The beacons are lit! Arthur calls for aid!

Well, technically George called for aid, but my Discord members know I obey Arthur, so when he seconded George’s call, I knew I had to drop everything and throw out a little Ask Angry to help them out. After all, I’m currently in catch-up mode, so I might as well put aside what I was polishing for release to write, rewrite, revise, proof, and polish from scratch.

Everyone knows the best way to catch up is to chase every distraction.

Here’s the deal. Angrican George asked a question in my supporter Discord community. Others weighed in. Arthur eventually showed up. Which means I owe George and everyone else an answer. But, honestly, it’s a really good question because it’s a really ugly question, but no one thinks it’s ugly. It’s one of those questions that seems easy to answer if you have a narrow view of what roleplaying games are and what Game Mastering entails. But the more deeply you look at Game Mastering and tabletop roleplaying and game and adventure design, the uglier the question gets.

But, really, it’s a good question because the speech I’m about to give about the question is something I know lots of my community members, readers, and Game Masters in general need to hear. Which is why I’m rambling around the non-ugly question that only turns ugly when you know too much and care too much.

You see, it’s easy to make Game Mastering decisions if you think of the game just as a bunch of gamey challenges or just as a world simulation for the players to hex crawl through or just as a stage for the players to play their little stories on. But when you realize how many different elements go into a truly great roleplaying gameplay experience and that you can’t just say, “Well, the game is just this, so I can just do that,” Game Mastering decisions get a lot uglier.

Especially when you really want to get this shit right.

Arthur, George, and probably every one of you reading this right now, you’re all a lot like me. You care. You care a lot. You truly want to deliver the best damned gameplay experience you can in every possible way for your players. You see Game Mastering as a trade to master and a gift you give your players every week.

When you combine an ugly question that’s impossible to answer right with caring way too much about getting things perfect, you end up paralyzed.

The specific thing George struggles with? I do too. I keep changing how I handle it, hoping I can find a good solution. One that satisfies me. One that I believe is letting me provide the best gameplay experience possible for most or all of my players at every table ever. But I also know I probably won’t find one. I’ll only find crappy compromises that require me to leave something on the table. It’s just one of those things where all the answers suck.

That’s why I’m doing this. That’s why I’m dropping everything for this question and this speech. It’s not because I have the answer, but rather because I know there is no good answer, and I still have to pick one. I have to pick my poison and hope it isn’t poisonous enough to take my game away from the greatness I want for it.

That’s the reality of True Game Mastery and True Scenario Designery and True Campaign Managery. Everything is a tradeoff. Everything is about costs and benefits. There are no purely good answers. There are no costs that don’t matter. If you find yourself saying, “I can give this up because, at my table, it doesn’t matter,” you probably didn’t understand the assignment. You’re always compromising something you shouldn’t. That’s because truly great tabletop roleplaying gameplay experiences aren’t narrow. Challenge matters, story matters, agency matters, guidance matters, openness matters, structure matters, pace matters; it all matters, and most things come in opposing pairs. Yeah, players need freedom, or else it isn’t a roleplaying game, but pace and structure are more strongly correlated with engagement and investment, so you have to find a middle ground. Call it closed openness or guided nonlinearity. It doesn’t matter. It’s a compromise between two diametrically opposed forces, both of which can make a game or break it.

The more you know and the more you care, the more screwed you feel.

Except that’s not true either. That’s the other reason I want to give this speech. Because I know George needs it, and I can think of a handful of others, by name, who need to hear it again, and probably lots of you need it too.

Yes, it all matters, and if you care, it matters a lot. But it also doesn’t matter that much. Gameplay experiences are very complex, holistic, emergent things. You don’t have to get every part exactly right. You just have to get enough right enough. You can actually get a lot wrong and still get a good gameplay experience.

But here’s the kicker…

There’s an aspect of all this crap that pushes every good game toward greatness. It’s a spice that makes even an okay game good and a good game great. You’re probably adding it without realizing it. The Game Master’s energy, their passion and drive and genuine care, your passion and drive and genuine care, those bleed into the game without you realizing it, and they matter a lot.

Unless you get in your own way. And lots of Game Masters do. See, you have to trust that that’s how it works. Not just the part about passion, but also the part about getting enough things right enough. Most Game Masters don’t. They don’t trust themselves to make good enough decisions. They don’t trust the game to just turn out okay.

Not too long ago, the feedback discussion broke out in my Discord community for the umpteen billionth time. You know what I mean, right? Game Masters are always trying to interrogate their players: what’s good, what’s bad, are you having fun, what would be more fun, what isn’t fun, should I do more of this, should I do less of that, how important is exploration to you on a scale from one to ten, does this screen make me look fat, would you prefer more time in town, where are your rebel friends now, and so on, and cetera, and nauseum.

You want my advice when it comes to feedback: just fucking stop it. Stop expecting it, stop seeking it, stop thinking it’s worth a single, solitary crap. I know that sounds crazy. Every time I say that, mouthbreathing asshats appear to scream about how I’m wrong and then tell everyone how they’ve discovered the precise end-of-session routine to get perfect feedback that has made their game so much better for their players. But experiments don’t work without control groups, and I’m the control group. I gave up on feedback years ago, and yet I somehow manage to run the best roleplaying gameplay experiences ever and make them better every year. Do you know how I end my sessions: “Thanks for playing, guys; hope you all had fun; by the way, nice job on that squid encounter.”

That’s it. Very, very occasionally, I will ask a player an open question because I notice something seems off or because I did something experimental and it didn’t feel like it landed well. I don’t do surveys, and I don’t interrogate. I just say, “You seemed a little checked out; is everything okay?” Or, “I was doing my narration a little differently tonight. Did you notice? Did it feel different?”

Now, my players do meet my “I hope you had fun tonight,” with specific feedback pretty often. My players like to tell me what, specifically, was fun, and it can turn into a very nice little ego stroking, but I ain’t doing it for feedback. I say that because it’s true. I genuinely end every game session hoping I gave my players a good time. And if all they say is, “Yeah, it was fun,” I’m happy.

That has to be enough for you. In fact, wanting more can be really bad for you. There’s this adage in playtesting and quality assurance: players are good at knowing whether they’re happy, bad at explaining why, and terrible at predicting what would make them happier. Player feedback is a great way to find out there’s a problem, but it’s a terrible diagnostic tool and the worst planning tool. You can’t trust any answer beyond a happy face or frowny face. And you shouldn’t have to ask for that.

Being a great Game Master is a lot like being a great parent. You can’t make every right choice. Most of the time, there isn’t even a right choice. Most choices are between different flavors of shit. All you can do is make the best choice your limited judgment allows and hope you make enough good enough calls. If your game succeeds, you’ll never know if it’s because of your choices or despite them. If it fails, you’ll never know whether you could have done something to prevent it or whether it was beyond your control. The fact that your game is still running today and your players showed up again has to be enough because it’s all you can hope for.

So, with all of that said…

Angrican George asked a question, and I want to explain why it’s a shitty question with only shitty answers, and that all anyone can do is pick a shitty answer and hope it’s not the thing that ruins your game. Which it won’t. Because it’s really hard for a passionate, caring Game Master to ruin a game just by handling the ends of adventures less than perfectly.

Whatever Are We To Do About the Journey Home?

George wanted to know about the return trip from the adventure site because he’s realized, like many of us do, that it’s one of the ugliest parts of the whole adventure design thing. Unless, of course, you’re narrow-minded about what the gameplay experience entails or you just don’t care. Seriously, anyone who offers an easy answer to this question is not to be trusted. They don’t understand the assignment. You can only trust people who start their answer with, “Yeah, that’s an ugly question. All I can do is tell you what I do, but I know it sucks…”

Let me clarify what we’re talking about a little so we can look at the problem…

The players’ characters have set out from a safe location, like town, and trekked their way to an adventure site, like a dungeon. There, they’ve had a grand adventure, beaten a boss monster, and rescued Princess MacGuffin. Now, they are leaving the dungeon, flush with cash, Scottish Highlander nobility cheerfully following, and they have to get home.

Now what?

What makes this question ugly is that, from a gameplay standpoint, the game is over, and from a narrative standpoint, the game has reached a dramatic conclusion, but procedurally and fantastically, there’s still stuff to do.

In gameplay design, the rule is that, once the primary challenge has been overcome, the players should claim the goal, and then the game should quickly end. You can see most clearly what it feels like to ignore that rule in those combats that end up in a mop up phase. The biggest threat is dead, the heroes are still fighting strong, but there are all these half-dead minions ineffectually running around, and the players have to chase them down and whittle all their hit points to zero. It’s boring because there’s no uncertainty left in the gameplay. The gameplay tension is resolved. The outcome is known. Unless they really fuck up bad, the players can’t really change the outcome. They just have to complete the chore of actually winning.

You can’t, by the way, solve this with a simple trick of wording. You can’t just say, “Well, the goal is to get Princess MacGuffin safely home so, technically, until she’s sipping mead with Laird MacGuffin in her dad’s timber hall, the uncertainty still exists.” That’s only true if there’s a good reason to think a significant threat might snatch victory away from the heroes. And before you ask, the answer is no; you can’t just solve this with some highwaymen attacking on the way home. You can’t follow, “Slay the dragon and save Princess MacGuffin,” with “Oh no! Several unwashed bandits!” The major challenge was the dragon. Princess MacGuffin, true to her namesake, was the goal, and lest you think I’m being sexist, you should know every member of the McGuffin line, male and female alike, was kidnapped at least three times in their lives. Actually, Princess MacGuffin is running well above average. This was her first kidnapping, and she comes of age next year.

Sorry…

The major challenge was the dragon, and Princess MacGuffin was the goal. Once the dragon’s dead and the Princess is with the heroes, anything you throw at them is just minion mop-up bullshit.

Meanwhile, the basic rule of drama is that, after the rising action hits a climax, the story is effectively over, so resolve it, denouement it, and move on. That’s why Peter Jackson was right to cut out that scouring of the Shire crap, but then ruined it by giving the movie seven frigging endings.

Rage-baiting the Tolkienistas aside, there’s a word for trying to raise the tension again after the climax has played out. That word is anticlimax. Anticlimaxes are draining, boring, and sap all the goodwill from the climax that came before them. Once Smauglethrax is dead and Princess MacGuffin is saved, get Han and Luke to the medal ceremony because the story is over.

But roleplaying games need consistency and verisimilitude. There’s a reality to the fictional world you just can’t break. Why? Because roleplaying is literally the act of imagining that you are your character and the situation they are facing is real. The gameplay has to conform to the reality of the world. If it doesn’t, you break the willing suspension of disbelief, and then the players can’t care about the world like a real place anymore.

If the journey out was dangerous, why would the journey home be any less dangerous? Did the wilderness suddenly become safe and non-hostile and impossible to get lost in just because you won? I mean, you might argue that killing the dragon might impact the ecology of the region, but that’s an adventure-specific contrivance. The issue remains that the characters are three days from home and there’s dangerous terrain on the way that they might get attacked in, lost in, or starve in. The journey home has to be the same as the journey out.

Now, we could say all this maps to the elements of gameplay defined in some gamer motivation model or another. For example, in my favorite model, the MDA model, I’d say the problem is about the conflicting needs of Challenge, Narrative, and Fantasy, and you, the Game Master as game designer, are stuck having to break one of those. But it’s not even as clean as that. The procedural issue isn’t just about making the world real. There’s more to it.

If you run the wilderness as gameplay, then it presents a challenge, right? There are risks to trekking into the wilds. There are encounters, complications, obstacles, and resource costs to contend with. If those challenges change depending on which direction the players are walking, you’re putting the players in a bad place.

Suppose you do the hand-wavy narrative, “… and then you headed home,” thing. Suppose you don’t calculate speed or settle navigation or compute resources consumed. Now it’s time for the players to plan their next expedition. Should they buy enough food to get there and back again, or do they only need enough food for the journey out because getting back is going to get handwaved?

Note, by the way, that this ain’t about my fear of players exploiting the game. I don’t worry about that. Which is another reason people think I’m crazy. What I do worry about, though, is putting my players in the uncomfortable position of having to deliberately choose not to cheat. If you, as a normal, reasonable, innocent player, notice that I never ask you to count food on the return trip, you now have to decide whether you should buy the extra food anyway just to be honest. You know I’m skipping the trip home to streamline, but the fair assumption is that your character needs the food anyway, so shouldn’t you just mark off the money and maybe even mark off the food? I don’t want my players weighing that kind of crap in their heads, but ever.

Don’t get too hung up on this as being about food consumption, by the way. This is about everything. Anything. Should the players hold back healing resources for the journey home? Should they slow down and carefully blaze a trail on their way to the dungeon so they don’t get lost coming home? Should they bring extra supplies for the prisoner they’re planning to rescue? Should they plan a longer, but easier route home to make it easier on the prisoner? There are a thousand issues that might arise when you start hand-waving gameplay procedure.

See how this isn’t as clean anymore as “Challenge plus Narrative beats Fantasy, so Fast Travel?” Challenge is actually straddling the fence. Ignoring the trip home is leaving some gameplay challenge on the table. Or it could potentially leave a potential challenge on the table in a certain adventure. Escorting Princess MacGuffin is a fair gameplay challenge, after all. It’s an escort quest. Is that worth playing out at least this time? Is it enough of a gameplay challenge to justify an anticlimax?

Speaking of anticlimax, or rather, postclimax, consider how it might feel to fail in the postclimax. Say your players survive the trek, clear the dungeon, slay the dragon, rescue Princess MacGuffin, and then, on the way home, she’s lost crossing a river or dies of dysentery. That is a completely valid outcome of a fair challenge, but do you really want that to be a way this adventure might end? It’s kind of dickish to ask your players to kill a dragon and then, instead of a victory party, let them tell the questgiver how their daughter shit herself to death on the way home because the rations had gone bad. You see what I mean, right? How would you feel at the end of that session? Not great, right? I know I wouldn’t. You know how I know that? I know that because I’ve done that. Not quite literally that, but I’ve taken my players’ amazing victory away with a really horrible postclimax failure. I did not end that session with my customary, “Thanks for playing; hope y’all had fun.”

The trek home is a lot like character death. Not doing it sucks, but doing it also sucks. No matter what, it sucks. Any Game Master, by the way, that says character death is unambiguously good and doesn’t suck is an asshole. Character death is, at best, a necessary evil, and I’m not even convinced it’s actually necessary. If you think otherwise, you’re bad, and you’re wrong, and you should feel bad.

So whatever should you do with the trek home? Whatever do I do? I don’t know… I just kind of do it. I hold my nose and I… remember my promise to my brand manager about casually making horrible, inappropriate remarks. I hold my nose, and I just get through it.

I usually play out the trek home, but I’m aware the whole time that it sucks, so I don’t linger on it. I pace it well. I condense it as much as I can, but I don’t actually skip the rules and procedures. I accept something terrible might happen. If I can make a challenge of it, like with escorting Princess MacGuffin, I do that, but I don’t forget it’s a postclimax challenge, so I don’t make a big thing of it, and I keep the difficulty on the easier side. If I can use the trek home to do some falling action denouement crap, I’ll do that. If Complications arise, I’ll hedge away from involved encounters and favor smaller things. I don’t want to ever say, “Sure, you beat the dragon, but can you handle three forest spiders!? Aaaah!” Of course, if the party’s escorting Princess MacGuffin or they’re laboring with a hard-to-transport prize or someone’s gravely injured or cursed, three forest spiders might be worth a fight, but it’s still a postclimax.

Really, it’s not so much a standard approach to the trek home as a grudging compromise. I know I can’t skip the procedure because of my philosophy toward roleplaying games and because I want wilderness treks to matter, so I can’t make them only matter conditionally. But I also know they stink. Really, the best analogy I can think of is what I already said: “I hold my nose and I get through them as quickly as I can.”

Is that the best answer? Yeah, I think so, but best doesn’t mean good when all the answers are shit. Fortunately, I run a good game, so my players have never even seemed to notice the few minutes of stinky ending at the end of every expedition.

The problem isn’t the trek; the problem is that I’m too smart and I care too much.