Thread by @VentureSatchel

A player thanked me for stepping up and GMing.

"I really like to play," he told me, "but I don't know how to run the game."

I almost joked back, "me neither" (which is how I've been feeling, lately) but my new thing is projecting confidence for the players' sake, so I didn't.

But later it got me thinking, "what do I know that he doesn't? He knows the PHB and splat-books back-to-front, while I've never cracked most of 'em, so what's he missing?

I think the answer is "notes" or, more philosophically, "ontology" or else "higher order abstractions."

A player has a character sheet (and the back of it). That is the beginning and the end of their notes. They've a single, over-arching abstraction that fits on one page. Sure, it comprises a dozen sub-abstractions, but none of them exist outside the bounds of The Sheet.

A character sheet can accommodate lots of what exists in the world: items, and spells, even ranks in an organization have their place on the sheet.

But not everything. Geography, Architecture, and Politics are nowhere represented by players except ad hoc in the margins.

(Oh, player-drawn maps are a whole thing I'm neglecting. In fact, I know there are players wielding @obsdmd to take meticulously abstracted notes, perhaps vanguards of a new era (ok, grognards, a "renaissance") in the hobby.)

What I have, that my players don't, are "character sheets" for everything else. I'm wielding abstractions that they don't even [want to] know exist!

Locations, Regions, Items, Factions, Encounters, and Adventures all get "Sheets"; of my own making or a hodgepodge of others'.

Except — syke! — I don't actually have sheets for all these. My notes aren't that good. Or, maybe, they aren't that _convoluted_.

In the past, I've only made sheets for Adventures and they Encounters they comprise, while the rest is relegated to pages of penciled prose.