Category: GM Advice

“Write What You Know”

I’m sure you’ve heard it before – in the context of writer’s block and not knowing what to do, the advice often given on writer’s blogs and somesuch is to “write what you know”; this idea that you should take things you’ve experienced and put them into your work and that makes the creative process easy… This also applies to tabletop roleplaying games! And no – not just writing modules (though I’ll get to that).

Last year, I ran a campaign in Stars Without Number, a sci-fi Old-School Rennaissance system by Kevin Crawford. I wrote a bit about it, I think – it’s a great system, and I highly recommend it for anyone interested in sci-fi (and OSR) to check it out.

But it wasn’t for me. And it’s not because I didn’t like it – I loved it. Kevin Crawford writes good stuff. Go buy the fancy deluxe version right now. The problem was that I don’t actually know shit about sci-fi or even fantasy-based space operas, as it turns out. Running a campaign in a theme I knew very little about (comparatively) was incredibly difficult. I don’t know the tropes (let alone how to possibly subvert them), and I basically just ended up having to peer into the depths of my fantasy knowledge to pull out a generic quest and strap LED lights and chrome on top. Which… kind of is what a space opera is, right? Either way, it was a pain in the ass to prep for, as a lot of my stuff is improvised at the table, and in between sessions I just had to read short sci-fi stories to steal ideas from and it felt like a lot of unnecessary work. I wasn’t a bad game master by any means, but it felt weak.

Fantasy is much easier – I read hundreds of fantasy novels when I was a kid, and even though I do not feel like I know the genre, it’s amazing the amount of stuff and tropes I can pull when creating adventure hooks and ideas for games – just because of what I’ve been exposed to and what I know. I personally probably won’t ever run sci-fi again unless it’s a premade module. I learned my lesson from that. As for writing…

…I did try and write a serious module. I posted about it last month – published under my company, Bovidae Studios. And it was a great project – I’m really pleased with how it came out! Yet, it was still a lot of work when I had to do the serious bits. I took a lot of jokes out of it in one of the final revisions, if you can believe that. I just struggle with writing truly serious content! So I’m taking a bit of a break from my second serious OSE module and writing a comedy one-shot, for April Fools’ day, which also happens to be my birthday (my whole life was a joke, really). It will be PWYW this time (consider it a birthday gift from me), and I’ll probably discount Cult that day too in celebration (in case anyone put it on any wishlists and is hard up for cash). I am not actually very funny, so we’ll see how that goes.

Circling back to the point: I’ve seen neophyte gamemasters ask for advice on how to run games in genres they aren’t familiar with – like if one of their friends wants to play in a Star Wars or a vampire-themed game so they pick up a copy of a system, but they have no interest in it so beg on public forums for someone to quickly explain the basic premise so they can bash something together… and I won’t tell people not to do that. Do what you want – play what’s fun. And do try new things – don’t be too afraid to get out of your comfort zone! Running SWN made me a better game master, and I’m glad I ran it. I try and run a new system at least once a month. But I will say that being familiar with the media that’s influenced what you’re running does absolute wonders. Run what you know.

Or at least watch the Star Wars films first.

On Time

Speaking of my missed session last week, and combined with some other things I have been thinking about, I would like to talk about time. Session pacing, session scheduling, spot-light sharing, in-game calendars: the works. This is sort of my typical ‘patchwork’ style of writing, so it’s a little about a lot of things without any depth. Maybe I’ll move on to writing more interesting, complex, specific articles someday? Probably not. Enjoy this for what it is, instead:

First up, session pacing. I’ve heard, on multiple occasions, that I am a “god of well-paced sessions, I wish I could run games like you”, as well as simultaneously someone who said I “could use a lot of work, it feels like the characters don’t accomplish anything”. These comments come from multiple different players from different backgrounds, all in the same month-ish timespan. So, am I good at pacing or not? The answer, unsurprisingly, comes down to it depends on the table. Both yes and no. Nobody wants to hear this, but I genuinely don’t think there’s a science to it. Maybe an ‘art’ – people have tried, bloggers have written dozens of articles about it, and while there are definitely plenty of tips that you can (and should) follow, like “bring a man with a gun through the door” when things get slow, or alternating high-intensity situations with lower-intensity downtime scenarios, and these things will help you improve your ability to control pacing… your mileage will inevitably vary, no matter what you do. I feel like even if I mastered and put all these skills to work as intended by the authors and game designers, someone, somewhere, is going to play with me and tell me it sucks anyway. Someone will also tell me I am incredible. Perhaps even two people at the same table. Maybe even the same player. My best advice, for learning how to pace sessions, then, is to set up a situation where your table has the level of trust in place that the GM is able to ask for and receive genuine feedback, where they can start tailoring to the specific group and find out what works. This is the actual trick to pacing – whatever’s fun, let the fun parts happen. Get rid of the stuff your group finds boring. Even if the fun stuff isn’t full of meaningful choices, it’s okay to still have all your shopping trips play out if the table finds it fun. Earlier this week, in session four of my Stars Without Number campaign, I spent probably far more time on the dance competition than was necessary, and I could have resolved it in a single roll…. but it was fun!

Certainly, if you were re-publishing the game as it happened into a book, perhaps you would cut out a lot of that content to make it more fun for the readers. Or perhaps if you ran a stream for a live audience, you want to keep things exciting for the majority (that’s a whole different can of worms). But in our case, the only ‘readers’ that need to enjoy the game are the people at your table. After that – you can always consult the advice blogs for your specific situation, but on their own, in a vacuum, it won’t work. That’s the trouble with GMing, there are almost no wrong ways to do it. I’ve had a lot of personal struggles with doing lot of GM theory-crafting and then when I put it to the table it turns into a mess. That’s a whole other subject, but yeah. Relax. My advice is to just run the game how you think feels best in play, if you find yourself spending too much time on one thing and not enough on another, check in with your players, and then try using different skills to speed it up or to slow it down. You’re always relearning everything with every new table you put together.

Putting those tables together is a whole different beast, though. You’ve heard it countless times: the greatest enemy in tabletop games is real-life scheduling. Players get married and need to take a month off for the wedding, suddenly have kids and need to work around their bed times, call in sick and can’t make it one week, or even end up leaving the table permanently for all kinds of reasons. I’ve had my heart broken several times over by a Numenera game last year that just didn’t work out – people weren’t communicating, we had different ideas on how often to play – things had changed over the past three years. I was left frustrated and upset and I don’t think there’s anything that I could have done to make it better.

Honestly, the best thing I can say here is to state your commitments, find people who are open and honest about their scheduling, communicate often, keep the overall game relatively short (i.e. only 10 weeks versus expected three years), and run regardless of attendance (one on one sessions can still be fun!). Or run an Open Table for as long as you feel like it. There’s not much to say, except it’s frustrating. The long-term things, the multi-year epics… those only complete with luck, a lot of player turnover, or a lot of money. With a lot of vetting practices (maybe I’ll do another post on how I acquire players) and good communication abilities, you absolutely can get a group that plays together and stays together, though, so don’t give up!

All these different players you do manage to get into the same timeslot, though, have other problems: Returning to the ‘fun’ talk, what happens when one player loves shopping trips and another finds it incredibly boring? The easy answer is ‘play with people who all find the same things fun’ and there’s no problem, and there are definitely some aspects of gaming that you cannot compromise on, but the likelihood of actually finding people who all love the exact same things and can bring enough fresh perspective to make the narrative interesting is probably somewhere in the 0.000000000001% range. As much as I love telling people to kick truly uncooperative players, and screaming bankuei’s everlasting great advice that you should be meeting at the game, there are always going to be situations where you have to acquiesce to the other person’s wants. So, the solution is ‘sharing the spotlight’. Make sure, at the end of the day, that most people are having fun, and get as much of a share of the ‘spotlight’ on their fun parts as they want.

Notice how I didn’t say ‘equal’ share. I could almost post an image of that ‘standing-on-boxes’ equity picture; I won’t but it’s the same idea – make sure everybody is having fun the way they want. Usually, it’s that you need to make sure everyone, including the GM, has roughly the same amount of speaking time – however, there are exceptions, such as one of my SWN players who deeply prefers to ‘spectate’ and only have small portions of personal roleplay per session. I have talked to him about this on multiple occasions; talked to that table about this, and everybody is on board with the situation of him mostly listening and putting forward his opinion when it matters. It’s all down to your table and what works for everyone, and listening to your players and adjusting as you go.

I left a game of Burning Wheel recently for this exact issue: it wasn’t the Game Master’s fault, per se (though I think I would have appreciated a more compromising response to my feedback), but it definitely wasn’t the right fit for me. We typically spent multiple hours of session time on a single player, with the expectation that ‘eventually everyone will get a solo session’ of sorts. This didn’t sit right for me, not because it’s terrible game mastery, but because it wasn’t what I found fun. I didn’t want to essentially spectate on a podcast for three hours, and I also didn’t want to ever end up in the situation where I had to narrate my own PC for two hours straight. Perish the thought. I don’t like being the main character, and though I absolutely want good sections of focus – I require a balance, and that table just didn’t have that. I spoke about it and the GM’s decision was final – this is how we’re running it. Back to bankuei – they decided to play a specific “game – for this specific rpg, this specific campaign you’ll be playing, and this particular group of people” and either the expectations earlier had some crossed wires, or I agreed to it and decided it wasn’t what I wanted. I’m not sure, but they’re having fun, and that’s what matters.

So, however you finangle your spotlight to your group, the point is keeping an eye on the clock and making sure you’re actually meeting the expectations of everyone. This shouldn’t be just the GM’s job, but the majority of the responsibility does fall on them to keep an eye on things, and it can be very easy to lose track of time if you get caught up in something the GM personally finds fun (see: my dance competition – I made sure to do a scene swap midway through to give the other players something to do that wasn’t just playing a dance minigame). However this works for you – whether that’s setting actual timers, or just making sure you have a very visible clock in your direct view, doesn’t matter, but you do need to be mindful. That’s far more important than overall pacing – making sure everyone is getting their fair share of what they want out of the game.

On a final note, despite me personally being fine with what happened in my Burning Wheel situation, I do want to point out that generally this really should be a ‘per session’ or ‘per two sessions’ basis. No one should be left out of a game’s fun for an entire session – if such a situation were to need to occur, just run a solo session or smaller group for the players it matters for and maybe give players a short summary to read. Offer them the choice to listen in or not. As mentioned when complaining about scheduling – we only have so much time in our lives. We want to spend it on things that matter, and every three to four hours of gameplay should be fun for the entire table. That is, if a particular player hates combat, it’s okay to have an hour of combat they slog through – but if the whole session is going to be four hours of combat, maybe telling that player to skip that week is better than having them there and suffering. Or, you know, don’t make sessions that are going to be four hours of combat if you know one person hates it.

Time in games is wiggly. For every real-life week, an hour could pass in the game world. Or It could be four months of content (see pacing, earlier). I actually had this article in my drafts when Adventure Forecasts by PCD was published (great article, go read it) and felt I should also add in a note about it, so here it is (if a bit awkwardly placed, it still fits the theme of the post). I’m not a very talented OSR blogger in particular, so I don’t think I have many important personal opinions to say, but here are my opinions on the above:

A living game world is a lot of work. A game where everything you do is realistic and makes sense is a lot of work. Even just writing a calendar of events is a lot of work. I can barely put my own life’s calendar together. The dream of pre-planning all these potential events is something I both want to strive towards, think this article is 100% right in recommending, and something I know is ridiculous for the average layman GM try to achieve. Maybe a professional who only goes GMing as a full-time gig could have the time and resources to spend on it. I think using the technique of having pre-scheduled, missable events in smaller doses throughout the campaign to add verisimilitude, while also keeping ‘static’ events that happen whenever the players interact with them, is a good mix that will keep your mind sane. A GM’s time in real life is just as important as time in the game itself. Don’t go burning yourself out writing potential hooks for every non-player character’s birthday in the game, or countless planet’s worth of holidays. Only do this if you genuinely have fun writing such things.

Time is the only thing we can’t get back in our lives. Spend it on things that create fun.


Actually, why don’t I like D&D5e?

Somewhat related to the last post, Leaving D&D5e, I should probably specify why I don’t like the system. I hadn’t actually grokked the reality of my feelings until earlier this morning, where I managed to write something in a conversation that I think was incredibly thoughtful and truly struck a chord as to answering why I don’t like the system, beyond a simple “it doesn’t do what I want out of a game” or “the rules are broken”, and even reflects on why I don’t like FATE Core, my problems with my home system of Numenera, and why my review of Ryuutama was so lukewarm!

Someone asked, a bit tongue-in-cheek, while we were discussing alternative systems, well “which [system] is the objective best”? The answer, of course, is that there is no such thing, and my friend replied as such – “there’s no objectively best system because they all answer different questions”. Therefore, then… The problems with systems come in when they fail to answer the questions they say they want to answer. This is where you get gripes with D&D5e, Shadowrun, etc. – most of my disliked systems are not disliked for their mechanics specifically, but because the mechanics and goals of the system seem to have failed to connect. Ryuutama had a weird amount of lethality to it for something that was thematically Ghilbi-esque, Numenera‘s combat and initiative system makes no sense for the logic-based rulings over rules guidelines, and FATE Core (review incoming)’s problem is that none of the mechanics actually work together to create something cohesive that answers goals. You hear time and time again from people who have played Shadowrun that they “love Shadowrun, hate the system” because the mechanics are just not conducive to the theme.

Recently I played Scum & Villainy, a “FitD” system that probably could merit its own review post, but I’ll just bust a quick one out here: I loved it. It did exactly what it was meant to do and the mechanics and the gameplay went perfectly hand in hand with the theme of the game we were playing (‘idiot assholes do shady jobs in space’). But I actually do not often care for PbtA-built systems, which is where FitD was born out of – but I liked this because it worked well. I love Numenera and nearly loathe Cypher because the system caters to Numenera‘s settings and goals and disconnecting the cyphers from that setting makes Cypher, well, not as impactful. It doesn’t feel good as a universal system.

What questions is D&D5e trying to answer? What are the goals of the system? One could say that it is in the name, ‘Dungeons’ and ‘Dragons’, but plenty of other bloggers have gone into the problems of the game no longer teaching people how to play or run dungeons, and how the mechanics of attrition seem to be fading away in favour of more narrative approaches. I think in order to become a better system in future iterations, the designers really need to lean into that more and change the rules to accomplish the goals that the designers actually want to achieve. But, they probably won’t, because D&D5e makes a lot of money as is… and that is why I think people should get away from 5e, not because it’s just, completely bad, or wrong, but because it doesn’t do what it’s supposed to be doing, and you have so many options that actually do a) what “D&D” is supposed to be and/or b) what you want to do in a game.

Leaving D&D5e

Woof, this title’s a bit of a misnomer, but it gets the idea across. This is a bit of a spicy one. As an early caveat, if you like D&D5e, keep playing it, and don’t tell me why it’s great. This blog post isn’t for you.

The first game system I ever played was Numenera, and I played it for about 2 years before moving on to trying other systems. I’d call myself fortunate, in a way, that my introduction to the hobby wasn’t Dungeons & Dragons, but for the most part, a lot of people’s first game system is going to be Dungeons and Dragons 5e (the current edition as of this writing). Dungeons & Dragons is arguably the very first TTRPG series to come out of wargames, and it makes sense why it has continued to be a mainstay in the tabletop community – it has clout. More recently, Podcasts and shows like Critical Role or Stranger Things have really brought a lot of new people to the hobby, and if you look on any ‘Looking for Group’ style community, such as on roll20, a huge majority of the people looking for games are going to be playing or running D&D 5e.

And it makes sense – D&D was always fairly easy to grok the premise of: everybody knows now what ‘medieval fantasy’ is. You have dragons, heroes, elves, wizards and all that stuff – you don’t need to explain to your grandma what a dragon is. She knows. While there is a lot of different worldbuilding in 5e with the Forgotten Realms setting, a lot of it is still on that Lord of the Rings-esque premise, and it’s easy to know what’s going on. Genres like sci-fi are also easy to grok, but it’s still a “nerdy” niche that a lot of people are going to be unfamiliar with past a certain point. Medieval fantasy is easy. Numenera combines the two into something truly strange – and getting people into understanding the setting takes effort, an effort a lot of people aren’t necessarily going to want to look into before starting a game – sure, (though I will say it wasn’t required of me in my introduction).

However, the mechanical rules of the game are a different beast. If people say that D&D5e is “easy to pick up and learn”, they may be referring to the above setting grok, but the game itself is hard to figure out. It’s not beginner-friendly. The game has baggage, rules that don’t make sense, misprints, overcomplicated sections that everyone has trouble with (grappling, action economy), and when someone comes to me and says “5e is great, it’s so easy to get new people to play it” I think those people are wrong. And normally, I’d say to each their own, but tabletop games are such a wonderful hobby, and if someone tries running D&D as a new Dungeon Master, and they find it hard, they’re going to think that any other game system is just as difficult to get into, and they’ll either quit the hobby altogether, or continue to try and desperately pull the things they want out of the hobby out of an unsuitable system for their needs and spend their days feeling frustrated.

D&D5e is popular for a reason. If you don’t know anyone else interested in TTRPGs, it’s a great way to find new players and friends to play with. I’ve run it for an Open Table before just because I wanted that cast of rotating weekly players (though now I might run Moldvay’s D&d instead). But it’s not my go-to for tabletop gaming, and I don’t think it’s helpful to encourage everyone to start with D&D 5e, or to tell them that it’s the ‘easiest to get into’, because it sets up that new GM for failure if they meet any sort of resistance (which in D&D 5e’s case, could be very often). There are so many different game systems out there that are so easy to get into – literally you can pick up and finish Honey Heist as if it were a board game in less than an hour or two, and get the idea of what a tabletop game is supposed to feel like. It sets the wrong kind of precedent for the TTRPG hobby as a whole, that tabletop games are a lot of work and heavy-duty commitment; so many games don’t have near as many rules as D&D 5e does or require that 4-hour-one-a-week-for-two-years commitment.

I hear time and time again from people who love D&D5e who say that trying a new system sounds hard. They say that it’s hard because they look back at all the work they’ve put into learning to play 5e (or 4e, or 3.5e, even) and think they have to put all that work in again. It’s not fair to say ‘most people don’t have the time to invest in a new system’ because often the systems being recommended actually have a very low cost of investment to start. To quote a friend, “there are some vicious cycles going on in this space too, where the thing is popular, so people play it, and because people play it, it becomes popular” and I think that discouraging anyone, especially yourself, from trying other systems under the premise that it’s ‘too much work’, or that D&D’s popularity and rapport are more important than anything mechanical, doesn’t help break that cycle, is setting a poor standard with D&D 5e, and it doesn’t help the hobby grow.

Game Mechanics as a Neutral Space

(AKA why I don’t love freeform roleplay). This is just a short thought from some conversations I was having earlier, so it isn’t all that fleshed out:

I like OSR (‘Old School Renaissance’) games. One of the main tenants of OSR games is ‘rulings over rules’ and there’s a focus on the GM as an impartial arbiter of decisions: while there are some rules, what is more important is focusing on good, consistent adjudicating based on player-skill.

However, rulings over rules could be a bit of a problem when it comes to dealing with people who ‘powergame’ (eugh, terminology nonsense again), defined here as folks whose primary source of fun is making the most powerful character as possible. Sometimes, these powergamers push rules, however – twisting things with vague wording or missing notes on contraindications to fuel their power fantasy. People pushing systems really sets off warning bells for me because it tells me up-front the kind of game they wanna play (very gamey), which is not the kind of game I want to play. It’s okay if some people like that, but it is not for me, and as a GM who operates under very rulings and logic/fairness rather than actual rules those players really wouldn’t work well at my table. They’ll just thrash about at rules that aren’t there… with no true constraints they feel like they can do anything, and the only thing stopping them is me, as the GM, and things start to look adversarial.

To this end, I find rules can be good tools, because they contain certain types of friction to in-game only: if someone wants to do x, the rules are telling them how far they can go, rather than me telling them how. If they have a problem, they can dislike the rules, but if it’s rulings, that dislike turns to disliking me, and my adjudications instead. This is why I don’t like totally rules-less systems: I don’t like having everything on me. I want some sort of barrier between my feelings and the players’ feelings in the form of game mechanics to reduce friction. I like something that tempers my own biases I bring to the table. Game mechanics end up being a neutral space – while most friction can be ironed out with communication, having something unbiased and in some form of rigidity is good for creativity as well as avoiding needing to deal with a lot of confrontation and heavier communication.

Part of why I like Numenera so much is because it directly addresses that in the corebook: “if a player has a problem with the rules not saying they can’t do something and asks you to show them where they’re wrong, point them here: they’re wrong” (paraphrased from memory, a little). It allowed flexibility while also providing a written constraint and advocated for me as the GM and my decisions. I always had a +1 to my justification, so to speak (though this didn’t help in tempering my own biases – there were other rules for that).

Of course, having someone butting heads over rules, rulings, and just generally shitting (or in my cat’s case – sitting) all over the game table is a whole other issue in general (and I just don’t play with those people to begin with), but this is useful food for thought and examining why I like having some rules if I ever get into a situation where I misjudged someone, am invited to a game or running at a convention where I don’t get to pick the other players, or if one-off miscommunication issues on rulings ever cropped up.

‘Backstory’s Back, All Right!’ – On Good Character Backstories

I wrote yesterday on the GM complaints I’ve seen regarding backstories. Something tangential I hadn’t really touched on is what makes a good backstory for tabletop play, and where too much really is too much. “Doesn’t this contradict what you said earlier about long backstories being acceptable?” – well, no, because my focus in that article was that if somebody writes you 30 pages you shouldn’t complain about it, not that a 30-page backstory is always going to be good or particularly useful. While I encourage fiction writing of backstories, in terms of efficiency and providing something to your GM, the more light bullet-point method of DailyDice‘s very reasonable ‘don’t write stories, focus on information‘ is definitely a lot better for use as a toolkit, and it’s something I usually include when writing my characters.

However… what I don’t like about that article is the point on how including certain more detailed information in a character’s backstory becomes “a spot of bother for the GM, who had a fantasy epic to tell”. I feel like this is saying ‘the GM’s story they’re writing is important, but the players’ is not’. Both of these things, the players’ story and the GMs story, can co-exist (I would even argue that they’re the same thing) – the important thing is you communicate and work on these things together. there’s no reason you couldn’t include those aspects in the story you’re experiencing together. You can write a whole bunch of really fun anecdotes and information so long as you’re communicating it and I don’t think it is going to ruin the overall narrative of the game – especially if that game is one driven by character backstories and created collaboratively.

I honestly propose that you do both things – provide the informative toolkit version and then let your creative mind fly with whatever nonsense you want to come up with. This also solves the GM-doesn’t-have-time-to-read-this problem of having a quick referencable summary of the background. It also doesn’t matter if you’re a good writer or not. Do long backstories ‘cage’ your character? Maybe, there’s some merit in the fact you can write yourself into a corner here and there, but the good thing about writing your own fiction throughout play is that it’s fiction, and can always be changed. So long as you keep the work malleable I think it’s fine to write a prequel novel you can then add and subtract from until their story is over. Be open to changes, have players and GMs work together to refine the details, and have fun with it.

I think Rich, the author of that DailyDice article, agrees with me, based on his remark of “if you enjoy writing backstories, do it more“, but I do wish he had included it in the article formally instead of as a side anecdote! There is an odd angle of separation between the two methods; where I think outright promoting both of them would be better.

99 Problems But A Backstory Ain’t One

There are two complaints I hear often in my GMing circles:

“My players refuse to send me any backstory, how do I get them to be more invested?!”

vs.

“Gods, my player wrote me 32 pages of backstory, what is the point of that, the story hasn’t even happened yet, I’m not reading that!! They’re level 1!!“

Okay, so, I have a lot to say on both of these comments, and as usual, this is probably just nonsense rambling, but I loathe people who say both of these sentences. You’re looking for a unicorn-specific level of investment from players and that’s ridiculous.

First of all, let me say up-front that I am excluding talking about people who suffer from extreme protagonist syndrome and make the game un-fun for other people at the table. Those people are a problem no matter how long of a backstory they write, and they aren’t who I’m talking about today. I’m talking about at least half-decent players and the differences in their level of investment and creative freedoms.

So, let’s talk about the first sentence because it’s pretty straightforward – the problem of players not being invested enough to give the GM any sort of information on who their character is. On the one hand, some people like to get a feel for their characters in play before they start really thinking about them. I get that – Tolfos, my first PC I ran with for over three years, didn’t have any backstory until about a year in. Mostly, I wasn’t sure what I was doing or that I even needed it. But in that case, I still wrote a backstory – it just came later! While I’m personally not a fan of players who do that method, I think it’s perfectly valid. There are also some games (especially stuff like MÖRK BORG) by their very nature don’t really need backstories (because your characters will probably die 30 times a session, and there’s hardly any time or reason to write more than a sentence.). So we have some pretty valid reasons why it’s okay to not write a backstory immediately. That does leave the problem of players who never write any backstory though – the ones who just don’t care to write one.

As bankuei writes on trying to make people do things: “‘How do I make them want what I want? How do I change who they are?’ There’s no answer to that. It’s an unsolvable problem”. If someone doesn’t want to write a backstory it’s because they don’t want to write one. If you want to play with people who write backstories, then you have to find people who like writing backstories. The kinds of stories I want to explore require players who want to write backstories, and I won’t play with people who don’t, but I still won’t chastise anyone for not being interested in writing one. Put the backstory requirement up-front in your game ad and communicate your needs.

So, you’ve found people who want to write backstories, at the minimum length required for your games to run. But, oh no, some of these people are too invested in their backstories! It’s time for the complaints against 32-page writers (I admittedly fall into this category):

First, there’s the matter of strain on the GM. On the one hand, it’s true that as a GM you don’t necessarily have a lot of time, and you already put in a disproportionate amount of work. I can understand not wanting to read [insert however many pages is too long for you] of backstory that your players have written. However, I don’t think this is a good excuse to complain about people who write these lengthy backstories. I think if you don’t have time to read backstories, that is where you tell your players up-front that you just don’t have time to read more than [x] pages and set limits for your table on how much material they can provide you. Set expectations and boundaries – if you let it be a free-for-all and then complain that someone sent you a novel I feel like that isn’t the fault of the person who wrote the novel, it’s another fault in communication.

Alternatively, one could take that disproportionate amount of work you put into the campaign as a GM and realise that for the players who want to put in extra work, or just as much, the only real space they have to exercise that passion is in their character’s backstory. These players care enough about their characters that they have fun putting extra work in. I see that as a very good sign. They’re appreciating your work, aren’t they? Appreciate their work back!

One of the other biggest complaints I see is “this character is only level one – he shouldn’t have any backstory!”. My opinion on that is if you’re a dedicated roleplayer, and your character is an adult, he’s lived a long life already, even if he’s only level one! I just turned 29 on the launch of this blog, and looking back at my life now, well, while I haven’t slain any dragons, I do have a wealth of life experiences I pull from that have shaped who I am today. Those experiences are important in shaping a person. No one exists in a vacuum. I wrote pages upon pages of backstory for a character once (though I didn’t send it all to my GM, it was just for me) and it was all just exploring relationships with others and figuring out his personal values and bonds. On that note, however, there is the problem of people including things like dragon slaying and superheroic feats: there’s a bit of a valid complaint in “he can’t have fought off a dragon! That makes no sense at level one!”. While it’s true that there is a bit of tonal dissonance there and a lack of realism… I think that just comes down to not everyone being particularly good at writing a backstory. But, as that can be fixed with gentle constructive criticism, I don’t think that matters too much either:

I am an artist – all of the art you see here on my blog posts was done by me (a lot of that is so I don’t have to worry about crediting anyone) and I frequent a lot of art and writing and creative communities. And you know what, some of the people I hang out with are, objectively, not ‘professional’ artists. They’re not very professional writers. But you know why they aren’t? Because they’re new, because they haven’t practised for years, or because they’re like thirteen years old (which is usually inclusive of both the previous two categories)! Do I run around in my online communities and tell these artists that their art is terrible? No, of course not – I fucking look at their art and give them a genuine compliment for the good bits I see and encourage them to keep going, because I love seeing people create stuff and put effort into things and I don’t want to discourage that flame of creativity. They will get better in time. I am a fan of their work.

In that same vein, I am also a fan of my players. I want to be a fan of their characters, too. Writing a good backstory is an art – both in terms of the quality of the writing and the efficiency of it. Honestly? I’d much rather support my players’ excitement in whatever way I can – even if that means reading their terrible unpublished Mary Sue novel.

Define Your Terms

After having been involved more deeply in the hobby over the last year, I’ve been exposed to a lot of different ideas. From blogs like The Alexandrian to The Angry GM, or big companies like Monte Cook Games, there are a lot of game masters in the hobby that put their ideas out on the internet on how to run your best games. I’d like to collate some of their ideas, as well as what I’ve personally been exposed to in the hobby, into what I think I’ve realised is the most important thing about tabletop: healthy and honest communication. You need to spend a lot of time talking to each other.

“But Beef, my friends would rather play the game with me than waste time talking about things! We barely have any time to play!”

Well, surprise: you can’t play the game without talking about things. People might disagree with me on this, but those are always the same people who come to me with ‘problem players’ that are ruining their fun.  You aren’t wasting time by talking about things, you’re setting up the fun – just as how you would be far less frustrated by first reading the instruction manual before building a particularly complicated bit of IKEA furniture.

That said, it is a fair point that one does not want to spend hours of their dedicated playtime talking about things (especially if you are rather limited by other priorities). What we want to do, then, is simplify the process of communication so it can be done quickly and effectively and ensure everyone is on the same page without having eight hours of conversation for one hour of actual play.

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Bankuei talks about misconceptions in ‘the roots of the big problem’, the focus of the post was how a lot of game rules, in D&D particularly, aren’t written, and how everyone is playing a different game under the same name. And, in the follow up ‘a way out’ article, Bankuei discusses how getting onto the same page in what game we’re playing is how you solve that issue. I’d recommend reading them for a bit more context so that I won’t repeat things that aren’t my words here. However… while these issues are part of the communication problem, I am surprised that this article wasn’t taken any further – into specific terminology and definitions used in tabletop roleplaying games.

Players always seem to not know what they want in games – if you ask them outright, you either get a vague idea like ‘lots of roleplay’, or specific examples of situations and then we go and include those things in our games as game masters and find those same players just aren’t enjoying it. I’d argue that while part of it is just limited experience (maybe they thought they wanted to roleplay, but actually didn’t like it when they experienced it), or unintentional emotional dishonesty as discussed in Bankuei’s article here, the problem may actually just be us perceiving them not knowing what they want because they don’t use definitions, they used terminology, and the people involved in the conversation are using different definitions for the same terminology. For instance, I used ‘lots of roleplay’ as an example, but what does ‘roleplay’ even mean? Playing a character, maybe? But how do you play that character?

You see this across experienced GMs as well. Bankuei uses terminology instead of definitions throughout their articles and defines ‘narrativsm’ in a way that implies that the characters of the game are the focus, but if you look at a lot of ‘narrative-driven’ bloggers, you find that those are more often than not focused on a central plot thread and story put forward by the GM (characters making choices in it is important, but the characters’ stories still aren’t the focus as compared to the ‘main’ story). Matthew Colville talks about different kinds of players (and the problems with categorising them), but if you compare that to the Angry GM’s ‘different types of fun’ based on this psychology article, from which he changed the definitions of the terms to suit his needs, things start to get confusing because the categories begin to not only overlap, but they also contradict each other. Not only that, but Angry is clearly fixated on defining in more detail the type of fun he particularly enjoys (which is expected, and not a bad thing), and the other definitions end up lacking a lot of verisimilitudes. You can take all these terms and categories in isolation and they work, and the definitions are included, but as soon as you start talking to someone who has seen Colville’s video but has not read Angry GM’s article, and you have read the article but not seen the video, you start to run into problems where you think you are talking about the same things but you’re not. And this becomes a problem in communication where you start to debate definitions.

A few weeks ago, I had a conversation with a colleague about RAW (‘rules as written’) and RAI (‘rules as intended’) in games. They argued that RAW is not necessarily about reading it literally but thinking about the intended meaning based on an understanding of common terminology. RAI was more about ‘abstract’ intentions for rules for fairness, rather than actual interpretations of words. For example, in D&D 5e, the feat “crossbow expert” is often applied to any ranged weapon RAW,  because it doesn’t say “with a crossbow” on that point. However, the name of the feats is ‘crossbow expert’, which implies RAW, the mechanics are built for use with a crossbow, and not all ranged weapons, even though it does not explicitly state “with a crossbow” in the description of the feat. They went on to say that “RAW doesn’t mean only take what’s only explicitly written nor does it mean to try to dissect things as if you’re a college writing professor”.  Other GMs, however, would argue that being pedantic about RAW is the point – that crossbow expert not including crossbow means that ‘as written’ you are free to apply it to any ranged weapon. So, who is correct? How do we read RAW or RAI? Are Rules as Intended actually about abstract intention or anything beyond pedantic literal readings?

It doesn’t fucking matter.

Dealing with absolutes is meaningless. That whole paragraph was a waste! Debating definitions not only takes up a lot of time, but it also takes away from the point of the conversation. People generally don’t want to be corrected on things, even if they’re wrong, and being right starts to become the focus of the conversation instead of solving the problem initially posed. Should we be debating what RAW/RAI means, or should the GM just decide how we’re going to rule the feat in play going forward and tell people that? Does it really matter who has the ‘correct’ definition of ‘roleplay’, or does it matter that you want to find out if you and another player want the same things out of the game? The problems never get solved and people decide that they don’t want to waste time talking about them. 

Solution: Speak in definitions, not terminology.

Language is contextual and situational. Especially English, which I’m writing in now (where homophones and homonyms abound)! By getting rid of terminology altogether, you stop making assumptions about something based on what might not be true for the other person, and start hearing what they mean and want when they hear those terms. Instead of asking someone ‘do you prefer roleplay or combat more?’ ask them ‘how do you use your character sheet in a game? What are the important parts of it for you?’ to get a better idea of where they’re coming from. Generally, when recruiting players for my games, I’ve turned away from those ‘What do you want out of a game?’ or ‘Do you prefer exploration, roleplay, or combat’ sort of political meme chart questions. It is a lot more work for me, but I find that interviewing people one on one once I get their applications and having a conversation about what they’ve enjoyed in games or hearing about their characters tells me far more and is a lot more accurate than me polling them to put their feelings into categories. Not only that, but opening this dialogue up from the beginning allows me to build much better camaraderie with people I hope to be playing with, and sets the stage for future open communication.

I could write a lot about what you do once you have figured out what people want, and we can loop into Bankuei’s point about folks not being able to force anyone to want the same things, but I think that’s best saved for another post altogether (and probably done enough by other GMs who have said it better than I). The point is, however, that using descriptive language instead of terminology is going to save you a lot of time when telling people what you want and them understanding what you want.

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Addendum: All said and done, some people might still want to use terminology. To that end, I am creating a handy dandy dictionary of common tabletop terms and the most common definitions I’ve seen across various communities. You might define these terms differently (see the entire article above, and I welcome feedback or clarification or additional terms)… but perhaps this might be a useful ‘come together’ standardisation point when discussing tabletops in the future (I’ll post the link here eventually and continue adding to it as I go). This is also a fairly incomplete thought, I feel, so I’ll probably write more about it later.