Too hard
People run. If it keeps happening, they stop trying. The clever plan stops arriving, and the quiet player who was about to try something brave decides not to.
The game master
Their best villain, and their biggest fan.
Mark Calleja has sat behind the game master's screen for thirty years. His current table has met every week since 2020.
The job
The only person at the table who can't lose.
The game master writes the world. One sentence could end everyone's evening, and another dragon is only a page away. So winning was never the point.
The point is next week, when the same people want to come back.
The game master can win whenever they like. So winning was never the job. The job is making it hard enough to matter.
Too hard, too easy
The narrow road between the two.
Too easy
It's lovely for about forty minutes. Nothing costs anyone anything, so nothing sticks, and a month later nobody can tell you what happened.
Too hard, and they leave. Too easy, and they never really arrive.
Reading the table
The real job is watching faces.
Who's leaning in. Who's gone quiet. How long it takes someone to say what their character does: fast means excited, slow means nervous.
Then the game master adjusts. The guard is a little more tired than planned. The reinforcements don't come. The clue turns up in the room the team actually searched.
I change the size of the problem. I never change who solves it.
What that means for your team
A story hard enough to matter and fair enough to win, with someone watching how you work together and cheering you on the whole way.
Then the debrief, where the team decides what, if anything, it says about Monday.
Behind the screen
Mark Calleja.
- Thirty years running tabletop games, with a weekly table since 2020.
- Over a decade designing game-based learning, for groups from pre-schoolers to postgraduates.
- Co-founder of HackLabUK.
- Two previous TEDx talks, at King's College London and Anglia Ruskin University.
Book a table
Pull up a chair.
Email us with your team size, two or three possible dates, and whether you'd like the session in person in Cambridge or online.
hello@academyofdungeoneering.com
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