I'm a Movement!

It's a funny thing, overhearing some gamers referring to you as a style/movement in GMing.

I am far from the be all and end all of the spectacular RPG community in Uruguay, which was already cool before I got here and has a ton of great people and stuff going on besides my presence.

But I guess I have made an impact. I know there are some games played here that are only here because I brought attention to them. And I've run a lot of games with a lot of people.

So maybe I shouldn't have been surprised when I heard someone talk about how someone else's GM-ing style is of the "Punditist" school.  And that certain things are a very "Punditist" feature of GMing.

So in the same sense as impressionism, cubism, etc., are to art, apparently Punditism or the Punditist school is a specific 'school' of the craft of GMing, where enough people have played under me (hell, there are crazy numbers who learned how to play from me, whose start in RPGs here was with me), that when they GM now they incorporate details into their game.

On interrogation with the people who said it, this ranges from meaningful and sweeping details, like having a vast number of NPCs, and a powerful sense of a living world, to particular quirks and minutiae, like having a fast and loose style with stats and and the 'theater of the mind' combat style; to comedic details (having some comedic parts to even the most serious of games being one feature of Punditism, no doubt), like how you can tell the bosses by the size of their mustaches.

So yeah, there's something funny about that, because I never made a manifesto or set myself up to play this part.  It was just a function of me being a fanatical GM and 12+ years gaming with a ton of people.

RPGPundit

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