Slice of Beef

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.