Dungeon Master as Metacharacter
Side-channel-attacks for fun and profit
Wildbow represents that Art is a three way dialogue between reader, author, and text. And that’s pretty true of writing (though I try to make it less so by disappearing and trying not to color anyone’s interpretation of my work).
It is, however, an extremely apt description of tabletop gaming.
When you’re running any kind of collaborative group hypnosis / “tabletop game” you’re the mouthpiece through which all descriptions must flow—so how do you deliver bad news? How do you deliver good? You could have your affect match the content, but then it reminds the players that you’re a person. You could be entirely neutral, but then the players miss emotive content and swing at shadows.
Your character—the version of you that you show up as to be their Dungeon Master—is as critical to the game experience as any in-game character, and requires consideration. What makes for a good storyteller, with the profoundly unusual, collaborative stories we tell?
There are a lot of different techniques for this!
Chris Perkins takes everything seriously, and occasionally performs a posture of vindictive glee, showing he’s having fun “torturing” his players—but everything works out okay in the end, doesn’t it? This antagonistic pretense unites the players quickly, as they assume they have only each other in an unmerciful, hostile world.
Jeremy Crawford is having an incredible time describing the wonders of the world. He’s visibly enraptured by the things he’s seeing, and it invites players to see them as well. Contrast his description of the riotously colorful pennants and parapets of the Great City Of Ravnica with, say, how a dungeon master usually describes a new town — “the inn, the magic item shop”— it’s clear Jeremy is in love with the picture he’s painting.
Jerry Holkins does a bit of this too, but the things he’s in love with are the abstract patterns and oblique interpretations to be found in everyday things. A bit too verbose and self-indulgent, in my opinion, but overall yes, he’s good at this. More on him later.
Jason Carl brings a sense of sorrow, solemnity, and regret to everything he does. This works really well for the Vampire the Masquerade games he runs—it gives everything a darkly beautiful sheen, like you’re in a Neil Gaiman story.
It’s really hard to read him, too. Players saying that they saddle up for war and investigate the long-abandoned vampire crypt provokes the same nonreaction as players saying they’re going to experiment with injecting themselves with nacho cheese. This is a neutrality to aspire to, but it reduces your ability to give nudges.
I have run more than a thousand sessions of dnd. I’ve experimented with a bunch of different styles.
Keeping yourself as a factor in the player’s minds is one option—occasionally noting “hm, how should I do this...”, being upfront about when they’ve gone off the rails—these are good for a friendly game without deep immersion. It’s better for newcomers or casual players who will be weirded out if you start going too hard on the NPC voices.
If you’re keeping it light, it’s possible to inject energy into the game by being really excited about the players’ ideas and actions—this is a Jerry Holkins move, to rephrase something the players are doing to emphasize how cool it is. “Are you telling me that you’ve set up a trap that is, functionally, a divine-energy-powered wood chipper??”
If the banter and momentum is flagging, this is a way to give it a shot in the arm. But it trades off against immersion, unless you have very stubbornly in-character players at your table.
Or you could be a robot, delivering good news and bad news factually. You are, after all, trying to simulate a universe in your head for them, and see how they interact with it. This is good for personally fading into background consideration, and helping them sink into the consensus reality of the game. It also usually requires more agentic, experienced players, because reliably signaling “I’m not even here” can leave the players feeling, y’know, like you’re not there.
I won’t pretend I like all possible DM metacharacters equally. I like poker-faced neutrality, except when you’re trying to evoke specific emotions in them — say, for NPC introduction, or scene setting.
One of the biggest upsides of the DM as metacharacter, side-channel-attack, is that sometimes your players need nudging.
Ideally, nudging will happen in a way that the players don’t realize—leading questions which scan as perfectly necessary clarifications, offhand mentions of the things they’re forgetting, or, if need be, describing things in a way that’s oddly simple and convenient to their planning—usually deployed when they’re tying themselves in knots trying to attack an obstacle which you’d never intended to be an obstacle.
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(Five minutes of fruitless heist planning elapse, then...)
The most neurotic player, the Planner, speaks up, with an audible hint of scorn for the rest of the party.
“How, then, are we going to delete the incriminating footage from the police station database? For that matter, how do we even approach? They probably have cameras on the exterior of the building.”
“It’ll be fine,” says a more blithe player. “We can delete those too.”
I note, in a neutral tone, “As you inspect the building from afar, you see that the vehicle bay—the side where police cars bring in suspects—has no cameras.”
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Be careful not to sound impatient here—you don’t want to diminish the efforts of the Planner. But do bring it up before you’re directly asked, like you’re a helpful AI assistant—this is information they need to have, to get back into play.
What’s more, bringing it up swiftly during their planning does imply that things will be straightforward, to any players prone to metagaming—which, in this context, is just another communication channel available to you.