When I was in my early 20’s, I was a bit of a try-hard as gamemaster. There’s a lot of reasons why (which might be fodder for a separate post), but it boiled down to the fact I wanted to sit down at the table with everything mapped out in detail. I thought that would create a better experience for the players, and a more engaging and realistic world.
Essentially, I wanted to write a publishable campaign setting during my initial planning. And that’s not actually useful—you only need the notes you need to run the game. (Hat tip to Mike Shea at SlyFlourish for putting into words a lesson I learned too late.)
You only need to focus in detail on the things in front of your players; as you get further out, you can leave plans fuzzier and half-finished. (This is often a great way to brainstorm future story elements—create the vague shape or theme first, and then watch them take form as you chew on them over the coming weeks.)
In my experience, this isn’t simply a question of how to organize your notes and GM prep, it’s a deeper philosophical question: what are you doing when you’re gamemastering?
My original approach ended up being very simulationist. I was a very literal kid (which I’ve grown out of to some degree); I thought this was the key to making good art, telling good stories, building good game rules and mechanics. If I’m honest, I thought it was required to be a fair gamemaster and a good, earnest person in general.
I don’t want to throw the baby out with the bathwater here; there’s something to this view. You can definitely tell better stories at the table when you think through plot elements using real-world understandings and experience. You can’t “yes, and” your way into certain story elements, like a plausible long-term history for your game world.
But planning your game as if you’re writing a history textbook or an encyclopedia doesn’t necessarily make for a compelling experience at the table. You spend a lot of time on details that you will never use (or, more likely, you stall out before you have a usable product trying to fill in all those little details). If you’re not careful, it can lead to a static world where you control the narrative focus and the flow of events, and if you’re lucky, your party enjoys the choices you’ve made (and doesn’t completely ruin your plans by making a choice you didn’t foresee).
This sort of gamemastering feels safe and certain. To prove it is done in good faith, it has the receipts and shows its work. We aren’t making choices to intentionally screw over the players. We can’t be caught by surprise—which means we never have to admit we were caught by surprise and let the players down! We have thought out every detail away from the table (where we can concentrate on writing, rather than trying to invent details on-the-fly). But it shatters the moment things go off the rails.
Which brings me to the title of this post: gamemastering is actually a magic trick, not writing an encyclopedia or designing a simulation.
When you see a magician palm a coin, or produce a particular card from a deck, you know it’s not real. But if the magician is doing their job well, you don’t care (outside of curiosity). You’re lost in suspension of disbelief.
To achieve this illusion, the magician doesn’t play fair. Maybe they’re using a fake deck of cards or some other device created specifically for the trick. But more than anything else, the magician is playing with your attention. Sometimes the trick itself isn’t especially smooth, complicated, or well-executed—it’s hidden by a distraction that holds your attention somewhere else. Creating the distraction is the real trick.
So it is with running a good TTRPG campaign.
You don’t have to have your world perfectly planned out, or everything decided in advance. All you need is enough detail to be able to improv. If you do your job well, players won’t know what you made up on the spot and what you had been considering for weeks. (And even the details you’re considering weeks in advance can evolve and change as you chew on them.)
You don’t have to simulate every detail that’s happening off-camera, you just have to provide detail in areas where players are paying attention. Obviously, you should strive for some realism here—what can NPCs know, how can they know it, how fast can they act on it (I’ll talk about one way I do that in a future post). But the only details that matter to the players are the ones they’re focusing on—and, conveniently, if you’re letting your players make decisions that affect your world, that’s going to give them a sense of agency.
The World’s Greatest Con podcast by Brian Brushwood (of Modern Rogue fame, also a stage magician) might be a good source of inspiration here. The first season focuses on Operation Mincemeat, where the Allies used a carefully-crafted fake persona to slip some misinformation to the Axis. Knowing how to provide the right tableau of details in the right places will encourage people to engage in their own meaning-making, selecting the pieces that work for them in the moment.
Here’s where this advice gets tricky: many of the techniques that a stage magician are similar to those used by con men. Thinking of your game like a magic trick isn’t a license to fake your players out, to screw them over, to constantly give them the worst possible outcome, all the while pretending it’s what you had planned all along1 . A good TTRPG group requires trust in every direction, and you can’t break that trust (as either a GM or a player) without ruining the experience. You need to use these techniques to give them satisfying experiences for their character arcs as well as create tension. Once again, like a stage magician, you are creating an experience, and it’s all about creating the right one.
1 As an aside, I stole the “magic trick” analogy from an episode of You Have Permission about church worship music. The guest on this episode argued that such music can provide a helpful and cathartic emotional experience—but to create that experience honestly and ethically, you need to be open with your audience about the techniques you’re using. To do otherwise risks setting yourself up as a supernatural authority.
In the same way, I think it’s helpful to let your players know that sometimes you’re making things up as you go along, rather than a master storyteller who penned everything out at the outset. This can hopefully lead to discussion about what’s happening in game and how the players (not the characters) feel about it. I don’t have to worry as much about letting people down (and thus maybe having my game fizzle) if I’m open to discussion about what’s not working.