I think I’ve mentioned before that if you haven’t read it, Atul Gawande’s Better is a great book about how things can get systematically improved. It focuses on medicine, but it’s one of those all-purpose insightful books.

Anyway, one section that really stuck with me was the Apgar score (article version here, for the curious) . For the unfamiliar, this is a rating given to babies when they’re born and a minute afterwards. It rates five things (Complexion, Pulse, Movement, Breathing and Irritability) to quickly generate a score from 0-10. In and of itself it’s not a very detailed piece of information, but it’s simple, easy to asess, easy to communicate, and generally makes an excellent shorthand for the child’s health.

Now, the specifics of the Apgar score are pretty interesting in their own right, but what’s much more interesting is positive impact it had on successful births. In an illustration of the trusim that you must measure something in order to improve it, Apgar scores gave hospitals a yardstick to measure their performance by, so they had something concrete to improve and to judge results by.

What gets me, and what brings this across to gaming for me, is that part of the success lay in the somewhat arbitrary nature of the scoring system. There are a bazillion variables at play when a baby is born, and picking those 5 and saying their the ones to score is, from a certain perspective, almost capricious. But, as with a lot of things, it seems to be one of those cases where making a good decision is a much better path than indefinite delay in trying to find the perfect solution.

So, with that in mind, I’m busting out a list of things GMs do. It’s probably a bad list, but I want to start somewhere. Honestly, I doubt we can come to something nearly as useful as the Apgar score, and even if we come up with a list, there’s a whole question of how to use it, but dammit, you have to start somewhere.

When I started on thel ist I realized that the biggest muddle I encountered was between the GM’s “Solo fun” (that is, design work) and actual play at the table. Both are important, but since I’m trying to take a practical tack on this, I chose to think in terms of how play went at the table. That is, I’m looking to rate things that the GM does in play, perhaps as a list to run through at the end of a session and see how each of these things went.

Removing those non-table elements shortened the list dramatically, but I still don’t feel it’s as solid as it could be, but here it is:

• Playing interesting NPCs (Strong character voice)
• Setting Presentation (how well does the world hang together?)
• Scene setting
• Engaging challenges (Puzzles, fights)
• Rules mastery
• Humor
• Creating Emotional engagement
• EDIT BASED ON MANY COMMENTS – Maintaining Focus/Pacing.

So what on that sucks, and what is it missing? Or is the entire methodology flawed, and the list should be entirely different?