It’s time for another installment of Ask Angry. That’s where I answer a few questions people have e-mailed me. After belittling them for being too wordy, including too much detail, or not telling me clearly and explicitly what to call them.

Want me to belittle you? E-mail ask.angry@angry.games.

I know I promised to make this a weekly short column and I still mean to do that. But things just haven’t worked out that way and I’ve built up quite a backlog of questions.

And for you Angry supporters who prefer to listen to me read these aloud as Proofreadalouds, I’m sorry but there isn’t one for this feature. Unfortunately, The Tiny GM brought a plague on our house. I have an irritated throat and a weak voice and just can’t record.

But enough introductions, let’s get this party started…

Amaeo asks…

My latest game recently fell apart because the players decided that they didn’t care for the style of game I was running even though everyone had agreed to this style during our session 0. I feel like the way I’ve run the game has been in line with what was agreed on in our session 0. In situations like this, how does a GM honestly assess whether they’ve lost sight of the original intent of the game or if there’s simply a mismatch of preferences?

Time for some harsh truths and tough love. Sorry kid. This is something every creator has to deal with. Doesn’t matter if you’re a GM or a YouTuber or a brilliant GMing advice columnist or a head chef or whatever. Sometimes, what you create just doesn’t work for the people you created it for. Even though you told them exactly what to expect and you gave them exactly what you promised.

Why?

First, there’s a huge difference between predicting what you’ll like and actually liking what you experience. People suck at guessing what they’re going to like when it’s in front of them. See, enjoyment is subjective and emotional. Predicting enjoyment is rational and cognitive. And the parts of your brain that handle those two things run on completely different software. I s$&% you not.

That’s just the way it is. For everyone. Everyone’s experienced this s$&%. Did you ever order something in a restaurant that sounded good and looked good and contained nothing but ingredients you loved and yet, when you took that first bite, it was crap? Did you ever sit down to watch a movie with a great trailer and great reviews in a genre you love and, twenty minutes in, find yourself hating it? Every time you choose what to consume, half your brain is guessing how the other half is going to feel about it. And there’s always a risk you’ll get it wrong.

And everyone who provides the s$&% others consume risks getting kicked in the balls by that harsh truth.

At least you’ve got some brains in your head. Because you seem to grudgingly admit that it might be your fault. Even though you’re damned sure you’re giving your players what you promised them, you admit that maybe you’re not. Which is good. Because that’s also a risk every creative provider of entertainment takes. There’s always the risk that you won’t manage to get your vision out there right. That you might stray or drift. Or that you can’t pull it off. Or that maybe your vision just isn’t what you hoped it would be. Like, you got everything right, but the created thing just isn’t as good as you imagined it would be.

It’s the same s$&%.

You’re human. Your players are too. We all get f$&%ed up by the fact that what we enjoy and what we predict we’ll enjoy are determined by two different, independent brain parts. When you create something for someone — multiple someones — all those risks pile up. They compound. You predict what kind of experience you’ll create, but you might get it wrong. They predict they’ll like it, but they might get that wrong. So s$&% just doesn’t always come together.

It doesn’t matter who got what wrong. There’s really no way to know. Usually, it’s a little bit of everything. Especially given that games are interactive systems that evolve through play. So when stuff starts going subjectively off the rails, you and your players tend to respond unconsciously, tweaking and changing the experience. Which throws things more off the rails. A few months on, things don’t feel right and no one knows quite why. And there’s no way to know why.

And given your question, it sounds like you want me to reassure you that this isn’t your fault. You want to know you did exactly what you promised and it’s the stupid players’ faults for not liking it. That’s perfectly human. To want to know that the thing you invested time, energy, and creation into came out right and it’s the audience that got it wrong.

But that’s a fool’s errand. Because none of this s$&% is anyone’s fault. It’s just how people work. And there’s no way to know where things went awry anyway. You have to accept that if you want to create entertainment for people to consume. Sometimes, people won’t like what you create, even if you created exactly what you promised and they promised to like it when you did.

Here’s the problem: you’ve got a game people don’t want to play anymore. Which means it’s time for a change. Maybe you can salvage the game and make some small changes, but it’s probably not worth trying unless the dissatisfaction is very small to begin with. And it doesn’t sound small.

I hate saying that. I know it’s hard to throw something away that you’ve built and I know it’s hard work to start over. That’s just a sucky part of running games.

I know you want to convince yourself that if you can just figure out who got what wrong, you can fix things. And avoid this problem in the future. Or avoid the trial-and-error you need to determine whether there’s a systematic problem that means you and your players can’t enjoy the same kinds of games. You can’t.

I know you won’t believe me. I know people are going to argue. You can’t.

The only way to really figure this s$&% out is to keep trying different things until you reach the point where you can look in the mirror and comfortably say, “nothing I’m doing is making these people happy; maybe I’m not the GM who can make them happy.”

The problem is trying to solve emotional, subjective problems — like the enjoyment of recreational activities — with logic and reason. Unless you’ve got a group of superbly introspective expert communicators, talking it out is going to send you down the garden path. And you don’t. No GM does. Human beings are terrible at introspection and communication. Especially those who think they’re not.

I’m not saying there’s no point in talking this s$&% out. By all means, try. But drop the belief that you gave the players what you promised and they broke their word by not enjoying it. That way, you can shut up and listen to your players and believe what they say about how they’re feeling. And then you can maybe figure out why they’re feeling the way they are. Because you can’t trust them to know anymore more than you can trust you to know.

Welcome to the human experience.

Camille asks…

Blah blah blah extra useless explanation blah blah blah wobbledy gobbledy yaddah yaddah yaddah blah blah blah… how do you handle the journey back from the dungeon? The players’ resources are usually depleted when they’ve finished the adventure and once they overcome the climax of the adventure, won’t the journey back ruin the pacing?… blah blah blahdy f$&%ing blah.

Excellent question, Camille! I’m glad you didn’t bury it in a bunch of useless explanations because I might have just deleted it the second I saw it.

You’re right: the journey back from the adventure is kind of tricky. For the reasons you briefly and concisely cited. From a gameplay perspective, if the homeward journey presents a challenge, the players have got to hold back enough reasons to survive it. And, from a narrative perspective, anything that comes after the climax is — by definition — anticlimax.

First, let me say the gameplay s$&% doesn’t bother me. Getting back alive is part of the challenge. If the party doesn’t bring enough food to make the trek home, or they’re so trashed they can’t survive the trip, they lose. That’s on them. It ain’t like they didn’t know they’d have to get home. And the wilderness doesn’t become less dangerous just because you’re heading in the other direction. So I don’t make any special concessions for that s$%&. No dungeon shops that offer a chance to restock. Nothing like that. Bring enough supplies to make the trek back or turn back before you run out.

For the same reasons, I don’t ignore things like the possibility of getting lost or mired in bad weather on the return trip. So, no, handwaving it ain’t the right approach.

That narrative issue? Well, it actually is an issue. The return journey’s just not as exciting as the adventure itself. It’s not even as exciting as the journey out. And you definitely don’t want to bog the game down too much between the climax and resolution. But you also don’t want the players breathing easy once they won, ignoring the chance the return journey could go tits up.

The thing GMs forget is this: narrative structure is important, but it ain’t all important. It’s just one part of the whole RPG thing. Remember that. If you’re an author or a screenwriter, then you can be all narrative structure über alles. Though, these days, you can sell a script without knowing the difference between a pacing curve and your own a$&, so whatever.

In RPGs, too much narrative structure erodes the feeling that the game’s world is an actual world. Worlds are messy and chaotic. They don’t always operate on narrative causality. And stories in RPGs aren’t neat, clean, prewritten things. They’re emergent. Systematic. Holistic. It’s important that s$&% happens because s$%& should happen. Even if it’s not the best dramatic choice.

You can minimize things without handwaving them. And that’s what I do. When the party’s heading home, I’m much more like to veto random encounters and complications. Or just skip them. Not all the time. And not every one. But certainly a lot. If it’s a long trek and the dice keep trying to throw encounters, I’ll accept that. But if it’s a short trip and I roll a random complication, I’m likely to skip it.

I also narrate s$&% more briefly on the way home than I do on the way out. On the way out, I tend to narrate on a day-by-day basis with lots of flavor text. I tend to narrate several days at once on the way home. Just to get it over faster.

And when s$&% comes up on the trip home — random encounters and complications — I lean into s$&% that resolves side plots, that illustrates the consequences of the finished adventure, or that foreshadows events to come.

Point is, I do rush the trip home narratively. And I minimize the random s$&%, but I don’t eliminate it completely. And I don’t do the players any favors. If they don’t have the supplies they need — or they get lost — I slow the action right down and deal with it like any other challenge.

That said, I don’t do any of that s$&% explicitly. I just handle it. Behind the screen. I don’t know if my players have ever noticed that going home’s slightly easier — slightly less eventful — than going out. But if they ever do notice it and if they ever try to take advantage of it, I promise it won’t be easier anymore.

Because nobody likes a smarta$& player.

GrokThis4Me asks…

Do you have an opinion on changing the skill mechanic to a d12 roll to stop the apparently rampant use of the critical skill roll rule that WotC feels the need to change? Scaling skill checks to the d12 range would increase the potency of taking skills without major changes to the probability.

I feel like I’m missing something here…

I assume this is all to do with the DBox One playtest thing that WotC released last week. I’m aware of that s$&% and plan to review it and provide plenty of hot takes. I’ve just been away these past two weeks for health reasons and haven’t gotten around to it.

I am aware that in the new DBox One playtests, players who roll a natural 20 on a d20 Test — which includes skill checks — now automatically succeed at whatever the hell they were doing. And they also earn inspiration for their critical success.

But I feel like you’re carrying some emotional baggage onto this Ask Angry flight.

I know some GMs reward natural 20s on skill checks with stupid critical success results. “You rolled a 20 on your Persuasion! OMG! You totally seduced the dragon!” That’s bulls$&%. And it’s bulls&$% for reasons that have nothing to do with the actual critical success mechanic.

Here’s the thing: there is a critical success mechanic built into the game already. DMG 242 advises GMs to — at their discretion — consider exceptional rolls — natural ones and twenties — when determining the outcomes of actions. It doesn’t say you should turn a critical Persuasion success into a sex scene or any pants-on-head-retarded thing like that. But it does suggest you give extra information on natural twenties and break lockpicks on natural ones. S$&% like that.

And you know what? Lots of us GMs already do that s$&%. And yes, I said us. Because I do it too. It ain’t a codified, systematic thing. I don’t have rules to share. Really good GMs who do it don’t have rules for it. We just, you know, make really good dies a little extra successful. Or make really bad die rolls suck a little extra bit more. GMs can’t help doing it. It feels natural to differentiate between a scant social success and a decisive one. That’s a good thing. I’m all for it. And I think it’s a way better approach than codifying this s$&% with nonsensical rules for arbitrary inspiration.

Because accidental dragon-seduction totally should give you advantage on your next roll to jump a gorge.

That said, I don’t subscribe to the automatic success on a twenty rule. And I know automatic success and critical success rules are divisive. A lot of the changes to crits in DBox One seem to be rustling panties. So I get it if you feel differently. If you’re in the not in my D&D crowd, so be it. Fine and dandy.

But this d12 thing? That seems like it’s either overfixing it or not fixing it at all. It just depends on whether I think you’re smart or dumb.

I actually think you’re smart. Yeah. I said it. You didn’t just suggest replacing the d20 with a d12. You specifically mentioned scaling DCs to the new range. Presumably, an Easy DC would now be a 3 or something and a Moderate DC would be a 6. Or whatever. You’d refigure the DCS based on the d12 but keep the modifiers the same to amplify the effects of proficiency and ability bonuses. To downplay the random element and play up talent and training. And if that’s what you want, sure, that’d work.

I just don’t get what that has to do with automatic success and critical success rules. Are you changing to the d12 just so the players can’t roll 20s and therefore can’t have automatic successes on a technicality? Wouldn’t it be easier to just ignore the automatic success and critical success rules? And if that’s not your plan, you’ve still got the same problem. Every die has a lowest number and a highest number. And players are going to expect something special to happen when they roll them.

So, really, I’m just not sure what you’re trying to fix or how. But I did give you a bunch of strong opinions about skill rolls, so I’m calling this answer good enough.