What is the most important skill a Gamemaster should have?

Click-baity enough for ya? Please bear with me while I’ll try to justify this bombastic post title.

On my second year of film school, our Film Directing professor asked the class a simple question that just stumped us all: “What is the task of the Film Director on the set of a movie?” Now this was in the middle of our second year of film school. We had all already written and directed several short student films. We were all already versed in the process of making a movie, from pre to post-production… and this question just stumped us!
The professor continued: “After all, by the time the film goes to production, everyone on set already knows exactly what their job is, everything has already been thoroughly rehearsed and there is a strict planned schedule. So, what is left for the Director to do on set? Just yell Action?!” Actually, yelling “Action!” was the task of the Assistant Director on many of the sets I’ve been on, so that obviously couldn’t be it. I hope you can see why we were baffled. After several quiet minutes he finally gave up and just told us the answer: “The Director just needs to sit there and watch the scene — the Director’s task is to be the first audience member of the movie.”
What he meant literally, as he explained, was that the director needs to watch and listen as the scene unfolds and let themselves feel. If it’s a comedy, the director should be laughing. If it’s a heart-breaking drama, they should be crying. And if it’s a horror film, they better be horrified. “If the director of the movie doesn’t feel anything”, he continued, “how could they expect anyone else watching the film to feel something?!” Obviously, if the director feels nothing, or feels the wrong thing, then their next task is to figure out how to fix the scene so it does work — meaning, it does convey the right emotion.
That really took all of us by surprise. If the director doesn’t sit, watch and listen to the scene taking place on set, if they don’t really take the time to absorb the scene and feel it, they are neglecting their job.

About a year and a half ago, I started binging live-play roleplaying games, from Critical Role, the Rolling Stones of actual-play RPGs, to lesser known Youtube channels and podcasts of “garage bands” doing their best to entertain. After many hours and hours of watching and listening to these actual-play sessions I finally had a shocking revelation: Listening to the Gamemaster talk is the most boringest part of the game session! Every live-play session usually starts with a long exposition by the GM that is just torture for me to listen to. Every time a new encounter started, I couldn’t wait for the GM to shut up and stop describing the scene, and for the players to start doing their thing. Don’t get me wrong, I watched some amazing GMs, but I was always anxious to see what the PCs would do next. I realized that it was exactly like watching a movie, and the Gamemaster describing the setup felt just like watching a 15-minute sequence of scenery shots. Now, who on earth, except Tarkovsky fans, really finds that fun?! Sorry fellow GMs, people watch movies to see what the main heroes do — not the landscape.

That got me thinking about the way I prepare and run my roleplaying games. I was spending months in study of the history and geography of made-up worlds, reading thousands of pages and preparing dozens of adventures… and all that even before session zero! I believed that would make me the best GM I can be for my audience – the players. By the time we got to our first session though, I was usually already completely burnt out. Furthermore, I was so fixated on my prepared materials that I would become upset if the party did not follow along, and found it hard to modify my plans and improvise during the game sessions themselves. But mostly, I was exhausted, and with a demanding career and a family, spending days on a game (and without actually playing it!) was not an option anymore. Eventually, I got to thinking that, maybe, there is no need for all this. After all, me (the Gamemaster) speaking, is the most boring part of the session. Why prepare so much material if I should just let the Players do most of the talking anyway?
The players are not my audience – I am theirs!

This new approach somehow led me to finding my new Torah of Gamemastering: The Return of the Lazy Dungeon Master. I encountered this book before but never thought it was for me. When I finally gave it a chance it was like a revelation – sort of similar to the one I had half way through reading “Rich Dad Poor Dad” – I was doing it wrong all these years!
The main point of the book for me is: You shouldn’t spend more than 30 minutes preparing for a session! That is mainly because, whatever you plan beyond that, there’s a 99.9% chance that the PCs will decide to go do something else anyway. The book goes into detail of what you should spend those 30 minutes on so you will have a full and fulfilling game session – starting with concentrating on the Player Characters themselves! I’ve been using this method of preparing for sessions for the last year and it works like magic! My core group of long-time players has never been this happy and just as important – I don’t get to a session completely exhausted and fixated. I have enough specific and efficient material prepared that I can handle anything they throw at me – truly letting us all tell a shared exciting story.

In a further attempt to maximize my new Gamemastering approach, I looked for a compatible RPG system – one that supports and empowers the players. After reading up on several rule systems I discovered, to my surprise, that the Genesys RPG, an evolution of Warhammer FRP 3e system which we played for many years, is actually exactly what I was looking for. Using its ingenuous Narrative Dice System^TM, the game allows the players to take a far more active role in narrating the story than any other traditional game I ever played, and after playing it for almost a year now, I feel like this is how roleplaying games were actually always meant to be played – it just took the hobby (and us) a while to get here.

So, here is my answer to the question, what is the most important skill a Gamemaster should have: Listening!

You should listen to your players before a game to understand what type of game they are looking for. You should listen intently at session zero when they create their characters and note their goals and fears. And just like a film director, you should really listen during a session, and by allowing yourself to feel, you and your group are guaranteed to have a good time. That is all from my game experience obviously. Like myself, some might find Listening difficult to master but, well, it’s a fun journey for sure!

Dedicated to Ziv, a player I neglected to listen to. Hope you come back soon!

What do you think is the most important skill a GM should have? Let me know in the comments 😉

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Roy Altman

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