Dungeon Masterclass: The Art of Game Mastering

Course Overview Introduction

This is the section where I'm going to give you an overview of the entirety of the course. This is just a bird's eye view of what you'll be learning over the next several hours.

Chapter 1: Introduction & Course Overview

This is the introduction chapter I'm going to give you a little bit of an esoteric and insightful look at how to prepare yourself for this journey and what you can expect maybe to get out of this experience.

Chapter 2: Your Inner Game Master

We're going to be covering your inner game master. This involves taking a look at who you are as a game master, including your weaknesses, strengths, expectations from your players, and the type of game you want to run.

Chapter 3: Understanding Your Players

This chapter deals with understanding your players. It focuses on each individual at the table, their strengths, weaknesses, and expectations from the gaming experience.

Chapter 4: Preparing for a Campaign

This chapter is all about preparing for a campaign. It includes deciding on your module or homebrew situation, pre-session preparations, rules, tools of the trade, character creation, and session zero preparation (including safety tools).

Chapter 5: Adventure Preparation

Adventure preparation involves putting together an outline for your adventure, preparing hooks, and investing your players in the experience to ensure they are engaged throughout the campaign.

Chapter 6: Session Preparation

This chapter covers preparation for each individual session, discussing the right amount of prep, necessary elements, and the intricacies of what each session entails.

Chapter 7: Running a Session

Here, we discuss all the aspects you need to be aware of while running a session with players at the table. This includes session pacing, making your world feel alive, dealing with unexpected player actions, and managing split-party scenarios. Finally we deal with the aftermath of your gaming sessions. This includes aftercare discussions, ensuring players are comfortable with intense scenes or role-play moments, and preparation for the next session to keep players excited and ready to continue.

Encouragement for New and Experienced Game Masters

As a new game master or a game master who's been doing this forever, there's always lessons that we can learn. I think the most important thing to remember during this course is no matter where you're starting from, if you've never cracked a rulebook before, or know every system that exists... try and remain teachable.

Staying Open to New Ideas and Methods

Open your mind, open your heart to potentially new ways of doing things without necessarily throwing away the knowledge that you already have. That experience is incredibly precious and incredibly important.

Challenging Established Approaches

If you feel challenged, I encourage you to challenge the way that you've always done things. What I'm sharing with you in this whole course isn't necessarily something that's better than what you've done, or even necessarily the way that you need to do it.

Value of Sharing Experiences and Suggestions

These are just suggestions based on my experience that may spark something within you that you may not have thought of before. Or it may confirm some things that you've done in the past, or confirm some thoughts that you've had about something you want to do a little bit differently.

Importance of Taking Notes and Reflecting

I would definitely encourage you to take notes throughout this process on things that speak out to you, things that challenge you, things that you want to think about later.

Focusing on Player-Centric Game Mastering

I would also, in this course, be thinking about your players. My approach to game mastering is that the players are the heroes of the story. They are the center piece of the story that you are telling and of the experience that you are creating. I would challenge you to keep them in mind. How can I best serve my players? How can I create the best experience at the table for them so that they have the most fun possible? And in turn, I then can have incredible fun knowing that I've given them the adventure that they had hoped that they would get.

Managing Expectations and Avoiding Overwhelm

Try not to feel overwhelmed. I know that's hard to do. You may have invested in this course and be looking at the outline and think, this is way too much. I am way overwhelmed. Ingest this content in the best way possible for YOU. Even if it's by listening to a chapter a day and reflecting on it for a week. I encourage you not to necessarily binge it. You may be excited to see it all, and that's fine - but I would definitely take note of the parts that you want to come back to.

Tailoring the Learning Experience

I want you to be able to take it in for yourself in the way that best suits your learning style, in the way that you think that you can take that information in, gather it, use it, commit it to memory, and then put it to practice.

Addressing Anxiety and Encouraging Growth

Try not to be anxious. And if you are, it's okay. We're going to go through this together. It can be overwhelming. But by the end of this, I hope that you will have better confidence in yourself to be able to do what you know you already can do - what you've already decided you can do.

Approaching the Course with Openness and Flexibility

Again, open mind, open heart, take what I give you with a grain of salt. And I hope that you (and your players) enjoy the journey together.

In chapter two, we're going to be covering your inner Game Master.

What kind of GM are you? What kind of game do you want to run?

What does it mean to come to terms with your strengths and weaknesses? What are those?

What type of person are you and what natural skills do you have as an individual that you can lean into to make yourself the best Game Master that you can possibly be?

What kind of game do you want to run? Is it a gothic horror campaign? Is it a high seas adventure campaign? Is it a sci fi campaign?

What is it that tickles that fancy of yours? What is it that makes you excited to run a game?

What do you want to run for a long period of time, potentially over a campaign that may stretch over a long period of time?

Look inside of yourself and don't be afraid to take a step back and just be excited about jumping into the experience and learning as you go.

That's what we're going to be covering in chapter two.