An Aged Wine Can Still Taste Like Shit

I once went to an associate’s home for a dinner party that was really more about his showing off than either dinner or the party. One of those “The Joneses have to keep up with me!” types. Whatever.

The host bragged about his wine collection, and made a big deal about opening a bottle that was seven years old. He poured many of his guests a taste and our opinion was unanimous – the wine tasted like shit. Maybe it had been kept for too long, or perhaps the cork had gone bad, but that wine was like vinegar.

Instead of just facing up to the fact that the wine was bad the host tried to play it off as if the guests did not understand how an “aged” wine should taste. Funny how he did not finish his own glass, but he made a point of saying that the wine had been in storage for seven years.

Nobody gave a damn, because the wine tasted awful.

If you are a game master who brags to people that “I run a good game, because I have been a GM for X number of years.” you are fooling yourself into thinking that how long you have been a game master actually matters. It does not. The only thing that matters is if you have been actively trying to improve your skills as a game master, and if so what have you accomplished through that pursuit?

Let me put it another way – I do not give a flying fuck if you have been running games ever since the original Dungeons & Dragons came out. I have played in plenty of games with game masters who had been running games for years who still ran a shitty game. I have also played in the games of some first time game masters that absolutely rocked! The difference was that one game master was confident that his years would bring the awesome to the table, and the other game master worked to bring the awesome to the table through effort.

Experience and time spent on any activity is not enough to help a person improve their skills with. You have to constantly strive to actively improve yourself, and not just sit back and rack up the hours. You have to be involved and learning from each of those hours as they pass by if you want to truly be an expert at what you do.

Do not confuse time spent as a game master being the same thing as effort spent becoming a great game master. And if you are the kind of game master who thinks your years of running games should impress me for some reason I assure that it does not. I do not care about the thousands of hours you have spent behind the screen, but I do care about the game you are running for the next four when I am a player. Screw it up and I will tell you how exactly many years you have wasted.

Feel free to share your opinion on this matter with me by leaving a comment below.