Re: Why we pick bad leaders, and how to spot the good ones

A neat article pooped up in Google Spotlight this week : Why we pick bad leaders, and how to spot the good ones. It’s not the most well-written article I’ve read this week, and it doesn’t have any earth-shattering research or world-changing analysis, but it does have application to what makes a good DM.

“Leader” is a good, if incomplete, word for a DM. A DM has to get people together, manage different personalities and time constraints, and moderate to keep everybody on the same page. Unlike a business leader, they don’t have to manage their people unless something at the table requires clear intervention, and they don’t perform any in-character delegation. Their job isn’t really to lead the party, but rather to lead the session and tell their story, present challenges, and make sure everybody is having fun.

With that in mind, I think we can draw clear parallels between Cohn’s article and the role of a DM. It lists a few traits that don’t make a good leader, particularly “a candidate’s charm, their stellar résumé or their academic credentials”. These correlations are fairly obvious. A good DM is not determined by their at-table personality (I’ve seen plenty of good players be average or lousy DMs), their past success in DMing (each new campaign, party, and set of players is a new challenge, and some DMs just don’t click with some challenges), or their knowledge of the system (it should go without saying, but encyclopedic knowledge of the system doesn’t make a person fit to design something in that system).

Some of the traits of good leaders are a little more vague, but here’s how I think they relate:

• Integrity – Cohn defines this as “a blend of honesty, consistency and ethics”. A specific breakdown of integrity differs from DM to DM; I lie to my players all the time, which would make me dishonest, except that DMs should lie to present incomplete information or deliberate misinformation to represent character knowledge. In general, a DM should just be a good person. There are few good reasons to give time and effort to somebody who is trying to make you unhappy.
• Passion – A person who treats DMing like a job isn’t nearly as enthusiastic as a person who treats it like a hobby, who in turn isn’t as enthusiastic as somebody who treats it like fun. A DM legitimately excited about their campaign will make players excited as well.
• Courage – Hopefully, this doesn’t come up as much. But occasionally a DM has to confront a player who’s bringing down the table or trust their their players can handle some devastating change to the campaign. I’m strongly anti-spoiler in my campaigns (there’s another post there), so I don’t ask players if it’s alright before I kill somebody or give them a difficult situation. I certainly fret about it for the two weeks before it happens and for one week afterward, but at this point I mostly trust my players to run with it.
• Vision – Campaigns are supposed to have goals. Few players can handle being dropped into the middle of a setting and told to explore. Good campaigns build to a peak or a series of peaks, and a DM had to at least know a little what he’s doing when he starts.
• Judgment – This one’s pretty obvious. A DM with consistently bad judgment will lose players fast.
• Empathy – A DM doesn’t run a table of characters, they run a table of players. A DM has to read players on the fly and occasionally flat-out ask them how things are going. If the players aren’t enjoying themselves (in general, maybe not at that specific moment), the DM has failed.
• Emotional intelligence – I’m not sure I get the name of this trait, but it means that a DM should be able to stand back and look at what they’re doing and how they’re doing it. Often, this means asking the players for their assessment and suggestions on how to improve. Much like anything, a DM who isn’t improving over time will never become good.

Ricky Gervais aside, I’m pretty sure this article is more targeted to the current election season than to business, and that works better for my comparison. DMs aren’t promoted, they’re elected. They don’t answer to management, they answer to the people who elected them. And it’s rare for a DM to not serve at least one term (the length of a campaign) unless they quit before then.

Having all seven of the traits above is rare. Everybody has should have them in some capacity, but most people can only expect to have a few of them enough to register as a courageous or empathetic DM. It can also be hard to figure out which ones a person has or doesn’t have until you sit through a campaign with them, and it’s even harder to see them in yourself. After years of running games, I think I’m good at passion, vision, and judgment and lousy at empathy, and emotional intelligence, which means that I create and run magnificent campaigns and I can’t figure out why my players don’t think I’m as great as I do.