Melody [00:00] 

Welcome back to the Game Master Certification Organization's interview excerpt podcast series. Hi, I'm your host, Melody Rainelle. We have been interviewing Hawke Robinson, a professional game master and recreational therapist, among many other roles. In this podcast episode, we will be talking with Hawke about the training program he has for Game Masters. Also, we will be talking about milestones Game Masters have and what tools there are to analyze performance and how to know when you're doing a good job. Let's get started. Ok, Hawke, so let's say someone wants to go to your website and join your program to learn how to become a Game Master. Can you tell us about the program they would be joining? Like, how long does it take? And when they walk out, what level of capability do they have? What are they certified for?
 
Hawke [00:52] 

Let me make a clear distinction between the nonprofit program and the for-profit program. So the RPG Research side, the nonprofit side, is a training diploma and based on the volunteer model, and it gets a lot more hands-on experience and more peer review. So, it's actually what we prefer everybody to go through. If they volunteer for free, give back to the community and go through that, they'll come out the end with more hands-on experience. But some people have money, but not time. So, on the for-profit LLC side, or for companies who want their existing professionals to be trained - want role-playing gaming brought in, we have workshops and targeted courses there that are a little bit more intensive on the theory and application and less on the community implementation. So you don't get as many hours of experience; they're more intensive towards passing the test etcetera and those are actual, you know, certificates - certification there. We hope someday to get that added into like- in the medical field at JCAHO or other certs in the educational world. You know, we're looking at different options there, but those take years and years and years to get credentialed at that level on the LLC for-profit side. So let's focus on the nonprofit one, which is the most accessible to everybody. You sign up as a volunteer, as a Player Level 1 going towards GM Level 1 training. So the way it works, if you want to be a GM Level 1, you're going to go through the training twice. And the first time you go through as a player and the second time you go through as a GM. We have a workbook. It covers 18 sessions of training. The session is 4 hours of showing up for class, whether remotely or in person. There is an instructor facilitating. There's a quiz- baseline quiz, in the beginning, to see what you already know. Some things you may have picked up, other things you don't know. How do you know- a lot of people aren't really aware of how much they learn in the session unless they can compare and contrast their baseline. They come in, they do their baseline for that topic of the week. Then we jump into some applied gaming. So we'll apply some specific game that's relevant to some of the topics we're covering. And we'll have a mid-session lecture, the tips and tricks and tools of the trade. And then we'll go back to get some more applied gaming. And then we wrap up with taking the quiz again. We've created interruption factors here just to give it time to kind of trickle in and see how much actually sticks at the end of the test, and generally, you see a huge increase from their baseline knowledge to at the end, and when they get tested later, you see that they're retaining a large percentage of it. Not all of it, right? There's an iterative process. So there's eighteen of these sessions. In addition to the one four-hour session a week that we recommend, and that's like for Player Level 1, you're also supposed to geive back to the community. One of the ways to give back is show up at other training sessions that aren't your training session as a fellow player to help other GM's who are training, just to be another player. It'll help you iterate through more of the topics or show up in one of our community programs just as a facilitator to help out. If you're not yet signed off on running a game, you can at least show up and help as a player, to help fill the seats. Let's say we've got a table that we've only got one or two kids at, or one or two senior adults at, and it'd be good to round it out with at least a third person, you can help fill in. Failing that, you can give back in other ways by helping on our website with organizing stuff, helping with the blog postings, helping spread the word, and carefully running programs that you're in. Now when I say a program, meaning running- just running the game, say, OK, I've been running D&D for five years. I joined as a volunteer. I want to become a better GM and I'm running a D&D group at my school now. No therapeutic, no at-risk population. I'm just running a D&D game at school. That's giving back to the community. You're taking your skills and you're sharing them with others, and we count those towards your giving back community hours, and we ask that you do two sessions a month of giving back to the community. That's about 6 to 10 hours a month you give back in addition to the training time, and again, there's a workbook you can get. You just search for the role-playing Game Workbook, RPG Professionals workbook, or just go to rpgworkbook.com and there's links from there, and it is a workbook. It doesn't have the answers. It has a whole bunch of questions and blank spaces you fill in to track your learning. At the end of it though, like other workbooks, we hope you'll find it useful because it has an index in the back in addition to the written-in topics, there's a whole bunch of blank spaces for you to add to the index to create your own custom index so that you now have a reference book you can use. So you finish as a player. You go through the 18 months. We've got to get our online testing platform fixed. GoDaddy blew it up and I'm trying to fix that right now. Once that's back up and running, you take the automated assessment of the written knowledge that you have, and you need to pass that at a 90% or better. You can retake it as much as you want. There's a delay between retakes, but you can retake it as often you need to till you pass it 90% or better. Then you get your Player Level 1 diploma. Now you don't have to wait for that to move on to your GM training, so you iterate through again another 18 sessions for your GM Level 1, but now you're supposed to work with your facilitator, your trainer, take opportunities to GM those sessions. So before you played seven or so different role-playing games we introduced you to and now you're going to take turns GMing those sessions with your fellow trainees as well. Then we'll also, if we have to, arrange additional sessions for you to get in a little more GMing practice. Then you're going to get pure feedback. Your fellow players and trainees and trainers are all going to give you feedback about how you did with your GMing to help you improve, so you actually have a peer review process that you go through. As you get near the end of both of these, in addition to the final test, there's also a final essay you have to write, and for Level 1, you come out- you're gonna be a reasonably competent beginner-level GM. You're going to be able to run seven different game systems with introductory- at least one or two introductory adventures per game system for other beginner players. And you're gonna be able to do it in a pretty good variety of settings. You're gonna have an expansive background about why gaming works the way it does, the social dynamics of players and the GM, and you're gonna have a pretty good foundation as a Level 1. Yeah, we're working towards 20 different levels. We used to have 4 levels, and we've been breaking up into smaller chunks because those four levels were just too intensive. Each level took like two to three years to get through. Now we broke it up into smaller pieces. You are not going to be qualified to be a role-playing game therapist on Level 1. You're not going to be qualified to be a role-playing game educator, unless you already have degree or certificate or license and training and such in your profession. You've added role-playing gaming to your profession. So if you're already a therapist, that's gonna be giving you a good foundation to start bringing role-playing games into your practice. If you're an educator, it's gonna give you a good starting foundation to bring role-playing games into your classroom. If you're an entertainer, you're gonna be able to incorporate your entertainment experience with role-playing gaming and be able to do some interesting, fun things in the entertainment world with role-playing gaming. You're not gonna be an expert. You're not gonna be a master, but you're gonna have a good, solid foundation. Then if you go through levels two and three, which covers the layperson level training, you're just gonna get better. We'll reiterate on some of the topics to help sink in a little more deeply, and we introduce additional topics that aren't covered in Level 1, and like the BECMI model, we slowly add more complexity and we introduce you to half a dozen or more role-playing game systems and settings with each level. By the time you finish Level 3 training, you've got close to 20 different game systems under your belt. You'll have one or two or three that you kind of specialize in more that are your preferred one that you love to do the most. So you're gonna have a diverse background, and you're gonna be diverse in your GMing style, your play style; you'll be a better player. You'll be a better GM. You'll actually enjoy gaming more. Some people worry that training at this level will take the fun out of their hobby. So far we found that it only enhances the experience because it grows their awareness and on their own, they would have hit a lot of roadblocks. They had to stumble along through a lot of frustration. We can shave years off of the trial-and-error approach they would have done on their own and maybe been stuck at. A lot of people will get stuck. We can move you along so you're much more advanced as a player and GM and have a much more rewarding experience each time went through that process.
 
Melody [09:29] 

Ok. So it's 72 hours for the sessions plus another 72 hours, plus 6 to 10 hours a month. So you're looking at a little over 200 hours of practice. So to become a master, that's like 10,000 hours or something, right?
 
Hawke [09:45]

Yeah, that's one of the old sayings. That's what we said that as well. That's an adage. There's debate about it and we won't get into that. That's a whole theoretical discussion, but, yeah, 10,000 hours is considered to be “mastery level”, and so that's just the structured play that we track. We encourage everybody to put in more hours if they can, right? Run their own sessions, doing other stuff, etcetera, etcetera, and most of the people who go through training are indeed also gaming elsewhere, though they usually come out the other end with closer to like 4 or 500 hours in a typical process. That's just Level 1, right? And then you add Level 2 and you just slowly level it up. After Level 3 you start getting into the-  Right, so levels one through three are pretty much focused on just recreational application role-playing. All foundations for the educational and therapeutic, but they're focused on the layperson just becoming a better player and GM. Level 4 is when we start to get into the entertainer level and I think it's around Level 7 or 8, we start getting into educational-specific environments and then we start to get into the teens when we start to hit the therapeutic environments and then the Grand Master is Level 20, right? That's what we've got currently at this point. That's well in excess of that 10,000 hours.
 
Melody [10:58] 

That's awesome. So what kind of milestones do or should Game Masters have?
 
Hawke [11:04] 

Ideally, follow the BECMI model. That is best approach. So start with one or two solo adventures to kind of get yourself oriented to the basics of the game mechanics. It won't really teach you a lot about the role play, but they can simulate some of the role play. Do one or two solo adventures to kind of just get your feet wet and get oriented and don't focus on trying to find a dumbed-down game system. Like it doesn't have to be a simplified game system, you know that's always simple. It can be a complex system that's teaching you incrementally more advanced concepts. That will raise you up as a person if you're working towards a more advanced system than just choosing a very lightweight system that doesn't really ever advance. At least the game mechanics. There's other benefits of the more free form games but that's a whole other thing. For new GMs, it's much better as a player and a GM to start out with the railroading. It's okay to be railroaded when you're starting. You don't know what you don't know, and it's hard to know what to get started. So start out with a railroaded, solo adventure or two, you know, even like you can start with choose-your-own-adventure before you go into a solo adventure book or module. Once you've done one or two of the solo adventures for that system, then get a good introductory module that is railroaded and tells- holds your hand as a GM, has clear boxes that say: "Read this aloud to the players. Don't read this aloud. If the players do this - X, Y and Z. Oh, and they might do things that aren't here… Here's how you can improvise.” Find a good beginner adventure module like that and meanwhile have the players go through the solo adventures you just went through so they get their baseline. Then slowly increase the complexity of the rules that are applied. And, again, there's only one role-playing game system published we've seen that does this all the way. There've been a few games over the years that do it for the player side and might start the GM out, but BECMI, Basic Expert Companion Masters Immortals, 1983 Frank Mentzer system, slowly just keeps adding more complexity; both social complexity and game system complexity working your way up incrementally a little bit at a time in such an excellent, excellent way, and it does have all of these little stepping stones, right? They're less milestones than stepping stones to guide you along the way. You go from railroaded to training wheels. So now you've got a scaffolding that you know to work with, but you can kind of loosen it up a little bit and have a little more freedom. You're not completely free form yet, and then eventually work your way to sandbox where things are much more open-ended. As a GM are allowing the players to have a lot more say. When you start out railroaded, the GM is in control. The players are responsive to the GMs guidance. Get to training wheels, it's a little more 50/50. When you get to sandbox, the players often guide the stories and the GMs having the world and the campaign respond to that, and everybody's contributing fairly equally there. If you can get to that level, and some GMs really struggle moving beyond the railroad and training wheel stage. Some GMs really do not like sandbox environments. There's a lack of structure and control that some GMs find threatening. Now, there's the- Oh, I forget his name. He's from GURPS. We critiqued it some years ago, but it's like: “A DM’s Guide to how to be a Great SGM” whatever, etcetera. And he's very much- he says all GMs are control freaks. And I've done many, many, many interviews and many, many, many, many innumerable Game Masters, and that is not what we see statistically. There are GMs who are control freaks. They're what you would expect for the general population, if you will. I see most GMs are GMs because nobody else was willing to do it. A lot of GMs are, unwilling heroes, right? They're doing it because nobody else will, and they're only ones are willing to do the work because there's a lot more work to be a GM. So again, the BECMI model really helps guide you step by step in a way, and lets the players advance incrementally. Reduces the risk of you going down weird rabbit holes of GMing that a lot of GMs go with- in other games, go off in weird directions that can get kind of creepy sometimes as they're exploring and trying different things out. The BECMI model is just really an ideal way to do that progression from railroaded training wheels to sandbox and iterating as you’re brought into each new increase in complexity. Really recommend that as an approach for development, and then that makes you a really well-rounded, very capable GM if you go through that process.
 
Melody [15:27] 

Awesome. OK. So what tools are there for Game Masters to analyze their performance? And in the same vein, how do you know when you're doing a good job as a Game Master?
 
Hawke [15:39] 

So, there are a lot of different ways to skin that cat. One of the ways we do it is we love to do peer review. So, we have GMs come in and do their baseline. They come in, and we record it so they can kind of see where they were at, and then as the months progress and they go through training, they can go back and look back at the video and go, "Oh my goodness, I've come so far," and the peer review feedback is always supportive, but critical, right? Critical in the good sense of the word “critical” in that you're giving critical thought to the feedback of like, "OK, this, this, and this worked. This, this, and this could be a little better, and these things didn't work at all." And it's totally done in a loving, supportive way of, "Hey man, we're all just trying to get better at this." And it's sometimes easier when you're outside the person for somebody else to notice than it is within yourself. So, if you have a peer group that you trust to give you helpful feedback, use that peer group, if they're able to do so in a way that's useful. The problem is most people aren't trained to give that kind of feedback effectively so often like, "Oh yeah, it was fine, it was fine, it was fine", and like, "Yeah, but give me something. I don't- I don't- that doesn't it tell me anything. How do I get better?” So, when it comes to self-assessment, one of the things we like all of our GMs to do that we found is helpful is in addition to creating a PC roster and an NPC roster with all the stats and such, we have a GM log. And there's a typical GM log of the adventure log and what happens in the adventure and who they ran into, but also doing a little bit of a self check and group check every 15 to 30 minutes. It's taking a few seconds to look at the group while they're talking and seeing who's immersed and who's not. Who's focused and who's bored. Who's off tapping away on their phone under the table versus everybody leaning forward. There's a lot of behavioral stuff you can learn to watch for to tell if a group is engaged or disengaged and if you're keeping your group- and then so like every 15 or 30 minutes you just put a quick little note; whatever scale you want to use… again, we have a more formal scale we're working on with the OIS the Observed Immersion Scale, but whatever scale says, "Yeah, everybody's pretty engaged." "Everybody looks bored." "Michael's bored." "Harry's OK." And you do that on your GM log - just get in the habit of it. At first, it's a little interrupting… Eventually, if you do it enough, you just do it automatically; it's really easy to do. Then that situational awareness process gives you some kind of feedback about what's happening in the game, and it isn't always about you. But GM does control the flow and pacing of the game in addition to the players. So that can give you some helpful clues. Having participant feedback surveys at the end. There are many, many, many, many different surveys available from very, very simple three-question smiley faces to more in-depth surveys that we do that give people the opportunity- and if you want them to be more honest, let them be anonymous. Let them do them online or something and be ready to don your fire-retardant underwear if it's both anonymous and online, but do it in a way that they aren't gonna feel like you know who gave the criticism and sometimes you're just gonna have to ignore if it's like just trolling and such, but other times they'll actually, when it's anonymized that way, give you really useful feedback. Like: “I really like how she GMs this way, that she goes along a little bit too long with her explanation setting up the scene, and I wish she kind of condensed the adjectives down a little bit so we could get on with the gameplay,” for example. “I really like how tricky the puzzles are in the dungeon, but I wish we did a little bit less dungeon crawl, a little bit more socio-political play.” Feedback like that. So those are really great resources, again, you have to be careful and take ‘em with a grain of salt, but they're helpful. And then as far as mindfulness, just self-awareness… You have a whole bunch of little tricks to the trade that we go through with training all of our GMs. It's, you know, thirty-six weeks of these, right, 4-hour sessions to get a lot of those basics down, but having these tools, you know, the roster, using initiative tracking, timing yourself, using a little egg timer to see how long the rounds are taking to complete. Nothing kills a game like looking up rules all the time. So if you're constantly looking up rules, that kills the game and you may not be aware of it. While you are looking up rules, your brain is active and you're engaged and it feels like you're being busy… For everybody else the action has stopped and it's dead air and they're waiting for you. And it may only take you 3 minutes or 5 minutes, but to everybody else it feels like half an hour, and so starting to become aware of how often you do rules checks, how quickly it takes to go around the table to complete a round, are your rounds taking 5 minutes, which most people will tolerate, or are they taking 15 to 30 minutes, which really starts to push the upper limits of people's patience? Especially in combat scenarios. You see a lot of the more advanced game systems, they can easily take really long periods, almost like Axis & Allies durations to complete rounds, and that may leads to slow gameplay, and for war gamer types sometimes that's fine, but for the majority of gamers that starts to get pretty boring. So these are all little things you can look for and measure, and again, it's a pretty lengthy list that we go through, but those are a few of the tools like system feedback, self-assessment logs, just noticing these different things, speech abilities, projecting. If you notice people are saying, "Can you say that again? I didn't quite understand." Maybe slow down your speech. Usually people are not gonna say, "Would you talk faster?" They usually want to say, "Could you slow down a little, you're going too quickly." They rarely say, "You're speaking too slowly. Could you speed up?" Mumbling. Those are things that a lot of times people will be afraid to say: "Could you say that again? I didn't quite understand," but making sure that you kind of take on a little bit of the actor- you don't need to be an actor, just the actor’s enunciating a little more clearly. Slow down your speech a little bit. These are just the many, many, many little things you can do to fine tune and watch and listen for these things, and again, learning to notice how your players body language looks and noticing your own. Same thing with your body language. If you're kind of slumped off and bored waiting for your players, versus you're engaged. Are you having flow state experiences? Are you losing track of time because of some really great scenes that are unfolding and everybody else is reporting the same thing? "Like, whoa, I can't believe it's 3:00 already, wow!" When you hear things like that, those are good games, right? Even- even if you didn't accomplish a lot, if everybody's like, "Wow! That went by so fast", that's a good sign. So that mindfulness practice, for GMing, is really, really helpful. Just becoming aware of both of self and of the others. Other than that, there's a lot more formal specific training, but that would be the best high-level guidance I could suggest.
 
Melody [21:55] 

Wow, this has been some wonderful information in this episode. Thank you so much for sharing it, Hawke. We look forward to chatting with you in our next episode. To our listeners, please check the podcast description for details on how you can connect with Hawke Robinson. In our next podcast episode, we will be getting some final thoughts from Hawke as we wrap up our interview with him. Please follow us to receive notifications when new podcasts are released. For more podcasts and information, check out our website: https://www.gamemastercertification.org/. If you liked what you've heard in this episode, please share it. Thank you for listening, and we'll see you next time.