Use Your Best Ideas Now
Don't save your awesome ideas for some future moment. Use them now.
As creators of games and entire worlds, we have no shortage of ideas. But it doesn’t always feel that way. We watch a movie or read a manga and the spark of inspiration takes hold. A precious idea is born. We delight in it and architect the perfect way to use it within our world or campaign. We save it for the big reveal, the holy grail, or the final boss. When the time comes, it’s either too late or falls flat. What happened?
A common question is “what advice do you have for new game masters (GMs)?” My answer is always the same: use your best ideas now. Don’t save them. You’ll always have more. That’s the takeaway from this article but let’s dive into the powerful ideas behind it.
Capitalize on the Excitement
Our best ideas are exciting. That excitement shows through to our players and brings energy to our games. We have more fun. When we’re excited about an idea, it’s more fun to prepare and run games. We put in more effort and everyone benefits.
Sometimes, our ideas still fall flat. They fail to deliver. But they fail a lot sooner than they would have had we saved them for the “right time.” Our time investment in the idea is smaller. We’re less prone to the sunk-cost fallacy that traps many a GM when things go awry.
Avoid Tunnel Vision
When we save our best ideas for later, we tend to get tunnel vision. All roads lead toward that idea. The risk here isn’t always railroading our players but rather the boxing out of new and better ideas. We’re thinking about how to build towards our grand idea more than we’re seeing what’s actually happening with the choices and story at hand. When we have tunnel vision, everything from preparation to improv gets harder.
Another piece of common GM advice is to plan one session at a time. It’s popular for good reason. It works. When we’re using our best ideas now, we aid in the effort to make each session better than the last. With this focus, we give our attention to what’s actually happening rather than some hypothetical future in the game.
Unleash Creativity
Creativity in game mastering is often less about the raw creation of a thing (nearly everything’s been done before) and more about how to connect things. Your next best idea might seem difficult to incorporate. How the hell do I introduce an ancient mirror dragon when my party is level 2? Questions like that are seeds of creativity that often lead to some of the most satisfying work as a GM. Maybe the dragon becomes a patron. Maybe it arrives gravely wounded or unwilling to fight. Maybe its just a lore teaser.
Figuring out how to connect your best ideas to your next session is at the heart of creativity as a GM. Connecting your next session to your ongoing campaign is an art and takes time. But that’s the journey of our hobby and it’s awesome.
Use your best ideas now.
Game on.