Game mastering

One person at the table is not playing a character. They describe the situation, play everybody the players meet, decide what the rules say when it is unclear, and keep the evening moving. The role has different names in different games — game master, dungeon master, referee, keeper, narrator — and the job is substantially the same in all of them.

The common misunderstanding is that this makes you the author and the players the audience. It does not. The nearest accurate comparison is a combination of a host, a referee and an improvising actor: you supply a situation and everybody discovers together what happens in it. A game where the outcome was decided in advance is a story being read out, and players can tell within twenty minutes.

What makes it a craft rather than a chore is that it is genuinely difficult in an interesting way. You are holding a fictional situation, a rules system, five people’s attention and the pacing of three hours simultaneously, in real time, while being fair. Almost nobody is good at it immediately and almost everybody improves markedly in the first year.

Session length

Two to four hoursThree is the commonest and the one most groups sustain.

Preparation time

Thirty minutes to two hoursAnd the ratio matters far more than the total — see below.

The hard part

Improvising when the plan is goneWhich happens in most sessions, and is the point rather than a failure.

What you need

A free system, dice and a notebookEverything else is convenience.

The shortest honest route from wanting to do this to having done it:

1. 1

   Step 1: Pick a short, published one-shot

   Written to run in a single session, in a rules-light system. Using somebody else’s adventure for a first game removes half the variables and is what almost every experienced game master recommends and almost no beginner does.

   You will know it worked when: A session you did not have to invent.

2. 2

   Step 2: Read it twice and take one page of notes

   Once for the shape, once for the details. The one page is what you actually run from — names, who wants what, the four rules you will need. Running from a booklet means losing your place in front of people.

   You will know it worked when: A single sheet you can glance at.

3. 3

   Step 3: Tell the players it is your first time

   Every group is generous about this and nobody expects a polished session. It also gives you permission to pause, look something up and rule quickly, which is the single most useful thing a beginner can have.

   You will know it worked when: A table that is on your side.

4. 4

   Step 4: Spend ten minutes on a session zero anyway

   Even for a one-shot. What kind of game this is, what nobody wants in it, and how long you are playing for. Ten minutes here prevents most of what goes wrong later.

   You will know it worked when: Agreed expectations rather than assumed ones.

5. 5

   Step 5: Start the game at the interesting moment

   Not at the tavern, not at the introductions — open with something already happening. The first five minutes set whether the table leans in, and a strong opening is the one thing worth scripting.

   You will know it worked when: A session with momentum from the start.

6. 6

   Step 6: Ask two questions afterwards

   "Which bit dragged?" and "what did you want more of?" Both get useful answers. "Did you enjoy it?" gets politeness.

   You will know it worked when: Something specific to do differently next time.

A session zero is a conversation before the game starts about what everybody wants from it, and it is the highest-value hour in the whole hobby. It is also the thing most groups skip, and most of the campaigns that collapse in month three collapse over something a session zero would have surfaced in ten minutes.

What it covers is unglamorous: how often you will play and for how long, what happens when somebody cannot make it, what kind of game this is meant to be, how much combat against how much talking, whether characters can be at odds with each other, and what nobody wants in the fiction.

That last item has a set of named tools built for it, and it is worth knowing that they exist and who made them. Lines and veils, from Ron Edwards, asks a group to agree what will not appear in play at all and what may exist but happens off-screen. The X-card, from John Stavropoulos, is a non-verbal way for anybody to remove or skip content mid-scene with no explanation required. The Script Change toolbox, from Beau Jágr Sheldon, offers a fuller set of rewind, pause and fast-forward controls. Several of these are collected in the TTRPG Safety Toolkit curated by Kienna Shaw and Lauren Bryant-Monk.

These are worth using without ceremony. The usual objection — that they will be used constantly and ruin the game — does not survive contact with actual tables, where they are used rarely and mostly by people who would otherwise have quietly stopped coming.

The unglamorous agreements that prevent most problems:

• Scheduling, honestly — Fortnightly that happens beats weekly that does not. The commonest cause of a dead campaign is a calendar, not a story.
• What happens to an absent player’s character — Decided in advance, so it is not renegotiated at eight o’clock on a Tuesday with four people waiting.
• Phones and side conversations — Worth naming once rather than resenting silently for a year.
• Whether it is a campaign or a series of sessions — Different commitments. A group that thought it was one and got the other is a group with a resentment.
• How the group handles disagreement about a ruling — Agreeing in advance that the game master rules now and the group discusses later removes almost every table argument.

There is a permanent shortage of people willing to run games, and it is the single most useful fact for anybody considering it. A competent, reliable game master who turns up and runs a decent session will never struggle to find players, which inverts the usual difficulty of starting a social hobby.

Where groups form: local game shops with notice boards and open tables, university and workplace societies, conventions, library and community sessions which are increasingly common, and a very large online scene. Online play through a virtual tabletop is a mature format rather than a substitute — it solves scheduling and geography, and for a lot of adults it is the only way the hobby happens at all.

The etiquette that matters is mostly about the fact that you are hosting rather than performing. Start on time, finish on time, remember what the players did last week, and do not punish somebody for a choice you did not anticipate. The community norm that has shifted most in the last decade is around content and comfort: the safety tools described above have gone from unusual to unremarkable at most tables, and a group that treats them as an imposition is telling you something useful about itself.

• The one-shot — A complete story in a single session. The best possible place to learn: preparation is bounded, you find out within three hours whether it worked, and nothing has to survive to next month. Anybody starting should run several before attempting a campaign.
• The short campaign — Six to twelve sessions with an ending planned from the start. Long enough for characters to develop and short enough to finish, which is why a growing number of groups prefer it to the open-ended alternative.
• The open campaign — The traditional shape: it runs until it stops. Rewarding, and the format most likely to end by fizzling out rather than by concluding.
• Episodic play — A stable cast and self-contained sessions, so absences do not matter. Enormously practical for adults and unfashionable for no good reason.
• The open table — A pool of players, whoever turns up plays, the world persists. Solves scheduling almost completely and asks a different kind of preparation.
• Convention and organised play — Running for strangers to a time limit. The fastest way to improve, because four hours with people who owe you nothing removes every crutch.

In rough order of how much difference each makes:

• Run more sessions — By a wide margin. This is a real-time skill and there is no substitute for hours at the table.
• Run for strangers — A convention slot or a public game. Four hours with people who owe you nothing exposes every habit a friendly group forgives.
• Ask for specific feedback — "Which bit dragged?" gets a useful answer. "Did you enjoy it?" never does.
• Play in somebody else’s game — Watching a different game master work is the fastest way to notice techniques you do not have, and the experience of being a player is itself instructive.
• Run a system unlike your usual one — A game built around improvisation teaches different muscles from one built around tactical combat. Both transfer.
• Cut your preparation in half — A deliberately underprepared session forces the improvisation skills that preparation lets you avoid, and most people discover they are better at it than they feared.

The complete list is shorter than the hobby’s shelves suggest:

• A rules system — Several genuinely good ones are free, and a rules-light system is easier to run than a heavy one because there is less to adjudicate under pressure. This is the one decision worth making deliberately rather than by default.
• Dice, or a dice roller — £5–£15 for a set, or nothing at all online. Dice are a collecting habit rather than a requirement, and every group has somebody with spares.
• A notebook and something to write with — For what the players invent — the tavern they named, the cousin they mentioned. Using those later is the highest-value note-taking in the craft.
• A screen, optionally — A physical or notional barrier for notes and hidden rolls. Some game masters find it essential and some find it a wall between them and the table; it is genuinely a matter of preference rather than a tool.
• A virtual tabletop, for online play — £0–£60 a year. Solves scheduling and geography, and for many groups it is the only reason the game happens at all.
• Not miniatures, at first — A significant expense that only pays off if your group prefers a map to description. Find out which they are before buying an army.

The single most useful idea in this craft is that preparation has two kinds, and one of them is almost always wasted.

Prepared outcomes are what you expect to happen: the players will search the study, find the letter, and go to the docks. This is the kind beginners write, it takes hours, and it is thrown away the moment a player does something else — which they will, because they are not reading your notes.

Prepared situations are what is true regardless of what anybody does: who wants what, what is where, what happens if nobody intervenes. This survives everything, because it does not assume a route through it. A page of situation is worth ten pages of outcome, and it is quicker to write.

That distinction is why experienced game masters often prepare less and run better sessions. They are not improvising more; they are preparing the things improvisation needs.

What is worth having written down before a session:

• A handful of names — The single most common thing to be caught without. Twenty names on a list, crossed off as used, removes the most frequent stumble in the job.
• Who wants what — For every faction and significant character, one line: what they are trying to get, and what they will do about it. This generates plot indefinitely without you planning any.
• Three to five interesting situations — Not scenes with outcomes — situations with tension already in them. A locked room with two people who both need to be somewhere else is a situation; "the players find the key" is an outcome.
• A strong opening — The one thing worth scripting. Starting well buys twenty minutes of goodwill and stops the session drifting into logistics.
• The rules you will actually need — One page, printed. Not the rulebook — the four or five procedures this session will use.
• Somewhere for what the players invent — They will name a tavern, invent a cousin, decide their character has a rival. Writing those down and using them later is the highest-value note-taking in the craft.

What is generally not worth preparing: dialogue, room-by-room descriptions of places the players may not visit, contingency branches for choices they may not make, and anything that only works if they do a specific thing. All four are the shape of prepared outcomes, and all four are why some people find preparation exhausting.

Most of the craft that shows at the table is pacing — knowing when a scene is finished and being willing to end it. The commonest failure among new game masters is not a lack of ideas but a reluctance to cut, so scenes run twenty minutes past their point while everybody waits politely.

The techniques that do the most work:

• Start scenes late and end them early — Open at the moment something is at stake rather than at the walk to the door, and cut as soon as the outcome is settled. Borrowed from screenwriting, and it fixes more pacing problems than anything else.
• Say yes, or say yes but — When a player proposes something reasonable, let it work. Refusal teaches a table to stop proposing, and a table that has stopped proposing is one you now have to entertain single-handed.
• Ask the players questions — "Why does this place frighten you?" hands the work to somebody else and generates material you could not have written. It is the single cheapest improvisation technique there is.
• Fail forward — A failed attempt should change the situation rather than stop it. "You do not find it" ends a scene; "you find it, and the noise brings somebody" continues one.
• Give every player a spotlight — Deliberately, and roughly evenly. Quiet players are usually not disengaged — they are waiting for a gap that a louder table never leaves.
• Describe, then hand over — Two or three sentences and then a question. Long description is where a table’s attention goes to die, and the fix is to stop talking sooner than feels natural.
• Do not roll unless failure is interesting — If nothing changes when they fail, do not ask for a roll. Half the dead air in a session is dice rolled for outcomes that were never in doubt.

The other half of running a table is rules adjudication, and the useful principle is that consistency matters more than correctness. Make a ruling quickly, say that you will check afterwards, and move on. Stopping a session to read a rulebook costs more than being wrong for twenty minutes, and a game master who rules confidently and revises later is far easier to play with than one who is always right eventually.