24 January 2026

Community creation - getting that second DM, trying that other system.

Challenged by Trick the Giant to commemorate the founding and server-activation of the Vienna DM Supergroup with a post on the theme of Community - I was brainstorming what I could possibly add to the topic with the in-house testing team and they suggested talking about how in the group and era I started out, everyone was a DM and that this bumps just a gaming table up to a gaming community because it is not just hanging off one DMs effort and availability.


Half of the intention of the Supergroup was to create a game design community - and for thoughts on that I direct you to the excellent A Quick and Dirty Guide to Building a Local RPG Design Scene by Brackish Draught - their checklist of ideas maps almost perfectly to what we did and what worked.

The other half of the purpose of the Supergroup was giving forever-DM's a chance to play and that is more likely to be the more useful thing for more of you. We short-circuited this by gathering existing forever-GMs, but what about the case where you are the only one?

Why it matters

One DM and their table, no matter how large the roster, is just one gaming group and it thrives or fails based on fate allowing that DM to continue to run their games. It also has a ceiling for activity based on when that one DM gets saturated and needs to fit in other things like sleeping, work, etc.

Should that DM have to quit for whatever reason, then while you might have a circle of friends, with no DM you do not have a gaming community.

A community forms when the gaming is no longer dependent on any one person - when you have multiple DMs. What I often see, with the people who come to our open tables, is that people want to play and few decide to run their own games - maybe 1 in 6 people through the door DM even once over the year and that includes all our existing DM cohort. There seems to be an apprenticeship approach which takes a while. There seems to be a much more solid divide now between DM and players compared to when I started.

Every player a games-master

When I first got into things, pretty much everyone who played at any of the tables also ran something. This was the mid-90s so the games in play were AD&D, WoD in all its flavours, WHFRP, Dragonlance Saga system, Shadowrun, and Conspiracy X. Everyone had their own thing they ran, according to taste, and we rotated. It meant there was never a shortage of folk ready to run things, the load was much more evenly balanced and the group as a whole more resilient to any one person being away.

I think it was also beneficial because everyone got some time at the head of the table and so knew first hand about the challenges of marshalling a table of players, running a session, and all the various chores of a DM. Thus folk were easier players, less inclined to grief a DM as they had been there too.

I suspect that the range of systems we played also made folk a bit more relaxed about the DM not being the single source of truth, with others around the table checking rules and picking up minor tasks that would otherwise all be routed through the DM. This made everything quicker, cutting down dead time since some 'DM tasks' were being solved by the players.

Since everyone was less familiar with the systems, prior to the internet being universally available in the palm of your hand, there was a higher tolerance to things being 'good enough for now' - making a ruling in the moment and moving on. Min-maxing was less, since all systems were less familiar and any one exploit was more tolerable because you were not dealing with it all the time.

To be fair this also meant that any given campaign progressed more slowly because it was not the continual focus of a groups game time but this is a feature not a bug. Rapid progress in a campaign is not what we are optimising for with these ideas.

"Try again. Fail again. Fail better."

Samuel Becketts line is one of the things to hold as a north star in getting from just a one-DM gaming group to a gaming community. If everyone involved can get relaxed about trying new things and these things maybe being a bit squeaky but with the anticipation that together, everyone will get better, then you have the fertile ground where a community will grow.

There are greater online communities one can participate in, those are their own thing and not my field of expertise so I defer to the better advice of others. For your local table however, getting together an in-person or hybrid group - any one where there is a good chunk of in person meeting up - then I would suggest that those folk, your local micro-environment, is what you want to be adapting to. There is a torrent of advice and opinion online, a firehose that will occupy all your time if you attempt to take it all in - sip from the torrent, take what works usefully for your table and ignore the rest.

The best thing that can come from online sources - or more slowly through books - are ideas, pointers to possible ways - and being open to trying those things with an attitude of testing to see what works is helpful. That test-and-keep or test-and-drop attitude is a great one to have collectively; it both expands the range of sources from which you might draw that one great idea that makes your games better and makes everyone more forgiving for hiccups and rough bits in games where you are trying something new.

Having an attitude of 'try it and keep/dump' is great - openly acknowledging 'we are going to try these rules for a bit then decide if we like them' is good. It takes the pressure off any set of rules being flawless and lets you test how often game-breaking edge cases actually come up. If some marvelous exploit allows the PCs to massively succeed one time, that if probably fine, a great story - if it happens twice per session and is making the game hard to run - tweak or remove it.

People as a whole are much more willing to give things a go when it is a short-run thing - a new system for a one-shot or a short run campaign is a much easier sell than trying to get people to commit to a weekly slot for an indefinite amount of time. In particular when you are trying to wrangle a group of people, no time will work for everyone so rather than locking in on one time forever and losing some people, try things and then adjust.

Thoughts on community

In the same way that the 90s gamers when I came up were pretty omniverous the mid-2010s local lot here used to have an Indie games night where they ran different things every week. This, with a local board-game bar as the venue and a classic forum has formed the backbone of a community that has now been running for over a decade.

If you are trying to get a community off the ground, in particular if you are starting from a single gaming table, then intermixing your big stuff with one-shots gives a great opportunity for others to shine. Switch the main campaign from weekly to every fortnight and have others run something on the off week, or maybe last week of every month is a one-shot - something like that opens up slots for others to have a go under relatively controlled conditions.

Some folk who turn up will only want to play, some will only want to play 5e, this is fine but do not let them stop you. Geek Social Fallacies say 'friends do everything together' but if one person does not want to do a thing and you've got a potential fledgling DM ready to run something and help take that step up - ask the naysayer to go catch a movie that night. As the DM who is putting in all the elbow grease you get to make the calls that help you cultivate a back-up DM. Go forward with the willing if you have enough of them, do not waste your energy trying to get unanimity or convert the unwilling.

Getting your group on board in general with the goal of learning collectively - figuring out how to run the best games, ideally more folk running good games for each other - is a great attitude to have. It makes everyone a participant and responsible for the collective enjoyment. When folk are just turning up to be entertained, the DM competing with whatever is on Netflix. TTRPGs are the place where people get that social interaction, lean into that part of it.

Not everyone is going to be on for this - some really do just see their DMs as wetware running their entertainment - but don't worry about those folk and do not bother to cater to them. Get one or two people to come along on this journey, encourage them to try new things, try some things with them, then expand the circle and do it again. After a bit you will have tables running in parallel, players swapping about, DMs get a chance to play and the whole group becomes resilient to something happening to any one DM.

Not to say this is a journey for everyone, nor that there is anything wrong with declaring "this is a gaming table that is reliant on this one DM" if all are satisfied with that. But if you find yourself wishing there were others to bear the load with you, then I would suggest some of the above.

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