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The Ten Commandments of Game-Mastery
Hi there! My name is(n’t really) Sable, and I haven’t been GMing for a full decade yet. I’m here to tell you EXACTLY HOW TO DO IT.
Of course I’m not. How you GM is none of my business. If you’ve been doing it for less than a whole campaign, you’re figuring out your style; if you’ve been doing it for 20 years, you’re probably still figuring it out and refining it. Heck, my favourite GM and best friend has a very different style from me: I prepare extensively and focus on scenes and events; she prepares only the bare bones and focuses mostly on populating her worlds with fantastic NPCs.
(‘GM’ means ‘Game Master’, sometimes called ‘Dungeon Master’, ‘Storyteller’, ‘Narrator’, ‘Keeper’ etc. Hopefully you know that already and if not, welcome to the world of tabletop gaming; you are more than welcome!)
These grandly-named Ten Commandments are intended not for the GM-as-writer alone, but for every GM. The GM is the group organiser, the chair of a meeting, the prim(a/us) inter pares, the arbiter of the shared story. You’re most or all of those things regardless of your GMing style or preferred degree of preparation. This is for you!
I definitely want to know whether you agree or disagree with any of these, or think I’ve missed some. Ten is an arbitrary number, and I stopped after it, so it’s eminently possible!
