Welcome to another installment of my once-monthly advice column, Ask Angry.
I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking, “Once monthly? When the hell did that happen? It’s been months since you claimed you were discontinuing this column! You can’t just say it’s a regular thing now!” Well, calm your titties there, and let me explain. Briefly. I’ll have a better explanation in next month’s Mostly Monthly Update.
Due to popular… ish demand, I’m bringing it back as part of some changes I’m making to my whole content release thing. Which I would have explained earlier this month except for the fact that I spent the better part of this month crippled by the superflu. Sorry about that.
The point is, I’m doing the Ask Angry thing once a month from now on. For a while, anyway. If you’ve got a burning roleplaying game question you need a sexy genius to provide an objectively and unarguably correct answer to, send it in, and, if you’re lucky, I’ll choose to give you the answer you need in a future installment and slathered in a generous helping of abuse. Why abuse? Well, it’s partly because wisdom can’t be given but must be earned and it’s partly because it’s funny and it’s partly because I actually really don’t like any of you very much.
If you can handle that, send any questions to ask.angry@angry.games. Don’t forget to tell me clearly and explicitly what to call you in a way that’ll hold up in a European data privacy suit. Each month, I’ll choose one to three questions from the multitudes I continue to receive to answer. If you want to up the odds I’ll choose yours, keep it brief and get to the point. I don’t read walls of text — which is why I don’t run WotC and Paizo modules — and if I can’t tell in a few seconds what I’m being asked, I get bored and move on. I also don’t need you to speculate on the answer you think I’ll give.
And yes, I am very much aware of the hypocrisy, thank you very much, and I don’t give a crap.
Mensam meam, praecepta mea.
Thane asks…
If player agency is an illusion maintained by the psychological tricks of the Scenario Designer, can the Game Master fudge dice rolls for the same reason?
No.
That was an easy one to revive this column with. See you all next month.
I guess I should probably tell you, Thane, and everyone else, why the answer is, “No,” and also why it’s a bad question and you should feel bad for asking it. Especially given this is an issue I’ve had with lots of you dumbasses. You just ain’t getting this agency thing and you’re starting to sound like all the decrepit OSR grognards who keep screaming at me to quit the hobby and go play video games about novel-writing if I love game design oh so huggy much.
Because those dumbasses love to sling the word agency around too and they don’t understand it any better than you do.
As you might have gathered, the problem here ain’t fudging die rolls. I mean, that is a problem, but it’s actually only the third biggest problem in your question, Thane. The first is that you still don’t get this agency shit. The second is that you still don’t get the difference between a Scenario Designer and a Game Master. So I’m gonna tackle those two issues.
Stop Saying, “Agency Is An Illusion”
Y’all have been parroting at me the claim that “agency is an illusion” for the better part of a year now. Worse yet, you keep blaming me for it. You keep claiming I’m the one who said agency is an illusion. Well, look, maybe I did say that in one of my shock you into rethinking your worldview with hyperbole moments. I don’t remember but I’ll take the blame for the miscommunication.
Agency is not an illusion. I never said that and if I said something that sounded like that, I didn’t mean it the way you read it. I’m stating categorically that I do not believe that agency is an illusion and anything I said to the contrary in the past is a mistake or miscommunication, okay? I’d have to be a complete dumbass to say that and if I did say it, you really should have questioned it because it’s at odds with everything else I’ve ever said about roleplaying gaming. But, since I’m taking the blame for everything here, I’ll also take the blame for making myself so unapproachable that you’re all afraid to question me ever. That’s my bad. Sorry kids. I ruined all of gaming forever.
How have I defined roleplaying and roleplaying gaming in the past? Seriously? Haven’t I always said shit like, “Roleplaying is the act of making choices,” and “Roleplaying games are about choices and consequences,” and that they’re unique for their open-endedness? Are those really the words of someone who doesn’t believe agency is a real thing? Abso-fucking-lutely not. Come on, use your damned brain a little. Help me help you.
Sorry. Right. This is all my fault.
The thing about agency is that it’s complicated. It ain’t this black-and-white, binary, objective thing. In fact, like many things in gaming, it’s all about how players feel. Agency is something players have. It’s a feeling that they are free to choose their characters’ destines, free to forge their own paths, and that their choices actually matter. Which, of course, is what roleplaying games are all about.
Now, you totally can create a big smoke-and-mirrors thing. You can trick the players into feeling agency when they really don’t have any, but that’s a really stupid thing to do. Why? Because all it takes is one little mistake for the players to figure that shit out and then your games — your ability to run games for those people — are ruined forever.
Roleplaying games are designed around player agency. It’s a real, actual thing. In fact, it’s the reason why roleplaying games have Game Masters. You can’t offer the kind of agency tabletop roleplaying games promise without an actual human brain dealing with the infinity of possible choices human players can imagine. At least, you can’t have a good one. No, I don’t want to hear how you’ve got ChatGrok running games for you.
Players really do get to pick their options. They really do have agency. For real. They get to choose their characters’ actions and they can choose any actions they want at any time for any reason. That doesn’t mean, of course, that everything’s going to work out the way they want it to. Nor does it mean there won’t be a price to pay or consequences to live with. Nor does it mean they won’t ever have to operate within constraints. Players in tabletop roleplaying games have a very specific, very realistic kind of agency. They have the kind of agency you have in real life. You can technically make any choice you want, but you’ll always have to contend with an uncontrollably chaotic world, the laws of physics, your own physical and mental limitations, and the fact that other people are going to react to your choices and you’re going to have to suck that up.
The trick to Scenario Design isn’t creating an illusion of agency. Instead, it’s understanding how to build games that work given that the players have the agency they do.
If I want to write an adventure about a bunch of heroes killing a dragon and rescuing a princess, I have to recognize — and accept — that the players can technically choose to not do any of that shit if they don’t want to. If they make that choice, all of my hard work on my adventure is wasted and the poor Game Master running the game for them is going to be totally unprepared for anything the players actually do. The solution then is to write the adventure so that most players will choose, of their own accord, to kill the dragon and rescue the princess. I do that with things like motivations, incentives, and consequences.
Now I realize that lots of you have trouble seeing the difference between “stacking the deck so players will want to make the choice I want them to make” and “using deception to force players to do what I want them to do.” I don’t know how to help you. Sorry.
But that ain’t where this whole building around agency thing begins and ends in Scenario Design anyway.
For example, many, many humans have trouble exercising their free will absent any constraints at all. It just ain’t something human brains are wired to do. People are really good at making choices between limited numbers of options, but give most people a totally blank page and they just freeze up. Likewise, people are really good at solving puzzles and problems by spotting patterns and analyzing situations, but they’re not as good at inventing solutions out of whole cloth. And when I say that shit is hard, I don’t mean it’s hard in a “fun challenge” kind of way. I mean, most people find unconstrained, open-ended, blank nothing stressful and frustrating.
If you’ve ever asked your girlfriend or guyfriend or wife or husband or whatever, “What do you want for dinner,” and dealt with the ensuing potentially relationship-breaking fight, you know exactly what I mean. That’s a question the vast majority of humans can’t answer most of the time. But as soon as you start suggesting shit — “How about pizza?” — they can tell you exactly what they don’t want. Meanwhile, if you said something like, “Would you rather have pizza or burgers for dinner,” you’re much more likely to get a useful answer, even if the answer is, “Actually, I’m kind of craving Italian.”
Seriously. It’s actually way easier for most people to come up with a creative, outside-the-box, none of the above kind of answers if you start with a constrained choice between limited options than if you give them a totally blank page.
That’s why True Scenario Designers don’t create totally open-ended, unconstrained challenges. At the very least, when you create a challenge the players must overcome to continue the game, you make sure there are at least some visible hints that imply one or two default solutions. There’s got to be at least one solution that requires the players to just put the pieces together, as it were. Building challenges in that way isn’t quashing player agency but facilitating it because of how human brains work.
Then, too, there’s also the issue that, for the players to have meaningful gameplay experiences, they have to make choices that actually affect the outcome of the game, right? This means I, as a True Scenario Designer, have to put the players in situations wherein they can make meaningful, impactful choices. Choices that different players will make differently depending on their priorities, motivations, mood, the character they’re playing, and any one of a thousand other factors that make different people different.
I ain’t talking here about puzzles and problem-solving. I’m talking about choices that reveal something about the person making them. Choosing the attack that does the most damage ain’t a choice, it’s a math problem. Consider even a simple, strategic choice like, “Do you push your luck and continue adventuring despite your limited resources or do you retreat to recover even though the lost time and progress might cost you the adventure.” Yeah, there’s math and probability to consider, but two players playing the same characters in the same situations might make completely different decisions based on their risk tolerances, how they perceive the stakes, and how they prioritize winning vis-a-vis their own characters’ survival.
Of course, this shit goes well beyond strategic choices. True Scenario Designers don’t stop at questions about risk tolerance. They’re not afraid to ask players to make complex choices like, “Are you willing to destroy something sacred to save a human life,” or shit like that.
Scenario Design ain’t just about building puzzles to solve and challenges to overcome. That’s Mere Adventure Builder bullshit. True Scenario Design is about empowering and facilitating meaningful choices. It doesn’t work if you — as a Scenario Designer — think of agency like a magic trick you’re pulling on your players. Agency is real and it’s vital to the whole roleplaying gaming thing, but it’s a very tricky thing to work with. Agency makes roleplaying games great and meaningful and fun and all that shit, but it can also totally wreck a gameplay experience if you don’t know how to work with it.
Game Masters Don’t Scenario Design
I feel like I’ve been over this next point something like ten thousand frigging times already, but I guess I’ve got to do it again. I’m not gonna blame y’all though. As I said above, I’m taking all the blame for everything today, so I probably explained this totally wrong on every one of those ten thousand previous attempts. You’d think, by luck, I’d have gotten it right once, but I guess not.
Scenario Designers and Game Masters are totally different people doing totally different jobs with totally different goals. Even Homebrewer Game Masters who do all their own Scenario Design are actually two different people doing different jobs crammed into one body and despite having spent my nearly four decades of gaming as a Homebrewer Game Master myself, I could actually make the argument that Homebrewer Game Masters actually make worse Game Masters than the ones that run other peoples’ games or, at least, they make it very hard on themselves to be good at Game Mastering, but that ain’t a today topic.
This, by the way, is why the Zero-Prep Improvisers can’t really aspire to run truly great adventures and campaigns. They can run great, fun gaming experiences and they can even trip over truly great adventures now and then, but they can’t actually pull off truly great examples of adventure and campaign design. Now, you don’t have to care about that — that doesn’t have to be your goal as a Game Master — but if you’ve got an actual passion for game design, you can’t be happy with the Zero Prep life. But that also ain’t a today topic.
A Game Master’s job — his only job — is to run the game at the table. It’s to provide four hours of exciting, engaging gameplay regardless of what the players choose to do with it. Game Masters describe situations, tell the players what their characters see and hear and know, invite the players to act, resolve their actions, and describe the results. Game Masters make sure there’s always another moment of gameplay no matter what. And frankly, that job’s big enough for most people. That’s enough for most Game Masters.
But there’s more to running a great gameplay experience than just providing an endless string of gameplay moments in response to whatever the players do. You can get an adequate game that way — maybe even a good game — but if you want the players to remember the world and the quests and the adventures rather than just the gameplay moments, you need more than just in-the-moment Game Mastering.
Consider that it’s hard to run a truly great combat encounter by just opening the Monster Manual and rolling initiative. I mean, sure, modern D&D’s system and monster design are such that you can run lots of pretty good combat encounters in open fields with nothing but a couple of stat blocks — even though most Game Masters are so far up themselves they can’t admit that — but things like stakes, context, terrain, and conflicting goals all elevate combat encounters to greatness and they ain’t the sort of crap most Game Masters can just pull from their asses at a moment’s notice.
Let me make this more concrete…
Imagine the players are just wandering randomly across the countryside. They rejected the quest to kill the dragon and they’ve decided to just explore in some random direction hoping to find something fun to do. As a Game Master, I know my job is to ensure gameplay happens no matter what, so I decide the players stumble on a cave with an angry owlbear inside guarding some treasure. Or maybe I get it off some random encounter table. Whatever. That’ll get me a half hour of fun gameplay, sure, but it ain’t really great gaming, is it? After four hours of randomly generated monster caves, things are gonna get dull.
That’s why Game Masters turn to Scenario Designers in the first place. Game Masters know they need more than blank maps and random monster tables. “Give me an actual gameplay experience to run,” says the Game Master, and the Scenario Designer gets to work. His job is to make sure that the Game Master has everything they need to execute an actual, good gameplay experience. The goal is to ensure the Game Master is never unprepared. To make sure that no matter what the players do, the Game Master’s got a gameplay experience to run and doesn’t have to wing it. Somehow, in some way, if the players choose to wander the countryside looking for shit to do, the Scenario Designer has made sure — in advance — that the Game Master has everything they need to run a great gameplay experience about wandering the countryside.
If the Game Master ever finds himself having to figure out for himself what happens next, the Scenario Designer failed.
That’s why, by the way, if I — a Scenario Designer — write an adventure about killing a dragon, I make damned sure the players will choose to accept that quest. If they don’t, I’ve left the Game Master with nothing. I’ve failed.
Likewise, if the players are ever left umming and ahhing because they don’t know where to go or what to do, the Scenario Designer has failed. The Game Master has to invite the players to act, but the Scenario Designer has to tell the Game Master what to invite them to do. That’s why the Scenario Designer makes sure that, as long as there’s more game to play, there’s always at least one discernible path to follow and, when there’s no more game to play — because, say, the players failed — the players know in no uncertain terms that the game is over.
The point is that the Game Master describes situations and resolves actions and that’s all the Game Master does. The Game Master should never have to think beyond moving from one moment of gameplay to the next. They can’t, really. You can’t design a great gameplay experience one moment at a time from the inside and I don’t give a crap what the Zero-Prep Improvisers claim. Hell, I’ve done enough of my own Zero-Prep Improvising to know what it costs me in terms of the quality of the big-picture gameplay experience because I’m a pretty lazy guy.
Consequently, you just can’t say anything about the Game Master’s job based on what the Scenario Designer knows about game design. They ain’t doing the same thing. So even if it was true that agency is an illusion and therefore it’s okay to just fudge everything to force the game to the best-designed outcome or whatever, it still wouldn’t justify asking the Game Master to be a party to that. It doesn’t matter what the Scenario Designer knows, the Game Master runs the game the way the Game Master runs the game.
Fudging Ain’t the Important Question
Hopefully, you can see precisely why I chose this question to answer and why I answered it the way I did. This ain’t really about fudging dice — and I don’t think anyone needs me to explain at this point why fudging dice is a bad practice from both a Scenario Design and a Game Mastering perspective — but rather, it’s about understanding the Scenario Designer’s job. Especially as it relates to player agency and especially as it relates to the Game Master’s job.
Agency isn’t an illusion and if you took that from anything I said about Scenario Design, you heard me wrong or I misspoke or something. I don’t care how the misunderstanding happened; I care about undoing the miscommunication. Agency is real. It’s vital. Being a Scenario Designer is recognizing that and knowing how to work with it. It’s knowing how agency makes the roleplaying gameplay experience what it is, but it’s also about recognizing how mishandling and misapplying agency can wreck the experience and leave the Game Master high and dry.
Meanwhile, the whole point of Scenario Design is to keep the Game Master from having to worry about anything beyond managing the moment-to-moment gameplay. It’s about making sure the Game Master always has gameplay to run no matter what the players choose to do. Sometimes that means ensuring the players play the content the Scenario Designer designed by framing choices in a way to make them the most desirable and most fun. Sometimes that means ensuring the players are never left lost and wondering what to do and can always see some way to keep moving. Sometimes that means crafting meaningful problems and choices for the players to solve and providing the Game Master with the tools they need to resolve every reasonably likely outcome.
None of that requires screwing with the dice. Honestly, if — hypothetically — the Scenario Designer ever did end up with a gameplay situation that demanded a specific outcome, the proper solution is to tell the Game Master not to use dice to resolve the outcome at all. Actually, the truly proper solution is to build the situation so that no die roll would be warranted at all, but that usually amounts to bad Scenario Design anyway.
And just in case any of you dumbasses need to hear it clearly and unambiguously: don’t fudge the damned dice. Ever. Just don’t.