Image Source: The Cartoon Source.

Those who know me know that I’m a very Meta-(insert subject) type of person. That’s why discovering the TV Tropes wiki made my month as a DM. I’ve overlinked that site and my Rule of Cool post so I won’t do it here. If you’re a new reader, hi there! Thanks for spending your precious time here and have a look at them.

But tropes are not all that I find fascinating. People interaction and motivation is also a great subject of interest to me. While I have not read Robin Laws of Good Gamemastering yet (and I should) I have read the 1st part of the Dungeon Master Guide II about 5 times now. I suspect Mr. Laws wrote that.

Anyway, I used to be the supervisor of a small team of people in a pharmaceutical company a few years ago., I then realized that Managing and DMing are very, very similar. So similar that most good DMing advice apply to management and the same can be said for the other way around.

One of my favorite management concepts is that of the 4 stages of team development. Like I do with my tropes post (Ah! Couldn’t resist, sorry!) I’d like to apply this concept to a RPG group.

A Gaming Group as a Team
Your Role-playing gaming group is a team like you would define one found in the workplace. It is a group of people that spend time and effort to reach a common goal. In the case of RPGs, the common goal is to have fun. You as DM/GM act as a team leader. You share the exact same responsibilities of any manager: make sure everyone, including you, work toward achieving the common goal . You achieve this by giving your player all the necessary means to have fun. However, note that different players have different ways of having fun, but the team’s goal remains the same. (That link there is a must read for all DMs, I only realized what my player’s type was not so long ago and it has helped a lot since).

I’m willing to bet that the cycle of development of your gaming ‘teams’ follows the same 4 stages : Forming, Storming, Norming and Performing. It sure did for my current one. In the next post(s), I’ll tackle those stages and how they relate to a gaming ‘team’ by drawing examples from my experiences.

Right now, where would you place your team at?