confidence as a referee

25 Aug, 2026

Believe that what you know is enough, and the vast gulf of what you don't know will cease to scare you. With the barrier of fear demolished, the unknown will become accessible to you.

When you are refereeing a ttrpg, it's important to project confidence. DON'T YOU FUCKING DARE take that as an invitation to grandstand, or be defensive, or be wildly confrontational when your rulings are challenged. Those behaviours are not rooted in confidence; they are rooted in fear. Fear that you got it wrong. Fear that this somehow means they could find out everything else you did was wrong too. Fear that one mistake will suddenly undermine the fragile social contract that holds up your authority at the table and, by extension, the game itself.

Discard those thoughts. Fear is the mindkiller.

Listen to your players. Understand that you can understand their frustrations, should they have any, and even empathise with them, without having to immediately fold to their every whim. This, my friend, is the mark of confidence: to believe in your vision and your faculties firmly enough that when you are challenged, you do not succumb to insecurity.

I say again, confidence is important for referees. It is vital. You are the players' medium to the gameworld. You are bedrock. You must be tangible. When the players push against the world, it must resist. Otherwise, they have nothing solid to stand on.

But you're also going to get it wrong. Indeed, to believe yourself infallible, or that you should be infallible, are both pitfalls. If you want an easy example of this, just try to referee in a historical setting for a player who knows more about that setting than you. Your shortcomings are obvious, impossible to obscure.

You must be able to admit you made a mistake, or that you're unsure how to proceed, while still projecting the kind of confidence that allows players to place faith in you as their referee. The trick is to accept your failure without remorse, as if it is natural to make mistakes and it isn't the end of the world. Because that's fucking TRUE.

You don't know everything, but you know enough. Even better; you are enough.

I hope, if you've been feeling bashful about running your first game, that this has gotten you amped up, and that you go for it. If that's you, I now offer up a couple quick and dirty heuristics for navigating rulings and reflections, stolen from my day(and sometimes night) job on the boo boo bus.

Ideas, Concerns, Expectations

When having a purposeful discussion, break it up into 3 questions, each answered by all stakeholders in the conversation.

The gaming group are discussing the extremely slow movement rate in Keep on the Borderlands.

Ideas: What ideas do we have about the situation at hand? Do those ideas line up? Are we percieving the situation similarly? What are our shared and differing beliefs about the way things should be?

Player: I think 300 yards per hour is incredibly unrealistic. Normal walking speed is like, more than 10 times that. It makes travel a boring chore. I pay for childcare so I can come to these games. I come to have FUN.

Referee: The module was written this way; it's tradition and should be honoured. Fun is only fun if sometimes it's bot fun. If you want an in-universe explanation, the ground is EXTREMELY overgrown and tangled, and the players are mapping and resting as they go.

Concerns: What are the primary concerns from both parties that need to be addressed going forwards?

Player: Travel feels fucking laborious, and the verisimilitude is just not there for me. It simply doesn't make sense that we'd move that slowly. I'm concerned that movement will just turn into a chore and I won't want to play anymore.

Referee: I'm concerned that fucking with the travel times will make distances seem insignificant. The module becomes way different when you can cross the map in an hour, and you're not setting camps at night. However, I'm also concerned that you're concerned, and I want you to keep playing because you're my friend.

Expectations: How are we expecting this to play out? What can we realistically achieve for each other? What compromises are we willing to make for each other?

Referee: I'm not going to make travel trivial, but if you want to set up a river ferry system, hire horses, or fund the building of a road, we can totally do that. Travel is a problem to be solved, just like a dungeon room... does viewing it that way help?

Player: That all sounds cool but I still think 300yards an hour is just wayyyy too slow. It really bothers me. It's not realistic.

Referee: Hmm. What if we ruled that each square was actually half a mile? Just upped the scale massively. Mechanically not much would change but it could make the map feel bigger and more grandiose? I'll have to check back thru the module but we could probably make that happen with very few big adaptations.

Player: ...yeah, that could work maybe. Thanks for trying to meet me halfway.

Referee: Cool, and we can come back to it if it's still not working out. In the meantime, here's the monthly prices for horses, ferrymen, and road pavers.

what? so what? now what?

See examples of this framwework here and here.

When something goes wrong (or right!), ask why and learn from it. Don't reflect idly, be purposeful. Do it fast, it shouldn't be a chore.

what: Describe the context. Describe what went wrong. Or right. Describe how you and your players felt.

so what: Dissect why it went wrong. Do some research -- has anyone had this problem before? How'd they solve it?

now what: Make a resolution. What will you do next time?

Reflection is cyclical. Act upon your resolution; reflect on it. Iterate yourself into a better referee¹.