How to run

Who, indeed, runs like that?

My style of running a roleplaying game is probably best described as "intuitive tempered by experience" but over the last many years, I've stumbled across a few resources that describe many elements of my style in a way that not only summarizes the way I do it pretty well, but also does a better job of getting past the intuitive way of doing it, examining and analyzing the nuts and bolts, and spelling it out in a somewhat more formalized and procedural state. This is both good and bad, I think. Good in the sense that if you understand why something that you know intuitively works for you, you can probably do it better and more consistently, because you actually know it at an intellectual level too. Bad in the sense that they may put a spin on it that doesn't work as well as you do, and sometimes having too hard and fast a set of rules on how to do something creative isn't a good idea anyway. But given that I am and always have been a tinkerer, that doesn't bother me too much; I take what works and if it improves my game, I implement it, if it doesn't, I discard it. Let me first talk about three sources that I think are great texts for kind of absorbing a lot of aspects of my running style. I've mentioned two of them a few times before (although not in a few years now, geez) but the third one is a new discovery of mine, and is currently a good font of ideas for tweaks to my rules and my style as I go through the content available there.

The first good source for how I like to run is the old Ray Winninger "Dungeoncraft" column from Dragon Magazine back... oh, quite a while now. They can be found archived online here, although just in text only form. This series started late in the Second Edition era, so the late 90s, fer cryin' out loud, when I wasn't even paying much attention to D&D, but they did overlap with the launch of 3e. I was buying Dungeons for at least a few years of the early 3rd edition run, and on top of that, this entire series was archived online at the official website. I was wise enough to figure that it probably wouldn't be forever, so I saved the articles and converted them to a pdf (again, text only; I got rid of most of the graphics) but as far as I know, the Darkshire archive has been online without interruption for years now, and it still is. Some of the stuff he talks about is specific to D&D, and even to AD&D for that matter, but most of it is more broadly applicable. I also don't have much interest in his homebrew adventure design, because it's very site-based, dungeoncrawly in nature, which is quite often a flaw of game-mastering advice in general. Although to be fair, when the assumption is that the game being played is D&D, maybe its advice that most potential game-masters actually want. When I first read this stuff in the early 2000s, my thought was that it was like a light-bulb; he was describing a lot of stuff that I did intuitively, and he actually understood why he did it and why it worked! Prior to that, quite honestly, I don't think I'd really ever even given any thought to how to run the game, I just did it by what felt right, what was working, and what yielded a game result that I liked.

The next source is Chris Perkins' column "The DM Experience" which also ran in Dragon (or Dungeon. I can't remember anymore which it was) and which also was posted in full online on the official site at the time. Which is good; this run happened during the 4e era, when I was once again not really paying a lot of attention to D&D anyway, and certainly wasn't buying their magazines. I wasn't too proud to go to their web site and read articles that they were posting, though. Because I had seen the Ray Winninger articles get disappeared when Wizards of the Coast decided they didn't want them hosted publicly anymore, I suspected that this would happen to this column too, so I was pretty diligent in making sure I grabbed all of the articles as they came out and archived them as pdfs. You can, still, get the whole thing on Scribd if you're willing to sign up, but otherwise this stuff is long gone now. Obviously, some of his advice is specific to running 4e, which I didn't and won't, but again, most of it is very broadly applicable to any RPG system. His approach was obviously much less systematic; whereas Ray talked about stuff in a rational order in terms of how you would go about creating a homebrew campaign, Perkins just talked about whatever topic piqued his interest that week. This scattershot approach is good, because it got a lot into the nuts and bolts of little nooks and crannies of the DMing experience that otherwise might not have ever been covered in a more systematic approach, but it also means that you just really kind of need to read the whole thing and hope that you were able to absorb it sufficiently well that you could replicate the stuff you wanted to; finding a specific tip or practice again wasn't always easy because it was so scattershot. I had, again, already thought this when Chris said it in his column, but he really talks repeatedly about how mimicking some of the structure of episodic TV shows like The X-Files or Supernatural (my go-to examples, not necessarily because they're the best shows out there, but because they're shows that most "genre" people will know, and their structure is perfect for emulation, even if the specific content isn't always. Well... minus The X-files tendency to not ever have intended to end, as near as I can tell. That would be a major flaw to imitate that structural element in your game.)

The last source, and a much more recent discovery of mine, is one that I've mentioned a few times in some recent posts; Sly Flourish. It's a website full of useful articles, it's also a YouTube channel, and it is a webstore for ebooks too. I have one of the books, The Return of the Lazy Dungeon Master, and I've read a number of his articles and poked around on his YouTube channel. (Speaking of which, I notice he made one for "safety" which is basically the same topic as my recent Consent in Gaming post. While his approach is more reasonable than that of the Monte Cook publication that seems to have sparked this ridiculous movement, it's still based on a majorly flawed premise, or set of premises: namely that dysfunctional people feeling sad about something said to them at a gaming table is a "safety" issue—do people not actually understand the definition of safety?—or that this blatant and caricaturish feminization and infantilization of our interactions with people should be encouraged in any way shape or form. And, perhaps ironically, or perhaps not, that seems to be the only YouTube video in which he turned off comments. Dislike.) In spite of the name, that's just an attempt to be cute. This technique doesn't have anything to do with laziness and rather focuses on recognizing what actually makes a difference to the quality of your game and what doesn't, even though we might be tempted to think that we need to spend more time on it. I will say that I sometimes find his advice comes across as too process oriented, but that's OK to take stuff out of the strict process that he describes it and see how well it works for you. On the website, his articles are less about the strict process and rather focus on one-off topics quite frequently, and that's where I sometimes find some real gems. But the whole Lazy Dungeon Master book is a decent read. Given that it's the third time I've been exposed to similar concepts in print (or digital print, as the case may be) the concept itself is less eye-opening to me, and the specific details are where I find it interesting to think about how or where I'd want to implement some idea. And, as with the other two, he gives all of this advice from a specific D&D edition context, which automatically means that it needs some occasional tweaking by me anyway.

Rather than do any of these processes strictly, I kind of synthesize and syncretize them all into my own GMing style that also has two additional pillars to it: I'm a rules-lite, rulings not rules, tools not rules junkie, and I hate dungeoncrawls or site-based exploration and focus more on the kinds of stories that the aforementioned TV shows, or any non-D&D based fantasy fiction would tell. That has a huge impact on any advice that is about mechanics specifically and how to implement them, as well as much of the adventure design stuff. 

Anyway, Sly Flourish did mention a specific tactic, which was picked up from another game, which I quite like, called Fronts. I don't really love the way it was implemented in the original game, but given that it adds a bit more structure to something that I was doing already, as well as something that Chris Perkins described in his column, its an obvious one for me to talk about how I would like to see it implemented in my own games going forward. Here's the place where it's described in detail at the original source. I've described this in the past as just having villainous individuals or organizations with their own agendas just marching around in the world doing their thing, and the PCs reacting to that vague threat, which gets less vague and more specific as they interact with it. If they completely fail to interact with it for whatever reason, then it will eventually get around to achieving its goals, and the players hopefully feel like chumps for ignoring an obvious threat, but in my experience that's a theoretical concern, not a real one.

The way Dungeon World describes it is also way too rigid and rulesy for me, but the idea is certainly on the right track. I also don't believe in Campaign vs Adventure fronts, although I do see some value in fronts that are meant to last the entire campaign vs some that are smaller and are meant to be interspersed through a campaign, like a minor story arc, or one that pertains to a specific character of the ensemble cast that is the PC group, and advances the characterization of that character in some specific way. I dislike the way that this description creates labels and very strict process rules for how to implement it, but even without that, most of what it calls for really kind of needs to be done; What is this specific threat? What is it trying to accomplish? Who are the people and organizations that make up the threat? The Grim Portents part is important, because its what raises the stakes as the storm front advances. Personally, the more I read about it, the more I think Sly Flourish's attempt to strip the front concept down to its most essential elements is better than the overly systemy original version. 

For my games, I'd have two or maybe three if I wanted an especially intricate campaign with lots of legs to last a long time fronts that were meant to last the entire game. And then I'd gradually implement a smaller front for each player character that is derived mostly out of either his character background or something that happened in game that had a significant impact on the "arc" of the character's development. This isn't meant to imply that these smaller fronts wouldn't be meaty enough for the entire group to enjoy dealing with them, merely that their genesis comes from one character specifically, and probably has more character-driven and higher stakes for that specific character than for the rest of the group. Again, it's not well organized to pull this topic out specifically, but if you read the run of Chris Perkins' columns, you'll see where he did something very similar to this in his groups to great effect. 

The benefit of using fronts, or something that works similarly, is that it gives you structure to plan around without any railroading. It allows the PCs to eventually drive the game, once they get a handle on it after a few sessions, but still gives you something to work on so that you've got material ready to go when the PCs finally figure out exactly what they're doing and go off in some direction that you never would have foreseen. It's a great tool for a more passive, improvisational GM style that gives the PCs more control and more of a leadership role in the way that the campaign turns out and what happens, certainly and especially compared to pre-written adventure-path type campaigns. At the same time, it's much less random and disjointed than a sandbox, where what happens is kind of just based on what's in the location that they go to. Without having the specific terminology or specific encoded tools for how to do this, I've been running my games using a more intuitive version of this same process for years now, and I think it works great. I also think spelling out some of the things like the Grim Portents and the specific NPCs and groups that make up the front makes it run more smoothly, though—so thanks to discovering this little slice of GMing advice, I'm able to fine-tune a process that I already use, already know that it works, and already prefer to get the kind of game that I like. Now, I should be, again, able to get the best results more consistently because I've got just enough structure to work with that I'm not going entirely by the seat of my pants with a vague idea.