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Let's Learn Together

by Mike on 13 April 2026

Note: This article was originally posted on 21 December 2015.

"He never assumes that he knows more than you do. He says: 'We'll learn this together.'"

Annette Kowalski, Bob Ross's Strange Afterlife

Mastery means different things to different people. To some, mastery is an end goal, a level of proficiency that shows one's true capability and understanding of something. To others, mastery is a path, a continuing road one travels to improve at something.

The ideas I post here on Sly Flourish aren't the end of understanding how we run RPGs. They're a beginning. Every article, every tip, and every idea is an experiment based on a hypothesis.

My style of writing can give the impression of direction and finality. It's easy to pick up "you should do this". Vigor is a byproduct of brevity, to turn a phrase from EB White.

But the real theme of the tips I share is "let's try this out and see how it works". Sometimes these ideas work well and we can continue to iterate around them. Sometimes they don't. Some GM tips work well for some GMs but not others.

There are over eight hundred articles on SlyFlourish.com going back to 2009. I guarantee some of those ideas don't work. There are a lot of ideas here. Some ideas still work and I continue to iterate on them. Some ideas we tried, discussed, and later tossed aside.

The ideas on this site don't live in a vacuum. These articles live beside hundreds of thousands of other sources of great GMing ideas. The last fifty years have given us countless ideas for running great games to sift through and find new golden nuggets to bring to our own games.

None of us are ever done learning. There aren't any real "master" game masters. We're all trying things out every game. Some of us play a lot. Some of us think about it a lot. Some GMs are great. Some aren't. But none of us are done unless we just plain quit. We're all learning from each other and, hopefully, we're all keeping open ears and an open mind so we can all grow.

You won't find an end-state of game mastery on Sly Flourish even if it sounds like it sometimes.

Instead, we're all going on this journey together.

Let's learn together.

More Sly Flourish Stuff

Each week I record an episode of the Lazy RPG Talk Show (also available as a podcast) in which I talk about all things in tabletop RPGs.

Last Week's Lazy RPG Talk Show Topics

Here are last week's topics with time stamped links to the YouTube video.

Patreon Questions and Answers

Also on the Talk Show, I answer questions from Sly Flourish Patrons. Here are last week's questions and answers.

Talk Show Links

Here are links to the sites I referenced during the talk show.

Last week I also posted a YouTube video on the Journey to Starhoof – Dragon Empire Prep Session 62.

RPG Tips

Each week I think about what I learned in my last RPG session and write them up as RPG tips. Here are this week's tips:

Let NPCs evolve based on events and conversations. Don’t presume their arc.
Try different games.
Talk to your players about what they love and what they don't dig in your RPG of choice. Seek out those games that bring fun for the entire group.
Nothing is official except what you run at your table.
Play lots of games with lots of people.
Learn from the world and bring what's valuable to your own table.
Keep things simple.
Focus on what matters for your next game.

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This work includes material taken from SlyFlourish.com by Michael E. Shea available under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International license.

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