The Art of the Game Master: A Hands-On Workshop for GMs at Gen Con 2024

To paraphrase an old saying, everybody talks about being a Game Master, but nobody does anything about it. The ins and outs of GMing practice—do and don'ts, philosophies and strategies, best practices and fatal mistakes—have been part of the hobby since its inception, if the controversies over things like Monty Haul dungeons and Killer DMs recounted in analog game historian Jon Peterson's The Elusive Shift (MIT Press, 2022) are any guide. Today, GM advice amounts to a cottage industry as well as a central motif of the discourse in the communities of play that surround specific games, schools of game design, and Actual Play fandoms. And, fifty years after the publication of Dungeons & Dragons, the stakes for GMs are higher than they've ever been! The increasing professionalization of GMing, the rising popularity of Actual Play media, and the expectation that the Game Master bears a lot of responsibility for facilitating the group's fun all combine to make it seem like becoming a GM is a huge deal. This can be daunting for a lot of people who would otherwise love to run role-playing games.

But the tabletop RPG hobby needs more GMs! And while the decades and decades worth of existing GM advice that's out there can give potential GMs insights into what might work, there is no substitute for hands-on practice. The potential is high for an ironic regress, a Game Master Catch-d20: the only way to get experience as a GM is to be a GM, but if you can't get experience as a GM without being a GM, how do you ever begin?

The problem disappears when someone says, hey, let's just sit down and start playing, you take over as GM for a while, and we'll talk about what you're doing as we go. A workshop called GM 101 Prep & Play Coaching, running at Gen Con Indy again this year, takes this approach. Each four-hour session offers a self-contained GMing experience for those seeking to explore the art of the Game Master. The workshop is being offered four times in total, once each day from Thursday through Sunday, August 1 through August 4, 2024, from 9 am to 1 pm in the Indianapolis Convention Center.

Participants in the workshop “dungeon storm” a short adventure together using a rubric that focuses on developing the backstory whose traces their characters will then encounter. They take turns as the GM running that adventure for each other using a rules-light system that “gamifies” the dynamics of a role-playing game table. Other participants at the table act as players playing characters. As players, they have “play styles” that they can follow for a game-mechanical reward: the Thespian gets a reward for talking in-character and getting in-character responses, the Problem-Solver gets a reward for recognizing and solving in-game challenges, riddles, and puzzles, and the Combat Monster gets a reward for dealing the killing blow to foes they fight. But everyone gets a reward from doing things that other players like! The effect is to simulate the economy of attention at the gaming table in a way that is also a real game that's fun to play.

While participants are taking their turn as a GM, workshop staffers are at the table acting as “GM coaches,” with the job of guiding the reflection-in-action of the person in the GM's chair. After each turn, the current GM “gains XP” for using GM techniques connected to the Describe-Listen-Judge cycle.

Participants leave with a stronger sense of how to be responsive to players in the moment, and how to create engaging sessions by paying attention to the core GMing loop. “Describe-Listen-Judge really helped me,” one participant in 2023 recounted. Another said, “I felt more confident in how to respond to what my players were doing in the game.”

If you know of anyone who thinks they might want to be a GM but needs one last push to get there, or who is a GM and is really interested in unpacking the nuts and bolts of how the tabletop game does it what does—if they're headed to Gen Con this year, point them at GM 101!