Sifting from the Stream of Knowledge

Growing Edges and GMing Exercises

Growing Edges

There are a lot of different aspects of being a GM - a lot of different valuable skills: setting up a good adventure structure, fun and challenging encounter design, vivid descriptions, engaging NPC dialogue, session pacing, effectively communicating key information, etc. When we first start out, we might have a good starting point for some of these based on our past experience and natural inclinations - but nobody starts great at all of them! GMing is a craft; we get better with practice and experience. However, I think it is easy to get overwhelmed seeing all these different areas where we could/should be improving - we see the kind of GM we want to be (whatever that is for our preferred style) and the big gap between that and where we are. It can be daunting to see the scope of that, and difficult to see a reasonable journey from here to there.

When I first got back into D&D during COVID, what I found helpful was to focus in on just one thing I wanted to work on in any given session. I'd even write it at the top of my notes: "use NPC motivations," "work on monster tactics," "help the players do creative problem solving," etc. It helped that I was teaching all my players (including a few kids) how to play D&D - I was trying to be intentional about what I was teaching them in each session, which naturally gave me some structure for what to focus on in developing my own skills.

The phrase that captures this idea for me is the concept of "growing edges" that I picked up a number of years ago when my wife was training to be a hospital chaplain. As you might imagine, being a chaplain and helping people through what is probably one of the hardest days in their life is really challenging! It also draws on many different skills, always throws you new surprises, and you can't possibly be good at everything that is important right from the start. My wife's mentor said that they way to get better at it is like the way a seedling grows into a tree: you pick one or two areas to focus on, and each day you try to grow them a little bit past where you are. You do it with intention and reflection - and a healthy amount of giving yourself patience and grace! You try to focus much more on how you've improved on where you've been, and trust that over time all those little changes will add up and get you where you want to go. It also emphasizes that you never stop growing! There is always something you can get a little bit better at, some new thing to try out.

What I like about this idea is that it feels like a really good balance between comfort and challenge. I don't get a ton of time to game (when things are going well I've got one game a week), and I want to make sure that I and my players have fun when we do get to play! However, I know that I can only ever get better if I get outside my comfort zone at least a little bit. So, if I am focusing in on just one area to stretch myself, that means that for the rest of it I'm relying on the skills and habits that I already know work to make a reasonably fun session. Maybe this one scene with the overly ambitious NPC concept will fall flat - but that's only going to be 30 minutes of the session. If I'm doing my usual approach for the rest, it will all work out and still be a good session. The safety net of everything else being "what's working for me right now" can make it easier to try something new without it being too risky or too stressful - this is still supposed to be a fun hobby!

GMing Exercises

As we are trying to work on our growing edges and work on developing a particular capability, it can be helpful to have some specific and focused ways to practice certain skills. Our biggest moments of growth will come from trying out these new skills in a session, but sometimes we can develop these skills in between sessions as well. This will often make those times at the table work better, but also can have direct benefits from really zooming in on exactly the thing we're trying to grow.

Helping Other GMs Brainstorm

My favorite way to practice my GMing skills is to help out other GMs with their games. We have a GM's Workshop channel on the Sly Flourish Discord, and people will often post questions or problems they've got for their upcoming session. This is one of my favorite places to hang out, offering my ideas and suggestions. It is the best example of the kind of helpful and supportive community that we've developed, and it is very rewarding to see someone find your suggestions useful. However, I think there are also some benefits of this as a way to practice your own GMing skills:

As fun as this kind of collaborative brainstorming is - it isn't necessarily going to be focused on any particular area that might be your "growing edge." One thing I've been keeping an eye out for as I watch RPG videos and read RPG blogs are ideas for specific and targeting GMing exercises. I've found a few that are interesting that I might try to incorporate more. I'm going to describe the main idea here, but I encourage you to watch/read the original source - they have a lot more details and useful examples.

Edariad: Exercises Borrowed From Other Creative Disciplines

Edariad has a really nice video with seven exercises that he borrowed from other creative disciplines and then adapted to RPGs. He also talks about some of the general principles that explain why they are effective: (i) constraints enhance creativity, (ii) time pressure quiets your inner critic, and (iii) creative skills benefit from deliberate practice (structured training with immediate feedback) just like other skills. Here are the exercises (and the source discipline):

  1. Crazy Eights (Design Thinking): Take a problem and give yourself 8 minutes to come up with 8 solutions. Edariad suggests using this to come up with adventure hooks, reacting to surprise player choices, or ways the PCs could learn something important. Edariad notes that research shows your initial ideas are usually just the most accessible ones in your memory, so you want to push yourself past those to get to the more interesting ones. This also has a lot in common with Mike Shea's advice to write lists of ten things that might be useful (locations, encounters, NPCs, etc.) - where he notes that the last couple are usually the ones that really stretch your creativity.
  2. The Constraint Box (Jazz): The goal of this exercise is to get you out of a rut of always making the same kind of choice. In jazz this involves improvising a solo with a very tight constraint (like only using a handful of notes). Edariad suggests that for RPGs you pick an area you want to work on (e.g. location descriptions) and force yourself to do it with a strong constraint (e.g. only use three specific sensory words). I would probably pull those sensory words from a spark table to really get outside the easy descriptors.
  3. Motivic Development (Music): The idea here is to take one core idea and use that idea to keep building and elaborating (like basing a whole solo off of a short musical phrase). For RPGs, Edariad suggests trying what he calls "core image threading" - take one image (like a rusted key with a missing tooth) and then asking a bunch of world-building questions that transform and extend the idea (what is the key for, how did the rust happen, who are some NPCs tied the to key, etc.). He argues that this will help you develop patterns of connection that you can use later in your improvisations.
  4. Status Numbers (Improv Theater): The goal here is to develop a wider range of NPC personalities that we can draw on. You take a deck of cards, and the value of the card you draw determines the status (low vs high) of the character you're going to practice roleplaying - with a focus on communicating that status through behavior alone. He notes that "status" isn't about social status, but about how the character expects to be treated by others. For example, a high status character holds control of the conversation (knowing people will listen and not interrupt), make strong eye contact, assumes others will cooperate, etc. A low status character might fidget, cut off their own sentences to signal self-doubt, avoid eye contact, etc. He argues that counter-stereotype characters (like a low status prince) can be the best; so here I might also use a random table of NPC professions or backgrounds to set up those contrasts. He also suggests trying to have a status shift (due to some event or complication) for increased drama.
  5. Decision Point Drill (Sports Science): This is trying to capture the idea of athletes reviewing game film, like pausing a play and asking the QB to pick what receiver is the best option. Edariad says that this helps with skills that are useful to GMs: pattern recognition, understanding complex situations and predicting what will happen next. His suggestion for RPGs is to use an episode of an Actual Play show, pausing when a player does something surprising and then give yourself 30 seconds to come up with three possible GM responses (and make sure at least one option is something you'd normally never do, to stretch yourself). The point is not to guess exactly what the GM of the AP did, but expand your set of situation-response patterns.
  6. Connect the Story (Writing): This exercise is about practicing tying in past events/elements to make them feel cohesive and like they were all planned to lead up to the next story beat. Take five random story elements (a location, an object, a character trait, a sensory detail and a small bit of dialogue). Then give yourself ten minutes to write a scene to incorporate and connect the story elements. This helps with the commong GMing practice of retroactively attaching meaning to things from past sessions to tie things together.
  7. One-Page Designs (Game Design): While the other exercises were focused primarily on improvisation, this one is more about our prep. The goal is to figure out how to condense the most important things you need to communicate about your game's design onto a single page (which actually connects for my to my friends' advice for giving a presentation: "understand your idea deeply, so you can explain it simply"). For RPGs, Edariad suggests applying that to a situation in your game (like a complex political intrigue). This doesn't have to be prose - it could be a diagram showing the relationships between key NPCs and their motivations. Lazy GM-style Secrets and Clues is also a good version of this: taking whatever situation you have planned for your session and boiling down the "what's going on" into ten nuggets of information that the PCs could learn to understand things.

Tales Arcane: Three Improv Exercises

Tales Arcane has a similar video where he suggests three exercise of a similar "take 10-15 minutes to work on X" format. They are also focused primarily on developing improvisational skills, although with a somewhat different emphasis. He emphasizes that the goal is less about the outputs of the exercise themselves being good, rather to train your mental muscles to help you improvise during the session.

Glorified Notepad: Dungeon-focused Training Exercises

Glorified Notepad suggests a number of ways to have focused practice at the many different aspects of running a dungeon well, particularly around (a) having useful and informative descriptions and (b) creating interesting situations. They suggest that you pick a dungeon that you are not too familiar with and then practice making descriptions and situations out of the keyed information:

Descriptions

Situations

Testing Out Some Exercises

I had a bit of time earlier this week on a flight, so I thought I might try out some of these exercises. As I've been learning on my recent physical fitness journey, exercise is most likely to happen when you can easily work it in to the realities of your life and schedule. Most of these exercises are pitched as "take ten minutes", which is the perfect bite-sized activity to do on a plane. I decided to take one or two from each person.

#GMing-exercises #explore-my-hoard