I don’t want to end the year on a sour note, but I’m sure trying my damndest to do just that. The way my little Best and Worst of D&D thing ended really harshed my buzz if you know what I mean. And if you do know what I mean, please tell me. I have no idea what that phrase means.
It’s easy to be down right now. I mean, I just wrote ten-thousand words that ended with me realizing that D&D 5E and I don’t like each other very much but we have to keep working together. That’s assuming WotC’s corporate stooges are going to let anyone keep working with D&D. Speaking of things dragging gaming down right now. DBox One, am I right? You’ve got the suits running their mouths about monetization and post-sale revenue and licensing requirements that are the equivalent of the Dole company charging kids’ lemonade stands a royalty fee for using their lemons. And you’ve got Crawford grinning a s$&%-eating grin at his own genius because people who love D&D enough to fill out surveys about the new edition love D&D and its because of his brilliant design. Meanwhile, I’m feeling like I’ve lost my way — as The Angry GM; leave my personal life out of this — and I’m struggling to find my footing with my home games — including a new one starting in January to replace the one I broke last month that I have no f$&%ing clue what to do with.
The word ennui barely covers this s$&%, huh?
Even this Long, Rambling Introduction™ is depressing me. But, that s$&%’s just s$&% and s$&%’s always happening. Being human is about learning to live through the s$&%. And the key to living through all the s$&% is knowing why it’s worth living through all the s$&%. Knowing why.
And to veer sharply away from life advice and keep this firmly rooted in pretend elf games, what’s really at the heart of this is why it’s all worth it. Why do I even do this gaming s$&%?
Why Master Games?
Why do GMs run games? Why do you run games? Why do I run games? And why do I keep banging my head against the wall teaching people who don’t want to be taught how to run games better? Or at least less worse?
Context time. But not personal context. I got all that s$&% out in the Long, Rambling Introduction™. This is the specific context that leads right into the question posed above. And another, different question that lies at the heart of the above one. The problem is, I can’t figure out how to present this context without just listing a bunch of disjointed, seemingly unrelated things and then tying them together.
Sorry, this intro’s a mess.
Context Thing One: MDA Design
A long, long time ago, I wrote a series of articles I won’t link — for reasons I ain’t going into — about the MDA Model of game design. The MDA Model was a legitimate academic model of formalized, iterative game design that… never mind… that’s boring. You can read the original MDA paper yourself if you want to, and I think it’s worth reading.
The not-boring part is like this: as part of formalizing iterative game design, the authors of the paper listed eight Aesthetics of Play. Eight subjective, emotional experiences people derived from playing games. They were Challenge, Discovery, Expression, Fantasy, Fellowship, Narrative, Subjugation, and Sense Pleasure.
And ever since I shared that s$&% with the RPG community, they’ve been misusing and misunderstanding everything MDA so f$&%ing badly I wish I’d kept the whole thing a secret.
I guess I am going to get into the reasons why I’m not linking the original article.
Context Thing Two: D&D Isn’t For Creators and That Ain’t Changing Anytime Soon
A couple of weeks ago, I wrote these two Best and Worst lists comparing the current edition of D&D to an edition published twenty years ago. And I concluded that little two-part piece of clickbaity crap by saying D&D 5E’s biggest failing was that it didn’t invite me — a homebrewing creator GM — to create for it the same way previous editions had. And that it seemed to resent me for wanting to make my own stuff instead of executing games for the all-important players at the table.
Which, by the way — call this thing two-and-a-half — has been a growing sentiment in the online gaming community for the last half-decade. That the GM’s raisin d’être — the GM’s only job — is to shut up and run the game the players demand. The GM’s a dancing monkey and no more. And this, by the way, is my pick for the number one reason why everyone’s trying to figure out why GMs don’t want to run D&D anymore.
Context Thing Two-and-a-Half: Shut Up and Run the Game You Dancing Monkey
See above.
Context Thing Three: Just Keep Dancing
Anyone paying any attention to the news dribbling out of WotC about DBox One shares my uneasy feeling that DBox One is mainly about giving the players more toys and more options to be creatively and improbably awesome without any effort to help GMs build artful, engaging, deep gameplay experiences instead of superhero sandboxes.
Context Thing Four: An Unanswered Question That’s Actually Super Easy to Answer
Since the dawn of time — 1974 in this context — TTRPG gamers have argued about the relationship between the GM and the game. And the debate can be summed up in one clear, concise, simple question. A question with no correct answer. Until today. Until me.
Is the GM a player?
The answer is no. Don’t be an idiot.
What Playing Means
Before I explain, categorically, why the GM’s not a player — which I’ll follow with a heartwarming anecdote that will lift your spirits and invite you to share your own similarly heartwarming anecdote — before I explain why the GM is absolutely, provably not a player, it’s probably a good idea to make sure the question is worth answering. After all, I’d hate to waste my time and yours on pedantical, semantical bulls$&%.
The thing is, the psychology of games and gameplay and game design? They’re really well-developed at this point. And that’s mainly because video games became a huge-a$&, bazillion-dollar industry. Very much unlike tabletop roleplaying games. Sorry to burst your bubble.
Wherever there’s a bazillion-dollar industry, there’s a bunch of greedy people who want to get rich. And there’s a bunch of smug people who want to study the industry and sell the results to the greedy people. Long story short, a lot of well-funded, academic research went into why people play games and what separates games from all the other things people do for fun.
I ain’t going into that s$&% here. Not in depth. You can do your own homework or you can trust me when I say I’ve done it. The important point is there are lots of ways to understand why players choose the games they do and what they get from the games they play. One example is the MDA Model of formalized, iterative game design I wrote about long ago and mentioned above.
The thing is, if you’re a GM and you want to design engaging, appealing gameplay experiences of your own, it helps to understand — psychologically — why people play games and what they get out of the experience. The more of that s$&% you can deliver, the better people will like your games.
But…
Logically, if a GM is also a player, the GM can use the same formalized models of game design to analyze their own engagement with tabletop roleplaying games, right? Thus, GMs can ensure their games also give them — the GMs themselves — engaging, satisfying gameplay experiences.
Moreover, system designers — and hopefully Crawford is listening, but I know he’s not — system designers can also use the formalized models of game design to design systems that appeal to GMs instead of treating GMs as vending machines that spit out gameplay experiences.
But…
The problem is that if the GM’s not actually a player — if the psychology behind all that game design social science crap just doesn’t describe the way GMs experience games — using a formal game design framework to analyze the GM’s engagement with the game is doomed to fail.
And that is why it’s important to figure out if the GM counts as a player. If they are, GMs can use game design tools to make themselves happy and publishers can use them to make GMs happy. But if they aren’t, things get more complicated.
The Part Where Things Get More Complicated
There’s nothing about running games that suggest a GM can be modeled as a player. The psychological experience of running a game is inherently different from the experience of playing a game. And that’s pretty clear just by looking at all the common, academic definitions of games.
To count as a game — and to therefore qualify in any formal game design framework — an activity must include certain things like an explicit goal, a competitive element, and a constrained mechanical framework. If you’re playing a game, you need a way to win, something to lose to, and a bunch of rules that tell you how to play. GMing just doesn’t fit that bill. Unless, of course, you want GMing to fit that bill so badly that you bend all the definitions out of shape to make it work.
You wouldn’t do that, would you?
Consider, for instance, the whole explicit goal thing. Which, by the way, is something I’ve brought up a lot. When the players are working toward an in-game goal, they’re playing D&D. Otherwise, they’re dicking around in a sandbox. They’re not playing a game and the ones who want to play a game won’t be happy for long. And while it’s true D&D — the rules system — doesn’t include explicit goals, each adventure does. Every adventure defines a way to win and so do all the individual challenges along the way.
And no, “everyone having fun” isn’t an explicit, gameplay goal. That’s not what goal means and you sound like a mouthbreathing moron every time you say that s$&%. So stop it.
GMs don’t have explicit, gameplay goals. GMs don’t have any conflict or competition. Nothing in the game is working against them as the GM pursues their non-existent goal. No, the players don’t count. And no, again, the GM’s explicit, gameplay goal is not to show everyone a good time. Because that’s not a gameplay goal. And some GMs run perfectly wonderful games without any desire to show anyone a good time. Seriously.
This deep philosophical question — is the GM a player? — is bulls$&%. And it shouldn’t have endured as long as it did. GMs aren’t playing games because GMs aren’t doing any of the things people do when they’re playing games. It’s as simple as that. They’re not pursuing goals, they’re not overcoming challenges, and they’re not constrained by the game’s rules and systems. Hell, the GM gets to change, break, or invent the rules and systems.
But that raises a question: if the GM isn’t a player, what is he? Is there a useful way to understand how GMs engage with games so that GMs and system designers can build games that make GMs happy?
I can answer that first question easily enough. But the second question requires me to put out my hand, palm down, wiggle it in the air, and say, “eh… kinda?”
Hobby Versus Game
Games are just one specific kind of fun thing people do. Games are interactive activities with goals, challenges, and constraints. But there are lots of fun things people do. Lots of non-productive activities humans engage in for pleasure. We call those things hobbies. Gaming is a hobby. So is painting miniatures. So is trapshooting and knitting and baking and collecting seashells and playing a musical instrument.
Anything can be a hobby. And the line between, say, a hobby and a job can get fuzzy and blurry and vague. You can bake as a hobby, but you can also make your dough as a professional baker. You can start off as a baking hobbyist and turn it into a profession, making your hobby a job. Though, as anyone who has ever turned a hobby into a career — myself included — can tell you, that changes the psychology of things. A lot. It is not for the faint of heart or the weak of spirit. This is why that non-productive part of the definition of hobby is psychologically important. It has to do with how our brain responds to the activity, but that ain’t important right now.
What’s important is that games and hobbies are different. You can game as a hobby, but you can also enjoy games without being a gaming hobbyist. And whereas games provide pretty specific and well-understood psychological payoffs, hobbies are complicated.
Obviously, hobby knitters and hobby trapshooters have pretty different experiences from each other in their free time. But what’s less obvious is that two hobby knitters can have experiences that are just as different from each other as from the trapshooter. Any two hobbyists can derive pleasure from completely different aspects of the hobby. In that respect, hobbies aren’t unlike games wherein some players are drawn to the Fellowship aspects of games while others like the Challenge aspect more. And it’s even possible to see analogs between, say, the pleasure that comes from mastering a skill and the Challenge-seeking behavior of a Soulsborne gamer or the pleasure of getting lost, trancelike, in the repetitive motion of knitting and the Subjugation of doing all the little chores that keep your Animal Crossing town running.
But that’s an illusion. The analogs aren’t one-to-one correspondences. And eventually, you find kinds of hobby pleasures that you can’t translate into gaming engagements without breaking the model or the brains involved.
Part of it’s that hobbies are way less constrained than games. Games include goals, for example, but hobbies don’t. Instead, it’s down to each participant to derive their own mix of rewards — extrinsic or intrinsic — from the activity without a goal to provide context. Some knitters like the knitted things they end up with. They’re after the extrinsic reward that scarves and blankets represent. Some knitters find the clack-clack of the needles and the muscle-memory autopilot thing relaxing. That’s an intrinsic reward. See how this works?
And see, also, why it’s better to understand GMs as hobbyists rather than players. Players have constrained experiences — games are more constrained than hobbies and TTRPGs are more constrained than games by virtue of their being a specific kind of game — and so player engagements are easier to understand, analyze, and classify.
It’s important to note that players can be gaming hobbyists also. But it’s not as important to understand their hobbyist motives because, as players, only the narrower range of gameplay engagements matter. The player’s brain knows why the player seeks those engagements. You just have to provide a game.
It’s also possible to be a gaming hobbyist without being a player or a GM. No, cosplayers and miniature painters and streamwatchers and readers are not players and they cannot be analyzed as players. Yes, that is gatekeeping. And it’s good. Because gatekeeping leads both to better-designed games for players and better-designed non-game products for non-game-playing hobbyists. They have different needs.
So, given that GMs are hobbyists who aren’t players and can’t be understood as players, can you analyze GM motivations in that regard and design better experiences for GMs? Should you?
Why This Crap Doesn’t Matter
Open any …for Dummies book about a given hobby and you’ll find a short passage at the very start outlining the various rewards the hobby offers. A little grab bag of extrinsic and intrinsic rewards a person might expect from knitting or baking or trapshooting. The list of rewards isn’t ever particularly detailed and it’s never exhaustive. It’s just there to sell the hobby to someone who’s on the fence or turn away someone who’s looking for the wrong rewards from the hobby.
And once that passage is out of the way, that s$&%’s never mentioned again. Neither the hobby — nor its practitioners — care why you’re doing it.
Even board games don’t waste time explaining why games are fun. They assume you know why games are fun. That’s why you bought the game. At best, some games will detail the particular kinds of gameplay experiences you can expect from that specific game, but that’s just to help you decide if you’re likely to enjoy playing that specific game. Once you open the box, the game’s like, “okay, here’s the goal, here’s what you’re up against, and here are the rules.”
The point is, you’re on your own to figure out what’s rewarding about any given hobby. The best a hobby can do is provide a list of possible rewards other hobbyists have experienced. And that’s because the goal of a hobby is to spend non-productive time on a pleasurable activity.
Look, no one designed knitting to provide Subjugation, Skill Mastery, Manual Dexterity, Creation, and Aesthetic Pleasure. Someone noticed that knitting is kind of fun. Then other people noticed it too. Each for their own reasons. And the companies selling knitting needles and knitting patterns and knitting instruction books and all that crap? They’re not trying to fulfill motivations; they’re selling tools.
And frankly, that’s a good way to understand marketing to GMs. I mean, if you listen to the average GM pissing and moaning about which systems are failing them and how, they mostly complain about not having the tools they want or need. Or the lack of instruction. Which is, in itself, a tool.
Ironically, one useful tool GMs really need is a game-design framework that helps them provide satisfying experiences for players. After all, that’s what the GMing hobby is all about. Knitters turn yarn into scarves. Trapshooters turn frisbees into shrapnel. And GMs turn blank paper into satisfying TTRPG gameplay experiences. Knitters need needles, trapshooters need guns, and GMs need design frameworks.
And just as knitters shouldn’t stab themselves with their needles and trapshooters shouldn’t discharge their guns into their own faces, GMs should not turn their gameplay analysis tools on themselves. It’ll all end in tears.
To Analyze or Not To Analyze
Hobbyists don’t waste a lot of time analyzing what they enjoy. They just enjoy it. And that’s good enough. I mean, if you enjoy doing what you do, just keep doing it. It’s working. Really, the only time to ask yourself why the hell you’re doing what you’re doing is when you’re not enjoying it anymore.
Or when you’re trying to pick a new hobby. This is why …for Dummies books have those passages. But I digress.
The point is, in general, it doesn’t matter why your hobbies are fun. For you or for anyone else. What matters is that they are fun. But if you’re trying to design tools for other hobbyists or teach other hobbyists how to hobby — or if you find yourself unhappy with a hobby that used to give you joy — it’s useful to understand, at the very least, what attracted you to the hobby in the first. And why you kept coming back to it.
As a GM, you’re far better off understanding the Aesthetics of Play and how to design good gameplay experiences for players — since, really, your hobby is providing good gameplay experiences for players — than you are trying to understand why you get any kind of pleasure from that s$&%. But there are times when some self-reflection is good for you.
Thus, in the spirit of the New Year, I invite each and every one of you — especially those of you feeling unsettled, uncertain, or anxious about your gaming life — to think about why you run games. Not play. You players can sit this one out. You’re easy to classify. GMs aren’t. Reflect on your GMing hobby. Why did you start and why did you keep at it? And post your reasons below.
Meanwhile, I’m going to end this by sharing my own reflection. Which means I can write off some therapy as a business expense. Thanks.
And Now: That Heartwarming Anecdote and Personal Reflection
First, be warned: this is all personal reflection and stream-of-consciousness crap. It goes where it goes.
Second, be warned: I’m old. I got into gaming 35 years ago. That was back in 1988. I was ten years old. Thus, it’s hard for me to remember specific gaming experiences. Or even how and when certain things happened. But there are a few very vivid flashes in the chaotic montage that reveal precisely why I love running games.
My clearest memory is drawing dungeons on graph paper in math class. That, right there, sums up half the reason I’m a GM. I started with the Frank Mentzer version of Basic Dungeons & Dragons which I bought at my local B. Dalton bookstore. What made Mentzer’s take on BD&D different from the previous Holmes and Moldvay versions was the very detailed dungeon-building instructions. Hell, half the DMG was a tutorial that walked you through running, stocking, and then mapping a three-level dungeon experience. And I got hooked.
At heart, I’m a game maker. Well, a scenario designer. A level editor. And I always have been. Before I discovered D&D, I spent hours fiddling with Excitebike’s track editor and the level maker in Wrecking Crew on my Nintendo Entertainment System. That was back before most of you were even zygotes. When Super Mario Brothers 3 came out in 1991, my best friend James and I spent our lunch breaks at school drawing Super Mario levels on graph paper. Yes. Thirty years ago, I played Super Mario Maker as a pen-and-paper game with my best friend. And, to this day, I’ll play any game that has a build your own level component. At least for a little while.
But that’s not all there is to me. Because I’m also an entertainer. And that gelled with my love for games and game-making in a pretty unique way. As far back as I can remember, I always took it as my solemn duty to make sure my friends and I had a game to play. Babysitting my cousin back in the day, I invented hand-drawn, point-and-click-adventure games on the fly on a chalkboard. With a flashlight and a Casio keyboard to make alarm noises, I challenged my sisters and cousins to find hidden objects in a cluttered playroom while evading a security camera’s watchful eye. In the pool, I took on the role of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle boss characters — using a variety of pool toys as parts of highly patternized attacks — and challenged my friends to get through the gauntlet. And because I grew up in the age of just be home before the streetlights come on, I led my friends on merry live-action adventures around our neighborhood. Our bikes were horses and the schoolyards, parks, wooded lots, forbidden construction sites, and abandoned houses provided an endless array of places for my friends to seek the clues and treasures I’d hidden the day before following the map I’d drawn. And I followed them around like a Dungeon Master, occasionally playing NPCs and monsters.
Even now, I can picture these game moments pretty vividly, like the oars from my inflatable pool boat which served as the missiles fired from Metalhead’s hidden internal batteries. And I’m surprised to realize that, early on, I had a pretty fundamental intuitive grasp of how games go together. Huh. Go little Angry.
GMing was everything I wanted in one hobby. I got to sit down with graph paper and a level-building toolkit and create my own game levels and then I got to entertain the people I loved with those creations. Not that ten-year-old me — or even twenty-five-year-old me — saw it like that. It was just fun.
My understanding of games and stories evolved. With the arrival of the Super Nintendo, I became entranced by adventure games like The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past and RPGs like Final Fantasy II. The latter, especially, hit me hard. It resonated. And it showed me what a TTRPG could really be about.
And yes, FFIV was and remains superior to FFVI in every way. But that’s a story for another time.
So my games evolved from dungeon crawls and isolated adventures to grand, sweeping epics across huge worlds. And my ability to bring worlds and characters to life improved with every campaign. And I invited my players to fully enter the world and to develop their own characters. Through play, of course. Always through play.
What’s interesting though — and I only see this in hindsight now — what’s interesting is that apart from some minor tweaks and the occasional custom class or race — like my awesome moogle dancer that another GM was foolish enough to let me play — what’s interesting — yes, I know moogle slamdancing came from FFVI, not FFIV but IV is still the better the game — what’s interesting…
What’s interesting is that I never really hacked the game much. I was pretty content to build with the tools I had. And I could do amazing things with those tools. Especially once I got them to the table and applied my improvisational sense of gameplay, narrative, and table performance. Honestly, it wasn’t until this whole Angry GM thing — and specifically when I built that boss monster thing for D&D 4E based on God of War III — that I started seriously hacking anything.
For all I keep trying to hack complex systems and rules into my own games, I don’t get much pleasure from it. Understanding the rules and tools and systems so I can use them well? That I like. And it’s really useful. But hacking s$&% really wears me down. And I’m coming to realize something important about the games I’m trying to run — and games I’ve recently failed to run — for fun as I write this. Because I keep getting lost in the hacking weeds instead of just running good games.
I guess this is where the difference between hobby and job comes in. I’m good at rules and systems, but it ain’t what I do for fun. I mainly do that s$&%… well, that’s a whole different article, I think.
For me, homebrewing is about the simple joy of putting the pieces together into something uniquely my own and then inviting my friends to experience it. And relying on my ability to perform, weave a story, and adjudicate a game on the fly to provide a rich, deep, moving experience. It’s honestly the same joy I get from picking out the perfect Christmas present for someone, wrapping it carefully, writing out a heartfelt card, and then watching them open the gift and helping them put it together.
In lots of ways, I’m still that kid drawing dungeons on graph paper and then turning them into amazing experiences for my friends. This explains why I can’t run published adventures and why I don’t really enjoy playing RPGs. But I love playing video games of all kinds. And maybe it explains why my for-fun games these days are such a struggle to enjoy.
But I’m rambling.
At the end-of-the-day, I’m a nuts-and-bolts homebrewer entertainer. At least, if you made me stick a label on myself, that’d be the one I’d go with. I enjoy the solitary act of game creation, but only insofar as it’s just assembling a baseline experience from Lego pieces. The skeleton of a game. And I enjoy the act of turning that skeleton into an engaging, rewarding, and moving experience that affects my players as deeply as my favorite video games and stories affected me.
And the reason I’m here — on this site — doing this is to give each and every GM out there the chance to enjoy their own acts of creation and performance.
And I’m also here because I’m an egomaniacal f$&%er who loves having an audience.
Thank you for being my audience.
And here’s to a great gaming New Year; whatever the f$&%wits at WotC do.
I started GMing as an adult because I was already part of a gaming group – and it was my turn.
I suspect that many GMs out there will recognise what happened next.
For whatever reason, I turned out to be a better fit as GM than the rest of my gaming peers. Not a better person, but simply a better fit for the hundred+ aptitudes a GM needs to have – including being more available and more motivated.
Once that ‘better GM’ status is established past a certain level: a self-reinforcing ‘competitive advantage’ kicks in.
Since then my players (telling that I think of them like that) have only ever toyed with the idea of running a game for our group.
But they do run games for other groups – its just that the GM role in our group seems to have been comprehensively filled. This is why I haven’t played in an RPG for decades.
But why do I keep GM-ing?
For the same reason that Picasso created X artworks a day. Now: I don’t care for Picasso’s work. To me, it looks like junk. But I recognise the drive.
I get the same urge to unpack ‘stuff’ from my mind and create something for others to engage with. It’s a drive. It’d be painful not to do it.
And I don’t have a better word than ‘stuff’. By ‘stuff’ I mean: situations, sense impressions, revelations, dramatic reverses and climaxes. All of it.
In my case it might be ‘stuff’ from e.g. the Dunwich Horror, or the Masque of the Red Death, or Aliens, or from well-done published scenarios like ‘Dawn of the Red Sun’. It all gets re-created into the game.
Hope this was helpful
I started running games to be popular. In the nerdy, ren-faire circles I ran in as a teenager the GM was the rock star of the bunch. I was losing touch with my childhood friends and wanted to be that social nucleus again.
It worked. My friend group and my player group have been synonymous since that point. I met my wife when she and her friends wanted to play in my game. I did and do take pride when I hear my friends say I’m the best GM they know.
I work at a hobby shop, selling ttrpgs. I see my friends every week, running ttrpgs. I play video games in my few spare hours, with a document open to write down any ideas that would be cool to use in a ttrpg. Podcasts. Patreons. Rulebooks. All to improve my game mastery.
I run games because that’s what I do. I’m The Game Master, and the only thing that brings me more joy than watching my players reactions to the stories I weave for them is seeing my daughter telling stories with her dolls.
Yes!
+1 to the idea of noting down stuff that might feed the game. It seems an obvious idea but the discipline of *actually doing it, all the time*, is the hard part that makes GM-ing easier.
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Also: the same disciplined approach with images.
Every so often I specifically browse for images. I create a library of images in folders named ‘Dwarves’ or ‘Lizard Things’ or ‘Creepy Nobles (Male)’ and so on.
As I will always (in VTT) be using images to show the players the monsters, I work from images first, then cast them as exact monsters either.
E.g. I can’t find a picture of a red-skinned snake-lady to order – but what I *can* do is browse, find (say) a purple-skinned lady medusa, store it in a suitably named folder – then one day deploy it as the perfect image of ‘the purple-skinned medusa in the marsh temple’.
——————–
One last piece of discipline: I record sessions and listen back to them. That way I can spot problems: poor pacing, slow game mechanics, questionable adjudications, etc.
And of course the recordings are great fun in their own right.
“either” ==> “later”
I am an entertainer. DnD is a medium for my art.
I enjoy succeeding on the never ending challenges and opportunities presented by the performance. I seek to delight and amaze my players in the way I was back in 1979.
ANALOGY:
In game, a DM is to a player as an official is to a sport. Out of game, a DM is more like a doctor, diagnosing what went well and not so well, and planning a new course of action to make more things go better and have fewer bad things.
And yet, the brains behind DnD have always ignored the fundamental challenge of a DM in game. I define it as “the nearly instant access to relevant information during the performance.” Angry started addressing this years ago, manifesting it in Silverpine Watch. I’ve taken that and other things and created material that works like a script, allowing the director to know what is happening without reference to anything but the script. This means a DM can read on one page optimally the things the DM must know, a description to give the players, possible outcomes of declared actions, and the exits from the scene. Sure, like a director, each DM will present the scene and make it their own. But they won’t need to look elsewhere to do it.
I got about 20 more years, maybe, to get this right and take it to my grave.
I have a long and storied history with D&D, starting with Chainmail (yes, I’m almost that old, it belonged to my older brothers and I still have the majority of the little silver-covered comb-bound booklet) and even some of those tiny-boxed games like Melee and Wizard (which I still have as well, maps and pieces) or Dungeon! complete with its exclamation point and that old foldable map that always made the little tile cards slide off of their rooms. We also had the Atari and got one of the first console RPGs way back when you could get away with naming a game “Swordquest” or an adventure “Adventure”. So I was immersed in the culture from the very start.
Thing is, no matter what the story, I always crafted my own little adventure around it, rarely content that the story ended there. (And no, not fan fiction. Don’t go there. Just… don’t go there.)
The story had to go on. Just had to.
It was pretty natural for me to start GMing so I could craft “the rest of the story”, as Paul Harvey would say.
And something else… I have one of those weird brains they call a “golden brain.” I’m neither right- nor left-brain-dominant (practice some google-fu if you want to get into their explanations). The TL;DR is basically that while I’m a font of creativity, I can and do go full-on brainiac all logic and s$&%. RPGs tickled that bone for me. I get to play with stories AND with lots of f$&%ing rules and numbers and all that crazy s$&%. Not that I’m one of those Chaotic Evil rules bosses, but I like having them at my disposal. Muahahaha-f$&%ing-ha.
I also happen to be an author too, and can say that the comparisons to GM stand. Storytelling is so intrinsic to me that I couldn’t understand for a greater part of my life that not everyone who reads has the desire to write or craft something of their own. Authors and Readers both love the same thing–stories–we just get our kicks out of it in different ways.
As a GM I’m really not what you describe. I completely lack that ability to “weave a story […] on the fly”. I’m also bad at writing, mostly because I don’t enjoy writing, so I rely heavily on commercial adventure modules. It may seem stupid, but those things are as important to me as the actual rulebooks, without the scenarios I buy or find online, I just couldn’t run games.
That said, have a great gaming year, see you in 2023 !
That’s the point. I only described me. I’m inviting everyone else to describe themselves. Including you. You and I both love GMing for different reasons and get different things from it. And that’s fine. Have a great New Year.
I have never commented before, but I want you to know that, although we enjoy different sides of the hobby, the work you have done is of immense value to me.
I get paid to DM, and each day I prepare for my groups using a carefully considered and systematized routine to both learn more and craft an experience they all enjoy, and do you know what the first thing I do is in the hour-long routine that helps me run 5, going on 6 weekly groups is?
I read an Angry GM article.
I must have gone through your Megadungeon series from start to finish three times now. Some articles I must have reread more times than I can count to glean additional sparks of wisdom. And yet there is always still more. So much left for me to uncover.
So if I were to say two things, the very first thing would have to be thank you.
The second one would probably be to suggest that you set it up so that people can get post updates without having to comment first, eheh. But mostly, thank you again.
Wow, you most certainly are a veteran DM. “Back in my day we played videogames on graph paper.” I hold high respect for the sheer amount of experience you have under your belt. I, too, ran games in my notebooks, except that was just because I only see my friends at school.
The reason I got into DMing was because no one was DMing and I had a thirst for DnD. I feel like I was probably an annoying player in my first campaign because I have always enjoyed telling stories. I got into DMing quite literally less than 2 months ago and am DMing 4 campaigns. I enjoy the storytelling, the worldbuidling, seeing my players interact with this cool thing I made and seeing all the pieces click together and build into one epic finale. I think the first time I was ever introduced to something like DnD was when my elder brother would tell us stories that we would act as characters in in our bedroom long after our bedtime. Those are probably my fondest memories, period.
I’ve always loved storytelling and entertaining people, so I feel like it was a natural development to get into DnD after my elder brother was like “you should watch critical roll.” My first campaign was not long after that, and being the only player who missed no more than 1 session, I was basically the main character. Isabelle took part in one shots that delved deep into the backstories of each of our other players and I brought in new players when old ones had to go. Looking back I was probably a really annoying player because of my tendency to pipe up and ask questions and narrate stuff that was probably the DM’s job. Glad the DM tolerated me lol.
I plan to keep it up because I still have stories to tell and world to build in my pocket world of Myrkheim which exists basically to say “Fuck DnD 5E’s default world I want nothing to do with it and all my players are new so it won’t matter.” I plan to keep it up because my players enjoy it and I have yet to make all four campaigns collide together in a colossal train wreck when the opposing motivations and desires cause ripple effects that shatter everything the other players are doing. I want to see chaos. I want to see bloodshed. I want destruction.
Lastly, I plan to keep it up because otherwise I have no way to get my weekly fix of this addiction of a game I play.
Thanks for the consistent advice, Angry!
Much like others and yourself, I have the story telling desire and urge in addition to the crafting aspects. While the overall same timeline, my exposures and memories began at 6 as I am the youngest of three brothers. Watching and then playing with them and eventually playing with my age friends opened a world of crafting, logic and math, and storytelling. My first GMing experiences sucked as I was concerned with the players and if something would be “fun” or “bad” etc. Instead of “story telling” I worried about the individual roles and if people “liked me”. That, by necessity, was corrected and since has been a struggle but an enjoyable one. Part of the drive is because I would like to write but struggle with the actual writing part…
Maybe it is coincidence, but I have always wondered if there is a causation (or correlation) between the lack of aligned novels with the change in overall feeling and gameplay. Sure the genre is alive and well but there was a “feeling” of having a distinct set of worlds available independent of, but related to, the game. It gave feelings and tones with storylines. Many of the same “master players” and “master GMs” were writing those books based off games run allowing a sense of “this is what it could be”. Maybe there is the same now and I am just ignorant… but without it, the game feels more like a trumped up Monopoly or Risk than a narrative.
And no, a pod cast of play does not equate and full that void.
Same here.
Do you have a beard?
Beards are awful.
I got into d&d through a friend back in middle school – he got out his dad’s old AD&D rulebooks one day and I was hooked – enough that I still remember my four PCs for that first sewer dungeon full of wererats. I still am a player on occasion.
But as a GM. I love hacking, tweaking, creating scenarios and systems. I really like to build off of existing frameworks, which I part of why I haven’t left 5e yet – it’s good enough that I can be satisfied tweaking the gameplay loop.
That’s also why I enjoyed building my own megadungeon off of Angry’s math.
To design stuff.
As a kid, it was legos, ADnD, coding in BASIC and trying to build my own R2-D2.
As an adult, got a doctorate in robotics, machine learning and how the brain works, so now it’s factory automation, robotic systems and machine learning based products and how people use them.
RPGs are fun because there’s fewer constraints- Mad Maxian Minotaur Cargo Cultists, heavy metal feline space bards or schizophrenic, mentalist conspiracy theorist superheroes who make their beliefs come true are all fair game. To me, the game world should be consistent and reward-ably learnable for the players- good and bad strategies that can be recognized and taken advantage of (or avoided) by the _characters_ (as opposed to the players, who can take advantage of rule quirks, the focus should be on the in-game world- so it has to behave as expected… not unlike an automated system.)
I started GMing because I discovered an AD&D book on my friend’s father’s bookcase and was entranced by the idea of being able to create worlds for my friends to explore like the ones I explored in my video games. D&D 3.5 was the first edition I was actually able to get my hands on, so that’s where we started. Why do I keep doing it? Partially, it’s because I still enjoy that experience of giving my friends a fantastical world for them to engage in and respond to, but it’s also because I find the way game design can incentivize and influence people’s behaviours and ideas to be fascinating. Finding or developing game mechanics that really reinforce the concepts they’re meant to represent to the players is a lot of fun.
I run games because I’m a Creator, a Builder, and a Tinkerer. I love disassembling things (stories, toys, electronics, games, etc.) and figuring out how they work, and then using that knowledge to make my own stuff. Some of my earliest memories are of drawing out diagrams of action scenes, creating settings based on my favorite tv shows, and dissecting their worldbuilding. When I discovered D&D 3.5 in college, I immediately latched onto the GM role, as it allowed me to create entire worlds from the ground up *and* share them with other people. Heck, I didn’t even know pre-published worlds and adventures were a thing until maybe five years into my GMing career.
In my post-college years, I’ve discovered that I also really enjoy the Entertainer side of GMing as well. I love making people smile, and I love seeing my players having fun. To me, every dungeon I build, every encounter I craft, and every NPC I portray is a carefully wrapped gift to my players, and I get just as my enjoyment out of watching them unwrap it as they do in discovering it.
I played DnD 5e briefly in high school, as it was all of our first times playing and we had little experience, it wasn’t the best and it fizzled out eventually. About a year ago, a couple of years after high school, my friend started DMing. It was a mere 3 sessions as a player before I felt an inexplicable draw to DMing my own campaign. I couldn’t tell you what it was that inspired me, other than just being near the craft, but I followed it. I can’t put into words exactly what I DM for, but I wanted to do it, did it, and still want to do it. I suppose that’s enough until I get more reflective and eloquent with age… or something
100% relate to this. It’s like trying to describe why you’re into breathing.
“And just as knitters shouldn’t stab themselves with their needles and trapshooters shouldn’t discharge their guns into their own faces, GMs should not turn their gameplay analysis tools on themselves. It’ll all end in tears.”
Sometimes what you write makes us laugh, sometimes what you write makes us better GMs… and sometimes, some very rare times, you get to write hidden gems like this, that are so amazing, they alone are worth the reading. Pieces of text that are simultaneously deep, comical, sarcastic, and yet sober and grounded.
It’s quite surprising to realize that, in the last few years, there’s been many times that I’ve come here only to leave with a great appreciation for the quality of your writing and the enjoyment it brings, instead of a trivial fulfilment of my own interests for the hobby. Thanks a lot Angry, and have a great New Year.
Now with talk like that, you’ll turn a young GM’s head.
I DM because I love nerdy fantasy s78$&t and it’s a great way to get together f2f and have a mostly good time. Being a few years older than you, I resonated with a lot of what you said about growing up with it. I miss those yellow character sheets, the limited number of classes that forced me to think about what KIND of fighter I was, not whether I was an Oath of Pointy Things with a Feat of Confusing Rules. Dang it, I got into complaining again. Go D&D!
I love to DM. I like to weave stories and spin adventures.
In my childhood in the 90s I loved the Point and Click Adventures like Monkey Island, Indiana Jones and especially LOOM, and later the RPGs like Fallout and the Elder Scroll series and I love anything SciFi and Fantasy and writing and creating my own worlds and stories is just fun.
And seeing my players interact with my World, seeing them having fun and getting attached to it is just … fulfilling.
I imagine, If I would have lived hundreds of years ago I/in a fantasy medieval world, I would be a wandering storyteller, a bard, a minstrel.
And being a DM today is the closest thing to being that. Apart from maybe playing LARP and Larping as a Bard.
Loom! Classic!
LOOM doesn’t get enough love. It has this perfect feel of fantastical/mystical that no other game got for me.
Reading your site (and book) for a long time but stopped running games. I was already determined to comeback in January and found this article really interesting and somehow encouraging. I don’t have a clear idea why I’ve became so obsessed with running RPGs since I discovered them. I guess I have some of the entertainer in me, also I think I like being an agitator of sorts, I like gathering people together to play this games. I struggle a bit with prep/design. Perhaps it have something to do with my approach to the creator/tweaker part. Food for thought. Thank you for staying around for so long with this blog!
This reminds me that before I found DnD, I wasn’t a game designer, I was an interactive storyteller. I used to run elaborate games for my little brother, using Legos and action figures, but as far as mechanics, it was just Calvinball. The point wasn’t to make a challenge, the point was to tell a story, usually a high stakes mystery with intrigue and betrayal.
I got into TTRPG, specifically Ascension, so that I could continue to tell fun stories to my Brother, and other new players. Mage’s rules are one step away from Calvinball anyways.
This makes me realize why I enjoy running WoD and PbtA games is because the focus is on storytelling, not gaming. In fact, the only reason I ever really run 5e and now PF2e, is because my brother is obsessed with Tactical JRPGs, so it is a great way to scratch both our itches.
This exercise reminded me it’s ok to focus more on the storytelling, and run the actual game more simply, based on the included rules.
I happened upon gming because somebody needed to do it. I stuck with it because I enjoy finding out how things work under the hood (game part of role play).
The other reason is that I like to spend my shower time thinking about situations and the characters involved in them, justifying their motives/actions in a way that the scenario makes sense and has minimum plot holes(i believe the biggest strength/weakness of the human brain is finding patterns in everything).
Thanks for making understand that after I make my little toy in my brain I have to give it to my players to break it while I impartially (as much as I can) adjudicate how they do that. And that is the third reason i like gming: discovering outcomes to my scenarios that i never thought just because the rest of the people on the table don’t think like me.
I also enjoy being a player so I guess I am not super normal for a gm.
I started DMing around 1979, armed with the little brown books. (And no polyhedral dice, and no Chainmail, which made the LBBs pretty hard to suss out for 12-year-old me.) I’ve always liked maps, and inspired by the glimpses I could see in those little books I drew out a 26-level dungeon on big sheets of plotter printer graph paper my dad brought home. I made my mom create a first-level character and explore my dungeon (IIRC, a basilisk killed her in the second room she entered.)
Why GM? The creative aspect (maps and so on) are certainly part of it. Honestly, I think a lot of it is because it’s as close as I can come to playing a lot of the time. Other people I know have run games but they generally don’t last long and so they’re ultimately frustrating (there are some exceptions, but that’s the general rule). By GMing I am at least participating in a game, even if I’m not playing. And I’m a long-time old-school wargamer (hex & counter; think Squad Leader and Advanced Third Reich and stuff like that) so I’m into strategy and tactics and all of that stuff, and so especially with the advent of 3rd edition and a more regularized combat system I _could_ play some of the time, by running the monsters and NPCs that the players might fight and trying to play them as smart and challenging foes.
I’ve been feeling a lack of motivation of late, too. Partly because there are a lot of competing demands on my time and attention. Partly because my players have similar demands on their attention and so they can’t/won’t remember details or backstory or other things in my game so it tends to devolve into a combat slugfest. And it does start to feel like, as you mention, my expected role is to dispense XP and magical treasures and whatnot that are precisely calibrated to let my players complete their planned character builds, rather than to model a world and let them find their own way in it.
So relate to this.
I am about the same vintage as the Angry GM, growing up with D&D as it also evolved. With my small group of gaming friends from primary school, we all acted as the DM on a round-robin basis. But this was only part of our hobby, which extended into miniature wargaming and anything else we could get hold of with our pocket-money budgets.
I continued to be a player of D&D and other RPGs through university and up to the present day. But my own contribution to running games was initially on the figure and historical wargames front, where I was always creating and umpiring battle scenarios or campaigns, providing a cross-over for my gaming friends who were less familiar with that side of wargaming. Though some of my more pedantic wargames friends would complain when I co-opted their figures into games set in a different historical period. I instead embraced everything I could find in the developing hobby, from roleplaying to reenactment, figure to PC gaming.
I think that desire for freedom in making new scenarios and lack of interest in the figure-painting and modelling side of the hobby led me into become a GM for RPGs. I started with Pendragon first edition and have continued ever since, with regular breaks for life changes. Almost all of my campaigns, regardless of rule-set, have some basis on historical scenarios and I think that goes to the heart of my interest. I like using the rules and players to explore what-ifs. How do people response to the world, history, moral dilemmas, swings of fortune, my plots. My settings are therefore always home-brewed, I’ve even made a few sets of rules for running some settings (including a couple of LARPs!).
I still play in other people’s RPG games and continue as a military history enthusiast, a figure, board and PC gamer, with a bit of reenactment with the while family at weekends!
Some time ago you shared that “It’s all D&D” video by Professor DM, and I had lengthy discussions with a friend of mine about it. I found myself caring about the system, even though I also recognized the idea he presented.
I realized that I too is a “build with the blocks I’m given” type of player. In fact I prefer to homebrew as little as possible, too often I find homebrew has odd and unforeseen consequences on my games.
And yet, it took me ages to actually use the tools presented in the DMG, it took an Angry blogger to yell at me for me to realize those tools even existed. I stopped reading the DMG first time around chapter 2, when I got tired of it stating the obvious to me, and not teaching me how to run a good game. Gods? World? Scenario? Yeah, I had that already, that’s why I bought the book, to teach me how to put that into good use!
It always baffles me how little WotC actually facilitates GMing. And yet every single D&D game out there has a GM at the table. It’s probably the most important person at the table. And yet: More sub-classes!
The tools given to GMs always feels like an after though. Like they go “oh yeah, GMs need something too. It’s them who buy all the books!”
I do like more magic items though, but since they don’t have their own random tables combined with the DMG one, I end up mostly using the DMG ones anyways…
Spot on! Honestly magic items should get their own book. And the DMs guide—and supplements—should be all about helping DMs DM.
There’s stuff like this:
https://homebrewery.naturalcrit.com/share/Syy_IAjVG
But there are plenty of magic item generators out there as well.
In the old days there was a 4 volume set:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Encyclopedia_Magica
available bundle:
https://www.dmsguild.com/product/120126/Encyclopedia-Magica-Series-2e-BUNDLE
5e conversion here:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Vrxhyk3WNZc5vekF_vvalxvCeojI0av1/view
Here’s a 5e conversion of the 4 volume set: https://www.reddit.com/r/dndnext/comments/7vod7v/the_not_really_complete_encyclopedia_magica_now/
My tool of choice for making dungeons was Microsoft Excel, the player position was the cell selector and I figured out how to use macros to make rooms change when you typed the right “password” into certain cells, letting you move on to the next room/puzzle. These games were utterly incomprehensible to anyone that wasn’t me.
The first experience I had with making something for other people was a roleplaying system I developed from scratch (somehow I thought of that before I discovered tabletop engines were a thing that existed already). The people I ran it with fucking hated it and refused to let me run anything anymore.
So I’m stuck for a decade plus reading everything I can about others having fun DMing while I almost certainly will never put it into practice again. I don’t know if it even counts as a hobby anymore if I would genuinely prefer self-flagellation to ever trying to run a game again.
I had always wanted a different name for both GMs and “Players”. I think “Gamers” was always the best but a bit cringe. “Participant” is a bit clinical. But I think that’s what people get at when they say, “GMs are players.” Not that they’re playing the game, but they are a part of it. More so than the designers of most games.
That being said, the point of GMs not being players does resonate. Yes, we are “part” of the game, but there’s very little *playing* besides combat.
But more so; I think more people would agree that GMs aren’t players because of the universal “success” story everyone seems to share. That the best experiences GMing are when the players take the reins and run with it. Talking with each other, usually in character, problem solving, etc etc. All without really acknowledging the GM. As if the game you designed could be played without you is a nice feeling.
My favorite times as GM are when my intelligent friends get pressured, “I don’t know what to do but I must do something.” and when they come up with creative solutions.
It is coaching. Coaching through adversity. A teacher giving the tools and desiring to present problems while having to hand hold less and less. To see the gears lock into place and the student walking on their own.
Video games act as teachers, rewarding mastery and punishing failure to learn. The designers want the players to succeed but to grow while doing so, and the games that balance the amount of struggle over time are popular because people like to grow. GMs are just semi real-time designers.
Fights over editions and rulesets sound like when people debate about fitness and diet regimes.
RPGs can focus on rules mastery, creative problem solving, and risk/reward management (and probably more). The rules a GM gravitates towards will be the areas he likes to coach in other people. For players, it will either be the areas they feel weak at (more challenge and engagement) or where they feel strong at (“I can showoff”).
I run games because I’m a creator – I love making things. Computer programs, paintings, drawings, whatever. It doesn’t even really matter what it is – I just genuinely feel the need to create and this hobby is an outlet for that. I do get a kick when people enjoy my work, but I’m also happy to make something that will get covered up the next day.
The rest of it – the performance, the social dynamics, the game design, it’s all just…what the creation (in this case, an adventure or campaign) needs to be cared for by others. All of that falls somewhere between indifference and dislike for me – but it’s worth it for the intrinsic joy of creating something.
When I was in college, I watched a documentary short on a Japanese artist who’s name I cannot remember. But what he said stuck with me – “Art is like a child. If you give it love, and support, and prepare it for the world with what it needs, others may come to accept and love it as well. But, if it is neglected or rushed, the world will reject it”.
For me it was all about the maps. I just wanted some independently-thinking friends to wander around the maps I created and run into fun things and ultimately win them. Then it was the equipment descriptions, the art in the monster manuals, the little boxes in the character sheets just waiting to be filled in with all the details. When I started in ’85 everything was a mystery to explore, and it’s become more and more clear over the years that creating new mysteries for my players to explore is where I get the most fun from my hobby.
I failed a lot as a DM for years until I started getting the hang of it. I find this site relatable because it parallels my growth experiences and gives me great advice, but also reassurance that other folks are doing what I’m doing in similar ways to how I’m doing it. I’m looking forward to running a lot of games in 2023 and I wish for all of you to have that fun hobby experience in whatever manner works best for you!
I love creating, envisioning, and presenting – but none of those are the reason I GM, or hack games or build my own. I secretly hope that my players go home with their hearts & minds refreshed and enabled. I am trying to push open the doors for us to teach ourselves through fun. I have always found that intelligence comes quicker with sensible enjoyment.
I was introduced to D&D when my parents bought me the original D&D starter set as a Christmas present when I was in middle school (late ’70s). I played with a friend and his older brother (the “dungeon master”) for a while before “graduating” to Advanced Dungeons and Dragons (yep, the first edition — I had the PH, the MM, the DMG … even got the Fiend Folio). I was pretty much hooked on that game for the next few years, all through high school. I played, I ran games, I drew pretty maps and dungeon layouts, I threw lots of dice. It’s no stretch to say that D&D, whether playing or GM’ing, made high school tolerable.
I stopped playing after high school. I basically forgot about D&D until my son expressed an interest in the game a few years ago. So his mother and I went ahead and bought him the current Starter Set for a Christmas present. He was excited, and he talked to his friends and they got excited about it too. But not all kids read rule books these days … it became clear to me that if they were going to play, someone was going to have to introduce them all to the game. That someone was me.
With lots of help, they created characters, and then I fumbled through the Lost Mines of Phandelver as the GM. I struggled with EVERYTHING: the story, descriptions of the scenes, the NPCs, and the rules mechanics. Funny thing, though — nobody else really cared or noticed. Everyone had a blast, including me.
A bit of time off because of schedule issues (and after an aborted attempt at Curse of Strahd — a bit to complex for either the kids OR me LOL), and we’re about to go back at it again. A dad sitting around the table with his son and a group of his son’s friends, being social, having fun using pencil, paper, funny shaped dice and our imaginations. S$&%, I can’t wait.
That’s the dream! Have fun
I don’t DM. I don’t run games often enough to count. The short reason is that DMing feels like too much of a job, and I don’t want to turn an enjoyable hobby into an unenjoyable chore.
But I DO love this hobby. It’s been a staple of my entertainment since the early 90’s.
For me, a big part of it is rules hacking. I like learning various systems, rules, and homebrews. I like finding different and clever ways to do things and then incorporating them into my own custom ruleset. Your tension pool is a prime example.
I like the community of it. I especially love how some people are passionate enough to make it their job. To produce new systems, new rules, new content, and share it with us. That’s a huge part of my love for this hobby.
I like that I don’t need a huge budget and an expansive production team. A handful of dice, a few rules, a pencil and some scratch paper, and an imagination and I can generate entire worlds. Universes of my own design.
I like the rabbit holes it sends me on. 20 tabs open relating to ancient agriculture because my world needs to be “believable” I don’t think I’d ever use it in an actual game, but I learned something interesting about our own world I never would have otherwise.
But every time I actually sit down to play? I barely enjoy it… This is a hobby for me. Not a game. But it’s fun and fascinating all the same.
I became a GM back in high school because I wanted to build a fantasy world for my friends to play in. The world-building was the primary draw. As time has gone on, though, I have found different sources of fulfillment. My first shift was only about a year later, toward story-telling, something my first campaign was lacking in. As I improved in that area, I became more interesting in that element than the world-building. In college, I joined a group in designing our own game and game design became my biggest source of joy. (and hacking mechanics) I still loved the story-telling and world-building, though. Fortunately, this hobby offers all of the above! It’s been about a decade since that shift to game design, and not much has changed since then.