2a: The DM's Mental Toolbox

Part 1: Introduction to Session Management


This class explores those mental tools which we establish in ourselves that permits control over a session, as well as methods by which we can train ourselves to excel in these techniques. Loosely, the tools may be grouped into three categories, each a necessary part of the game's ongoing structure: governance of ourselves, governance of the players and governance of the game. In practical terms, we should view "governance" as disciplined oversight, a drawing of lines that establishes our behaviour, the player's engagement and the game's functional progress.

We shouldn't imagine that the proficiencies discussed here can be acquired through a few practice efforts, or indeed in any period short of actual years of effort. Nor is it necessary that they be practiced with expertise... in fact, if they are practiced at all, even in the smallest degree, then the DM is well ahead of the structure of nearly every other table that exists — because, in fact, none of this is ever addressed in a practical, constructive way. More usually, the toolkit explained here is vaguely indicated, perhaps remotely conceded as a "good idea," but never actually discussed. That is because the cognitive load that role-playing requires complicates the marketable TTRPG product itself; if a role-playing game demands a layered, complex mental framework, then it cannot be described as a "casual, pick-up-and-play experience." It can't be encouraged with the flexible, lighthearted approach of "just have fun, tell a story, and the rest will follow." Dungeon mastering can't be acknowledged as "hard," and therefore time cannot be spent explaining precisely the steps one must take to do this "hard" thing.

Yet the "kit" need not be something we already have. It can be genuinely learned. Nothing here is presented as a "trick" or a "short-cut"... but rather as proficiencies that can be gained and applied to hundreds of human activities beyond RPGs — so long as readers are truly prepared to stretch themselves and risk momentary embarrassment or uneasiness. Nothing of value is obtained without risk or without discomfort.

We begin with governing ourselves, through equanimity, mindfulness and pre-cognition. Together, these three things make us more confident, but this last is not something that can be simply willed into existence. It must arise because we DO feel confident, not through wishing to feel it.

The first of these describes the structural mental boundary between our perspective vs. that of the players. "Equanimity" isn't an inner calm we feel, but our understanding that the players' perspectives, needs and intended outcome is detached and separate from our own. We are not required to puzzle out what's happening, nor to survive, and not to work with others in order to provide the game. The back-and-forth may be collaborative, but our presentation of the setting is not: it is solely our vision, transmitted to the players, who must accept it as given. In some ways, this "detachment" is unemotional. When the players are threatened, excitable, in a panic... we are not. When we are stressed, struggling to manage multiple details as rapidly as possible, the players are often in a state of suspension, perhaps apprehensive, perhaps even bored. There is an internal insulation between their experience and our own, with which the DM must learn to be comfortable.

This equanimity is most important of all in maintaining an emotional mask, allowing us to present danger, humour, surprise, even behaviour, without conveying how the players should feel about it or whether or not they're on track. Let's say that a group has entered into what appears to be a simple, unthreatening domestic space, with furnishings, tableware, cupboards — which contain some hint about their danger. There is, we might say, a bowl on the table; closer inspection reveals it is partially filled with soup; and further inspection indicates the soup is warm, thus recently heated. Outside the room, a pile of humanoids are quietly girding themselves to burst into the room, but this is not in evidence. As the DM, we define a moment for the warparty to enter; we allow time for the players to discover the soup as a clue, to guess that until a minute ago, someone was here, eating. And as we describe the scene, we give no clue through our tone or facial expression that there is anything special about the bowl, its contents or their nature when describing them. We give no clue that we know there is a warparty about to burst in. We are stonefaced, not just in this moment, but in every moment, so that as the game progresses, we never give away any intention through our behaviour being different now than it is at any other time.

Thus, if the player makes a joke about there probably being a warparty behind the door, we can say "maybe" in the same atonal fashion, whether the warparty exists or not. The bowl is described in the same manner as the table leg, the size and shape of the room, the colour of the walls. Our neutrality becomes a kind of suspense in itself; the players learn they can't "read" our intention unless we wish it so; and it builds the world's credibility, in that no moment is special until the players make it so. We don't break character, so that the world itself is the character the players investigate.

To gain this equanimity is to obtain one's detachment regardless of the situation. Practice by searching out the most chaotic circumstances possible — a busy commuter train, an ongoing sports event, a loud and boisterous night club, a festival — any situation that is loud, thick with people, where the crowd presses together for conviviality and connection. Then, don't engage. Adopt an observational, disengaged mindset. Don't ignore; watch. We inspect the faces of those around us, we practise at reading their emotions, their cues with regards to each other, the waves of their emotions rising and descending... while we recognise the similarities between our being present here and our being present before our players, whom we are also not a part of. It is the separation itself that we practice, but not as a matter of disinterest or disengagement, but as a matter of inspecting them closely, in detail, in order to determine their nature and condition.

The temptation will be to join in, to embrace the experience like everyone else there; resist that. Alternately, because we're not engaged, habitually we'll "zone out," drifting into our own thoughts, keeping ourselves company as it were. Resist this also. We want to see the micro-expressions of the people, maintaining our connection with them, yet without becoming a part of them. It's a knife edge of disassociated participation. It takes practice; it requires a clear, unjudging awareness, remembering always that we're here to learn, to recognise, to accept without needing to be accepted. The process is anti-tribal. Yet it's also the member of the tribe, the shaman, who was nominally part of the tribe but necessarily divorced from it.

Compare this to the DM's game mindset. Throwing ourselves into the players' fun, we lose our standing as the game-runner. Mentally checking out while the players talk, we miss the cues that might shape our next communication. The goal is to listen and not seem to be listening; to play with the players while inwardly separating ourselves from them. The skill is acquired through conscious effort, an understanding of what's gained and through practice, practice, practice, as are all the skills to be discussed here. The approach suggested here can't be done a few times, but repeatedly and often, at scattered times over a period of two or three years, until we're quite certain we've acquired the observational-detachment instinct.

Contrary is the alternate technique of mindfulness, which is practiced in those hours outside the game, so that in-game we cease to be aware of it altogether. Traditionally, "mindfulness" is seen as being conscious or aware of something, typically what's going on in the immediate moment with ourselves, that we are able to focus better on it, comprehending our thoughts, feelings and sensations about that thing accordingly. The mindfulness we want to rehearse for role-playing is mental cognition of the game's setting, as something that is real, that we may be fully fluent in it, in the manner of a memory we have of some real event or place we've actually been.

This requires a mental leap, one that first allows our consciousness to ascribe to the setting we've conceived all the characteristics of the actual world. This is a part of the human condition — the fabrication of heroes, mythological structures, fictional events, outcomes and inherent messaging related thereto — only in this case, because role-playing is a GAME, we must concretely structure more than a message, but all the aspects that underlie the structure of that message. The shape of the land, the people on it, their history, their motives, the manner in which things are accomplished, ongoing conflicts, belief systems, morality, philosophy and the day to day mechanics of living within said premise. And all this must be done so thoroughly that we're reflexively able to reveal it as though we were describing, habitually, the manner in which we get from our house to our workplace.

Just as we adore characters in a story that moves us, or we imagine inhabiting a fictional setting, we must give in to accepting that fiction — yet in a far more ontological manner than with an ordinary story. We must go beyond story or narrative, beyond theme or character design, we must reach into the WHOLE of the setting's systematisation, its social mechanics, its full structural design, right down to the smallest pebble we might feel deserves mention, at the foot of a post that has a sign that points down a road to a place where the players might want to go. No detail can be discarded, or in the very least we must be able to construct details of any size, at will, that fit the motif, so comfortably that this accurate presentation requires little to no mental effort. Once we do so, we shift from improvisation to "recollection," as though we're remembering the place rather than inventing it.

This is accomplished by taking the time, in meditation, whether in the shower, on the bus, sitting at a park bench, walking to work or wherever we may happen to be, to simply think about the setting. To wander through it, puzzling out details as we go. There is no "preparation" to meditate involved. We know the meditation has happened, in our considering the setting, when we've achieved flow. An example of this would be climbing aboard a bus for a half-hour journey, choosing to think about the customs or politics of a given region, only to realise that we've arrived at our destination without the comprehension of time having passed. When this is the case, we've successfully immersed ourselves into our setting. It is something we must practice at, until we can take a comfortable walk for an hour and find ourselves unable to remember having seen anything, so deep were we in another world of our own making. Obviously, without being hit by a car.

Success isn't achieved by our taking notes or sketching maps, but in BEING there. To some extent it's escapist, to some extent indulgence, but importantly it's a rehearsal for game play. For setting fluency. So that later, when a player asks a question about the two factions we've just described, we already know their answer because we predicted it months before. We already know how a merchant in this city will react to this sort of player question, because the answer is obvious, as though we ourselves were the merchant, on this street, with goods to sell. The improvisation part was done while we were meditating; in-game, it's memory retrieval.

As with equanimity, the habit is acquired through time and hundreds of incidents, where we feel perfectly free to self-review our fictional vision without inhibition or a sense of guilt. The setting is ours, after all, and serves a purpose; it is not wool-gathering. It is constructivist in function and therefore necessary for providing a good game in real life terms.

This "knowing what the answer is" provides us the third mental tool in our kit, pre-cognition. We may think of it as forward patterning, or "running a movie" before the movie has been made, as a metaphor for game play. We know we're going to place the players in certain places and situations as we initiate play. This room already exists in our mind and is part of the performance we're going to give; but in this performance, the "struggle" we perceive with the players is really a struggle with ourselves. In sports, this is called an intrinsic locus of control: when we perceive that the struggle is internal, we engage it differently: with agency, with flexibility and with far less fear of failure.

In dungeon mastering, this is done by realising that the DM could easily be a player in the DM's own game. From this premise, we can understand that the questions the players ask, and the decisions they make, are precisely those we might make ourselves, with their knowledge instead of our own. Seeing this clearly, we can predict that the players aren't behaving against us, but in fact are behaving in a manner that our instruction has directed them to act. We say A and B, knowing that C is almost certain to result, and possibly D, E or F as well, all in accordance with our having put the boat in the water, so to speak. Everything that happens after that, to the boat, the water or anything else affected, we caused. Therefore, the response is not only predictable, but intentional and desirable. This removes nearly all the sense a DM feels for the game being competitive.

This isn't omniscience, but preparation yielding predictability. To stress the metaphor, if we launch the boat from a certain point, into a current we understand, we can predict where it will be pulled. We may not know precisely how it will move, but we shouldn't be surprised to find it moving downstream or out into the lake, where the current takes it. IF, therefore, the players respond to a cue in a particular way, we should recognise that their response doesn't occur in a vacuum — we ourselves have imposed that response, even when we didn't know what the response would be, through our choice of scene, our choice of words, and our inflections and stresses as those words were spoken.

Knowing this can be arresting; a DM might feel overly concerned about saying everything correctly in order to achieve the "right" response; but the DM must comprehend that no "right" response need exist. The DM's focus is upon the setting, which will always be the setting; the players' responses to that setting are not ours to be concerned with — they are only ours to inspire. Thus, ANY response is sufficiently "right," all the time, even the most self-destructive responses imaginable. The players, interacting with the setting, are responsible for the consequences of their responses, not us. But knowing there will be responses, and over time and through play becoming comprehensive of what those responses are likely to be, gives us enormous power in knowing how to respond to the players' responses, when they occur.

Let's just stick a pin in this to be addressed later: the DM's responsibility stops at the setting's edge.

Our capacity to "run a movie," something else we learn to do while enacting mindfulness, described above, allows for situations where we can see several steps ahead, so that as the players push here and pull there, we can build if-then structures in our heads that again provide considerable cognitive leaps forward during game play. When the players arrive in the room, we know they'll find the soup, either before or after the door bursts open; if not before, then the door bursting open solves the equation; we know the fight will occur and that they'll win or lose, continuing afterwards or retreating, knowing if they continue they'll find what's in the next room and so on. All this can be played out in various ways before the game is played... even weeks or months before a certain part of the setting is finally reached after much effort is made to get there. We're not stipulating what the players would do once they get there; only what we would do, if we had the information they'll have. We're not competing against their knowledge or problem solving, but our own. Can we solve the problems the players will solve... in all the ways... the players solve those same problems? We have days, weeks, months to do so; the players will have perhaps an hour. This puts us well ahead of their game, without our ever having to tell them how to play their game.

We don't have to railroad. We have the time to build all the alternative tracks the players might want to invent, so that we know where that track goes before the players climb onboard. We can then stock them with all the necessary logistics, drama and meaning beforehand, mentally, without doing physical work, discarding everything that's irrelevant the moment it becomes so.

This is a good place to stop. Let's pick up governing the players with the next post.