The GM's Dagger Pt 3
Understanding Time Preference
An important aspect to understand as a Game Master is one that few people are familiar with by name, but experience on a daily basis. It is present in young children and it informs every decision you make on a daily basis. This is the concept of time preference. In basic terms, time preference is the dichotomy between investment and return. How soon after you invest are you expecting some kind of return on that investment? People with a high time preference are looking for a rapid return on investment. People with low time preference are willing to delay their gratification if they perceive that doing so will net them a higher reward. If the high and low time preference man went car shopping, the high time preference buyer would be more likely to take a high interest loan with a smaller down payment if it meant driving off the lot in a brand new car today. The low time preference buyer would be more likely to leave the lot without the new car and come back at a future point when the car they want has been marked down and they have 25-30% to put down on the car. They negotiate a higher monthly payment with a lower interest rate and leave in a new car that they will ultimately pay less for overtime.
The concept of being low time-preference is fairly simple to understand when it’s broken down, but hard in practice. Waiting for the greater long-term gain rather than jumping immediately at the short-term gain seems self-evidently good, but it requires patience and foresight that are hard to cultivate for most and impossible to cultivate in others. Role-playing games are inherently a low time-preference hobby. It takes time to learn the rules and to truly get good at playing. Characters begin with limited power and wealth and have to place themselves in direct danger to acquire more of both. Your early choices may not be the optimal ones but, if you persevere, the pain you suffered for early bad choices will be offset by later gains. Still, players are given the positive feedback of overcoming smaller challenges over time. They kill the monsters, take the treasure, buy new armor, find magic items, etc. By contrast, the Game Master does not receive those direct rewards. The GM is the arbiter, but he does not have an active hand in shaping the world. At most, he is a reactive force. What is the greater value he receives from this sacrifice? The value of watching your players grow into prime movers, shape the world with their actions and slowly grow into the role of power brokers and king makers within the campaign. The GM’s delight is the chaos that the players kick up with their actions and the ways in which they resolve it.
As a father, I have realized that there is a lifetime of investment put into the rearing of children. It will never end. I will never get back the money or time that I have put into raising my daughter. If I expected to, I would be a cold, cruel, heartless individual unfit to raise a child. The “return” on my fatherly investment of time and money is the flourishing of an intelligent, beautiful and kind daughter who will, Lord willing, grow into a virtuous woman and someday get married and raise her own children. The role of a father is a sacred one, comparable to nothing else, but there are parallels to the role of a Game Master. A GM will not receive the spoils of campaigning the way that players do. Instead he instructs his players in the ways of the rules, the language with which they interface with the world of the game, adjudicates their actions based on those rules, and watches as they use those rules to make their way in the world. In a group with experienced players and a shared world, the GM role may even rotate between players as the original characters become the kinds of power brokers who send wandering, expendable adventurers on quests. You can be one of those adventurers while one of them takes on the GM role. Your group could grow to include several GMs if you embrace a club style of play. We will discuss that in a later chapter though. It may be overly grandiose, but there is a paternal quality to Game Mastering and its rewards echo those of a proud father if only in a small way.
Table-top games are not designed with a short on-ramp. The mechanics are open-ended and players must actually make decisions as to how their character will act as well as the mechanics that facilitate their action. Having both successfully and unsuccessfully onboarded brand new players in the past, I can tell you that players not only have to learn to play RPGs, but to think in RPG terms. This goes double for GMs. While this guide is intended to help GMs think in RPG terms, I can only offer a starting point. Both the new player and the new GM will find themselves paralyzed by the options in front of them or the choices of players at the table. I have stopped counting the number of times that a new player has asked “What can I do?” when I leave the party room to act on their own volition. I also remember the shock and terror of watching my players get overwhelmed by an encounter for the first time or the way I froze when faced with an unusual course of action taken by one of my players. These moments make the inexperienced feel like bad players and bad GMs. This above all is where having a low time-preference comes into play. RPGs aren’t a hobby like video games where you can “get it” fast. They remind me of two other hobbies I enjoy; baking and Jiu-Jitsu. The first time I attempt a bake, I rarely nail it. Usually, it takes a couple tries to get it right. Likewise, I am only a few months into my Jiu-Jitsu training and I am not very good at it. I frequently freeze and usually lose. I only recently discovered things that I’m good at on the mats and I still need to hone those. That’s part of the journey though. You have to view RPGs like an art and arts are a lifelong pursuit. How much lower time-preference can you get? You will work at this for the rest of your life or until you decide it’s not worth doing anymore. If you can make peace with that, then you’re ready to begin, Game Master.