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Message: <blockquote data-quote="delericho" data-source="post: 5689543" data-attributes="member: 22424">To a large extent, "good DMs" are quite hard to define - we know them when we see them, but what works for one guy may not work for the next.Still, I broadly break DM skills down into three categories: "rules mastery", "story mastery" and "table mastery".Rules mastery is, of course, knowledge of the rules of the game. A bad DM doesn't know the rules, interprets them wrongly (or in a stupidly rigid manner), or, perhaps worst of all, inconsistently. A good DM knows and can apply the rules of the game consistently and well. But the best DMs know when to use the published rules, but also when it is best to step outside the rules and do something else instead.Story mastery is all aspects of storytelling, including descriptions, characterisation, plots, and so forth. A bad DM will have no plot at all, a badly disjointed plot, or a rigid railroad for the PCs. A good DM will have some notion of the plot in the game, even if this just amounts to having the world react sensibly to PC actions, will go some lengths to breathing life into the world, and will allow the PCs to also make their imprint on the world. The best DMs do all this, and make it all look easy.(In some ways, story mastery is the most difficult of the elements to define, since what makes for a good story is equally hard to define.)Table mastery is the handling of everything in the game that isn't rules or story. Like it or not, the DM is typically in something of a leadership role for the group - they tend to be the person who is looked to to resolve conflicts, to keep things moving, and in some sense to 'own' the game. A bad DM is likely to adopt a tyrant's role, imposing a heavy authority on the group (for about five minutes, until they quit), or have absolutely no control over events, so that nothing gets done. A good DM will try to keep everyone fairly focused, without becoming that tyrant. And the best DMs, of course, don't even have to bother about the issues at all, since it all just comes naturally.Anyway, that's my (really bad) attempt to define something that I don't think can be readily defined. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" /></blockquote>

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