Its been nearly a decade since I started playing table top roleplaying games, and they've had a big impact on my life. My closest friend, Ben, recently finished up his fourth one-to-twenty campaign in Dungeons and Dragons 5e, which led to me recommending he write a memoir of his experience with the hobby. Then, I realized I've been playing longer than he has, so why not write my own as well?

I'm twenty-eight years old, and I characterize my adult life as a series of passions, each lasting two or three years. First it was violin, culminating in me joining my community orchestra for a few shows. Second, it was running, culminating in me recording a 3:22 marathon. Right now, it's Go, where I'm currently eleven-kyu and rising, attending tournaments. My passion for the first two waned significantly after those few years. Meanwhile, I've been in the tabletop space for nearly a decade, and I'm just as interested in them now as I was back then. So, I feel it's right to consider it separately, as the hobby I've enjoyed most.

This is going to be a mix of various thoughts. I'm going to present this mainly as a chronology, from my intro with the hobby, to the present day. I'm going to discuss the concrete things that happened, as well as my thoughts and opinions. This is going to involve specific discussion of my campaigns and settings, which... Is about as boring as someone describing their dream or an acid trip to someone else. Intensely meaningful to me, just another whacky fantasy knock-off to someone else. Still, I'll be discussing these in details if only so I can write down my inspirations as well, as an attempt to document and resurrect what was going on in my mind at the time. My main desire is to discuss techniques, because I feel techniques are sorely underdiscussed when compared to plot and setting. Which is ironic, since I'll also be discussing the setting and etc. in detail as well, making myself guilty of the sin I'm describing. Alas!

Start

I always wanted to play tabletop games, ever since reading about them online at a young age. I had first made some attempts to play Labyrinth Lord as a teenager, with some friends I met in highschool: Adam, Billy, and Zack. It must have been 2012 or 2013. I picked Labyrinth Lord because it was free-as-in-speech. I took a flash drive to the library and printed off the two hundred or so pages of content it had. I don't even think we played a successful session. To memory, I offered to GM, and three friends made characters. We played in my basement, around an old table I would eventually go on to inherit as my dining room table. In fact, I'm writing this section on it now! I didn't know how to GM, so mostly just fumbled with improv, while not knowing how to prompt the players for rolls or how to challenge them on, well, anything. We gave up on that quickly.

Later, in 2015, I enrolled in Lakeland Community College. I met a guy there, Tyler Legg, who asked me "if I felt like a creative person," as an awkward segue into inviting me to play Dungeons and Dragons 5e with him and some other friends. I accepted the invite, and joined my first competent group! Tyler led me through character creation, as well as the rules. I was joined by a bunch of other twenty-somethings, and we played a sandbox campaign, roughly from levels one to eight. Tyler was the game master, and I was joined as a player by Matt and John Talbot, and Will, and later my friend Mike joined as well. We played for a few months, and the campaign eventually fizzled out due to lack of direction. I learned a ton from Tyler, who continues to be an inspiration in my GMing to this day, even if we're no longer friends. He eventually showed me Call of Cthulhu, through a duet of one-shots. The first one was a nine-hour marathon session with one pizza break, and plenty of player deaths. The second one was an eleven-man session, while I was visiting from college.

College

I had made some good friends after moving to Columbus, OH to attend the Ohio State University. Naturally, this was the beginning of the end of my relationship with Tyler and the Talbots, simply due to distance. However, I made fast friends with Ben L., David H., Tommy S., and Nick T., and while shooting the shit walking through campus, we all mentioned some interest in D&D. Ben had played before, and I was adept at the rules, so we agreed to start a campaign, with Ben GMing and me helping teach the others the rules and spot-check Ben's rulings. The campaign started at level 2 and went all the way to level 20, and was an Evil campaign, with us playing as various types of baddy, but nonetheless saving the world from Elementals and Demons and flamboyant tiger college-deans. It was a good time among friends, with plenty of injokes made and laughs shared. Notably, Ben organized the campaign into character arcs, where every player got a ten-to-fifteen session spotlight on them, and their backstory plot. The campaign ended joyously, to much celebration as well to the monumental feat of running a happy 1-20 on the first attempt GMing.

At some point along the way, I brought David home to meet Tyler and play in that eleven-man game. It was here where I suddenly learned just how vital soft-skills are to GMing. Mastery over rules, ability to improv, and a richly decorated world mean nothing if you can't wrangle all eleven players to stay on-task, which Tyler was expertly able to pull off. He used a bell and chimed it whenever he needed everyone's attention at once. While it might seem silly, it was very effective. The fact that I can remember it so clearly is a testament to how formative this session was towards my journey understanding the art of GMing.

I ran a silly one-shot for Ben, David, Tommy, Nick, and Bailey, Ben's girlfriend at the time. It was set in a world inspired by The Way of Kings, specifically the Parshendi lands. The players got to work under the eye of Duke Legg, and fight over some forgotten piece of badland, where something powerful was hidden. I got to employ my first and favorite tactic for the fight -- open air approach, with enough space for adversaries to trade words before trying to kill each other. I also took inspiration from The Way of King's shardblades, having the enemy bruiser materialize a sword-sledgehammer to start hacking away into the ground, down into a buried city where the central macguffin was buried. This got the players to panic and was what forced them to approach the villains, which I think was a successful attempt at throwing them off their plan.

Speaking of throwing them off their plan... Does that sound a little adversarial? Well, perhaps it is. There's a few ideas here -- if the players form a team, does that mean the GM forms the opposing team? For my first campaign I certainly conceptualized of the game like this. With fair play and balance in mind, I'd always try to play hardball with my players. Putting them in situations where fighting their way out wouldn't win, putting them in awkward situations. Putting the hidden fiction first, the fiction that I had preplanned, with intended solutions for them to (fail to) find.

Starting to GM

I graduated college in 2018. I got a job doing software, and started planning a campaign. I moved in with David around this time.

My first campaign, I had Ben, David, and Bailey as players. I didn't have a great relationship with Bailey, which led to some struggles planning content to suit her. But nevertheless, I tried to compromise, and I think the content was worse for it. Ben would say that the campaign was good, but I don't look back upon it so favorably. I went into it with the grand design to match Ben's achievement, doing a proper 1-20, in a fully-custom world. However, I wasn't a huge fan of characters arcs, so I made the world a bit more an open ended sandbox, with an undead theme and a big demon badguy, with no obvious way to kill him. The idea was to get them to level fifteen or eighteen or so and rally enough forces in the meanwhile. I didn't give any clear directions, but did give plenty of plot hooks and interesting, well-realized characters. The lack of direction started to really hurt by level nine, and we ended the campaign prematurely at level twelve, sprinting to the end and just fighting the BBEG in a straightforward fight. COVID split the campaign up, and during COVID, we all moved in together as roommates, and started experiencing some cohabitation woes. Maybe in a perfect world it would've gone better.

That said, I am still proud of many things, it being my first campaign and all. I got really good at putting the players in dire straits. The highlight was probably at level five, when the Cleric encountered a slave in a cage, staring at him hungrily in a capitol city's bazaar. The slave ended up being a cleric of Ballos, the BBEG demon guy, who broke out of prison started eating everyone. The demon was essentially Kitava from Path of Exile, with the name Ballos coming both from Cave Story's hidden boss, as well as the power word from Castle In the Sky that destroys the island. With the players caught in the city, the enemy priest caught the whole place on fire, which led to some of the best set-dressing I think I've come up with to this day. Flaming zombies, lakes of blood, the walls trapping everyone in, the noble Orcs doing their best to evacuate the rest, the Cleric confronting the rival priest and being so woefully outmatched. A running theme from then on would be 'my best content is when everything is on fire.' Each player character had an associated character from their backstory. When they eventually revisited the flaming city of Tetaco, each player got to play as their alter-ego in a one shot, whose plot was concurrent with their main characters also revisiting the city, which was just a crazy every-friend-and-every-foe crossover event. My players and myself particularly enjoyed my portrayal of the Feywild, the Plane of Ice, and the Plane of Earth. It was here where I first developed my internal world, which I've used in varying forms ever since.

Another technique which, today, I'm somewhat middling on, was the character of Thomas, and the idea that the players can simply fail to get what they want from someone or something. A somewhat shady assassin, clearly very good at what he does. Friendly yet reserved. Not divulging more than he needs to. An obvious liar. A liar who knows you know he's lying. What is the party supposed to do about that...? You can roll as many Insight checks as you want to figure out, yes, he's lying to your face and isn't even trying to hide it. I can't imagine talking to a brick wall is the most fun. But damn was it great running that character. Him being so impenetrable, alongside my philosophy of 'there is a world here, unchanging, and it is your job to navigate it,' likely led to very frustrating experiences. The character isn't helping you learn the world. The world isn't really helping you learn it. You basically have to play a shittier version of Mastermind to get any progress done -- guess what the GM already cooked up, and maybe employ some prying and probing techniques to get further information; iterate.

Sometime near here, I also traveled to Akron to meet some mutual friends I met through Tyler: Jacob and Joe, and a few others. I joined them for a single session of their ongoing long-term campaign, between crashing on their couch, watching art film, and smoking them in Smash Bros. We talked shop for a bit, and Jacob showed me the vital technique of 'going down to the art store, buying a bunch of one-inch wooden tokens, and painting them colors to use instead of expensive battle minis.' My tackle-box-of-dice, a trick I stole from Tyler Legg, is brimming with colorful tokens as well, with player names on the player tokens and Roman numerals on the enemy tokens! Surprisingly effective for how cheap it is.

Thirst For Change

I had been playing almost exclusively Dungeons and Dragons 5e until this time. During COVID, I had done some reading online and found a few other systems people were talking about. Burning Wheel had a certain level of infamy, and I felt myself up to the challenge. Blades in the Dark was well-regarded for fitting a certain theme I enjoyed. I don't know precisely where I heard it, but 13th Age caught my eye. I ended up buying all three and reading through their rulesets in a few weeks.

I eventually ended up convincing my roommates at the time - David, Tommy, and Nick - to join me for a campaign of 13th Age. I ran the intro adventure out of the back of the book, and we took off. It took only a moment for them to get used to the core gameplay, owing to its shared heritage with Dungeons and Dragons. The Icon system took much longer - D&D has no equivalent meta-narrative mechanics. In 13th Age, you have relationships with various factions, called Icons, and every now and then, you can spend some resource to influence or narrate the fiction involving that faction directly, rather than through the actions of your character. This was also my first introduction to meta-narrative mechanics. And, further, why not give the players a bit more stake in the world by letting them chip in and build it? In addition to the rules allowed by 13th Age via the icon system, I also let them narrate what was in various locales they visited. This campaign involved the party confronting an alliance between the Crusader's attempt to gang up with the Lich King's necromancers, in order to better resist the Diabolist's plans. Classic 'victory at any cost' affair, culminating in the party gathering up some dragons and kobolds to assist them in assaulting Ren's encampment, the necromancer-crusader bad guy. The side-villain Irena, who was somewhat inspired by my Ukrainian friend Katarina (Katarina - Irena. Sounds similar!), a random cultist of the Diabolist's, would eventually get promoted to big-bad in the next campaign. Further, I had set out from the start to make this campaign short. Maybe twelve sessions? I had too high expectations for my previous campaign, so rather than embark on some fifty-session nightmare that may never finish, that may drag on forever, and that may outstay its welcome, my goal was to run something tight and narrow-scoped.

Finishing this campaign, David volunteered to run the next group game. This time it would be back in Dungeons and Dragons - his core concept had something to do with Spell Schools, which is specific to Dungeons and Dragons. He had long told me about the climax of the campaign idea he had - fighting against a caster who could switch between Wizard, Cleric, Bard, and Warlock spell lists. I didn't love this idea, because it reifies the concept of a wizard, a bard, etc. in the game world. As the GM, you get to work with any idea you want. Why would you limit yourself to class spell lists? (There are plenty of good reasons, like wanting to show the players that there are actors similar to them in the world. However, it is my belief that this effect can be better achieved other ways.) In any case, the campaign started, with myself, Tommy, Nick, and Jude playing. It was good for a while. Our first adventure involved going to a city with a robot factory under it. My character was a robot character, and I had later found out that this was meant to be my arc. To me, this was a two-fold red flag: I don't like character-arc based campaigns, and second, I didn't even know it was my arc. Perhaps I should've said something at the time, but this disillusioned me for the rest of the campaign I would sit in for.

During this time, I also elected to run another 13th Age campaign for Ben, Tommy, and my neighbor Gregg. Irena was the main villain - the expanded concept was that the Diabolist had broken herself into various body parts, gave Irena her right arm to graft onto herself, and then the rest of them to distribute as she saw fit. Going around making an army of elderly grandmother cultists with various bits of demon stitched to them, or transplanted. Gregg dropped out early, just because he wasn't able to make commitments, so Ben and I kept it going. I composed a very good scene where Irena was converting a small hamlet into a hell hole, complete with walls of fire and demons flying around everywhere, and a haunted windmill with a well in it and a heart therein -- copied shamelessly from Paper Mario. This was the scene that solidified the idea that I was at my best when everything was on fire. The campaign ended when a random ogre who had picked up a magic item named Brilliance crit both party members who were looking for the magic item. There was some attempt to keep it going after a campaign-loss, with Tommy creating a new character, but it wasn't meant to be. Tommy bowed out, and with only Ben and I left, we called it there. I can notice a mistake here, which is that unlike the prior campaign, I hadn't set out with an end-goal and a session-count in mind. I let the reigns get away from me, and failed to consider how long we all might want to play. A campaign loss might've been fine to suffer through, if there was a known end in sight. Instead, this campaign was looking to go the meandering way my previous Dungeons and Dragons campaign had gone.

Jude was visiting town again, and we decided to play a Call of Cthulhu one-shot, the third one-shot I would've played in the system. Never a full campaign! One day I'll actually sit down with the system, or Delta Green, or Unknown Armies. In any case, Nick decided to GM it, his first time GMing. The game was fun, but it dragged on -- if I recall, we had to run it on a weeknight. This connected back to my previous experience with Tyler running Call of Cthulhu for us, and the gap in soft-skills when it comes to GMing. It was Nick's first time, and no one's going to get perfect on the first go, so this is not meant to excoriate any one person. That said, not only do you need a good understanding of the rules to GM an effective session, you also need to be able to pace things out, track progression and subtly nudge in the right direction (some call this 'railroading'), and get the people at the table back-on-task once focus wanders. This was also the moment where I realized that running a one-shot is also harder than running a short campaign, due to the added challenge of fitting all your content into a single three-hour burst. Or four hour or five hour, as the case may be. A few sessions to breath can make things way easier.

At the same time, I was running Burning Wheel online for some of my furry friends - Orion, Nerix, Archie. We got a small crew together, came up with a concept, and got to work. The concept here was that the Fire God and the Knowledge God got in a disagreement, and the Knowledge God cast the world into eternal darkness. Through some mysterious rite, the Fire God would bring the day back to small areas of the world. One day, in the players' town, out of the darkness came explorers from a foreign country. We only got three sessions in - One of the players started having anxiety attacks leading up, and another player just didn't feel the system, which is fine! Burning Wheel is not a game for power fantasies, most of the time. It's a game about failing and failing again and eventually overcoming. Orion made his character a murder-hobo, which Burning Wheel actually treats spectacularly. If all you're good at is combat, well, shit! That's gonna be tough when you have to do literally anything else. But when the guards come knocking to take out the weird guy on the outskirts of town, making friends with foreigners... The Fight! he had with the guard captain will live forever in my head. Unlike D&D or 13th Age, so called F20 games (fantasy D20), where you get in massive sprawling fights with rolled initative, to-hits, spells, etc., Burning Wheel has you get in one-on-one fights with each swing of the sword scripted out. Oswald, Orion's character, and the guard captain getting in an axe-versus-sword fight after Oswald caught his house on fire and ambushed him out back was probably the single coolest fight scene I've ever had the pleasure of GMing.

Living Alone

During this time, for an assortment of reasons, my relationship with my roommates had deteriorated significantly. Jude had left to pursue their Master's degree, and I was not feeling the spark for David's campaign. I quit, rather gracelessly. I wanted less obligations so I could focus on my 13th Age and Burning Wheel work and free up some time for other relationships I was building. Further, I was not enjoying the campaign, as mentioned previously. Nevertheless, there is always room for tact, grace, and decorum. Let this be a reminder to treat those around you well and with kindness, and a reminder that you can always be better than you want to act. I would endure another six months or so living as roommates, suffering some abuses, before moving out on my own in 2023, for the first time in four years.

I will take a brief aside here to opine: People often say 'No D&D is better than bad D&D.' I really can't agree more. Further, if you find your relationship or your trust strained with anyone or any group, getting into a campaign with them likely won't leave anyone happy. We all like to say we're adults who can gracefully handle contention and quitting in-stride, but. When you write a campaign or proctor one with your friends, you're putting your heart and soul into something you think is beautiful, in the hopes that your peers see the same beauty you do. When your friends see your soul laid bare and say "not for me," well. That's heartbreaking. I've had it happen to me, I've done it to others. Be graceful whenever you can.

I got started again on a 13th Age campaign right away. I met a guy named Sean on the 13th Age discord, and we met over beers. Then, I met a guy named Sam on reddit, and we met over beers. The two of them, Ben and I all met over beers to discuss playing a game together. I was still eager to GM the system, so I volunteered to give us a good twelve session experience - once again, planning out the time bounds - and we chose a preferred villain. This was to be an Undead campaign! Or at the very least, a campaign where the villain was the Lich King icon. This was Sam's absolute first time playing a TTRPG, at the age of forty-something and married, and my first time GMing for a complete novice. And he was far and above one of the best players I have ever had the pleasure of running for. Immaculate understanding of the idea behind role-playing, eager to throw his character into danger for drama, not caring too too much about his own survival. Driving his character like a stolen car, essentially. Ben and Sean were excellent players as well, and together we had a good group going. Their nemeses would be the unlikely duo Fabian the Frail, an old necromancer who was a brief side-character ally in the previous campaign, and Gaspard the Golden, a rash and angry paladin who met Fabian in the previous campaign. Continuity! Irena killed Gaspard's dad (who was holding onto Brilliance, leading to the ogre getting it), so Gaspard needed a father figure. Meanwhile, Fabian had left his wife and son to go do some wizarding, and felt it time to take on a mentee. So it was a kind of a campaign about fucked-up fatherhood. Culminating in Sam's character becoming Gaspard's granddad and then killing him in a stained-glass demon realm beneath the sea. Altogether, just a great time. It came to an end with little chance for a sequel, since Ben, Sean, and I were all moving out that year.

However, we did deign to try Dragonbane, a system Sean had found and had fun with. Squarely in the OSR tradition, the game centered around fairly-weak characters that couldn't get into combat without serious risk of harm. The system was a roll-under system, with per-skill advancement instead of character-levels. Essentially, Call of Cthulhu but scaled down into a little F20 package. It was very open-ended and sandboxy, with no time constraint! It lasted four or so sessions before Sean got good news about becoming an uncle, and had to depart Columbus for a time. By the time he got back to the city, Ben and I were making plans to depart, so we didn't pick the game back up. We all decided to embrace the OSR ethos for this game, opting to roll our characters from-scratch, instead of choosing options. It led to us having unorthodox characters we otherwise would not have created, and we had a good time with them! Combat uses a deck of cards for initiative, dealt out each round, which really keeps the table engaged. Further, big monsters don't roll to-hit, they roll to see what they hit you with, and its usually pretty scary.

At some point after I moved out, someone on the 13th Age discord by the alias Superwash invited me to play in a session of Shadow of the Demon Lord, another F20 system. The focus here being 'survival horror' for the first few levels, and then a more-classic heroic approach later on. Notably, this game has a very well-rounded character creation mechanic, allowing you to freely combine various tiers of classes to achieve the effect you want. I went with a Clockwork (robot-y guy with a windup key) Rogue-primary Spellblade-second, and focused on teleportation magic. All by level three! As a player, Shadow of the Demon Lord (and perhaps its less-edgy successor, Shadow of the Weird Wizard) could be my favorite system. I'd need to play more to decide, but I'm sold on my initial exposure.

I visited my friends Adam and Mike in my hometown, and together with Adam's coworkers in their stained-glass workshop, Mike and I joined their AD&D 1e campaign for a single session, rolling up a bunch of fighters. It was a good time, during which we crushed a thirty-rack of Pabst Blue Ribbon. If you've ever heard of beer-and-pretzels D&D, this was it. A few player deaths later and it was over. The GM acted as an impartial referee, not crafting any sort of story, but asking for rolls and providing content from random tables. They had based their world map on the shore of Ohio and Michigan, calling it "Oiho." They played real-time rules, so the in-game date was always the date they were playing. If a character had a travel arc that would take 'em five weeks, they couldn't play that character for five weeks real-time. Naturally, this led to a proliferation of backup characters, and they had no fewer than three distinct 'parties' at any one point. I find this fascinating, if only to contrast with the modern sensibility where each player's character is some treasured jewel, to be protected and tested safely and fairly. Further, the GM didn't come up with any story, just the interaction between so many characters built a story naturally. I don't think I'd choose to participate in such a campaign, certainly not run one, but after my fair share of beer, I can say that I had a very good time with it.

In 2024, I would move to Buffalo, to be closer to some fur friends I had made, who run Heartleaf Games, a Dungeons and Dragons content-publisher. We've rolled up some characters for a prospective AD&D 2e game, which we haven't played yet. My friend Doug is unveiling a wholly-custom game, Egalia, which seems slated to start in 2025. Meanwhile, I am casually scouting for a group to play some more 13th Age with. Thus concludes the history, as the rest is yet to happen.

The Hobby

Hitherto, I've mostly written about my history with the game. Various bits of things going on in my life, checkpoints, transitional periods, and likewise, while detailing the games I was playing during any one point in time. I'd like to take the next section to discuss the hobby itself, focusing on themes and techniques, and mentioning the history subservient to any one point. When you've been playing for close to a decade, you start to build up certain opinions!

These next sections are not meant to be arguments, on their own. Rather, just a description of the way I feel about various facets of the hobby.

Being a Game Master

I've played my fair share of games as player-character, probably a dozen or so. Nevertheless, in my mid-to-late twenties, I became obsessed with running the game, and I think it's also the role in which I excel. Perhaps it's just my ego at work, but! The GM gets to be the center of attention, involved in almost every task at the table. I like to be engaged the entire time I'm running the game, to put it simply. Further, I enjoy the art of worldbuilding, if only for my own sake.

I've built up some value propositions as well. Things I take as maxims when it comes to structuring a game and running a game. Some might be controversial, but they ought to provide a viewpoint upon which to understand the rest of my ramblings.

• Time at the table is scarce and important. When you have three or more people looking to you for direction, you ought to spend that time well.
• Action in the here-and-now is better than action in-the-past. Backstories ought to be slim, and the current conflict ought to be rich. In a campaign, your characters are forging the story in the present, not putting the capstone on their backstories.
• Player characters ought to be challenged. Of course, this hobby has a healthy dose of power-fantasy built in, but that can't be the entire thing. The players ought to meet their betters and struggle to overcome them, if it should come to that.

I used to care a bit more about consistency. To provide some color, I'll recount a scene from my first D&D 5e campaign I ran. The party boarded a ship to head between continents. Unknown to them, some druid tagged them and scried them, thinking they were part of some plot to smuggle undead from one country to another. There were barrels of bones aboard the ship, and the druid - Wildshaped into a seagull - boarded the ship, Thorn Whip'd the captain out from behind the Cleric, and pulled him in as a hostage. The point of internal consistency was that, in 5e, you cannot make a non-lethal ranged attack. Thorn Whip, despite having thirty feet of range, counts as a melee attack! Huzzah, my plot worked. Today, I wouldn't bother with any of that planning or ceremony. With enough buy-in from my players, and mutual trust to respect each other, my respect towards their goals, and their respect towards my task of disrupting them fairly, I would just come up with something GM-fiat and make it so. You might file this note under the 'Systems' heading, because 13th Age has no rules for how NPCs can act out of combat.

Things I Disliked About Being a GM

I'll preface this subsection by saying that I've fixed most of these aspects, with the games and systems I run.

Anyways, speaking of GM-fiat, it was actually one of the reasons I moved to 13th Age. I hated having to make those sort of soft arbitrations all over the place. My main pain point was factionalism, and social gains. There wasn't even a semblance of a faction system or a social conflict resolution system in D&D 5e. 13th Age offered the Icon system, which I latched on to. I did not enjoy having to adjudicate something as grand as "will their army lend us their strength, against our united cause?" by either a single charisma check, or by just saying yes. The former was too much of a coin-flip, the latter was too much fiat. I wanted my players to have a structured way to navigate factions, social encounters, and the world writ-large, without having to rely on my agreeing with their plans. I often would agree with their plans, because we're all friends and I want my players to succeed, but I had always felt something was missing.

Scheduling was also always a pain. I sort of get why it's on the GM's shoulders to do it, but come on. The GM is arguably doing the most work already. In the past I've tried to foist this responsibilities upon my players, and I think it worked out pretty well. Help the GM out! This goes for hosting, snack supplies, and all sorts of physical at-the-table concessions. I think most tables do this fine, in reality. Once you're friends with a group, the decorum emerges naturally.

Worldbuilding

My interior world has a rich history, a rich geography, and a slew of cultural and metaphysical details. The five elemental planes, their inhabitants, the gods they worship and their languages, and how they all influence and pair with each other. How these planes spilled out into the material world, how their peoples migrated and integrated, or failed to do so. I am barely scratching the surface here, but my point is to actually disparage this part of the craft. This sort of deep worldbuilding almost never comes up in the actual session play, since the game the players are part of focus on their characters, and what's happening here and now. Not what happened some thousand years ago.

At best, my value assesment on worldbuilding is that it can serve as a nice frosting atop the cake that is tabletop roleplaying. If it's missing, maybe that's fine, and it can't replace the foundational skills of running a good story. Combine too-much-worldbuilding with too-much-story-directing, and, well. Maybe you should just write a book instead! All of my favorite books have such rich worldbuilding, and that's likely where this facet of the craft shines the brightest. In an actual game, any time you attempt to exposit details about the world itself, is time you're not spending on engaging the characters, challenging them, setting the scene, or moving the action along. As mentioned, time at the table is a vital resource, one I would rather not spend on the meandering, pastoral aspect of the games. Describing scenery, histories, and etc.

To further complicate things, worldbuilding is actually probably the part of the hobby I engage with the most! It's hard to stop the mind from wandering. I find myself imagining all sorts of little details and views and histories whenever my mind is unoccupied. Sometimes this will be when driving from city to city, taking a flight, or especially when I'm road running. I did all of my campaign prep and worldbuilding for my last two campaigns while pounding pavement, prepping for the marathon. I have come to the conclusion that worldbuilding is a hobby that rewards the builder, not the players. And to me, that's enough to consider it valuable. I derive enjoyment from worldbuilding, even if it rarely percolates into my games. Contrarily, if someone boasts of their worldbuilding prowess as a reason they'd make a good GM, I tend to treat that claim as tangential to the premise. One of my dear friends said he'd make a good GM because he has an eye and a brain for this sort of thing. I would have recommended that he write a book instead, but... He's already two novels deep into his epic sagas! Which I am very much looking forward to reading.

Soft Skills

I've talked a lot so far about the 'soft skills' of running the game. To contrast, I'd consider 'hard skills' things like system mastery. Do you know your character sheet, do you know the rules, can you create and balance combat encounters (in systems that have them), can you track complicated rule-interactions. These are all important skills, but they're also readily apparent. Either you know the rules or you don't. You can max out your hard-skills in a few months just by reading the rulebooks closely, and you should do so as well. For soft-skills, these are going to be the finer details, mostly social, when it comes to organizing and running a game. I'm focusing mostly from a GM's point of view, since I consider myself a GM first and foremost. It's also the role I have more fun with.

Firstly, I'd put organizing a game up there at the top. Getting everyone together, agreeing on a schedule, agreeing on a timeline, and agreeing on a campaign-premise or villain. Again, my worst campaigns were the ones where I didn't have a timeline to commit to, and my best were the ones that were tightly-scoped.

Once your at the table, controlling the flow of conversation is key. Time is limited, so for me, I don't like it when the topic wanders over-long. Of course, these little meandering segues are where plenty of injokes and fun are to be had, so I'll admit I can be a bit of a taskmaster in light of this. But if I've only got six hours real-time to wrap a campaign up, well. We're going to have to keep things moving. And of course, directing this flow naturally and without force is the real skill. Tying things back together, roping in extra player-characters into a scene at the appropriate time to drive momentum and raise stakes. Sometimes, it's as much as ringing a bell and telling all the players to get back on-task if they get distracted by something; thank you Tyler.

Speaking of real-time constraints, pacing! Pacing ties in with the previous point, and there's a lot of area for discussion here. When you scope out a fixed-end campaign, you don't really have the opportunity to meander too much if you want to hit the climax of the story. I'll admit that this is something I've come to miss, but you can't have your cake and eat it to. The slow moments of the game can be some of the best, imbuing the adventure with that sense of journey and awe the likes of which Tolkien wrote. Describing the sway of the trees in the wind, the mountains in the distance, the scent of the air in whichever season befits. It's all quite beautiful, but likewise time consuming. They slow down the pace. I would rather focus on the characters (players and villains), as well as the action. I'm sure there's a skill here in juggling both, but I am only human and am with my flaws. In the face of those flaws, I prefer to run faster-paced games, working towards an ends.

Finally, there's an art to fulfilling the players' power fantasies while also challenging them. This usually manifests as peaks and valleys in the plot. Each hero ought to get their shining moment, where exactly their skills are what gets them out of a bind. This is something Burning Wheel taught me: Just look at their character sheets! The abilities and flaws they took for their character are the abilities and flaws they want to be important, so just lean into them and let them shine for a while. Cycle the savior-spotlight between your players now and then, let them all be badasses at the same time once or twice, and then wallop 'em all every now and again.

Smoke and Mirrors

Being a GM does involve a lot of improvisation. Some would say that the best GMing is all improvisational! I'm happy to do my bit of prep-work; I'll probably be doing it subconsciously anyways when out for a run. That said, you've gotta keep an even keel while responding to the players' antics, so you'll always have to do some improv. Whether you want to maintain course, or veer off in the directions your players are suggesting, you'll need some tricks.

My main tricks have to do with when NPCs show up. Always either the most convenient time for them to be around, or the least convenient. Perhaps several mutual foes arriving, causing sparks to fly! Is there any world-internal logic to why it ought to be so? Well, no, not really. I can usually justify something post-fact, but one of my jobs as a GM is to challenge the players and provide drama where approriate, so I'll use some smoke and mirrors, where appropriate.

Okay so can we talk about puzzles for a second? They're kind of a genre staple but they're always really goofy when it comes down to brass tacks. Why is my GM giving me a riddle about lanterns, that I as the player instantly clock, but my 7 Int paladin is supposed to not understand? Like, who is being tested here? The framework of a tabletop game system is to provide ground upon which to test a character, via combat or skill checks or saves, so why am I, the player, fielding a logic puzzle? And the best case scenario is when the puzzle is solvable, like a children's riddle. Worse is when the puzzle is actually hard, to the point no one can divine the solution, and the session just kinda stalls out for a moment. I have a GM tactic here that I do use once in a blue moon, but it's almost too smoke-and-mirrors for me to be comfortable admitting: Come up with some hard puzzle or scenario that has a hidden solution, let the players guess incorrectly a few times, and then flip a mental switch. Next answer that's plausible gets promoted to 'the actual answer,' and we just never talk about the real answer. Makes the players feel smart, gives them a bit of puzzly goodness, but. Smoke and mirrors.

This kind of ties back into my earlier talk about there 'being a coherent world in the GMs mind, of which it is the players' responsibility to attempt to divine and act upon.' The sort of Mastermind game plot, where you have a floor plan for a mansion the players are robbing, but you keep the floor plan hidden, and your players just have to bumble through a few rooms not knowing what the hell is going on and getting smacked around as a result. It can lead to some pristine hijinx, don't get me wrong, but it a feels a little patronizing. These days, I am very happy to have the players' actions paint the world into coherency. Keep details sparse until interacted with. This can end up smoke and mirrors-y still, but you can get around that by just being honest. Rogue asks if there's a chandelier overhead? Well, of course there is, because you're asking and I know something badass is about to happen.

And further, don't play twenty-questions with me. "Is there a ladder? Yes. "Is there a rope near the ceiling? Yes. Is there a tablecloth on the table? Yes. Is there any oil nearby?" Goodness, just ask me what you want your character to do. I'm more than happy to say yes, if we both respect each other. I want your characters to look cool, and I want their nemeses to look cool. Let's help each other out and cut to the case. "I'd love to catch the room on fire and then swing from a rope out of the place, can I do that?" is much more mature.

Systems

I started on Dungeons and Dragons 5e, and I did truly enjoy it, but I had gotten my fill of it after five or six years. I don't believe it's the everything-system. Blades in the Dark dispelled that illusion handily - the sort of crackhead villain adventures you can get up to in Blades does not at all map to a fantasy D20 experience with combats and spells and such. Just being a bit of a hipster and a bit autistic as well, the mainstream-iness of Dungeons and Dragons started to irritate me a bit as well. Cliches, people shouting "Nat 20 baby!" and "How do you want to do this?" and "Fireball is addressed 'to whom it may concern'" made the hobby seem trite and predictable. I'll freely admit this is my own miserly attitude at work. Further, the mechanics did start to bore me after a while. It's a good game, but not a perfect game by any means.

I picked up 13th Age somewhere along the way, and it fixed basically every issue I had with D&D 5e. Still a bombastic, superheroic F20 system, but with a bit more in the way of collaborative storytelling, via One Unique Things, Background checks, and Icon relationship rolls. It took a bit of the fiat out of my hands, and put the world in the players' hands. The mutual trust needed for that helps enrich the experience. I've introduced several people to the system, but none stuck on it as a home system, preferring instead the comfort of D&D 5e.

I tore through all eleven-hundred pages of Burning Wheel (plus the Codex) over a month or two, and have become somewhat obsessed. If only I can find a group to run it for! The classless system with individual-skill advancement looks so fun, alongside the concept of Beliefs, Instincts, and Traits. Players get directly rewarded for putting their characters into troubling spots! I'd say 'putting myself in tricky spots' is the soft skill of a player, and Burning Wheel makes it a requirement of the system. Pretty fancy stuff. The massive skill list and traits list are pretty cool -- you can be good at Beer Tasting and have that be your thing. Further, it's very Tolkien-esque, harboring an innocence and awe.

Sidenote, since I've been reading The Lord of the Rings: The earnesty of Sam Gamgee and the rest of the hobbits saddens me. All the characters I've ran for have been either grumpy, cynical, or snarky. I think this goes back to some power-fantasy cockiness. In contrast, the first time Sam meets an elf is the best day of his life. He's not a child, far from it, but he still treats the world with awe, wonder, and reverence, the likes of which I don't think I've seen a player-character embody. Perhaps my sessions just aren't awe-worthy, aha.

I've read several other systems, and even authored my own system that fits on a single index card, inspired by Burning Wheel. I'd advocate that everyone give a shot to writing a one-index-card system or a one-page-system at any rate. Distilling something down to that fine a level ought to reveal to you what you value in a game, and in the hobby. As for other systems, I've got some interests. Unknown Armies looks like it really explores the traumas of adventuring. Your characters get worse at something at the same pace as they improve at other things. For example, if you advance your abiliy to lie, you diminish your ability to see the truth by an equal amount. The early Dungeons and Dragons installments offer a very different outlook on the hobby. You can see the evolution towards our current understanding: In the past, we had random tables and expendable characters. Today, we have crafted storylines and strong, central characters. I won't say one is better than the other.

Community

What is a hobby, without a community to discuss the finer points of your craft with, discuss your experiences, triumphs, shortcomings, and complaints with? And, ultimately, play the game with. You can say a lot of things about the tabletop game space, and what constitutes a tabletop game. I'm willing to be a bit controversial, and say that a tabletop game needs at least two people to play!

I never found much of a community in the Dungeons and Dragons space. I won't say that there isn't a Dungeons and Dragons community - In fact, it's thriving, as far as I can tell. Rather, it's become a bit too diffuse for me to want to engage with. I actually know plenty of people who play the game, and in any room I'm in, there's a good chance one of them plays D&D! In fact, I joined the Go club in Buffalo after moving, and one of my opponents, Jesus, mentioned his son was getting into D&D. So, I gave him all my 5e books! And, my neighbors produce 5e content. So perhaps there is some community there, and I just engage with it obliquely. On reflection, given the amount of traveled around and met people, you could argue that I am involved deeply in the D&D 5e community, but only in-person, not in the realm of online discussions and such.

Contrast the 13th Age community. Tiny, relatively tight knit, cordoned onto just two Discord servers - the unofficial 13th Age Discord, and the official Pelgrane Press discord. I'm a part of the former, and there are a few dozen active contributors who I've been talking with on and off for some years. I even met one of 'em in person, and started playing games with them! Here, I think the tininess of the community is what draws me towards it and keeps me engaged. My voice matters in that community. Not because I'm special, not because my ideas are great, not because I'm everyone's favorite. It matters the same way everyone else's voice matters in that community: We're small, and each voice is a noticable percentage of the activity therein. If the community got much bigger, much more diffuse, my voice wouldn't matter as much. This reads equally well as an endorsement of any small community, and, well. Yeah! The Buffalo Go Club is about ten people, and I've already been invited to a member's marriage reception, after three months of knowing. Small communities are where I thrive.

Likewise, the Burning Wheel experience is a bit of a small-community affair. Burning Wheel has two discords, an unofficial one for just the game, and an official one by the publisher, which includes their other content. The official one is where I occasionally reside. There's a small amount of cross-pollination between it and the 13th Age discord, even. A few shared faces. Notably, the creator of Burning Wheel, Luke Crane, is active in the official Discord, sharing podcasts, ideas, answering questions... He's even opined on my Go experiences and said nice things about the cats whose photos I've uploaded to the #cats channel. Now, you don't need to lecture me on the term 'parasocial relationship,' but! I just think that that's cool.

Going Forward

I suppose I ought to wrap up this reflection at some point. My ideals going forward, is that I want to keep experiencing this hobby, growing it as a craft, but also experiencing it through the innocence of an amateur. I hope I get to run my high-concept, intimate campaigns, and also get plastered with my besties-since-highschool while throwing dice around a glass workshop. Maybe I need to spend a bit more time in the player role so I can better advance my understanding as a GM.

If you've followed along thus far, I'd like to thank you, and then also recommend that you undergo a similar exercise, if you're so inclined. I doesn't need to be an eight-thousand word essay on the past ten years of your life, nor does it need to be as broadly-scoped. If you do write one, let me know and I'll read it or listen to it! If you're reading this, you probably know where to find me for the hand-off.

This hobby has enriched my life in many ways, bringing me closer to people, allowing me to express my creativity, and giving me countless late nights, mind racing with possibilities. I am thankful for that.