Put your fun first

This is a little sidetrack from the series of posts outlining the foundations of game mastering, starting with Building foundations 1.

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.

But before we can talk about what fun means, we must first address a concern some people surely might have. In the previous post I said that my first and foremost concern as a GM is my own fun. Some of you are no doubt objecting to this - what if your first concern are your players instead? Should you throw the rest of this blog out, as it is clearly based on a premise incompatible with your style?

Well, hold your horses. First of all, even if you switch the first two priorities around, then the majority of strategies and tools which will be described in this blog will still work for you. You may need to adjust some things, but you will not be starting from scratch.

Secondly, I put it to you that you should hold your fun as a pretty high priority. The reason for that is simple: if you don't, the game will inevitably collapse. This is an argument I haven’t seen elsewhere, and I hope it will be convincing to some of you.

To have a pen and paper game you need two critical things: a GM, and at least one player. Dice, miniatures, GM screen, map - all of that is secondary. You can make do without a GM screen: minimize the number of information you need to think of, and you can hold it all in your head. You can make it work without a map: theater of imagination works fine. Planning and worldbuilding are also secondary: blatantly steal from settings you have read and your players haven’t, and you can “do worldbuilding” on the fly. You can even skip dice, practically the main symbol of PNP games everywhere. But if your GM quits, and you can't find a new one, the game dies. If all your players quit, and you can't find new ones, the game also dies. These are the only two critical components.

Side note: How can you skip dice?

We'll talk more about the purpose of dice in a later post, but the basics are like this: dice exist for two main purposes, to introduce randomness into the action and to keep conflict resolution honest. Without randomness in the story, it is easy for the game to fall into completely trope - driven play and become predictable and boring. Without randomness in conflict resolution, any conflict can become a kindergarten-level "I hit you with my laser" "no i block with my mega shield" "no you" "no you" sort of exchange, which is obviously undesirable. The only question is how to introduce randomness into the game without any dice?

This is very simple. Let's say that your system works on a d20 basis (you need to roll a 20-sided die for most things). To "roll a die" without rolling a die, GM thinks of a number between 1 and 20. Player does the same. Then they announce their numbers at the same time. Numbers are added together, and if the sum is above 20, you subtract 20. Resulting number is what you "rolled".

Since neither player nor GM can realistically guess what number the other is thinking, the result is completely unpredictable for both of them. "Unpredictable" is exactly what we mean when we say "random": the desired result of introducing randomness had been achieved.

If you disagree with this definition of randomness, stick around for posts about Bayesian probability theory.

These two critical components lead to three critical questions:

1. How easy it is to find a replacement GM and a replacement player group?

2. How easy it is to cause a GM to quit?

3. How easy it is to cause players to quit?

Well, from my experience, almost everyone who hears about PNP gaming wants to at least try playing it, and out of people who had played it before, almost everyone is willing to play. When you make a post about starting a new campaign on the dedicated forums, you can easily get dozens of high quality applications from players within days. Finding new players is fairly easy, so they are not a critical component to keep the game running.

Finding a new GM, however, is typically very hard: at a guess, I would say maybe 1 out of 10 or even 1 out of 20 people is willing to be a GM. Talk to any PNP veteran: they either have a group they have been running with for ages, where a single person masters all games, or they will complain about it being hard to find a GM. I almost guarantee this.

Say that you need 4 players for a game: this still means that finding a GM is going to be two to five times harder than finding an entire group that is willing to run. The reason for this ties into the next two questions: how easy it is to cause people to quit?

Well, I put it to you that people quit when they feel the game isn't worth their time in terms of enjoyment per hour spent. And who puts more time into the game? Generally, the GM. GM has to prepare plot, draw maps, think of the NPCs, balance encounters, and do all sorts of work. Players, largely, just need to show up and roleplay their characters in the moment. If the moment-to-moment gameplay is enjoyable enough, players will be satisfied: for them the game is basically purely positive sum. But a GM has to put all the work to prepare this: if the work is hard, and the resulting enjoyment isn't high, it is incredibly easy for the GM to burn out, start skipping sessions, and finally break the game apart.

This is why I think GM has to put their enjoyment above the enjoyment of the players. If they don't, chances are the game will collapse when GM doesn’t feel like preparing things for adventures the players want to have.

Of course, this doesn’t mean the GM has to be some kind of despot ruling over the players: obviously not. Just because they have to put their fun first doesn’t mean that that fun has to involve killing player characters by dropping rocks on them. In fact, as we will see in the next article, plenty of ways of having fun are not zero-sum: GM doesn’t have to sacrifice fun for the players in order to have fun themselves. However, this doesn’t change the overall principle: if the GM doesn’t put their fun first, they are risking the game falling apart due to their own burnout.