The Why of a GM (a.k.a. Why I’m in Control)
by Joel Gilmore
(Editors note: today we have our first guest column, written by a Broken Hands affiliate [it’s much less of a sweet deal than being a Wu Tang affiliate, sadly. We can’t even offer dental.] Today’s writer has been running games for me, Edgar, Alex, and Cassie for a couple years now, and is currently responsible for Invisible Sun, mentioned previously. Today he has given us a brief memoir on running Tabletop games.)
The cover of the AD&D Players Handbook, the motif of stealing the jeweled eye of a grotesque idol has been repeated often.
I have been gaming forever, or near enough as makes no difference. My brothers and I dug up an AD&D core set back at the edge of my memory, 2000 or 2001, and knew we’d struck mithril. It was my father’s and it took us all of a heartbeat to drag him away from whatever project he was working on and get him to tell us all about it. It took us a week to get him to agree to build a campaign and another month or so to get everything ready.
Those sessions were heaven, but my father worked all the time and could only run one session a month. It wasn’t enough. I don’t remember which of us ran the first one-shot, but it only took us a few months to get a firm enough grip on the rules to feel like we could paint our own worlds. Another few months and I had my first idea for something near the scale of a full campaign.
AD&D was our first love, TSR’s Alternity came next, then White Wolf’s Werewolf: The Apocalypse and Vampire: The Masquerade, then another and another and another. My brothers were happy enough learning and playing whatever was in front of them, but I was insatiable. Every book brought new ideas, but also new restrictions for whatever system or setting assumptions were made by the authors.
Within a few years of finding AD&D, I tried writing my own systems. They were… deeply terrible, but they let me play with my ideas more than our limited library. Then I learned the power of toolbox systems and it blew my mind. Alternity had long been our grail of sci-fi systems: not the easiest to get into, but it had everything in modules that could be used or discarded as the setting required. Savage Worlds came along and our lust for pulp (and poker) was satisfied. Then World of Darkness brought White Wolf into the toolbox arena and whole vistas of magic realism and horror lay open.
While my brothers and I had started in the round-robin style of passing control as our stories sparked and faded, that approach died around the time our father’s campaign wrapped up. Every person has a pretty unique personality which shapes the development of their gaming style. For my brothers and I, this set the GM/player assignments pretty firmly.
Now, personalities and the styles they shape are deeply complex; I can only provide the basic structure for any gaming style other than my own, but here are how things shook out. My brothers came out of those early campaigns with strong player instincts; they could run games here and there, but they were strongest when playing the group dynamic and running individual characters within a setting. I, on the other hand, had more ideas than I knew how to use, and I was so desperately impatient that waiting for someone else to pull together something playable was excruciating. As a player, I am proficient, sometimes even clever, but I’m loud, I’m impatient, and I can’t help but game the system.
A demonstration of a “GM screen” for the game Numenera, taken from the Monte Cook website.
That’s how I became a GM. Here’s why I’ve kept doing it: I’m damn good. I have been running games for nearly 20 years now and refined that geyser of inspiration into a (mostly) coherent set of practices for developing ideas, building worlds, and communicating both to my players.
Now, every decent GM has a philosophy built out from their gaming style and, if they’re any good, it’s constantly evolving as they find new systems. Mine is built on the principles of obfuscation, improvisation, and deadpan delivery.
Obfuscation is my prime method of building a believable setting. In case you find it counter-intuitive, allow me to explain. If there is an objective reality, we can’t know it. Every individual perceives the world through a filter built from their past experiences which, necessarily, distort every new experience to some degree. Also, people lie, to themselves and to others, about pretty much everything all the time. By incorporating that into the construction and communication of my settings, I push my players to doubt, to ask questions, and to explore beyond the immediately obvious.
Improvisation is my go-to for building stories, but it was not always so. In the beginning, I would meticulously plot out my stories, merge them with whatever system I was running, and then run my players through them. AD&D lends itself to that, as do many of its relatives, so it was a natural starting point for me. Players, however, have their own ideas, and no plan survives contact with a roving band of murder-hobos.1 I learned this rather quickly.
Over time, I have shifted more and more to the side of improvisation. I create elevator pitches of plot, independent and modular encounters, and a broad supporting cast of characters with which my players can interact. While I usually have some meta-plot or grand arc to provide a backdrop and general structure, each component is pulled together only as my players approach it. If you get good at it, your plots come together quite naturally and your players feel a true sense of agency, drawing them further into the world.
Finally, I never run fully mundane campaigns: the weird, the macabre, and the outrageous are rarely out of sight and never out of mind. In the pursuit of effectively incorporating these facets, I have found the deadpan delivery to be quite effective. It creates a disconnect between the way the players experience their characters and the way their characters experience the world, and generally enhances player investment.
When you use the deadpan to relate that a building communicates by rearranging the patterns on its wallpaper, what may be weird or wondrous for the players is normal for the characters, and so your players want to see more. When the monster made of flayed skin and mirror shards is described in the deadpan, what is chilling and macabre for the players is no longer unthinkable in the setting, and your players worry about what else is out there. When the swashbuckling rogue rides a chandelier cable off a landing, over a masquerade ball, and through a window, all in the deadpan, the outrageous becomes viable and the players wonder how they might shock or impress the supporting cast.
The artwork used by the LA Times Review of Books to head their review of the game.
Over the years, my library has cycled with each evolution of my philosophy. Monte Cook and company’s Numenera and Invisible Sun have strengthened my obfuscation. D. Vincent and Meguey Baker’s Apocalypse World and its million offshoots have given me a lot of practice with improvisation. Onyx Path’s Chronicles of Darkness, Chaosium’s Call of Cthulhu, and Unknown Armies from John Scott Tynes and Greg Stolze helped perfect my deadpan delivery.
In the end, I can’t be anything but a GM. In the end, I can’t be anything but in control.
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1 — A brief aside: I hate stories of GMs who are constantly fighting to make their players follow their perfectly ordered plots and lamenting when things inevitably go awry. It’s pointless bitching that does not address the actual problem (a lack of group communication) and has no place in the collaboration of tabletop gaming.