I competed in the Iron GM World Championship on Saturday afternoon at Gen Con. It was my first time participating in the event in any capacity. I had heard of it only shortly before signups for events opened for Gen Con this year, but it was the thing I was looking forward to most about this year’s con.

I have many thoughts and feelings about it, and I decided the only way I could get them down coherently right now without rambling overmuch would be in bullet point form. There is only limited reasoning behind the ordering.

The Basics

• Game masters (GMs) are each paired randomly with a table of six strangers, for whom they will run a tabletop RPG for four hours.
• Each GM can propose whatever system they want, but if there isn’t unanimous agreement by the players, then the GM must run 3.5 D&D.
• The GMs are given three “secret ingredients” that they must incorporate into the game they run. No one knows these ingredients before the event. This year’s ingredients were “troll hunter,” “thieves’ guild headquarters,” and “traitorous influence.”
• The GMs have one hour to prepare the game, while the players make characters. A GM may only say three words aloud to their players during this time, but may otherwise communicate nonverbally, as with writing notes.
• GMs and players play together for about four hours, with an intermission at the halfway mark.
• GMs are scored by their players after the game concludes, and prizes are awarded to the top three GMs. Other GMs receive smaller prize packages as well. The questions on the score cards are:
  • Originality in incorporating each of the secret ingredients. [1-5 each]
  • “How well did the GM facilitate your participation in the game?” [1-5]
  • “To what extent did the GM allow your character to influence the adventure?” [1-5]
  • “How rule savvy was your GM?” [1-5]
  • “Did your GM build a coherent story arc into the adventure?” [1-5]
  • “What was the worst thing your GM did?” [No numerical value.]
  • “What was the best thing your GM did?” [No numerical value.]
  • “How exciting was your game?” [1-5]
  • “Was your GM Iron?” [1-3]
• It’s called the “World Championship,” but there’s no barrier to entry beside signing up before it sells out. Anyone can compete. It’s not easy finding the “regional” events they hold outside Gen Con.

What Worked for Me

• The silliness of the format and the way it encourages improvisation and rewards adaptability.
• My players’ willingness to try 5th Edition D&D, even though many of them were new to it. A couple of my players told me after the game was over that they didn’t like 5th Edition, but that they enjoyed our game. One even said, “You made me like 5th Edition.”
• My players’ willingness to focus on the fun and to engage fully in the story we were crafting together. After the inciting incident, they largely grabbed the reins in deciding the direction of the adventure.
• The other GMs were all very welcoming. They wanted to share advice and support newcomers to the event.
• Using GM pseudonyms. It’s silly, but all the players have character names, so it’s fun to have GM names too.
• I brought pre-made character sheets for my players, along with blank character sheets. Although players are supposed to spend the hour of GM prep time making their characters, they all decided to use one of the provided pre-made characters.
• The character building prompts I made and gave my players to fill out during the prep hour. This allowed me to come up with hooks to bring them into the story, and to give each character a personal denouement after the adventure ended.
• GMs are scored based on encouraging player engagement and letting the characters influence the adventure.
• I got the Starfinder core rulebook in my prize package as a competitor. I don’t know if or when I’ll ever get around to playing it, but I’m glad I have it.

What Didn’t Work for Me

• The event clearly values showmanship, with the GM as the star of the show. This isn’t the style of GMing I strive for at all, and GMs standing around recalling the games they’ve run isn’t my scene. There’s much more pageantry than I anticipated or am comfortable with.
• The inclusion of, “Why will you win?” in the form you fill out as a GM before the event. This answer is read aloud to the room when you enter. People enjoy it, and my answer got a laugh as well, but it’s not my thing to call shots like that.
• It feels very much like an old boys club at its heart, with a circle of insiders, despite the participants being on the whole very welcoming.
• The role that the female volunteers play while the men emcee the event. Even done in jest or ironically, it’s off-putting to me, for hopefully obvious reasons.
• Each GM’s game system proposal is made in front of the entire crowd of players and GMs assembled, even though it affects no one except the people at the table. It reads to me like an opportunity for GMs to show off to the entire room what cool system(s) can run, and that the other GMs maybe cannot run.
• That one guy at another table who, when the GM proposed 5th Edition, flatly shook his head, leaning back in his chair with his arms crossed, and stuck to it, despite the GM’s protest that 3.5 wasn’t a system she didn’t know well. He probably made the game worse for the whole table by forcing their GM into a system he knew she wasn’t comfortable with.
• The scoring method is not publicized, and the organizers don’t make clear what an “Iron GM” should be. What do they mean when they ask, “Was your GM Iron?”
• The scoring sheet never asks the players whether they had fun, nor whether they would like to play with this GM again.
• GMs aren’t given access to the scoring from their players, nor any other feedback, such as the best and worst things the GM did. So you know if you didn’t place in the top three, but you don’t know why, nor how close it was. The organizer I asked about it said that sharing player feedback with GMs leads to “problems.” I can see that being the case, but I’m surprised more GMs aren’t interested in hearing from the players what they liked and didn’t like, so that they might improve generally as GMs, if not for this event.
• The use of 3.5 D&D as the default, based on the rationale that “everyone has played it.” As the hobby continues to grow with new players cutting their teeth on new systems, this becomes less and less true.
• The t-shirts. Probably going in the pile of old race shirts I never wear.

Conclusions

• I’ll probably do this event again next year, but that’s not certain. Something else going on at the same time could change my mind.
• My list of things that didn’t work is noticeably longer than my list of things that did, and that’s with some effort to try to keep them somewhat balanced. Nevertheless, I enjoyed it overall. The basic concept of the event carries a lot of the rest.
• It is still a little hard for me to justify doing this over just stepping up and running a regular game that anyone can sign up for at next year’s con. The most significant thing to lose from this would be the pool of other GMs to talk with about their experiences during and after the game.
• Assuming I do compete again next year, I’ll propose Shadow of the Demon Lord for my players. It’s more in line with the ethos of the event, both by showcasing a more exotic system and by aligning with the tone of the event.
• I should find ways to lean into the pageantry of the event, once again assuming that I compete next year.
• As with most things, this event would be a lot more fun with friends, with whom you could share experiences afterward. I suspect that the “old boys club” is just sort of an organic consequence of this fact.
• The values of this event, insofar as the organizers set it up, don’t align strongly with my own. I mean this mostly with regard to the kind of GM they encourage their competitors to be through the setup and execution of the event.
• I’d love to run something similar to this event sometime locally with some particular changes, such as less emphasis on the competition and pageantry, while still challenging GMs with semi-absurd requirements and restrictions. I’m sure it should be easy with all the free time I don’t have.