It’s Ask Angry time.

Every month, I choose one to five reader-submitted questions to answer in my sick, abusive parody of advice columns. To be clear, though, the advice itself is absolutely solid. It’s the best advice you’ll get from anyone anywhere about running and playing games in which the players pretend to be elves. I just don’t sugarcoat anything and I’m not afraid to call it like I see it. The best truths are harsh truths and the best love is tough love.

Not that I love any of you. I don’t.

If the above sounds like a great way to get you some gaming advice, send your question to ask.angry@angry.games and maybe I’ll answer it in a future column. I do get a lot of questions, though; I can’t answer them all. The best way to make your question stand out, apart from asking a question that I think a lot of people need to hear the answer to, is to keep it as brief as possible. If I can tell at one quick glance that it’s a question I want to answer, you’re getting picked for sure. I’m pretty lazy. Otherwise, the more opportunities I see to abuse you unfairly and cruelly, the more likely I am to pick your question.

Nico asks…

What tips would you give a DM running a 7-player D&D 5E long-term homebrew campaign with a consistent 3-hour session per week [with an open-world structure as described in the Angry’s Open World Game series]?

Thanks, Nico. This question is exactly what I’m looking for. It’s clear and concise. There’s no extraneous bullshit before or after the question for me to cut out. I even get to plug an old series of mine. It’s just perfect.

Which is why it sucks that I’ve got to crush your hopes and dreams.

Nico, my tip for you is to not do that as soon as possible. That’s a terrible idea.

I know y’all think I’m a massive asshole that spends my whole life telling everyone what they’re doing is wrong, but that isn’t totally fair. I am a massive asshole — I don’t deny that — but I almost never tell anyone what they’re doing can’t be done. The people who really listen to me — and the supporters who’ve interacted with me in my Discord server — the people who really pay attention know that I’m the last guy to ever say, “That can’t be done; give up.” Usually, I’m the one yelling at the people saying, “That’s a bad idea and you should feel bad; don’t do it.” Hell, people usually yell that at me but I’m too busy doing the shit they say can’t be done to notice.

Shut up, it’s true.

But…

We also have to live in this ugly, nasty place called reality and reality is a harsh bitch. Some things just aren’t practical and that means that, sometimes, giving yourself the best chance to succeed means not fighting the real, actual, external constraints in the way of what you’re trying to do.

Unfortunately, your setup, Nico, is fighting real, actual, external constraints.

Let’s get the obvious — and least important issue — out of the way. Dungeons & Dragons is designed to accommodate three to five players. Once you hit six players or more, the system starts to break down. You can adjust for that — there’s guidance in the Dungeon Master’s Guide (2014), though it’s mainly for combat encounters — you can adjust for that, but it takes time and practice and it’s a pain in the ass and it doesn’t work great. Because even if you keep the system from breaking down, you’re still fighting the most merciless, cruelest force in the entire cosmos. You’re fighting time.

Think about this just in terms of raw minutes. That ain’t the best way to think about it — I admit this ain’t really an accurate way to assess the issue — but it does highlight an underlying issue you’re going to run into. With seven people at your table, you can only give each one eight minutes worth of your attention in every hour of gameplay. If you’re only running a three-hour session every week, there’s just not enough minutes to divide among the seven players.

Especially when you’re running Dungeons & Dragons.

Now, D&D 5E is a pretty streamlined game. I know people piss and moan about how slow it is, but a competent Game Master who knows the game and knows his players’ characters can still get a lot of game into a session. But it’s still D&D and it’s still a tabletop roleplaying game and so it’s still going to have some frame rate issues.

With seven players, your ability to know the players’ characters well enough to anticipate actions and keep spell effects in your head as well as to prompt slow or forgetful players is going to be pretty limited. That means, your players need to bring their best games. With seven players, though, it’s unlikely you’ve got a full roster of top-notch players who can slide through their actions and turns like a greased stick up a pig’s… holy shit, what the hell was that? Where did that analogy even come from? Nevermind. Moving on.

The point is that you’re going to be relying on every player to keep the pace up because you’re going to be at your own cognitive maximum load. But, with such a big group, everyone’s going to be stuck in waiting for their turn a bit longer than usual which means you’re going to have more engagement issues and attention drifts to deal with too. That’s just how people be. Now, add in all the possibilities for off-turn actions, reactions, and the players passing bonus dice and buffs around — because D&D loves that shit — and your most intense, action-packed scenes — combats and chases and shit like that — are going to be chugging like an NES game with too many sprites on the screen.

This ain’t just a combat thing, either. Just imagine the challenge of running a tense social interaction with seven people trying to each get a word in. The truth is, seven people can’t contribute meaningfully to a single conversation. Some of them are going to check out and some are going to get crowded out.

Running a D&D game for seven players is already running with an extreme pacing challenge, but when you consider you’re limited to three-hour sessions and add in the time it takes for seven people to show up and settle down — or connect and settle down if you’re running online, but, if you’re running online, just kill yourself because everything I said above counts double online — when you consider you’ve probably only got two-and-a-half hours tops of useful game time if everyone stays a hundred percent focused, now you’ve gone from setting the difficulty to Nightmare and into the realm of trying to beat the game on New Game Plus at Soul Level One.

But that ain’t enough for you. You’ve also decided to play with a Guitar Hero controller too.

That whole player-driven, open-world type game is probably the worst kind of game you could run for seven people in three hours a week. Why?

Have you ever watched three people try to reach a consensus on anything? How long does that take? Now double that. Then double it again because the Committee Slog is an exponential problem, not a linear problem.

Open-world games are driven by the players deciding, as a group, where to go and what to do and what goals to chase and so on. The problem is that group decisions take forever even for the smallest of groups. You’ve essentially decided to start every adventure with a very large group trying to reach a consensus on where to go and what to do given infinite possibilities. You’re also doing it in one of the worst group-decision-making situations that exists: the game table. At the game table, there are no lives on the line, no chain of command, no de facto authority structure, no pressure that enforces politeness or even mutual respect, and nothing at stake. Meanwhile, every player is playing their own special, fanfic superhero of their dreams. You’re basically choosing to kill every adventure’s first session in committee. And Heaven help you if there’s any serious mid-adventure dilemma to resolve.

Look, you’ve asked me for my advice, but you’ve already ignored a crap-ton of advice I’ve already published on this topic. Remember all that shit I said about running the game the world will let you run, not the one you want to run? Remember letting the practical realities tell you what campaign you can run? If you were prepared to take my advice, you’d have stopped typing in the middle of that e-mail and said, “Shit, this is pretty much a setup for a game that’s going to implode in three months and probably burn me the hell out in the process.”

You know how I know that? It’s because, if you didn’t know what a terrible setup you were wading into, you wouldn’t have sent the e-mail. You knew this was going to be bad. That’s why you asked me for tips.

But, as I noted above, I’m not the kind of guy who says, “That’s impossible; give up.” Instead, if you give me a situation, I’ll look for a solution that gives you the best chance to succeed. In this case, there’s a pretty simple solution. Just split the group in two and run two different games. Instead of running one weekly game, run two games and alternate them from week to week. You can even do that thing where you run them both in the same universe and they can hear about each others’ exploits — provided you manage the clock and the calendar carefully and, no, you don’t need that one-to-one time bullshit everyone realized was a terrible idea fifty years ago — and you can even do occasional super-awesome weekend-long marathon crossover events. Maybe the two teams are members of the same organization and the teams each pick missions from the same list that contribute, somehow, to the organization’s goals.

There’s lots of fun shit you can do with this setup.

Yes, this does mean the players don’t get a weekly game. That sucks for them, but a good game every other week is better than two months of a slowly disintegrating sloggy mess of a campaign that eventually falls apart. You might even get lucky and two players might say, “You know what? I’d rather play a game every week so I’ll go find a different table.” Then you’re down to five and that’s just on the outside edge of manageable.

All of that said…

My advice is always predicated on maximizing the odds of success. Or, in this case, minimizing the odds that the campaign will die before you decide it’s time to end it. That’s precisely what I’m telling you to do. If you want to give yourself the best chance to succeed, split your armies and run two simultaneous games. That’s the less taxing, safer choice.

However, I cannot predict the future perfectly. I’m not saying your setup is guaranteed to fail; I’m just saying that most campaigns set up the way you’ve described will end in failure. I can’t even say what that failure will look like and I can’t guarantee that the campaign won’t be salvageable after the failure. Honestly, the best outcome here is that a couple of the players get frustrated and quit or ghost you and then you have a more manageable group. Doesn’t matter. That ain’t the point.

The point is, there is a chance that you can actually pull this off and get a fun game out of it. Maybe even a great game. The odds are against you, but it ain’t impossible. So, maybe, despite everything I’ve said, you might decide to go ahead anyway and give it a try. Take the big chance. There’s nothing wrong with that. Hell, you can’t achieve greatness without risking great failure. I’m all for that. In that case, I don’t really have any specific tips for you — other than don’t get too attached and don’t be too proud to say, “This ain’t working; time to pull the plug,” — but everything I said above should at least tell you what you’re going to need to manage to pull it off. Pacing and engagement are going to be your biggest concerns and group decision-making is a morass that’s going to suck up a lot of time. Those are the problems you need to solve.

I’m sorry I can’t help you get exactly the game you want. Whether you take my advice or you plunge on heedlessly, I wish you all the best. Godspeed, Nico.

Hank asks…

Do you think that games that use GM Actions or GM Moves, like Dungeon World or Blades in the Dark, can provide meaningful gameplay experiences — especially challenge? Why or why not?

Wow! Another concise question free of extraneous bullshit! Thanks, Hank!

Unfortunately, though, I can’t call this one clear. Oh, sure, it looks clear enough on first reading and I pretty much had my answer before I finished reading it, but then I had to go back and reread it before I caught my mistake. Only then did I realize the question is actually really easy to answer. Three repetitive, hyperbolic paragraphs are all I need.

Yes, I think games like Dungeon World and Blades in the Dark can be used to provide players with meaningful and meaningfully challenging gameplay experiences. I don’t see any reason to assume otherwise. Any game can provide a meaningful — and meaningfully challenging — gameplay experience. To the right player, even Candy Land can provide a meaningful — and meaningfully challenging — gameplay experience. That ain’t actually a very high bar to set.

As long as a player’s actions matter somehow, in some way, and as long as the player is intellectually or emotionally engaged, and as long as the player believes the outcome isn’t totally arbitrary, they’re having a meaningful gameplay experience. I’ve had plenty of meaningful gameplay experiences playing single-player board games and video games. Beating Super Mario Brothers 2 was an extremely meaningful — and meaningfully challenging — gameplay experience for young Angry, and that was a linear-as-hell hop-and-pop platformer. I mastered it, I earned my victory, and I cared enough to keep playing. Beating Hollow Knight was just as meaningful for adult Angry. Meaningfulness unlocked.

Now, even though it is totally obvious to me that there’s nothing about Blades in the Dark’s Game Master Move system that would get in the way of creating meaningful gameplay experiences — I’m done with the meaningfully challenging parenthetical; it’s redundant anyway — to the point where I consider the question totally silly, I do understand what you’re really asking and why you’re really asking it. I just think you’re using the wrong words.

This leads me to the initial answer I was going to give.

See, my brain read that question, first, as “Angry, do you hate games that restrict the Game Master to specific moves and can you explain why you hate them with a particular emphasis on how they basically destroy one of the most important mechanics that make roleplaying games work like roleplaying games,” and I was prepared to rant myself hoarse. Or, given that I type this shit out, rant my fingers raw.

Well, to be fair, it wasn’t going to be that much of a rant. But then, I don’t really hate games like Dungeon World and Blades in the Dark, though BitD doesn’t really interest me much except as a mechanical oddity because I hate heist bullshit and I think the way roleplaying games keep trying to pull off heists is bullshit too. Because let’s be clear here, we’re really talking about those two games and their mechanical cousins.

See, the whole constraining Game Masters to certain moves and actions thing is pretty specific to the Powered by the Apocalypse engine which was first presented in Apocalypse World by D. Vincent and Meguey Baker back in 2010 and then exploded in popularity with Dungeon World by Sage LaTorra and Adam Koebel in 2012. I know there’s a lot of debate about whether Blades in the Dark counts as a Powered by the Apocalypse game — and its publisher, Evil Hat Games, insists it doesn’t and labels it a Forged in the Dark game — but John Harper himself — the dude who wrote Blades in the Dark— has said several times he personally considers Blades in the Dark to be a Powered by the Apocalypse game and he certainly built Blades in the Dark on the core Powered by the Apocalypse engine.

So, yeah, this Game Master Move thing is mostly a Powered by the Apocalypse innovation.

See, the goal was explicitly to treat the Game Master as just another participant in the game. Sure, he’s playing by different rules and his goals are different, but he’s still participating in the game. As such, he’s got specific actions he’s allowed to take at certain times. Those are called Game Master Moves. There are hard moves and soft moves and the Game Master is only allowed to make hard moves — like dealing damage — when the players do certain things and fail in certain ways.

Generally speaking.

There are other games and systems that constrain Game Master actions and responses, but none is as explicit or firm as the Apocalypse games — including Blades in the Dark — as far as I know. And while I get the idea behind it and while I have had a ton of fun running Dungeon World and several other Powered by the Apocalypse games — hell, Blades in the Dark is fun enough though it ain’t my kind of game because of that heist crap — I find the whole idea really wrong-headedly stupid if I’m being honest.

I’ve been clear, first of all, on my stance that the Game Master is not a player nor even a participant in the game. The Game Master is part of the system. The Game Master is a game mechanic. The Game Master is actually a vital game mechanic. The Game Master makes roleplaying games work.

The simple fact is there is no way you could write a complete ruleset that would enable enough depth to create a true roleplaying game experience. You can’t do free-form, open-ended gameplay with rules alone. You need a human brain running the show to respond to whatever dumbass actions the players can imagine. Putting a human behind the screen to run the game’s holodeck matrix was key to making roleplaying games what they are.

Of course, that was a risky move. By putting the game’s execution in the Game Master’s hands — and more importantly, brain — you’re making the quality of the gameplay experience dependent on the quality of the Game Master. It’s thus in a designer’s best interest to give Game Masters plenty of tools, advice, and help to empower them to run good games. It’s also important to make sure that running games isn’t a miserable experience no one wants to do.

But the Game Master Moves in Powered by the Apocalypse games go well beyond tools, advice, and help. They treat the Game Master like a player and force them to execute only the rules as written and that works against everything the Game Master is supposed to bring to the table. Literally. Because the Game Master is supposed to bring an unconstrained brain with human judgment. If you limit the Game Master to executing rules in response to specific triggers, you might as well replace him with an app. Or a book. “If you choose to Defy Danger and roll a 6 or less, turn to page 54.” Now the game’s limited to only what you can write in the ruleset.

Of course, there’s a spectrum here. Powered by the Apocalypse games are neither as constrained nor as constraining as I’m making them sound. The Game Master Move system is pretty open and it’s not far removed from what other roleplaying games do implicitly. Consider, for example, that in D&D you can totally call Grant Advantage and Impose Disadvantage Game Master Moves taken in response to certain player actions. So this is all just academic discussion.

Likewise, meaningfulness — and meaningful challengeness — is also a spectrum. In the end, a meaningful challenge is any challenge that makes you feel something for overcoming it. Hence my statement that Super Mario Brothers 2 and Hollow Knight are meaningful and meaningfully challenging. I cared enough to see them through, I cared enough to get good, and I felt good about myself when I did. But are they the same as resolving a complex moral dilemma that makes me discover something about myself and the human condition and ultimately makes me a better person? Absolutely not.

Then again, most people don’t want too much of that shit and most roleplaying game adventures are much closer to the Hollow Knight end of the spectrum than to the identity-remaking moment of self-reflection end. Though, to be fair, Hollow Knight did have a lot to say about its themes. But I digress.

I do think too many constraints in a roleplaying game could impede the Game Master from creating certain kinds of meaningful experiences or meaningful challenges, but I really don’t think Powered by the Apocalypse games get anywhere close to that. Nor do I think that’s what really matters.

What I think really matters is that the idea of constraining Game Masters is the opposite of everything roleplaying games stand for and the goal of making a Game Master a participant in the game won’t lead anywhere worth going.

And I think, Hank, that that’s really what you were trying to say.