Welcome to Applied Game Mastery

What Makes a Legendary Game Master?

That’s the question we ask at Applied Game Mastery. We’re talking with table-top role-playing game (TTRPG) players, game masters, and designers to find out; from the very basics to the most advanced topics we seek to discover what a GM needs to know!

One of the problems with learning any skill is that there are “unknown unknowns,” that is, there are things that you are unaware that you need to know.   This can lead to interesting skill gaps and blind spots.   Depending on your approach to learning, sometimes you can become aware of these gaps, and then they become “known unknowns” – you become aware that there’s missing information or skills.   “Known unknowns” are relatively easy to address; you find a mentor, tutorial, guide, or text book.   Unfortunately, making “unknown unknowns” “known unknowns” is often a matter of the breadth of experience or exposure that you have with a topic.  Sometimes this is expressed as “the more I learn, the less I know.”  

It is our hope that we can identify all the things about game mastering that we haven’t thought of or imagined and  highlight these traits through a series of short video interviews on various social media platforms which we hope to record at conventions and local stores.  

We’ll be doing our first set of interviews at Ret-Con in Cary, NC after which we’ll be working with as many stores and conventions that will have us!