002 - How much do you need to know?

GM FM — Broadcast 002
HOW MUCH DO YOU NEED TO KNOW BEFORE YOU GM?

Transcript

MILLIE
When I first sat down to DM Dungeons & Dragons, fifth edition. I'd never actually played that system. I'd never GM'd it, I've never been a character.

Six players were due to turn up for an Adventurers League game at my board game cafe, and the GM, who was supposed to run the game, called in sick. These six folks had paid for their seats at the event, so I just stepped in. I ran my first ever game of Dungeons & Dragons fifth edition. Fortunately, all six players came back, and in fact, Adventurers League became one of the most popular nights at the cafe. So am I.

Some kind of dungeon master savant? Do you need to know the rules before you actually GM.

As always, I'm Millie and you're listening to GM FM.

For this show I asked the internet, can you GM if you don't know the rules of the roleplaying game? 70% of folks said yes.

15 said no and the final 15 picked the option "You can do it, but you have to have GM'd something else before"

It's not my fault the question changes once we get into it... It's Matt's.

MATT

Hey, Millie. Matt here from the UK to your question. Can you GM if you don't know the rules? First thing I thought of was like, no, how could you do that? But then I sat back and I thought about it.

And actually, I've been doing that so much. I play rules like I make my players know we go rules. Like, I don't need to know every single rule in the rulebook. I'm still finding things out. We're seven sessions in, we've gone with something that makes me and the players happy.

That's what works for us. And I think that's probably the case for a lot of things. You know, Dungeons & Dragons, obviously the industry standard has so many rules that people don't use or people don't know off the top of their heads. And yeah, maybe sometimes they look them up if they feel they're important.

But how many GMs really use encumbrance or drowning rules and things like that? It's there's so many books. And obviously I think that as long as you are have a table of players who are happy with the way that you're going and that you're happy with that style, I think that's absolutely perfect. I think that's great. What does it mean to know a game?

MILLIE
I've been running RPGs for decades. I couldn't sit an exam for most of them. I have games I've run for years, but I still go back and look things up. And there are games I've read cover to cover and absolutely want to run or can't. I'm looking at you 2d20.

There are games I've barely read at all, and I am confident I could host a one shot in it this afternoon. So apparently how much of this book is stored in my head isn't a particularly useful measure of whether I can jam it. And it's not just me. Like Matt said, he's seven sessions in and still finding out how the game works. And I think it's it's worth saying that's completely normal.

RPG rulebooks aren't scripts, you don't have to memorize page 12 before you're allowed to use page 217. Most games only reveal which obscure bits of machinery you actually need when somebody at a table does something dumb enough to activate them, and they will. Eventually somebody will want to drown while encumbered. But if that happens and nobody knows the rules, we do have options.

We can crack open the books and look it up. There's probably somebody at the at the table who is the rules lawyer and knows it. And if not, we can make a ruling and we can get it wrong. Like, the game won't explode immediately because I got it wrong.

I think Alex puts it better than I do.

ALEX

Can you run an RPG if you don't know the rules? Yes you can. I assume that means knowing the rules by heart so that you don't need to look things up. But there's always something you need to look up. There's always a query with some detail that you can't find quick enough, and you don't want to spend 10 - 15 minutes trawling through the rulebook because that's not fun.

So you make a call on something that's GM. The every RPG has got a basic rule book, a start, a mission, adventure, mystery, whatever that's designed for first time as people to run the game who don't know the rules. It's just boiled down to the essentials, the basics that they need to do it. And at the end of the day, if your sessions not falling apart, if everyone all the players at your table, GM and PCs are enjoying themselves, they're having fun. Congratulations your GM.

You run the game. You run that game. The rules didn't.

MILLIE

Thank you for your call, Alex. And I agree with you. Except do you think there's a trap hiding in that? The rules don't run. The game can very easily become the rules don't matter.

And that's not true. If it were true, why the hell am I buying all these different rules systems? Why have I got an entire bloody shelf of the things? And I'm jonesing on the next Kickstarter? If all I need is the ability to make sensible rulings and tell a good story, I could just run everything using the same six-sided dice and a bunch of storybooks, essentially.

So there has to be something that makes playing ALIEN different from playing Dungeons & Dragons. There has to be something that makes Colo-Colo different from blades in the dark. Some of that difference is absolutely the setting in the tone, but the majority of it is the rules is the mechanics. The ALIEN stress dice and then administrative inconvenience I can ignore. They're an integral part of what makes the ALIEN game feel like ALIEN.

Take enough of those decisions away and eventually you're not playing the game you said you were going to play.

DENNIS

I'm Millie, it is Dennis again. Do you need to know the rules before you? GM I would say no, a fervent no. You don't need to know anything before you start. There are very rules light RPGs out there, down to the famous one page RPGs where the entire game gets explained in a single paragraph.

Anyone can read that and become a GM right then and there. Many RPGs nowadays have quickstart guides, starter sets which everything is provided. You need to play in GM with reference sheets and pre-made characters. And if you want to go to a more complex RPG, you can always employ the session zero where characters or players, rather GM included, can build their characters together. And so learn how all these mechanics that make up a character work.

And while your players are making their characters, you can perhaps have a little read of the first couple of rules that you'll need to run their first session, so nothing needed beforehand. I can do everything at the table.

MILLIE

Thank you very much for returning. Call Dennis there. And Dennis is going to return in more ways than one because he does make a couple of great points in his call this week. But the point right now is something that Alex also kind of touched on as well. Starter set is literally the publisher saying here, this is enough, go and play it.

It's not. This is your prep material. This is your intro to RPG course. Please return after completing this and we'll give you the remaining 397 pages. The Starter Set product only works if somebody who doesn't already know the game can pick it up and be the game's master, which means the people designing the RPGs don't necessarily think system mastery is a prerequisite for GM in them.

Like the starter set doesn't give you a carte blanche. It gives you selected rules. It teaches you the things you're likely to need for the experience it's trying to produce, and that much more interesting, I think, because maybe the amount, you know isn't the important part. Maybe it's the quality of what you know. And I think I've been doing that at my table for years.

When somebody brings a complicated character with a lot of abilities I've never seen, I go away and tell them they need to learn all about how your character works, and I'll learn about how the rest of the world works. The fact that I enjoy quite lethal games. And this leads to folks learning most of the character creation rooms over the course of the campaign is beside the point. I've always treated the rules knowledge as something the table can distribute and that works. Nobody appointed me the tables organic search engine, but there are some things I do need to understand.

I'm not getting out of this. It's the chapter of the book called The Games Mastering or Running the game, and need to know what the game expects me to do, and need enough of the game to make decisions that feel like they belong in the game.

AVA

Hi again, I there's part of me that like, wanted to answer the initial question and like, yeah, you don't have to know the rules. You can just GM and it's true. But you're then not like playing that specific game. And like I found myself caught between extremes on this where on the one hand I really love the, Vincent de Baker idea that like games should collapse down to one core rule core mechanics. That is enough to resolve enough situations and functionally create the game that you're looking for.

I really like that idea, but also there's a bit of my brain that desperately wants to understand the game and all of the law and everything in the book entirely. Before I go anywhere near jamming. And like, this is a problem because my brain can't hold that much information in that way. Like, that's not how my brain remembers. So I'm kind of knotted between those two ways of thinking about it.

Thank you for calling back again this week, Ava, but you're not playing that specific game. Is the line there? That's the problem. I think I've done this. I think I've run games where I know the sub system because I didn't really understand it or connect you to do you to ante.

I replaced mechanics with ones I'm more comfortable with.

MILLIE

I thought, that's just unnecessarily complicated. I'll make a sort of sweeping ruling and sometimes, yes, like Matt said, that's the right decision. But doing it enough. I'm not learning that game anymore. I've got this right?

I'm translating the game into things Millie already knows how to GM, and those aren't necessarily the same thing. There are two completely different anxieties tangled together in this question. One is I need to know everything before I'm qualified to sit in the chair. And I don't agree with that. Absolutely don't.

That way lies a pristine rule book, 12 pages of campaign notes, and like a game, you never actually get to sit down and play. But the opposite extreme is I don't need to understand the system because I can just make my own rulings. And I don't buy that either, because the rules are actually communicating something important. They're telling us what this game thinks it's worth paying attention to. So how do I know which ones matter?

Ed sent your voice note on Instagram and gave me a much better test.

ED

Hi Millie, loving the podcast. My policy is that the game is there to support the GM and the players, so it's not like you need to get the game and run it, right? Right. Depends upon what your table wants. So if you're playing that game because the players love the combat mechanics or the exploration mechanics or the the personal reflection mechanics, you should definitely know those and include those because that's part of the group's expectations of play.

But otherwise you bought the game. You own the game. You do what you like with the game. It's your session. No one can stop you and, play how you like.

MILLIE

Expectations of play. That's the line. That's the missing piece. Because when we say we're playing this game, we are making that sort of social contract, that tiny promise to each other. Not every rule will be applied correctly.

Not that the GM has memorized book, not even that we're going to play it exactly as the the designers intended this game to be played, but we are promising some version of the experience that made us choose this game instead of that game. If the players have chosen a game because they love tactical combat. As the GM, I need to understand the tactical combat. If we've chosen to play ALIEN because the stress steadily turns competent professionals into panicking disasters, I probably shouldn't replace the stress system with, I don't know, make a wisdom save. But if none of us can remember the drowning rules, fuck it will work it out because we haven't picked a drowning game.

And I think that's where the boundary is. You don't need to know the rules. You actually need to know the game. And those aren't the same thing. Knowing the game means understanding enough of this machinery to deliver the thing everybody thought they were sitting down to play.

The rest can stain the book until someone needs it. All right, we've got a quick broadcast interruption there. If you're listening to this and you've got an opinion, I want to hear it. GM FM has a call in line at the website gamesmaster.fm. You can send me a voice message from your phone or your browser.

It doesn't need fancy equipment and it will probably end up in a future broadcast. A genuinely mean that because after broadcast 001 went out. I've had some more calls come in and some comments on social media about whether the GM is a player, and I could just sort of leave them sitting in the head or ignored. But once we reach critical mass, I'll make broadcasts 001.5. So if you listen to episode three days ago and you've only just worked out what you want to say, excellent news.

The conversation doesn't close when I upload the episode. I don't particularly want GM FM to be me deciding what I think, recording it, and then announcing the answer. I want the broadcasts to keep changing because people call in, disagree, notice something I didn't, or completely fuck up the question I thought I was asking. Thanks, Matt. Which is frankly how we got here.

So, gamesmaster.fm, there is a calling button. I'll put some links in the show notes this time, I promise. Tell me what you think and you'll probably end up making the next episode slightly more complicated, because that's what we do in our. Okay. Right.

Where were we? Yeah. All right, I said, you don't need to know the rules. You need to know the game. So that kind of brings us to the strange third answer in my poll.

You can only GM without knowing the rules if you've GM something else before, because when I ran that first D&D fifth edition game, I didn't know fifth edition, but I did know how RPGs worked. I'd run other systems, I knew how to establish a scene, and you had to put the problem in front of the players, and I'd learned to shut up while they ruined the solution. I knew that when somebody did something completely unexpected, I should keep a poker face and don't panic and knew how to keep the table table moving along. And those skills transferred from other RPGs over to D&D Adventures League. The specific and knowledge was filled in as we went along, and that's probably why the first session worked.

But it does create an absolutely horrible circular problem. If running games as a GM is what lets you GM a game you don't know, how do you GM the first one?

DENNIS

The honest answer I haven't learned. I'm still learning. I do so and did so, through the noble art of theft. Just stealing from other GMs, observing the way they do their thing, and then taking the best bits for myself makes them with a healthy dose of trial and error. Seeing what works and what doesn't.

Maybe don't simulate every single combatant in an epic great battle and roll for every attack. And once you get through all that, eventually your own kind of style emerges and and you roll with that.

MILLIE

I did Dennis off earlier, so I hope it was worth the wait to get this full call. I haven't learned, and I'm still learning. That's the answer. That's the answer because we've been talking about learning to as though it's a qualification. First you learn, then you're ready, then your GM.

But actually nobody who sent in a voicemail or left a comment seems to have done that. We all learned one way or another by playing or by watching, by stealing, by getting things wrong, by building and then running encounters that absolutely didn't work, and then by watching and experiencing somebody else put something together brilliantly and then stealing it, putting it in our pocket for another day. My next caller, Laurence, has thoughts about being a player.

LAURENCE

So for me, I think, is it Laurence from Wotan Games? For me, I've been a player for lots of different systems and lots of different people over the years, and I've also been a GM or referee in a number of systems. Two and I think what's interesting is being a player gives you the advantage as a DM because you know, you know where you're coming from as a player. So I think it's essential to to have been a player to be a DM GM. But you don't need to be a GM to be a player.

Sorry, I don't know if I'd go so far as to say you have to have been a player first, because then we've invented another qualification somebody has to obtain before they're allowed to be behind the screen.

MILLIE

But I absolutely think playing as a character teaches you things about playing as a GM. And actually the way we learn games has changed as well. If you think about it for a long time, the obvious model was somebody bought the physical rulebook, they took that away and they read the rulebook, they learned the game, then they taught it to everybody else, and quite often because they bought it and because they were teaching it, they were the GM. And that's not really how we have to do it anymore. I am not suggesting you acquire a suspicious PDF from your mate Dave.

I'm not suggesting piracy, but things like D&D Beyond and alchemy and virtual tabletops make it much easier to share the rules of the game than ever before. Like, and then actual plays. Let's watch the game being played. Critical Role doesn't teach us how all the rules of Dungeons & Dragons work, but they show you what a session of D&D looks like. There are entire YouTube channels and podcasts and discord servers and communities dedicated to explaining the bits we don't kind of understand.

So perhaps the idea that the GM needs to know all the rules comes from an older model of how information got to the table. One person owns the book, one person read the book, one person teaches the book. But the rules don't have to travel through the GM in that method anymore. They can be distributed between people playing as the GM and people playing as the characters. And the rules in some cases now are on the character sheet or clickable on your VTC.

And this kind of brings me back to those six players who came to my board game cafe to play Adventurers League. Was I a fifth edition Dungeon Master Savant? No, I've. I've very much learned how to GM. Did I know Dungeons & Dragons fifth edition?

No, some of the players knew it. And we had a quite well written adventure. And we had a rule book, and we had, in fact, all watched some of Critical Role. So we had six people who wanted to run characters and one person willing to sit in the GM chair. And between us, we knew enough.

So maybe that's my answer to the question. Can you GM a game without knowing the game's rules? Yes, but you need to know enough to keep the promise you made when you said we're playing this game. Everything else there is a book for that. And apparently these days all the folks around the table are allowed to open it to.

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