Describe, Listen, Judge: a Comprehensive Gamemaster Framework
The "describe, listen, judge" loop is a comprehensive framework for understanding what a gamemaster does. It's an abstraction that applies to any TTRPG system, while being concrete enough to serve as a lens for focusing practice and analysis. In our introductory GM workshop, "GM 101: Describe, Listen, Judge," we teach it as a tool to help GMs diagnose and correct hiccups and miscommunication at the level of play, which enables them to become more confident in their own abilities.
The "Describe, Listen, Judge" (DLJ) loop's powerful simplicity is the result of synthesizing systematic academic analysis with pragmatic pedagogical principles. If you want to learn more about how that works, read on.
The heart of GM 101—our workshop for novice, aspiring, and skill-seeking GMs—is the Describe-Listen-Judge (DLJ) cycle. It’s a comprehensive framework for understanding what a GM does, and a tool that helps GMs diagnose and correct hiccups and miscommunication at the level of play.
When GM 101 participants are in the “hot seat,” they work through DLJ cycles.
DLJ focuses on the GM role as a communication process, in a way that’s in line with recent accounts that say role-playing games are played in conversation—see the text of Vincent & Meguey Baker’s game Apocalypse World (Lumpley Games 2016), for example—as well as older visions of role-playing, which saw the campaign as the focal point of play to be developed via player-GM interaction, a la Gary Gygax’s Role-Playing Mastery (Perigee 1987). So DLJ starts by taking seriously the fundamental description of tabletop role-playing as being constituted in “joint talk,” as game studies scholars Jose Zagal and Sebastian Deterding put it in their book Role-Playing Game Studies: A Transmedia Approach (Routledge 2018).
On a conceptual level, DLJ is framed as the verbs that characterize the GM’s side of the role-playing conversation. This helps clarify the fundamental GM tasks in play in a way that’s different from descriptions that treat being the GM as a role someone is filling rather than an action someone is doing. For example, in Master of the Game (Perigee 1989), Gygax listed an enormous number of essential functions enacted by the GM, including the primary roles of Moving Force, Creator, Designer, Arbiter, Overseer, Director, and Umpire/Referee/Judge of a given game, and the secondary roles of Narrator, Interpreter, Force of Nature, Personification of Non-Participant Characters, All Other Personifications, and Supernatural Power. This is actually not too much different from the way that the 5th edition D&D rules describe the Dungeon Master, who is we’re told the architect of the campaign, a storyteller, an actor, and a referee—in short, the Master of Worlds, Master of Adventures, and Master of Rules.
It is true that in recent years, the emphasis in GM advice has shifted toward nitty-gritty descriptions of specific actions. The “powered by the Apocalypse” (pbtA) games inspired by the Bakers’ Apocalypse World include principles for running games that let the game’s MC (Master of Ceremonies) play with the players, not against them, for example. Similarly, early testaments of the Old School Renaissance (OSR) like Matt Finch’s Old School Primer (Mythmere Games 2006) offer principles described as the “tao” of the GM intended to retrieve a vision of “old-style gaming.” However, both of those texts operate at the level of refining or zeroing in on a mode of game-running that serves to define and create a particular style of play. DLJ describes the more fundamental process that both of these approaches have in common. In other words, both “barf forth apocalyptica” (i.e., “harsh landscapes, garish bloody images, and grotesque juxtapositions”) from Apocalypse World and the “Way of the Moose Head” (i.e., present players with situations to investigate and explore imaginatively, not just opportunities to make spot checks and other die rolls) from the Old School Primer are each in their own way applications or instances of the broader GM task we call Describe.
From the perspective of DLJ, the GM’s job begins with description, getting people on the same page in terms of what they are imagining together. The goal is to establish a shared sense of situation so that actions and intentions make sense in the context of the game. One GM advice blog we regularly consult seems to suggest that it begins with a “principal player” committing to an action, which then triggers a set of GM procedures in response, but looking at that advice more closely, it’s clear that before that commitment, the GM is told to “narrate” what’s going on and then “invite” the commitment that triggers the GM to act. This larger cycle mirrors DLJ, exactly as it should do if it’s trying to articulate what actually happens at the table.
DLJ emerged from introspective practice, taking recorded excerpts of play and listening hard to what was there. If you do that with your own GMing, you’ll notice that sometimes players will say things but nobody responds to them. Sometimes that lack of response leads to confusion; sometimes it leads to conflict. Sometimes it leads to a player checking out, disengaging from play until a later moment, if at all. In his online seminars, Ron Edwards of Adept Play says that, in role-playing games, agency is being heard, and this idea about agency is a fundamental insight for play. This is why the second step in the DLJ cycle is Listen. It’s active listening, responsive listening, invitational listening; listening in a way that seeks not to confirm what you already know but instead to reshape your own understanding, to generate surprise and novelty. This takes practice, but is very rewarding. Try recording a game session you run and giving it a listen, paying specific attention for moments where someone says something and it gets ignored.
One of the early names for the GM was the “judge,” and we’ve borrowed that as the label for the last part of the DLJ cycle. It encompasses the idea that judgment is necessary to figure out what happens in play. We rely on the distinction that Jonathan Tweet makes in his game Everway, where he says that what happens next can be determined according karma (you win if you’re bigger, faster, or stronger), drama (you win if you’re the scrappy underdog and it’s do-or-die), or fortune (you win if the luck of the draw says you do, the odds being what they are). This is important because it makes Judge not just about interpreting the outcome of a die roll or other game-mechanical procedure, but also about making the decision as to what procedure to employ at all.
Taken together, the elements of Describe-Listen-Judge compress rich concepts about play that deserve to be unpacked and explored at length. The best way to do that, of course, is to use DLJ as a framework to guide your own game-running and see how different approaches to each aspect affect your practice. DLJ isn’t a mechanical process, a cookie cutter approach to GMing. Instead, it’s a description of what happens when we play, what needs to happen for play to happen at all. In GM 101, we use DLJ to direct attention to the nature of role-playing as constituted in communication, and from what we’ve seen that awareness helps people become more confident in their GMing skills.
In beginning to look for DLJ in practice, it will be most visible in specific moments, where you finish your turn at talk by saying, “What do you do?” and the player finishes theirs by asking, “What happens next?” As you continue, you will begin to see how your GM practice actually encompasses overlapping cycles of description, listening, and judgment that revolve at different rates. For example, in one cycle, you describe a situation, listen to the PCs discuss it, and then judge how to resolve their collective action (e.g., by saying, “The orcs run away!” or “Roll initiative!”). Within that longer cycle, you might describe a menacing monster, listen to how a player speculates about its motivations or origins, and then judge if those speculations are indeed part of the picture. Once you know you’re doing it, you can do it more deliberately. The strength of DLJ is that it raises your awareness of the possibilities of play, making the game more rewarding for everyone.