This site seeks to firmly establish the thoughts and practices I have come to refer to as metagamemastery. I cannot claim to be the originator of all ideas presented here. My goal is to create a site that serves as a lightning rod to coalesce this school of thought on the art of gamemastery.

Before we dive into metagamemastery, let’s discuss the etymological antecedent, metagaming. From Wikipedia, “In role-playing games, a player is metagaming when they use knowledge that is not available to their character in order to change the way they play their character (usually to give them an advantage within the game), such as knowledge of the mathematical nature of character statistics, or the statistics of a creature that the player is familiar with but the character has never encountered. In general, it refers to any gaps between player knowledge and character knowledge which the player acts upon.”

Metagamemastering is to gamemastering what gaming is to metagaming. Here is my first stab at defining metagamemastering. “In role-playing games, a gamemaster is metagamemastering when they bring in elements outside of the rules of the game to draw the players into the narrative or gameplay.”

This is a really simple concept for gamemasters to understand because they use it in practically every session. A handout is metagamemastering. You are giving your players a piece of information (artwork or a letter, for example) that is not strictly covered by the game rules and the only real purpose is to illustrate the fluff you are reading. Playing mood music and sound effects, building detailed terrain maps, using dramatic lighting, video projections, squirting your players with waterguns… all of this is metagamemastery.

This concept has been integral to the role playing game experience since its creation. Don’t limit yourself to thinking about game props. Gary Gygax’s narratives are littered with concepts that I consider to embody the principles of metagamemastery. In “The Tomb of Horrors (pg 6)”, Gygax writes, “OBVIOUSLY THE PLACE IS BEGINNING TO COLLAPSE, but take your time detailing the rumblings, tremblings, grinding noises, falling hunks of ceiling and so forth; and if players inquire they can see a jade coffer, the dead monster’s fallen crown, and a fine leather bag (a give-away – it isn’t rotten) within easy reach. All other items are iron, locked, etc. NOW BEGIN COUNTING SLOWLY TO 10, and its odds in that there will be a stampede up the stairs to get away!” YES! This is gamemastery bordering on metagamemastery. Gygax is exploiting the social programming of his players to intimidate them into to fleeing. There are no game rules to cover this. This is pure mind fuck.

Here we are at the core. When you are gamemastering, several human beings are essentially handing their sensory inputs over to you for several hours and asking you to fill them. My technique is a cross between Gygaxian frontal lobe penetration and planetarium light show. I use a sound board, DMX lights, fog, strobe lights and a sprinkle of extrasensory perception in my games. In the coming months, I plan to share my techniques and learn some new ones.

And yes. That’s Skittles and absinthe.