The Platonic DM

The people at Story Games have been going OSR-crazy, it seems. There are at least half a dozen threads about either the OSR generally or OSR games on the top page. (Although to be fair, it seems one of them was Zak baiting the site's denizens.) This one asks what makes an old school game old school - what are the mechanics? - and it inspired me to give a response:

GM neutrality is the bedrock on which old school play is founded. The GM is objective arbitrator, referee, judge. He is neither against the players nor for them. He presents them with the world they interact with, and he provides the consequences for their actions.

I elaborated a bit further:

No human being can be totally neutral, but he can try. That's really what it's about.

There will always be some level of illusionism, because in giving the players freedom they'll go where you don't expect, so you have to just make shit up (NPCs, locations, etc.). You try to do this as "neutrally" as possible by thinking to yourself, "Okay, in this game world, what would happen? What would be here?" Not what would be "fun", not what would be a challenge, not what would kill your players, not what would make a good story... but what would happen.

Random generators help a lot to keep you honest. Roll the dice and go with the results, and don't ever fudge. 

That's what I think it's all about, really. If I was listing DMing best principles, or drafting a manifesto, there would probably only be three points:

• Try as hard as you can to be neutral.
• Think about what would happen, not what would be fun, what would be a challenge, what would kill your players, or what would make a good story. Just what would happen.
• Use lots of random generators to keep yourself honest.

None of these points are actually realizable 100% of the time. We are human beings, and human beings are flawed. But you can try as hard as you can, and you'll get better at it. (As Zeb Cook put it, you need to "Take the time and effort to become not just a good DM, but a brilliant one." A big element of that is training yourself to be neutral. At least as far as my own DMing preferences go.)

The platonic DM is, basically, a deistic God who is utterly objective and dispassionate. And being a deistic God is not really such a bad thing to aspire to.

How I Run Sandboxes in the City, Part III: Appendix N

Here is a list of fictional and non-fictional resources I look to for inspiration in designing a city-based game setting, and when fleshing it out.

• Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets. Before David Simon wrote The Wire, he wrote this masterpiece of nonfiction. Ostensibly the account of a year spent with the Baltimore Police Department's homicide squad, it is so much more than a 'true crime' book: it is almost a social novel, encompassing every area of Baltimore life, with a cast of hundreds and dozens of plots and subplots, very few of which get resolved. It's also stunningly well written, once you get used to its detached, objective tone. The perfect description of a modern, developed-world city seen from the belly up.
• Ian McDonald's The Dervish House. Set over the course of a few days in Istanbul in 2027 AD, the city is as much a character as the people themselves in this novel: there are few books you'll read which more accurately capture the complex, random fabric of city life than this.
• Uncaged: Faces of Sigil. 40 NPCs to use in a campaign set in Sigil. If the unimaginative folks at TSR could come up with Big List of 40 NPCs to start off a game with, then you can do it too.
• Time Out city guides give a great sense of what a city is like - charting their history, geography and social characteristics, as well as providing lists and lists and lists of restaurants, clubs, bars, galleries, shops, etc. If you can take in the information through osmosis, you can then pull it out when you need something like it to appear in your game.
• Detective/police procedural fiction often relies heavily on a strong sense of the city as a living, breathing place. They also have large casts of interesting characters, with tangled webs of interaction. Reading a lot of detective fiction gives you a genuine sense for how complex settings work, and how narrative (or, in our context, the game) emerges from the interactions between different elements within them. I highly recommend Miss Smilla's Feeling for Snow (Copenhagen), the Inspector Rebus novels (Edinburgh) and Gorky Park (Moscow) in this respect.
• Many people have read his feudal-Japan-set book, Shogun, but Noble House is James Clavell's real masterwork. Set in a week in Hong Kong, you get to see every facet of life in that great metropolis, from the bottom (maids and prostitutes) to the top (stock market traders, corporate executives). It's also impossible to put down, despite being 1200 pages long.
• I should also include William Gibson's Bridge trilogy, which is in a way an imagined city par excellence (even if it's sort-of based in Oakland), and many of my notions of cyberpunk cityscapes in particular stem from it. 
• And finally, of course, there is Perdido Street Station, which as a novel I don't particularly like, but as a setting I think is wonderful. Again, it's an imagined city par excellence, complete with subway map and sprawling suburbs: if you're going to come up with a fantasy city, this really ought to be one of your starting points when it comes to inspiration.

How I Run Sandboxes in the City, Part II: In Play

So I have the Big List of NPCs, the Random Mission Generator, the List of Organisations, and the Relationship Hexmap. This is the raw material from which the game emerges. It's important to keep this vision of "game as emergent" in mind when running any sandbox game, as I'm sure you'll agree.

Anyway, how does it work in play? Like anything, it needs a bit of work from the GM and a bit of work from the players.


The GM


The GM's job is to use the raw material to improvise. This is more than just rolling on the Random Mission Generator. It needs him to constantly think about what's going on throughout the city, what the various actors are doing, and what the consequences of the players' actions are. This could be as simple as "the players have robbed a bank so the police will be investigating" or as complicated as "the players have introduced £2,000,000 worth of heroin onto the street - how does that affect the state of play between the different drug gangs in the city?" The Big List of NPCs and the List of Organisations help with this, because they provide motives for the different actors which suggest how they will react.

The GM also needs to be good at improvising. The nature of a non-linear game is that it's surprising, and a city sandbox has fewer anchors than a traditional fantasy one: there is no hexmap and there are no random encounters (at least, not how I run it), two things which are natural fulcrums for a GM to riff on. And the players are not constrained by geography, if it's a modern or futuristic setting: they can travel freely and quickly, wherever they want. This means the GM needs to be on his toes all the time - the players could do decide to do anything at any moment, and he needs to be able to make stuff up on the fly in response.

The Big List of NPCs naturally helps, here. Perhaps the players decide they want to get their hands on some horse anaesthetic? Check the list of NPCs, find a vet. Turns out somebody who they know knows him. Bingo. But it also helps to let the players know that you're making stuff up. I'm never afraid to be obvious about the fact that I'm making something up on the spot. An example from tonight's game: my players went to a bar to try to meet a politician rumoured to drink there. I had no idea they were going to do this. I needed to make up prices for champagne, the names for the politician's friends and floozies, the name of the barman, and several other things. I was perfectly open about plucking names from thin air, and rolling a dice to see how many drinking companions the politician had. They know it's a game: you're not fooling anybody by pretending you have it all planned out.


The Players


Correspondingly, the players have a big role. They have to be active. I'm blessed with really good players in this regard. They have ideas. They brainstorm. They want to interact with the setting - to meet new people and make contacts, to move things forward, to act. They are an engine.

But their actions are also food for me as the GM. By going to that bar that I wasn't expecting to go to, I now have four new NPCs for the Big List of NPCs. And each of them has a motive, a reason for existing. More flesh is added to the setting, and who knows when one of these NPCs will become relevant again?

Players also have a tendency to take a "bull in a china shop" approach (I'm sure this holds true across every game group that ever existed). To put it simply, they fuck things up, in good and bad ways. And their actions also feed into the setting: they attract the attention of the police, they make enemies, they kill people, they fundamentally change the economy and the physical make-up of the city.

All of this is gold for the GM, and it becomes a self-perpetuating process: the more the players do, the more they flesh out the Big List of NPCs and the List of Organisations; and the more this happens, the more stuff there is for them to do. Over time, the setting becomes far more than the sum of its parts.

What this means is that, the longer you play, the less time it takes for the GM to prep. Things begin to take on a life of their own. The players act, and their actions have consequences, and those consequences force the players to act, and that results in more consequences... and so on and so on and so on like a snowball. While the time investment before play began was big (say 5 or 6 hours total), the GM now spends about 30 minutes a week preparing for the next session - just statting up anything that needs statting up, ruminating over what the different NPC actors might be doing behind the scenes, and book-keeping. If you're a busy person with work, family and a social life, it's a no-brainer: the prep-per-minute to hours-of-enjoyment ratio is hard to beat.

For the final post in the series, I'll list some of the things I use for inspiration when I'm making things up on - either in the planning/setup stage or on the fly during play.

How I Run Sandboxes in the City, Part I: The Setup

Non-linear game play is not the preserve of fantasy gaming, and a sandbox does not require a hexmap. This sort of game can take place in any setting, in any genre. I'm running such a game at the moment: it's a totally non-linear, sandbox campaign of Cyberpunk 2020 set in Liverpool, or "Cyberpool" as it has come to be known.

It occurred to me recently to write a series of posts on how I've gone about running this, and here is the first: The Setup.

If you are a player in my game and would not like to see "behind the veil" and thus realise that I am in fact no Wizard of Oz but a mere conjuror, stop reading now.

In setting up Cyberpool, I sat down and created three things that I consider indispensable:

• A big list of NPCs, each with a plot hook/motive attached.
• A table for randomly generating missions/tasks/jobs, linked to the NPC list.
• A list of "groups/institutions/gangs/organisations", similar to the NPC list.

Then, with the help of the players, I created the icing on the cake:

• The relationship hexmap. 

Let's take a look at these in turn.

The Big List of NPCs

The Big List of NPCs exists in the form of an Excel spreadsheet. At the beginning it contained approximately 30 NPCs, each with a Name, a Profession, a Description, and a Motive. Every time the PCs encounter somebody in the game and have an interaction lasting longer than a few sentences, that NPC goes into the list. It's now 63 entries long. 

I think of this as being akin to the hexmap that you might draw when starting off a typical D&D-style sandbox campaign. Rather than having a number of hexes filled with adventuring locations, you have a web of NPCs who will, if you like, provide the stuff of adventure. 

The Random Mission Generator

This is a more complicated, bespoke version of the Mr Jones Mission Generator. It is 20 entries long. I can roll on it at any time, and instantly come up with a link between two NPCs (if, for instance, I come up with "A pimp" "needs to" "kill" "a local businessman" I can within 10 seconds find that pimp and businessman on the Big List of NPCs and create a link between them. It's then a matter of a few more minutes' thought to come up with a backstory for the pair and why the former wants to kill the latter, drawing on their different motives and descriptions). Sometimes, if the mood takes me, I create a new NPC for one of the results and add him/her to the Big List of NPCs.

This is what you draw on when the PCs go out looking for work. If they know some of these NPCs, then work might come looking for them.

The List of Organisations

This is similar to the Big List of NPCs. It's a collection of organisations present in the city, each with a Name, Type, and Description. Sometimes the Random Mission Generator generates results that necessitate referring to this list - other times I use the list when I need to elaborate on the backstory for NPCs.

The Relationship Hexmap

This is the final piece of the puzzle. In our first "chargen" session, I sat down with the players and we created a web of relationships for the PCs and the people they know. Cyberpunk 2020 has a character generation system which by necessity gives each starting PC a certain number of acquaintances (teachers, friends, enemies, family members, ex-lovers, etc.). We put the names of the PCs in the middle of a sheet of hexes, one name to a hex. We then started adding acquaintances in neighbouring hexes, again at one name to a hex. If two names came to neighbour each other, it meant the two people concerned know each other for some reason, which we noted down. 

We also write down the names of other NPCs who emerge during play on this hexmap who are in some way "allied to" or at least in cahoots with this core group of PCs and their acquaintances. These, of course, also go in the Big List of NPCs. The Relationship Hexmap now looks like this:

Which might be a bit confusing to you, but does the job.

These are the basic tools from which the game emerges. The next post will look at how I use them in play.

You are responsible for your own orgasm

There's a daily free newspaper here in the UK called Metro, which appears on buses and trains in the early hours of the morning in time for the morning commuters. When you get on your morning train to the office you're greeted with a scene like the aftermath of a gun battle - Metro are scattered hither and thither, strewn at random, like corpses littering a battlefield. (If you like your "going to work = going to war" metaphores, I suppose you would see this as making a cosmic sort of sense.)

Anyway, the Metro has a weekly sex advice column, which I always read. (Don't pretend you wouldn't.) The letters people write run the entire gamut from the boring ("I'm 26 and my girlfriend is 34, and I'm worried she's more experienced than me") to the stupid ("I can't figure out which hole to put it in") to the amusing ("I'm in love with my boyfriend's grandfather"), so you get quite a smorgasbard of advice being given by the collection of Agony Aunts on the payroll, but one thing I've noticed them say quite often is "You are responsible for your own orgasm". This seems to be a Sex Counsellor Aphorism^TM of sorts.

I think, as advice/aphorism goes, the statement is pretty idiotic stuff. But it works for role playing games, if you replace the word "orgasm" with the word "role within the game".

I'll explain further.

This morning I was moseying about on my feed reader and found a link to this blog. I've never read it before, but it appears to deal, in part, with role playing games. The title of the post in question is "How to Run a Successful RPG: Some Tips", which naturally caught my attention, given my recent spate of posts related to this topic. Anyway, it's all very well-intentioned stuff, but in my view it is fundamentally wrong - but wrong in that interesting way that things can be wrong, when they reveal something that is taken for granted but is horrendously damaging if you think about it for even a second.

The wrong bits are:

Make Sure Each Player Will Have Something To Do.  
Some of the most frustrating games I’ve been in were where I told the GM, “I want to play a sniper,” and all of the combat turned out to be in hallways, leaving all my skills to atrophy.
As a GM, I’d be loathe to let someone play a sniper – it’s the kind of role that invariably involves splitting the party, and it’s hard (not impossible, just hard) to come up with consistently interesting combat challenges for someone who works best from half a mile off.  But if you’re going to tell someone, “Okay, put all of your points into ranged attacks and a weapon with a slow reload skill,” then you owe it to them to put them in a situation where they’re often going to be useful.
It’s way better to veto a player’s choice than to get them all jazzed up for playing a ninja, only to discover this isn’t really a stealth game.  If you give someone a skill, make sure they have regular opportunities to use it.

Now, maybe you can see where I'm going with the post title. Why is it that we, as a hobby, seem to think that it is the GM who is responsible for making sure each player will have something to do? Why is it that, if we assume that the players at the table are relatively reasonable adults, the players don't bear any sort of responsibility for making sure they themselves have something to do? In other words: Why do we think the GM is the one who has to give the players orgasms?

My response to the "make sure each player will have something to do" advice is as follows: "Make sure the players understand that they are free to choose whatever character type they like, and that they have the freedom to go with it, and from there on they're on their own."

If you have a player who insists on playing a sniper, then it's his responsibility to be a sniper. It's his character's special skillset, so he should be playing with that in mind. If all combat is turning out to be in hallways, what the fuck is he doing? Why isn't he engineering it so that all his combats turn out to be in the middle of a huge meadow, except he's the one who's in a tree? Why is the GM the engine of his fun/success, and why isn't he thinking creatively and gaming in such a way that he can use his special snowflake character to do what he does best?

It's the same with playing a ninja "only to discover it isn't really a stealth game". Who says it isn't a stealth game? If one of the players is being a ninja, he should be making it a stealth game. He should be making his part of the game, his role within it, about being a ninja. He shouldn't be sitting around with his thumb up his arse whining because the GM hasn't designed an entire game to service his every little whim. Unless he's 8 years old, in which case he's forgiven.

You are an adult. You are responsible for your own orgasm. Not the GM.

What this piece of advice reveals about the hobby, of course, is that too many people still persist in seeing RPG play as linear. The GM thinks of a scenario that he believes will be fun, with a beginning, middle and end, and the players follow it through to its conclusion. If the players don't have fun, it's the GM's fault, because it's the GM's job to be on his knees under the table giving them orgasms.

All of this falls away if you pursue nonlinearity. This is the USP of RPGs: the GM creating a setting, with hooks to get the players involved, and the players going about their business in a way they deem best. Computers can't emulate this well. It's one of the huge advantages that pen-and-paper has over the computer game. And yet for some reason the vast majority of players still don't seem to have got the message yet.

Now, this isn't to say the GM doesn't have a role in this. If the player wants to be a ninja and is doing ninja-ish things, the GM needs to support him in that. When he makes ninja plans to ninja stuff the fuck up, the GM needs to interpret his ideas favourably, and certainly shouldn't be saying "Nah, you can't do that". The GM's job is to be the catalyst for, to encourage, creativity. But there's a world of difference between that and the GM engineering things to suit specific players.

To close with an example from the game I'm running at the moment: one of the players in the campaign has a "Rockerboy" character (it's Cyberpunk 2020). He's a superstar East German DJ who wears silver pantaloons. This isn't somebody who naturally fits with the other characters, who are more traditional noir-ish cloak-and-dagger corporate assassin/fixer types. But the player in question has become a huge part of the game by manipulating situations to his advantage (with the cooperation of the others). Almost every session he's at the centre of things, whether doing impromptu performances, arranging gigs, networking through his club contacts, or doing sham concerts as fronts for other activities. He's a massive piece of the group's armoury, and it's because he and the other players have been willing to think creatively. At no stage have I ever sat down to think to myself, "How can I make sure [x] will have something to do this week?" Because I know that he'll think of something.

You are responsible for your own orgasm, people. And don't you forget it.

On Improvisation and Getting Better

Let me begin by making a statement which I don't think will be easily contradicted: Improvisation of rules is perhaps the most important skill for a GM to develop.

Let me make a further statement: Improvisation of rules is not very thoroughly theorised, taught, or even talked about, whenever anybody grapples with the issue of "how to be a good GM" or, more fundamentally, "how to make games fun".

Let me make a concluding statement: There is a good reason for this.

In the intro to the 2nd edition AD&D Dungeon Master's Guide, we find Zeb Cook giving probably the best GMing advice that I can think of:

The Player's Handbook and the Dungeon Master Guide give you what you're expected to know, but that doesn't mean the game begins and ends there. Your game will go in directions not yet explored and your players will try things others think strange. Sometimes these strange things will work; sometimes they won't. Just accept this, be ready for it, and enjoy it. 

Take the time to have fun with the AD&D rules. Add, create, expand, and extrapolate. Don't just let the game sit there, and don't become a rules lawyer worrying about each piddly little detail. If you can't figure out the answer, MAKE IT UP! And whatever you do, don't fall into the trap of believing these rules are complete. They are not. You cannot sit back and let the rule book do everything for you. Take the time and effort to become not just a good DM, but a brilliant one.

To repeat: Take the time and effort to become not just a good DM, but a brilliant one.

Coming as it does at the end of these two paragraphs, the implication of this sentence is clear: Zeb believes that becoming "a brilliant DM" is directly connected to having fun with the rules; adding, creating, expanding, and extrapolating; and making up the answers to things. I agree with this - it does. But there is another implicit question which Zeb doesn't answer: How is possible to get better at all of this?

That's not a question which is easily answered, because I tend to think that GMing is basically a form of tacit knowledge, and being able to improvise rulings is perhaps the area where this is truest. Improvising rules in ways that are fair, interesting, and workable is not a skill that can really be learned from a book. It's something that has to come through experience. To borrow an analogy from Michael Oakeshott, being a good GM is rather like being a good chef. There is a set of rules, which are like a recipe. But creating a really tasty dish is much more about the feeling and intuition gained from years of cooking than it is about slavishly following the recipe. Strict adherence to the recipe will get you so far, but proper chefs have the experience and know-how to take the dish to a level far higher, and often if you ask them why they are doing what they are doing, and what rules they are following, they'll find it difficult to tell you.

GMing is similar. A good GM probably isn't particularly aware why they are doing the things they are doing (beyond the obvious awareness that they're doing it "because it works"), and if asked to write down a "good GMing guide" they would probably not be able to produce anything particularly coherent or enlightening. This is especially true when it comes to improvisation. I'm sure you all know GMs and players who are good at this - but try asking these people to explain how they got good at it, or what principles they apply. Probably, they won't be able to do that. Probably, they're just good because they have a lot of experience in GMing, giving them an intuition for what will work, and the tacit knowledge of how to pull it off.

In a sense, this reinforces Zeb Cook's advice, and perhaps shows it in an even better light: Take the time and effort to become not just a good DM, but a brilliant one; or, in other words, develop your tacit knowledge and intuition for improvisation through continual play.

(Edit, because I think it was unclear in the original post: Let me emphasise that I am talking about improvising rules for situations not covered in the game text, rather than improvising content - like NPC personalities or settings. I think the latter is more easily taught than the former. The paradigm example of what I am talking about would be what crops up in this post: There is an elf who might try to sneak up on the PCs' campsite during the night. One of the players decides his character will put coins on the tops of rocks, as a primitive alarm system which will make a noise if the elf knocks them over. Rules improvisation on the part of the DM here is crucial - he needs to decide how he will adjudicate the success of this. And to do so successfully he needs tacit knowledge.)

The Players' Job is to Screw Up Your Plans

Following on from my previous post, which generated far more discussion than I anticipated, I played in my regular d20-modern based sci-fi campaign yesterday afternoon. I like the group and the game, but our GM is a palette-shifter, fudger and illusionist of the most inveterate kind. His campaigns have a beginning, a middle, and an end, and you can be pretty sure that whatever you do you will always kind of, sort of, end up where he wants you to end up. This doesn't mean his games aren't fun; he's very good at creating puzzles and challenges and making play interesting that way. It just means they're a lot less fun than I think they could be, and I sometimes contemplate near-suicidal actions during the game just to see what kind of genuflections will be carried out to keep my character alive.

Anyway, yesterday's session only confirmed in my mind what I like in RPGs and what I suspect most of the readers of my blog like too: player creativity. Not GM creativity. Player creativity.

This may sound strange coming from me, the arch-setting creator, but for me a great deal of the enjoyment in our hobby comes when the players get set loose on the game world that the GM has created and start, for want of a better term, fucking it all up. They go where they're not supposed to. They start fights with people they shouldn't. They do stupid and dangerous things. They decide on courses of action you never could have dreamed of. They squabble with each other. And 99% of the time this leads to a good time had by all.

It can even happen, as it did yesterday, in the most rail-roaded game. Four of us, with the help of an insider, infiltrated a base run by a rogue corporation who were using time machines to plunder from the past. We were masquerading as new recruits, and the insider insisted we lie low and do absolutely nothing to cause any trouble for at least a few days while we oriented ourselves. So what happened? Within 5 minutes we'd found a locked door, tried to find a key, created a disturbance to distract a security guard while one of us tried to steal the key, whereupon three of us got arrested while the other got trapped hiding in the air ventilation system for the facility. The sole free member of the party ended up on a long, quixotic voyage through the base, trying to pass herself off as a member of the corporation, while the three of us in prison plotted our escape. This set off a chain of events which resulted in an invasion by laser-toting time-police who levelled the entire base, and the party being split into two units at entirely different points in time with apparently no hope of reunification. The GM was utterly aghast.

My point? None of us, as players, were being dicks and deliberately trying to ruin the game. All of us were behaving in character and doing what we probably would have done in our characters' positions. The GM, to his credit, went along with us entirely and followed through on what the consequences of those actions would have been - he never once told anybody 'no'. But simply by exercising our agency we created bedlam with the 'plot' of the game and probably had 10 times more fun with it than we would have done if we'd stuck to what he would have preferred we'd do.

(He may have been palette-shifting, of course. But I doubt it. I know him and I know his games, and I have a good palette-shifting detector when it comes to him.)

The lesson of all this takes us back here. The OSR way of playing the game works by giving the players agency and consequences in a sandbox. Narrativist story-games work by giving the players agency and consequences within the 'plot' - because they create it. Somewhere in the middle you have the rail-roading illusionist GM, shifting palettes and playing around with quantum ogres, and this poor fellow is missing out, caught between two stools, trying to make the game fun and interesting for the players while failing to realise that you achieve this in spades simply by putting the power in their hands.

Faking It; or, you'd better be Al Pacino; or, stop rolling the fucking dice

There's been a lot of talk recently about player agency, quantum ogres, the GM as illusionist, palette shifting, and so forth: see here, here, here, here and here. I won't regurgitate it all; suffice to say, I agree with -C.

This rebuttal interests me, though, because it raises an orthogonal issue that rarely gets mentioned in these sorts of discussions, here (none of it will make sense unless you read some of the linked posts):

[Robbing the players of agency is bad] only if the players are aware of the palette shifting. 

So long as nobody ever knows that the ogre so easily could have overcome the party could your predetermination in ignoring the agency of the dice be called into question. Remove the foreknowledge of the possible outcomes and you’ve removed all knowledge of the palette shift… and with removal of that knowledge, the palette shift itself is actually removed because the knowledge is a requirement of the shift by definition. 

What robs the game of fun is when the palette shift is known and is in direct opposition to the meaningful choice expectation of the player. Failing that, there is no measure against which to determine how the choice strayed from meaningful to false. 

And that is the true fallacy of the Quantum Ogre argument, that it is relativistic and requires player foreknowledge to categorize it as a false choice offering. Eliminate that foreknowledge and there is no Quantum Ogre.

The issue this raises is as follows: unless the DM is really good at acting and has a great poker face, players will often know when he is palette shifting/robbing them of agency/fudging dice/whatever. An RPG is not a Schrodinger's Box, and nor is the GM's head, because the players can observe what is going on indirectly. They are human beings and so is the GM, and human beings can often read each other's thoughts and feelings through body language. This makes the rebuttal of -C's arguments a kind of classic example of a Geek Social Fallacy.

I've been in a lot of sessions of games where I've suspected that the GM is either fudging dice rolls, palette shifting, or otherwise resorting to fiat to "make the game fun", and believe me, on every occasion that I suspected this, it made the game many orders of magnitude less fun than it was before. Suddenly, I didn't feel like a player in a game - I felt like a participant in an interactive story: I felt like the whole thing was a bait-and-switch. I no longer felt like I was master of my own destiny, and instead had become a participant in somebody else's prescribed idea of what my own fun should be.

This is the strongest argument I know of against fudging dice rolls, palette shifting, quantum ogres, and anything of that ilk: if you're going to do it, you'd better either:

a) be of Al Pacino-like stature in terms of your acting, because otherwise the players (if they have a brain in their skull and a rudimentary understanding of human nature) will be onto you and they probably won't like it; 

b) have a group of players who don't mind you robbing them of agency - in which case, you may as well just tell them what you're doing and forget rolling dice and giving them choices entirely (at least in the scenarios where you've already decided what's going to happen).

Here endeth today's rant.

On DMing

I tend not to write much about my approach to the nuts-and-bolts of PnP gaming on Monsters and Manuals, because, to be brutally honest, those sorts of posts (actual plays, DMing advice, thoughts on managing the game) are the ones I least enjoy reading on other blogs. But a couple of posts (namely this one and this one, the latter of which in particular is simply excellent) got me thinking about the subject today, so here I am, inflicting some of my 'thoughts' on you.

The first thing I want to say is this: DMing is a lot like teaching, and it's been my misfortune to have done a lot of teaching in my life - thankfully only to adults (both proper adults and undergraduates). When I say it's a lot like teaching, I don't mean for a second it's like lecturing in the sense of standing in front of a group of people and haranguing them, thus imparting knowledge. Rather, I mean that the skillset that a DM needs is quite a bit like the skillset of somebody leading a seminar or tutorial in an academic setting; you have to facilitate discussion/adventure, make sure that everybody in the class/group is getting a fair share of the limelight, arbitrate over disagreements or debates, and, finally, be the voice of authority when required. Usually, this requires taking a back seat, controlling the flow: your job is to a) pose problems, b) clarify, c) provide expert knowledge (you are the ultimate expert on your game) and d) demand answers and decisions.

This last bit - demanding decisions - is crucial to DMing, I think, and is all about timing and intuition.

Let's talk about group decisions first. A group of five people will rarely reach an agreement on a correct course of action, especially if they all have large opinions, so you as the DM have to judge when a group decision-making process has reached enough of a conclusion that everyone has had their say, so that nobody feels short-changed, while also preventing decision-making from going on forever and momentum being lost. When it comes to individual decisions, you have to make sure everybody is getting a roughly equal share of attention and having their questions answered without hogging the limelight, that everybody is getting an adequate amount of time to think things through without being an indecisive wet blanket, and that everybody is on the same hymn-sheet with respect to what exactly is happening and what they plan to do.

This is all requires intution, and is quite a fine art. Sometimes players have to be chivvied along: "Come on guys, I need an answer, what are you doing?" Sometimes shy players have to have the limelight thrust upon them: "Greg, you look like you want to say something." Sometimes you have to make sure the players remember certain facts that they appear to have forgotten (because they're not robots and they're just playing a game): "Don't forget that you left all your rope at the cave entrance." Sometimes, you have to be firm, "No, you can't do all that in one turn." All of this requires a good sense of timing, an understanding of the rhythm and flow of human conversation and interaction, and a neutral but benevolent attitude. None of this can be learned from blog posts. To a large extent you either have it or you don't, but you also get better at it the more you practice.

The second thing I want to say is: as the DM you are the alpha male - even if you are a woman. Again, I need to clarifiy here that I don't mean this requires you to be dominant, to boss people round, or to act like a dick. But what it does mean is that everything flows from you: you set the tone. If you're feeling down, or bored, or a bit under the weather, then this is a very good indicator that the entire session is going to feel down, boring, or a bit under the weather. Likewise, if you're in the zone and you're feeling good about yourself and gaming in general, you can be sure this will generate a buzz among the players and get them having fun and being energised. What this means is that from the moment you walk into the room where you're DMing, you have to force yourself to feel good and energetic, even if you don't. (Again, this is what a teacher, or at least a good teacher, has to do, too.) You have to exude confidence and enjoyment about the game, because if you don't it will fall flat. I say again - you set the tone. I also say again - you can't learn how to do this from blog posts, but you can get better at it over time.

The upshot of all of this is that being a good DM, and thus facilitating good gaming, is in my opinion almost entirely a matter of feeling. Of course, prep is important, being able to think on the fly is important, and knowing the rules is important. But really, lacking one or even all of those things is forgivable if you manage to set the tone well and facilitate/control/arbitrate effectively. And conversely, if you don't manage to achieve that, there's a good chance the game will fall flat - no matter how well you've prepped, no matter how good you are at improvising, and no matter how many random generators you've got.

Gaming Advice #1: Don't Be A Dick Head

Because for my work and research I spend most of the day on the internet, I do rather a lot of trawling through rpg-related forums and blogs. (This is about the only perk of spending day after day in front of a computer.) And because people who post on forums and blogs about rpgs are an ornery lot, this boils down to reading lots of amusingly vitriolic flamewars. (rpg.net is the indisputed king of these, though the rpgsite has its moments.) A waste of time, perhaps, but no more so than watching Japanese TV, and occasionally more educational and edifying.

A common theme running through these flamewars is that an awful lot of problems get blamed on rpg systems, when really the fault is with the players. I call this the Forgetting That One Shouldn't Behave Like A Dick Head phenomenon.

Some examples might help to illustrate:

1. Older versions of D&D are bad, because they rely on individual DMs' judgement, and this means that players who "get on with the DM" or can "convince him to rule in their favour" have an unfair advantage. Often presented by fans of 3e and 4e, which supposedly leave less to each individual DM's judgement and are thus "fairer". This is a not actually a problem with older versions of D&D. It is a problem of DMs and players behaving like dick heads and being biased and easily swayed or excessively manipulative, respectively.

2. D&D 4e is bad, because it forces everybody to do things a certain way - if you are a Warlord you have to do this or that in combat, and if you don't, other players will accuse you of failing to properly fulfill your role and not being a team player. Again, not in fact a problem with 4e, but a problem of players behaving like dick heads and being inflexible and mandarin.

3. Cyberpunk 2020 is bad, because you can manipulate character generation and equipment a certain way and create characters who are virtually indestructible killing machines. Not in fact a problem with Cyberpunk 2020, but a problem of players behaving like dick heads and trying to create munchkin characters to ruin everybody else's enjoyment rather than just participate in a fun game.

4. The Rust Monster is bad, because DMs use it to spoil players' fun by destroying all their hard-earned magic items. Not in fact a problem with the Rust Monster, but a problem of DMs behaving like dick heads by deliberately trying to piss off their players, and also of players behaving like dick heads and being cry babies and forgetting that it's just a game.

You get my drift, anyway. As a rule I tend not to read much 'GMing advice' on blogs, because I think it all boils down to something rather simple: play with cool people who are your friends, not dick heads, and don't be a dick head yourself. Mostly it all works out fine from that initial foundation.