I was listening to some old Friends at the Table Patreon content (it is so much easier to access now that I’ve got an RSS feed to pull from and am using an actual podcast app to pull it instead of flipping through patreon posts like I just assumed I had to for every podcast I’ve supported prior to March of 2023) and I heard one of the players talk about some of the lessons he has learned over the years from his experience playing tabletop games and taking comedy classes. He said that some of the best advice he’s ever heard was that, after you spend a bunch of time mastering a creative skill, that you should go do anything else for a few months so you’ve got things to pull from when you return to the improvisational or creative skill you’ve learned. The broader context that this came up in was about preventing yourself from becoming too focused on one type of game or play experience. Play a lot of different things and then, when you return to the thing you want to spend a lot of time on, you will be better at it for having enriched yourself with other experiences. This is something I’ve always felt was true of pretty much every form of creative work. Spend some time honing your chosen craft and then spend time learning about a lot of other things so you have information to pull from when creating things. This is why I’ve spent so much time reading about various bits of history, different occupations, and generally learning about how the world works and why it works that way. Everything informs my writing, so the better I understand anything other than writing, the better my writing will get.

In recent years, I’ve been applying the same lesson to the tabletop games I play. As I’ve listened to podcasts play various games, watched them be streamed, and read books on my own, I’ve taken what I’ve learned from each game and done what I can to incorporate the interesting bits into the few games I’ve been running. It started with what my friends and I called “3.P” back in the day, when we took some bits out of Pathfinder and applied them to Dungeons and Dragons 3.5 in a way that made sense and made our games feel more fun. I probably did this the most during the pandemic, though, as I tried to run more games with the same amount of time and energy I had prior to the pademic when I only ran one. I had started watching or listening to a bunch of different games at that point, all of which involved less structure than Dungeons and Dragons did and purposefully left gaps for the players to fill in or to be developed between players and GM as play happened. While the things I learned from these other games didn’t really alter the way I ran my Dungeons and Dragons sessions, it massively altered the way I prepared for my games and saw my role as the GM.

Now, as I’m going into different games, specifically Heart: the City Beneath and Blades in the Dark (well, trying to, anyway. We’ll see if I can get another group together), I’m pulling from all this listening and reading I’ve done to expand and adapt these games to fit the interests of my players. All of these systems are great because they’re fairly straight-forward and easy to build on. When all you really need to do is figure out how many dice are in your pool and success/failure results are almost always interpreted the same way (with a few fun exceptions), it is really easy to make up stuff on the fly. The somewhat loose but limited in scope rules of a game like Blades or Heart means that you’ve got a pretty big target to hit and as long as you hit it somewhere, you’re fine. This is crucial when it comes to larger groups (six players, in this case), who might need extra levels of customization to avoid having characters that feel the same in game that’s normally intended for medium (4-5 players) to small (2-3 players) groups of players. While I intend to rely heavily on the stuff in the books for Heart, I am familiar enough with the core mechanics to make stuff up on the fly and it took a lot less work to get there than it took me to be that comfortable with Dungeons and Dragons Fifth Edition.

The more open and narrative-based framework of other games, like The Ground Itself or The Quiet Year, provides me with a lot of space to improvise as well. Sure, those games are meant to be played without a GM, but adding a GM in for my purposes (which I will not specify in case any of my players read this post before we’ve had a chance to play them out) is fairly simple because I can just match my GM powers to the various player turns and already have a framework for what does and doesn’t unbalance the game. The Quiet Year is a great example, because it is possible to get through the entire game incredibly quickly, if you just so happen to draw the right cards. Sure, you know you’ll draw the card that ends each segment of play in a decent amount of time since the decks are spread out and there’s rules available to prevent the game from ending too quickly, but it’s really easy to tweak the rules a bit on your own to get a faster or shorter game if that’s what you want.

To add a GM role to The Quiet Year, I need to do is add a couple steps that fit in with some of the cards or just make sure that I use my turn as the GM to introduce some events or mechnical/narrative elements. The game itself is already built to be very open-ended with the way you can interpret or apply the cards and the great examples provided by Friends at the Table of possible hacks means I’ve got plenty of ideas on how to adjust the game in a fun way. Throw in The Ground Itself as a sequel to or setup for your custom game of The Quiet Year (which fits really well because The Ground Itself was inspired by The Quiet Year), and you have a recipe for some really fun improvisation. The Ground Itself can wind up being more chaotic as well, since you’re pulling from a single pool of cards, so you can have incredibly large gaps between time jumps and segments of play, or incredibly small ones. It’s a lot of fun to play out and the open-ended nature of interpreting the results of your draws means that I’ve got an excellent framework to insert a GM turn into that game as well if I want one.

One of the reasons I enjoy Friends at the Table as much as I do is because they’ve been playing for so long and they’ve played so many different games that I’ve gotten an incredible sense for those games and how growth as a GM can open up so many more possibilities with the same or similar tools. Because not only do they play a lot of different games, but they occasionally return to the same game in a different context or a very different time, showing their own growth and development as players by comparing the various ways they played the game over the course of the past several years. It’s a wonderful and inspiring way to be introduced to games and I’m super excited to apply it in my own GMing by basically never playing a game as-is ever again. It is the hacker’s life for me. Everything is going to get tweaked to fit the style of play my group and I am looking for. As I always say, we’re here to have fun playing a game. All that matters is we’re having fun and let’s do our best to stay focused on that. If its not fun or doesn’t serve our pursuit of fun, then toss it aside and find something interesting we can use to replace it.