Introspective Practice

If you’re running a campaign or otherwise have a regular game right now, we hope you’ll use the insights you took away from GM 101 to make that game more satisfying for you to run. We think the best way to do that is through introspective practice—a fancy way of saying “think about what you’re doing.”

GM 101 was designed to get you thinking about what you do as a GM in procedural terms. Dungeon Storming is about thinking carefully and critically about the situation you’re going to offer to players. Even if you’re running a module or adventure path session, you’ve got to understand how the pieces fit together—or deliberately decide that it doesn’t matter. The Quick & Dirty Dungeon Crawl is about the interaction of people, procedures, and imagination at the table. Between the two, the GM 101 workshop is intended to prime you to see how the process of prepping and running a role-playing serve as the structures of GMing.

At the end of a session, the important thing is to reflect on what happened. If it all seemed to click, everything ran smoothly, and you know how it all came together—just keep doing that!

But there may have been moments that felt a little off or unsatisfying—you were off your game, the dynamic at the table fell flat, or something in the fiction of the game-world somehow rang off-key with your players. Those are key moments for introspection!  But those good sessions are worth some attention as well. Recapturing the magic of a great game session is like catching lightning in a bottle, and so trying to figure out what made a great game great isn’t actually all that simple.

Even good sessions may offer grist for examination, since figuring out what works and what doesn’t under what conditions is like trying to capture lightning in a bottle. It’s tricky.

So the first step is to identify the crucial moment of play that you want to consider. You’ll probably recognize it based on your own memory of the session: a question a player asked or a comment someone made; the reaction of the table to something that happened, either highly engaged and enthusiastic on the one hand or turned off, negative, confused, or even upset on the other. Maybe this crucial moment:  

• Made you feel a certain way, either in the moment or upon reflection.

• Got a big or an unexpected reaction at the table.

• Had mechanical or fictional ramifications for which you weren’t prepared—players reacted in a way that surprised you, for good or bad; maybe they engaged with something you didn’t expect, or didn’t engage with something you thought was sure to hook them.

Introspection questions

If you have access to a voice recording of the game session, listening to it afterwards with an ear toward interesting or unusual moments of play can be very instructive! Bursts of laughter, cheering around a die roll or the turn of a card, on the plus side, as well as extended intervals of hesitation, self-correction, or searching for the right answer, on the minus side. All of those indicates important moments of play. If you’re not sure why something happened, it might be a good focal point for introspective practice.

I should interject here that if what’s going on is a relational matter—something that extends beyond play to affect the social relationships and emotional well-being of the human beings in the gaming group, your first responsibility is to check in and address the people involved as people. Sometimes when friendships are at stake the answer will be to play a different sort of game together, or do something else entirely. But to the extent that improving the game gets you more satisfaction with play, it’s worth pursuing what we might call, a little tongue in cheek, forensic ludology.

The second step is to reconstruct the crucial moment so you understand what happened! Basically, you want to know who said what, in what mode (“in character” versus “out-of-character”), with what apparent intent and to what evident effect? To do that, you’ll draw upon your own memory (perhaps supplemented with written game notes or mechanical recording); you can also ask the people who were there what they remember and what significance they give it. By the end of this process, you should have a pretty clear idea of how what you said and did as GM fed into what your players said and did as PCs.

While you’re thinking about what players did, or asking them to give you some insight into their play, you might consider how their expectations about what it means to play an RPG fed into what they said and how they reacted. Some factors that may feed into their style of play include these four:

• Challenge. Do players seem to expect an intellectual or social puzzle that tests them as players, or a game-mechanical obstacle that probes the efficiency of their character builds? Or are they not really playing to be challenged?

• Immersion. Are players interested in experiencing the game-world through the medium of their characters? This is play as reception or even celebration of a particular fictional world. Or are they not really playing to experience the fiction as such?

• Agency. Do players want to have an impact on the game-world? This is play as action, using participation in the game to do things that leave a mark on the fiction in some way, even if only by virtue of having decided to do one thing instead of something else. Or are they not really playing to be active?

• Attachment. Is the connection that players feel to their characters a central part of play, such that they invest a lot of time and effort into backstories and other details? Or are they content to regard their characters as more or less interchangeable, relatively disposable avatars for themselves?

Finally, the last step is to connect the crucial moment to your GM practice. In other words, feed your reconstruction into the Describe-Listen-Judge cycle in order to consider alternatives or reinforce successful techniques. What you’ll wind up with, usually, is a principle, procedural mechanic, or rule of thumb to guide you in the future.

For example, years ago, I ran a game of Spirit of the Century (pulp adventure via the Fate system), and my brother was listening to the audio I’d recorded of it. He noticed that at a key moment, after I had introduced an important villain incognito, I told the suspicious player who wanted to attack that villain, “I’m not going to let you do that”; instead, I inserted a (kind of lame, actually) reveal where the villain whipped off her disguise and ordered her goons to attack. Why stop the player, my brother asked. If the point was to start a fight, the player had already done that. Let him, and then have the goons attack. In the moment, I had described something (menacing NPC shows up on the scene) but then failed to listen to what the player was offering me. Instead, I was fixated on the idea that the dramatic moment I had envisioned needed to happen before play could proceed. But that was a procedural error! It didn’t lead to a cool moment; it led to an awkward one. I had judged before I had listened, and the result was weaker than if I had used what the player offered (“I attack this guy!”) and let it go to the dice (“Roll your attack!”). If the player had rolled poorly, the villain’s scoffing would have been infuriating. If the player had rolled well, the villain siccing her goons on him and his friends in response would have felt a little like he’d kicked a hornet’s nest.  

It was an important realization for me, that paying close and critical attention to what happens at the table can produce useful insights into your own GMing skills, which if applied in the future results in better play. It’s an intensely personal process, to be sure, but those insights are often worth sharing, if only in a “here’s one way to do it,” sense.

During this process, you may find it helpful or rewarding to talk about it! That’s what the GM Academy channels at the Bringing Fire Discord are for. Think of it as being like any other art form or creative practice: the more eyes you get on it, and the more feedback that is given and received, the better off everyone becomes.

— Bill White,
Director of Education
Bringing Fire GM Academy