By: Chris Acuff

Earlier, I wrote in Go Touch Grass, that lived experience is important for writing, and I am including GM’ing as writing, and I reframed “write what you know” to be more reflective of the metaphorical than the literal. (I may have never been in a battle, but I do longsword fencing and can describe what it feels like to swing a sword pretty well.)

Let’s expand on that idea. Let’s say we are focusing our entire lives around being the best GM possible. We want to make it into the Olympics of GM’ing, and treat this skill as something we are athletically training for. In this scenario, we need to figure out what makes for good cross training. 

Cross training in the athletic sense is training something that is not your primary sport but will still help you be successful in your primary sport. A runner might also bike to take stress off of joints while still training cardio and leg strength, for example, even if it is not the same as putting in more miles or speedwork. 

Unfortunately we can’t all be Brennan Lee Mulligan running more games of TTRPG’s than seems possible, so what kind of things should we be doing and thinking about in order to improve at our primary sport of DM’ing. I think there are loads of options, but because posts like this work in 3’s, I’m going to pin down my 3 personal favorites. Where I focused on outside things in got touch grass, this one if more focused on intellectual pursuits. 

1. Read Non-Fiction: Specifically history, but there is plenty of good stuff out there. It is important that we read more than fiction, because too much focus on the same genre and story type can cause our creativity to become incestuous. I have three recommendations to avoid an incestuous brain: On War by Clausewitz completely re-wrote my brain chemistry on how to understand conflict and competition. While he is focused on military conflict, it is applicable to ALL conflict / competition. Unless you want to better understand Napoleonic strategic, operational, and tactical warfare, you only need to read the first half to have your mind blown. the Guns of August by Barbara Tuchman is a history about the opening days of the first world war and helps you understand just how easy it is for events to spiral out of control of leaders, even leaders with absolute power over their governments. It was so good at demonstrating this, that JFK made his staff read it, (and in my brain is part of the reason the Cuban missile crisis went as well as it did.). If you don’t think that is a relevant thing to understand GM’ing well… I don’t know what to say. Like On War, you only really need the first half unless you want to understand how the bloody opening days of the first world war unfolded. (A bunch of generals forgot their Clausewtz…) My third recommendation is history of the world in 6 glasses by Standage. You may have had to read this in school like me. Even if you did, it is worth a re-visit. It can help you see how food and resources impact a place, how and why some of those practices would develop and the cultural impact of those foods. This is great fodder for worldbuilding. 
2. Play a wide variety of games: My secondary drug of choice is war games, but all board games are up for grabs. I think there are diminishing returns for videogames in this category though. This is because I want you to pay attention to the mechanics of the games you are playing, and those are better hidden behind the screen. Game mechanics are more than the actions by which a game happens, they set a tone and tell the emergent story the game is trying to bring about. Having an understanding of game mechanics and why certain ones are chosen is obviously important for what we are trying to do. James may be better at articulating this point than me, but I think it is important to include. 
3. Pay attention to/ Get involved in politics: especially locally. First off, it is good for you, and you will be amazed about how relatively easy it is to have a significant impact on your community. However, right now we don’t care about being good citizens, we only want to become the best GM possible. Well, politics touches everything in story, especially the kind we tell in TTRPG’s, which are almost always fundamentally about power. Politics is the process by which we allocate and use power at a large scale, so you can imagine how seeing it from the inside could be helpful. Plus, most people practicing politics are messy bitches and you will get some wild stories. 

All 3 of these things function off of the same idea- building creativity. I don’t know when, or where, I came across this, but years ago I found a video of someone explaining how creativity is a skill that can be trained and grown. The bedrock of that skill, the video argued, is having a wide base of experience and knowledge to pull from, mix around in your noggin, and remix again, to create something new. This is part of the “read nonfiction” argument. By having real events – which are often stranger than fiction- to pull from, an understanding of game mechanics, and the ability to map relationships and power politically, you can build out an amazing game. Hopefully we’ll see you at the GM Olympics.