The Most Important Thing I've Made For Pro GMs
Let me sell you on How To GM Romance (campaign live now!)
I’ve been a professional GM for 2.5 years. When I was new to the scene, often the more experienced professionals in the StartPlaying Games Discord would talk down to me or about my advice. They stopped doing that, largely, when I went full-time in 3 months. What I was doing was working - no one could argue with me on that point. The next major hurdle I had was convincing people that they were not writing effective ads.
After organizing and running ad workshops for hundreds of pro GMs, I noticed some trends about not only their business but also how to deal with their players, community, and so forth. You might even say there was an underserved market (MBA term, heeeyy)! The most difficult aspect of this job for many of us is the expectation of customer service in a casual setting. This takes many forms: from responding to messages at all hours, to managing a table’s culture, maintaining a 24 hour notice policy for attendance, to anything a player can swing at you.
Beyond those business considerations that I’ve covered in my newsletter, the biggest “table problem” was always romance. Such as:
A player did something without consent from another player and now you have a problem on your hands!
Your long-time player wanted to get married but you were unprepared, so the scene and romance fell flat.
Players had difficulty matching expectations with one another for a PC to PC romance.
You were unable to communicate where your boundaries were with a player.
Romance isn’t your specialty, so even though you really wanted to enable a player going on a date, you said no because you weren’t confident.
You didn’t know how to design an NPC for a romance, so you didn’t.
You felt overwhelmed by the amount of work involved in developing a romance, so you didn’t. There was no template or resource.
Education is difficult as a medium to push. However, I have faith that as a subscriber to this newsletter, you believe in professional education and useful tools for GMs. I am so proud to be a part of this project How To GM Romance - it’s genuinely a dream come true that I’m in a position to lead it.
As a game master, be you professional or hobbyist, you are in a position of power. It’s so important that you are educating yourself on how to best manage your table while building trust. Relationships - all of them - are about trust. With a thorough education about how you might try to approach romance in your games, you are giving yourself the best opportunity to be trusted by your players. In turn, that trust is going to build into a beautiful opportunity to share something powerful with them.
If your players are not invested in your game, I would wager that a big reason for that is the lack of trust or respect in what you are trying to achieve. Many of the most “anti-romance” player I have met in my games, if they stuck around long enough, asked for some form of romance. Why? Trust.
Yes, even an “off screen” romance is facilitation of romance. The expectation of romance for a GM is not a prescribed conclusion, a sex scene, or a saucy break-up - just as it would not be for any theme or plot. Being educated about romance does not mean you are going to railroad everyone into polycules. It just means that you are prepared.
We run the game for the love of the game. Why not game with love, too?
Please check out our Backer Kit campaign. With the support of this growing community, I hope to keep building tools for GMs. May this book be loved as intensely as the support you all have given me.
