Hailing from Portland, Oregan, Brian Jamison had been gaming since he was about eleven years old. According to the “About the Author” section at the back of “Gamemastering“, he was a LARPer and the designer / producer of the MMORPG “Underlight” in the late 1990s. But the “Introduction” tells us that:

I used to struggle as a Gamemaster. I’d ask myself, why does it take
so long to come up with a new adventure week after week? And why is
it that most roleplaying rulebooks, despite being hundreds of pages long,
never thoroughly address how to actually prepare for and run a game?

Jamison, B (2011) “Gamemastering”, Rampant Platypus Press, page 1

The book is his attempt to share “one possible way to gamemaster, start to finish.” When I first read the free .PDF version (now unavailable from the original host site) back in 2012, it was a fresh breath of air into my world as a roleplayer. Lots of good ideas… and an almost equal dose of things I passionately disagreed with.

The first big idea that rocked my thinking was The One Law laid out in Chapter 1:

“The more the Gamemaster plots, the less the players will follow the
plot.”

It was a strident rejection of the “storytelling” tradition that had grown up through the late 1980s and 1990s, with words that I have oft heard repeated from people who clearly have never heard of Jamison’s book:

GMs sometimes write a story in advance because that’s what they want to do. These folks should write a book/play/movie and get it published or produced. Likewise, if the players want to act in a scripted environment, they’d probably have more fun with a theater troupe. Those are great activities, but they aren’t roleplaying.

Jamison (2011), pages 11-12

The second big idea followed on its heels: don’t choose a game system or write an adventure before you’ve chosen the players and agreed on a setting; don’t roll up characters but rather co-create them with your chosen players.

It was the first time I came across the idea that is expressed today as “running session zero” and Jamison dedicates four chapters, the first major part of the book, to achieving this. Frankly, it’s one of the best described processes for such an endeavour I have read.

In practice, this idea of choosing the players – based on their play preferences and style – and then agreeing the setting first was (then) new and weird. Even today, the “Traditional Way” (as Jamison puts it) is still the way most people set up a new RPG game:

• GM chooses game system
• GM buys / writes adventure
• Characters are rolled up
• Start playing

Jamison espouses a very different and much longer approach to setting up. In my recent games, both the school-based “modern-horror” and a one-to-one “prehistoric fantasy”, I’ve returned to his advice to great positive effect. With my own want to improve the Fantasy engagement, I’ve found Jamison’s advice very fruitful.

In this sequence of blog posts, I plan to lay out the impact of his advice and my reactions to it. While I passionately dislike some of his comments, through the pages of this old GMing book I find much to commend it to anyone who seeks to escape the twin traps of Narrativist railroading and shallow Gamist worlds.

Game on!

On to Gamemastering II: Universes