I’ve been GMing tables and coordinating groups for a few years now and there is one particular comment that, like clockwork, pops up every couple months.
“I really want to DM my own game.”
Allow me to offer a reply to every single person that has said this to me. You should. I’ll be there if you don’t have enough players. You can borrow my books, ask me questions, I’ll offer you options on venue. I’ll help coordinate the schedules!
You may have heard rumors about a “DM drought” or seen comments from folk that can’t seem to get a seat at a table. Maybe it’s a Looking For Group bulletin board or Discord channel at your friendly local game shop. Maybe it’s friendly chatter on a group outing. The hard truth is that the ratio of “people who want to play an RPG” relative to “people who are GMing RPGs” approaches a functional infinity.
That means there is opportunity, a chance for you to help someone’s dream come true; a chance for you to fulfil a desire of your own.
Is playing as the GM the easiest role at the table? Nope.
Is it the hardest role at the table? Sometimes.
Is it the most fulfilling? I can’t answer that for you.
Does it require special skills or knowledge? It depends…
In my own experience, there are some qualities that people assume the GM (note: I use the term “GM” rather than “DM” or “Dungeon Master.” I fill the role of a “Game Moderator” because I am not in charge) has to possess. Most of the time this is based on bad information.
What a GM Does Not Need:
- Comprehensive knowledge of the game
- Acting skills
- Encyclopedic mastery of the setting
- Props, miniatures, environments
- Management experience
That first one trips a log of folks up. They’ve mostly only seen GMs with years, decades, of experience running tables and conclude that tenure is a requirement. I promise you this: It. Is. Not.
Find your nearest “forever GM” and ask them what their level of expertise was when they first stepped behind the screen. Ask how “expert” they feel about the role today. Oh, you’ll absolutely get a few guys, who are totally full, of it telling you that they basically invented the genre, or that they independently derived THACO. Ignore those guys. I’ll bet they haven’t GMed for a dozen different people in the last five years. They don’t have a gaming group, they have hostages. Ask the GMs who are smiling as people take their seats, who applaud (literally) when a player succeeds, who say “thank you” at the end of the session.
Truth is, we all started out at zero on literally everything we know. Someone taught you how to poop correctly (admittedly, some visitors to facilities could use a refresher on this). We learned and developed skills through instruction, observation, and practice. I learned how to GM games by reading books (like the excellent So You Want to be a Game Master), absorbing blogs and videos on the subject. My understanding of the craft grew thanks to getting to watch and play with amazing game moderators and designers (there are a couple of you lurking on the roster here). More recently, I’ve been honing my craft by trying out ideas and techniques at the table, iterating my way toward the personal style, approach, and vibes that I want to share with people.
I gave a list of things that GMs don’t need, but what is it that a person needs to fill the GM role?
One thing. Just one, single solitary thing that - if you develop it in yourself - will take care of everything else.
GMs need to have an internalized understanding that other people have states of mind different from their own. Other people have their own thoughts, perceptions, and experiences. Even people who are very close to one another, who have lived through the exact same episodes, might contextualize those shared episodes very differently and reach incompatible conclusions as a result. What a GM (or anyone, really) needs is a theory of mind.
People do things, even playing the same game as each other, for very different personal reasons. It is impossible for you, for anyone, to entirely know someone else - to know why x makes them cringe, y gets a chuckle, or what causes that little tick of tension at the back of their teeth.
While one person wants challenges to triumph over, their neighbor is enjoying people’s company, the player across from them is developing a part of their identity, someone else is making a beautiful pattern - and the thing is that you won’t know, you can’t ever really know.
People know wildly different things, attend to different things, attend differently to things. Genuine attention, sincere interest don’t have a single face.
You can’t control it, you can’t plan for it, and you can’t hold it but (courtesy of the vagaries of language) you can embrace it and leave space for it.
The alternative is expecting yourself to have perfect knowledge, circumscribing every one with your omniscience, prescribing the world-as-you-have-it to all the “NPCs” you meet. It’s solipsism, the belief that other people - other minds - can’t be be proven to exist and therefore don’t. The result is being such a miserable loser that you have to pay your employees to let you cheat at Settlers of Catan. It’s exhausting (even if you never go “full k-hole”) to burden yourself with optimizing for everyone else’s “failings.” They notice and pull away at your well-intentioned, unsolicited advice. They close off, leaving you isolated, alienated… alone.
That expectation is unfair to the other players, to other people, and to yourself. Everybody finds a way to shine.
In your practice as a GM, honor their shine and meet it - don’t constrain it - with your own. Free yourself from plotting out every possible move (ffs this isn’t chess!). Stop obsessing over dice rolls and stat blocks and inventory. Ask yourself “what do they need to succeed in this space?”, the answer is probably much simpler and more fundamental than you assume. Give yourself grace to be fallible. Keep making mistakes. Repair your mistakes. Your session prep will be easier, your sessions will flow better, and other people will amaze you with the ingenuity, inventiveness, and agency that you’re getting better and better at realizing they had along.