Happy New Year! For reals, this time.

This here’s a turning point at TheAngryGM.com. A new beginning. Sort of. I’ve already explained it in exhaustive detail in my boring-ass monthly updates, but I know some of you skip that crap and I don’t blame you. I also know some of you are new here. Hell, I intend this particular feature article to serve as the best place for Angry newbies to jump in. Which means I’ve got to explain it all again. But I’m gonna make it quick.

I’m getting back to my roots this year. That means two things, but only one of them matters today. I’m getting back to showing new and inexperienced GMs how to run games. And teaching experienced GMs how to run much less worse games. Over the next twelve months, twice each month, I’m going to drag you on a whirlwind tour of intermediate and advanced GMing skills.

I even wrote a nice, solid lesson plan so I can build on earlier lessons and weave a sort of plot arc through the whole thing.

My point is that if you want to start running games or you want to take your GMing to the next level, this is the year and this is the place.

Click here for the The True Game Mastery Series index.

What Does it Mean to Master a Game?

This year — through twice-monthly feature articles — I’m going to help you stop running games and start mastering them. What’s that mean? It means I’m going to show you how to run the best damned games possible. The best damned games you can possibly run. Within the limitations you struggle under by virtue of not being a sexy gaming genius. By not being me.

But best is subjective. Everyone has their own idea of what being the best game master means. So it’s kind of pointless for me to say, “I’m going to make you the best damned Game Master you can be” without also telling you what best means. To me.

That’s what this feature’s all about. I’m going to paint you a picture of what I think the Best Game Master Evar!!!1! looks like. And I’m going to let you decide if you want to look like that. And if you do want to be that particular Best Game Master Evar!, I’m going to show you how to get yourself there.

Now, I ain’t arguing that my picture of Bestest GM that Ever Was is the only possible way to be the best. Nor am I saying it’s the best way to be the best. Even though it absolutely is. Because I’m the best and the picture is basically a self-portrait. I’m just saying, “that’s my goal; that’s who I’m going to teach you to be.” And I’ll let you decide if that’s the GM you want to be.

If you do want to be that GM? Stick around and keep reading. If you don’t… well, there are plenty of other websites and GMs out there.

To paraphrase the Graceful Goron — how’s that for a reference — to paraphrase the words of the Graceful Goron:

I refuse no one who wants to learn, but I chase no one who wants to leave.

What Makes a GM a Game Master?

Last December, I invited all y’all to think about what it means to be a true Game Master. What does it mean to go beyond executing a game like a PlayStation? And I promised that, someday, I’d tell you the right answer. My answer. I’d share my vision of a True Game Master.

Today’s that day. And here it is in one, single, concise sentence that’s going to need a few thousand words of expansion…

A true Game Master makes the players care.

That’s it. Simple. Pithy. Totally non-actionable. But aspirational nonetheless. Get your players to give a crap, you’re a Game Master. But — here comes the first expansion — what the players care about and how matters. Because players naturally care about one of two things or sometimes both. First, most players naturally care about winning the game. Second, most players care about their own awesome characters. So a true Game Master makes the players care about the TTRPG adventure or campaign as more than just a game to win. And a true Game Master makes the players care about the world and the story beyond their own dumb characters.

So a true Game Master makes the players care about the world and its inhabitants.

And if you’ve ever tried to pull that off as a GM — to make your players care about the game world and its inhabitants — you know that ain’t nearly as easy as just getting them to care.

Investment: Your New Word for the Year

Today’s secret word is Investment. And you know what to do whenever anyone says the secret word, right kids? That’s right! Scream really loud.

The truth is, I’ve struggled for a while to find the right word to describe what a true Game Master strives for. It’s not fun. It’s not engagement. It’s not even satisfaction. Well, I finally have a word I like. That word is Investment.

Fun’s nice, sure. But it’s fleeting. If you’re having fun, you’re experiencing pleasure right now at this moment. When the moment’s over, so’s the fun. A fun game is an endless string of pleasant moments. And endless churn of increasingly pleasant moments is hard to provide. And it also means lots of games just can’t work. Horror games, for example, don’t come from endless strings of pleasant moments. Engagement is no better. It means you’re having an emotional response right now, but it’s still fleeting. Satisfaction is just bland.

But Investment…

When you’re Invested, you’re pouring resources into something because you know what you get back will be better. You spend time and energy and attention and emotions and you endure some losses and heartaches in the present moment because the game you get out of that will be an amazing, rewarding experience to look back on. Invested players are willing to put their all into a game because they want to be a part of the whole, amazing experience.

The TTRPG Investment Portfolio

Invested players put their energy, attention, and emotions into the game, right? Into actually playing the game. At the table. So what are they getting out? What’s the payoff?

A TTRPG offers an experience. A sense of being part of something. That experience happens gradually over the entire course of the game. It’s what we call an Emergent experience. Moreover, the longer you play, the bigger and grander the experience. It builds on itself so the whole experience is nothing like any of its constituent parts. That’s what we call a Holistic experience.

But let’s put that hippie-dippie bullshit aside and speak more concretely. A TTRPG offers a unique blend of gameplay and story experiences. TTRPGs are games that are also stories. Or stories that are also games. And stories and games are things human brains love. Human brains crave stories and they crave games. For different reasons, of course. But a TTRPG is the “chocolate and peanut butter” of mental experiences.

Moreover, TTRPGs go beyond both games and stories. Unlike most games, TTRPGs are relatively unconstrained. Not wholly. Constraints and restrictions are important. But you’ve got a lot more freedom in a TTRPG than you’ll ever have in a board game or a video game. And unlike most stories, TTRPGs are interactive. They don’t just give you a window into a world, they open a door and say, “get the hell in here and have a look around. This is your story.”

When players Invest themselves in your tabletop roleplaying game adventure or campaign, they’re giving you their time, energy, and attention. And they’re getting a great game, a great story, a lot of freedom, and a world to explore.

That sounds like an amazing deal to me!

What Makes a Great RPG Experience

Invested TTRPG players enjoy great games, great stories, lots of freedom, and an escape into a fantasy world. Well, there are two things on that list that you need to understand to really get what being a True Game Master is all about. Freedom and world creation? I’ll cover that stuff later. Briefly. Because that stuff kind of handles itself for reasons I’m not getting into today. But you absolutely have to know what makes for a great game and what makes for a great story. Because it’s your job to make that crap happen at your table.

Great Games Defined

Great gameplay experiences are ones in which the players — not you, by the way; you ain’t a player — great gameplay experiences are ones in which the players use their skills, talents, and in-game resources to overcome challenges and accomplish goals. There’s a little more to it than that — and of course, there’s an Epic Level Archdevil in those details — but there’s not much more.

Note, by the way, that I said the players use their own skills and talents. Not their characters’. Characters don’t have skills and talents. They have mechanics and statistics. The players’ own skills are the ones tested whenever the group has to pick a strategy or solve a problem. So let’s have none of that Player Skill vs. Avatar Strength BS, okay?

Of vital importance is that all the gameplay outcomes feel earned. However the game turns out — win or lose — the players must feel like they deserve the outcome they got. If they won, they’ve got to feel like their choices and strategies made that happen. If they lost, they’ve got to know they could have done something different to change the outcome. Even if they don’t know precisely what that something different might have been.

That ain’t to say random chance has no place in determining the outcome. It does. Random chance is a very important aspect of game design. And I will definitely talk about it more later. But whenever chance is a factor — and it always is — the players must feel like they can nudge the odds in their favor.

If I’d thought to cast that spell, Rolfgar would have a big bonus on his attack and he might have killed the dragon before it escaped.

That’s a totally fair thing to say and a sign of an earned outcome.

Great Narratives Defined

Great narrative experiences — from now on, I want to be more careful about my language so I’m using the word narrative instead of story from here on out for reasons I won’t explain for months, probably — great narrative experiences have a certain shape to them. Human brains love stories, but they love stories with certain shapes most of all. Great narratives are shaped like great stories.

There’s a helpful piece of actionable advice, huh?

Seriously, though, you know this stuff, even if you don’t know you know it. Your brain knows it. Good narratives have beginnings, middles, and endings. Certain things happen in the beginning parts; certain things only happen in the ending parts. Good narratives are carefully paced so tension rises and falls, but trends upward to a climax before it’s fully released with the resolution of the narrative’s major conflict. Crap like that.

TTRPG campaigns — and even TTRPG adventures — actually have fairly complex narrative structures, unlike the average episode of whatever garbage Amazon Prime is farting out these days. They have nested and cyclical structures. Narratives within narratives within narratives with the occasional parallel narrative running on a different track for good measure. But I’ll cover all that much, much later.

Weaving the TTRPG Tapestry

True Game Masters invite player Investment by providing great gameplay and great narrative experiences. As the game unfolds, the True Game Master adds the necessary ingredients and steers the game on the right course to end up with a great gameplay experience and a great narrative. That probably sounds really hard. And it is. But you don’t get to call yourself a Master unless you’re good at doing something that most people can’t do well.

I’ll come back to this idea — which I’m going to call Bringing the Game to Life — in a moment. Because there’s something else, apart from Investment, that separates True Game Masters from Mere Game Executors.

Ownership: Your Other New Word for the Year

Yes, there are two secret words to scream for this year. Because True Game Masters don’t just run their games, they Own their games. And that’s something lots of Game Masters are afraid to do. Hell, that’s something lots of Game Masters are told not to do. But Ownership and Investment go together like owl and bear.

Yes, owlbears are a thing, in case you somehow didn’t know that. Look them up.

Ownership is a leadership skill. And one that’s hard to get right. At its core, Ownership means accepting responsibility for all the things that happen at your TTRPG table. Even the things you don’t control. It doesn’t matter whether a disaster is your fault or not. If it gets in your way, you’ve got to deal with it. Your job is to earn the players’ Investment. If they ain’t Investing, you ain’t a True Game Master. And it’s on you to fix it.

Be the Expert

To Own your game is to know that you’re the expert. There’s no one more qualified than you to run your game. You’ve accepted responsibility for running a great game and weaving a great narrative. That means you must know better than anyone else at the table just what that takes. That’s the only way to build Investment.

When you invest in something, you hand your money — or whatever — over to an expert and you trust that expert to turn your money into more money. Or something else of value. When you support my work and this site, you give me cash and trust me to turn that cash into great content. I don’t ask you to help me write my articles. I don’t trust you to help me. If you were the expert, you’d keep your money and write your own damned TTRPG site. I ask your opinion sometimes. Often. Because my job is to provide great content — content you want to invest in — your opinions do matter. But, in the end, I know better than you how to make the content you’ll like most. Or the content you need most.

Yes, I do sometimes screw it up. That’s Ownership.

TTRPGs are no different. Your players give you their time, energy, and attention. And they trust you to turn those costs into an amazing game experience. You’re the expert. They’re the supporters and the audience. Watch their reactions and pay attention to their feedback, but in the end, never doubt that you know better than they do how to deliver the best damned game experience.

And if you can’t believe that, step down and let some other, better Game Master have your game.

You Do Not Collaborate, You Incorporate

A TTRPG is not a storytelling experience. And it sure as hell isn’t a collaboration. The players are playing a game and experiencing a narrative. You’re building that game and weaving that narrative. Does that mean you can’t add the players’ ideas to your world? Of course not. If you think you can get the best game by building worlds from the crappy fanfic backstory elements your players vomit forth, so be it. That’s up to you. If you’re willing to put your signature on that piece of art, so be it.

True Game Masters incorporate good ideas from everywhere. Even their players. And True Game Masters help the players find a place for their characters in the game’s world. But True Game Masters don’t abdicate their personal responsibility for choosing what goes into the world and what doesn’t.

Making Players Miserable

It’s hard to say no. It’s hard to impose restrictions and constraints. It’s hard to force your players to accept risks, costs, and consequences. But, as a True Game Master, you have to know — in your shriveled, blackened GMing heart — that restrictions, constraints, risks, costs, and consequences are central to roleplaying and they’re an integral part of Investment. People’s brains literally give less of a crap about things that cost them nothing. People are less happy with things if they know they don’t have to live with them. And people are less creative in an unrestricted environment. There’s a crap ton of research proving that stuff.

Your players are gonna make it hard to say no. Especially if they’re used to Game Executors and Game Runners instead of True Game Masters. They’ll piss and moan and resist and even threaten to walk. That’s a tough storm to weather. But weather it you must. If you’re afraid to say, “this is how it is and there’s the door if you want to use it,” you can’t be a True Game Master.

And consider this: if the players threaten to quit and you give in, all you’re doing is teaching them they can bully you by threatening to quit. Do you want to set that precedent?

When I get around to the Campaign Management portion of this so-called course, I’ll teach you how to talk to your players and how to resolve conflicts. But those tricks ain’t worth jack squat if you can’t assert your Ownership of the game. Meanwhile, if you run a great game — one worthy of Investment — you’ll have a lot fewer conflicts. You won’t have none. You’ll never have none. Sorry. That’s the price of playing games with humans.

Expect Nothing and Never Get Let Down

The bright side to this Ownership thing is that it frees you from expecting anything from players. And that’s good. Players will always let you down. It’s not personal. Players don’t let you down because they’re dumb or lazy or selfish — they are all those things, but that’s not why they’ll let you down — but rather, players will let you down because they’re the players. A player’s only job is to show up and play the game.

Don’t expect players to read rulebooks. Don’t expect them to read pages of world lore. Don’t expect them to do more than the barest minimum for homework. Don’t expect them to create the world. Don’t expect them to make things fun for everyone else. Don’t expect them to watch videos entitled Ten Things Every GM Secretly Wishes The Players Would Do. Some players will do that crap on their own. Most won’t. And if you think you can make them, you’re the dumb one.

Investment begins and ends with the play session.

Now that said, there are two things you’re allowed to expect from players. Two things you must demand, actually. First, demand the players play the game you’re running. Second, demand the players not make the game unpleasant for you or anyone else. Which ain’t the same as making it better for everyone. That’s it, though. Those are the two demands you can make. The conditions under which players get a seat at your table.

And if they can’t abide by those conditions, they can’t sit at your table. The end.

Build a Game; Bring it to Life

True Game Masters earn Investment by sharing great gameplay and narrative experiences. To pull that off, True Game Masters have to understand that games and stories have structures, rules, and shapes. And when I say rules, I mean “rules of the form,” not like game rules. These are meta-rules. The rules about how games are put together. And it’s the rules and structures and shapes that make great games and great narratives feel great. When they’re done right.

To pull that off, True Game Masters take full Ownership of their games. They ain’t afraid to impose constraints. And they stand at the gate and decide what belongs in the game and what doesn’t.

Now, the whole point of my writing this long-ass introduction and vision statement is so that I don’t waste a lot of time having hypothetical pre-arguments with imaginary detractors — a problem I’ve had in the past — but I know I’m scaring some of the more experienced Game Masters out there and I have to address you.

When I talk about shapes, structures, and plans — and about full Ownership — I know lots of y’all are thinking, “toot toot, all aboard the TTRPG railroad!” And I promise you that ain’t what I’m talking about. The players need agency and they have to be able to explore reasonably freely. Otherwise, you’re not running a TTRPG.

But I also don’t buy into the idea that a Game Master’s job is to simply map a world and fill it with stuff for the players to trip over. That’s can be fun — for a certain specific kind of player — but it’s not broadly fun for lots of different kinds of players. Neither is the Game Master providing a stage on which the players can act out their personal dramas. I call bullshit on both approaches.

True Game Masters curate their gameplay and story experiences. Sometimes with kid gloves; sometimes with an iron fist. Some lean more heavily toward improvisation; some do a lot of forward planning. The approach varies from Game Master to Game Master and situation to situation. But a True Game Master ensures that whatever happens at the table, it’s shaped like both a great game and a great narrative.

True Game Masters build a game, then bring it to life.

First, True Game Masters plan their TTRPG sessions or adventures or campaigns so they’ll provide great gameplay and narrative experiences if everything goes as planned. This means planning TTRPG sessions that the players will likely want to play as planned. The actual plan can be as simple as some stray thoughts or scribbled notes or as complex as a notebook full of maps, stats, and notes worthy of publication as an adventure module.

Next, the True Game Master takes that plan to the table and, you know, runs it. Describes the situations, invites the players to act, and all that Game Mastering crap. The Game Master reacts to whatever the players do. And “you stopped playing the game we agreed to and we need to fix that” is a fair reaction. Hopefully a rarely invoked reaction. The True Game Master reacts to the players’ actions and choices in such a way that whatever plays out, it’s a good gameplay experience and a good narrative experience. Or a good compromise between the two.

And, in two-dozen lessons, I’m going to teach you how to do exactly that. Just not directly.

The End and the Beginning

In my personal and totally correct opinion, a True Game Master builds Investment by providing great gameplay and narrative experiences, by giving their players a lot of freedom, and by providing an immersive world to explore. And a True Game Master takes Ownership of the game, curating the experience and expecting little of the players other than that they play the game and don’t wreck it. A True Game Master provides neither a railroad nor a sandbox nor a stage, but rather a lovingly crafted, carefully designed and executed experience.

In short, a True Game Master — even one who doesn’t write homebrew content — is an expert Game Designer and Storyteller.

But all this high-minded crap is just aspirational vision stuff. You can’t just become a True Game Master. And from now on, I’m rarely going to talk about Investment or Ownership directly. I’ll be talking about narration techniques and character generation methods and which rules to strictly enforce. And how those actual, practical things relate to Investment and Ownership won’t always be clear. And that’s down to the nature of Game Mastering as an art and as a skill. That’s just how Game Mastering works.

In the next lesson — call it the second half of this two-part course introduction — I’m going to explain the nature of Game Mastering as an art and a skill. And why I’ll sometimes tell you to do crazy, counterintuitive things. But I’m also going to tell you what you can start doing right now to work toward True Game Mastery.

And after that, I’ll take you down into the trenches and show you what to actually do at the table. And away from it.