The stages of a RPG team's development, Part 1: Introduction

Image Source: The Cartoon Source.

Those who know me know that I’m a very meta-(insert subject) type of person. That’s why discovering the TV Tropes wiki made my month as a DM.

But tropes are not all that I find fascinating. People interaction and motivation is also a great subject of interest to me.  There’s something about observing people play a role playing game that fascinates me beyond just plain curiosity.

Anyway, a few years ago, I was a supervisor for a small team of people in a pharmaceutical company.  At the time, I realized that Managing and DMing were very similar activities. So similar that I still think that most good DMing advice apply to management. The same can be said for the other way around.

One of my favorite management concepts is that of the 4 stages of team development. Thus, while musing on the similarities between workplace teams and RPG gaming groups, I decided to explore it further and write about it.

A Gaming Group as a Team

Your Role-playing gaming group is a team, pretty much  like you would define one found in the workplace. I would define it as a group of people that spend time and efforts to reach a common goal. In the case of RPGs, the common goal is to have fun. You as DM/GM act as a team leader. You share the very similar responsibilities of any manager: make sure everyone, including you, work toward achieving the common goal .

You achieve this by giving your player all the necessary means to have fun. However, note that different players have different ways of having fun, but the team’s goal remains the same.

I’m willing to bet that the cycle of development of your gaming ‘teams’ follows the same 4 stages : Forming, Storming, Norming and Performing.   It sure did for my current one.

In the next posts of the series, I’ll tackle those stages and explore how they relate to a gaming ‘team’ by drawing examples from my own experiences.