Introduction
The Leader is a GM archetype recognized by Extroversion, Intuition, Thinking, and Judging traits. You are a well of confidence paired with the strategic contemplation to overcome most challenges that come your way. Filled with energy in social environments, you seldom feel uncomfortable behind the GM Screen with creative and elaborate ideas.
tHERE IS ALWAYS A LEVEL OF COMFORT AND SAFETY AROUND YOU
There is a sense of enjoyment and passion that becomes contagious regardless of the gaming experience you offer. Of course, this could be partly due to your (potentially) stubborn insistence the game follows your guidelines, providing a high level of comfort and safety for your table. As a result, you ensure a high level of comfort and security for your tables. Emotional management is a challenge for some deep thinkers, but the benefit is that you dedicate your energy to encouraging others and keeping positivity strong.
Game Mastering Styles
You are a goal-oriented individual, choosing to establish clear objectives that you can and certainly will achieve with enthusiasm and energy. The ability to take command without needing to take control means that any system allowing you to create meetable goalposts is likely the most comfortable. On the other hand, something too open-ended leans heavily on the side of loose structure and creates obstacles for tracking progress. However, engaging in a rigid system with guidelines for every step feels stifling and challenging to maintain enthusiasm.
You need enough rules to help your players follow the path, but not so many that you will not experience the joy of creative solutions.
You are about the long-term experience, building a connection, and driving it through to the end. This makes you effective with small systems or setups, such as one-shots or small adventures, but your desire is for a much longer campaign. You already have this idea in mind, an epic adventure that will reach a specific level ending with a well-thought-out end game established. You need enough rules to help your players follow the path, but not so many that you will not experience the joy of creative solutions. That is the driving force for you, a system and setting that allows you to see your players express joy from overcoming a challenge and thriving.
The benefit is that it makes you the type of GM that doesn’t typically have to play within your favorite setting or genre if the system works for you. However, as much as you love a classic social interaction, the center of your enjoyment comes from the bit of crunch a game has and seeing what flavor of ideas your players have.
Storytelling Style
When it comes to telling a story, it is not just about the developing narrative but the feelings the story may invoke that you enjoy most. You have a passion for deep, meaningful conversations, which translates into a structure that pushes players and characters to learn and develop over time. You are not satisfied with status quo experiences, choosing to push the boundaries of a character that wants to remain good in everything they do. You pay attention to your players, and it shows as each moment is almost curated for someone, whether it is social interaction, exploration discoveries, or tense combat.
You have a passion for deep, meaningful conversations
You believe that no obstacle can’t be overcome, and you push that on each delivery. You create a sense of the impossible within the narrative, having characters settle in the hopelessness of an overall situation and then providing a small yet powerful thread of hope through player determination. You encourage players to push their limits and have characters go beyond their expectations because you focus on the fact that a hard-won victory is worth celebrating.
You have a no-nonsense approach to delivering a story. Because of this, challenges can sometimes be too much for a character or player to handle. As a result, there is always a chance that someone’s best effort will not measure up to the grand idea you had. However, this approach does not mean that you have a ruthless drive—quite the opposite. Instead, you make everything a little harder than expected and adjust that pressure to match the energy at your table.
Table Management
When managing a table, you’re always up for the challenge. You take your role as Game Master seriously and see the success of your game as a personal responsibility. As a result, you’re less likely than other Game Masters to come to the table with only a passing understanding of the game’s rules.
You welcome your players to state their opinion on rulings or decisions. You relish in a good pushback and love hearing the protest’s logic. However, you both know that at the end of the day, the Game Master makes the final decision.
You're less likely than other Game Masters to have only a passing understanding of the rules
You may be somewhat stern when calling out a broken rule or mismanaged mechanic. Certain players may perceive your bluntness as insensitive if you’re not careful. You might have trouble handling emotional support but you make up for it with deep conversations about the story and the world after each session.
Your players have the independence and freedom to push the story forward in the way they’re inspired. You’re not one to railroad, you want your players to feel their choices matter and that the story is truly a collaborative one.
Session Resources
People see you as confident with high charisma. There’s a power behind the simple presentation in your words. Unless requested otherwise, you will stick to a theater-of-the-mind experience with no added ambiance. This choice is less about an inability to add additional tools but the flexibility to work with less and maintain efficiency. That said, you rarely hold back when you have an opportunity to excel.
Including curated music, battle maps tailored to a specific setting, additional art pieces discovered through research, and even taking the time to study real-life lore adds depth to your delivery. It is not a matter of having a solid presence as a GM but making a point to yourself that you can do what you set out to do and be one of the best at it.
how will you deliver the best experience if you don't know where to improve?
There is no middle ground, as you will make do with the simple resources to keep a safe and comfortable table, or you will manage to find a way to uncover an accurate representation of the specific tavern music for the moment. You also thrive with resources that aid with criticism because how will you deliver the best experience if you don’t know where to improve?
The Game Master's Toolbox
- World Anvil: A worldbuilding program that helps you create, organize and store your setting with detailed wiki-like organization and interactive maps to store your notes.
- DnD Beyond: An excellent place for digital character creation and creating a campaign group for easy roll shares and sheet management.
- Notion (TTRPG University Notion Templates)
- Evernote
- DnD Beyond’s Encounter Builder: I’ve heard it’s helpful. You can build an encounter and determine its difficulty level based on math.
Role Generator: You can randomly generate everything from cities, to magic items, to herbs, to NPCs. https://www.rolegenerator.com/
- Inkarnate: For fantasy world and city maps. Yearly subscription.
- Wonderdraft: For fantasy world and city maps. One-time purchase.
- Dungeon Scrawl: For creating flat and isometric dungeon maps. Completely free.
- Dungeondraft: Building and Dungeon crawl maps, full color.
- Azgaar Github Fantasy Map Generator
- Dungeon Fog: Free map-making tool
- Dungeon Map Doodler
- Spotify: There are so many D&D playlists to choose from, or, pick your favorite video game tracks to play.
- Syrinscape: With Syrinscape, you can control the master playlist and players can decide their preferred volume from their end.
- YouTube Premium: Put on a 3-hour ambiance video without commercial interruptions.
- Google Forms
- TTRPG University Google Forms to Copy
- DMs Guild: A place to find supplemental guides and campaigns to enhance your official D&D content.
- Drive Thru RPG: The all-TTRPG sister of DMs Guild.
- The Monsters Know: A book series about monster tactics and strategies to help enhance gameplay.
- Point Buy Calculator: Doing a character sheet from scratch? This will help so much with the number crunching. https://chicken-dinner.com/5e/5e-point-buy.html
- DnD Beyond: The best place to build a digital character sheet. Fully connected to all the official D&D content. Makes leveling up take about 30 seconds.
- Wild Shape Tracker: Super helpful for druids. https://arcaneeye.com/apps/wildshape-tracker/
- Character Backstory Template: https://arcaneeye.com/dm-tools-5e/dnd-character-backstory-template/
- Xanathar’s Guide to Everything: I use this particular book ALL the time to help build my character backstories. There are roll tables in the “This is Your Life” chapter.
- Google Dice Roller: Super simple. Go to Google, type “dice roller,” and you have a dice roller.
- Roll Dice With Friends: You can give your temporary room a custom name, share the link with your friends, and all roll together!
- Owlbear Rodeo (straightforward and intuitive)
- Canva (DIY, simplified VTT)
- Roll20 (complicated learning curve)
- Foundry VTT
- Norse Foundry
- Shard
- Tablespire
- Tabletop Simulator
- Fantasy Grounds
