My Game-mastering Philosophy
Something prospective readers ought to know about me, and something I suspect I share with many OSR-and-adjacent folks, is that I am a perpetual tinkerer. As much as I love Worlds Without Number, there are some blind spots - namely in playable species, rules for followers, and strongholds. So I've spent time gathering up resources from across the internet as well as making my own. Because I want to start blogging, I figure I should dip my toes in before going full tilt. I originally wrote this as an afterword to my 60 page homebrew compendium and setting guide, which evolved out of a project to compile everything I had written over the last few years. I am not saying that these sentiments are the only way, or the best way, but that this is how I like to run my games.
In a sandbox campaign such as The Third Dynasty, a proper player character needs goals because the characters’ goals ultimately drive the story. There will be plenty of opportunities for adventures, as I will be constantly supplying you with plot hooks via rumors or other forms of information, but you will eventually have to go and forge your own path if you want to fully engage with the game. Not everyone will, and that’s fine. You can have a perfectly fun time playing this campaign if you don’t. But the way to truly advance is by setting and achieving goals for yourself. It’s my job to simply set up a canvas for you to paint on. Personally, I’m not much of a play-actor. Doing voices for NPCs is not what drew me into the hobby. I like the gameplay and that “anything can be attempted.” That said, I recognize that for some the element of play-acting is a huge draw, and I do enjoy roleplaying, but I will fully admit that it is something of a weak spot in my gamemastering. To this end, I’ve created a channel on the campaign server to facilitate roleplaying outside of the game session. I don’t know how much use it will see, but I encourage everyone to at least give it a shot.
My experience has been that the typical RPG campaign goes something like this – the players create player characters and show up to the first session. The GM has written a story with blank spaces for the characters, who plug in their PC and their backstory which may or may not fit into the GM’s prewritten story or setting. Each week, the players try and advance the plot like what would happen in a video game, except for the fact that there’s no way to tell what the players will do when they are given free reign in the setting and so the campaign is in a precarious position. Any unpredictable move results in its derailment and the loss of many hours of work for the GM. I’ve become convinced that there’s a better way – the stories in my games are post-hoc. I don’t write them while I’m preparing a session and they don’t happen at the table. They happen after the session when we’re sitting around the table talking about what happened. They’ll happen when your characters are sitting in the tavern talking about what they’ll do next week and what others missed out on. People who learned how to play the “trad” way don’t do random encounters because they “derail the story,” but to me that is the story. The game and all this stuff that I wrote is procedural, it dynamically generates a scenario that may not be what was expected and it’s up to us to riff off of it. Devotion to a single narrative thread turns a lot of games into a cage for the group. I know because I used to run games like this.
Let me posit something – I don’t want realism, I want consistency. I enjoy RPGs that are less number-crunchy but are more discrete or objective in their rules. For example, I’m not a fan of supply/inventory dice, which is a mechanic that has players rolling a die each time an item is used to see if they run out. I like the idea that if start with six arrows and fire three that I for sure have three left. I like measuring time in distinct turn increments and tracking movement on a grid – these are things that are objective and enforce fairness. There are systems that are out there that could be considered more “realistic,” but what exactly does that mean? Does simulating a sword swing, or the thrust of a dagger into a gap in armor, really make a better game than simply rolling to hit, then rolling damage or applying Shock? I'm not so sure. It’s a game, it’s meant to be fun. An Impressionist painter doesn’t need to detail every leaf for you to know they're painting a tree. Likewise, I don’t want the game mechanics getting in the way of having fun, especially when the world can come to life without simulating each blade of grass in the secondary world.
Internal consistency also applies to the setting. Middle-earth was what Tolkien referred to as a secondary world, and it’s clear that he put things in it that he liked, disliked. His passion is clearly obvious for any who have read his books – whether you like them or not. It’s this passion, the sincerity, and the authenticity that makes Middle-earth so enduring and it’s something that I want to emulate. Part of planning a truly excellent campaign is to believe in the reality of your secondary world – "I have to believe it if I’m going to sell it," as Phil Robb once said in his interview with Matt Colville. My process is something I’ve come to refer to as “diffuse” or “inferential” worldbuilding. I have a few strong core ideas about the setting, and then I infer or allow those to diffuse out in order to build the rest, using history and great examples from fiction as a guide. I’m not saying this is the only right way, but to me what makes the standard D&D setting so boring is the way everything feels like a requisite. You can tell someone started with a map and began filling in spaces, or thought that they had a plane of Lawful Good and Chaotic Evil and so they needed seven others. I find that this relatively shallow worldbuilding leaves something out of most campaigns, they lack that gravitas that something in a more developed setting might have. There’s a tendency for people to say that because a setting has fantastical elements in it that it’s free from following logic and reason – if there are dragons, why can’t there also be some totally illogical inconsistency? I think this reasoning comes from the thought that quantity is better than quality. The more fantastical a setting is, the better! However, I think that restraint, especially in adhering to your own established rules as a creator, leads to even more depth. One way this manifests is in how people write fictional conflicts, especially if the conflict is allegorical in some way. We don’t imagine people on both sides complexly. The best antagonists are written so that you can see why they’re doing what they’re doing, but disagree with their method or their conclusions. I also think that there’s a tendency to misunderstand the role of myths. In simple terms, myths are the way that people understood the world before science. I could be wrong, but I don’t think that a Babylonian potter would have really thought that the universe was made of the bones of a dead god. The priests and oracles maybe did, but the average person never really gave it much thought in the way that your average person today doesn’t think about quantum mechanics. As a result of this misunderstanding there’s this constant need to create myths, but use them as scientific fact. This seems like a misguided and frankly kind of shallow process. What if, instead, we apply real world religious studies to our imagined religion; integrating ideas of syncretism, political expediency, and cultural exchange can really liven up your typical fantasy pantheon. If you read the Imperial Guide to Almorin, effectively the guide to my setting overall, it provides you with much information on the setting but…can you really trust what you read there? What about some of the contradictions it has with the Origins section? To me, I much prefer to have my setting be steeped in this sort of historical uncertainty, as if all the information is from an unreliable narrator. It makes the secondary world more real, in a sense.
I'm not saying that all of these things are necessary for a good campaign, or that they'll even necessarily make my campaign amazing or particularly noteworthy, but it kind of all comes down to that quote from Phil Robb. I think back to moments that I haven't enjoyed in various campaigns and they are all when the reality of the secondary world failed, when I felt shackled by the predetermined story, or when the system got in the way of the fun. Anyway, those are just my thoughts. If any of this was intriguing, or even if you hate it, let me know on Bluesky!
Until next time, keep your eyes on the skies.