Riley Silverman / Ginny Di GM Styles

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 Riley Silverman did a post on D&D Beyond about GM Styles that later Ginny Di tweaked into a Youtube video. Let's take a quick look and update our MEGA GM STYLES LIST & FUTURE ITINERARY from the first post.

This will not be the full posts on these styles, necessarily, so much as a time to figure out how I want to keep the list updated and choose where to differentiate. It's especially nice here because I have Ginny's tweaks to Riley's framework to consider and decide to agree or disagree with. I can further explain and establish my methodology by comparing to others'.

Riley's Styles

Riley lists two "classes" and six "subclasses", which can presumably be mixed and matched like a 2x6 alignment grid, with "panster rules sage"s and "plotter vibe checker"s.

Classes:

  • Plotter - prep heavy
  • Pantser - prep light, improv heavy
Subclasses:

  • Number Cruncher - RAW (Rules as Written) GM - focus on following the rules
  • Rules Sage - focus on knowing and clarifying the rules
  • Vibe Checker - focus on following in-game narrative momentum and Rule of Cool
  • Beer Holder - focus on letting PC shenanigans play out
  • Novelist - focus on story (implicitly GM story over PC story)
  • Taxi Driver - focus on freedom and sandbox play

Ginny's Tweaks


Ginny Di combines "Number Cruncher" and "Rules Sage" as well as "Taxi Driver" and "Beer Holder", both of which are sensible enough choices. A lot of the decision how finely to slice distinctions between one style and another is a matter of taste, especially for shorter form content where you're trying to give a semi-definitive list, like both Riley and Ginny are making. Ginny then adds two of her own:
  • Tinkerer - focus on homebrew
  • Immersionist - focus on immersion

Holy Snail Knight's Translations

Because this blog's whole deal is these styles, I want to subdivide as much as possible. I want to identify places of actual overlap (these are essentially the same) and differentiate them from the tendency to overlap (these tend to go together, i.e. correlation) explicitly, so we get the clearest possible terms. 


Actual overlap I'm treating like synonyms in a thesaurus: list all relevant ones, let the reader / writer / framework user choose which word they like the flavor of best.

The first thing I realize is there was a core opposite pair I had left out! The GM's attitude towards the application of the rules. So I add Rule of Cool vs. RAW (Rules as Written) and add Rules Sage as a synonym for RAW. 

I also decide to reinterpret Number Cruncher a little as the opposite of the MinMaxer player archetype, i.e. the Encounter Optimizer. It naturally feels like there's an opposite to this, so we'll add another spectrum of the GM's attitude to encounter design, with Number Cruncher / Encounter Optimizer on the one side and "Just Use Bears" on the other. 

"Just Use Bears" is the title of famous OSR blog post saying that anytime you need to improvise a monster, just use a bear stat block and flavor it in your descriptions to be an "Eldritch Spider Monster With Heads Instead of Hands" or whatever monster you might need.

I'll also pull Plotter vs. Pantser directly as a perfect opposite pair for the GMs relationship to prep, synonyms for my existing High Prep and Low Prep. I already have Improv on there, but it's under the Worldbuilding section, and so we'll just correlate Pantser and Improv Worldbuilder as being correlated with an asterisk. We may need more correlation symbols later to track the various macro-archetypes, close to what Riley was calling "classes," but we'll worry about that later. 

While we're correlating, though, we'll add "Just Use Bears" and Rule of Cool with an asterisk as well, correlated to Pantser and Improv Worldbuilder. All are similarly loose-y goose-y GM styles, but refer to different parts of the game which might be handled differently by different GMs. For example, a "Just Use Bears" Pantser DM might still be Simulationist in their worldbuilding, using the reality and blorbiness (more on this later) of the preexisting world to make it easy to fly by the seat of their pants mid-session.

Reflecting the opposite, more controlled style, I will also correlate RAW, Encounter Optimizer, Plotter, and Simulationist using a carat "^". Again these are correlations and tendencies, not strict connections, so just as there could be a Panster Simulationist straddling both sides of this divide above, there could be another who is an Encounter Optimizer Rule of Cool GM, making elaborate encounters with huge stakes, but honoring really awesome moments and solutions when they come. Runehammer's Rooms, Battles, and Encounters youtube video playlist comes to mind.

Taxi driver / sandboxer* vs. novelist^ work as a good opposite pair in terms of player narrative agency, and I'll personally just throw Beer Holder in as a synonym for the Silly style, though you could argue there's some more nuance there. Similar adding Vibe Checker as a Rule of Cool synonym. Perhaps I'll separate them later. Tinkerer goes in cleanly as a synonym for Homebrew GM.

Immersionist^ seems like a very good umbrella category in the physical presentation section to encapsulate both crafting GM and minis GM, as well as suggesting from Ginny's description the further subcategories of Propmaker, Playlister, Mapmaker, and Ambiance GM (for further enhancements like your mood lighting, scented candles, and so forth). Opposite that is just "Theater of the mind,"* here meaning not only Theater of the Mind combat but an internal imagining of all the sensory elements of the game world.

I look at our other existing pairs and further correlate Homebrew* vs RAW^; Experimenter* vs. steady / unchanging^; Nemesis^ vs. advocate*; and Referee^ vs. mid-game creator*. This is starting to mirror Riley's original classes distinction, but I am loosely correlating some of the subclasses to more often coincide with the Pantser or Plotter side. 

I'm initially tempted to start calling these sides OSR^ vs. Storygamer*, but I know that wouldn't quite correlate. Same with calling them Simulationist^ and Narrativist*, because many of the elaborate encounter prep aspects among our carat^ group would be much more Gamist than Simulationist. I can maybe connect them in worldbuilding across Simulationist^ and Improv worldbuilder*, though. Eventually I'll need more dimension on our charts, full graphs as opposed to the spectrums represented by all these opposite pairs.

Maybe I could make a GNS+Improv 2x2 square and plot some of these correlated things there. The x axis as "Prep" and the y axis as "Game vs Story"...? 

I'll leave that for after I've had the initial GNS post, at least, if not the individual posts comparing these different styles and terms. So for now, we call this done, to return again later.


Updated list:

Rule of Cool / Vibe Checker* vs. RAW / Rules Sages^


Encounter Optimizer / Number Cruncher^ vs. "Just Use Bears"*


Plotter^ vs. Pantser*


Worldbuilding:

  • GNS theory precis and discussion of drawbacks
    • Simulationist^ vs. 
      • Gygaxian naturalism
      • No quantum ogres
      • Combat as war
    • Gamist vs.
      • World as fun house
      • Combat as sport
    • Narrativist / Storyteller
      • World is centered around the central narrative (usually the players’ stories)
      • Things are only defined as much as they matter to that core
  • Improv worldbuilder*
    • Make it up together at the table


High prep / Plotter^ vs. Low prep / Pantser*


Style

  • Serious vs. silly / Beer holder
  • Edgy vs. All-ages
  • Theatrical vs. 3rd person
    • Flowery vs. plain language
  • Collaborative vs. novelistic


Following specific credos / game traditions:

  • OSR GM
  • “Trad” GM
  • Storygames GM
  • West Marches GM
  • Smaller traditions
    • GLOG GM
    • Lazy GM


Homebrew / Tinkerer* vs RAW^


Physical presentation:

  • Immersionist
    • Crafting GM
      • Terrain
      • Props
    • Minis GM
    • Propmaker
    • Playlister
    • Ambiance GM
    • Mapmaker
  • Theater of the mind


Experimenter* vs. steady / unchanging^


Genres

  • Horror
    • Subgenres like folk horror, cosmic horror, body horror, gothic horror
  • Fantasy
    • High fantasy
    • Low fantasy
    • Urban fantasy
  • Scifi
    • Space Opera
    • Hard sci-fi
    • Cyberpunk
    • Science fantasy
    • Post-apocalyptic
  • Specific external settings
    • Tolkien
    • 40k
    • Fallout
    • Etc
  • Specific RPG worlds
    • World of Darkness
    • Numenera
    • Shadowrun
    • D&D settings
    • Minor favorites
      • Harn
      • Etc.

Re: Players

  • Nemesis^ vs. advocate*
  • Challenge players vs. challenge characters
  • Audience vs. collaborators
  • Referee^ vs. mid-game creator*
    • only adjudicating rules and setting as established 
    • vs. tuning and reactively creating on the fly


Types of challenges

  • Puzzle GMs
  • Tactical GMs
  • Social intrigue GMs
  • Mystery GMs


Setting preferences

  • Type
    • Dungeons
    • Biomes
      • Jungle
      • Arctic, etc
    • Space
      • Planet
      • Sector
      • Solar System
    • Fantasy
      • City
      • Kingdom
      • Continent
      • World
  • Points of light
  • Factions
  • High / low magic
  • Sandbox
  • Blorbiness
  • “Takes” on various genre tropes
    • Eberron (or later Tal’Dorei), with monstrous cities
    • Marvel Zombies

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