One of the universal truths of roleplaying games is that players outnumber gamemasters by a significant margin. And one of the universal problems of RPGs is that players outnumber GMs by a significant margin — because without a GM, there’s no game to play.
An aside — I absolutely know that there are many amazing RPGs that don’t require a GM in the traditional sense of the baseline GM-plus-players setup that D&D invented. (One of those games — En Garde! — is almost as old as D&D!) But for the purposes of this discussion, most of us live in a world where no matter what our game of choice, if we’re players, we need a GM.
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| Eddie Munson, Gamemaster extraordinaire, from “Stranger Things" |
I don’t know how ubiquitous this experience was for gamers of my generation, but back in the day and among the group of friends I played with, everybody was a GM. We all started as players in campaigns run by the two friends who had learned the game as players in other campaigns, but it took no time at all for us to start running our own games — because we all understood pretty instinctively that running games was an incalculable amount of fun.
It was also the case back in the day that it felt relatively easy to get players to try their hand at running even a one-off game or two because being a GM felt like the best way to understand the game. If you loved the game, if you enjoyed the experience of embracing the rules of the game, then why not explore those rules to the absolute maximum?
Regardless of my own experience, though, I get that a lot of players perceive stepping up to be a GM as a daunting task. And to be fair, those players aren’t wrong. It’s definitely more work being a GM building a narrative framework for the game and running a limitless crowd of NPCs and monsters than it is to simply focus on a single backstory and a single character. For me, though, all the things that make playing a single character fun are amplified a thousandfold in the experience of running games.
So as experienced GMs, how do we express that idea to players? What can we do to show off the fun of running games and building worlds to those still waiting to take the first steps toward sitting on the other side of the screen or the map, then saying, “So what do you…?”
Finding Likely Players
In the games we run as GMs, we can easily set out to give players a small taste of what it’s like to do what we do. But as the first step of this process, we need to figure out which players are most interested in becoming a GM. In the best-case scenario, you’ll have a player who actually expresses that interest. But if not, keep an eye out for players already expressing a natural interest in some of the things a good GM does.
Do you have a player who loves digging into the rules? Maybe even a player you make use of to remember rules details when you don’t? That’s an amazing candidate to take on the role of GM. How about a player who loves not just building a backstory for their character, but adapting that backstory to better fit the story of the campaign and the backstories of the other characters as the game progresses? That’s potentially someone with the interest in building shared narrative that’s a core strength of a good GM.
Moving Multiple Pieces in Combat
Once you’ve got players with whom you want to share a bit of what it feels like to run a game, think about asking those players to test out an essential GM skill by running multiple creatures in combat. In any scenario where one or more NPCs lends the party a hand in a fight, give the players those NPCs’ stat blocks and ask them to direct those characters tactically and narratively. Or if your party has a spellcaster who’s prone to summoning multiple creatures, getting multiple players to take the responsibility for those creatures out of your hands is a great way to lighten your load as a GM — even as it gives players a chance to develop a knack for thinking in parallel during combat.
Invitation to Improvisation
Outside of combat, a GM’s greatest skill is probably the ability to improvise — and improvisation is a great thing to have players take on from time to time in a campaign. For a lot of GMs, getting players to help with the improv nature of world-building in a game is a kind of Holy Grail. When asking players to engage with the game that way, though, keep in mind that improvisation is always easiest within a framework of possibilities. For GMs, that framework is our sense of all the things we know about the story that the players and characters don’t. But because the players don’t have access to that framework, we need to create one for them by establishing bounds on the kind and degree of improvisation we ask for.
Here's an easy (and classic) example. The characters are entering a new town or neighborhood, and looking to find a tavern to ask around for information. Normally, you’d come up the name of the tavern, decide what it looks like, and provide details for the NPC the characters need to meet. For you, that’s probably easy, because as a GM, you have enough sense of the scene and the world around it to narrow down specific options from a broad range of possibilities. But if you ask the players to come up with the name of that tavern and the NPC, the broad range of possibilities might feel overwhelming in the moment. So instead, provide a name for the tavern and ask the players what kind of place it sounds like based on that name. Describe an NPC and ask the players what that NPC’s name is based on their appearance — or vice versa.
Likewise, whenever the characters are in a town or city that one of them knows well, ask the player what some of their characters’ favorite places in that settlement are. Anyone playing an RPG has the requisite imagination to easily come up with answers to all these questions and more — but giving the players a specific focus can help keep them from being overwhelmed by not knowing where to start.
Magical Fun
Custom mechanical design — of encounter areas, environments, traps, hazards, magic, and more — is one of the biggest jobs of a GM. And although many of those things are outside the scope of what players can be reasonably asked to contribute to a game, there’s one bit of mechanical design that many players gravitate toward all on their own — magic items. To get a would-be GM’s creativity flowing, feel free to ask players not just for their wish lists of stock magic items (as many GMs do). Ask them to design a magic item they’d like their character to have, within any general creative boundaries you establish (including item rarity appropriate for the character’s level). For potentially more interesting results, ask each player in your group to design a custom magic item for another player’s character.
Designing magic is something that it’s surprisingly easy to get players into — even those who profess they don’t have any real interest in digging into the nuts and bolts of the game. And each player who discovers how much fun it is to tinker with the wider world of the game is a potential GM in the making.