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Take It Easy

by Mike on 14 July 2025

Go easy on yourself. Your game doesn't have to be perfect. Your voices don't need to be A-list quality acting. It's fine to look things up in your books at the table or ask your friends for the clarification on a rule.

The growth of the internet over the past 30 years helped us game masters expand our knowledge of RPGs tremendously. We're able to get the opinions of thousands of other game masters and use those experiences to shape our own style when we sit down with our friends and run our games.

But there's a risk. We hear it when we discuss the "Mercer Effect" in which GMs worry that players expect Critical Role levels of performance from our games and are disappointed when it turns out to be a normal game. My expectation, based on some data, is that the Mercer effect isn't as much of a problem as some might think. Most players just want to enjoy a game. They don't need (and shouldn't expect) Hollywood-level performances around our dining room table.

Going beyond the Mercer Effect, though, I hear GMs who put a lot of pressure on themselves for things like

A-tier NPC voicework
rich deep storylines
intricate combat environments
expert combat tactics
perfectly interwoven character backgrounds and story threads

and so on.

RPGs are an incredible opportunity for us to get together with our friends and experience awesome creative stories together. They're also just games. Your players want to have a good time and to watch their characters do awesome stuff. It's ok to screw up an NPC's voice, forget their name, or forget what they did last time. It's ok to fall back on your players to help you fill in parts of the game you might have dropped. It's ok to forget some monster ability or forget to mention a crucial description of a room only to remember it later.

You don't need to be perfect to run a fun game. Focus on the fundamentals that make games great:

Let the story unfold during the game.
Set up situations and let the characters navigate them.
Be fans of the characters and their heroic activities.
Prepare what you need to help you improvise at the table.
Focus on the friends in front of you, the session you're running, and the characters they're playing.
Pay attention to pacing.

Seek to improve your craft as a game master session by session. Take in new information, advice, tips, tricks, tools, and other materials. Continually hone your GMing technique one piece at a time.

But go easy on yourself at the same time. Focus on your friends and your game and having a great time.

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.

Maps and Theater of the Mind Breaking Immersion

Talk Show Links

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

Last week I also posted a couple of YouTube videos on Defending Out of the Fun and Stonewatch – Dragon Empire Prep Session 29.

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:

Single foes against a full party will almost always be at a severe disadvantage. Accept it or account for it.
Give characters hard meaningful choices. Do they destroy the evil citadel or send it back to the hell from which it came?
Balance character to enemy actions (known as the action economy) for challenging fights.
Assign the role of quartermaster to one of the players. They keep track of all loot and who took what — even when other players write that loot down. Double-entry bookkeeping like it’s 1299!
If players are fond of abilities that shut down whole monsters — add more monsters.
Every scene reveals more of the story.
End before a big fight. Give yourself the strongest of strong starts for next time.

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