Am I ready?

Welcome Everyone to Sol’s Roles, today I’m going to lay down some wisdom about being a first time game master.

If you’ve ever thought about starting a new game or campaign you will know the feeling of uncertainty that comes with stepping into that critical role.  You’ve maybe never played before, aren’t 100% confident in the system and maybe some of your players know the game better than you do!  Good news?  Not a single bit of that matters.

If you don’t know every rule in the game, have never played before, and have no idea what to expect from the game then congratulations! You are starting this journey on the same footing as every single other person who has ever tried to wrangle a half dozen of their friends around the table to throw math rocks.

The first thing to realize is that everybody makes mistakes and nobody starts off perfect. Game designers, famous roleplayers, even that annoying rules lawyer! Every single one has made (and will make many more) a rules mistake or had to look something up. Understand that and allow yourself to make mistakes with grace and you will be doing yourself the best sort of kindness..

The second thing to realize is that your prior experience with playing the game may have little bearing on the way that you run the game yourself. Being a player is one thing, being the person responsible for the game is a bit different. If you’ve never even played? All the better! You will often see a sort of blindness to innovation in people that have been playing for a long time. As a novice you’re going to make mistakes in new and exciting ways, and you’re going to also innovate in ways others can’t predict. 

Your inexperience is a feature, not a bug!

Experience with the game system is probably the least critical skill that you could need.  Humility, willingness to grow and experiment, social skills, imagination, adaptability, a good sense of humor, communication skills.  Those are really the keys to running a game. Without exaggeration I can say that once you’ve got a handle on those you can sit down with a completely new game and group and run a satisfying game.

So how do you hone those skills? The game table is one way to hone them, in fact it’s a great way to develop a lot of skills useful outside of gaming. So go ahead and get started already!To get those skills developed though you really can’t beat humility and honest communication. If you can bring those to the table everything else will sort itself out.

So if you are asking yourself if you are ready to run a game, if you are ready to be a game master or dungeon master…  Yeah buddy, yeah you are. You’re as ready as Gary Gygax or Matt Mercer or anyone else was. 

In further articles here I will be writing more about developing those soft skills and how to bridge the gap between the game table and the rest of your life. So if you liked this teaser article, click the links to follow and support me and comment below if you are new!