Soft Skills - Talents for your Table and your Resume

When I first started DMing, I knew I had a lot to learn. Looking at the game, I immediately saw all the elements that I wanted to become proficient and eventually excel at. Hearing all the amazing stories come to life with challenging combat, captivating social encounters, and epic explorations made me want to focus on improving my abilities. Focusing on understanding how to design and run DnD encounters, I worked to improve my abilities. My abilities to craft and run DnD sessions improved steadily, but I noticed certain issues would persist. The combat in sessions would improve by adding extra elements, but scheduling sessions would prove a challenge, and make it hard to have regular games. I could create an NPC quickly, but if conflict arose out of the game, it would be difficult to manage. Campaigns prep became organized, allowing me to better track story plots, but I had trouble making sure that these plots were working with players. Simply put, I had improved my skills specifically for running DnD. While those improved, I did not put any focus on my skills to run and manage a group, also known as Soft Skills.

What are Hard and Soft Skills?

Although more commonly used in the professional world, the concept of both “Hard” and “Soft” Skill categories fits well into the realm of DnD. The term Hard Skill refers to job or task-specific knowledge or abilities that allow someone to do that task effectively. A computer programmer knowing specific coding languages, for example, would classify as Hard Skills. A person working in the finance world would add any accounting software proficiencies as Hard Skills. In our case, the specific tasks involved in building and running DnD sessions would be‌ Hard Skills. The abilities and knowledge, whether writing in Python, GL reconciliation, or balancing combat encounters, allow someone to effectively and efficiently do their job. While extremely useful, these skills are very specific, and usually have a narrow range of usability. An accountant understanding Visual Basics can provide some additional utility in the finance skills, but does not match the values of other job-specific skills, such as understanding Oracle’s Accounting Software. 

Soft Skills‌ focus on a more universal set of abilities. Also referred to as Common or Core Skills, these comprise a broad range of traits that can find use in most jobs and activities. Organization, Communication, Empathy and Problem-Solving all fall into the category of Soft Skills. While having a programmer that understands coding languages is useful, having a programmer who also excels at organizing projects and keeping regular meetings with the clients will often have a broader usability. Unlike Hard Skills, Soft skills will find use at just about any job. While understanding and implementing the GAAP principles can find great use in the Finance Field, you would not ‌see those skills having as much use in a Marketing Department. The ability to resolve intergroup conflicts, however, will remain just as useful. These skills, while not as flashy or focused as their hard counterparts, have a ton of value in a wide variety of situations. This proves especially true for anyone running a DnD, or any TTRPG, game.

My Top Soft Skills

The amount of soft skills varies from source to source. Part of their broad adaptability means that having a specific list or definition can prove difficult. Most skills that help better manage and lead a group could be Soft Skills. I have a top three sets of Soft Skills that I focus on and regard as my key to excelling as a Game Master. While these are not the exclusive skills I try to improve, I put priority into making sure that I improve these alongside my other DMing abilities, and I believe they make the game a much better experience for everyone.

Time Management

Having Successful Time Management skills sits quite high on my list of Soft Skills since it can apply to multiple aspects of running a game and that it can be such a challenge when running a game. If you have experience playing TTRPGs, you know that scheduling can be the real boss of any campaign. I have had more than a few games fall apart because we could not get to the table regularly. Everyone involved in the game, DM included, has a variety of other obligations besides the game itself, and sometimes those need to take precedence over game night. But if you have to cancel or reschedule games repeatedly, it can affect the momentum you have, both in gameplay and during your prep time for the campaign. After a while, you might see your game stagnate and end.

With proper Time Management skills, however, we can reduce the problems these might have and mitigate them when they pop up. As I have talked about in my article on cancellations, having a solid system in place for scheduling games, RSVPing, and dealing with cancelation helps tackle any problems that might arise. Setting the expectations of when and how often you play will help your players make sure that they can attend your session and help make sure you have an idea if one or more players might miss a night. Having a plan in place in case that normal schedule needs to change will make the inevitable hiccup more manageable. Understanding whether you take the night off or do something else (such as a short and simple TTRPG) will take any of the stress away from Time Management. It does not entirely remove cancellations, but it does make them more manageable. 

Scheduling is a large part of time management, but it is not the only aspect where this Soft Skill plays a part. Determining the duration of each session will make sure that you have a consistent session length as well as be respectful of everyone’s time. In my group, we have soft and hard stops. When our games reach 9:30, I will start keeping my eyes out for an appropriate time to end the game. If we reach 9:45 and our game has no end in sight, I let my players know the time and confirm that we are good to play until 10PM. Once we reach 10, however, we have a hard cut off for gameplay, ending in almost all situations. For my group, this works the best. We play a weekly, weekday night schedule that allows myself and my players to get to the table as much as possible, but that means our sessions run a little shorter. While some nights we would all love to play until midnight or later, it does not fit in with our schedules. By setting those expectations early on, my group knows what to expect. As a DM, I can plan around that expected time playing, organizing sessions so that we start promptly and getting an optimal amount of time playing.

Many other aspects of a DnD campaign will improve with the right Time Management skills. Preparing for your game session involves a lot of prep outside of the game itself. In order to craft amazing combat encounters or create interesting dungeons for the party to explore, you need to give yourself the time to prep, and know the deadline by when you need this work complete. Sometimes an individual player might need a one-on-one with the DM to push their character’s story forwards. Finding the time for that outside of the regular session can take a bit of coordination, and you will want to know when those actions need to be determined in order to influence the story. Ultimately, time management is incredibly vital.

Communication

Since DnD is a social game, it involves a group interacting with one another. We create characters, get spells and abilities, and roll dice, but ultimately we are communicating with one another in order to tell this story together. While it might seem like communication is an obvious and natural part of the game, some of the specific aspects around this Soft Skill can sometimes be difficult to achieve.

The most obvious implementation of communication comes up during gameplay. A player will want to do an action, and you as the DM need to understand and communicate the potentials for success as well as the requirement. The DM has the job of taking what the players want to do and then translating it into the game world, deciding whether what they want to do makes sense. Your players describe what they want to do, and then you inform them how they will go about doing that. Perhaps the barbarian wants to shove a grappled enemy out a third-story window, riding them down in the most magnificent pile driver they have ever imagined. When put in that situation as a DM, I want to help the player achieve their amazing ideas as long as they are within reason. That requires communication skills, both on understanding your players and being able to communicate back to them. I need to understand what the player is asking to do and know when to ask for further clarification. Does the player want to ride their enemy down, or just defenestrate them? I might need to ask for elaboration in order to make sure I am understanding the intent behind the choice. Once I understand what the player wants to achieve, I need to convey how they can achieve this, as well as what the results could look like. If the player pushes their enemy out the window, this will cause some major damage. However, a failure, especially a spectacular one, could send the PC on a fast downward journey instead. Communication skills might not allow me to understand how the player will go about doing what they want, but it will make understanding the players’ intent and explaining the results and the requirements much simpler.

Communication skills also help you with setting expectations and makes sure your players understand your intent. Before you even start playing your game, you will want to have some sort of way of letting your players know what your intentions are with this campaign. DnD can take many forms. You can have a game of high-fantasy heroes taking down the ultimate evil, noir detectives fighting the ever rising tides of corruption, or the main characters in a gothic horror story. When planning your game, you want to make sure you let your potential player know what your intentions are with the game. What story do you hope to tell with the group, and what elements do you want to have a focus on? Will you use house rules, or want to have specific choices around character creation? Communicating the choices, as well as the reasoning, to your group will help make sure that the players know what game they will play. They can decide if such a game sounds like something they would enjoy and create characters that will align with the core of the story you wish to tell.

Empathy and Conflict Resolution

TTRPGs revolve around overcoming obstacles. These obstacles can take many forms, but they all require the party to work together in order to overcome the challenges set before them. With high stakes, emotions can get high. Sometimes the in-game conflict can spill out to outside of the game. When this arises, it can lead to an uncomfortable and hostile environment at the table. You will want to have a plan for how to approach, as well as the wisdom to understand both sides. Having the proper Conflict Resolution skills, as well as a decent understanding of empathy, will help with this. These real-life equivalents to the insight check provide a lot of utility at the table.

Conflict can arise at the table, and when it does it can come in a variety of situations. It could come from a disagreement between two players who do not agree with how some element of the game played out at the table. It could also result in a disagreement between a player and a DM. As the individual who has final say on the rules, sometimes a ruling can hinder a player. As the DM, you will want to‌ diffuse the situation. You will want to make sure that both sides, whether or not you are one of them, have a rational frame of mind before trying to proceed. Then work on resolving the situation in a way that takes both sides into consideration. Having a basic idea of how to handle disagreements will help resolve this situation, giving you a framework on how to proceed in a fair way.

Having a solid understanding of empathy will also help you when you need to adjust your campaigns. When you run a game for a while, the tone and intent can sometimes drift. Players may realize their earlier choices and plans do not fit the game, or you might realize that something you have done shifted. When this happens, it pays off to take the time to reach out to players to get an idea of what works and what does not. You need a Session 0-2.This out of character roundtable, where you can try to resolve any issues the party or individual party have currently, allows you to adjust the campaign. This can, however, be a bit of an arduous task when you want to get all the problems out in the open.

The skills I named above rank as the most valued Soft Skills to me, but many other skills exist that fit into running DnD as well. If we think of our DnD tables in a general sense, we have a group of people working together to achieve a goal. Anything that makes running a group much easier will fall into this realm. Having adaptability to react to changes with little turnaround time can help with both scheduling issues or in the game when players throw a curveball. Organization will help structure both your notes and your outlines, helping make sure that you can easily outline your campaign, making sure nothing gets lost. Ultimately, it falls into what is most important for you.

Improving Soft Skills

Now that we can identify Soft Skills and know that they help with many aspects of a game, you may wonder how you go about bettering the skills. For hard skills, you can find a variety of information available that will help you improve and rethink how you approach the DnD specific elements of the game. You have the core books and material, which provide a great foundation to learning how to run DnD specifically. There also are a variety of individuals out there helping you run your games better (including me!). All that said, we want to focus on the non DnD specific skills. However, how do you go about improving the soft skills?

Focus and Practice

For me, the first step has always been to focus on the individual skill itself and try to practice better procedures. Once you know what you want to improve upon, proceeding with an intent to both focus and improve upon said skill can help a lot. As an example, Time Management was one of the first skills I wanted to have a focus on improving. Cancellations and last-minute changes would disrupt my flow. It made it harder for me to have a consistent story at my table. So my first steps at the table had me focus on how I could improve my time management. I realized that having a solid schedule with many check-ins would help me make sure that I could identify potential cancellations early on, and have plans in place when they would arise. While it did not resolve my time management problems entirely, it put me on a path where I could focus on how I approached scheduling, and improve from there.

Reading (and Listening) Material

Self focus and practice help, but you may find that you want some other ideas to add to your own. Having solid skills at conflict resolution was another focus of mine, but I found it hard to gauge how to improve those skills. At that point, I sought other sources that I could read, listen to, and otherwise learn other people’s methods in order to better myself. Since Soft Skills have a universal usefulness, you have a ton of options to choose from. These topics have many books, available either online or at the local library. For Conflict Resolution, books such as the Conflict Resolution Playbook will provide some great insight into how to approach potential issues that might arise at the table. Grabbing this book, either digitally or in audiobook form, allowed me to learn some new ways to approach conflicts at the table.

Courses

For those that prefer a different medium, or a more active approach to learning, courses exist. The professional world focuses heavily on the cultivating of Soft Skills since these universal skills have so much benefit in any occupation. That means that you can easily sign up for courses or seminars. Most of my foundations on communication were through a variety of Public Speaking courses available at my university, and many local community colleges have these options as well. Alternative options such as Udemy and Skillshare also exist. While you will pay a little in order to take the course, I have found in my experience it is a worthwhile way to learn new materials. Many of these courses will come with handouts, worksheets, and activities to help you improve your abilities.

You have endless options available for improving your Soft Skills, with varying levels of involvement. It will come down to preference most of the time, and a lot focuses on your preferred learning style. I prefer to listen, watch, and practice in order to learn, so I make sure I take options that allow that. If I do any reading, I grab an audiobook. Courses that have handouts always stand out to me over ones that do not.

Final Thoughts

Soft Skills might not seem like an obvious necessity when you start your journey to become a talented DM, but they have an importance to your abilities as a DM‌. Coming into the game, the Hard Skills will stand out more, being tied to the game and even a bit more exciting. But Soft Skills, the universal abilities to improve teamwork, have just as much of a place. Managing your Time to minimize cancellations, communication to convey story elements and understand player intent, and Conflict Resolution to make sure everyone trusts each other and enjoys the game just scratches the surface of what these abilities help you with. Focusing on them and improving them will make the game much better, and you can find books and even courses to improve your abilities even further.

The ‌bonus of improving Soft Skills might already seem obvious, but by improving these abilities you will find utility outside of your game tables. Having better Time Management skills has paid itself back tenfold for the rest of my life, whether I am making sure I meet deadlines or coordinating events with friends. While something like running combat won’t come up outside of the game often, these Soft Skills certainly will.

You might never think to put your credentials as a DM on a resume, but what about managing a group of 4-5 individuals in a collaborative project? You handled Time Management through scheduling and by setting session durations. Communication was focused by making sure you and your players understood one another. Any time conflicts between group members arose, you would help de-escalate them, and resolve the conflict.

These skills have value and can pay back in dividends when you put the focus on them.Do you have a particular soft skill you have worked on at the table? If so, how did you improve?

Do you have a soft skill you struggle with and want to improve?

Either way, I always love to hear comments, so mention them below!