Do you dream of a day when I make fun of your stupid question in one of these monthly Ask Angry columns? Fine. Send me your question. But if you want to see it answered, you’ve got to send it right.

First, you’ve got to explicitly and clearly tell me what to call you so I know I have permission to use your name, nickname, gnome duh plume, or whatever.

Second, keep it brief. If I take one look at the e-mail and think “there is no f$&%ing way I’m reading all of that,” I’m not going to. And if I don’t read it, I can’t answer it.

Remember, I’m a pretty smart guy. I can answer most questions without paragraphs of context or background and I sure as s$&% don’t need to hear any tedious play-by-play from your dumb game session.

Also, if you send me an e-mail, that means that I, ipso facto, have your e-mail address. If I need to follow up or ask a clarifying question, I totally can. I won’t. But I can.

If you have the minimal brainpower necessary to follow those simple guidelines, send your question to ask.angry@angry.games. Otherwise, keep it to yourself. Even deleting e-mails wastes my precious time.

Daniel asks…

If a player separated from the party and overcame an encounter by themselves, would you consider only giving the encounter’s XP to that player’s character instead of spreading it amongst the party? For example…

See? This is precisely what I mean. I can actually answer that question without the next paragraph of bulls$&%. But I get you. You probably think this is a crazy question, Daniel, because individual experience awards and—gasp—splitting the party are both f$&%ing unthinkable these days. But, once upon a time, that s$&% was de rigueur. I mean, all XP used to be individual XP. If the party split up, only those on camera for a given encounter got XP for it. Crazier still, classes had different advancement tables. The weaker classes, like the rogue and cleric, leveled up faster. The wizard, who became very overpowered very quickly, leveled up very slowly.

Oh, and the more raw talent your character had for their chosen class—as determined by their ability scores—the quicker they leveled up. Experience used to be a really personal thing. And because it was divvied up evenly amongst the participants—even the hired help—the bigger your party, the smaller your share of the XP. And if you ran off on your own and just handled s$&%, you didn’t have to split the XP with anyone.

I know some of you are having f$&%ing aneurisms just reading this. Different characters at different levels? That’s unfair! Classes that level up slower? That’s just punishing people for their class choice. Because that’s where we’re at. Any differentiation between players is unfair punishment. At least, that’s where we’re at in the futuristic world of 2021 when people can’t tell petty jealous resentment from fairness anymore.

I’m not going to address that petty, childish, kindergarten bulls$&%. Nor am I going to address all the complicated bookkeeping involved in giving different people different numbers. Because I know using basic arithmetic on a column of numbers it takes seconds to record counts as complicated bookkeeping in 2021. And even tracking hit points is too much for some people.

But I will address some counterpoints to the idea of individual XP that are actually worth addressing.

See, unless you’re really crappy at reading the subtext, you might have noticed some subtle clues in the tone of my writing that suggest that I maybe think that individual XP awards are kind of a good idea. Or at least, that there’s nothing wrong with the idea. And that I’m also okay with split parties. But there are a few common counterarguments that actually need addressing. One has to do with game balance and another has to do with incentivizing the wrong kind of gameplay.

First, the second. The argument goes like this. If PCs can not only earn experience on their own but actually earn proportionally more experience on their own, there’s an incentive for party members to split up and take on problems on their own. And that is, to some extent, totally true. Moreover, players might even want to play entire sessions or adventures alone. And that’s also somewhat true. You know how I know these things are true? Because they used to happen. If a character had a thing to take care of on their own or just needed to catch up to the group because they were lagging behind a few levels, they’d ask the GM to run them through a solo game. Or they’d make a solo delve into whatever dungeon the party was currently plundering. This was the era of the sprawling dungeon complex whose depths the players would plumb throughout many expeditions and many sessions.

But you know what? That s$&% was fun. There’s nothing inherently bad about either of those things. It ain’t bad for PCs to break from the herd once in a while to handle a specialized problem on their own. It ain’t bad for individual PCs to get some spotlight time showing off their unique skills and for everyone else to wait their turn for a little while. And certain classes, like the ranger and the rogue, used to really shine here. They were good at splitting away from the party, scouting ahead, blazing a trail, and clearing minor obstacles. And assassins could actually assassin once in a while in those days.

Of course, the rogues and rangers and assassins and everyone else? They couldn’t do that s$&% all the time. No one could. Because most of the challenges in the party’s way required a party’s worth of skills, talents, and resources to deal with. That’s why adventurers travel in packs to begin with. And there were risks to it besides. Sometimes the loner would end up in hot water. They’d get spotted or miss their backstab and then they’d have to run screaming back to the party who’d hear them coming and lay in for a fight.

The “never split the party” mantra that’s become a big, hilarious in-joke these days? Yeah, it wasn’t as big a deal back in the day. Once upon a time, it was just a reminder that splitting the party was a high-risk proposition. After all, the party’s skills, resources, hit points, and abilities were divided, but the encounters remained the same.

That’s why we never worried much that individual XP awards incentivized the wrong kind of gameplay. The argument is basically that D&D’s a team sport. The party’s supposed to work together. If lone wolves earn proportionally more XP than team players, the game’s encouraging the players to play wrong. But, as noted, the lone wolf could—and often did—end up facing something alone that ought not to be faced alone. And if they got hurt or killed, there was no one around to save their pelt. The risk of being a lone wolf hasn’t changed, but the payoff has. There is none. So, you never split the party.

The thing is, while they were an occasional pain in the a$&, split parties actually added some depth to the gameplay. When the party was investigating something, for instance, in a reasonably safe location like a town, the talkers would go off and question people while the bullies found some heads to crack for information and the thinkers poked and prodded at the scenes of the crimes to find clues. And if you—the GM—could run the split party efficiently—which ain’t that hard—you could cover the same three scenes simultaneously in the same amount of time as it’d take you to cover them sequentially with the whole party there for each.

Actually, they’d usually go quicker. See, with the party split, the encounters didn’t need to provide something for everyone to do. Everyone didn’t have to be a talker because only the talkers would show up for the talky scenes. And the encounters themselves ran faster because there were fewer participants in each.

The spotlight time—if you care about such—was also the same. Instead of the non-talkers hanging back and not talking in the talking scene, they’d just hang back and wait for the cutaway to their bully scene or investigation scene or whatever.

Point is, splitting up was a choice. A strategy. Sometimes, it was a good one. And sometimes, the party had the right skills to take advantage of a split party. But it was a risky choice. Usually, risky enough that it wasn’t worth the payoff. But, when it was a strategically reasonable choice, the high payoff nudged players to consider spreading themselves out.

And giving the players a choice adds more depth to the game than not giving them a choice. These days, splitting the party just isn’t a choice.

A lot of subtle s$&% has actually changed about the game as parties have been increasingly resistant to ever dividing their numbers and resources. Because every character has to be able to participate equally in every encounter, for example, the skill list has been distilled and pared down and the difference between being good at something and being bad at it has been minimized. Penalties for things like encumbrance, failed actions, vision and light, armor, and all that s$&% all had to get swept aside. Take stealth, for example. These days, no one knows how to run a stealth encounter because every party has at least one dude or dudette with an entire kitchen showroom strapped to their body, clanking away and ruining the fun. And they sure as hell won’t back more than one move action away and just let the sneak work.

Meanwhile, GMs bend themselves to breaking trying to get their players to participate in encounters they aren’t good at and usually don’t want to be involved in. Do you have any idea how many f$&%ing e-mails I get from GMs asking me how to make their quiet players play social interaction encounters and s$&% like that? They can find all the faults in the system that make it impossible for every character to contribute to every negotiation, but they never consider that maybe there’s a reason why those players chose barbarians over bards for their characters.

Ultimately, like every GMing discussion, the whole “split party” thing always comes down to a false dilemma. Like, if there’s a reward for a certain behavior, then that’s all the players will ever do. All the time. You can’t let splitting up be the right answer once in a damned while because then splitting up will always be the only thing that happens. Well, that ain’t how reality works. That’s just arguments on the internet.

Personally, I’m all for individual awards for individual contributions to the adventure. And if a player manages to handle a dangerous threat or obstacle alone—without the party there to cover their a$&—then they deserve something extra. The old method of giving them five times the XP does seem a bit extreme, but that’s not the only option. For example, you might decide an encounter is worth a certain amount of XP, and each and every participant in that encounter gets that same amount of XP. It’s not divided. That’s just how much XP the encounter’s worth to any and all participants individually. But, the amount of XP’s reduced proportionally based on the number of participants. It sounds complicated when I explain it in words, but, trust me, it’s a lot easier to implement than it sounds. After all, it’s basically how I handle companion characters.

And sure, there’s this issue of game balance. The idea that having PCs of different levels in the same party will f$&% up the game balance. Well, that’s not actually an issue. D&D isn’t that precisely balanced. It claims it is. But it ain’t. And the disparity between the PCs usually doesn’t end up being that big in any case. Besides, the game could do with a little imbalance. Imbalance is good for a game. That’s the secret to Blizzard’s success. They built some of the most popular video game franchises in the history of ever because they understood better than anyone the value of imperfect balance. But that’s another story.

I’d like to see “splitting the party” come back to the game. Not as something the players do all the time, but just as a viable strategy. Something the players could do. One more string for their bows. A high-risk, high-reward strategy that was sometimes the right answer and sometimes just got PCs killed. A lot of interesting gameplay scenarios grew out of that. D&D and Pathfinder have become very rote “kick in the door and kill or be killed” affairs. When’s the last time your players did even something as simple as scouting the enemy and then splitting up to attack from two different directions?

In other words: yes, Daniel, if a PC works alone, give them a little pile of XP that they don’t have to share with the others.

Some nameless GM who can’t follow directions asks…

My players would rather work for NPC patrons or factions than drive the campaign themselves. They want me to just hand them missions and quests. And when they’re confronted with impactful choices, they use their spells and abilities to contact their superiors and find out how to proceed. It’s the logical thing to do, but it lets them avoid making difficult decisions. How can I give them more agency without just cutting off their communication with their bosses completely?

It’s hard, oh nameless wonder, when your players use their agency to play the game they want to play instead of the game you think they should play. It sucks when the players have fun wrong. That’s why the only thing you can do is sabotage their preferred style of play and force them to do things your way. For agency.

Do you hear what I’m saying? Is my sarcasm obscuring my point? I mean, considering you can’t understand simple instructions like “tell me what to call you explicitly,” I’m probably being too subtle for you. So, let me spell it out.

When I was talking to Daniel above—notice how I called him Daniel because of the instructions he followed—I told Daniel above that some GMs try to force their players to engage with certain game situations even when they don’t want to. And that’s what you’re doing here. Have you considered that maybe—just maybe—your players are playing exactly the way they want to? Maybe they don’t want to play Telltale Games Presents Dungeons & Drama and make giant, impactful choices? Maybe they just want to take on a mission and do their best to win? That’s why, when you take away their missions and tell them to make their own damned fun or when you shove an impactful choice in their faces, they just sit and sulk until Pliskin calls them back. And why breaking their Codec won’t fix anything.

Look, it’s possible your players think they’re playing smart. It’s possible they’re optimizing the fun out of the game. It’s possible they really do feel like they’re not allowed to make choices because they’re punch-clock minions. It’s possible they think they’re supposed to call their boss every ten minutes and ask him what to do next. I doubt it. I really do. But it is possible. If you want to test them, try sending them on a mission where they know they’ll be out of communication range with HQ. Like, they’re going into an anti-magic zone or that the top brass is worried about magical scrying or a mole or something. Make it part of the briefing that they’ve got to operate on their own initiative. Then, throw them one tricky choice and see how they react. If they panic, end up paralyzed, or spend six hours debating their course of action in committee, you have your answer. They don’t want that s$&%. If they handle the situation reasonably well, though, ask them at the end of the session—in a very general way—what they thought of the game that night. Don’t ask about the specific situation or anything like that. Just see what kind of reviews they give the game that night. If they don’t specifically mention the part where they had to think for themselves and describe it as a refreshing change of pace, if they’re just so-so about the game in general, you’re trying to fix something that ain’t broken.

Honestly, though, I wouldn’t bother with that s$&% if I were you. Because this is a classic GMing trap you’ve fallen into. GMs have these personal ideas about how RPGs should be played and what makes them fun. And they cannot wrap their f$&%ing heads around it when the players play differently or don’t have that kind of fun. So they’re convinced they’re doing something wrong. And crappy online GMs giving s$&% advice just make the situation worse.

The truth is, the things most GMs—especially online, advice-giving GMs who aren’t me—don’t understand is that the things they think are fun aren’t the things most players find fun. That’s why they’re GMs and not players. And why the players are players, not GMs. GMing and playing are different. They draw different kinds of people. For every group of players, for example, that loves the idea of narrative agency and creating world details for their own sakes, they’re ten groups of players who hate that s$&%. Who don’t want to create a f$&%ing world. They just want to play in one. That’s what the GM’s for.

I bet your players are having a great time being soldiers for the resistance and cracking heads and winning missions and s$&% like that. And the impactful choices you see as defining moments are just speedbumps in their fun. They probably don’t want to burn resources on sending spells and animal messengers every mission trying to find out whether they should capture the turncoat or just kill him outright. They’d probably be even happier if they got clear instructions from the get-go and could just get on with the execution challenge.

Ironically, what you’re proposing is actually taking away the players’ agency. The characters have tools and skills. The players are using them to resolve problems the way they think is best. If they wanted to strike off on their own and make their own calls, they could. And they would. The players are making choices. They’re choosing to follow orders and get further instructions.

Now, having said all that, there is another possibility. And I ain’t saying this as a joke or dig at you. This is a serious thing to consider. It’s possible you’re not presenting the choices and options the right way. It’s possible the players actually do want to blaze their own trails but something about how you’re presenting the game makes them feel like they can’t. Or shouldn’t. And lots of GMs struggle with that. It’s actually not easy to present meaningful, impactful choices and to create an open-ended world. It takes more than just giving the players a blank canvas or a list of choices, then waiting for the players to give their answer. That’s because most people—not most players, most human beings—don’t handle too much open-endedness well. There’s a reason why blank page syndrome is real. There’s ways to frame choices and options that make them easier for people to digest. But that’s a big issue and there’s so many ways to get it wrong that I can’t possibly diagnose the problem and advise you based on this e-mail.

Maybe, I need to do a full-length article about this topic. I don’t know. Any dancers in the crowd tonight?

But my gut tells me that’s not the issue. I really think you’re trying to fix a problem that doesn’t exist. I think your players are perfectly happy with the game you’re running and don’t want the game you wish you were running. So, you’ve got to decide whether you can be happy running your current game and letting the players have their fun. And if you can’t be, then you have to sit down with your players like f$&%ing adults and tell them you don’t like the way the game’s going. Tell them what you don’t like about it and see what they say. And if you all can’t find common ground, maybe you need new players.

Hope that helps. Whoever the f$&% you are.

Kevin asks…

I want my players to immerse themselves in the game’s world and leave their mark on it. So, sometimes, I give them the chance to tell me what they find during play rather than inventing the world for them. But they have this irritating tendency to say things like, “we found a fountain that heals the whole party and cures all our ailments and coats our weapons in diamonds.” Or “hidden behind the painting, I find the amazing axe of amazingness that kills foes in one hit and turns straw into gold.” How can I find a middle…

And I’ve heard enough. Did you read what I said to whoever the f$&% I was talking to above? If not, go read it now. And then feel free to withdraw your question.

See what I mean, Daniel? I get a crap-ton of these “my players are doing it wrong, how do I make them do it right and play the way I want them to” e-mails.

Everything I said above applies. Especially the part about how GMs assume that, because world-creation is so much damned fun, everyone wants to do it. But there’s another issue here. And that issue can be summed up thusly:

Some people can’t be trusted with the power of the game master.

Most people make s$&% choices. Terrible, awful, short-sighted, selfish choices. Not because they’re terrible, awful, short-sighted, selfish people, mind you, though some are. No, it’s just because most people don’t know any better. They’re doing the best they can, they’re just not very good.

Consider this: most low wealth or low-income people who win massive lottery prizes end up deeply depressed. And they usually end up poor again after just a couple of years. Even most middle-class people end up depressed after they win the lottery, though they usually end up holding on to the money a little better. Ironically, wealthy people who have huge windfalls usually turn out the happiest of all. And they usually end up managing the money better too.

Good game designers don’t give the players what they want. They know that just leads to a crappy gameplay experience. Good game designers don’t just let the players win. They impose challenges and limits and constraints. They make the players earn their victories. And a good GM is, in part, a good game designer. Because role-playing games aren’t just collaborative storytelling experiences or creativity exercises. They’re also games. It’s right there in the name.

Your players aren’t game designers, though. They’re not GMs. They probably don’t want the power of game design. And when they get it, they’re going to do crappy, stupid, unsatisfying things with it. Power that’s given, rather than earned or acquired, comes without discipline. And without discipline, power’s not a great thing to have.

Moreover, when undisciplined people suddenly have total freedom, the first thing they do is test the limits of that freedom. They want to see how much they can get away with. That’s just how people are. If you give a person the ability to create whatever they want out of thin air, the first thing most people will do—sadly—is to try to create something they know you’d expressly forbid. Just to see where the walls are. And if they don’t run into a wall the first time they should, they’re just going to keep looking for the walls.

You have to understand this s$&%. You have to understand human nature. It’s just one of the things that go along with being a good game designer and a good GM. It’s part of the discipline. And you also have to understand—and accept—that not everyone wants to be a GM. And not everyone can be good at it.

As for your game? Well, I hope your players have taught you something. Don’t trust them with the power of creation. It’s your world. You’re the GM. Stop dumping your responsibility on people who never signed up for the job.

Sneak Dog asks…

After playing D&D and other TTRPGs at a variety of levels, I realized I have no idea what experience levels actually mean in the setting. Is a 5th level fighter in D&D an expert swordsman or a town guard? Is a 16th level barbarian a demigod capable of wrestling a river to clean out a massive stable? Should the system define this stuff or is it up to the GM?

Sneak Dog? Didn’t you just drop a single hinting that you were going to hang up your GM screen for good? Or am I thinking of someone else?

I feel you. I really do. But I have no answer for you either. Because D&D has simply stopped giving a f$&% about what experience levels mean in the setting. Hell, it’s stopped caring what most things mean in the setting. But that’s a whole other rant.

It’s weird going back to D&D 3.5—which I recently did—and rediscovering how much firm setting stuff was built into the mechanics. Specifically as pertains to just how powerful player-characters were supposed to be and how common members of different classes were at different levels in different populations. Not in terms of raw numbers, mind you, but in terms of the likelihood of stumbling over a double-digit level wizard, say, in a metropolis.

And then there’s this solid gold table from page 31 of the Dungeons & Dragons 3.5 Dungeon Master’s Guide. Just check out that “who could do it” column. Tell me that s$&% ain’t great.

But we’re not talking about third edition here, are we? We’re talking about 5E. How powerful is a 5th level fighter or a 16th level barbarian in the world? Who knows? Who even knows how powerful a 1st level character is? How rare they are? Are 1st level PCs exceptional heroes or common as dirt? How many people in the world even have class levels? Is every town guard and sellsword a fighter? Is every hunter a ranger? Who the hell knows?

The funny thing, by the way, is that lots of people speak categorically about this s$&%. Like, some people will state like it’s a clear f$&%ing fact that the PCs are special, exceptional heroes. But other people will point out they’re basically apprentices who’ve never done anything worth doing. And both sides of the fight will cite all sorts of crap from the game’s books. This just goes to show how the game has no f$%&ing clue.

You can’t even establish a baseline level of power for a newly-minted PC. Let alone extend that logic to 5th level or 16th level or whatever. And then translate that into something about the game’s setting.

On top of that, though, the game’s balance system makes all of this even weirder. You never want the PCs fighting anything that’s too weak for them, right? Or too strong. That just won’t do. So, while there are a few high-level things that feel like they should be high-level things—like elder dragons and the tarrasques and Demogorgons—there’s also a lot of high-level stuff that doesn’t actually seem high-level. If the PCs can advance to 15th level, after all, why can’t goblins? Or orcs, despite their savage evil? It’s easy to create any creature at any level. And lots of GMs and adventure writers do just that.

Why’s that an issue? Well, pretend you’re running an adventure wherein the PCs are finally infiltrating the Dread Citadel of the Evil Overlord. They’re 15th level, say. The Evil Overlord being an Evil Overlord, he’s got a lot of perfectly normal guards in his Citadel. Stormtroopers. Centurions. Whatever. I mean, when you infiltrate Dread Citadels belonging to Evil Overlords, you expect to cut a bloody swath through a lot of stormtroopers, right?

As a GM, what level of challenge are you going to make those stormtroopers? As a rule, you’ve got to provide a reasonable challenge for 15th level heroes. Very few GMs have the conejos—you heard me—to let their PCs slaughter their way through waves of 1st level soldiers for a few hours. Even though that’d be f$&%ing awesome. So, instead, you end up with this weird situation where perfectly normal, enlisted grunts and gruntildas—the proper feminine form of grunt, by the way—have roughly the same skill and training as a hero with double-digit levels.

D&D’s 5th Edition goes to great lengths to downplay the idea that experience level means anything in the world at all. GMs are instructed to just build mechanically balanced challenges however they have to. Sure, there’s some lip service to tiers of play and some published modules handle it better than others. But, for the most part, the scrupulous balance between hero and challenge combined with the smoothing of the advancement curve has brought us to the point where level’s just a number that determines how many hit points everyone’s got. It’s got nothing to do with anything in the world.

Combine that with the fact that very low-level characters can already do amazing things and trivialize most non-combat challenges, and you’ve got a situation where the PCs basically start out as junior demigods, but so does everyone else in the world.

And I can’t help you fix that. The game’s system has to give you some kind of baseline to work with. It’s got to establish how the mechanics translate into the reality of the setting. As a GM, you can always redefine that s$&%, but you need a starting point.

It’s like this. In D&D 3.5, I know I can stock the Dread Fortress with hundreds of stormtroopers with 16 fighter levels apiece if I want to. The game gives me the option. But there’s a lot of subtext in the game telling me I probably shouldn’t. It’s not really stated outright. But it’s there. Because the game takes the time to establish what levels mean and how common PC classes are—and should be—in the world. I’ve got a baseline to follow or break away from. But in D&D 5E, you’re just on your own. And nothing you do is ever going to feel right because the game’s got no feel of its own.

Sorry.