4 Things You Should Work On

Time to apply this concept of working to role-playing games.  

1.  Pick a system.

Notice, I say a "system," not a genre.  If I so wanted, I could easily run a modern day spy adventure with guns and smart bombs using the basic D&D system.  I could run a campaign set in the future.  I could build an old west campaign, or a Roman campaign, simply by applying basic premises.  All characters have a set collection of ability stats, hit points and skills.  These are applicable regardless of the setting; the only thing that might need to be changed is the "skin" on the character.  Rather than a fighter, Rolf Brand of the Galactic Empire is a "marine" or a "space ranger."   Janie Jewel the mage is a "scientist."  All other principles are easily adaptable.

I can see how this might be unclear to many who allow themselves to be taken with the specific words used to describe specific characteristics.  It's the concepts that matter, however, not the words.  Rolf still has to decide what to do; he still needs to hit with his neucron-discharger.  He still dies.  There's still some expectation he gets better with the tools he has and how hard he is to kill, the longer he survives.  Interactivity with the setting is managed just fine by the base D&D game rules ... and there are quite a number of other game systems that are equally as flexible.

I wouldn't say that describes 5e or pathfinder, which are so dependent upon genre-based jargon words to describe what the characters are doing, what I called a codex in an earlier post.  But Masquerade would certainly work, as would Traveller, most gurps systems, and I think Call of Cthulhu, though I have limited contact with it.  I could definitely run a fantasy-like setting with the Traveller system, with a few years of work testing.  Remember that I spent at least ten years of game-testing D&D before making it interact between players and a fantasy setting how I wanted.  It would take me no more than a few weeks to put my present D&D characters into a space adventure, if I wanted to do so.

2.  Learn the rules.

Seriously.  Read every book cover to cover, then do it again.  Then start rewriting rules exactly as you think they should work, exactly as if you were the game's inventor.  Write the whole rule, both the parts you want to change and the parts you want to keep.  Then start doing that with every rule that you can't look at in the book without needing to correct it's meaning or its grammar for the player.

Yes, of course this is a lot of work.  Do it.  Enjoy how much work it is.  Enjoy discovering the various nuances of the game rules, and pay attention to what further rule or idea each suggests.  When you find yourself getting bored of the work, turn on some music and low volume and keep working.  When that doesn't work, put on a movie you've seen a hundred times, one you don't need to look up at, and keep working.  Print copies of your work; put them in attractive binders or physically make them into books, with needle and thread.  Keep listening to music or movies as you work, thinking about how cool this is going to be when you show your players and other people.

Most of all, not only will you know the rules cold, in the end they'll be your rules.  You'll have rewritten them ... and in rewriting them, it'll be a final decision on your part that maybe you'll defend.  "No, no, no," you'll say, "That only applies in this circumstance.  Here it is in the book I've spent twenty hours binding with thread and covering with leather.  Try something else."

3. Don't quit.

If you're like virtually everyone else who tried to run a game or make your own setting, long before you get ten pages of new rules, or finish your first map of your new game setting, you'll already be thinking about quitting.  This is because you're bored.  You may think this is a response to the thing you're doing being dull and repetitive, that in retrospect the cool new world you were going to make isn't that cool or even that new.  But you'd be wrong.

In actual fact, your boredom is a defense mechanism against you ever becoming valuable as a person.  In your youth, whenever you raised your hand in school, or got singled out by other peers or by a teacher, or got assigned to work by your parents when you'd really rather have just sat playing video games, the experience really sucked.  An equation rose in your lizard brain: (a) doing something that stands out gets you noticed; (b) getting noticed is a form of humiliation.  Solution: do as little as possible.  Don't get noticed.

Having reached an age older than ten, if you need this list (and for the record, I didn't), then it's evidence that you're not ready to do anything exclusive to your own creativity.  Creative things stand out.  They make people notice you.  And since most creative things, at the start, are just plain awful, most of the initial notice comes in the form of, "Jeebus fuck, who created this piece of shit?"  Which is definitely humiliating.  It's also something you'll have to go through to create anything of worth ... which, most likely, is something you've never learned to handle.  So boredom is the thing that protects you from all that.  As soon as anything becomes difficult, or seems to indicate your spending a lot of time on something — indicating you care about something — the boredom reflex kicks in and stops you.  Caring about something is bad.  Therefore, the amount of time your brain lets you care about anything you do is, oh, about two weeks.  Then it's safe to pretend to care about something else.  Just so long as nothing gets actually done, and therefore noticed.

If you don't believe any of that, congratulations, you've joined the ranks of all the rest.  If, on the other hand, you'd like to get past this boredom thing and actually do something, then seat this thought in your head: if you don't make this game world happen, you're a loser.  A great big piece of shit loooooser, and you might just as well stop pretending you'll ever be a DM and just accept that you're a mere player.

Cruel?  Yes.  But then, we have to get past all that cruel shit that your parents and teachers did to you when you were just a little child only half their height.  You're an adult now, and you ought to be able to handle a few cruel things.  So push through that boredom and keep working.  It's what you do at work, after all, for pay.  If you can't work long boring hours at something you care about, when you're willing to do it for someone else's money, well, we know what that makes you ... don't we?

4. Choose a setting.

Let's pretend you're still working.  When the players sit at your table, they're going to ask, "What do we see?"  It's a good idea to have an answer.  Unfortunately for you, it only takes about 30 seconds to describe a tavern, and you've got 3 to 5 hours of game to run ... so you'll need quite a lot of setting.  A dungeon with three or four rooms might get you through one night (though it's a bit thin, I think), but if you really want to be a DM, you've got 20 or 30 years to plan for.  Conservatively.  So in thinking about what your setting is, and what it offers, and how long it takes to describe, think big.

The main difference between rewriting rules, which you'll find yourself occasionally doing, and making a setting is that the first is at least visibly finite.  You can see there's a last page to the book and that if you keep working, you'll eventually get there.  Unfortunately, the game setting doesn't work like that.  The players eat voraciously through game setting every time they play and you'll find yourself scrambling to stay ahead of them.  It won't be easy.

Think of it this way.  Imagine that starting next week, you've just been given a job as a high school math instructor.  It has an impossible salary of $65K a year and forgiven property taxes on your new house — the community is just that desperate for a math teacher.  Unfortunately, until now, you've been looking for a job as a physical education instructor.  You haven't done any math since you yourself were in grade 12 and now, in just seven days, you need a lesson plan and you need to know more than your students ... who, as it happens, were taking grade 10 math just two months ago.

Now, you can try and wing it.  Chances are, if you act with a lot of authority, even if you look like a fucking idiot to the students they won't say anything.  Students are like that.  But believe me, even though they keep coming to your class, because they want to graduate someday, they are never, ever, going to respect you.  And that disrespect is going to carry over to every other student throughout the school, who have never taken a class from you but definitely know who you are, and what a loser teacher you are.  Worse, it will carry over into next year, and all the ones after, since the new grade tens will get told by last years' grade tens and elevens that the math teacher in room 229 is a total dickwad.  They'll know this before they sit down in your class.  And it won't matter in a year or two that you've gotten better, that you know math pretty well now.  It's too late.  You've got a reputation.  Your only hope is to move to another school.  If you can find one that isn't willing to ask the other faculty of your school, who also know about you, what kind of teacher you are.

If that's not what you want, then you're going to have to buckle down and sweat the next seven days like nothing you've ever suffered through before.  And not just one week, either.  You have to stay ahead of these students every single day, which means hour after hour of you being smarter than they are.  And you have to do this without losing your composure, without showing that you're feeling any stress in front of the students — because if you fail in this, they may think you know what you're doing, but they'll still think you're a miserable wretch of a human being.

This metaphor is meant to get across two basic principles of being a good DM.  First, that even if you think you're such a great shit that you can "wing it," bet your ass what you think and what your players think are not the same thing.  Because they won't tell you.  Ever.  They'll tell each other.  They'll marvel over your ego, your cheap efforts, your apparent delusion that you're a great DM, but these things will never be said to your face.  For the time being, at least you're running.  That's a tick in your favour.  But it's probably the only one, and if they can find somewhere else to go, they will.

Second, knowing what you're doing and working hard isn't enough.  You're not entitled to be a fuck-tard.  If you are, rest assured that this too will be kept secret from you.  But your players will know, and any new players will be reassured that yes, their first impression is absolutely right.  You are a fuck-tard.  It's a pity, too, because if you weren't one, you'd be a half-decent DM.

So ...

In working on your setting, have enough of it for every session and do it with such panache that it feels to the players like you're falling off a log.  For a long time, that won't be easy.  For a long time, you'll feel very needy, wanting to be told that yes, you are a good DM and yes, they are liking the sessions.  But the only opinion that ever counts is that they keep showing up.

If they keep showing up, and you seem not to be wallowing every session, and tempers don't seem to be flaring, than you're likely doing very well.  Keep at it.  Keep expanding your setting.  Keep rewriting the rules.  Keep working.  This is no time to quit.  200, 300 more hours of play, it'll almost feel like you've got this in hand.  A few thousand hours later, you'll be so ready to work on your game, you won't want to do most other things.

That's when you become a recluse, like me.