You’re back, eh? I guess you liked my take on True Game Mastering. Either that or you just found my site and you have no idea what the hell I’m talking about.
Well, if you are new here, this is the second part in a year-long, twenty-five-ish part journey. The Way of the True Game Master.
Click here for the The True Game Mastery Series index.
Still here? Great! That means you want to be a True Game Master. And now that you’re totally sold on Owning your game and building Investment, let me hack apart that enthusiasm like it’s a troll and I’ve got a flaming vorpal greatsword. That’s right: it’s reality check time.
Ownership? Investment? You Learned ‘Em; Now Forget ‘Em
I spewed a lot of words about how True Game Masters earn player Investment with great narratives and great gameplay experiences and by taking full Ownership of their TTRPG adventures, campaigns, and sessions last week. And now I want you to forget I said any of that crap. Because I’m sure gonna. I’m probably never again going to mention Ownership or Investment. Except in passing.
Instead, I’m going to teach you lots of specific techniques and provide lots of advice, none of which will seem to be remotely related to Ownership or Investment. Hell, some of my lessons will seem to take you in completely the wrong direction. But I promise you that every word I write — not counting sarcastic remarks, asides, and sidebars — every word I write, is written with the express purpose of helping you build player Investment or Own your game.
What gives? Why no more talk of Investment or Ownership? And why am I going to instruct you to do things that you’re absolutely, totally, completely, categorically sure will make for worse gameplay and narrative experiences?
Partly, it’s because I’m the expert and you’re not and if you knew good advice from bad, you wouldn’t need me. That’s me taking Ownership of my work, by the way. But mostly, it’s just the nature of the beast. It’s just how Game Mastering is.
The Art of Mastering the Game
Game Mastering isn’t a skill; Game Mastering is an art. And that isn’t pedantical, semantical bullshit because I don’t do pedantical, semantical bullshit. There’s a huge difference between art and skill. Really huge. If the difference were a figure on a grid, it’d be at least five squares across. And you have to understand the difference if you want to master Game Mastering.
Arts are Complex
Game Mastering is complex. No duh, Angry, right? Everyone knows that. But hold on there, smartass, I didn’t say complicated, I said complex.
The Art of Game Mastering is a complex synthesis of many, many different skills. Way too many for me to list on this site because I have to pay for my storage by the byte. But I can rattle off a few. There’s game design and storytelling, obviously, which are themselves complex arts. There’s communication and logistics and creative writing and conflict resolution and leadership and social interaction and information management and information presentation and puzzle design and logistics and organization and on and on and on and on and on.
And the Art of Game Mastering isn’t just the sum of all those skills. It’s a synthesis. The skills come together to something greater than the sum of the individual skills.
It’s like painting. Painting involves brush technique, color theory, composition, perspective, working with specific materials, tool maintenance, and a thousand other things I can’t list because I’m not a painter. And you could master every one of those individual skills and still not paint anything people actually want to pay for. Or look at. Because putting together texture and composition and color choice and brush technique and using the right media? That synthesis is an art in itself.
That’s Game Mastering. You can master every single individual skill involved and still run sucky games. And like some talented painters, you can run amazing games without having any idea how any of the individual skills work in a vacuum.
Arts are Subjective
Feedback is SUS AF
Game Masters hear a lot of feedback. Whether they want it or not. As a Game Master, you’re probably inclined to go digging for feedback. You probably think it’s a good thing. But you have to treat all feedback with extreme levels of skepticism. And that’s down to how brains work.
Enjoyment, engagement, and investment? Those are emotions. And they come from very old, very fast, very snap-judgment parts of your brain. And you don’t know them, you feel them. In general, humans are pretty good at knowing how they’re feeling. At least, they know if they’re feeling good or bad.
The problem is reason and understanding and analysis come from totally different brain parts. Newer and slower parts that don’t know anything about feelings. When you try to figure out why you feel the way you do, a part of your brain that doesn’t speak emotion is trying to understand the emotions in a totally disconnected, different part of your brain. And it rarely gets it right.
In general, people know whether they like what they’ve got, but they’re bad at explaining why. And they are absolutely awful at guessing what they’ll like before they’ve got it. Keep that in mind when you seek feedback and never, ever ask the players to assess anything they haven’t experienced.
Game Masters produce experiences that are part game and part narrative. In other words, they produce entertainment experiences. Entertainment is entirely subjective. It’s about evoking emotional responses in your audience. Emotions aren’t rational or reasonable. They can’t be understood in logical terms. They’ve got to be felt.
Does that mean there’s no way to be a True Game Master? After all, subjective experiences vary — by definition — from person to person. How can someone produce a satisfying subjective experience for anyone else? Or for anyone outside of a very small number of very similar people?
Who cares how it’s possible? It is. And you know it is. If it weren’t possible for artists to create broadly appealing emotional experiences, there’d be no popular culture. Part of being an artist is having a knack for creating subjective experiences that satisfy lots of other people.
There are actually many ways to evoke emotional experiences across broad groups of people, even across sociocultural lines. People’s brains are more similar than different. And when it comes to game design and storytelling, there’s a giant pile of great games and stories that show you just what kind of experiences touch lots of people in lots of similar ways.
Getting Good at Arting
If Game Mastering is a complex synthesis of an unfathomably large number of skills and can’t be understood logically or rationally, how the hell can you — or anyone — possibly learn how to do it?
First, let me reassure you that you can learn it. I’m betting my livelihood on that because teaching you how to do it is — God help me — my career now. And I really don’t want to dust off my accounting degree and go back to the debit mines.
Fortunately, your brain is hardwired to learn complex, subjective arts. Provided you get the hell out of its way. Let me tell you about Experiential Learning.
The Best Teacher is Experience
Citation Not Needed
I’ve been running games for several decades and writing about games for over a decade. In that time, I’ve consumed a hell of a lot of information on a crap ton of topics. See, I realized early that if I wanted to really understand this whole GMing thing — insofar as it’s possible to understand it — I’d need to understand lots of other things too. Things like story structure and game design and human psychology. I’ve devoured countless credible books on many topics and I’ve used what I learned to adjust my GMing style accordingly.
That combination of lay research and practical experience? That’s what I’m sharing with you. Out of the goodness of my heart.
I am not writing an academic paper. This site isn’t going to earn me a Ph.D. in Roleplaying Games Administration or anything. And I frankly don’t care if you agree with me or use my advice. I’m not out to prove anything. I’m just offering you a shortcut and you can take it if you want it.
You can do what I did. You can read The Paradox of Choice and Thinking Fast and Slow and Screenplay and Sway and Behavioral Economics: The Basics and Twelve Rules for Life and The Heroes’ Journey and You Are Not So Smart or The First Twenty Hours or The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People or Designing for How People Learn or any of the dozens of other books occupying my shelf right now, all of whose lessons I’m absolutely not qualified to teach but will nevertheless summarize so you can pretend to be an elf better, or you can take the shortcut I’m offering because it’s just pretend elf games.
Just don’t ask me to prove what I know. Because there’s no margin in that and I don’t care if you believe me.
You’ve learned many, many very complex skills just by actually doing things. Playing video games? Driving a car? Navigating the complex social drama that is a holiday home with family? Those are very complex skills. And you didn’t learn them from one weekend with a driving instructor or from a politically-charged website telling you to disown any member of your family whose opinion differs from yours. You learned them through experience.
When you do something — or try to — all the parts of your brain involved in the task light up like overloaded Christmas bulbs. That is not how a neuroscientist would explain it, but I’m not a neuroscientist so I don’t have to be accurate.
When you were learning to drive and pulled out of your driveway, a bunch of different brain bits all fired at once. The bits that control your hand on the gear shift lit up. The bits that process your tactile senses as the gear shift clunked into place sparked and arced. So did the bits that control your eye and neck muscles to shift your field of vision and so did the bits that control your foot muscles and the bits that process auditory input and heard the angry honk from the approaching car. Your brain was like Time Square on New Year’s Eve.
When brain bits fire off at once, your brain assumes you need those parts to work together. So it quickly wires some extra connections between those parts. And every time those parts fire off in synch, your brain wires more connections between them. This is down to a thing called neuroplasticity. Which is a neuroscience term.
But that ain’t all. The quick, emotional, hyper-aware, snap-judgment part of your brain is also constantly evaluating what’s going on. And it’s drinking in a vast array of sensory information to do so. Far more information than you’re consciously aware of taking in. And it’s monitoring things like the stress hormones triggered by an approaching moving thing in your peripheral vision and the fear that you’re about to die. And it decides whether things are going well or going poorly.
When things are going well, every new connection your brain builds, it builds tough. When things are going badly, your brain builds weak, iffy, tentative connections. Kind of. Again, I’m not a neuroscientist and I’m generalizing a lot.
That’s Experiential Learning. And triggering it deliberately is called Practicing. And it’s the only way to master a complex skill. Once you know the basics of how to turn on a car and obey the rules of the road, the only way to learn to drive is to practice.
Same with Game Mastering. Once you can get a bunch of friends together and muddle through a game, all you can do to master the art is to keep running games. Mostly.
Exploiting Your Brain for Maximum Game Mastery
Let’s see if I can squeeze something more concrete out of this than “all you can do is mostly just run games until they’re good.” There are actually four things you can do to supercharge your brain’s Experiential Learning potential. And I’m going to help you with three of them.
Above All, Run Games
I can’t overstate the importance of practice. If you want to Master Game Mastering, you have to run games. Lots of games. As many as you can. This is the single most important path to mastery. So, if you’ve only got four hours a week to devote to this entire hobby, spend every last minute of them running games. Quit watching videos, reading my website, or doing anything that isn’t running games. That’ll earn you Master status the fastest with the time you’ve got.
Feed Your Brain the Good Stuff
If you’re running all the games you can conceivably run, the next best thing you can do is show your brain what good, subjective experiences look like. Consume media you enjoy. Read books. Watch movies. Good movies. Nothing released after 2010. And play games. Board games and video games. Fill your brain with examples of good narratives and good gameplay experiences. That’ll help your intuitive, snap-judgment brain tell good TTRPG experiences from bad.
It’s also worth immersing yourself in some TTRPG-specific media. Read about the hobby. Or watch videos about it. But that’s less valuable than training your brain separately to recognize both good narrative experiences and good gameplay experiences. This is one of two reasons why I suggest not going overboard consuming streamed TTRPGs or actual play podcasts.
Work on Your Form
If you’re running games and you’re consuming non-TTRPG media and you’ve still got some free time, use that time to work on specific skills and techniques. Game Mastery is a complex synthesis of many skills. You can practice some of those skills directly. Especially if there’s a specific skill that’s giving you trouble. It’s kind of like having a trainer help you correct your form.
But — and I cannot stress this enough — too much of this crap isn’t learning. It actually detracts from learning if you overdo it. So try to work on one skill at a time.
May I Humbly Suggest a Good Source for TTRPG Immersion and Help with Form?
If you’re looking to immerse yourself in TTRPG-specific advice — to supplement your enjoyment of related games and stories — and get help with specific Game Mastering techniques, I know the perfect place…
And it needs your support to stay online.
But I digress…
Relax Your Brain
Do you want to make this Experiential Learning crap as difficult as possible? Do you want to turn mastering Game Mastering into a protracted, insufferable ordeal? One that’s likely doomed to fail? Just get your conscious brain involved.
Your conscious, rational, logical brain isn’t useful with the subjective. Mostly it’s just there to guess what the subjective parts of your brain are doing so it can go looking for stuff to make your subjective brain happy. And it sucks at that because it doesn’t speak the language. While the very old, capable parts of your brain are mastering very complex skills, your conscious brain is endlessly asking, “what are you doing? Why? What’s that for? Why does that work? Does it work? How do you know? Are you even doing this right? I don’t think you’re doing it right.”
Want to see what I mean? Find a recipe for a complex dish you’ve never prepared before. Something really challenging like beef wellington or consommé or that blowfish that kills you if you make a single tiny mistake. Now, borrow a two-year-old child or make your own. And ask the two-year-old child to help you prepare the dish.
Gamers like logic and reason. That’s why they obsess over which dice-rolling techniques are the least swingy and how to achieve perfect game balance even though that crap doesn’t matter or doesn’t exist. As a gamer, you’re tempted to analyze everything. So, you might think recording your game sessions and analyzing them is a good idea. Or you might spend more time watching videos analyzing games and stories than you spend playing games and watching movies. Or you might try to implement every piece of advice I give you into every game perfectly.
Game design analysis is interesting. It’s worth consuming once in a while. But it won’t help you as much as consuming good games will.
My advice can help you overcome a sticky problem at the table, but if you try to memorize and implement every word I write instead of just letting it mostly slosh around in your unconscious, it’ll screw up your practice.
And if you record every session and listen for all the mistakes, you’ll convince yourself you’re a sucky game master and your brain will be a stew of stress hormones more toxic than a blowfish soufflé prepared with the help of a toddler.
Stress is also why it’s a bad idea to absorb too many actual-play TTRPG podcasts and streams until you’re very confident in your own abilities. If you’re like most people, you’ll endlessly compare yourself to those other, better GMs. Comparisons like that lead to stress. And stress leads to continued Game Mastering suckage.
In short, trust your brain to do its thing without your attention. Don’t overanalyze or overthink and don’t try to work on more than one aspect of your form at a time. Mostly, just relax and run games.
Why My Lessons Won’t Make Sense
Ass Pains are Immersive
Maybe you’ve noticed that I keep mentioning fiddly little pain-in-the-ass mechanics like supply and ammo tracking. Mechanics that players like to piss and moan about and that GMs like to throw away. Guess what? They’re actually really valuable. And they’re valuable because they’re a pain in the ass.
It’s all about Immersion.
Immersion is a player’s ability to pretend they’re not playing a game despite all the evidence they are. Or, less sarcastically, Immersion is a player’s ability to lose themselves in the fantasy of the game. The thing is, Immersion isn’t hard to achieve. Human brains love Immersion and they’re willing to ignore all sorts of sensory evidence to maintain it. You know this is true. You’ve lost yourself in movies and video games even though sitting for so long made your ass hurt and the controller was giving you thumb cramps.
One thing that helps maintain Immersion is constant reminders that things work how they should. If you have to tick off an arrow every time you shoot a foe, you have to think of the arrow as a real, physical thing and you have to stress over how many arrows you have left. Instead of the act of making a mark on paper reminding you that you’re playing a game, your dumb brain clings to the fact that it feels like the sort of thing an archer would stress over and therefore you feel like an archer.
The more little reminders that you’re simulating a world and not just playing an abstract game, the stronger the Immersion. And the more pain-in-the-ass bookkeeping you drop for the sake of convenience, the shakier the illusion that you’re doing anything but pushing dice around.
Now that I’m done explaining a very complex aspect of neurophysiology I’m wholly unqualified to talk about, let me get back to the point. Because, yes, I had a point when I started and I’d kind of like to make it.
First, throughout the rest of what I’m laughably calling a course in Game Mastery, I’m not going to talk much about Investment or Ownership even though I claimed those ideas were central to True Game Mastery. Second, a lot of my future lessons will leave you saying, “how the hell can this possibly lead to increased Ownership or Investment.” Or worse, leave you saying, “oh hell no, this is just going to lead to crap games my players will hate.”
Why? Well, there are a bunch of reasons.
First, Game Mastering isn’t just about subjective experiences, it’s about long-term subjective experiences. It’s about creating experiences that feel good for weeks, months, or years. True Game Masters worry more about how the game will feel tomorrow or next month than how it feels right now. After all, there’s only ever one present moment but there’s an infinity of future moments. At least, there would be if Game Masters weren’t mortal humans and TTRPG campaigns didn’t tend to peter out after six months.
Human brains are really weird. Especially when it comes to the interplay between present-moment pleasure and long-term engagement. For instance, in the long run, humans are happier with decisions they can’t undo. I know that’s counterintuitive, but it’s true. And it happens because your brain actually does a bunch of secret, behind-the-scenes work to gradually make you accept things you can’t control. If you know you can undo a decision at any time, your brain is constantly re-evaluating the decision. And no decision stands up to that kind of long-term scrutiny. That’s called the Law of Diminishing Returns.
The point is, if you want to drastically increase the odds your players will be happy with their characters in the long term, don’t allow any kind of retraining or take-backsies and make it really hard to retire characters.
See what I mean? This crap is bonkers sometimes.
Second, Game Mastering is a complex art, right? So there are a lot of moving parts. Every change changes something else. And those changes don’t just propagate through the whole system, they compound on themselves. A lot of times, I’ll tell you to make small changes that do a lot of different things at once. For example, when I tell you to limit the number of available races in your TTRPG campaign, it’s not just because people tend to be more creative under constraints — though that’s true — and it’s not just because people tend to be more satisfied with long-term choices when forced to select from smaller numbers of options — though that’s true too — and it’s not just because it trains you to take Ownership of your campaign — though it does — and it’s not just because it’s easier for you to build strong identities for a small number of races than a large number of races and thereby makes it feel like your world’s inhabited by several distinct fantasy races instead of a hodgepodge of funny looking human-ish things — though it does that too. Limiting the number of races does all of that crap. And it does more stuff besides.
That’s why it’s bonkers when people try to figure out the one, specific reason for anything I do. I never do things for just one reason.
Relatedly and third, that same complexity means Game Mastering choices are rife with unintended consequences. That’s when a choice you make has an undesirable side-effect. When fixing something breaks something else. Suppose, for instance, you impose strict ammo and ration tracking in your TTRPG campaign. Good on you. That’s a great way to build Investment. But suppose you also think long and hard about encumbrance tracking and decide it’s a bunch of fiddly complexity that doesn’t add much depth to the game. It’s a pain in the ass and does the game no good. That’s also a totally reasonable game decision.
But when your players realize that, without weight limits, they can carry as much ammo and food as they can afford, tracking that stuff doesn’t matter at all anymore. No one’s ever going to run out. Bingo bango, unintended consequence.
Making Progress
Give This Crap Some Space to Work
I’ve asked you a few times now to trust me enough to test my advice at the table instead of judging it by reading it. Because that’s the only way to judge anything as complex as Game Mastering. This is why I don’t judge a TTRPG system or mechanic until I’ve used it at my own table. And why I ignore any opinion of my work that doesn’t start, “I followed your advice for three months…”
Keep in mind that when I’m asking for your trust, I’m asking for long-term trust.
First, remember it takes two or three sessions before any change feels remotely comfortable. When you change your game’s rules or your technique, you spend the first three sessions just remembering what you changed and how. It takes you three sessions just to internalize the change.
Second, all my advice is about long-term, incremental improvements. It takes some time for any change to really affect the entire complex system that is a TTRPG campaign. And the direct, observable effects might be pretty small. This means you need another two or three weeks after you’re used to the change before you’ll see any impact at all.
The point is, you’ve got to be in this for the long haul. Once you adopt a chance, you need to stick with it for six to twelve sessions. Only then can you ask yourself if your game is going well. If you’re happy with your game twelve sessions after you made a change, the change was probably a good one, even if you can’t see what exactly it’s doing. If you’re not happy with your game twelve sessions after a change, the change is either not helping or it’s making things worse. So dump it.
The same is true on the other side of the screen, by the way. Players resist change. It takes two or three sessions before players stop resisting or resenting any change. Then it takes two or three more sessions before they’re used to it. And two or three more sessions before they can decide if they’re happy.
And for the sake of all that is good and holy, do not ask your players if they’ll accept a change. Just tell them you’re changing things and you’ll let them know when you want their feedback.
In twelve weeks.
Game Mastering is the complex art of creating subjective entertainment experiences that marry the best aspects of games and stories. You can only master it experientially, it can’t be understood rationally, and all the best advice is weird and counterintuitive. As such, while I’ll do my best to explain as much as I can, you’re going to have to trust me sometimes and just keep chugging along.
The problem is, chugging along takes a long time and it won’t feel good. Practice is hard and painful and slow. It hurts to do things you’re not good at it. And you can only make incrementally tiny improvements so you won’t ever notice you’re making progress. And you can’t trust the feedback you get from your audience half the time. How the hell are you supposed to keep your spirits up? Because you’ve got to keep your spirits up. If you get stressed, you stop learning.
In short, how can you reassure yourself you’re making progress?
I’ll tell you what a local golf pro told me as he struggled to help me suck a little less at golf. It’s the only thing I actually learned from him, but that’s my fault, not his. Because I didn’t commit myself to practice.
Do as I say, not as I do.
Anyway, the golf pro told me to judge my progress by my worst swings, not my best. Great golf shots are really rare, especially for amateurs. And great shots don’t improve much over time. But if I kept practicing, I’d notice my worst swings would get less and less bad. If I kept practicing, I’d stop merely scaring the ball by swinging my club past it. I’d connect more. Sure, I’d send the ball caroming off at impossible angles or into the parking lot, but I’d do that less and less too. Soon, although the ball wasn’t going anywhere near where I was aiming, it was posing a lot less danger to other golfers and passers-by with every swing. I was moving the ball forward.
This ain’t a glamorous way to judge success. “My crappy games get slightly less crappy with every session” is about as humble a brag as you can Tweet. But it is progress. And when you’re struggling to stick with something hard, you have to cling to anything that looks like progress just to keep from feeling like a failure.
But that’s enough of a pep talk from me. Next time, I’ll help you improve an actual Game Mastering skill. I’ll try to help you narrate better. Or at least, less crappily.
I’ve been noticing over the last several sessions I’ve really been trying to apply some things that you’ve brought up in semi recent articles and something you mentioned here. One, I’m putting more effort to include NPCs that my players care about during adventures, especially recurring characters. Two, I’m forcing decision points that they cannot take back. Three, I’m toning down my planning brain and letting my gut carry more of the work. I can definitely feel the difference in my game. But even the players knowing they can hurt the NPCs’ feelings because they kept a secret for months, and them wincing when they know they’ve made NPCs mad because they know they can’t take back their choices… It’s magical. And came from a combo of my head and gut. I think I now understand what you mean by investment. I just want to learn more because when I capture it, I can see my games becoming much less bad.
Thanks for the articles, I’m pretty excited for this year’s batch!
You’re welcome. Thanks for taking the time to share your experiences. I’m glad you’re enjoying your game more.
A good article, and I now know what books to look into adding to my reading list too!
Off topic, I know it’s never going to be updated, but I still like reading through your Megadungeon series, enough so that I’m planning to make my own Megadungeon at some point.
Thank you, Angry GM.
About incremental improvement on the worse swing/session : it is also proved true in photography: everyone is able to sometimes take a great shot. But after 10 years of amateur photography my rate of good photo to crap is slowly but steadily improving. And you paid pro photographer so much vs your uncle, because they can guarantee good photo, while your uncle is only showing you its best shots – and not all the key moments he has missed.
And my 10 years on improv’ has also shown me how much you can only learn by doing it again and again.
I need to apply those lessons to GM, but finding motivated friend AND time away from my children has proven too much for now.
What I am keeping from this : even if I am not able to find organize the recurring campaignof my dream, I should still try the 1h30 session with semi-motivated friends to learn the craft and improve.
Absolutely this. Having shot rifle at international level, I’d absolutely echo that you track progress by seeing your worst performance get less crap.
And a pro photographer has to nail the shot every time because you can’t redo the bride walking down the aisle. Also they carry insurance for when they so screw up, but that’s probably not relevant here…
I’m very excited about this new start; ias you’d probably point out it’s too early for feedback but it seems great so far.
I thought “caroming” was for sure a typo of “careening,” but here we are.
Thank you for that list of books I have been wanting to deepen my understanding of various subjects about the game. If you have more please do not hesitate to share them. I will be both DMing games and reading them on the side.
I like the new article formats and the sidebars have good info.
If they just weren’t inside the article to begin with.
I like reading about the immersion reasons for arrow counting but not when I am trying to understand why you won’t teach neurophysiology of subject experiences.
The sidebar location turns a single column article with side notes into a two column article about two different subjects. Does the site template not allow them in the right hand margin that sits there empty ?
This article … wait, sorry …”I followed your advice for over a year” since I found your site. Thus article made me realize I’ve already been adding the incremental things from the advice you give, and wow, it really does make a difference. I changed the way I did recaps, changed the way I describe things, and most recently changed the immersion by making sure I talked about weather, clouds, etc. I’m already getting players saying that they feel more immersed in the world, and even the quiet one is joining in more!
Great article, though after two pep talks and some theory I’m burning with anticipation over the practical advice. One thing I’ve always lamented is that (outside of your book, which I still got to buy) the practical changes here have to be pieced together from different articles that often weren’t conceived of as a unit. By the way: is the information of this year’s course the same as the one in the book (though more refined) or is it sort of a sequel?
On to another topic, while I was sharing your articles I started to wonder: would you acquiesce to someone translating your article (with proper credit, ofc) in other languages? Not that I have the time to do it atm, but I suspect many people who support you on Patreon could do it. Some countries (like Italy) have many players that don’t like to read English, even when they can more or less understand the language.
Anyway, on to a sourer note: “Navigating the complex social drama that is a holiday home with family? […] you didn’t learn them from […] a politically-charged website telling you to disown any member of your family whose opinion differs from yours.”
Are you referring to the articles where Mr PRetty Unbearable had a huge tantrum about others reminding people “Hey, putting up with bigoted or abusive family members is totally optional, the blood of the covenant is thicker than the water of the womb”? If so, that’s hilarious, but I have to reiterate my dislike for tangents where I’m reminded of your real life opinions.
Anyway, this semester I’m hoping to start DMing (finally), so I’ll be using your advice. Thanks and good luck with the new schedule, I know it’s hard to adjust.
My only “real life opinion” is “social interaction is a learned skill” and “not one you learn online from online media of any kind.” Anything else you added. And if that sort of thing bothers you, you will continue to bothered as long as I continue writing. There’s no need to keep reminding me you don’t like it. If this is a bridge too far, you do not like my writing and we can both be okay with.
Long story short: I’m running a Conan 2D20 campaign. Lot’s of things I don’t like about the system, but that’s another story. I decided after the 1st year of play that it was a mistake to have allowed the PCs to choose traits (D&D5e “skills” equivalent roughly) from any background (i.o.w. Cimmerian (Celtic) barbarians could choose traits associated with Khitai (Chinese). The game rules didn’t restrict this.
I didn’t understand why I felt this way, and of course the players want freedom of choice of any trait.
After reading this article (I’ve only found your site in the last year or so), I now understand why I felt the game needed restrictions.
To summarize: although the players ‘think’ they want the freedom to choose any trait, they (and I) would find it much more satisfying (and meaningful) if the Cimmerian simply could not learn fancy society traits more common in other cultures–at least without a conscious in-game effort (not just by spending XP). This way, a Cimmerian is a Cimmerian, which gives being a Cimmerian an actual meaning and identity, which increases investment and sense of realism and thus fun. Etc., etc. ad infinitum.