Develop the GM. Improve the game.
Game Master Academy brings structure to Game Master development through assessment, focused practice, feedback and reflection. Build your skills while keeping the style that makes your table yours.
The Academy uses evidence-based training design grounded in PhD-level expertise in industrial-organizational psychology. Whether you have never run a game or you’re an old school grognard, there is something you can learn to bring more enjoyment to your table.
Find your path
- For Game Masters: choose a development priority and turn it into focused practice.
- For Gaming Groups: build a shared understanding of what works at your table.
- For Organizations: explore a structured approach to developing Game Masters across a community or team.
Turn experience into deliberate practice
Assess your starting point. Diagnose a useful priority. Develop the skill. Practice it. Observe what happened. Reassess your next step.
The Academy follows this six-part development cycle. Each stage connects what you notice about your practice with something you can do about it. The Academy offers guidance every step of the way and at multiple stages of development.
Assess
Gather a starting picture from the evidence available: your reflections, examples of play and relevant feedback. Take the self-assessments to determine your standing on key traits. Develop a profile to specify your preferred play context. Click here for a list of the most common assessments.
Diagnose
Based on your experience, traits, and preferences, we build a menu of recommendations. Choose a priority to work on now. We describe it as a skill or action you can practice and produce a training roadmap. This customized training plan can be your guide through the course content, unique to your situation. Click here to see an example roadmap.
Develop
Study the concept, examine examples and identify what a useful response looks like in context. This is preparation for putting the lessons into practice as well as developing personalized learning tools, mnemonic aids, or GM screen cheat sheets. Click here to see a list of some of the training resources.
Practice
Rehearse the action or apply it in preparation or play. Keep the task focused. The Game Master Academy facilitates group study with rotating GMs and manageably sized scenes. We are also working on a practicum training setting where GMs perform curated experiences for players in a living world campaign.
Observe
Compare your intent with what happened. Use reflection and appropriate feedback to identify what helped and what needs adjustment. For outside opinions, our facilitators observe trainees across the practice settings or at your virtual home table. This is a challenging and often neglected stage, but it is a critical accelerator of success. Our staff is on hand to support.
Repeat
Reassess for change over your baseline. Review the evidence, adjust your approach and choose the next priority. Development is an ongoing practice.