Reading books in English

I’ve learned that I’m apparently pretty decent at ciris management and completely awful at non-crisis managament.

DMing has helped practice a lot of business skills…communication, organization, running a meeting. Making pretty documents in google docs

As a DM, thinking on your toes has been invaluable. The ability to come up with ideas, explanations, and more on the fly has helped a lot at work in meetings when unexpected things come up.

Good too hear. I’m just starting my GM journey, and hoping for something similar.

Hah, true, what is DMing but creative facilitation?

Or maybe I should say: what is business but a fantasy roleplay with a bunch of gameable stats/metrics/KPIs?

Compromise and communicating my boundaries! If you want the game to be fun for everyone, yourself included, you need to learn when to go with the flow and when to stand your ground on something, after all.

Took me a second to realise you weren’t compromising your boundaries

Some people just aren’t a good fit. That doesn’t mean they’re a bad person, nor you’re a bad person, but sometimes you just don’t get on with someone in a particular context and that’s okay. You can still be friends or do other things together. You don’t have to do everything together to be friends.

It’s okay to let people have fun even if it seems stupid to you, or they’d have more fun doing something else. So long as they’re not hurting anyone, let it be. It’s tempting to be like “you know, there’s a whole game series about playing modern day vampires doing politics while holding onto their fading humanity” when some folks are doing that in D&D 5e, but it’s almost certainly not worth it. Many people don’t care about what you care about.

People learn in different ways. Some people really struggle with things that seem easy to you. That person who asks every week “what do I roll to attack?” or “Can I roll my armor against their sneak attack?” probably isn’t doing it to be annoying. They’re probably trying their best, even if their best is pretty bad by objective measurements like "getting the rules right’. Don’t be a jerk about it. You can gently ask them about what they think would help them keep the rules straight (one player liked little notecards, another player benefited from watching games on youtube), but you can’t just make someone learn.

So, first off, Satanists dont actually believe in magic, but they do believe that people need religion to some extent, that people need to live in a world of wonders. So, they turn things under their control into magick. For example, you combine some ingredients correctly in a baking pan, nurture it with heat for the correct amount of time, and you transmute these base ingredients with the power of life and death into bread. That’s magic. You enacted your agency upon the world to transform it in a manner that you will it to.

LaVey had some very insightful descriptions in the Satanic Bible, which otherwise is fairly useless beyond being an edgy bookshelf decoration, about how ceremonial magick works. (I tend to refer to this as ritual magic, since I think he was rather limited in his imagination). As he puts it, every ceremony needs an appropriate ritual space to invoke the correct state of mind in your audience, a leader (you) dressed in the appropriate vestments, a wand to direct the attention of your audience, and an altar to act as the focal point. You may also need a throne or crown to perform your authority.

When I started DMing, this was how I approached my task. The ritual space is the table with the map and the minis, the DM screen was my altar, my metal dice (or rather their rolling sound) was my wand, my vestments were the stack of rulebooks directly to my left, and the one nice chair I possessed was my throne. Each helped convey a message that supported my authority. My DM screen has transparent pockets that I would put art into that was appropriate to the vibe I wanted. My books, which i would gesture to whenever I made a ruling, had three meanings: first, the rules are what the game derives its authority from since the published rules feel more official; second, I had read them all and my players knew it, so I could usually imply any given rule was in the books somewhere; third, they were mine, but the players could also use them, as I am a generous and benevolent god. The dice also give legitimacy, but I had also found that (if used sparingly) nothing instilled greater dread in the hearts of gamers than the sound the the DM rolling on tables behind the DM screen, which is why i used metal dice rolled on a dice tray I had made by taping two plates back-to-back. Additionally, lending my metal dice to my players was a literally weightier display of my benevolence.

Teaching can be interpreted similarly. The ritual space is the classroom; it should be decorated to go along with your curriculum, and the desks and items in the room should be arranged in a way that encourages behaviors you want and discourages unwanted behaviors. Your vestments are your teacher clothes, because you need to look like a teacher to be respected. The altar is the whiteboard for obvious reasons. Every teacher has their opinion on what kind of wand is best, but I prefer a yardstick over a laser pointer. And finally, the throne is the teacher desk.

This is also why I am really opposed to virtual learning. I cannot create my ritual circle when I am not in the same room as my students. If I am physically present but don’t have a classroom, I can just put more work into my appearance and performance. But I guess i will have to adapt. Besides, I also realized that adhering strictly to Satanic ritual practice made my DMing rather rigid and encouraged me to act like an asshole sometimes, so these days I’m more focused on creating a space having where my friends can have fun with me.

Is that like the kind of person that can only work when under pressure and slack off otherwise?

Nah I’m just bad at undirected tasks, get everyone organized, code a physics engine from scratch, those I can get motivated for. Tell people what to do once they’re organized or actually build a game out of those functioning mechanics? No clue.