Monte Says is a regular column in which Monte talks about topics related to the Cypher System—or anything else on his mind!
I know how it is. You’ve been gaming for years. You’ve played a million games. When you pick up a new game, you read the character creation rules and figure out all the great combos. You read the combat and basic rules sections and master the material there quickly. You got this. Then you come to the GM section. “Meh,” you say, “I know how to run a game already, thanks.” You skip over that, and get to the creatures or the spells, or whatever. Or, at best, you kind of skim through the GM section, look at the headers, but that’s about it. I know. I used to do the same thing.
I suppose it was when I sat down to write the 3E Dungeon Master’s Guide that that all changed for me. I realized that the Player’s Handbook tells you how to determine hit points for your paladin, and the Monster Manual tells you how much weight the griffon can carry in flight, but it was really the DMG that tells people how to play the game. As in, what it’s actually like to sit down at a table and play this thing. The hows and the whys of the game.
After that, I now turn to the GM section of an RPG rulebook first. It gives me a really good idea of what the game will be like to actually play. I can go back and read the nitty gritty of the rules later. (You might think this doesn’t always work out. Because sometimes they’re not very good, or—gulp—there isn’t one. But that actually tells me everything I need to know about the game too.)
When I sat down to write Numenera, and for that matter, The Strange and the Cypher System Rulebook, I knew that the GM section would be really important. Because in the Cypher System, it’s probably the GM’s role that changes the most from other games. That’s why it ended up not just as a chapter in each book, but as a part, containing multiple chapters.
There’s a lot of valuable information in those sections. Not rules, but the ideas behind the rules, and if you understand those ideas, you not only grok the rules easier, but you make off-the-cuff adjudications of your own more easily and comfortably.
Whenever someone asks why cyphers have levels or why the game uses a d20 and not a d10, I know they haven’t read the GM chapters. If someone wants more information about GM intrusions, wonders how to set difficulty levels, or asks how to deal with players who have created combat tanks, they can just go back to the GM chapters. That’s all in there.
If you’re a Cypher System GM, you really will find value in reading (or rereading) the GM section.
