I write a lot on this blog about the social skills involved in being a storyteller, because I think many of our RPG books ignore the topic. What’s more, many RPG-related blogs and YouTube channels that I admire share advice about the mechanics and structure of RPG systems… but don’t cover the social dynamics. It seems like a collective blindspot. We assume that people will know what they’re doing, or that they’ll muddle along well enough.

Some of this has changed since I started running TTRPGs about 30 years ago. Many RPG books now include the basics of safety mechanics like lines and veils, the X-card, etc. But there isn’t much on how to find consensus or foster buy-in amongst your players. You have to learn the tricky art of building agreement and engagement in your own gaming group with few pointers and little advice.

On the one hand, I get it. I think the arguments run something like the following:

There’s so much variation in social expectations between gaming groups that no system could truly be one-size-fits-all. Those interpersonal connections are outside the scope of a roleplaying game. People should figure out what works for them, and do that.

But on the other hand, those arguments are an avoidant pile of crap.

Building consensus and engagement is a skill. Communicating clear expectations is a skill. Finding the combination of collaborative creativity and directorial control that works for your group is a skill. Honing the insight, persistence, clarity, and directness needed to elicit more from your players without causing excess discomfort takes time and skill both.

Not everyone has practiced these skills. I don’t think these skills are even consistently acknowledged as being important to running games. And in my experience the people least likely to have honed these skills (teens and young adults) are also the people most likely to be playing lots of RPGs.

I admit, you can have good and fun games without mastering these skills, just as you can have good and fun games without using safety mechanics. But using these skills drastically improves your chances of having fun with your RPGs—just as using safety mechanics, or some system for in-the-moment player input around discomfort and tension, reduces the likelihood of your game going horribly, irrecoverably wrong. If games are sharing tips for safety mechanics (as I think they should), they should include tips for “good GMing practices.”

Look, I’ve played a lot of roleplaying games. Which system was used certainly mattered. The mechanics were important. But even awkward kludged-together systems were a delight when everyone was on the same page, working together, and playing for compatible fun. Meanwhile, no amount of technical mastery of a system could outweigh a group that didn’t gel or was at odds with itself.

Thus, we come back to the social aspect of running RPGs.

This is too broad a topic for me to cover it all today. Plus, I already have enough posts that belong in this topic that I’m going to (slowly) go through and build a series, a new category. My hope is to create a set of posts I can reference for teaching new storytellers the social side of running games for their friends.

Given that, if you have any questions you wish someone would answer about running games—preferably questions about the social skills side of things—please ask them here. I’ll either find a post for you in which I’ve already answered that question, or I’ll add your question to my to-be-answered list. I make no guarantees about solving whatever trouble you face, but I hope that my experience and perspective can help.