Building Foundations 3: Taxonomy of Game Master fun

This post is part of a series of posts on foundations of game mastering.

As usual, if you are confused about any terms, make sure to check out the glossary, and if you are looking for other posts, check out the blog map.

Now that we’ve outlined the types of fun that players have, it’s time to talk about the fun the GM can have. There will be a decent amount of overlap here, but some types of fun will be entirely unique. Furthermore, because of a delicate position that the GM is in, some types of fun they have could clash with the players, which can lead to a critical problem - complete breakdown of the gaming group. As I’ve discussed in the first post of the series, this is a scenario that should be avoided if at all possible.

Imagine that GM can derive fun out of five aspects, and one of them clashes with the players: it does no good for the GM to go all in on all five aspects if the group breaks within a month, because then they will derive no fun out of the other four afterwards. 

I’ll first talk about the types of fun that are the same as player fun. Then I’ll move on to types of fun that are, typically, unique to a GM. I’ll use the names of the types I used in the previous post, so that cross-referencing should be easy. I’ll group the types by the degree to which they may lead to problems.

First up: types that present no real problems. In my opinion, Improvisation, Immersion(Imagination), Systems(Observation), Storytelling(Collaborative storytelling), Storytelling(Character tropes), Chatting, People watching, Tactics, Art and Emotion all fall into this group. GM will necessarily have to improvise in response to player actions, and they will have to imagine the scenes they are describing, talk with the players, and perform tactical combat (just as the other side of the engagement). Using PNP games as inspiration for art is also a staple of GMing.

Systems(Disruption) deserves a special mention here. Obviously, as a GM, you are the one setting up the systems and so putting spokes in wheels would not really seem to make sense. However, there are two cases where it can make sense. First of all, you can derive enjoyment from seeing the players put spokes in your own wheels. If you redirect this emotion from being about “I wonder how I can break this” to “I wonder how these guys will break this”, it is very compatible with being a GM.

Second method is to take the world from someone else - e.g. another GM or a publisher - and see how you can break it. I may talk more about this when I talk about worldbuilding methods.

Next we have the types that are either very hard to achieve, or straight up do not make sense as a GM. Growth, Puzzles, Objectives, Immersion(Anthropology), Storytelling(Plot) all fall into this group(but stay tuned for future posts where I show how you can do this anyways).

1. Growth and Objectives: as a player, you are typically tied to a single character or group, while as a GM you control the entire world. There is no central “locus” for you to grow or to achieve objectives around: the only real enjoyment you can derive here is from seeing the players do it, which is not the same.

2. Puzzles and Immersion(Anthropology): as a GM, you are the one setting up puzzles in dungeons and during investigations, and designing cultures and geography. You can’t very much try to solve a puzzle when you already know a solution, can you? And you can hardly derive enjoyment from re-learning facts you already know.

3. Storytelling(Plot): as a GM, you write the plot. There is great enjoyment to be derived from this, but it is not the same type as that of experiencing the plot as a player (see below)

Next up we have types of fun that may, but do not necessarily, lead to clashes with the players:

1. Puzzles(Exploits): This is the most harmless of the types. Generally, there is no problem with GM enjoying finding exploits in the rules: In fact, doing so can be very good for the game, as potential problems can be home-brewed away before they appear at the table. There is a potential for a clash, however, in several areas.

   1. First of all, if other players derive enjoyment from finding exploits, they may feel like you are “stealing their thunder” if you do it first.

   2. Secondly, due to the nature of exploits in PNP RPGs, a lot of them offer massive gains in combat or utility power. If GM uses an exploit in combat on an opposing NPC, players who like tactical combat may feel that the jump in power from a typical enemy NPC without exploits is “unfair”. Ones who do not enjoy the combat may be stumped enough that they fail to find a solution to a combat encounter at all.

   3. Similarly, if an exploit is used to give an enemy massive out-of-combat power, this may be seen as unfair.

2. Respect: This is another tricky one. Potentially, there is nothing wrong with GM deriving enjoyment from players respecting their GMing abilities. However, this may turn into an unhealthy dynamic if GM performs actions in order to force this respect: for example, trying to somehow “awe” the players by stomping them in a combat encounter. In general, I’d advise to be aware of this potential problem, and I think that should solve most of the issues with it.

3. Riling up: Just like Respect, this is tricky. It can be part of a healthy dynamic between the GM and the players, but can also go overboard very quickly. Use your own judgement.

4. Storytelling(Scripts): This source of fun for a GM is fine if it is limited to small, self-contained scenes: Players will not (typically) stop you from narrating a villain preparing for an attack, or an NPC doing something. However, longer duration scripts can lead to problems, especially if the players do not agree with your vision. You are essentially trying to wrestle away narrative control from them, and narrative control is key to a whole set of ways that players have fun. Degree to which this will lead to problems for you depends on the amount and frequency of control being taken away, as well as on the degree to which your player group cares about this.

A special case in this group is Escapism: in my opinion it leads to problems often enough to deserve it’s own category. 

1. Power fantasy: This one is especially famous. In my opinion, if you heard about some GMPC story that ended badly, or about GM flipping out and killing the party - this emotion was probably to blame. In my opinion, power fantasy relies on a subconscious feeling of challenge being stomped: not just overcome with difficulty, but obliterated with certainty so that there is no doubt who is the real top dog winner. But therein lies the problem: GM has ultimate control over the entire fantasy world, and so any challenge within that world would be necessarily self-imposed. This, in my opinion, puts a hole in most attempts to get the power fantasy feeling going. There is one source of challenge, however, that isn’t self-imposed: the players. So the easiest way for GM to derive the power fantasy feelings is to trounce _the players_ in a way that leaves no real questions about who is stronger. This obviously is a source of potential problems. Even if the GM directs the power fantasy against their own world (by using an NPC (likely GMPC), for example) some problems still remain: amount of spotlight is necessarily limited, so if GM is taking it up by exercising their power fantasy they are not letting players exercise their power fantasy, if any. 

2. Political power fantasy: This one, however, is much less problematic. In fact, I would say that the GMing process almost naturally fulfills this niche: as a GM, you get to control how the entire world develops, which is a very similar desire to what drives political power fantasy. Furthermore, due to how broad the political scene potentially is, you should be capable of sharing the spotlight with the players without any issue. And lastly, in my experience, most players do not engage with this kind of fantasy anyways.

Now we can talk about the kinds of fun that are (mostly) unique to GMs:

1. Worldbuilding - first up, we have the enjoyment that comes from putting a world together. This is, in a lot of ways, the inverse of Immersion(Anthropology): instead of learning facts about the world, you create them. This process can be intensely enjoyable for some people - setting up a self-consistent world can be something like designing a rube goldberg machine where every part fits together perfectly, and none is out of place. See also: Systems(Observation).

2. Researching - a complement to Worldbuilding, this comes from the enjoyment of learning all sorts of related real-life subjects that have to do with worldbuilding (or Plotting, or Design, see below). This is an analog of Immersion(Anthropology) for the GM: instead of learning about the fictional world, they learn about the real one, and translate that knowledge into fiction.

3. Design - this group is related to Worldbuilding in concept, but is much more specific. Where Worldbuilding has to do with broad design decisions about the world, Design has to do with more specific decisions of much smaller elements of it.

   1. Tactical Design - this has to do with a complement to Puzzles(Tactics) enjoyment. Someone has to set up the encounter, and that someone is the GM. Traps, dungeons, and clever positioning of monsters go here. This enjoyment, in my opinion, is the closest to conventional video game design out there.

   2. Environmental Design - designing castles, cities and dungeons falls here. This is something halfway between tactical design and classical environmental storytelling - partly you are designing an environment as a real place where people lived, and partly you are designing it to provide interesting possibilities for combat, sneaking, and character interactions. 

   3. Character design - this is a type of fun very similar to player’s character building, but due to GM designing dozens of characters, this imposes unique limitations on the design process, ones that some GMs find entertaining.

4. Plotting - this is the kind of fun that comes from designing a story for the characters to go through - setting up the bad guys, their motivations and resources, and then figuring out how they are going to use those resources to accomplish their objectives. A similar kind of fun comes from writing a book, but the resulting notes do not have to go through editing rounds - nobody will see them besides the GM - and the product has to be more flexible to accommodate for sticks players will be throwing into the gears.

5. Storytelling - this is a complement to Plotting, and the fun you have when you convey your story to the players, through various scenes and activities. It is tightly related to other kinds of storytelling fun that the players might have, with the crucial difference being the level of control you have over the proceedings.

With this, we’ve covered all kinds of fun that are had by everyone engaged in PNP RPGs. Next time, I’ll look at the other side of the coin: the unfun, things that can significantly reduce someone’s enjoyment of the game. After that, we’ll have everything we need to finally discuss how to put these theories into practice: the session zero.

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