10 Rules for New (and Old) Game Masters
Being a Game Master is unlike any other experience, and is as rewarding as it is fun. It is challenging, but worth it every step of the way. If you want to be the best Game Master you can be, here are some guidelines to follow, as with great power… comes great responsibility.
Here are my 10 rules for new Game Masters who want to ensure that they are having fun, their players are having fun, and they have a rich and rewarding gaming experience.
10 Rules for Game Masters
1) Talk to Your Players
First and foremost, talk to your players. Open communications is the single most important trait for a long lasting campaign. When, not if, you run into trouble or have a difficult time with the antics or actions of the other players, talk outside of the game and share your experiences. Don’t lay blame or accuse players, just explain the situation and how it is affecting you or the game (and encourage the players to do the same).
And this extends beyond problems at the table. Talk about the type of game everyone wants to play, talk about how you want to handle secret rolls, what changes to the core rules you’d like to add, and more. Be open about how you want the game to run and what you, and the players, are hoping to get from it.
And then follow what you talk about.
2) Consistency
From what time you play to your rulings, be consistent. A chaotically scheduled game will quickly die out, and players won’t know how to play the game if the rules keep changing. Obviously, sometimes you have to skip a week or change a game time, just like you may need to tweak a rule or retcon something. But you shouldn’t be changing and tweaking things every week.
If you need to change something, be it the game time, the game rules, or anything else, refer to Rule 1. Talk to the table in-person, and then stick to it. If the change doesn’t work out, that’s OK too. You can change back or change things later on, but you have to talk about it at the table and be slow with those changes. Consistency keeps the game going, even when a player or two can’t make it to the game.
3) ‘Yes, And’ / ‘No, But’
There is a ton of advice online about how Game Masters need to know how to ‘Yes, And’ their players. If you don’t know what that means, it is a way for improvisers to accept what others have said (“Yes”) and then expand on that concept (“And”). It is a rule that states you shouldn’t reject the ideas of others. However, that is only a single tool and works best in freeform thought experiments where you don’t have rules to help guide play.
Game Masters should also know and freely use ‘No, But’ in equal measure. This allows you to refine another player’s ideas and challenge them in a constructive manner. Often this can be done when a player wants to do something, like convince a dragon to give up all its treasure without a fight. While you don’t want to reject their idea outright, it would not be a fun game for the player to just get all the treasure without going on an adventure (they are adventurers, after all). Instead, you could “No, But” the idea by saying the dragon is willing to give up a portion of its treasure, but it needs the party to go on a quest and do a great deed for it (which keeps them doing adventures!).
4) We All Make Mistakes
Don’t fret knowing every single rule before you start a game. I’ve been a Game Master non-stop for almost a decade and I don’t remember every rule. Dive head first into your game, make notes on what rules you don’t know or were confused about, and then, after the game, go back through and learn what those rules were.
During the game, when you are faced with a rule you don’t know (and a character’s life doesn’t hang in the balance), adjudicate and keep the game moving. You don’t need to stop everything just to look up a rule, instead, make a decision and then learn more later. If you do end up changing your mind on how a rule works, make sure you communicate that openly with the other players so they aren’t surprised later (see Rule 1).
That said, there are times where you might want to look up a rule during the game, and that’s OK too. Just don’t look up a rule because you fear making a mistake about trivial things.
5) Lean Towards Restrictive
Players will, unintentionally, ruin their own fun. That’s why there are rules in place in a game. The rules provide the boundaries where fun and excitement can happen. A famous quote by Soren Johnson and Sid Meier addresses this:
“Given the opportunity players will optimize the fun out of a game.”
- Soren Johnson, Game Developer (Volume 18 Number 3), March 2011
It is up to the Game Master (and the game designer) to protect the ‘fun’ in a game. A level 1 character would love a Holy Avenger and +3 Plate, but then… are they going to face a challenge? Are they going to get bored because they can nuke a kerbal kobold from space?
When faced with a decision you are unsure about, lean towards being more restrictive. You can always go back and give the player the magic item, spell, ability, or whatever at a later date once you have had time to think on it and how it might interact with the game (or provide it when they are stronger or at a higher level).
On the flip side, if you give them that item or ability, and it turns out to be way stronger than you realized, then it is a lot harder to correct the issue. You don’t want to take things away from a player, but you also want to make sure there is still fun being had, so now you are messing with dials and difficulty, which can lead to other players having a worse time at the table and then you find yourself going too far in one direction over the other, and it goes on until you are burned out and no one is having fun.
The easiest thing to do is lean towards being more restrictive and giving yourself time to experience the game as is. As a piece of advice, if you do want to see if the item is game breaking or would be very disruptive, consider giving your players a potion or two of the item or ability and see how it goes. This gives everyone a taste of it and whether or not it will break the game or create problems later on.
6) Rules Work Both Ways
You might think of the rules as a bit of an arms race. The players are looking for advantages, and you sometimes have to up the ante to keep it challenging (which then leads to the players looking for more advantages).
Game Masters, and players, should know that rules work both ways. If players want you to rule that they can flood a dungeon with an unending supply of water from a magical bottle (and it doesn’t take literal years to do so but rather minutes or hours), than they have to understand that those shenanigans are at play in the wider world. If the players want a cheese strat to get unlimited spell slots (coffeelocks don’t actually work Rules As Written), then there are other people in the world that can do the same, and do it better.
When adjudicating rules, always make sure that the players know that if you allow something, you allow it for the entire world, not just for the players. The players might want to argue that the grease from a Grease spell should be flammable cause they have a torch. That is up to you to decide if that works (that said, the rules for the Grease spell make no mention it is flammable), and if you do decide it works, it is something that everyone in the world knows works and is used by others against the players, and perhaps to a greater effectiveness (the Game Master controls the world, after all).
7) Prepare for the Unexpected (and Don’t Stop It)
Every Game Master should prepare, no matter if they are running a low/no-prep game like Blades in the Dark or a high prep game like Dungeons & Dragons. Even just taking a few minutes to write down a few ideas, like what adventures are available, what the bad guys are doing, or anything like that can help you prepare for the unexpected things that players love to do.
The second part of this rule is that you can’t arbitrarily block unexpected events, like the players bypassing a trap or climbing into the second floor of a dungeon when you want them to go through the front door. Thinking on your toes is an ability that you have to train and practice to get good at, and the only way to do so is by letting your players do the unexpected.
If you are ever in a situation where the players do something unexpected, get excited along with them, and then roll with it. If you need time to figure out what to do next, announce you have to use the bathroom or that you need to look at your notes because your players were so clever that you need to reread over something, or simply tell the players that the table is going to take a 5 minute break while you consult the adventure/notes/think about how their actions impacted the world. Once you have taken the time you need, go with the flow and let your players do that unexpected thing.
It is far more memorable (and fun) for the players to ‘break the GM’s plans’ than for the Game Master to force the players to play in a specific way and do very specific actions to match what the GM was thinking (Rule 10).
8) Take Responsibility
As the Game Master, you are responsible for your world. It doesn’t matter if you are reading off an adventure or making stuff up on the fly. You are responsible for what appears, how things work, and what happens.
If the adventure states that the dragon hoard has a +3 Longsword and the players are level 1, it is your responsibility to figure out if that is a good match for your table or not. Those pre-written adventures are written by people just like you and they don’t know your table, only you do. Change things as needed, remove bad options, and more to keep the table having fun (Rule 10).
This goes doubly for rolling on tables and coming up with ideas. If you roll on a random table cause you aren’t sure what is in a treasure chest, feel free to reroll until you get something that works. While the dice can hold the fate of some things, like whether or not you are going to hit a dragon with a pointy broomstick, it should not hold the fate of the fun and balance at the table. That is your responsibility and you can’t offload it onto random chance or someone else.
9) Know When to Delegate
Just as you need to know when to take responsibility (Rule 8), you often need to know when to off-load some of the work on to others. Game Masters are often seen (whether right or wrong) as the parent of the group. A lot of the responsibility is placed on their shoulders, such as scheduling the game, ensuring rules are followed, providing the ‘fun’, and more. But the Game Master doesn’t have to be in charge of all those things, it is a collaborative game, and some responsibilities should be treated as such.
Have the players keep track of the schedule, let them track initiative during combat so you don’t have to, give them control of some allied NPCs so you can focus on the monsters, if a rule comes up you don’t know then ask them to pull out the rulebook and find the rule in the glossary so it saves you time (though, also Rule 4), and so on. There are plenty of things that you can delegate, and having a co-GM can be helpful when first starting out. Some people like having a ‘rules lawyer’ player to help them understand the rules, just be mindful that a player has a vested interest in winning (Rule 5).
Rely on the players for things that take up brainspace, but aren’t giving them power over the world, unless they are players that have proven themselves to be adults and capable of separating themselves from the game and be a neutral party (often times, other Game Masters at the table can be handy to ask their opinion, but remember Rule 8, the world is your responsibility, not theirs).
10) It’s About Having Collaborative Fun
A game is about having fun. You, the Game Master, are supposed to have fun, just as much as the other players are to have fun. Don’t let their fun overshadow your fun, and don’t let what you think to be fun overshadow the other player’s fun.
Role-Playing Games are collaborative and works best when everyone is working towards the most fun for all people (not just most people). Let humor into the game, but, just because a player makes a joke, don’t assume that that joke actually happens. Let the players laugh about a ridiculous idea they had, and then ask them if they really do that or not, letting them take back whatever joke idea they had for the real idea. Those bits of humor and jokes help the entire table have fun as friends, and forcing players to do their joke idea just makes it so that no one wants to have fun for fear of punishment.
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