Monthly Archives: May 2024

Every Game Is Beautiful, and Nobody is Playing

Posted on by dconstructions
Reply

There was an old joke in the 1980s when the conversation turned to overpopulation. It went “everyone thinks there’s too many people, but nobody wants to leave.” In a similar way there are too many tabletop games but nobody wants to stop designing.

This week the great Tom Vasel of the Dice Tower became another critical voice adding to this call and he hit the same notes most of us have: the problem is not really how many games there are but that there’s too much consumption and conspicuous consumption. As I said a few months back, we can start by buying less and playing more. We can use libraries and build groups; focus on experiences not things. But I don’t think we should end the discussion there – especially when companies and publication and marketing aren’t part of that solution.

Also, let’s be clear: this is a problem for everyone: for companies, for designers, for players. The average time a player gets to play a board game is plummeting. It was under two four years ago and for some hobby gamers its probably going to go below one. People are buying far far more than they can ever play. Then they go to gaming groups where, in my experience, they form a queue, waiting for the rotation when they will be chosen to get one of their games on the table, one time. Then the fancy car has to go back in the garage, hardly driven, onto a shelf of shame that tells the world they have failed. To paraphrase RS Benedict: every game is beautiful, and nobody is playing.

But nobody wants to stop. So I have a different question: if this is the new normal, how do we make it work?

Let’s set up some background and talk for a moment about Robert Cialdini’s six pillars of persuasion. Like a lot of pop psych books of the 70s I’m sure much could be done to debunk Cialdinis work but the CIA found it useful enough so let’s assume for now it’s got some usefulness. Cialdini basically identified six reasons why people will agree with or be persuaded of something, besides just the quality of the thing itself. Here they are:

  • Reciprocation. If someone does something for us we are likely to do want to do something nice for them in return.
  • Liking. Do people that I like like this thing? Is it a thing that is like other things I like?
  • Authority. Has some authority decided this thing is worthy or high quality?
  • Scarcity. Is this a thing that I might miss out on? Or am I vulnerable to some effect of not having it?
  • Commitment. Is this a thing I am already into? Is it my brand or identity?
  • Consensus. Is everyone else doing the thing?

I am of the opinion that there is nothing inherently wrong with making people aware of your product. In fact, I think it can be a thing of great moral good! But that said, marketing has always been driven by anxiety. As Don Draper says, you create an itch in your market and then offer the product as the balm. The itch tends to come in three flavours: it solves a problem you have, you’re vulnerable to something without it, or all the cools kids are doing it. Cialdinis list are the most common ways the itch can be created. An authority will tell you that it’s cool, or good, or dangerous to be without. They will associate the product with values and ideas and celebrities you already like, so the message is intensified. They’ll create limited time offers and price “drops” to create scarcity and false reciprocity. And once you’re on board they’ll give you reasons to buy in with commitment and you’ll organically bring in your friends.

And all of that is a monstrous evil that makes me sick to my stomach but but but the six pillars remain in play even if we get rid of marketing. We do and should look to authorities, our friends, standards, comparisons and repeatability as metrics for if we should investigate and hence own/do a thing. That makes sense! And as soon as there are more things than we have time to evaluate we turn to the voices of the reviewer and the critic (which aren’t the same thing). Even, indeed, to the influencer. These things are necessary and important elements of pretty much any aspect of art and culture. So is consensus and liking too. Sorry, mum and dad, but if all my friends jumped off a bridge I might suspect they had a good reason to do so. My friends are wicked smart and have good taste.

My point is these are systems we tend to use no matter what. They have been inflamed by marketing, and they may just be habit, but they make sense. So what happens when those things break down? The truth is a lot of this is happening everywhere – more and more people want to buy experiences, not things because the entire western world is in a grip of stuff-malaise. We all have too much stuff, and we even need to pay people like Marie Kondo to get rid of it for us. So we can look around us and see how other entertainment forms are dealing with this. And the truth is they too are struggling.

The dangers are clear from that. In the 1950s and 60s rock music got big but it also had a lot of churn. Individual artists could become big but often it was the producers who made the real money, switching from hot new client to hot new client. Ultimately though, they depended on huge tentpole stars like Elvis and The Beatles to make reliable money. When those vanished and the industry diversified in the 70s, nobody knew what to do. When the Bee Gees were the last big stars left, they were played so much on radio that this triggered the DISCO SUCKS movement. But the radio was running on the old rules: play what was visibly popular. Music was fragmenting into scenes that were invisible to a larger audience and difficult to turn a profit from. The industry eventually found the solution by making themselves into a kind of automated factory – companies like Stock, Aitken and Waterman made themselves in a factory. They found young artists, wrote them their songs, gave them their look and then moved onto the next artist when the fad was over. Only a precious few like Kylie Minogue or Madonna managed to gain some kind of self-mastery over this process, by doing it to themselves. Now, of course, Taylor Swift made sure she did it herself from the beginning; her success is as much because of her sheer business acumen as her song writing and voice. She is Vertical Integration made flesh.

Stock, Aitken and Waterman in their heyday. What a bunch of douchebags.

Of course, music scenes retaliated to this through punk, garage, grunge and indie movements, trying to recreate authenticity. Over time, though, the goal of the indie was to become mainstream. And that model now is also gone. The indie has grown tinier and tinier until it is a cottage industry, and the giants have become gargantuan. Spotify, the factory at the top makes billions; indie artists that might have cut an album in the 1980s and made a few grand can now reach the entire planet to make a few cents. The same thing is currently happening to movies. Martin Scorsese has talked about how movies now are made for 5 million or 500 million, and nothing in between. Anthony Mackie has explained how there are no movie stars any more, only franchises and characters; and the only movies that can be made are for “16 year olds or China”. Again, the indies are shrinking and the giants are behemoths, and the giants are machines. (Here’s a link to A.O. Scott talking about the same thing in the NYT but it’s paywalled.)

Will this happen to board games? In a small way, these trends are there, with big companies like Awaken Realms running two gigantic kickstarters a year and smaller games now struggling to be seen on crowdfunding. Likewise brands and franchises are way more important than ever. But it’s not quite the same just yet, because board games have less money behind them and are less transferrable. A better comparison is to television, perhaps: not only do both of them go directly into our lounge rooms, but gamers like TV audiences are fickle and easily bored and are ready to change channels. Streaming has certainly put a lot of new terrible pressures on television but the quality has only gone up along with the quantity. The only thing that is threatening TV right now is too many streaming channels locking off content, but people are willing to pay. The cost though is it is easy for great stuff to be missed. Every single TV show is reduced to a tiny rectangle in a long strip of rectangles, and few survive the first episode. If you’re very very lucky people will watch the whole series, which is now the most important measure of success, what the industry calls “completion”. TV therefore is now full of shows with mystery that NEED to be watched all the way through. Board games have done the same thing: more legacy games, more campaign games, more story games. The appeal of something like Gloomhaven is for once, you know what you are playing every Thursday night. That’s exactly what people like about television: the choice hurts. They want to just go “oh it’s Thursday, the show I like is on” – or at least a new series has dropped for me to binge.

But still, we need ways to navigate TV, and board games. Music used to use the hit parade to keep people informed of what was “hot”. Movies had big critics and reviewers (now completely broken by review bombing and youtube manosphere lunatics). And note: there hasn’t been a time before when there were so many movies that you felt even the reviwers were behind. But nowadays, this is the situation with both TV and with board games. TV critics are mostly ignored and just pointing to things as they drive by. Community sharing has evaporated. TV used to be about the water cooler moments, as they said in the 90s – people would gather at work to talk about the thing on TV last night. Every now and then a show drops bit by bit and for a brief moment the world feels a shared connection: there was some kind of beautiful moment of community I felt when a lot of my friends were watching Wandavision. This is also I think why people have reacted so strongly to Taylor Swift tours: it’s a shared experience. But quickly it faded away and TV no longer has this. It’s not a shared hobby any more. Few people are enjoying the same thing at the same time. So there’s no social proof in the medium. No authority because of the death of reviewers. And no scarcity at all. Although the new fear of deletion is real, we still think like we have been taught to: everything will be online forever. That’s why DVD sales are so low. Who needs to own things?

This means there’s no commitment either. There’s a lot of internet memes about how thing X has been completely forgotten by culture, so it must suck, but we can’t commit to a thing if it burns out in eight episodes but is simultaneously always available. I’m old enough to remember the need to circulate VHS tapes to see our favourite shows: that kind of desperate scarcity created commitment. You HAD to be a fan or you couldn’t even see the show. This is why again big companies know they can’t sell you on character X or film Y: they have to sell you on a franchise that maybe they can hit you with on every single platform. If they don’t, you’ll lose interest. Star Wars is fucking everywhere, but it has to be, or you’d forget about it.

The exact same trend has occurred in board games. We’ve gone from around 250 games coming out a year to 5000 in the space of ten years. Reviewers and critics cannot keep up. Tastemakers who were the kings two years ago are fading already. And although prizes matter, the Spiel Deh Jahres judges recently admitted that they have to play games five days a week to even get through 10% of the releases of a year. So slowly awards are failing to be useful. There goes authority. Since people aren’t playing the same games with the same groups, there’s no commitment and there’s no consensus. Since there’s so many games, it’s even becoming hard to follow your favourite designers, so Liking is drying up. And scarcity is a joke: the whole problem is owning too many games.

So here’s the problem: our six usual ways of finding out what we might like do not operate well inside this new environment of total abundance. When there’s a ton of money it turns into the minnows and whales option like movies; when there’s a different financial model it turns into a sea of rectangles like television. So far, TV hasn’t really solved this, except by going back to word of mouth. We ask each other what’s good – our friends being the only Liking and Authority that we have left. TV is trying to get us with algorithms which aren’t working well and – as social media has shown – really dangerous, so we tend to distrust them. Board games can’t use the algorithm as they are now, because we have to go out and buy a box. And while word of mouth is good, only a few of us play in-house with our families. But I certainly think that is the dream now, and where the biggest games tend to succeed. We want that TV experience in things like Gloomhaven: this will be for me and my significant other to play regularly, reliably. (In this area, I think RPGs can do really well, too.) We can see what products are good – but we don’t know how to solve the problem of finding them.

That’s what I mean by a different question. Since this keeps happening, since abundance is changing mediums so that Cialdini’s principles aren’t taking off, what comes next? Is there a way to navigate a cultural scene that works in this different way, without it turning into silos of cultists doing their own thing, or minnows and whales? If TV hasn’t solved this, it’s unlikely board games will soon. So I don’t have the answer. I just want to make sure we’re asking the right questions. The question is not “do we have too many games”. The question is: yes we do have too many games, just like we have too many TV shows, and we need to figure out how to navigate that. Let’s see what we can come up with.

Oh No, Humans! Or 5 Tips for talking to the public at events

Posted on by dconstructions
Reply

Let’s be clear: I can’t help you get over your social anxiety. I have that too a little, but not at cons. Nor can I help with agoraphobia or sensory overload, nor can I magically give you a Charisma boost and the dapper manner of a television personality. But there is a science and a technique to presenting your games to humans and if you start there, you’ll probably do fine.

  1. Figure Out Where You and Your Game Are

Early on, this stuff isn’t easy. If you don’t know what it is to be a game designer and if you want to do that, you might not know where you’re up to or how good your game is. For your game, broadly speaking, stages of design tend to fall into one of the following categories – Alpha, when you just have a rough idea and are trying all sorts of things to make something work, Beta, where you have the shape of the game locked down and are trying to see if it is fun and interesting, Gamma when you have most of the design done but are looking to balance and enhance, Preproduction where you have the game mostly finished but want to check for the last niggling elements where players find edge cases or pinch points and finally Demo, where the game is finished and you’re either showing it off to hopefully build attention for you selling it yourself, or to practice demoing it for companies. Where you are is basically how many times you’ve been through that process, and how many cons you’ve been to. Then you’re going to take all that info and…

2. Set A Few Modest Goals.

Now that you know where your game is, you have some idea of what you want from this event. And that’s both what you want to do with your game and what you want to do for yourself. Your game will have goals like “I want to test this mechanic” or “I just want to see if people can enjoy it” or maybe you want to find out who it appeals to or why. For you, this might be personal, like you want to try it out! Or you want to get some confidence, or network. Maybe you want to sell one copy, or ten copies, or a hundred copies. Don’t go crazy: it’s easy for lots to go wrong especially at a new con to you or a new con to come into existence. I usually go with the goal of selling one game, or something like that. Sometimes I go just to make sure I get organized to order signs or some promotional material. Or to make sure I finish a game to a decent state! Sometimes you might hit your goal just by turning up, and that’s cool! Then it doesn’t matter if you don’t talk to any humans. But if you need humans to do a thing, figure out exactly what that thing is. and write it down. Now you know exactly what you hope the people will help you with.

3. Start By Asking Questions

Now you know what you want people to do, the next thing is to ask them to do it. But you can’t do that until you get their attention. You can do that visually – with a poster or banner showing off your art, or a cool looking booth, or something interesting on the table, or just your smiling face. You can do with fun things to pick up and touch, maybe take home, like stickers, snacks, bookmarks, badges, freebies, etc. Once you catch their eye, you have to see if they’re interested in your game at all. There’s a lot of really dumb sales advice that suggests every person is a potential sale and you should convince them or control them somehow. That’s nonsense. What you want to do is find out who they are though. They might be in the wrong place. They might be exhausted. They might not want to be bothered. If they’re interested, you’ll get positive feedback and you can go further. There’s am ALERT mnemonic I use here that I’m going to put in a call-out.

A.L.E.R.T.: Ask questions, Listen to the answers,, Empathize with the situation they present, use empathy to build Rapport, turn Rapport into the idea that you are on their side and they can Trust you.

4. Hone A Clear Pitch That’s Ten Words Or Less

Somewhere between that first visual connection and building Rapport, you’re going to have to explain your game and what you are doing at the con. You want to be able to sum that up super quickly. That might be the pitch for your game. Or it might be explaining what this part of the convention is like “these are all local Australian designers” or “this section is new prototypes being developed”. Keep it general, and absolutely keep it short. Try to have a question in there if you haven’t asked one yet as it encourages them to share, or follow it up with a question. If you want them to do something besides just “find out about your game”, let them know what the other options are and what that requires of them. What’s the smallest thing they can do for you? Take a card? Start there. If you need more, ask from that point on. Have they got a few minutes to learn more? Okay cool, let me explain the rules. Want to play a few rounds? That will mean sitting down for THIS AMOUNT OF TIME. Don’t like about that time length either. They are very busy. The last T is for trust and if you lie, they’ll remember. You can hype the hell out of how fun it will be but be honest. And be honest about what you need and what stage your game is at – thats why you did steps one and two. You’re giving your context so they understand you. You asked questions so you understood them.

5. Be Nice.

Remember that you’re asking these people to HELP you. Even if they get a cool game out of it or game session out of it, you’re getting so much more. Every person who comes even close to your booth should be treated like someone who showed up to help you move house. They are not just saints, they are HEROES. So be nice. Be grateful. Be accommodating. And part of being nice is figuring out what kind of experience they have and what kind of games they like, and if it isn’t your game or they don’t have time for your game right now, then help them with whatever else they need. Likely that’s going to be one of the other games around you designed by your colleagues, and yes, you will Be Nice to them too. You will offer to watch their booth and help them do a coffee run. But most of all you will help customers find thei games, because those designers are not your enemies. And because people hate too much choice in anything, but particularly in spending their time. They have very limited time at a convention and they paid at the door so every second counts. The tiny thing you can give them back for being interested in your game is some clear advice of what to do next. You can present what you have and if it isn’t for them, you can recommend something else. Your job, really, is to make sure they have a great time.

Does that sound like some self-sacrificing hippy nonsense? Well, it’s also good salesmanship. People never, ever forget how you make them feel. You have about two seconds to make an impression on every person walking by, and try to get them to stay longer. The absolute best way to impress them in that time frame is to help them out. And I find this makes the socializing easier. That might not work for you, of course, but I can only do so much.

Monkey See

Posted on by dconstructions
Reply

I’m someone who learns well from examples. Sometimes I find it hard to learn without examples. For this reason I tend to like ttrpgs that have really explicit mechanics and instructions about what we’re doing and how we’re supposed to do it. A strong brief and a strong sense of the core idea is vital to getting me on board.

This is why I’ve always been a fan of games based on pre existing media, and emulation in general. It’s also why I want my games to be filled with examples – example characters, examples of play, the lovely Japanese trend of replays, and of course prewritten scenarios and adventures. Hooks and prompts are a good start but you need to show me how to write one and show me the finished product. This might be an autism thing – we’re very emulative. And with me if I spend five minutes with a person I will be copying their accent and mannerisms. So it could be just a very me thing.

How true that is – as in, to what degree this is mostly/only a Steve problem – determines whether any of the following thoughts are useful, so I’m posting this partly as a question: how much do examples guide you in how you approach an RPG?

There are lots of ways this manifests. I don’t, for example, typically like games that ask you to come up with a concept for your character before you start chargen. Thats what chargen is for! This is why I like to do it randomly. It’s also I suppose why I don’t like games or GMs that ask me to describe what I’m doing before I roll the dice – that’s what the dice is for.

More dramatically, it prevented me from getting into D&D as a kid. A lot of silly people will demand that rpgs aren’t emulating media but that’s exactly how they were designed. The magic system in D&D was taken from the Dying Earth, the setting from lord of the rings, and the combat explicitly from the Errol Flynn Robin Hood. The alignment system was furpm the Elric books. The classes were roughly from Conan and the Fahrfhd books. The idea of going off and fighting shit in caves mostly comes from Ray Harryhausen movies about Sinbad the Sailor. Very swiftly a bunch of other insane shit was added like priests from Hammer horror films, lovecraftian demons, poorly understood ideas of medieval history and a bunch of rubber dinosaurs. And then Beastmaster came along so they jammed that film in too.

Nowadays it is probably hard to understand because D&D dominates culture so hard but that produced a combination that wasn’t exactly representative of fantasy fiction at the time. If D&D hadn’t become so insanely popular until it made these things normal it would stand out more how bizarre and chaotic a lot of it was. But more importantly it depended on being inside a subculture. If you hadn’t grown up with those books and movies, it didn’t make much sense.

Enter me at age 11, who has read two and only two fantasy books: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe and The Hobbit. I have seen a total of one fantasy film: The Neverending Story. It will be twenty years before I see Conan, thirty before I see Beastmaster (which cleared up so much). I try to understand D&D but it’s really hard. I don’t know what any of it means. I know dragons guard gold in mountains, sure, but what the fuck is an orc?

Two years later I find TMNT which is set in a universe I understand, because I have seen Die Hard and a dozen other action films. And kids cartoons which are basically the same thing. That makes sense. I’m home.

Years later I bounce off other games which are either really open or a little harder to pin down. I cannot get my head around how to play Nobilis or why anyone would want to. I didnt really get the world of darkness (I didn’t see the crow till later). I’m currently reading Unknown Armies and until it mentioned Twin Peaks I thought it was about Elmore Leonard. And it is a bit, yes. But you wouldn’t pitch it as an Elmore Leonard game. I remember trying to play cyberpunk and nobody telling me what kind of characters to make or what they were supposed to do. My first and second characters in that game were killed by “obvious traps” because “I should have known they were traps”.

I tended to find my home in history: ars magica, call of Cthulhu, blue planet become my favourites. And genre as I said: ghostbusters and Buffy are the two games I’d save from a house fire or a meteor strike, and TMNT has my boyish heart. Now I design games where you can’t do anything but follow strict genre cues. The system simply won’t let you.

And I find a lot of games really do end up back at finding the media you know to get you started. Even if they’re in a totally unique setting – especially if they are – they come back to “have you ever seen a coen brothers film? It’s like that”. When I was working on the first 40K rpg we had an in-house brief that went: “it’s the A Team fighting Cthulhu in Star Wars”. Obviously we can’t always put these things in our texts; certainly not on our branding. But if we keep doing this, we should recognise how vital it is. How it’s the core of what we’re doing and so it should be core to the rules we write. The only reason D&D appears not to need this is it invented its own genre and rewrote pop culture around that.

Maybe im wrong though. Maybe nobody else needs this but me. Maybe everyone got world of darkness fine. Or maybe they’d seen a bunch of vampire movies to give them context. And maybe it’s about time we admitted this and put it front and centre in our designs.

Let me know your thoughts. You know, like in the movies where everyone responds to a viral post.

Whither Railroad? How Do We Actually Build Narrative in GMed TTRPGs

Posted on by dconstructions
Reply

Since the very beginning of TTRPGs there’s really only been one question that matters – at least to me. One point of difficulty, one point of tension: how do we build narrative in a game, especially one where we can do anything?

feels rude that the humble railroad be blamed for everything bad in RPGs

Don’t get me wrong, sometimes the answer is “we don’t”. We don’t want to and we’re not expecting to. But clearly that ship has sailed for a lot of people. It’s certainly not how D&D markets itself. Another answer is “exegesis”, as in we let random shit happen and build a story in our heads later that makes it make more sense as a logical progression and with narrative payoff. This is often done during the game as well – “You crushed your perception check? Well I guess this random goblin DOES know the way to the mines, because that makes it more satisfying”. As humans, we kind of do this instinctively, to everything in our lives so it’s natural for us to do it to games, even when they are completely random.

Another answer we’ve had is “eh, whatever, I don’t run pregenerated scenarios”. That I have always felt is not a good answer. Neither is “I do run them, but I completely change them.” People buy these products, especially now (Strahd was huge!) and I used to only be able to run games I had adventures for (and it’s still really the only thing I find interesting as a GM). Often there is a self-fulfilling prophecy at work here: people say they don’t want these product because they are always bad, so they don’t buy them, so the products have no incentive to get better. Yet when they are good, in the past, people flock to them – The Enemy Within, Murder on the Orient Express, Fly to Heaven, these things are legends. Or they were, I think that ship has perhaps also sailed. The rise of the indie scene and the absolute conquest of D&D has meant there’s less and less money in the centre for mainstream products that aren’t D&D, so there’s no “experimental” campaigns any more. Indie designers, so far, have decided not to care much about this idea, or approach it in a different way. Which is interesting, too.

(The indie/old school revived scene has also sort of kicked off “West Marches” as a term, but I’ll come back to that.)

Another answer that I don’t think is useful is “play zero prep games” or “learn to run with zero prep”. One big reason this isn’t useful is it is usually delivered with a degree of smugness as if as soon as the GM learns this One Weird Trick they will stop living in the stone age and, scales falling from their eyes, discover they never needed to prep at all. There are a few problems with this beyond tone. One is that a lot of “zero prep” things aren’t entirely zero-prep, because they kind of expect some prep to be effectively zero (for example, reading the game/source material, or reading and learning how to do the zero prep in the first place). Another is that it only works for certain games, certain play styles and certain GM styles.

And as I say I think that’s actually the question that matters – what do we want in an unfolding narrative and how do we get it, and how do we use both a human moderator to get it and a pre-written story to get it? I actually think computer games are way ahead of TTRPGs when it comes to that latter element, because not having a human moderator they actually set out to solve this problem. In some cases, sure, the computer players have just learned to go along with the fact that the story will be clunky, or with railroading (the cutscenes don’t change no matter what you did in the play scenes, or you just go from story check point to story checkpoint) but in many cases there have been incredible leaps in storytelling both in terms of nudging into narrative and exegesis narrative. I’m not up to date in this field at all but in my own experience the Monkey Island games for example, were full of puzzles that didn’t block exploration and gave a sense of telling a great story, and the way that Gone Home used a few locked doors to make the story happen in a strong sequence of reveals while still using puzzles to make it feel like a game was extraordinary.

But are we applying this new learning to writing TTRPG written adventures? Not really, I fear, because of all the above. Some might say we shouldn’t because of all the above or because we have that human brain to do it for us. But that latter one ignores the question of HOW our brains do it. Because in the end we do it a lot like the computer games do it, which is to say we have two basic concepts of story construction (leaving aside purely random or mechanical outcomes that are recontextualized post-facto):

  • Area based, which is to say that if players go to a certain location in space in the world, the GM/adventure/prep has decided/decides what is there and what the players find out
  • Consequence based, which is to say the adventure is structured as a series of if/then logic gates. These gates can be incredibly complex, but in essence they are “if the PCs do this kind of thing, this kind of thing happens”.

In most cases, we tend to use both at once, I think. If players don’t go to a place for a long time, something might happen because of that, or if they go there instead of somewhere else, that’s a consequence choice.

I am avoiding the terms “railroad” and “sandbox” here because I find people actually disagree on what they mean. Some consider the classic D&D dungeon crawl a railroad, because the players can’t really leave. They have to progress through rooms, and find the big bad. On the other hand, others would call that sandbox because they can go to any room they want, in any order, no matter what. And in that case, a railroad feel stronger to those players, it feels like no choice at all. And I think we should avoid jargon as much as we can because people use the same words to mean different things all the time, or to attach bad or good feelings to them that aren’t part of it.

Definition drift and terms being altered or misunderstood is something that happens in every field but it seems very strong in TTRPGs. I think this is because we don’t have the kind of language base we need to talk about this, and as a result language always seems to swiftly become a form of attack. What you described on this forum or blog is bad, evil, wrong roleplaying/GMing, or what system X wrote is revolutionary brand new roleplaying. See above about how we treat zero prep like it is this great salvation – and how that makes us feel judged and devalued, too. And this vagueness I think is why people feel uncomfortable with the idea of actual plays and paid GMs – we haven’t actually worked out what good GMing really IS, so it feels rude to say mine or yours isn’t worth watching or worth paying for…

Speaking of definition drift, because I’ve been talking about this online for …. (thinks in head) thirty years, I invented some of the popular terms for it. I invented Pixelbitching, which was a word for when there’s one specific thing a GM wants you to do, but to preserve a sense of player agency, there are no massive context clues which thing that might be. Don’t look for the secret door in room 12? You’ll leave the dungeon thinking there was nothing there. That might be fine in a very “sandboxy” campaign, but it can be devastating to enjoyment if you want some sort of sense of where the GM might have put some things to interact with or if it is used to penalize you for “playing wrong”. I’ve played far too many convention scenarios where at the end the GM has gone “oh you know how you felt like you had no direction? that’s because you didn’t talk to NPC X” or “the reason the monster killed you all at the end is because you didn’t talk to NPC X who had all the clues”.

To counter this, I always said that I tended to figure out what I want the players to know (and indeed, sometimes the cool things that I think they might do) and put them wherever the players go or with whomever they might talk to. This was then labelled Illusionism, and has become to be now very taboo, with a lot of extra things attached to it. And it also has problems: if the plot is everywhere the PCs go, then the players can just go “we talk to the first person we meet”. That sounds unreasonable and it is, but a close equivalent is “I roll Gather Information to see who to talk to – because my character would know.” It is a golden rule that you should not expect your players to be as smart or as charismatic as their characters…but it is also a golden rule that “I roll my Smarts to figure out how to solve this adventure” is no fun.

To me what I conclude from this, overall, is that RPGs are actually a kind of agreed upon pretence. The players agree to pretend as if they are not in a story, and are acting only for their characters survival and viewing everything as if it is natural and real to them, but will of course do no such thing when they see opportunities for great plot hooks and dramatic things to do. Meanwhile the GM pretends that everything the players do is a free choice and they are merely reacting as the universe might, while doing no such thing when they see opportunities for great plot hooks and dramatic scenes to build. The exceptions are prompt games like The Score or games that are specifically about creating narrative elements like Hillfolk or Smallville, although even then we enter the stance of “now I’m playing my character who doesn’t know that we just had a Dramatic Conflict, and doesn’t know they live in a soap opera”. And let’s be clear, I don’t think there’s anything wrong with this. We’ve all seen horrible writing where the characters are too genre savvy or they seem saved entirely by plot armor; we’ve also all seen films where we know that the hero will win but we understand he cannot act as if knows that, and our feeling of suspense is not undercut by our knowledge that it will all turn out alright. The lie is built into fiction, so there’s no problem with it being built into RPGs.

But even if we all agree on this, we still have a question of “how do we decide what happens”. My friend is of an improv school and one time a player had an idea and I could see how he completely rejigged a scene so the player idea would be super useful. As he explained, in improv they are taught to follow what others say. But I’ve seen other GMs go “look no I already said he was too far away, that idea won’t work,” or “you don’t have that skill” or “you’ll need to roll really well”. It’s not “wrong” or “blocking” to give weight to established in world-truths, or to make it feel hard for the players. I’ve had a player once blame me for their character dying because I knew their character was at the back of the line and I had skaven attack with poison, and I honestly had just chosen how skaven do things and let the dice decide – it was nothing personal. Meanwhile I’ve also run games where to me, the players had zero choice about really anything. My notes were: players arrive at the hospital, they encounter weird stuff, they get clues XYZ, the patient tries to kill himself, they stop him, they convince the ghost to leave”. And it all happened just like I said, around all the dramatic events I listed. The players at the end said they felt like they had more agency and control than in most adventures they played, and they had all the choices in the world.

One of my rules of RPG Theory is that often the actual play events visible to the outsider are identical regardless of what theory or style of play or GMing you’re using. In practice, that is, even the players at the table cannot tell how the GM is making their decisions. Nor can the GM tell of the players. Thus a GM railroading a dungeon crawl and some virtuoso improv god building a wide open sandbox might actually appear identical to everyone involved. That said, the players and GMs still have to make decisions internally. And that is going to involve either a if/then thought or a what’s over there thought. It’s also going to involve (as so many theorists have come to conclude) what kind of thing matters more: a really cool dramatic/narrative structure, the power of an experience being curated for the players and the needs of the players right now, the story the GM wants to tell, the truth of what the PCs can do and what the rules say about that, the truth of the dice rolls, the truth of the world and the coherence of the setting. And there’s how much we want to control for those values, so that the ones we want come through and the others don’t. And how hard we hit those things.

I actually have a lot of trouble with this because I just like people so much (and fear conflict so much) I don’t want to hurt them. So eventually my GMing became worthless because I was like “Of course you can kill the dragon and be king – you’re awesome! Don’t even roll!” or I collapsed into the opposite and started blocking and pixelbitching. And so I keep asking questions and trying to get into what people really think. And it starts by I think stepping away from railroad and sandbox because nobody really actually knows what you mean. They have too much emotion tied to them and too little definition. Let’s try instead to go “what are the goals here” (eg to feel like we are heroes of a story) and how much are we pretending those aren’t the goals in order to achieve the other goals (eg pretending we’re not the heroes of the story, as all fictional characters must)? So far I’ve found GMs have an enormous difficulty trying to actually explain these things out loud. They just “know”. And I think we also kind of just know when it’s done poorly.

But if we can find actual words, without prejudgement and without vanishing up our own asses, or trying to force everything into categories, maybe we can go from that to figuring out good ways to put those things into prewritten scenarios, and make those interesting as hell. Even if we admit that in executing them, it is also important to have a human brain, who can adjust when things don’t work perfectly. That’s why every escape room has a radio or a telephone: because everyone who knows anything about games knows that you can’t just set things up and expect every game to work for every group to produce the perfect outcome of fun every single time. But admitting that a human brain is needed doesn’t stop escape room design from being a fine art, and the same goes for scenario design.

I mean I’ve only been saying that for 30 years….this time, Rocky, for sure.