10 of 37 Questions

A quiz, lifted from Tumblr, about D&D, in the style of LJ

In lieu of thinking of my own content (and because I was about a thousand words into “the kind of campaign I’d like to play in”, only to find it was identical to “the kind of campaigns I run”), I have stolen this rather excellent quiz from Tumblr, and am answering it as they were answered on Livejournal, yea, in the days of yore.

(MidJourney’s idea of a DM’s screen. I’d use that.)

1. How did you get into TTRPGs? Was there a transition into the DM’s seat, or have you always been there? Are you playing more often than you’re running or vice versa?

In about 1988 or 1989, at the age of 10 or 11, while my father was working a craft show in the Strawberry Fair in Enniscorthy, the local bookshop (the new bookshop, not the varied population of second-hand bookshops that Enniscorthy in the 80s had) contained a copy of The Riddling Reaver, by Steve Jackson. This was a followup, more or less, to Fighting Fantasy - The Introductory Role-playing Game which, in the way of their people, the bookshop didn’t have. I bought the one they had anyway, and read it obsessively, and then combed every bookshop in the south-east until I found the other one. And it’s been somewhat obsessive acquisition ever since.

RPG books were very hard to come by in that time and place; despite knowing that D&D was the game I wanted to play, it was about 1991 or 1992 before I got the 2nd Edition DMG and PHB, and later again when I got the Monster Manual. Weirdly, Dragon magazine was more available - you could sometimes even get it in provincial bookshops.

2. What was your first time running a game like?

Honestly, it was so long ago that I don’t remember. I assume it went reasonably well, allowing for the fact that I was about 11, and the available players were my brothers at 8 and 6. I know I got going very quickly on the idea that you could write your own adventures and settings, and I did that pretty much from the start. As with many other people who came to running games from books, my earliest written stuff mimicked the style of published material, written as though for an audience.

I do also have a vague memory of putting together a sort of randomly-generated Heroquest-ish board-game-adjacent monstrosity which was intended to be a GM-less RPG, but I really didn’t have enough of the tools or concepts to do it properly. In retrospect, it was a vaguely roguelike game without the computer. I tried to play it with my brothers and some school friends, but it was way too complex to actually finish.

3. Have you picked up any general DM tips or tricks that you’d like to share? What types of resources do you use, if any?

In a Michael Pollan-like vein, “Run games, not too many, mostly with friends”. I’ve written about resources before, so I won’t replicate that here. It’s very hard after 34 years to pick out any specific tips or the like, really. I’d say “do your prep work, make notes, make sure you know your tech”, but I know of plenty of DMs who seem to run perfectly solid games off the tops of their heads and with any tech that comes to hand, so it’s hard to make that stick.

4. Do you have any noticeable DM mannerisms? Anything you’ve picked up from TTRPG shows or other dungeon masters in your life? Or common tropes, themes, or encounters that reappear across your games?

I have no idea about mannerisms. My ASD-spectrum blank expression may conspire against them. Nobody has pointed out anything to me, particularly, apart from my habit of having vast and complex worlds within which vast and complex plots boil. I’m trying to keep that one in check, but it’s not easy - as a historian, I’m firmly convinced that there is no such thing as an isolated event, and everything eventually ties into everything else. It feels weird and artificial to run game plots that don’t sprawl, but I recognise that the wide spread doesn’t make for as satisfying a narrative as a tighter plot. At the same time, I refuse not to represent the rest of the world, and I feel like that sometimes gives some of my players a tough time distinguishing plot from background. And some players don’t care, and engage with everything, which is lovely.

TTRPG shows absolutely did not exist during my formative years of DMing. They’re still a new concept to me, to be honest, and I spend some measurable percentage of any Critical Role watch with a voice in my head going “this is a Dungeons and Dragons game and a million people will watch it”. And I sat on the other side of the screen in my first more-than-one-session D&D game in 2020, so I can’t say I’ve picked up much from other GMs. I do think Matt Mercer’s “how do you want to do this?” is a fine habit; I’m inconsistent about actually remembering it.

5. What is your favourite part about running a game?

There’s a very specific detail: the fake-lament of players as they realise there’s combat imminent. This has been a consistent thing over various groups through my lifetime, and I’m unsure whether it’s an Irish thing or wider. The cheers of the Critical Role crew as a battle map comes out look distinctly odd in contrast.

I also like the moments where it becomes clear that something that the players have just discovered or just realised has in fact been there from early on. The first few times this happened, admittedly, it was because I was kitchen-sinking so hard that it was inevitable, but I’ve gotten better at laying down the groundwork early on for future revelations.

6. What is your least favourite part about running a game (if there is one)?

Burnout. I’ve hit burnout a couple of times, and it’s very disconcerting when one of the things you know you enjoy most in the world just doesn’t do that anymore. My solution to it has been to find people who will run a game I can play in, so Gordon, Mike and Aidan have prevented that over the last few years. Playing the same kind of game as I’m running (as in the same RPG; I’ve yet to find anyone who runs games the way I do) seems to work particularly well.

The absolute ideal will be to find someone who will run a long-term campaign for a group that overlaps with my players, so that I get the comfortable-familiar social space as well as the game; otherwise I’m in introvert-trying-to-socialise mode for some moderate number of initial sessions. But I may need to actually recruit someone who already runs games into the group for this.

7. If you could give one piece of advice to first time gamemasters or people thinking of running their first game, what would it be?

Just go for it. You can’t break anything, the worst that happens is that your plot doesn’t make much sense, and in most cases, the players will re-interpret the plot from their own point of view anyway. Knowing the rules is a low priority; you can learn them as you go, and players are generally happy to tell you how their characters and spells work.

However, do try to read the rules. I have accepted by now that other people will not, in fact, read the rules before playing the game, and that I’m always going to be teaching as I go, but I live in hope.

8. What types of stories do you like to tell? What is a game of yours incomplete without?

I like high-fantasy, epic, world-ranging stories, venturing into the Planes, with magic, a sense of history, a plenitude of unknowns, and for the players to decide where they’re taking the story, rather than me telling a story per se. I like long narratives, strong continuity, and subtle references to all manner of literature, songs, TV and catchphrases, 90% of which go unnoticed. All my games have undead and fiends because they are the best monsters. Also, if there isn’t some form of wizards-guild-like organisation in the setting, evil or otherwise, you may rely on it that I have been kidnapped and am being made to run games against my will.

At some point, I may try to run a science fiction game - probably space opera in some form - and that’s going to be interesting, because I’ll be applying the skills of more than thirty years of running games with way less in the way of habitual setting material.

9. What is your preferred roleplay to combat ratio? Do you enjoy one more than the other as a DM/GM? Why?

That varies from system to system. High-level combat in D&D 3.5 was such a pain that we played very little of it, and when I was running Fate games, it just wasn’t very meaningful. In 5th Edition, I reckon that there’s combat in two out of three sessions in Heliomar, and maybe one in three or four in Utterbaum. I love running combat in 5E, as long as I have interesting monsters to play with, but a session with a good bit of exposition and role-playing - preferably one NPC talking to the party - is where I really get into a flow state. But you can’t do that all the time, and some players are much more interested in using the powers on their character sheets than in listening to some lich yammer on about ancient dangers, which is fair.

10. What is something your players do that makes your job easier or livens up the table in a way that you appreciate from the GM seat?

In-party conversation lets me take a few breaths, and is always interesting to listen to. I observe a lot more of it in streaming games than happens in my own; I’m not sure if that’s a cultural thing, or if the players in those games are specifically tasked with it.

Of late, some of the players have taken on the job of polling for suitable game dates and setting up the Zoom sessions for Heliomar, which helps immensely; having a facilitator who is not me makes running games a lot easier. Also, running and/or contributing to a wiki or similar setting-information-recording thing is fantastic.

Another ten questions in a future issue!