DB

Goodreads is currently down and being buggy, so I can’t look up the rest of the books that I have read this year. There are a few, and one of them probably contained the idea for learning that is mentioned in the above book…well, it came up twice, so I think it is useful to talk about it. It’s an interesting visualization that comes with mastery, and I think it is a helpful way to keep track of how you’re progressing as a storyteller.

(Oh wait, I can look up the books that I have borrowed from the Libby app. Let me see….I think it was probably Thanks for the Feedback: The Science and Art of Receiving Feedback Well by Douglas Stone and Sheila Heen. I was listening to Hidden Brain, and they were talking about switch-tracking in conversations which is an interesting idea, and happens when you’re talking with another person…anyway. Also another great book.)

Effortless: Make It Easier to Do What Matters Most by Greg McKeown is a book that I will undoubtedly recommend to any of my friends, family and strangers who are workaholics or who enjoy self-help books. This book is cooked in with a lot of advice, and with ideas that honestly could have been stretched out over a longer book (because I have unfortunately read another book of the self-help non-fiction variety that was longer than it should have been). One of the many ideas is the idea of steady self-improvement, and through the illustration and visualization of a bag with a thousand marbles.

Find yourself a bag of a thousand marbles. Say that you’re learning a new skill–bowling, public speaking, and the focus of this blog–game mastering. Game designing. Whatever it is. For whatever skill you are learning (oh, this was illustrated in relation to language learning in the books that I read, I think) take out a marble whenever you make a mistake. The idea is that to reach mastery, you will empty the bag of marbles. As you continue to make mistakes, you take note of each mistake that you make. Ideally, you find a way to correct that mistake and redirect yourself towards the ideal form that you want you to emulate. And ideally, you will make less mistakes as you continue to improve, so it takes a bit to recognize what mistakes you could possibly be making.

The first few hundred marbles can easily be removed for sure. And heck, if you wanted to power-level the marbles, you could intentionally make the same and fastest mistakes until you got rid of all the marbles. But you know, that wouldn’t be helping you.

Anyway, the idea is that it takes a lot longer and it becomes harder to empty those marbles as time goes by. I have been GMing and gaming in the TTRPG space on and off for about 8 years, and in that time I have done lots of things wrong. I have forgotten rules, I have fudged dice rolls that I don’t think I should have fudged, and I have not honored player choices in a healthy way. Nowadays, it feels like I make less obvious mistakes, but a few missteps that occur in miscommunication. The best thing that I can do at that point is to clarify ideas outside of game, move around the script and story so that people’s intentions are honored, and using the useful retcon skill.

I have recently started improvising (I’ll be making a year as an improviser and improv class-taker in November of this year, I think!) and one of the things that I would like to work on is honoring the audience suggestions. There are some scenes and one show that I did where we did not explicitly address the audience suggestion. Now, I have had a few instructors. One of them has a philosophy that I am a fan of, but which has a certain balance to it: “fuck the audience”.

At the end of the day, if you are improvising in a scene with your scene partner, the person that matters the most there is your scene partner. You matter. Take care of yourself and your scene partner, and things will be great for the two of you. Sometimes, the scene is terrible, and the audience hates it too. Sometimes, the scene is great, and the audience hates it. Sometimes the scene is great, and the audience loves it. And sometimes the scene is terrible and the audience loves it. (I had to do all permutations, or I would feel terrible).

But anyway, what matters the most is your scene partner. That being said, it feels wonderful for the audience when their suggestions are honored. And in a TTRPG, if you are in the traditional DM, GM, Referee, Facilitator, or Storyteller role, your players are both your audience and your scene partners. They will give you their choices, they will give you a wishlist of the things that they want to do (sometimes explicitly, sometimes implicitly) and you will react to them. You will play with them in a scene, but you must also remember to honor their choices and to give opportunity for them to explore what they want to! If their choices are honored and affect the world, they will feel listened to, they will feel that the world is alive, and they will likely be more invested in the story that you are creating together.

Because if you listen to your players, your fellow players, and your GM, you are making a story together. And that’s all we want at the end of the day, right? That, and sometimes rolling lots of dice. Because that’s fun.

Anyway, that’s it. Making mistakes, and I am working on listening to my players. Don’t be too hard on yourselves, y’all, and don’t forget to have fun! Happy gaming!