Close your books, everyone; we need to have an important talk.

You knew I was going to say that, didn’t you? And you know what’s coming, right? You should. Because I went through this bullshit last time. So there’s no need for a Long, Rambling Introduction™, is there?

Great. So let’s dig into what it really means to be a True Whatever Whateverer.

To Be a True Game Master is a Work of Heart

After I posted that lesson about whether it’s worth hosting Session Zero, I saw some really troubling interactions and received a couple of upsetting communications. And that shit made me realize some of you really aren’t getting this. You just don’t understand what it means to be a True… whatever. A True Game Master, a True Campaign Manager, a True Whatever Whateverer.

Maybe this shit’s my fault. Maybe I suck at explaining things. Or maybe I forgot that True Whatever Whateverers are rare and special and that few folks have got what it takes to claim the title. Personally, I want to believe — and savor this moment of actual, genuine encouragement, dumbasses — personally, I want to believe that anyone whose got the will and wherewithal to read my shit after week after week has it in them to become a True Whatever Whateverer. And that’s why I think it’s worth the time to dish about it.

And I think it’s especially worthy because being a True Whatever Whateverer is at the glaring heart of a giant omission from my list of good reasons to host Session Zero. I really do want to address that omission. And explain why my opinion on Session Zero is the same as it’s always been. I’m only saying different things because I’m talking to different people.

But one step at a time…

To Session CG or Not

In that last lesson, I mentioned something called Session CG. And man was that a frigging mistake. Because it became a thing.

So, I said Session Zero could be anything — it could take any form — provided it was a meetup before the first real play session of a new campaign. “Except,” said I, “that it can’t be a character creation session.” If you have a special, pre-game session to make characters, don’t call that Session Zero. Call it Session CG. And I said — very freaking clearly, I might add — that I was only saying it to separate the discussion about character creation from the discussion about pre-campaign startup meetings.

Maybe it’s my fault that some of you took that as my saying, “The only true, proper, and correct way to get characters made for a new campaign was to host an entire, separate meeting to make characters.” You got it in your heads that I was suggesting that every campaign should include a Session CG wherein everyone gets together to make their characters and that it must be separate and distinct from Session Zero.

Some of you dumbasses — and I’m not calling any particular thorn-in-my-sides out even though they seem to trying to win themselves a 2024 Angry Award for Totally Missing Every Damned Point Ever even though no such award exists — some of you dumbasses then took to my supporter Discord server to predict what the final True Campaign Managery Proper Campaign Startup Process Checklist Procedure would look like. And man did some of you build some convoluted outlines. I’m pretty sure one of you idiots tried to make a flowchart.

Meanwhile, back at the comment section — and in a couple of side conversations — some of you fixated on my ridiculous statement that you shouldn’t smash your Session CG and your Session Zero together. One of you tried to start a debate with me in the comments even though I said, “I said that for reasons, and also, you’re missing some shit and I’ll be addressing this further,” and even tried to throw some shade in a subcommented reply to someone else. Check below. I’m sure that dumbass has already added a comment to this post too.

Now, before I get to my real points, I’ll admit that I might have been a little unclear. In my charitable magnanimity — a word choice I’m sure I’ll love when I’m doing the Proofreadaloud — in my charitable magnanimity, I’m going to assume the fault is mine and try to clarify a few things.

First, I didn’t mean to suggest that you must host a separate session to make characters. I did not claim that Session CG was the best — or the only — way to get characters made. All I said was, IF you choose to host an all-hands get-together before your game starts to make characters, THEN don’t call it Session Zero because I want to discuss character generation later. Please call it Session CG.

Notice the IF… THEN structure? That’s a thing called a conditional. It’s not saying you must do a thing or even implying that a thing should be done. It is saying that in the event such a thing is done, this other thing follows.

Second, the three very good reasons to host a Session Zero all preclude character generation. That is, if a Game Master is in a position to need Session Zero, they aren’t in a position to make characters yet. The game’s not ready for character creation. So even if there weren’t very good reasons not to combine Session Zero and Session CG — there are — the fact that you need a Session Zero means you can’t do a Session CG. And based on everything else I’ve taught you, Session CG alone won’t get you there. Even if it’s a Group First campaign, you still need time away from the group to build a vision.

Hopefully, that’ll help some of you dumbasses calm down. Maybe all of you. I don’t know.

But now for my real points. Both of them.

Point the First: You Can’t Beep-Boop Your Way to Trueness

Last year, when I started this True Game Mastery shit, I flippantly called the majority of Game Masters Mere Campaign Executors. I said they beep and boop their way through the game, executing it like a computer. The joke stuck. And it returned this year in the form of the Mere Campaign Supervisor who can only follow a bureaucratic campaign startup process and ain’t ready for a promotion to a real leadership role.

I’m actually hoping that that paragraph alone will reveal to many of you exactly what’s wrong with the idea of trying to distill a step-by-step campaign startup process from my lessons.

To be fair, there’s nothing wrong with Mere Game Executors and Mere Campaign Supervisors. Most people are. That’s where you graduate to once you’re done being a Total Noob. And you can Execute and Supervise perfectly fun games for years and years and years. You can have a perfectly happy gaming career without ever going beyond execution and supervision. There’s nothing wrong with it.

For many years, I’ve been telling you how to Execute and Supervise games. I focused on rules and processes and checklists. Years ago, I published a campaign startup process you could follow to launch a perfectly serviceable campaign every time. And it was in that same spirit that I told y’all to default to hosting Session Zero and I even told you how to host it right.

But I ain’t doing that anymore. I ain’t talking to Executors and Supervisors. I’m trying to make True Whatever Whateverers out of you. While I’ve put some things in process form — like the Declare-Determine-Describe Cycle; because it really does work like that — I’ve mostly been trying to get you to think about what you’re trying to do and make the best choices. That’s why I didn’t, for example, spell out precisely how to choose a principal character. I offered some loose guidelines, but I also said, “The truth is, it doesn’t actually matter who you pick as long as you pick someone. It ain’t about who you pick, it’s about managing the flow of the game. And that’s all it’s about.” That’s also why I didn’t want to spell out the proper way to run this-or-that specific kind of encounter. I wanted you to use the tools I gave you to work through encounters as they came. Because that’s how you do. You don’t need special processes and mechanical frameworks. You just need to resolve actions and manage the game’s conversation.

Being a True Whatever Whateverer means knowing your judgment will get you through every situation. And it means knowing that every situation is unique and special and different. There are not five kinds of encounters, there are just encounters to run. Run them. Every campaign is different. Every group has different needs. If you follow the same process every time — if you have the one formula you’ve found to work every time or if you prefer to always do things a certain way — you are not considering each campaign’s needs and making the best choices for each. You’re beeping and booping.

If you waste your time on unneeded Session Zeroes, you ain’t breaking your game, but you are wasting time. Players don’t want that. You don’t either. Don’t do it unless you have to.

Hosting Session Zero and then hosting Session CG is a big waste of time. It wastes two whole sessions. But if you’ve decided — after careful consideration — that your game needs a Session Zero, you can only reach that conclusion by admitting you ain’t ready for characters yet. And if not, you made a bad judgment call. And if you do really need a Session Zero, trying to make characters in the same meeting is rushing yourself. It’s the opposite of giving your game the best chance to succeed.

Might you do it anyway? Of course, you might. You might conclude that the only way to launch your campaign is to do Session 0-CG. But you might want to consider all your options first.

Someone complained — yeah, I’m back on this but it perfectly illustrates what I mean by judgment — “If my group can only meet every two weeks and I need both Session Zero and Session CG, the game will take six weeks to launch so the only option is to combine those two into one session.” Is it, though? Is it really? Is this really good judgment? Or is this some dumbass trying to find the corner case that disproves “don’t combine the two” without having the sense to ask, “Hey, Angry, why did you say not to combine the two?”

Judgment is about laying everything out and looking at the situation and finding a good solution. A Session Zero is a short hangout anyway. Is it really the sort of thing that must be done on the game’s regular schedule? Why not see if everyone can grab a bite to eat or coffee on an off night. Then, plan character generation for a few days later. Then start. If the players are really eager to start, they’ll probably be flexible to get the game started faster. Or maybe think about whether you really need a Session CG? Can people make characters on their own? Can you schedule private meetups for an hour with the one or two players who can’t handle it on their own and trust the rest to submit characters by a certain deadline? Can you save some time by hosting Session CG online even though you’re game is in-person? It ain’t ideal, but it’s a solution.

That’s True Campaign Managery. It ain’t about a process. It ain’t about rules. It ain’t about the one correct answer that’s always right. It’s about knowing your goal, assessing your situation, figuring out what’s practical, and making the best move for the actual circumstances you find yourself in. It’s not about arguing imaginary hypotheticals, it’s about knowing where you are, knowing where you want to go, and plotting the best possible course.

That’s why that whole Session Zero thing had all those digressions about communication hierarchy and about minimizing the time you spend not playing. Apart from three specific situations in which Session Zero will lead to a better game and apart from the warning about not combining Session Zero with character creation — both to allow me space for a separate discussion and because the need for the one precludes the possibility of the other unless you put undue stress on your game — it was all just shit to think about. Just ways of looking at the campaign in front of you and making a deliberate judgment call based on that actual, real, practical situation.

And, for the love of fuck, if any of you ever utter the phrase, “I worry that my players will feel…” again in my presence, I will trace your IP address, fly to wherever you are, and slap the stupid right out of you. However many slaps it takes.

And that brings me to…

Point the Second: Grow a Pair and a Be a True Whatever Already

That wasn’t actually a good segue. Because I’m gonna come back to the worry thing in a few paragraphs. First, I need to circle back to something else.

Some of you noticed that I explicitly said that gathering information about the kind of game your players want you to run is not a good reason to host Session Zero. And, good job, Detective Dipshit. You caught that, did you? It isn’t because I warned you I was totally going to omit that. And that’s despite the fact that, in past Features about Session Zero, I’ve cited such information gathering as the best — and only — good reason to host Session Zero.

So what the hell?

Real talk: True Game Masters and True Campaign Managers don’t need players telling them what game to run. Or what game will feel best. True Whatever Whateverers know how to run good, fun, engaging games. Or, at least, they trust themselves to run good, fun, engaging games even if they have no frigging clue how they’re doing it. True Whatever Whatevers trust themselves to make the best choices for their games. And when their games run into trouble, they trust themselves to adapt and adjust and respond and fix it. They trust their own judgment.

Even if a True Whatever Whateverer is running a game for total strangers, they still trust themselves to start a good game and then adapt as the players’ wants, needs, and preferences reveal themselves. They know that shit happens naturally, organically, and intuitively. It’s part of the whole good judgment thing.

Mere Game Executors are X-Station Switches. They’ve got a game to execute, a set of rules to follow, and ten thousand pages of printed procedures they cribbed from some Internet sexy gaming genius. It doesn’t matter whether their game is one they wrote or one they bought. Most homebrewers are actually Mere Game Executors. It doesn’t even matter whether they’re improvising or going on script. This is a mindset thing.

True Game Masters are game designers. They’ve got the same games and notes and rules and systems, but they know they’re actively creating a game from one moment to the next. And I ain’t talking mechanics and rules and statistics and systems and shit. True Game Masters know they’re creating, on the fly, one moment at a time, a complete gameplay experience. Not a story, not a collaboration, not a simulation, a holistic and emergent gameplay experience that encompasses story and simulation and is wholly responsive to the players at the table.

Game designers — good game designers — don’t start their projects with meetings and surveys. They don’t say, “What kind of game do you all want me to design?” Game designers trust that they know enough about games and people — from their experiences playing games with and designing games for people — to, you know, design a game. One that people will like. That’s why many of the best game designers say shit like, “I built the game I wanted to play and assumed others would like it too.”

Yes, there will come a point where they test their designs. And where they take that information and use it to iterate the design. But that ain’t the same thing as asking people to tell them what game to build. And, funnily enough, that is how Game Mastering works. Every play session is also a playtest session that lets you iterate your game for the next session. As long as your game never fails so bad that a single session kills the whole damned thing, running a campaign is an act of iterative game design.

Never thought about it that way, did you?

The point is, you become a True Game Master by growing a pair — a pair of whatever; this ain’t a boy-or-girl thing — and telling yourself, “I know how to build and run a good game. I’m just gonna do that.”

Gathering information from your players is at best useless, and, at worst, it’s a delaying tactic for pussies. Boy pussies and girl pussies.

Why’s it useless? Because every game designer knows people can only give opinions on the things that are right in front of them. People can tell you whether they like a game they’re playing right effing now. And they can’t tell you anything else. They can’t tell you why they like it — they can only guess — and they can’t predict whether they’ll like some hypothetical thing when it’s put in front of them in a week or a month or whatever.

People suck at knowing what they want and predicting how they’ll feel when they get it. That’s basic human psychology.

In fact, one of the things that makes designers good designers is that they’ve got a knack — a talent — for predicting the kinds of things people will like. The more they make things, the better they get at knowing what they should make. Your guesses — as a game designer — about the games people will like are better than most people’s guesses about what games they will turn out to have liked once they’ve played them.

But — and this is also human psychology — humans use information gathering as a delaying tactic. Gathering information lets people avoid doing scary things. Of course, that’s not always the case. Research and education can be useful. But gathering information ain’t research and education. Instead, it’s something people do because they think that if they’ve got enough information, they’re not gonna fail. Or, if they do fail, they’re not to blame. “Look dumbasses,” you can say if you spent four hours surveying your players before you started your game, “I built exactly the game you asked me to. If you hate it, that’s your own stupid-ass fault.”

Mere Game Executors need coddling and handholding before they can launch games. So, they learn rules and procedures and follow checklists and they waste their whole first sessions chatting with their players and making notes about the kind of players they think they have and what will probably make them happy. That helps them get their courage up. And I think it’s a good practice… for Mere Game Executors. But the information they’re gathering? It’s useless.

Not that it matters that the information is useless. It’s not like Game Masters actually pay attention to that information. I don’t. Neither do you. Psychologically, when you sit there grilling your players for their preferences, you’re ignoring half the shit they say. When a player says something that aligns with the game you already want to run — or with the style of games you tend to run — you write a big note and underline it and you put an exclamation point. When a player says something that doesn’t fit your preconceived plans and internal biases, you write it small note and then forget about it later. If you write it at all. If you even hear it.

Tell me I’m wrong. If you’ve ever run an Information Gathering Session Zero, I dare you to look me in the eye and tell me I’m fucking wrong. That it isn’t just a giant-ass pile of confirmation bias and rationalization and huggy self-soothing. Tell me and I’ll call you a liar. Because you’re lying. I know because I do it too.

And, for someone who needs all the help they can get to just run a game — which is most Game Masters throughout most or all of their entire gaming careers — it’s a harmless, useful lie that helps them get over themselves and start a game.

And now I’m back around to the worry thing. You know what True Whatever Whatevers don’t do? They don’t worry so damned much about how things are gonna turn out or how their players will react.

Or, more correctly, they do worry, but they don’t let worrying dictate what they do or don’t do.

Consider that dumbass comment I mentioned with the line, “I worry that if I wasted two whole sessions not playing, my players would hate my game and hate me and burn my game table down.” Or whatever. Consider everything you’ve ever heard that starts, “I worry that if I… my players will feel….”

“I worry that if I tell my players they can’t play cat people, they’ll get mad.”

“I worry that if death is too common in my game, my players won’t care about their characters.”

“I worry that if every player doesn’t get exactly the same amount of play time to the minute, they will all quit my game.”

Worrying is perfectly natural. Everyone worries. It’s a normal, emotional thing. It’s a kind of fear. That’s all. And you know what you do with worry? Nothing. You just let it sit there. Let it nibble and gnaw a little. Because that’s what it’s going to do. But you can’t engage with it.

There’s a time when it’s useful to act on your worries. And that’s when you have solid evidence that whatever you’re worried about is likely to happen. If you’ve got a player who has actually said, “If you stop me from playing the race I want, I’ll quit,” or maybe, “Game Masters who restrict their players’ choices have just internalized roleplaying games’ Western fascist, colonialist roots”, then it’s worth worrying how they’ll react to whatever restrictions you’re thinking of imposing. But if your brain has pulled a hypothetical response from its ass — yes, brains have asses; that’s what the basal meningeal lymphatic vessels are for — if your brains pulled an imaginary response from its ass based on nothing, that ain’t worth wasting your energy on.

That’s why I don’t engage in hypothetical horseshit. If someone says, “I worry that if I follow your advice, it’ll make imaginary players unhappy,” I’m like, “I’ll bet you do worry about that, but that sounds like a you problem. Go away.”

And even if your worries are valid, worrying is still useless. Worrying leads to ruminating or gathering information. That’s why mouthbreathers keep posting messages in my Discord like, “I’m worried that if I start a new campaign and use this rule, the nonexistent players I haven’t even recruited yet will lose their frigging minds.” They’re hoping someone will say something to take the worry away. But there is nothing to say that will take the worry away. That’s not how worry works. This is why those conversations turn into endless strings of reasoned responses followed by, “Yeah, but what if…”

That shit doesn’t solve worry, it feeds worry. Worry is like a furnace. If you leave it alone, it burns down. But if you keep shoveling puppies into it, it just burns hotter and hotter and hotter.

If you’ve got a valid worry — if you can find the solid, strong evidence that this ain’t just something your dumbass lizard brain spun out because it worries about everything — if you’ve got a valid worry, work out a solution. Or ask a nice, simple, direct question. I can’t stand, “I worry some hypothetical player will…,” but I’ll never object to, “I want to remove gnomes from my game, but this specific player has threatened to quit if I ever restrict her character creation choices again. What can I do?”

But do understand, also, that no amount of good advice will stop you from feeling the worry. And that every solution’s got risks, costs, and downsides. Once you’ve picked your solution, stick with it, and then it’s time to just let the worry nibble and gnaw. Because it won’t stop until the situation’s resolved. And often not even then. But it does wax and wane. And it does go away eventually.

I Don’t Know How to End This

So, that was a thing, huh? Lots of good stuff in there, I hope. Though some of it was probably hard to swallow. That’s just life too. Medicine and vegetables keep you healthy, but they don’t taste good.

Anyway…

This is one of those discussions that’s hard to end. I can’t figure out a way to wrap it up that isn’t like an overlong fart fading to stinky silence. I could try to sum up, I guess, but I’m not sure I can even do that effectively. Because there’s just so much in this.

I guess, the lesson today is that being a True Whatever Whateverer isn’t about plans and procedures, but rather about trusting yourself to respond effectively to the situations that arise when they arise. It’s about considering every situation and every game and every encounter and every campaign as a unique thing with merits and flaws and all that stuff and exercising deliberate judgment over each. And that means trusting your judgment. Trusting it over anything and everything else.

It also means not giving in to fear or worry. You’re going to be afraid, you’re going to worry, but that can’t dictate your actions. And you can’t burn energy trying to prepare for hypothetical situations. Instead, you need to vet every worry and every fear. Ask yourself if it’s a real, valid concern or whether it’s just normal human anxiety. If it is a real, valid concern, being a True Whatever Whateverer means trusting in your judgment and picking the best solution. And understanding that having a solution won’t make the worry go away. And that every solution sucks somehow.

Really, what it’s about is dealing with the situation that’s right in front of you and trusting your judgment to see you through. Everything else is just wasted energy and distraction.