The Perspective Trick: Why You and Your Players Might Feel Differently About the Same Thing

Recently, I had a conversation with a long time player of mine who's been gaming with me for ten years. I mentioned my reflection on what I believe to be the best DMing I've ever done: the Of Gods and Dragons campaign. I assumed, I implied, that my friend's experience was the same, and that he too felt Of God's and Dragons was his favorite gaming experience. But he explained that, in fact, my mystery campaign held that honor. Initially, I was baffled. I was proud of the mystery campaign, but Of Gods and Dragons seemed a much stronger and more imaginative campaign. It was only after weeks of thinking it over that I came to understand this little mystery.

One key component was realizing that what made Of Gods and Dragons so compelling for me as the DM also might have limited the impact for the players. I ran a low-combat high-social interaction campaign, and that's fun for me, but my players might have been looking for more combat and less talking. Or perhaps the balance was fine, but what impressed me so much was seeing my world handled kindly by the players, and they weren't in a position to appreciate that the way I was. Either of these could explain why my friend gravitated more to the mystery campaign. 

But there was something else. Over the intervening weeks, I've continued to chat with my friend about best experiences, and something has come into focus. My friend regards his character Beor from the mystery campaign to be his favorite character, and I can empathize. Beor is a character who has strong principles but who is new to talking about them with other people, someone who by the campaign's end was the moral heart of the group. That also describes my character Daisy, though she and Beor share at least as many dissimilarities as similarities--let's not overstate things. But thinking about Daisy helped me to understand my friend's connection to Beor. 

See, when I started playing Daisy, I found that I was hooked. Something about her just fit right, and I let myself sink into her character completely. Every choice was a thrill, and I really got into character deeply. Looking back with distance now, it's hard to say what exactly clicked--it just did. And even though the campaign she was a part of had some bumps and was ultimately canceled before we could play the ending, it's still my favorite experience playing D&D.

That's when it clicked: maybe Of Gods and Dragons had flaws, but not being a player's favorite campaign is not a damning thing. My friend connected with Beor at least as much as he connected with the campaign, and being host to that is magical. You might be saying to me through your screen, "You kinda freaked out over nothing." And I do see that. But tabletop games are my art, and thinking there was something wrong with my ability to grade my work was distressing.

So as much as I have preached talking to your players about the games you run, here's your grain of salt: it's all a matter of perception, and trusting your gut is ultimately the best general direction to trust unless you have big reasons to assume otherwise. 

That's all for now. Thanks for reading, and happy gaming!

Coming soon: how to plan a quest, how to modify D&D for a western setting, and a detective D&D one-shot. Until next time, happy gaming!

What is the Role of Fantasy in D&D?

Lately, I've been working with a lot of tabletop games beyond D&D. Most notably, I've been working with Geist: The Sin Eaters in preparation for a campaign set in the system some time in the near future. I've often reflected that ttrpgs outside of D&D sell themselves on a setting. Call of Cthulhu offers survival horror in the 1920s; Vampyre the masquerade offers psychological horror in a Gothic horror setting; one of my favorite games, Don't Rest Your Head, offers a broad horror game in a literal nightmare world. But the game I'm preparing now is Geist, and Geist only specifies that you use a generally horror-based and never gives a distinct setting. [As a result, I'm adopting a cyberpunk future as the GM who introduced me to the game did, but that's beside the point because . . . ] The lack of a setting got me thinking: what does setting actually accomplish in a game like D&D? And why is fantasy so synonymous with D&D?

Let's start with the most basic step we can: defining setting. Setting is the collection of a story or game's physical locations, the way the world and the creatures and people in it interact, sets of cultural ideals, and other details we use to determine what normal and unexpected behavior in the story or game will be. That is to say, the setting of a D&D game includes ideas about medieval life we have from popular culture, specific homebrew additions from the DM, our own preconceptions about how society works, our ideas about how our character fits into society, and other details inform just about everything that happens. 

So then setting represents and impacts quite a lot. In fact, let's try to list things that are not setting: player characters, their actions, and the collaborative story that emerges from playing. Yep, that's about it. When it comes down to it, the DM is a setting machine whose job is to provide enough of it to help the players tell the story. It's really only the players who can add things that are definitively not setting in terms of how the game functions. (As a DM who specializes in roleplaying my NPCs, I'd say it can feel like I'm stepping outside of setting, but the NPC's inner worlds are still exterior facts that impact their own experiences, much as setting does. 

So this is why setting matters so much in a game. I remember playing Call of Cthulhu and seeing players satirically act out 1920s-style misogyny in a way that would have felt weird and out of place in D&D or another game because the setting allowed for it. One of the things we understand about the 1920s is that women had basically no rights in the western world and especially the United States, and that becomes part of the game. 

This is why so many people--be they experienced gamers or first time players--will instinctively do the same thing while roleplaying in D&D and specifically mention fantasy elements. Every backstory in D&D seems to have high fantasy elements in it--because that's what these worlds are like, the setting tells us. I've created characters with essentially no magic or epic fantasy circumstances in their backstories, and it works, but I was always the only person at the table with a simple background that didn't have to be rooted in fantasy. We know what the setting is, and we want to fit into it, so we do and say what seems to fit. 

This can be a powerful thing, knowing that you are expected to behave in a certain way. I won't delve into the worlds of psychology and sociology, but I will say that both players and GMs will often do things because they believe they are expected, myself included. It's not a bad thing, either. Sometimes, what a story really needs is someone doing the thing we're all thinking of. Honestly, a lot of campaigns are designed to end on heroic deeds, and those deeds usually come from a sense that it's what's expected of them as heroes tasked with the quest. 

I think about this in terms of other games that I've played, and I can see how even things like how the GM describes the game can impact behavior. I played a game called Exalted once long ago, and my GM described the class I had chosen as calculating and aloof, which reflected the kind of grisly work I was to do as a kind of cosmic undertaker. I took this into consideration in my roleplaying, and my character was always at an arm's length from the party right up until the end when the campaign died to a party split (not my fault). I wouldn't say that my character was responsible for the party split, but I would say he didn't help it, and I don't like that looking back. But while our beliefs about what's expected of us can complicate things, I think they can be used for good. 

To make that point, I will use another experience, this one from my time as a teacher in charge of D&D Club. I asked a particular group of hijinks players what story ideas they wanted. A few of the players in the group, not students I'd met before, offered very mild suggestions about adventuring. But several of my students were also in the group, and they knew me well enough to know that I'm playful and permissive. They threw out some more risqué options such as "The 9 Levels of Hell." Because there were middle schoolers in the group, I adjusted this to "The 9 Levels of Heck," and we went with it. Each session, I would devise some silly unpleasant situation to be stuck in using more suggestions. The fact that the players believed I would hear them and knew I would do what was expected of me and deliver, we were able to have a really fantastic campaign.

But that aside aside, let's get back to the final thrust of our question: if setting matters so much, what is it about D&D that captures the fantasy setting so iconically? After all, there are less competitors in the fantasy tabletop game niche than there are in other niches, like the wealth of horror games out there. I think that the answer here is that D&D was the first to market, and competing with the giant seems unwise to most.

But that doesn't explain how fantasy does so much heavy lifting for D&D. I've discussed on a gaming podcast with my wife how D&D is not the most easy or approachable first tabletop game for people; many other games are simpler, more intuitive, and less cumbersome. It would make sense that D&D being most people's first tabletop game anyway would have to deal with the legacy and popularity of the game, but its claim on fantasy, which makes up a large amount of book sales, television show and movie premises, and video game development--but again, more or less only D&D for tabletop games.

I would argue these last two ideas are actually more closely related. D&D has the legacy and popularity to be the behemoth in the industry. As a result, and because D&D has always had claim to fantasy, D&D's setting being fantasy was solidified and more or less had to go unchallenged (lawsuits help with this kind of thing, even though D&D was itself beset by lawsuits when Gary Gygax was using Tolkien's work in early game materials). And so D&D equals fantasy equals D&D. You want to play a fantasy game--go to D&D. You're playing D&D--behave like you would in a fantasy world. The end result is everyone performing a fantasy story together, and it reinforces it again--D&D equals fantasy equals D&D.

Setting is so vitally important to tabletop roleplaying games that we even try to sell each other on them by pitching the setting. Literally an hour ago, I pitched the campaign I was describing above to my friend; I described zero story and 100% setting and rules. I'm a writer, and I included no story in favor of mostly setting. Because that's what really impacts the majority of a game experience, and we know that on some level. Moving forward, I want to embrace that. I've put time and energy into describing the setting of my D&D homebrew setting--at the time of this writing, my homebrew section has 60 full articles--but I don't know if I've used it well. Sure, I have all this information written, but it's nothing if I can't use it in my games. So moving forward, I'm planning to increase the amount of setting I give in response to players so they can get a more complete experience. (I'm doing this within moderation--more is not necessarily better.)

That's all for now. Coming soon: the perspective difference between people in the same game, how to plan a quest and imagining the future of tabletop games. Until next time, happy gaming!

An Argument for Open-Ended Stories

For the years I have run this site, I have long argued for open-ended writing from GMs. I've argued that it prevents us from railroading, one of the cardinal sins of tabletop games. I've argued why it makes modules better than the traditional closed writing we see in that world. I've addressed how to keep going when players derail what you had hoped would happen--I regard it as inevitable and think we should be prepared. But here, I want to come at this from a different angle. Today, I want to address how an open-ended story provides something that all veteran GMs will recognize as important: open-ended stories are the perfect and sometimes only response to the natural chaos of players and characters. 

This is broadly true of all tabletop games, but let's use D&D as a simple example. In D&D, characters get alignments. If even one out of a whole party of adventurers has "chaotic" in their alignment, you will be likely to have to deal with some really surprising behavior. If multiple characters are chaotic, this effect compounds. And even if you have a party of all lawful characters, that doesn't mean that the players won't make an occasional choice that isn't pretty chaotic. In other ttrpgs, though we don't always quantify alignment, the same principle is true: players and their characters are going to make some unpredictable choices, and we need to be able to deal with that as GMs. 

Keeping stories open-ended is an easy solution to this. You can't derail a plan that doesn't exist, and your players won't be able to throw off your plans if you don't have plans. Already, I'm sure that some readers are alarmed at me casually mentioning not having plans. What I mean is less radical than that. I do prepare for sessions, but I don't write out any events. I only develop characters. 

What I mean by this is pretty simple, actually. At the beginning of a campaign and as we play, I generate NPCs. I work hard to develop realistic personalities, motivations, and relationships for these NPCs. Then, when the player's actions affect these NPCs, I know from their personalities how they would react and behave. This takes very little time or effort because I have worked to know these characters well enough to know how they think and feel. I can then easily improvise how those NPCs behave and carry on a scene with the players. 

This is not to say that the NPCs are just along for the ride. They have big agendas and take meaningful actions like the player characters do. In my most recent campaign, Of Gods and Dragons, the main NPCs were gods and dragons, all at least level 30, and their impact on the world was huge, for good and for bad. But I never sat down and decided "the red dragon accomplishes this goal while the god of the elves fails to accomplish this other goal." I might decide that "the red dragon tries to accomplish this goal while the god of the elves tries to accomplish this other goal," but I let the players decide the actual fate of things. That gives them agency, which most all players enjoy (if not all players), and it also makes the story about them. But that's not my focus here. Today, my focus is on why this method is important. And to do that, I want to tell a few stories about chaotic players and the games they played in. 

When I first started DMing, I was a college freshman with more ambition than skill. I also lacked a fundamental understanding of how the collaborative nature of tabletop games worked, and so I was guilty of a fair amount of railroading. I remember one of the games I was running had a player who was intensely curious about everything I described. He would interrogate every NPC and pore over every vaguely noteworthy object in the world. I should have taken this as a compliment--my player was fascinated by my world and wanted to connect to it. But I foolishly grew impatient and summoned up a mean little gnomish wizard NPC to threaten the group with death if they didn't get going on a questline soon. I cringe to think of it now, and I wish I could apologize to that player for my stupidity. 

What I didn't see at the time was that my player was deviating only mildly from what I expected. I wanted him to follow the plot I was laying down, and he was, but I wanted it done efficiently. It was a very rookie mistake to make. This may not sound very chaotic, and it honestly wasn't; his other actions tended towards chaos, like randomly deciding to seek the god of death as a level 1 character. But either way, I saw something that deviated from what I expected, and I punished it. This is the opposite of how it should be done, and I'm ashamed to have messed it up so badly. 

Shortly thereafter, I ran a campaign I describe here often. I had a long list of assassination contracts drawn up with the big twist at the end to be that one of the last contracts was the questgiver, and the final contracts would eliminate the royal family of the city. My players began to chafe under the questgiver's violent goals, and they turned against her about 10% of the way through the campaign. Instead, the party split upon finding the twist, and the game turned into a civil war in which the guard organization they were a part of either defended the royals or turned against them. 

By this point, I had learned not to railroad, but I also hadn't learned to anticipate player actions very well. So when the party split, I was totally confounded about how to proceed. I ended up just refereeing the civil war, which resolved in a tense battle between the party members and their allies. But the shock to my system was all I needed: I realized I couldn't assume much of anything about the players, and I resolved to spend the rest of my tabletop career writing more open-ended adventures that allowed my players to actually have freedom of choice. 

I will acknowledge that this isn't a "more freedom equals better experience" situation. For a while after the civil war campaign, I was a little too far the other direction. I ran campaigns designed in part by my players where I never guided my players away from anything they seemed interested in for a few years, one set in a lush and varied forest and another in a Wild West setting. I look back on both campaigns with general satisfaction but some disappointment. In the forest campaign, I was running four main quests at the same time--one for each player. In the Wild West setting, I was running a very loose antics campaign for my silliest friends. In both campaigns, I let my players wander to their hearts' content, but I never thought to keep the pace going as the DM. I learned from that mistake moving forward. 

Most recently, as mentioned above, I ran the Of Gods and Dragons campaign. I consider this campaign the high point of my work as a GM. I credit much of that success to finding just the right group of players and to finally getting the balance right as far as open-ended writing. The truth is, I've been GMing since I was eighteen; I'm thirty-six now, and that means half my life has been spent doing this. Whenever I have written events that occur, the result has been disappointing. My players and I always seem to feel that something has been lost, perhaps their agency, perhaps some of the fun, perhaps both. If I give only a world to explore, things are aimless. But if I script characters to populate the world and let the players fill in the events with their actions, things seem to go exceedingly well. 

So I suppose in the end that by an open-ended story, I don't just mean that some details are not filled in, but also that the players must be given the ability to fill in what the GM does not. And most players enjoy filling those details in, so the opportunity to do so is very important. I think that if there is a true challenge that defined my experience in growing as a GM, it's been finding the right balance of how much to ask the players to contribute. At first, I didn't see the importance of it. Then, I underestimated it. Then, I overestimated it. It was only with the striking the balance that things felt truly right. 

How do you strike the balance to create open-ended stories that suit your style? I suggest trying the character-driven model I described above--having detailed characters' intentions be the driving force that meets your player characters, not events that were decided in advance--and seeing what works and doesn't. It will take some practice and calibration to get just right. But there's also a chance that that method just doesn't suit your personal style, in which case you should think about the following:

• What can you do to offer part of a story--a beginning--to your players?
• How can you influence the world aside from directly controlling the world around the players? Can you use characters or worldbuilding to influence the players?
• What can you do, without deciding anything for the players, to advance a story?

Thinking about these things will get you going in the right direction. Remember: the ultimate goal is to give your players a good time, and that can mean learning to do things in a new way. I like to remind myself that there are several players at the table who will benefit from and enjoy playing an open-ended game, and rising to that challenge serves more than my own enjoyment. Besides, the satisfaction I have after managing to do something difficult that benefits my players (my friends) is greater than what I would experience if I just lazily manipulated events to tell my own story instead of my players'. 

So in the end, an open-ended story is something that benefits your players immensely. I would argue that an underwhelming story idea that is open-ended enough to really let the players tell a part of the story themselves is usually a bigger hit than a beautiful tale narrated to players who aren't really doing much. It's all about finding the way you can provide the open-ended story that fits your style. And I believe that since keeping the players' experiences in mind in this way can be very simple, any GM can do it if they work at it. 

I'll say from my own experiences as a player, when I'm given the ability to have real control of my character and be a part of the story we're telling as a group, that's when I'm having the best time. I've tried to reflect on that as a GM--how could I give my favorite experiences as a player to my own players? That's really the heart of what send me on the journey I described above, and I hope your own journey serves you well too. 

That's all for now. Coming soon: an expansion to the Paladin class, a guide to the planes, and the role of setting in tabletop games. Until next time, happy gaming!

Reflections on Character Deaths

Different tabletop games have different likelihoods of player character death (Call of Cthulhu has a particularly treacherous likelihood) while games which are the "tabletop game version" of a media property (I played the Firefly ttrpg many years ago and found it very, very gentle). But in all games, dying is a big deal. You've made a character, and you presumably care about them and their goals, and you've spent considerable time with them, even if just in creating them. Character deaths are the thing of story and legend for better or for worse. 

I honestly have tried not to think too hard about the character deaths that I've been party to. I understand that it's necessary to have serious consequences for risky actions, and I don't think a deathless game or story would be more compelling than the alternative. I do believe that death should be a part of tabletop games . . . in theory. It's good that the option is there for when it's the right thing. But I think very frequently in the gaming community, character death is used by GMs as a way to tell a "shocking" story (rather than coming up with an idea that would be interesting, just kill somebody). 

Let's say that you are in fact using good wisdom on how to deal with character deaths. It's still going to be one of the defining moments of the campaign, so it needs to be handled gently and with consideration. In order to really fully get at my experiences with death in tabletop games, I'm going to reflect on the characters I've seen who didn't make it to the end of the quest. 

My first GM was a gentle man, a neighbor and father of a school friend who graciously invited me to learn at his table. He became something of a surrogate father to me, and I think he saw me developing as a GM even as I learned to play. My second player character ever was for an evil campaign, a horrifying self-scarring grim reaper-inspired orcish Barbarbian. My teammates mocked her name (Morana, which they said was basically "Moron," which they said she was) and me for having a female character (I would, many years later, come out as a transwoman). During the climactic fight that was to define our opening session, I charged forward to save an ally; the ally retreated, and the rest of the party fled and left my character to be overwhelmed and killed. It was awful. 

What stung the most was the intentionality of it. My party's players wanted to hurt my feelings, so they seized on the situation and maneuvered so that I would die. I never saw it coming. Morana was torn down by enemies (I don't even remember what type at this point), and my DM decided that perhaps this party was not the best home for me. He created a new group--fostering my interest in the game--with one of my best friends where we had our own evil campaign. I played a nasty little gnomish Wizard who terrorized the countryside and always figured out a way to stay on top, and his named was Loki (I was a high schooler, okay?). 

I have so many stories of Loki that it's impossible to know where to start. I mentioned wanting a castle, and my GM presented an expansion on elaborate keeps, and I took one over and began a trade empire. I met a man with a beautiful gold ring; I shook his hand and cast Incinerate (3.5E), plucking the ring from the ashes. My evil deeds spread, and an Inevitable was sicced on me; I tricked it into believing I was dead, survived its "just to be sure" attack, and went on being evil. Loki was everything you could dream of as a first real tabletop game character--he was bound only by my creativity, I was in a friendly, safe space (the GM really made me feel at home), and Loki was the star of the show every time I played--I got to see my little character be truly powerful. 

After high school, I did some scattered GMing; nothing was professional or refined, but it was quick and fun tabletop action. Later, when this scattered fun grew tiresome, I tried more ambitious projects. I set out on an experiment to see if I could get a party to assassinate an entire royal regime (the result: not at all). This party was, as an out-of-game construct, very turbulent. We began as a group of four: my best friend, my brother, my girlfriend, and my roommate. As the game continued--and it lasted nearly two years--we added more people--more friends, friends of other players, etc--and it swelled to eventually eight players by the end. It was, in a few words, entirely chaotic. 

This is especially true when you consider that the story ended up being about the division of the city where it was set splitting in half in a compacted civil war that destroyed the ruling class. The players ended up splitting into loyalists to the throne and anarchists trying to overthrow the city, and the result was something of a compromise: a democratically run council to replace the monarchy. The wrinkle is, with all this conflict built into the game and the long campaign time, there was a practical issue. 

I said in the end eight players finished this campaign. One did not. An original player--the guy who had been my roommate--and I ended up in a difficult situation. We were living together, working together (I was his direct boss), and our social circles all overlapped. We couldn't get away from each other. Eventually, things snapped, and I threw him out of the campaign. It was, I will admit, a childish move. I should have talked things over with him, I shouldn't have let my feelings get the best of me, and I definitely shouldn't do what I did next: I killed his character in a really mean way. Specifically, I said he was run over by a stationary cart, hoping to make a cruel joke at the expense of the character and the player. The party laughed, and every so often people who played in the campaign bring up the death. I feel awful about it, honestly. I was immature, and I turned character death (something heavy and not very funny) into a careless punchline. Looking back, I was an unconfident GM who felt like something shocking would work. To a degree, it did, but I'm happy to not do things like this anymore. 

I had a vision of what I wanted my tabletop games to be like--collaborative stories, though I couldn't have articulated that yet--and I had the skills to develop and improvise open world, so I set off running. I ran an audio actual play podcast and live radio broadcast of D&D in the early 2010s called Listen Check, and while we stretched what was considered possible in the artform at the time, we didn't stray into character death scenarios. They entered on many dangerous scenarios, but there was never a moment that placed them at death's door. I consider that a blessing as a GM since I wouldn't have known how to deal with it. 

I turned my focus on a mad quest that would span three campaigns: how could I grant the most possible control of the game to the players? I made a critically wrong assumption (that the empowerment would come from outside of the game) and set to work. I made a campaign in which each player submitted a storyline specific to their player character, each of which I would tie together. I made a campaign of mishmashed references, bits, settings, and comical NPCs for an antics party based on their insane list of inspirations (one of which involved me watching the National Treasure series for reference). I developed a mystery story using themes and details from player input. Their scrapes with death were unique and taught lessons not specific to death. 

In the first campaign mentioned, the Eastweald campaign (named for the large region of the map I created where the campaign took place). One player, my best friend, in fact, told me towards the very end of the campaign that he was dissatisfied with his character. He felt that the best thing that could happen was for his character, a somewhat disillusioned Paladin, to succumb to the depression and commit suicide. I was opposed to this for a lot of reasons. What I told him was this: we can change your character. The point is to have fun. Don't feel shackled to it. Change him in a way that feels fun. And shockingly to all of us (I think including the player), the Paladin threw himself at Vecna in the final moments of the campaign, only to find Vecna unwilling to defend a former Paladin, and the fallen Paladin was slain by the rest of the party. 

To have this Paladin kill himself accomplishes nothing narratively or for the character. Having him believe that darkness would enrich him and finding no hand to support him has a similar result--the Paladin dies--but with a more interesting choice and with an end that actually fits someone who would make the choice he made. To be honest, it's clumsy compared to something I might have come up with if I hadn't only found out about the Paladin's intention to defect as it happened, but it worked, and the player who made the Paladin maintains that it was a fitting end he doesn't regret. 

What makes the Paladin's death fitting is that it takes a meaningful action (siding with an evil deity) and provides it with a meaningful reaction (he is left to deal with his betrayal of his teammates alone). Had he committed suicide, there would be no meaningful action or reaction. And keep in mind--the player chose the betrayal. He called out to a trickster deity, asking for help without anything meaningful to offer. It was a desperate plan, and it didn't work, and death was unfortunately the only option I could offer him. 

The National Treasure campaign, as it was sometimes called (along with the Western campaign, the Goofball campaign, and other various nicknames), had no character deaths. I had essentially set up the large Western continent to be a sightseeing tour--a dozen unique and interesting places with story possibilities and colorful characters. The goal was not for them to be in danger so much as free. It didn't go as planned. The Goofballs earned the name every moment of every session (they were, for instance, permanently barred from ever returning to all but one of the towns they visited), but that was the point--they were having fun by being chaotic and wild and full of surprises, and making the world dangerous wouldn't contribute to that. It was a deathless campaign, as well it should have been. 

The mystery campaign was also deathless. To be fair, it was something of an experiment. To begin, we were using D&D (a system mostly focused on combat rules) to investigate a mystery (something that could have been done more easily with something like Call of Cthulhu or another more investigative game). Next, I knew from GMing experience that you can't make one piece of information that's especially hard to find and call that a mystery--there had to be a network of escalating clues that carried them from uninformed to the solution, and I had never done that before. Combat was rare, and we limited antics to a pretty rare frequency--we were really trying to tell a story and roleplay. There were death close calls, there were meaningful NPC deaths, and there were deaths that would change the gameworld, but the trio of player characters survived. 

In the interceding years, I got to try a handful of tabletop games that strayed from the D&D style to different degrees. I played characters in Don't Rest Your Head, Call of Cthulhu, Geist, Exalted, and the Firefly tabletop game, and fortunately for me, all of those characters survived. Not all my party members were so lucky. I saw Don't Rest Your Head allies fall to risks that went bad. I saw a Call of Cthulhu ally killed, it seemed, because she pissed off the GM. I saw a near party-wipe in Exalted when our GM fostered a party split and incentivized a player to snap. For the Don't Rest Your Head players who took one too many risks, I respect it. That's how the game is designed, and we accept those risks when we play. But the other two instances I mentioned--what amounts to GM malfeasance--it's awful. It should be avoided. Remember, the point is to have fun, and this kind of behavior is not fun. 

This brings us up to my most recent work, something I am immensely proud of. I call this campaign Of Gods and Dragons, a name that at once tells you that this will concern the most powerful forces in the setting with a linguistic flair, an indication that this is literary in a sense. And in fact, the party was abducted in the opening moments by an oppressive dragon, then rescued by another dragon, all before being set loose on a gameworld I've spent almost 20 years building. It was, as the mystery campaign was, a roleplaying and storytelling game, which was important given than I gave my players immense power to begin with (level 12 at session one--they easily could have wrought hell on almost any target if they'd chosen to be more chaotic. As it was, they chose to bring kindness. For one hundred years of epilogue, all three player characters improved the world. It is the peak of my GMing career so far.

No player characters died, but characters who were as important as player characters did die. I cast a group of ten characters as dragons, people empowered and made nearly immortal by their dragonhood. Seven survived. One of the three that died fell into an unfortunate scenario, catching the party at a time where she couldn't leave them alone and they couldn't leave her alive. Another was planned, the assassination of the man scheming to bring down the forces of reality in the name of destruction and empowerment. The last was a matter of closing loose ends, taking the last truly evil dragon out of commission so that the world would be, at least at the level of dragons, more good than evil by a greater margin, and so that the world would be safer from his potential threats. These dragons had been the source of conversation and planning for an out of game year, and finally facing them was unavoidable. 

Looking forward, I don't know what to expect when it comes to death in my campaigns. I'm eager to run other systems, and death is not a huge part of every game. I am especially intrigued by running a tabletop game I created in which players explore historically accurate versions of important times and places like 1750s London and 1930s Chicago (not to mention my projection of Washington D.C. in 2050). I don't suspect I'll be encountering a lot of player deaths in my future. 

So this next part isn't really for me. This next part is for GMs who are free with player death. I'll work backwards. Of Gods and Dragons taught me as the GM that death and danger are not necessary for a high stakes game. My various tabletop experiments taught me that when used irresponsibly, player death can ruin an experience. From my experiments as a GM with radical freedom, I learned that a well-earned consequence (including death) can enrich a story, and a poorly-considered consequence (including death) can ruin a player's experience of the story. My time DMing on the radio taught me that the story cannot precede the players and their experience--I often had to be changing game expectations based on radio broadcast, and I let the story and the listeners be more important to me than the players. My civil war campaign taught me to let the players define everything except reality. My clumsy DMing in college taught me to go beyond the cliches. And my time with my first DM, my neighbor and the man who spent weekends making popcorn and hosting movie afternoons in the basement, taught me that deaths are awful. 

Seriously! I spent a lot of time develop Morana. She was this fearless warrior who I wanted to be like, and she was strange but didn't care what people thought (something I was and desperately wanted to do), and she was covered in decorative scarring, not unlike tattoo art, which I was obsessed with (currently, about 50% of my upper body is tattooed). I cared about Morana. I looked forward to playing with her for weeks. I painted a mini for her, something that took endless hours and painstaking care. Watching her get hacked to bits while my supposed friends got away with the treasure was the kind of experience that would have turned a lot of people away from tabletop games. Most people, I would wager, would take that experience and decide the whole thing wasn't for them. 

But I didn't. I was hooked. D&D was a doorway that peeked in on the ideas of storytelling and roleplaying and imaginary play and game design that I couldn't just decide wasn't for me. The fact that my DM saw that and was willing to help me is one of the great kindnesses of my life. I didn't burn out because my character died--but I almost did. It was a bad thing that only happened because my DM's hands were tied--there was no way to fudge that my character survived. A separate campaign for me was the solution he had, and it still strikes me as incredibly generous. Because of my initial interest in tabletop games was strong, because I was given a kind recovery when I was betrayed, and because my interest was then fostered, I recovered. Lots of people aren't so lucky. 

Look, if a character straps explosives on themselves, runs into a goblin den, and detonates it, that character should die. If a character makes a few bad rolls and suddenly die from factors shouldn't really be deadly, that character realistically should not die. The dice and rules might say so, but you're the GM. You are empowered by the game to decide in the end what happens. Don't be afraid to do something. 

Ask yourself a few questions. First, what's best for the character? Does a death here serve a purpose? Has the character achieved everything they were designed to and this death would fulfill them somehow? Does the character still have unfinished business that would be unresolved if the character were to die? Things like relationships with other characters are less important here. 

Another vital question is, what's best for the story? Does this character still have some vital role to fulfill? Are there things later on you can think of that would be complicated or prevented by this character's death? You're not eagerly looking for an excuse to kill the character so much as looking for evidence that the character might benefit from a death; think of it like how juries work--you must be totally convinced that the character must die to kill them, otherwise they are innocent. 

Lastly, what's best for the party? If a character's death is going to have a major impact on the party, it's important to know going in that an issue is going to occur. One example, for instance, is if the party's sole healer would be killed, in which case all manner of complications could occur. Similarly, if the party leader is killed, the trajectory of the party could be massively affected. Or as I've had happen as a player, a crucial party member missing can stop the party from completing part of a quest. Any of these can affect a decision on what to do as far as a player character's fate. 

And finally, ask yourself what the player's experience will be if the character dies. Is this a hardened player who took a risk knowing the consequences, or a new player still learning the ropes of a complicated new game? Is this player being treated poorly at the table in a way that might affect their willingness to keep playing? Will this player keep playing tabletop games if their character dies? You may recoil at the idea of factoring this in, but our goal should be making more happy tabletop game players, not less. 

I made Morana when I was 17. I'm 35 now--that's half my life ago, plus a bit. Morana was, to be honest, a pretty hollow character. She was, like so many characters made by teenagers, meant to be cool without much thought as to roleplaying or anything beyond the lethalness of her scythe. But it still hurts to think of what I lost. Morana played one session before dying, and that meant that months or even years of gaming with her could have taken place. She could have been the character I carried with me in my heart as special, and instead, she was a fallen character who never had a story to tell. Her death hurt, and it could have driven me from the game. 

Instead, I stood my ground. I got some help from a good GM, and I set to playing and learning. Tabletop games slowly became more than a fascination--an obsession, and then a way of life. This website came together. Experimental campaigns happened. Tabletop games were created. My interest in D&D became something so much larger, and all of that could have been lost had I been shaken by Morana's death. There is a timeline in which D&D became "that thing I did in high school," in which I don't return to the stories and dice, in which that world is lost to me. I'm glad it wasn't. 

For a character to die in a tabletop game, you've got to be 100% certain it's their time. Think like a juror: is there no question that this character should die? Or is there reasonable doubt? The stakes are too high to make this decision without caution. This could be a defining moment for the player. Be gentle, be kind, and be reasonable--deaths are remembered, and you want to be remembered well.

That's all for now. Coming soon: how to not get weighed down by worldbuilding, reflections on the campaign of a lifetime, and what perfect GMing looks like. Until next time, happy gaming!

An Argument for Downtime

I've been reflecting on my earliest days as a GM lately. It's been easy to, with nearly 18 years of practice and the benefit of hindsight, pick apart things that went wrong when I was still figuring out the art of GMing. I was more keen to enforce rules than invite people to tell a story with me. I had high expectations of my players that I didn't communicate. I was guilty of railroading at times--I once had a god appear and threaten to send down a comet with grass on top that would drive inactive players into the ground where they would seemingly disappear to the world (yeah, I cringe when I think of that one). I was kind of a mess, and it's something of a miracle that I managed to fix all this. 

But the thing that strikes me now as most misguided is something else. To make the mistakes I made were the kind of mistakes that a GM lacking experience and confidence would make, and that's why I made them. But there was one mistake that went in the face of logic, and I've unfortunately seen it in plenty of games. I hate to see GMs suffering under delusions that make the game experience worse, so I'm going to address this mistake so many of us have made: downtime for the players is a good thing. 

I remember getting antsy as a GM during sessions when I was newer to the role. "But they're not getting enough done this session!" I would worry. "They're just standing around talking--there's a whole quest to do!" I would complain to myself. "Nothing is happening!" I would lament. I would pressure them to keep moving--the next bit of the quest would come to them, for instance, or I would even say something out of game to imply they should get to work. And I've had tactics like these used on me as a player (sometimes, in fact, by people who played with me as a beginner--how poetically tragic to have your own bad habit used against you). They're common thoughts: as GMs, we have a whole world and story to unveil, and trifling with the delicate art you perform complicates things for you. 

In order to understand why downtime is necessary, we have to address a few core truths about tabletop games. The first is that the point of tabletop games is to have fun. This is fundamental. Tabletop games are a medium that is capable of essentially anything that people can imagine, so you can choose with willing participants to pursue a use that is fully something besides a collaborative story, but tabletop games are designed so that you and the people you're playing with can have fun. It's what hooked us with tabletop games, and it's what keeps us coming back. We forget this over time with all the complicated elements of gaming, but at the heart of the matter, these games are for having fun. 

If we accept that fun is the point, then we can address GMing differently. Now our goal is to maximize fun for the players while also enjoying ourselves as GMs. And that means structuring the game so that it's fun. Here's where your individual game is the focus: you as GM have decided on a particular style (personal GM style, storytelling style, storytelling content, NPC use, worldbuilding, responses to players, etc) that suits you but also matches the players. Maybe this means being yourself as a GM and working at delivering a game that caters to your players' interests; maybe it means stretching yourself to try something new for your players while relying on established work you've already made. But these are ways that GMs can pursue their own fun while catering to their players' fun. 

And if our GMing choices should naturally aid what would be fun for the players, we can question whether certain elements of the game are fun for our players. If we notice that a group's interest flags when puzzles are introduced, we can change or eliminate the puzzles. If we notice that players enjoy combat more than we anticipated, we can add more of that. You get the picture--we can and should tweak our gameplay to match what the players enjoy (again with the qualifier that your fun counts too). 

Some things are a matter of taste. The broad play styles I decribe here on this site--combat, antics, and roleplaying--are all matters of taste. Some committed ttrpg players hate roleplaying or combat or goofing around, and they are no less of players because of it. That's just how they have fun. Getting the balance of this right is about observing your players and adjusting, and there is no hard and fast truth that applies to all games. How players feel about GM styles also falls into this category: some players and some GMs just will always struggle to get along well, and it's neither of their faults. It's just social dynamics, and that's something bigger than tabletop games. 

Other things are about the degree to which they're a part of your game because they are necessary. Story, for instance, falls into this category because any series of events in a tabletop game without connective story is just a series of random ideas. Setting and NPCs--the world around the player characters--will need to exist in order for the campaign to move along. You can run a campaign with relatively little worldbuilding and few NPCs, but going entirely without either is fairly unheard of. Some manner of direction, whether it's a questline or personal goal by the players, will be necessary to connect the world to the story. These are pretty much non-negotiable--your campaign has to have them, or something crucial will be missing. 

Downtime is like that. I'm going to split this into two groups: combat strategists and antics goofballs in one group, and storytelling roleplayers in a second group. Group one, our fighters and jokers, do need downtime. I'm not talking about looting and prepping for the next fight. I mean real downtime. Time when there is little to do that changes the mechanics of the game and the players must express themselves as the character. Yes, your brutal barbarian character has an impressive array of stats, but after a long day of fighting, how does he relax? What does he talk about (or not talk about)? This doesn't have to be an hour of painstaking roleplaying deep emotional trauma or anything, but even the players themselves will need a moment to digest and relax before the next step. These downtime moments are not about making players roleplay so much as inviting them to express their characters and allowing everybody a moment to reset. 

Group two has different needs entirely. A roleplayer thrives during downtime more than almost any other time. In downtime, a roleplayer can express their character, but they also get to explore aspects of the character's inner world, give opportunities to collaborate with other players, respond to other players, and take symbolic actions that represent the character's mindset. All of these are the tools of the trade with a roleplaying character, and it's hard to use those tools in the midst of a fight or a tense scene, so downtime becomes the way we're able to get the most out of our characters. Without this time, roleplaying characters would always be somewhat held back and underdeveloped, and that short-changes the players on the experience of fun that they're looking for. 

Of course, downtime exists on a spectrum. As a storytelling/roleplaying GM, I've sought out players with the same tastes, and that has meant that I'll often have a party full of eager roleplayers throughout campaigns. This can mean that downtime is chock full of people wanting to engage as their characters, and I've had downtime moments last over an hour or even for a full session on occasion before I started being more active about moderating downtime. I'm not claiming that more downtime is better, full stop. There are limits. But for every one GM like me who's allowed too much downtime, I think that there are a half dozen GMs who have restricted downtime out of the belief that they were improving the game. 

And I think that's a tragedy. Downtime--the moments where I or my players were just exploring the world and ourselves with openness and sincerity without worrying about some grand adventure--those were the moments I found my characters, and the moments where my players' characters shone the most. To have no downtime means being harried and rushed along through an adventure that we're meant to enjoy, and the rushing makes it harder to enjoy and appreciate it all (that is to say, it's harder to have fun). 

So how much downtime does a party need? It depends on the party. Like I said above, combat and antics groups usually need a touch less downtime, but your group might be different. Roleplayers will need more downtime and may even need gentle reminders to get back to the story. Newer players may need to be encouraged to take downtime as they may not know that they can choose to regroup or relax. Some players unused to roleplaying may need the behavior modeled for them. There are variables to consider, but there's actually a very simple formula which can be memorized and used at any level of the game, and it's even intuitive: for every chunk of story progress the group makes, grant them an opportunity at downtime.

I'll admit up-front--if used too strictly, this can give the impression of a formulaic and repetitive structure for telling a story. But for the most part, assuming you take steps to keep the story fresh, this works just fine. If you take a look at the campaigns I've posted notes for here--the Eastweald, the mystery campaign, Of Gods and Dragons--all of the sessions follow this pattern. I actually have internalized this pacing to the point that I get physically tense and uncomfortable if we stray too far from a balance of story progress and downtime. Here's how I think of it: the party builds of tension (think of steam in this metaphor) whenever it works on the story. Taking downtime vents that steam. If I were to push my party too hard, the steam pressure would build up, and there could be catastrophic consequences. You have to vent the steam often. And since I play a storytelling/roleplaying game, I want to give opportunities to reflect on the developments in the story as we go, so I have every incentive to give downtime often. 

Besides, if we're honest with ourselves, planning takes place during downtime, and planning is a crucial part of the tabletop game experience. Whether your plans are tactical, hilariously hare-brained, or revealing of your character, the plans matter. There's a stereotype that tabletop game plans are usually comically bad--imagine that without the planning. Even if you are the harshest of GMs, you want your players to give a full, honest effort to your work, so you want to give them time to think about it. Downtime is critically necessary. 

To close, I'd like to share something that happened during downtime when I was a player. I was in a campaign playing as a con artist, and for the sake of the party's cohesion and the story I wanted to tell with this character, I wanted her to do something dramatic in the name of good to try to make up for her past misdeeds. For sessions, I couldn't find a moment that fit or felt right. Then the party had a massive fight with a den of vampires. The combat was grisly, but we slayed most of the vampires--aside from the one that kidnapped the ally most vital to our mission. We were discouraged, stopped for now, without a direction, and covered in gore. My character reached something of a breaking point. 

My GM had left us to downtime in the farmhouse manor where we'd fought the vampires. I shuffled off to a corner and prayed--to anybody, to almost everybody. Just trying to see if someone would listen. In the end, the goddess of spring aligned with what my character wanted, and my character's earnestness in wanting to do better sealed the relationship. My character became, in that moment, no longer a Charisma-based Rogue, but a healing Cleric of second chances with high Wisdom and Charisma. 

The thing is, I didn't know going into that downtime that my character would end up suddenly cross-class or that she would pledge her life to good or that her entire approach to life would change on the other side of it. But all of that did happen, and I needed downtime to do it. Obviously, this is an extreme example--not every downtime results in something transformative--but the principle still applies. We need to have time to digest, to refocus, to look within and look forward. 

(Oh, you can read a novelization of that campaign, by the way, as well as two prequels and a sequel.)

That's all for now. Coming soon: reflections on character deaths, how to not get weighed down by worldbuilding, and what perfect GMing looks like. Until next time, happy gaming!

What Exactly is a Tabletop Game?

When I set out to write my Master's thesis (which included Dungeons and Dragons and Don't Rest Your Head, both tabletop games), I had a lot of explaining to do. It turned out that people who had been cloistered in academia for decades didn't necessarily have a strong understanding of the finer points of tabletop roleplaying games, and so in order to justify my work, I would have to explain, what is a tabletop game? How does one play it? Who writes it? Is it a computer game? This took place even in the era of Stranger Things, so I expected at least a base understanding of roleplaying. But this was not so. In today's world, with D&D and to a lesser extent other tabletop games becoming more popular, this still happens sometimes, and I'm sure that gamers, especially longtime gamers, have had to explain what you actually do when you play. That doesn't happen to people who play first person shooters or board games or duck-duck-goose. 

I think there's value in the question, though, from an artistic perspective. That's largely how I approached it when I wrote about it. The thing is, any creative work is art. A crude child's drawing, an uneven crocheted scarf, and a lopsided coffee mug were all made with intention and purpose and have form in the real world, channeling the creator's vision into reality--that's art, even if you don't think it's good art. And certainly, tabletop games as produced and sold are art, as are the experiences had and stories told by players of tabletop games. So, reading tabletop games and the experiences of playing them as art, what is a tabletop game? 

In higher education, creative endeavors have pretty clear-cut creators. A novel is written by an author (often with the help of an editor or team of editors); a song is written and composed by a musician or group of musicians (often with the help of a producer); a film has a writer and director and editor and performers and literally hundreds of creditable people so that any specific role can be attributed. But who is the author of a tabletop game session? 

I've explored this idea more fully before, but briefly, I would argue that there are a whole mess of different creators we need to worry about. Firstly, if the GM is using a module or other prepared material they've not written themselves, there is that module writer to consider (not to mention the many supporting writers, editors, illustrators, and more who make large-market modules). Then of course there is the GM, whose foundation of the setting and the basics of the plot are also something that needs meaningful credit in the experience of a tabletop game session. Perhaps most importantly, we have the players, whose choices actually form the story itself, and that is in itself a collaboration unless there's only one player. So in considering even the most basic unit of tabletop gaming--the session--there are so many voices to consider that it becomes mindboggling rather quickly. 

Let's conclude then, that whatever tabletop games are, they are collaborative in nature. Every statement and action is a reaction to another from someone else, usually inspired by someone else, and this means a great amount of what actually happens in tabletop games is not a singular effort. 

Next, let's consider how actions take place. Players state their actions, either verbally in most sessions or via text in asynchronous campaigns, and then the GM determines with the help of dice rolls what the outcome is in the reality of the game. This is to say that players say what they want to happen, and then the dice (if the game uses dice) generally decide how effectively that intention is channeled into the game's reality, and then the GM decides given context, story, fudging, and other details how to provide an end result. It's a mediating process from a game design perspective--the player provides a direction, the dice factor in luck and skill, and the GM refines it for the larger experience. It's quite beautiful--simple enough, but infinite in terms of possibilities. 

So then what's the point of taking actions? This is a game, so there must be an objective. Certainly, some campaigns have clear-cut goals such as "slay this monster" or "retrieve this relic," where success is easily quantifiable. But months or years of gaming can take place before even meeting the monster or getting close to the relic, and what is the intervening gaming if not also the game? I don't think we can say that it's so simple as "you complete the main quest and you win", especially since a lot of original gamers have classically run multiple campaigns all strung together into one epic adventure. We can't just set an endpoint and declare that reaching it is the point of the game. 

I'd argue for something a bit more poetic. Perhaps it's just that the destination isn't the point so much as the journey, because the stories I've heard told about tabletop games are almost never about a campaign's final moments--they're about the crazy things that happened on the way there. And it's more than some cliché about enjoying how you get there; to me, a campaign is like a book, not a video game. I enjoy the twists and turns on the way, getting to know the characters, seeing the plot unfold--I'm not training my skills to overcome some mythical challenge. There's a way to play tabletop games that way, but I think if we're honest with ourselves, campaigns are more than the finale. 

So what is a tabletop game according to all this? It's a story. It begins with the first sessions in the campaign, it follows the player characters on their journeys, it features colorful moments along the way, and it has a grand finale at the end. The players tell the stories of their characters (or at least, what their characters want), and the dice and GM interpret those individual stories into a larger story about everyone. Sometimes that story is a battle epic. Sometimes it's a bawdy tale. Sometimes it's a heartbreaking drama. Sometimes it's a thousand different kinds of story all mixed together in one dazzling tapestry. But even if it's just "Grog killed a gnoll with an axe," that's a story (by the same logic that any creative work is art). 

So far, we have that tabletop games are collaborative and story-based. Is there more to the equation? Have we overlooked something? Many would take issue with the fact that I don't have "game" anywhere in the core definition, perhaps arguing I'm understating the role of the dice. Others might say that the word "game" is directly in the name "tabletop games" and should be present. I disagree. 

Firstly, there are tabletop games that are diceless. These are straightforward storytelling games that do not factor luck or skill into the outcome of player character actions (or, in more abstract games, forces besides people). We use the term "tabletop game" for these, and that carries with it questions of how luck and skill factor into the "game" and whether it can be truly won, so to me, the question of what a game is seems to be a whole other equation beyond what tabletop games are. I personally use a rough definition: a system of rules that govern play, the end result of which is to win, whether that be against a roughly equal foe or against an abstraction (setting high scores and record times, adding a meta-condition of success on top of winning). And to be, I am unconvinced that tabletop games are necessarily games by that definition. Plenty don't care about winning, which composes a large portion of my definition. Fudging means that skill and luck can be limited or eliminated. Homebrew changes the rules themselves, sometimes in considerable ways or dropping rules altogether. Tabletop games may be games, but not in a clean way that can't be debated. 

In undergrad, I took a creative writing course. My only assignment beyond reading and commenting on my classmates' work was to write and share two short stories. My first was not great. Had my professor been a less gentle man, I think he would have called it "uninspired." I had struggled with the possibilities. I couldn't choose a topic to write about, and what came out was forced and clumsy. I asked my professor for advice with this problem before writing the second story. He said that when possibilities are infinite, creativity withers. When restrictions are placed, our creativity grows against the constraints. We have a challenge to work against, a secret game we're playing to keep things interesting. I threw a few restraints on my writing (every proper noun needed to be time-related and my main character had to be depicted through actions rather than words), and my classmates and professor loved it. It was the best work I had ever done up to that point. 

I mention this because I think that tabletop game rules are like these writing restraints. A class tells a player what their character can and can't easily do, which is a restraint on the actions they're theoretically capable of. Mechanical rules restrain possible outcomes to a few or only one outcome by nature. The players and GM working in tandem and against each other is a check on each other's power and a restraint on how much either can lead the story. I think of tabletop games' rules less as game rules and more as the unique restrictions each story places on how we tell the stories of each game. 

Let's explore this with some examples to clarify that last point. In the mother of tabletop games' case--Dungeons & Dragons--the rules exist to simulate essentially anything in a high magic fantasy setting by restricting how combat work, what spells exist, and what types of fantasy adventures fit within the canon. A game like Call of Cthulhu creates rules that define magic and general simulation as well in other to restrict the setting to Lovecraftian horror, to make characters incredibly vulnerable (which shifts how players play the game), and to restrict how much depravity a character can witness. Don't Rest Your Head offers no rules on how to simulate the world itself and give players only two abilities in order to not restrict story opportunities (instead offering lore to adapt and use) but also what players are capable of (leading to a lot of lateral thinking about what the limits of their powers are). The addition that games make in the tabletop game community when released is not about what the rules are or what the lore is so much as how it restricts storytelling in order to empower GMs and players to create their best stories. 

So ultimately, since I reject the notion that tabletop games are game-like enough to classify as game, I have decided that tabletop games are collaborative storytelling guides. In fact, let's turn an eye to the term tabletop roleplaying games--is that even accurate? Tabletop is the origin of the gaming tradition, but many if not most games are played in other arrangements. Roleplaying? Sometimes--but just as I, a roleplaying, storytelling player and GM eschew a lot of excessive silliness and non-plot-essential combat, many players who focus on other styles don't really include roleplaying as part of their experience. And I've already contested "game," so we can move on. I know that "collaborative storytelling guide" is not very catchy, but it does feel more accurate to the medium as a whole. 

And this brings me back to many years ago when tabletop games--even D&D--were basically unknown to almost all people. I would pitch it to potential players and to new friends, but nothing ever felt totally right. What ended up clicking was when I was lobbying to start a D&D radio show and podcast at the radio station where I worked. In order to secure a long enough slot for a real session at a time when people could actually listen, I had to convince the station owner to give a "D&D radio show" a chance. We talked for a while--a long while--and eventually, I knew what to say to him. He was a lifelong radio man, and so I said, "It's like improvised radio theater. If someone gets into a fight, we make it a little random. We're just doing a serialized story on air." And it suddenly made sense to him. The resistance went away. Here I was, trying to revive something he'd appreciated growing up and that had made him go into the business. He agreed and supported our show through its entire run. 

I think that the lesson here is that for most people who don't play tabletop games, they see the dice and character sheets and the miniatures, and they hear the rule citations and in-jokes and game lore, and they realize two things. 1. This is all very complicated. 2. I am out of place for not knowing how any of this works. And they're wrong on both counts! Tabletop games are not complicated. They are actually collaborative (doing it with your friends--very relaxed) storytelling (just pick what your character wants to do--very relaxed) guide (there's going to be help from the game and GM and other players to tell this story--very relaxed). And is the impression I try to give new players now. Everyone picks up the rules eventually, and giving someone a gentle introduction is a great way to make a lifelong tabletop game fan. And of course, tabletop game fans want someone to play with, not send people packing. Presenting tabletop games as a collaborative storytelling space can ease a lot of potential players' minds. 

So, what is a tabletop game really? The way I run my games, and the parties I play in, it is not the fighting simulation it was when tabletop games were first born. It is a unique interpretation of how to tell stories, created so that players could pick up the game and tell a story that lives in that world. To me, tabletop games are an excuse, an opportunity to spend time with people you care about making up a story just for you. It's truly beautiful, and I think they transcend being just games.

That's all for now. Coming soon: how to balance kindness and antagonism as a GM, an argument for downtime, and reflections on character deaths. Until next time, happy gaming!

What I Look for in a Player

I have spent years writing on this site about how GMs can cater to their players. If there is a central argument to the 250+ articles here, it's that giving freedom to players is a good thing. And in all that time, I have spent comparatively little time talking about the opposite: how can the players cater to the GM? What does that even look like? It's hard to imagine, but it is possible and meaningful. 

First, let's rule out things that are not good ways to have the players cater to the GM. We don't want submissive drones who follow our stories exactly as imagined--that robs the players of agency, and it makes stories more boring without the element of surprise. We also don't want players who don't push boundaries narratively or within roleplay. As often as it might complicate GMing, the most beautiful moments in a game comes from players who are going beyond the obvious steps of a story. And we also don't want players who do and say what they think the GM wants--that removes the personality and agency of the player characters, reducing them to shadows of themselves. 

Instead, we're going to investigate the strategy of choosing players who will naturally fit with your GM style, and that means knowing what to look for in a player. This is, however, a complicated matter. What you do as a GM informs the kind of players you'll want to look for. That means that there's a broad answer for everyone as well as a more personal answer for each GM. Let's review them together. 

Firstly, your player should approach the game with the same emphasis you do. If you are running a silly antics game, you want players who enjoy and play along with silly antics campaigns. The same goes for a combat focus--if you want to offer strategic challenges and tough combat, you'd be best served by players itching for a fight. And if like me, you're looking for storytelling and roleplaying, you want players who are looking for the same thing. This may sound obvious, but I can't tell you how many times I've had player/tone mismatches in my games and games I've been around--if you just want to hang out with friends, this idea might matter less to you, but if you're looking to maximize your tabletop game experience, you need to be able to maintain style across the group. 

This is a hard lesson to learn, to be honest. I think we have to divide things: these campaigns are for hanging out with friends (if that's something you enjoy), and these campaigns are for getting the most out of the game (if that's something you enjoy). If you enjoy both, the division is necessary, or else you end up with a strong possibility of being let down by your experience--let me tell you about my experience with that. 

Many years ago now, I ran a Western-themed campaign on a little desert island. The setting was like a child to me--I'd painstakingly mapped a dozen cities and the sprawling island, I'd developed NPCs and politics everywhere on the map, and I'd come up with a handful of storylines to offer my party. They opted for the silliest antics campaign I have ever been a part of. They were banned from almost every town. They committed almost every crime known to humanity while purporting to be a "good" party. They ignored (and sometimes mocked) so many things about my setting. It was, in a word, a nightmare. 

The thing is, the party was my best friends at the time. It was a combination of old college friends and work buddies that got along great. Everybody came to play excited and left thrilled. Friendships were forged. It was socially an incredible game. But for me as the DM, the person responsible for guiding the game, I was always frustrated or overwhelmed. I learned a lesson from that. I needed to be more selective about parties when I was looking to maximize my game experience instead of socializing with friends. 

After that, I was very careful about selecting players. The campaign that followed was initially composed of my three best work friends and my girlfriend at the time. But crucially, my three best work friends were intelligent, somewhat reserved and very thoughtful, and eager to try something a little experimental. My girlfriend at the time did not necessarily have those qualities, and our inevitable break-up ended her time in the campaign, leaving a party that learned to work within how I GM (lots of narration and roleplaying with radical player freedom). After that, I stuck with the same party, and with a good chemistry as a group and me with refined GM skills, our party was incredibly rewarding for me. I was spending time with friends, but the way we were spending our time was pushing the boundaries of our favorite games. 

And that led me to a radical choice. For my most recent campaign, I cut a member of the trio I had been gaming with off and on for a decade. We're still friends--I attended his wedding not that long ago--so it wasn't a social factor. It was a gaming factor. This player, who we'll call Wilkes, was and remains a terrific improviser. Few can out-roleplay Wilkes, and he's always able to add a poignant note here and there. But the thing about Wilkes was that he was very competitive. He would bully NPCs. He would powergame, destroying a lot of narrative moments with (admittedly clever) solutions, frequently derived from metagaming knowledge. And he would challenge me as the GM, deliberately throwing difficult situations at me with a wry smile. It didn't ruin my experience, but it definitely deflated my enjoyment a bit. 

Deciding what to do was hard. On the one hand, Wilkes had been a close friend for a decade. We'd played some of the gaming I'm most proud of together. The trio Wilkes was a part of had been playing with me for a long time. On the other, Wilkes was making me enjoy the game less and especially making it harder for me to do what I wanted to do, what I needed to do, and what I enjoy. And for campaigns meant to entertain a group of players, I have always excused those things because I make player fun a priority over my own. But what I had planned next--Of Gods and Dragons--was not an average campaign meant to entertain; it was my attempt to at once experiment with the scope of my storytelling while also exploring the most arcane of lore in my homebrew setting. 

When it came time to pick a party for this campaign, I reflected. Wilkes posed problems in that powergaming, metagaming, and GM opposition would be very serious problems with what I had planned. I chose to move forward with the other two members of the party, who would become Brokk and Lethanin because I felt I had no reason to change what had been a historically fruitful and harmonious gaming relationship until then with them. For my third, I picked the woman who is now my wife. She is brilliant, creative, highly experienced with tabletop games, strategic while respecting the story and world, and generally an exciting player to watch, evidenced nowhere better than in her work as Aurora. I chose as carefully as I knew how, and the result is something I couldn't have been happier with. 

And the thing of all that is that I didn't chose to play without being with friends. The players of Brokk and Lethanin are my real life best friends who I happened to find I have good tabletop game chemistry with. I hope it goes without saying that I enjoy spending time with my wife, especially since she's learned to play my individual style of game. I got the best of both worlds, and so can you. 

So you've chosen your broad style: are you a storytelling, roleplaying GM with a world to explore; are you a strategic, tactical GM whose enemies are fearsome; or are you a GM who wants to laugh with your friends, using tabletop games as a way to hang out? Knowing this is really the first step, but it can be taken further. Let's further define the storytelling, roleplaying GM archetype. Within it are storytellers who focus on story, roleplayers whose acting and improv is the star of the show, worldbuilders whose creations take center stage, or combinations of these. And we can go further still. Our storyteller might present open prompts and respond to player action; they might guide player action through the world; they might railroad their players along a storyline; they may balance these in some way. Only now are we getting a really clear picture of an individual GM. I describe myself (as I did above) as a storyteller, specifically with lots of narration and roleplaying with radical player freedom. This is what a game at my table looks like: I am going to be describing NPCs and the world, I am going to be roleplaying as NPCs, and I am otherwise sitting back and letting the players lead. 

And that's a style that some people don't like. Some people don't seem to understand it. Some people think I'm not really playing tabletop games so much as adding dice to a collaborative story. All of that is fair. And knowing that people don't like it helps me. When I meet someone who says they play tabletop games, I ask them to tell me about their favorite moment from their experience. This question tells you a lot. I really struggle to connect to the combat style of play, and when I'm talking to someone who describes a cool battle moment as their favorite, I know I am unlikely to appreciate a game in the same way as them. So now I get to avoid playing with them and having a bad experience. 

There are other ways to gauge how people will fit into your style before you play with them. Ask them what they're looking for in a campaign. It's always okay to say that you have something already planned that doesn't really incorporate that style. Describe your ideas for campaigns or ideas about how tabletop games are played and see how people respond. You may get some opposition or polite dismissal, but the people who agree with you will be great gaming partners. And one tactic that has worked for me is directly asking players what they do and don't like as a player. If their don't list sounds like what I do, I accept it's a bad match and move on; if we sound compatible, I have a new player. 

Of course, all of the screening in the world will not prevent a surprise in a group of players. Wilkes was someone who was great on paper and whose only trespass was not fitting the tone of an experimental project, but screening didn't catch him. I've played campaigns with significant others who brought down the game before, and my judgment was too biased to meaningfully screen her. Someone can always be agreeable when spoken to and quite different at the table. There are no guarantees you can find the perfect candidate every time. You do eventually have to give people a try to know how it will go. 

While GMing, watch the player in question. How do they respond to your GMing? Are they connecting with you/the story/the party? Do you enjoy the things they do? These questions are not meant to judge the player as a person--by no means is this a reflection on the individual. But the point of tabletop games is to have fun, and you the GM deserve that fun, and if a player is deflating your fun, you can do something about it. 

Cutting a player loose is hard. It's a messy thing, and it never plays out well. I suggest starting with an intro session to most campaigns--if you use one, you can get rid of a bad fit before the party ever meets. By a similar token, you can play a one-shot or briefer campaign to get a sense of a player and how they fit in with the rest of the group before plunging into a longer campaign with an unknown. 

Once, when I ran my western campaign, a player showed up with a complete stranger to me who he insisted was also going to be in the campaign. I don't think he realized that this would likely take a year or longer, and I later came to believe that he didn't really know the stranger well either. The stranger, who I'll call Leif, turned out to make everyone else pretty uncomfortable. Down moments were filled with rants (often political), NPCs were irrationally slain, and conversation was not relaxed around the table. I felt awkward cutting Leif off--he told me every week that it was the high point of his week, and he was obviously lonely. In the end, I don't know what would have been for the best, or if there was a "best" in this case. But I do know that if I had run an intro session or a one-shot first, I would have had a chance to nip this in the bud. 

You may be saying, "this all sounds pretty mercenary. You're just cutting players off because you don't like them?" And yes and no is my response. Yes, I am deliberately choosing to include or not include the people who exist in my leisure activities and hobbies. And no, it's not because I don't like them. As I said about, Wilkes is still a close friend, and I have no ill will or judgment for Leif. But when I was honest with myself, my enjoyment of the game would improve with a different arrangement, and I have a right to pursue that. 

So what do I look for in a player? 

I like players who have some kind of intelligence. It can be knowledge or wisdom or cleverness or whatever breed it takes on in the individual. I am myself a pretty intelligent person who likes telling complicated, nuanced stories, and I want my players to be able to appreciate everything that's going on and be able to respond in a meaningful way. It also helps that I tend to get along best with intelligent people, so the social component of the game is helped in this way too. 

I also want a player who's willing to experiment a bit. Every major campaign I've ever run has ended up being in experiment in something--an experiment in following a party split to a massive conclusion, experiments in how the game is written, experiments in what the player experience is like--and not every player wants that. I've played with a lot of people who want a traditional experience (and there's nothing wrong with that) who would not enjoy my experiments. We need to be on the same page. Speaking of which . . . 

I need my players to be willing and able to roleplay and lead the game at times. This can be sticky for some players. Not everyone wants to roleplay a story when there's faeries and dragons and magic and adventure to explore and meet and slay. Not everyone wants to (or is able to) lead a scene with improvisation in a way that feels satisfying. I'm asking a high level of performance from my players, and that can be a complicated thing. I don't want anyone to walk away frustrated, so I choose players who I think are up to the challenge of some complicated gaming. 

The results speak for themselves. Of Gods and Dragons is, in my estimation, a work of art within the context of tabletop games. I gave three talented players (two of whom knew my world quite well) free rein to change my world as they pleased. Over the course of the campaign and the three epilogues we did covering 100 years of post-campaign life for Brokk, Aurora, and Lethanin, my players systematically set about improving my homebrew world. They eliminated sources of violence and oppression, they established themselves as forces of good, and they systematically improved life for common people. Those epilogues are collectively about 50 pages of text, and most of it is directly focused on being selfless and heroic. I set out to see what happened when I gave massive control to my players, and they wrote a love letter to my world. I never would have gotten that response--the love from my players and the satisfaction that I did something interesting--with the group that destroyed my Western setting. I needed to pick the right group to get what I was looking for. 

This is, of course, all a spectrum. You're not going to go out and recruit pro gamers you don't know. Tabletop games are games, and the point of games is to have fun--we should be playing with people we like. But we also want to aim for the middle of the Venn diagram on this--people who we like who also fit our style as GMs. That's not a radical thing to ask for, especially when we consider GM satisfaction, which matters. 

At the end of the day, it's all abstract anyway. How you enjoy something in concert with someone else when you're both adding creative ideas to a collective--that's a delicate thing. Creative groups like bands break up over stuff like that all the time. If it doesn't feel right, don't feel obligated to keep doing it. Keep the mantra in mind: this is for fun. This is for fun. Pick yourself a good party, and I promise you'll see it's worth the effort in being selective.

That's all for now. Coming soon: how to design and improvise NPCs and groups of NPCs, what exactly a tabletop game is, and how to balance kindness and antagonism as a GM. Until next time, happy gaming!