Hello ANIM crew,
I recently saw your post about RPGs and artistic merit - and there was an addendum at the bottom talking about how 5e actively damages GMing and playing and ingrains bad habits and mindsets. It’s something I’ve been struggling with myself (as someone who really only learned to GM on 5e). What would you say is the best way to go about unlearning 5e?
I don’t know if I can give this an answer to the fullest possible extent, but I think I can rapid-fire a few things.
Most of this advice is going to be most applicable to running “trad” or “OSR” “challenge” games, which D&D and the vast majority of other TTRPGs fall into even if their designers don’t fully realize it. (Like how VtM really seems to bill itself as a story game but RAW it really wants to be something more like a dungeon crawler.)
Read the rules and play by them.
Not all games are as broken as D&D5e. (D&D5e is not even as broken as most people think it is, it is just mediocre at being a fantasy combat game and bad at everything else it isn't built for.) You will often find that the rules for other TTRPGs are much easier to memorize and reference than D&D5e, and that playing by the pretty strictly is easy and fun.
Don’t be a “magician,” check the rulebook.
Get used to just pausing the game for a couple minutes to look up a rule, get the players to help you. Treat it like an open-book test. Play the game with the rulebook open on the table on or as a PDF or something. Don’t try to impress anyone with the “smoothness” or “cinematicness” of the game you are running. If you and the players are not well versed in the rules of a given game, this can be a little rocky at first, but you’ll get better at memorizing and searching the rulebook over time so these pauses will get shorter and less frequent the more sessions you play.
Be a ref, not a storyteller.
This is kinda just a continuation of the previous point. No TTRPG is perfect, they will often fail to account for edge cases and certain situations in their rules, and may even have “glitches” where a rule played strictly RAW will result in outcomes not intended by the game designers. When this happens it is your job as GM to make a reasonable and fair call on how that rule is going to be played, like the ref in a sports game. Remember that the ref in a sports game is not tasked with making up new rules or overriding existing-and-unambiguous ones to favor the players. As a GM you should be rooting for the PCs, but not engineering their victory. If they lose they lose, even if that means the “story” ends or goes in an unexpected direction. (In case it needs to be said, the GM should also not be engineering the defeat of the party beyond just creating/playing out hostile NPCs and environments that have their own motivations counter to the goals of the party. Don’t make spontaneous traps materialize just because the PCs are winning too much.)
NEVER fudge rolls, lie about stats/dice, or anything else like that.
Demand respect.
Make players pay attention and actually play the game. Even if you are following the various tips here and thus significantly lightening the workload on yourself, you are still putting in a lot of effort to run this game for them. If they’re on their phones, not taking it seriously, etc., tell them that you don’t want to prep and run this game for them if they’re not even going to try to engage with it.
Players must know their characters’ rules, and ideally more.
It’s your job to play all the NPCs, not the PCs. It is the bare minimum for your players to have read the rules that pertain to their characters and those characters’ abilities and stats. Of course nobody is perfect, but if you’re several sessions in and a player still doesn’t know how to play their character at all, circle back to the “demand respect” heading.
Ideally, players should know the rules as well as the GM knows them, but that is such a radical idea in most TTRPG spaces that it can be kinda hard to ask for.
Oh also I'm just tacking this on here: players should build characters that fit the setting and situation, not the other way around. If you’re playing a fantasy combat game, they should not be presenting you with a pacifist baker, they should be presenting you with a warrior who is willing to go sword-to-sword with the enemy, and even more importantly willing to do it in the context that the situation asks for. If it’s a dungeon crawl, for instance, the player should be presenting you with a PC who either wants to go into that dungeon, or is at least easily motivated by the allure of the treasure that might be down there or the desire to save the kidnapped princess or whatever else.
Write situations, not plots.
Remember you’re a ref and a facilitator, not a storyteller, and challenge-based TTRPGs almost universally actively resist consistently producing conventional plots and character arcs. This is not a flaw, and it is not your job to “fix” this. You do not need to be writing a plot, you need to be writing a situation.
Example of a plot:
The PCs will first go to the tavern and witness the Bad Guy give his evil speech and then kidnap the Victims. They will have particular witty dialogue with him before he gets away coolly and they are unable to stop him. Then they will go to the wizard’s tower to meet the wizard who will become their friend and teleport them into the Bad Guy’s lair, where they will have a specific encounter with the Guard Captain who will defeat them and lock them in a cell. They will overhear specific dialogue in the cell that makes them sympathize with the Bad Guy’s tragic backstory. They will break out of the cell by appealing to the conscience of the Minions. Then they will confront the Bad Guy and have an epic battle with him that they can’t win, but once they are nearly defeated, the Bad Guy’s Minions will turn against him and save the party.
Example of a situation:
The party arrives in Town. A barmaid comes running out screaming “Oh won’t someone help! The Bass Guy has just kidnapped the Victims!” (You can probably expect the PCs to pledge to rescue the Victims at this point if you are following the above tips and telling players to make PCs that fit the setting and are easily motivated by the “hooks” of the adventure.)
The party can find out some clues about the location of the Lair by asking various NPCs.
There is a wizard tower where a wizard lives and he might be able to be convinced to teleport the party into the Lair.
There is a front entrance to the Lair they could try to fight their way through once they find it.
There is a back entrance to the lair they could try and sneak through once they find it.
Any number of other plans might work based on the rules of the game and cleverness of the PCs, such as disguising themselves to walk past the guards at the front, using a spell to fly over the walls, etc.
Once inside, instead of specific encounters that have preplanned outcomes, there’s just guards and minions with set stats in locations where it makes sense for them to be, and who will do what it makes sense for them to do in response to the actions of the PCs. The PCs might die if they do something stupid like try to fight all the minions at once, it’s up to the dice rolls and their clever actions should be done to the purpose of making it so that they are not taking stupid risks and are not at the mercy of luck or skill that isn't in their favor. It’s up to the PCs and players to do these actions though, not the job of the GM to give them plans or make sure those plans work.
The party may or may not end up directly confronting Bad Guy, and he has his own set stats not just a scripted battle. If he wins, he wins. If they defeat him by the skin of their teeth, great! If they defeat him quickly and unceremoniously by using a spell to make the ceiling collapse on him, that’s also great! Forget “balance,” don’t try to perfectly scale encounters to the levels of the PCs. It is their job to figure out the best way to overcome challenges, even when they can’t win by a straightforward attack. Often it is best to run away, even.
The GM creates a situation, the PCs react to the situation, and then the NPCs react to the PCs. Whatever happens happens, even if it doesn’t produce a conventionally satisfying “story.”
Use adventure modules!
I say “the GM creates a situation,” but that shouldn't necessarily be true, even though disagreeing with that being necessary is another idea that is so radical that you might have a hard time convincing people of it. Anyway, adventure modules are not bad or lazy to use for a GM. Many adventure modules are very very good, others are bad and don’t follow the “make situations, not plots” rule, but these bad ones can still be stripped for parts to make some good open-ended situations out of with less work than coming up with the whole thing yourself.
Scale it down! No, smaller than that!
When creating a situation, do not commit to a gigantic “campaign” that will take 600 sessions to fully play through, keep it small, keep it “episodic.” One dungeon at a time, one mystery at a time, etc.
Don’t aspire to be a Big Budget Actual Play GM.
You should not aspire to be anything like Matt Medcier or any of those other guys. This is not because “they’re professionals who have trained forever and so they’re too good for a hobbiest to expect to be like right away,” it is because they are actors putting on a show for an audience. Big Budget Actual Play is not high-tier TTRPG play, it is TTRPG WWE. It isn’t realistic to the real experience at all, and isn’t meant to be. Trying to be like these GMs will make you a worse GM in your home games, just like trying to do WWE moves will make you a worse fighter in a real fight.
