Game-mastery and Teaching

19 Dec, 2025

Introduction

I'm in the depths of earning my teaching credential at the moment, which is why I've gone completely silent on here. My degree is in political science, so I'll be a social science teacher of some kind once this is all over. Something that people may not realize is that social science is really, really broad -- including everything from world and U.S. history, government, economics, and geography. Political science is not really any of those, but my AA is in history and I have a minor in history as well so I had hoped to land in some kind of history or government. I got landed in economics, which I barely understood before the semester started. So that was something to adjust to, but in addition to that I had never met my mentor teacher until a week before school started. It's now finals week, I have some more free time, and there's been something that's been eating away at me over the past few months.

As I've been sitting through classes talking about educational philosophy, differentiated instruction, and adolescent psychology, there have been a few times where discussion in class has reminded me of game-mastery. I first made the connection as I had to prepare a presentation for my Methods class on a helpful piece of software that other future educators might like to know about and the first and only thing I could really think of was Obsidian. The professor is using Google Slides to essentially fill the role of an Obsidian Vault that she can look at to see our notes or weekly reflections on the various topics. Her method works, obviously, but I imagine it took a lot of time for her to set up¹ and I personally have a distaste for Google and a love for Obsidian. Methods was by far my favorite class this semester, primarily because there were a lot of people who really cared about teaching and all had some kind of background in the social sciences. Really great classmates overall, and the professor was amazing. I mentioned RPGs during the ice breaker on our first day and she told me she was actually the D&D Club advisor for her school, but didn't even know how to play. Then, a few weeks later told us about how she teaches her geography class using this cool as hell tabletop/webapp grand strategy game that would make any homebrewer feel ashamed and I told her that she was already closer than she knew to being an amazing GM.

The Presentation

However, my presentation was a bit of a mess, I fear. The problem was, I put down on the sign-up sheet² that I was going to talk about Obsidian and then kind of forgot as I focused on student teaching, coursework, and other things.³ So when my date to present came up I just got up in front of the class and kind of explained what Obsidian was, how it worked and how I used it -- to organize my campaigns. If you're not familiar, Obsidian is essentially the cooler version of OneNote. It's a notetaking app which you can organize with folders, which have folders within them, and those folders have folders inside, so on into eternity. It can also hyperlink notes, just with a few brackets, and uses markdown formatting which I have been using for over fifteen years on various forums so using it is second nature. Don't get me wrong, I love my chunky GM binder. When I'm running, I much prefer to have a physical notebook, rulebook, and so on in front of me. Technology has its place, for sure. I couldn't possibly hope to make my huge hexmap without it, for one thing. My entire setting lives in Obsidian, as do my blog post drafts, and even my first draft of Covenant & Empire. I kind of realized while I was up there that I was on the verge of rambling about my campaign and RPGs, which I wanted to avoid because it's a niche hobby and that would have been a waste of everyone's time so I tried to keep it relatively vague. It really clicked for my classmates when I showed them the graph view and they could see the connected notes. I also explained how an adventure could be thought of as like a unit of the curriculum, the procedures of the game as the procedures for teaching the lesson, and the individual encounters/dungeons as lessons and so on.

Game-mastering and Teaching Philosophies

I think the analogy works because, while this may be a more story-driven or trad way of thinking, I am generally a fan of my players and want their characters to succeed. Success is much more fun than failure. This mentality is echoed by Jon Peterson in The Elusive Shift when he says about setting challenges for the players that "just as a teacher amenable to the edification of students will design tests that challenge pupils yet still provide opportunities for the worthy to excel." The difference is that in public education there is a problem with getting students to have intrinsic motivation. My opinion is that this is because students are forced to be there, but also because the public school system in America is not built to actually foster the creation of intrinsic motivation in students -- it has been created to make more workers. In games, however, if someone shows up to game night then they are at least choosing to be there because they actually want to play the game!⁴ However, you still see a lot of discussion online about game masters wanting to engage their players, from my end I typically see discussions about engaging with the world specifically. I think that games, specifically RPGs, are very good at creating, if not intrinsic motivation then sufficiently ravenous extrinsic motivation. We know this is true because since 1974 there has been a huge number of ways that gaming terminology has been adopted into the common lexicon. We "level up" and gain points for shopping at various stores, for instance. Part of this is due to the wide reach of video games, but video games would not have had this terminology without OD&D. I still think a lot about the Matt Colville video Toward Better Rewards which can be summarized as, "just tell your players what you want them to do and reward them for it." I think this is a hard lesson for GMs to learn...for some reason. I know that I definitely complain about some aspects of various tabletop games "feeling like a video game" but the haptic, instant feedback that video games give players is definitely a huge draw. I've made a habit lately of giving out magic item cards, quest cards, and so on and it really gets a big reaction even though I'm just writing on a 3x5 card and handing it over the screen.

As I said before, my general game-mastering philosophy is to present the world how it appears in my mind as best I can to the players and let them approach it on their own terms. I think that this is a style that requires players to have a high intrinsic motivation, that is -- they find the motivation to participate within themselves and not necessarily because of any external factor. The classic, OSR sandbox style of play is something that seems to favor intrinsic motivation. The GM throws out plot-hooks or rumors⁵ and it's up to the players to find something to do. If a character hears some rumor about a magic sword being lost in a cave system in the mountains, then shrugs and says "weird...anyways..." then they complain about the campaign being boring then that's not necessarily on the GM at that point. The players just haven't been given the right prompts. If you hand them a card, like in Colville's video, that says "Reward: Barael's Blade," then they might get interested. Or maybe they're just not interested in loot.

The end of the semester is approaching and I have had to write out my educational philosophy at least three times by now. I think my favorite was for my Methods class because I was able to be specific to our subject area and felt comfortable being more candid. Again, as I was writing it and already had a few weeks of student teaching behind me, I could see some parallels between teaching and game-mastery. To be clear, this is totally anecdotal and unscientific, but I think that the skills of running a campaign and the skills of running a classroom are very similar. For one thing, like running a game, teaching requires a lot of adjudicating. Rounding up grades, having a student go to the front office for a minor offense, strictness around using the bathroom pass, and so on. This is before really getting into pedagogy, the method of teaching, and I think there's a parallel there that transcends educational philosophy much in the same way that even trad or story-gamers have to adjudicate their rules as much as OSR gamers. And I think the big distinction is whether you value intrinsic vs. extrinsic motivation.

My mentor teacher is very much of the so-called "direct instruction" style, which involves what I suspect most people who could possibly be reading this would be familiar with: lecture with worksheets and quizzes/tests. She had the students listen to us lecture, taking notes as we went, and then they would complete a worksheet. Some days the students would have to complete a pre-written outline based on the textbook chapter. Each day was basically the same, if an assignment wasn't due in class then it would be due the next class. There were the occasional oddball assignments, as well as a couple foldables.⁶ Tests and quizzes were all multiple choice. This style of teaching does not encourage, nor reward intrinsic motivation. If you ever felt bored out of your skull in school it was probably because this is essentially the educational philosophy that comes from the dawn of the industrial revolution where we had to train workers to pull a lever over and over again for sixteen hours a day, like I alluded to earlier. The students sit in rows, silently filling out their menial paperwork, getting graded on their ability to accurately recall meaningless information of which they have no real understanding. There is no incentive to question the information, and actually that is undesirable because that would eat up class time which we can further use to force feed them this meaningless dreck. I know I'm only a student teacher, and my goals now are lofty and unburdened by the real necessity of teaching as my profession, but I envision my classroom as a place where I give students the tools to perform their own analysis of the world, whether through a historical, economic, or political lens. I am not interested in the regurgitation of my beliefs, or the state standards, but in giving them actionable information and tools to navigate life.

Similarly, I don't want my players to be passive observers of my created nonsense. I do put a lot of effort into crafting the setting of the game, but that is my "lonely fun" and I don't expect that the players at my table are going to engage with it the same way. I have talked at length about the "ad libs" approach that I think is the major problem with trad gaming, and I think a corollary to that is that if the players expect that the GM is going to spoon feed them the next episode of the story on game night then they're not going to take the reins for themselves. I am never going to say that anyone is playing the game the wrong way, partly because it is just a game, but also because I know for a fact that it can be a lot of fun; I will however go out on a limb here and say that I think this is completely wrongheaded when it comes to education, but that is definitively outside the scope of this blog.

Learning as Play

So what does roleplaying have to do with teaching, outside of vague metaphorical similarities? For one thing, it is an observed phenomenon across the entire animal kingdom that play is a method of instruction. Animals learn to hunt, socialize, groom, build shelter, and more through play. Human children learn a lot of social skills through play. It is an integral part of learning before kids ever set foot in a classroom. Psychology tells us that while the brain dos lose some plasticity with age, it never loses the capacity to learn. Many people since the dawn of the hobby, and probably in the unrecorded pre-history before 1974, have had very meaningful experiences with roleplaying games. I mean, the roots of what would go on to become OD&D can be found in kriegsspiel, a practice meant to teach military officers how to deliver effective orders. Diplomacy was used by Kissinger to teach realpolitik to his minions during the Cold War. My Methods professor was telling us about that game she runs, and showed us video of a real diplomatic negotiation between two groups of students from her actual class and they were genuinely emotionally invested in what was going on...and class wasn't even in session!

Roleplaying specifically, however, is unique in that it allows someone to live another life. There have been studies that have shown that RPGs can help children better develop their social skills, as they can experiment both in-character and with concepts such as navigating a social contract -- and with the case of gaming the contract is sometimes very explicitly written into the rules.⁷ Gamification is incredibly strong. I have tried it somewhat with my class so far and it has really motivated them to go above and beyond. There's a reason why stores have all adopted a points system, complete with levels that you advance through much akin to XP, as I alluded to earlier. Some of the most memorable lessons I ever had in school were gamified. There is a lot of fascinating research on this topic, and all of it points to the fact that gamification works incredibly well.

Conclusion

If this is true, then that means that, as far as I can tell, someone who is an effective Game-master could almost as easily pivot from running a dungeon delve to running an immersive simulation that teaches students how a market works. Vice-versa, an engaging teacher who frequently employs gamification could just as easy run something like Stonehell or Arden Vul. This is also why I appreciated my Methods class so much because the class was just as much about thinking about why we use the methods we do as it was teaching us those methods, and that has been my approach to game-mastery as well. I think that any gamer who has engaged with a game for a long enough period of time, even when it comes to video games, will start to think of ways they wished it worked instead of how it actually does. That's probably why modding is so hot in games that are violently mediocre. But I think that this tendency to want to improve games speaks to a wider part of our psyche, something that drives us towards games as an illuminating experience. What exactly that is, I'm not sure but it's definitely been fascinating to ruminate on.

Anyway, that was a very long post so I think I'll leave it at that. I have more or less completed the character creation portion of Covenant & Empire at this point, so expect my next post to be on that. If anything I talked about is intriguing to you, feel free to pierce the veil of Strages and find me on Discord⁵ or comment/DM me on Bluesky. Until next time, keep your eyes on the skies.

Footnotes