Episode1PrinciplesandFoundation
Rematching speakers...
SPEAKERS

My experience if you want to
know, I think I'm good at what I do. So I think that doing the work outside of the table is the best way to start -  is the best way to start.
The Game Master certification organization presents
an expert GM interview limited series in audio format.
Hello and welcome. My name is Melody Ray now.
The following is a curated discussion on contemporary tabletop role-playing gaming presented in a limited series podcast. It is the combination of observations and interviews based on proposed standards towards certification in-game leadership excellence, specifically for tabletop role-playing games.
In a moment we'll begin meeting our expert guides Claire the DM Claire's a theatre production manager actual place dream GM and highest reviewed fam identifying GM on start playing games.
My name is Claire I am known around the internet as Claire the DM and I run tabletop role-playing games both through a website called start playing duck games as like a freelancer as well as on twitch.tv slash clear the DM. Right now I'm getting to the sort of climax of a campaign called tail tritter camp for wayward adventurers which is an all female cast of a d&d actual play set at a summer camp. So I'm a theatrical production manager by trade. theatrical production manager is a person who when you go see a play, every technical element that is onstage has to be sort of navigated between a designer and the technicians who make the thing and is done on schedule and everything like that. So I like to say that I it's my responsibility to make sure that everything but the actor themselves is on the stage and ready to go by opening night. And so really, it boils down to like budgets, scheduling a lot of emails and an ability to talk to people. And so it's very similar to running a game and the like, obviously, the scheduling nightmares, but also the like doing a thing, making a plan and then being willing to receive feedback from the people around you and adjust the plan to make it make sense to still do a thing the way that you need to.
JOHN and J.
JOHN and Jay turn their free world building software kanga.io into a goto organizational tool for creatives around the world. Hi, there. I'm Jay. Grant j john. There we go.
Nice and easy. We're happy to just goof around and enjoy. The other question I have is you will you will be editing like slipping in and out of what we're talking about. Right? Hi, my name is Jay who I go by the alias lsds online. I'm a dungeon master. And I've been playing role playing games and more specifically Dungeons and Dragons fifth edition since it came out. I fell in love with role playing games and the forever dm. Since then, I'll make a segue for you to join in john.
So caca has been growing as a hobby project since end of 2018. And beginning of 2020, john joined along, because I didn't want to have to figure out marketing and paying taxes with the income from the company. So that's where he comes into picture. Yeah, it was it was a real privilege to join the project. I have to say, I've worked in various sectors before, but this is by far what I've enjoyed the most. I didn't even know that this is what I wanted. I didn't have any prior experience in and marketing, which is one of my main responsibilities within canker and, and I kind of had to learn and and sort of, you know, adapt to what the company needed. But it's really been, it's been a true like gem of a job, I have to say,
Hi, my name is Sam, I go by the tag, the educational dm, although it's more of kind of stuff I do. And that's the stuff I work under on social media. And what I've been doing for last few years is promoting the educational aspect of d&d and in fact any tabletop role playing game
I've got a few projects on the go and looking forward to kind of continuing to
promote that aspect.
Be a leader at world A world of air and lead author of the same. Hi, I'm b i am, I'm the writer for dm have and one of the creative ads behind the world of holdover. ttrpg. It's a small indie developed ttrpg that the whole core book was written in a weekend was just sort of a labor of love. I was initially going to be a one shot for our friends with a simple system just for the sake of getting our mind off things and it slowly became so much more I write in most of the books, both from the Guild of navigators, expert mapmaker, Craftsman and polymath. I am Bo, from the Guild of navigators, Derek the creative mind behind how not to dm podcast. Hello, everybody. I am Derek. I am the host, the producer, the interviewer on a podcast called how not to dm So the focus of the podcast is to interview awesome ttrpg creators from around the web, talk about their experiences running the game from behind the screen, the best of the worst moments, they've had also their advice for anyone who's looking to start running the game or who's been running it for a while and just needs, you know, an injection of some interesting new ideas to use and spend a lot of fun. It's it's grown a lot faster than I anticipated and talk to a lot of really interesting, talented people who are way better at it than me. And you know, that's really what my goal was from the beginning was to talk to people who I knew who could really help me up my game and help the rest of the internet who is willing to listen up their games as well. So yeah, a little bit about me. I work as a data analyst. So my day job is doing nerdy stuff already. So it's kind of a natural fit for me to be into this sort of hobby. But yeah, that's just a little bit about me.
Charles, the sinister storyteller. Hello, my name is Charles. I go by the sinister storyteller online. And I like to run games, but they're also for atiner. I mean, I would say that RPGs are becoming pretty mainstream. I mean, I don't think I'd call I guess Joe Manchin. ello is a nerd. Yes. I don't know. Like, who cares if you're a nerd, like, Who cares? My name is Rich Ochsner. I'm the director of hash things. Games, which is a recently started a limited company and we make all ages role playing games, promote deaf awareness and sign language. My wife and I work in a deaf charity we have I've been there for about 12 years now and my wife about six or seven.
shawntel be a polymath as well. She's an actor, writer, and up and coming. I am shantelle Benjamin shantelle be on Twitter. I am a psychologist and actor writer a some time a GM streamer. If it has anything to do with words, I probably have something to do with it. Team or soul, an anthropologist and community activist. I go by the name Timor Sol on though that's not my proper name. The proper name is about those vishnevsky but it's unpronounceable in any foreign foreign country. So I go by Timor Sol. I make creative stuff for d&d, mostly, though some of this stuff can be also used in other key the rpds I believe, oral oral creator and content creator, but I'm also cartographer somewhat, I was wondering what would rant of my creativeness you were more interested in
Devin, the GM co founder of start playing dark games. My name is Devin Schulich. I'm one of the founders of start playing games. I help create micro communities through play. Hi, my name is Hawk Robinson. I'm founder and president of the 501 c three nonprofit RPG research we study the effects of all role playing game formats for the potential to improve lives around the world. We are 100% unpaid volunteers we have more than 170 volunteers across six continents and I also started gaming around 1977 researching the effects role playing games since 1983. running programs in educational settings with role playing games since 1985, with incarcerated population since 1989, and with therapeutic population since 2004. I'm also president and founder of RPG therapeutics and RPG diterlizzi, a for profit company using role playing games and cooperative music with a recreation therapy background to help people improve their lives with autism spectrum brain injury and many others. I'm a Washington State Department of Health registered recreational therapist with a background in nursing.
In education, neuroscience and research, psychology and music therapy and play therapy and compassion focused therapy.
Help a music teacher and founder of the charitable GM support community hope for TT RPGs Hello, I am hope from hope for ttrpg as john Fraser, a pop blogger focused on TT RPGs and over 250 reviewed materials. Alright, well, my name is john Frazier.
I'm basically no buddy, I just have a blog that I've been doing for several years now. I'm Benton. Densmore. I have been playing d&d since the Second Edition. When I was about eight years old and saw my parents play, I have played in a ton of different campaigns. And after running in one of a friend's games, I decided I want to take my hand and dming and since then, I've been trying to write in, in fun adventures and stories to tell my friends.
Where should we start?
I would say it's, it's fun. It's having the joy of doing of creating of making stuff. And of course, seeing people using the stuff I create, and seeing people to play with it. And, and, you know, utilize it in their own games, or even seeing my guys who I'm playing grid to be happy about the maps or
the tokens for the games done. So I would say
it would be fun. Number one is always fun.
All these things are just the rule zero, like the base of what how IDM amazing. Yeah, I mean, I say this at the beginning of every session, like there is no winning and losing and a tabletop role playing game, we're here to tell a story with our pals and have a good time doing it.
And yeah, so I think creating a system creating a basis for community at the table, taking a moment out of our adult lives and telling a story together experiencing real feelings in a safe setting. The fun thing about it to me is just watching my friends but figure out new and different ways to communicate with each other both as themselves but also as the as the characters that they're creating and the stories that they're telling. And when I say I guess when I say my friends I mean everybody that I play with whether whether it's folks that are coming into a game that I don't know in a paid game, you know a cast on the channel publicly or my like my private home game of the folks that are in my house right now.
I find it interesting that we have titles at all, but of all of them I like storyteller that said I feel as though everyone is the storyteller so I am not sure maybe lead storyteller or something I have no idea of GM is an interesting one because the concept of a master means that everyone else has to obey we're all sitting around a table rolling dice and playing games person's just at the head of the table and they have all the other characters in their head and that's not a master if anything that's the seven
that's the game seven you holding out characters and saying hey, do you want to interact with this one? No. Okay, I've got another one for you. I I think games master Dungeon Master they are all they are what they are the the metaphor and implied in them tells me all sorts of things but they are what they are and I don't actually think people think too deeply into it so I don't necessarily either Yeah, yeah. Yeah, I mean, I think gamemaster just works because you know it's it's also piggybacking off of Dungeon Master Dungeon Master because Dungeon Master is obviously trademark there's nothing that really holds down for it. I mean, you call it referee game keeper facilitate whatever you want to call it, you know the idea of being able to get across quickly like well my role is I'm the master the game I run it on the referee. Yeah. So the audience is king. The audience in my purse from my perspective is anyone that is around the table and that includes the the MDM storyteller. I mean, it's a it's a good phrase for a reason the audience is king. It's not a the customer is always right. It's the audience is king who you are
telling a story with and who you are telling a story to say other people that are the focus of your attention. for clients, it depends on the setting. So if a player is a participant, and whatever the goal is whether it's a therapeutic goal, recreational goal, entertainment goal, educational goal, it's the generic term I use for role playing game participant, they're the player, right? And then they're participating in the activity. If it's an educational setting that we more likely say, student, if it's a therapeutic setting, more likely, say client, or patient or something like that participant just kind of covers all of us. So there's some of the things we like to do, no matter what the setting, whether it's recreational, entertainment, educational, or therapeutic. And then other things that are very specifically there, we want to do differently in the therapeutic setting. So across all of the settings, we'd like to have, if possible, of any role playing game participant, fill out an assessment of their genre interests, game system types, the settings they like etc. Because that helps us get to select the media they consume, etc, helps us get to what intrinsically motivates them, when I am doing that for Applied gaming. So for education or therapy, then it's all different, right? Then it is okay, I need to build the materials to teach the topic. It's educational, that's a that's a different world building process, obviously, than the more recreational approach for for the therapeutic one where I'm building a module that's going to have specific events happening and specific stimuli. So they can bring up the issues for discussion to achieve the therapeutic goals. When I work with people with various phobias, social phobias, agoraphobia, you know, they've locked themselves in their house and afraid to come out, creating electronic role playing games for Neverwinter Nights, and then migrated them to the tabletop, slowly through an exposure therapy approach, bringing in the topics that cause them discomfort, but doing it incrementally and adjusting to their level of anxiety. Those are obviously more targeted approaches for world building to meet those specific client needs. not my place to tell people they need to see a therapist, I don't think anyone knows my game. But as therapy, playing games is therapeutic, but we are not therapists. And mental health is a serious thing. And, you know, if people are coming to me with very serious issues, also, like, you know, like this might be like something you want to talk with, with a therapist about but, you know, I probably will blindly says like, Hey, you need to go to therapy, that that doesn't really happen a lot in my games where or that people assume or that they accept my games as their therapy.
Dr. B from take this
is was one that kind of set this in my mind about the idea that running games is not therapy is therapeutic, then there's two very different things therapy is using actual knowledge that you've gained from school classes, all these things to help someone and therapeutic are things that we enjoy that bring us that bring us joy, and that, you know, allow our minds to have
this relaxation because of the game, but definitely not a replacement for therapy.
session zeros where we talk where we can talk about, okay, where are players limits? Right?
My, my wife ran a game, and one of our players went a little dark. And she like it was he was an evil campaign to begin with. So it was already gonna be a little dark already. But like the player was making actions that made her as the DM uncomfortable. That's, that's really strange. That's really a, that's a really unique situation, in my opinion. But I do understand the purpose of them. And I do see the value of them. Because there are definitely you know, there are some things that do trigger people.
I think it is important, if you're not going to use a safety tool, like if you're not going to have safety cards or something like that in your game, you definitely need to have a conversation with the players beforehand. You got to sit down and be like, Okay, this is the kind of game I like to run. These are the types of situations that we might run into. If you're not okay with this, or any like, if there's something you're not okay with, please let me know, because you can get into some weird situations in games.
One person might think it's funny, and it might really be unsavoury for for other it might be really uncomfortable for some people. I feel like that happened a lot more when I was younger when I was a younger dm when I was a younger player. as I've gotten older by I like more realistic games. I like dark, gritty stories. And so that's usually what I run and I will
Like putting my players in uncomfortable situations like I tell my players the beginning, I want to put you in an uncomfortable situation. And that's supposed to be where you live, you're supposed to overcome those uncomfortable situations. But at the same time, I'm not trying to have somebody, you know, like, this is supposed to be fun. And I think it's, it's hard to answer that question, because I think that safety tools are necessary for some games, but only if you don't know the people. If you know, the people, you know, their limitations, and you know, me, there's obviously things you would never do. That's unacceptable as a DM, that's not something you can do that's, that robs that player of agency, that, you know, is a deeply traumatizing situation to begin with. That's exceptionally dark. The the, I cannot, as a DM foresee that situation ever happening in one of my games, unless that player came to me and said, I want this as part of my fantasy. And even then that would be a little uncomfortable for me. But I, you know, I'd have to sit down and have a conversation with me, like, why why do you want this to happen? What what's leading you down this path? And then I would really take it on a case by case basis, but it would more likely be a default? No. Unless it was like, Look, this actually happened to me, and I need to work through this kind of thing, then I might be like, oh, okay, maybe. But I mean, it's still like, there's some hard nose, our nose, that kind of stuff is hard. No, don't do it. Just don't do it. dmws that want to put that, that stuff in their game? I don't know, if I recommend playing in their games. Honestly, that doesn't sound fun is supposed to be fun. At the end of the day,
I built my world around my rules, for the most part, those just kind of came out of nowhere. Don't feel like it. This is my own world of I don't want to build a combat system, I don't gonna if you don't want to put in the effort to try and do 1000 different voices, you don't got to you're your own person, you don't have to do with people who are famous for doing things or doing, you can go your own way and blaze your own trail. And just have fun because this is a game. And if you're putting in more work into having an effective session, but then you are in I don't know, like you're you're in education or your job. Like, if you're stressed out about something that's supposed to be fun, then you've already kind of lost.
So the self is important.
Within the purely administrate administrative side, being very aware of your limitations is crucial.
I can struggle with that. And I am very aware that I can struggle with that. But I'm also very flexible, I will
plan for myself on any given day, maybe three activities. And by that I mean, one of the activities, if I know that I'm going to have a difficult week one of those activities might just be lunch, one of them might be
going for a walk, one of them might be
learning that monologue, one of them might be prepping that game.
And they're all going to be different amounts of work. One of them might be fleshing out that piece of world that I haven't done yet.
It might be typing up some ideas that I had, before I fell asleep, it might be making notes on something that happened.
It might be sketching, and just making sure that the the idea that I had in my head is somewhere that's not in my head.
For anyone that is going to be professionally engaging with players or audiences,
you're performing for an audience. Whether that audience is the people at your table, or people elsewhere, or people in physical audience somewhere, doesn't matter. You're still performing. And so that can take its own toll that can have a psychological toll.
It's important at that point to make sure you're taking a step back every now and then and just saying, hey, do I really want to be doing this? Is this for me? Is this enough? Is this not enough? Is there anything I can do to change those things? Is there anything I want to do to change those things? Don't force yourself to do something that you dislike, because you feel like you should.
That's really important. And it's very difficult for people to have fun if you're not having fun. And that comes in every realm of performance. If you're not having fun. The audience will not have fun. They just they will feel it. It's there.
As you can imagine the tension of being in a group of people that know how to play, and you being the only person that not doesn't know anything. First thing, give every player a space, the space that they need, you can throw all the magic items and all the feats he wanted players, and it won't do nearly as much as a really cool moment. And so set up a situation where they get to be an awesome offer for a minute or two, let them do a really cool maneuver, really, like spice it up as much as you can make sure that you've set up the situation for that player to take advantage of it, like find what their character can do, that none of the other characters can and really be like, Oh, this is gonna be the moment and sometimes you got to put it in a couple of spots, because they're gonna miss the first couple, but make sure that they see it and make sure you do like tell them, hey, there's a thing, and then reward them with a really cool, almost cinematic moment with doing that, that cool thing, and that if they're emotionally invested in that player, when that are in that character. When that player does that thing, their endorphins are going to go through the roof, that's going to be the moment that everybody talks about for weeks, and everybody else at the table is going to talk about it as Oh my God, when you did that, and you did that thing. Second thing, you start playing, they start playing.
If you want your players to do voices,
that's already a no go. If they want to do voices, they will do voices. But if you want them to feel inside the world, you have to feel inside beat that you have to get the feeling of being inside worlds.
Vampires exist.
Then problem GM is to
no one's innocent people make mistakes, you got to own up to get out. And stuff like that is useful because then you can look and see exactly where you made mistakes exactly where you've
got some border. And if someone is refusing to change or refusing to
you cultivated the space, you have created a spot where you and your friends can go through this experience and be comfortable and happy and safe. And if someone is disrespecting that for no really good reason,
then they shouldn't be welcomed in the space because they agreed to it, and then are turning their back on it for their own personal kicks. You know, it's uh, you know, these communities usually think like, okay, like this, like whole neighborhood of people. But you know, my room is like a group of friends. You know, they're, they're a community themselves. But you know, a much smaller scale and a d&d group or a tabletop. Group is a micro community. There are obvious lines and veils, and there are boundaries, people set up, do not use, I'm just playing my character as an excuse to be a terrible person, obviously.
And that's where learning from others comes in. This is also a collaborative game you are with your friends. And even if you are playing the most lone wolf character in the universe, remember, you're sitting at a table with people you claim to care about, probably. So treat them like you care about that. Treat the people around you well, and the rest will kind of fall into place. If someone else wants to use things like safety tools for their own comfort, go with it, because you care about them. That's, that's my simple rule. No one can take away your imagination. But also don't let that be an excuse to stop caring about the people at your table.
role playing games, or just world building in general. It's it's always been Jays belief. And I have to admit that I wasn't initially as sold on on this as he was, but over time, it's really kind of grown on me. Whereby, you know, it's just
you create a certain relation with your users who appreciate what you do and appreciate that we're not here to sort of gouge them. We're really here to build something together. And I think it sort of ties down ties to the community aspect of kanko where we do feel, I do feel that we're all sort of building this together and moving forwards together.
I think it you know, you can, you can single out the fact that we have a very large free offering. But ultimately, I think
if you look at the bigger picture within Kanka, everything we do is based on a lot of community input. So, you know, we have regular community votes, we are always JNI available to the community, we regularly engage, we regularly talk to our users, I get emails or, or private messages on a daily basis. I'm sure Jay does, too. And I think that the whole mentality
of cankers, cause very much not just about being free, but just about that, that community and that moving towards together and towards a common goal, which is making the best possible version of can come.
I don't think that there's a final point to that. I don't think there's a point where we say, okay, we're done. It's now perfect, and we can stop. But I think, you know, it all ties down to the core values at khanqah. And the core philosophy at kanker. It's not simply
a question of, well, we have the the best free offering on the market. Yes, we do. But you know, that's the why. And I guess the Why is the community.
It's definitely that community. You know, like, I think of all the people I've played games with, and the kind of odd bonds we've formed from it. I think that's really powerful.
So I started just on Twitter as I really enjoyed social media management. And I just started with the idea that I could help other people who are creating ttrpg content, whether it's podcast streams, homebrew content, articles, anything, I'm just kind of helping to support them by giving encouragement, my time, a little bit of promotion, you know, retreating their stuff, commenting on it, liking it, just really trying to help them be supportive of them. And that ended up being a really great thing. A lot of people really liked the idea that, hey, you can just support someone. And it doesn't have to have any tie ins, it doesn't have to be monetized. You don't have to do anything to get anything. And so with that, Twitter it, we started making a pretty great community there. And shortly, I think only a week or two after having the Twitter we started our discord community, which is something that's really close to my heart. I've met so so many amazing people through our Discord. We have channels for everything. Um, it started out as a general chat and self promotion channels. So it's a great hub for people to come in and promote their stuff. So when you're streaming, when you post the social media pages, when you've got cool stuff coming up, you can drop in and post it. And as a group, you know, we see it and then we go and we help support you as much as we can, which is absolutely fantastic. And that kind of grew into rehab workshop and resource channels now. So we have channels for media marketing advice, for Danny engagement, for advice on advice and feedback on your homebrew content, all of that. And so it's a really supportive community of people just wanting to help each other out. And still, my favorite things that have come from it is we all kind of follow the same of when one of us wins, we all win. When we support one person, we all get better. And it is so true. I think a big thing that happened in the beginning is we started getting a lot of Twitch streamers. And so we were able to kind of create an awesome little community of people raiding each other, giving advice, just supporting each other dropping into each other's chats. And that created such an amazing community. And some of the people who have been absolutely amazing and kind of taking the head on that and so it's just a really great community of people helping each other out whether you're a streamer, a podcaster, whatever, you know, we just really want to help each other as we started the team.
trpg family hashtag. So by working together and just becoming so close and invested in each other's projects, because we all love what each other was doing, and we all have the same goals, you know, we were really that ttrpg family, we 100% believe it, you know, and it all spawned off of that beginning mentality of when one of us wins, we all win. So let's all just support each other and bring each other up. And when you do that, you make a family. And so now we've had that on Twitter. And it is just been fantastic. We have a ton of different things that we do there as well. We've got a lot of people who participate in follow Fridays. So just working really hard to help get people out there, learning about new accounts, helping them get started, you know, self promotion, Saturdays, just helping each other out with that promotion, and just getting our stuff out there. We've got support Sunday, searching Sunday, where it's a day entirely dedicated just to, hey, let us know we can do to help you out this week, whether it's collaborations retweeting something, liking something, giving advice, just anything. And it's just been so amazing to see this little corner of the internet just carved out for such an amazing community that just keeps growing and growing. And so that has just been so amazing. And we kind of almost do a little bit of everything. And so it's it's just a lot of fun. And it's just so fun and exciting to see where it's come from and where it's going. I
think all my all my kind of writing, creativity is geared towards bolstering the community around me really, I suppose, all the projects I'm working on, and trying to increase the inclusivity all the time, the accessibility. I did a talk at Taylor University in Kuala lumper, a couple of years ago, and I talked about intellectual curiosity as one of the big learning points. And the first thing I said to a roomful of students is, Who here thinks that exams encourage intellectual curiosity. So by case study for exams, by kind of having that pressure exams, makes them more interested in their subject. Now, one or two of them did put up their hand, and that's a great thing. And I can see why kind of being forced to study will get you into the subject, and possibly make you more interested in it. But if there are purely there are better ways. And, and to be honest with you, I think that mostly exams, and the pressure exams and having to do constant testing, actually turns students off learning about their subject.
It's, it's not good for intellectual curiosity, which means that they're not going to take on these subjects on to university and beyond, and especially beyond University and, and go and learn more about it and contribute to their fields. And yeah, just just be excited about it. So kind of my dream goal is to see role playing games being used in an extracurricular kind of
setting. I think my first foray into exploring games came from I was like, maybe five or seven, then my mom had gotten the chooser, an adventure book that was a bit older audience, but she was reading it to me, and then there was a dice rolling component in it. Why do I do this?
Oh, well, I started blogging, because I had a lot of books and a lot of free time. My what pays the bills is me working the night shift at a hotel. And so when the hotel slow, you get a lot of time to read. And I figured why not use that time to, to write as well. So that's literally why I do it. But as far as my sort of aspirational motivation, I think I just enjoy thinking about these sorts of things. I like getting into it. And noticing details, perfect. A casual reading, or a functional reading wouldn't necessarily catch an eye especially like reading a whole series in sequence, because then you can see how it, how it changes through time and how different voices made their marks on it. And I don't think that that's something that would come across. If I were just doing doing things casually that so that's why I do the blog. As far as why I roleplay.
I don't know. Honestly, it fascinated me early, and then I've been doing it for so long, that I can't imagine not doing it anymore.
standards and milestones about being a Game Master. I think
I mean, milestones in being a Game Master. I would say just include, like, running your like,
acknowledging that you can do it is probably the first milestone, running your first game, running your first campaign.
milestones.
And I think that sticks with a lot of people, I think you could be in a game from five years ago, you could still call out their character's name and like how they died and still have a laugh about that. And you can just, you can have so many shared experiences and one night of roleplay that you don't necessarily get me of sitting in front of TV playing a video game.
first session achievement gap, I guess. Second milestone would be do I want to go back? Yes. hazhar we did it. After that, it's, do I still want to do it? Yay. That's my third one.
Hold on. I think I think every GM, I think every gym starts out, very Monty Hall, you know, the, the gains are very slapstick. The, the monsters are really goofy, the characters are really goofy. Everything is very loose. You know, a lot of times, you're just plugging in playing monsters directly from the monster manual. And everything is very two dimensional. I think from there, the next milestone is trying to I think every dm eventually tries to create their own world. And inevitably, they're going to get in over their head, trying to create a world. There's so much that goes into creating a world. I think there's a lot of self doubt after that. That's a huge milestone for DMS, like realizing you can't create a whole world by yourself. And then you quickly overcome that. Because if you want to dm I mean, not everyone that's I think that's a big hurdle for a lot of DMS, you either overcome that hurdle or you don't. The ones that do overcome that hurdle, I think, part of the ones that realize that it's easier if you have a story you're trying to tell. And I mean, it doesn't have to be your story. Like you could, you could read a cool book, and you've now taken that you're like, I want to put this in a game. That's great. That's perfect, do it. Hopefully your players haven't read the book, because then it will be fun and new for them. But even so like that's a milestone of taking the the media that you're used to and putting it into your games. And then I think that final milestone for dmws is the ability to take the media that you've you've been watching change the names and mix multiple, multiple media's together, I think that's the last milestone for GM. And and that's that pinnacle of storytelling that people don't realize that you've, they don't see it as plagiarism, because you're not like I played a game where were one of the NPCs was jack Sparrow from the Pirates of the Caribbean game, same character, everything about him was identical, that breaks verisimilitude that makes it less fun for me as a player, it makes it very goofy. Had the DM changed his name, a simple name change, you know, this is Captain raw, or something like that, you know, that that would have been an immediate fix to the problem. And that's a milestone that dmws have to have to come to is understanding that something as simple as a name change is sometimes enough to like, cover up what you know, cover up that you've taken this character from somewhere else. And then like understanding that if you're going to have that carbon copy of a character, you can take that character's mannerisms and things like that. You know, we've got captain, you know, Captain jack Sparrow, we changed his name. He's now Captain Ron, it's the same story, you know, you can still use the same story beats. He had the gym, his crew mutinied against him, they took the gym, he's Captain Ron, and he's trying to get a gym from his muteness crew and the players when you present that to them won't recognize it as the same as Captain jack Sparrow, when in actuality is the exact same person, the exact same story beats he had just spun around a couple of names. Or you can take the plot of a character in a different movie and mash it into him. So you deal you take Captain jack Sparrow, and you mash them up with Han Solo. So he's this you know, Rebel Without a Cause, you know? Per ship, ship, Captain. And he's now you know, trying to help rebellion. He's got all the mannerisms of, you know, Johnny Depp's portrayal of Captain jack Sparrow, you know, you just blended those two things together. And now you have a new story and a new character. And the players are not going to realize that you've been heavily influenced by these two other properties that are properties that I guarantee your players you don't know. And that's a huge milestone, like to get to.
And providing an actual ends to a campaign, which I think are two very different things. I think a lot of times we start campaigns and then scheduling or life or whatever other reasons, we end up not finishing them. So I'm about to experience the ending it milestone, I have leaps and loads of milestones to go still certainly have varying levels of success, what that means for people,
standards. Part of what makes this game so unique is every dm comes at the task of being a DM with their own perspective, their own personal experiences and their own goals, you might have a different goal than me in how you want to tell a story or why you want to tell a story and putting restrictions on a DM by saying, Okay, this is the standard list of everything that a DM should do. Like that takes away that takes away your agency as a storyteller to do the best job you can. I don't think there should be any,
keeping people safe and sane. Like, I don't want to be like it's not it's not a Master's aren't trained therapists. I'm sure some of them are. But we aren't all and it's not necessarily our responsibility to help people navigate their own trauma or to be the only source of an outlet for certain things in people's lives. But I do think there is a certain standard of if you're in a leadership position in any aspect of your life, being willing and able to call out moments that need to be addressed. Whether that is someone being uncomfortable at the table, whether it is you being uncomfortable as a Game Master, like you're I do this for money, but even so like if I'm in a situation where I am uncomfortable at the table, I will find a way to navigate that if I'm with my pals, and someone's making me uncomfortable, we're just gonna pause and we're gonna like interrogate what's going on and how we're gonna change it. It's so hard to set standards, right? I think standards have to be set across the community for safety tools and using those or talking to one another, like, as human beings about what went well in a game or what didn't go well in a game. So like, doing the sort of checking in or debriefing or whatever it is that you want to call it. And then there is the sort of like, standard of like, are you going to? You know, I haven't I haven't elected to take an improv class or a vocal training class or anything like that yet. But, you know, I did study theater I did. You know, I've surrounded myself for many years with actors and performers and and even done it myself occasionally. But I think being a good game master is about starting with internal standards, looking toward the community to continue developing your own growth, figuring out which parts of GMA excite you. Because everybody's going to be good at a different thing, right? Like maybe your standards are, you want to develop really great ability to handle tactical combat, and maps and minis, and all these things. And so like setting those standards might be different for someone like, like that, versus someone like me who's like, I want to, I want to make someone fall in love with this NPC, the way that I did when they popped into my brain, or like there is it's hard to standardize how to have fun with your friends, right? Like you know your friends better than I do. And you know yourself better than I do. But across the board, just acknowledging that we're playing games, and like, we're not saving babies, we're not, you know, we're not curing cancer, we're playing a game. And we can grow and be better at that game. And we can grow and be better at taking care of the people in our lives and supporting them and telling stories together and like moving ourselves with the power of our words and plastic rocks. But like I can't necessarily fully ascribe what the standardized system of like a plus you're a good GM now can be because I still walk away from a session and I'm like, I don't know. I don't know if that was my best work like and I feel that way. Based on the standards that I've set for myself of like, Well, you know, I could tell so and so was checking their phones. So I know they weren't really as engaged as they typically are. So I think you have to, like have those moments of self talk of what the things are that are important to you, but also checking in with the people at your table, like what standards do they have for a GM? What are they expecting from this? I like to do that with clients, especially recurring ones for campaigns? What can I do for you, you were expecting a dungeon break? next session, you'll have a dungeon of some kind, it might not be a typical dungeon because I don't, I'm not a typical GM in that sense of like, nobody's going into a dungeon underground, going through several rooms, fighting several random encounters, blah, blah, blah, with me, but maybe you will be going through an alley trying to find a piece of art and a variety of different things are coming out now. Oops, I've accidentally made a dungeon that is an apartment building that a bunch of vampires own or or what have you. But I don't know, I do feel like I copped out of that question a little bit. But
no. Yeah. So I've said to him that I will, I don't think you'll ever see tabletop role playing games as part of a formal syllabus, I might start to be starting to change my mind about that. But I'm not saying that there won't be teachers who build it into their kind of into their syllabus, I'm saying it won't be formally kind of part of a national syllabus for let's say, kind of entry exams to university. Just because I just I think that the there are there are so many luck in learning objectives. It's hard to assess those. And then but also, it's hard to kind of build scenarios specifically to hit specific learning outcomes. Because I think the education is, firstly, it's very conservative, I think it's it's very slow moving to change. education system is incredibly slow moving to change, which is not a problem for maths as such a really, I mean, there are some issues, I'd love to do more exploration investigation. Yeah, I just don't think they would know how to kind of categorize it
and assess it. And then when I when I came across the game when I was like, in, you know, middle school, I was like this, is it. I love this. Yeah, I think i think i think i think a lot of parents want their children to have creativity and use their imagination. I mean, your kid, I mean, you get toys, use your imagination, your toys. The world worried if my parents didn't want me to use my imagination as a child
are talking recently to a school worker who works with children who have anger issues and have emotional and abuse issues. He was so his name is he was saying how they assess the social engagement of their students in his students in. In a role playing environment. I think that's slightly different, though, because that's more of a behavioral thing. And seeing this social engagement is this is is assessed by him. But in terms of kind of academic learning outcomes, I think it's difficult to have it as something that is easy to assess. And so I don't see it ever being part of any countries or any kind of example, it's a kind of formal syllabus.
setting standards is so hard because being in it, I mean, we have this issue in theater as well, if like, we all live in this weird space of like, doing something because you love it and then monetizing it or turning it into a career. And that means that you do need to start interrogating what the standards should be, because there should be like standard work practices and like people who are on actual plays, like, you know, the tail trader, girls, girls, the children or women and I have set up you know, systems of like, this is you know, we're not making a ton of money from it, don't get me wrong, we're very small, actual play, but like, you know, they know that they'll get a certain percentage of my subscriptions from the twitch channel because I it doesn't sit right with me to like ask these people to do free labor even though I know that they would be in this campaign whether or not we were streaming it right. And so like, I think those standards of like just how to be a basic, a good human being, if you are, if you are making art and expecting to, like capitalize on it, or monetize on it, like, figure out what you need to do to support those people, right, like Joyce and I have created agreements around the music and stuff of like, of like, how we would navigate that financially and how we would navigate that with crediting and all these things. And I think that it's really really important in that sense, but for like the actual practice of jamming, the biggest standard to set is Using safety tools, checking in with the people at your table and being open and honest with those people and with yourself about like what it is that the goals are for a game right like if you want to do a fun heist great do a fun heist if you want to do a great horror great do a gritty horror but make sure everybody knows that that's what they're walking into. The worst thing we can do is surprise people with trauma right like if we want to explore gritty body traumas and group in a scary game great, but I don't want to like surprise my friend who's used to playing like fun goofy comedy games with me and my summer camp. Like come and listen to me describe body horror, right? Yeah,
we also like to get the their consent and so there's a great tool for Monte cook which is a conceptual uses uses a basically a stoplight green, yellow, red light where they go through their ask a few questions. It's basically checking for triggers and topics that are they're comfortable with, kinda well, kinda can push this but don't push it too far and verboten topics. And so they it's a one page assessment, it's publicly freely available. And it's a really handy tool. And we really liked that we had our own version before. But this is we we like the current one that's publicly available. So we use it quite a bit for all of the different settings. So again, if time is available to do that, then that's handed to the GM and lets the GM know how to customize the adventure to work around. So you get all of these from all the players and now you have an idea of kind of the areas need to watch out for other things that can be added. Of course, people use things like the x card or the no thank you card, etc. My only concern about those as if they're public in front of other people, we find them to be less effective, then the more private communication of what makes them uncomfortable. So being able to pass a post it note or if it's online, a private chat, saying hey, this is getting a little too edgy for me. You know, with the kid with the little kids games, no thank you evil. Maybe when they come across a ghost maybe they're a little too scared of ghosts. So instead of being a ghost, it's a cotton candy. quote unquote monster right? Something something a little less upsetting for the kid.
Hey, GM discovery This is Melody Ray now with the narrator script, GM CEO introduction from where basic GM preparation materials and, and into advanced techniques, processes, metrics and strategies for hobbyists and professional game masters to improve their play. It is the basis of standard for advanced certification as a reflection of practicing gems. You can learn more about free basic and free advanced certification at our production site at Game Master certification.org. This is the first of 10 sessions covering the major aspects of jamming. Each session is approximately an hour. This first session is titled The work outside the table. And it covers how we formulate standards for excellent gameplay. The other topics in this series are rules and their design, world building and lore administration for hobbyists and business pointers for aspiring professionals, GMA as a performance art, working with players, mediating disputes, analytics for gmms research, advocacy and community and other experiences that shape our games.
Every game has different subsets of what types of safety tools they want to use. A very common one used is like we've been talking about lines and veils. I describe them. There's like a great essay on it. I don't remember who wrote it, but like you can very much Google lines and veils if you want to read more about it based on just what I'm saying here. But lines are things that we don't want to see in our movie. We're making a movie together. Let's imagine if you will, we're at the table and we're writing this story together lines are things we do not want to see in the story. They are not included at all. In my games, I always line non consensual sex, but they but it doesn't always have to be that serious. It could be like an lines and veils can always change. So you could come to the table one day and be like, Hey, I was sick last week, I'd like to line vomit. Like and that's totally fine. And you also don't even need to provide the context you can just come to the table be like I'd like to learn vomit today. And that's great. Then everyone respects the things that we have discussed and if they don't, then that is where things get a little sticky up like as a as a DM as a leader. I will have those conversations with people and potentially remove them from games if they continue to just respect those, you know, what we've set up as a as a contract. But so that's lines lines are not in the movie. veils are things in the movie that we would fade to black on. So veils are often things like any sort of like sexual acts or something like that, where it's like, great, you hook up with this person. That's awesome. Let's cut away from you, we'll come back later. Like, we're not going to do the play by play of those types of encounters. There are also other things that are veiled. Sometimes people have different levels of violence that they'd like to have failed, or, you know, sometimes in dungeons and dragons, animal harm is also a thing that happens of like, you know, if you're trying to like, you know, down a Mounted Combat and, or something like that. So, there are lots of things that can be very serious or very not better lions or belts, I also like to do brightspot spots, which, because talking about safety can be like, such a downer, right? You list all these things that you don't want to see that you want to cut away from, that you're nervous about having to talk about at the table. So I always like to finish my safety talks with bright spots, which are like things that we want to see things that are working well, things we're excited about. And those could be really General, like, I want to get in some good roleplay today, or I want to have a fight, or it could be something really specific. I have a I have a table that loves to do brunch, but I'll come and be like, we want to have a brunch today. And I'm like, awesome, let's do it. And so everybody has a sort of different relationship with safety tools. And that's just the general version of how I talked about them at the top. I typically also check in, depending on like, age range and stuff like that about swearing, or about, like the general movie writing of the day, right? Is it like, are we telling a PG story? are we telling a PG 13? story? What's our relationship to violence in those descriptions? Or even occasionally, are we telling an R rated story with our language and our violence and that sort of thing?
And then what do you want to see happen next week, don't choose the most popular choose the thing that you love. If you love 13th age, then you should run 13th age group was very murder hobo II,
very you guys were really focused on just fighting monsters, which is what d&d is all about.
I mean, I'm really excited about what we've done with our community at Star playing. I mean, our gems are crushing it. They're on track to make a million dollars on our platform this
year. My art? Which aspect of art Would you like me to speak on?
I, I didn't want to be a theatre maker. I didn't want to go into the arts really deliberately. When I was a young person, I had done it for a while. And I felt like it hurt me too much for a variety of reasons.
Pretty much the same as any other visual memory. And one of one of my players did in fact, say, Yeah, I find it really strange that if I go back and watch our game, because it was streamed, if I go back and watch it, it's just sitting around what you
will and it will sound a little aggressive. But like, first of all, I will say to any man who's asking me to convince him to do that, absolutely.
I get stars in wishes after every every game. So say, like, Hey, who you want to give
in this paper. It hasn't been instantiated until you the GM and the players go through it and bring a perception check. It's not that I you know, didn't have enough dark vision to see that far. Sometimes stuff is happening in the shop wherever you get your podcasts and that Game Master certification.org
Rate transcript quality