A Community of Practice
What is Bringing Fire’s GM Academy? A school? A club? A blog? No. It’s the nucleus of a community of practice for tabletop RPG Game Masters characterized by critical self-awareness—in other words, a community of introspective practice.
When Avery and I first started talking about the GM Academy, we agreed that we wanted it to be a community of practice, which as a term refers to those pervasive informal networks in which people come together to live and learn. “Communities of practice are everywhere,” says sociologist Etienne Wenger in his 1999 book on the topic, and so even if the term is unfamiliar the idea is not: Families, workplaces, classrooms, support groups, friendship networks—all count as communities of practice. And “across a worldwide web of computers,” he adds, “people congregate in virtual spaces and develop shared ways of pursuing their common interests.” That sounds like us!
But as we thought about it more, we realized that we weren’t interested in creating a new community of practice for GMs—this smacks of the ironic trend wherein the concept is leveraged by management consultants to give the boss new ways to exert control over the employees (Hughes, Jewson, & Unwin 2007). Instead, we wanted to create a space that facilitated and reinforced the most positive aspects of existing communities of practice. GMing is a thing that people learn how to do, and there are ways in which they currently learn how to do it.
Which basically turns out to be trial and error! For example, a communication scholar named Jennifer Grouling Cover, in her 2010 book on how tabletop role-playing games create narrative, describes her experience as a novice D&D Dungeon Master, in which she “attempted to DM a pre-made, one-shot adventure in a home setting.” This was the 3rd edition module Speaker in Dreams, which includes an encounter flowchart depicting the connections between different scenes or locations. “I found that in practice,” she tells us, “the flowchart is easily set aside.” The lesson she took away from her experience was that “the GM’s word is final,” although she also describes how, “upon realizing how easily characters could subvert my intentions, I found myself frequently modifying dice rolls in order to present more of a challenge to the players.” In other words, she taught herself to fudge the dice as GM!
To Cover, fudging dice made sense because of her understanding of the GM role—a storyteller who has a specific vision of the story they want to tell. It’s also a legitimate move, she tells us, for a Dungeon Master to deliberately have a party of 5th level characters face a threat capable of challenging a party of twice that level in the expectation that their defeat at its hands would serve the needs of the DM’s story.
“The point is not that one is right or one is wrong... It’s that we learn to play... not in formal settings, but in specific social situations that produce different understandings of the same thing.”
From other perspectives, this amounts to GM malpractice. For example, in Muster, Finnish game designer Eero Tuovinen’s primer on “D&D the wargaming way,” the author lays out a model of the game in which dice fudging or caring about the outcome of an encounter one way or another would be a betrayal of the social contract guiding play. The Game Master, from Tuovinen’s perspective, “does not have a plan for the outcome of the game. They’re not responsible for the outcomes...They are a functionary of the game, not your social superior. You are learning to dance together.”
The point is not that one is right or one is wrong—though you probably have a strong opinion about that. It’s that we learn to play—”to dance together,” as Tuovinen says—not in formal settings but in specific social situations that produce different understandings of the same thing. Matt Colville, in making his pitch to turn people who want to play D&D into people who want to run D&D, tells his listeners not to compare themselves to Matt Mercer of Critical Role or Chris Perkins of Acquisitions Incorporated. “When you start off, you’ll be terrible,” he says. But it won’t matter, he goes on, because your new-to-D&D friends will think you’re amazing, and eventually you’ll actually be a great GM. “And the thing is, it will be fun the entire time.”
That vision of a permanent GM with a relatively stable group of players amounts to what could be called the traditional vision of the role-playing game community of practice, a “community of play,” to borrow the title of game scholar Celia Pearce’s ethnography of an online community in Second Life, co-authored with her in-game avatar (Pearce & Artemesia 2009). She offers the term community of play as a “deliberate counterpoint” to the concept of a community of practice, since “play practices warrant their own understanding of how communities form and are maintained.” She makes a good point! When somebody says we’re playing a game here they are tapping into a very different set of associations than when somebody says we’re working here. Rhetorician Brian Sutton-Smith’s (1997) book The Ambiguity of Play is essentially a catalog of those associations. But don’t we tend to position the GM role as work, not play? By some accounts, a typical GM mode is to act as the only grown-up at the table, riding herd on unreasonable players with childish impulses (White, LaLone, & Mizer 2022).
“If running the game is a performance, “on stage” behavior, then talking to other GMs about the tricks of the trade is the “backstage” behavior.”
So while a community of play might be a DM and their 5th edition D&D players, “game master” turns out to be a structural role within that community. GMs don’t play together, like the members of a community of play. They play in a particular way, in a way that’s similar to the way that other GMs play in their own communities of play. They “run the game” for the people who play it. If running the game is a performance, “on stage” behavior, then talking to other GMs about the tricks of the trade is the “backstage” behavior. This may account for the way that the “fan” discourse of TRPG play has tended—at least until recently, as the rise of “Actual Play” streaming has created audiences that consume play without playing—to amount to circulations of GM advice, insider talk from one GM to another about best practices and how to deal with problem players.
Our question became—and remains—how do we get inside the circulations of GM advice and practical know-how that shape the way that people learn to be game masters? How do we offer something that can be taken up within as wide a variety of existing frameworks of understanding as possible, and then incorporated into practice in ways that generate new possibilities and inspire further innovation? We know that the “Describe, Listen, Judge” cycle offers a broad baseline for understanding play. We think what gets us the rest of the way is the idea of introspective practice, our term for thinking about what you’re doing reflexively, paying attention to how you’re doing what you’re doing, and being self-critical in a clear-eyed way about how what you do produces or doesn’t produce the outcomes you’re interested in. This is something that can be shared with others in a way that allows them to take the parts that map onto their own experiences, needs, and desires directly, while also giving them access to broader realms of TRPG play.
Refrences
Colville, Matt. “Intro.” Running the Game. Accessed October 19, 2023.
Cover, Jennifer Grouling. The Creation of Narrative in Tabletop Role-Playing Games. McFarland, 2010.
Hughes, Jason, Nick Jewson, and Lorna Unwin. “Introduction—Communities of Practice: A Contested Concept in Flux.” In Communities of Practice: Critical Perspectives, edited by Jason Hughes, Nick Jewson, and Lorna Unwin (pp. 1-16). Routledge, 2007.
Kapell, Matthew Wilhelm. “Introduction—The Ludic and Narrative as Dialectic About ‘What Games Do.’” In The Play versus Story Divide in Game Studies: Critical Essays, edited by Matthew Wilhelm Kapell (pp. 1-16). McFarland, 2016.
Pearce, Celia, and Artemisia. Communities of Play: Emergent Cultures in Multiplayer Games and Virtual Worlds. Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press, 2009.
Tuovinen, Eero. Muster. Arkenstone, 2022.
Sutton-Smith, Brian. The Ambiguities of Play. Harvard University Press, 1997.
Wenger, Etienne. Communities of Practice: Learning, Meaning, and Identity. Cambridge University Press, 1999.
White, William J., Nicolas LaLone, and Nicholas J. Mizer. “At the Head of the Table: The TRPG GM as Dramatistic Agent.” Japanese Journal of Analog RPG Studies, no. 3 (2022). Accessed October 25, 2023.