This is one of those rare Long, Rambling Introductions™ that came after I finished writing the Feature it introduced. I tried to draft one at the start, but I realized I was saying a bunch of stuff that I should just say in the body of the Feature itself. I do that too often.

What you’re about to read is the result of a stupid and terrible decision I very suddenly made. But,… well,… I’ll get to that at the end.

What you’re about to read follows from my speech last week about dropping monsters on your players for them to run from. Except it’s not really about that. And it ain’t what I set out to write. I didn’t mean to defend my stance and this sure out what I outlined. It’s what came out of my fingers and it served my purposes so I went with it.

Thus, what you’re about to read isn’t a complete and total defense of last week’s screed. Some of my points here justify that hot take, but there are lots of other points I didn’t raise. Some of them, I’ve already made in the comment section. Some I’ve made in my supporter Discord community and some in the Supplemental Q&A audio recording my supporters got to listen to last week. And some I’ve made by e-mail and private message exchange. I ain’t trying to rehash all that shit because, really, this argument doesn’t matter.

Because I went way off script writing this Feature, it’s gonna seem like a Random Bullshit article. But I can’t flag it as such because of the ending. Which I’ll get to. At the end.

But that’s enough Long, Rambling Introduction™; let’s get to the meat. I want to explain why your job ain’t about narrative or simulation or verisimilitude or self-expression or player expression or open-world exploration or collaboration. Why you don’t have to worry about any of that shit. Why you’re wrong if you do.

You’ve got one job. And if you do it right, you’ll have everything else handled.

Just Design a Good Game

Last week, I vomited forth this hot take…

If you’re running any modern edition of Dungeons & Dragons for modern gamers and you drop an encounter before your players that looks like a hostile monster encounter, but that will totally effing wreck their shit because of it’s statistical power level such that their only recourse is to recognize they’re outmatched and flee the scene shrieking like cheerleaders, you’re a terrible Game Master and if I had the power, I’d dispatch jackbooted Pinkerton thugs to steal your Dungeon Master’s Guide and beat you unconscious with it.

For some reason, people didn’t respond with the level of calm, dispassionate, and reasoned discourse and understanding I hoped for.

Fortunately, I wasn’t actually disappointed. Hope is a stupid emotion and I don’t let it drive me.

But buried beneath my purposely inflammatory trolling was a subtle statement about how modern D&D is actually pretty sophisticated about its game design. And, “If the players ain’t smart enough to know they’re screwed, their characters deserve to die” is just bad game design. Pure and simple.

Which ain’t to say, by the by, that it’s bad game design to challenge your players to escape an unbeatable threat. Just that that ain’t the good game design way to do it.

For instance, my players know there are threats beyond their characters in the world. Dragons and demigods and all that shit. And they know — or think — they’ll someday be equal to those threats. But they know if they go chasing them now, they’re going to be feeding their character sheets to Mr. Shredder. In one of my games, my players are following this powerful, murderous demonologist. Gradually, they’ve learned that a direct confrontation with the said demonologist is totally unwinnable in their current state. And I’ve run games wherein the players know there’s a dragon living in those hills there or that wandering too deep into the Ghostwood will get them killed by hungry ghosts. Shit like that.

The demonologist hunters are sitting at a crossroads right now. They’ve got several different ways to learn more about the demonologist’s plans and to gather resources to help them against the dude. But they can also follow the demonologist’s trail and confront him right now. If they choose the latter, they’re gonna die and I’m gonna let them. But I will remind them of everything they know that makes that a stupid idea. If they choose the former paths, they’ll find a rich tapestry of exciting adventures that’ll empower them to deal with the threat. And they’ll have fun on the way.

That’s good game design.

If I’d just let them frigging trip over the demonologist hoping my players would be smart enough to flee before some summoned demons tore them up with acid claws, that would be bad game design.

Yeah. Acid claws.

And if I were running a game of open-world exploration and decided — for whatever reason — that my world map needed a 15th-level ralbidium dragon somewhere, I would not put it somewhere where the players could simply trip over it. It would just not be possible for the players to simply trip over its cave, go wandering inside, and end up face-to-snout with my murder dragon. Even if the dragon was asleep and they had three rounds of grogginess to make their escape before it killed them. My players would know there was a dragon out there, that it was well beyond their low-level punk-asses, and approximately where it was.

And if I decided — for some reason — that I wanted them to see the damned thing, they’d be funneled to a place where they could see it but not interact with it. And it would not be able to get to them. Maybe they’d be on a high ledge well above its sleeping chamber. And the ledge would be enclosed in stalactites and stalagmites.

In other words, when my players had to decide whether to interact with the dragon or not, they’d not be under any kind of pressure at all. And if they did choose to interact with that dragon, they’d have to ignore so many implicit and explicit warning signs that I’d feel zero guilt if the dragon won initiative and flambeed half the party before anyone got a turn. The Board of Game Masters would rule the matter, “Assisted Suicide by Dragon” and absolve me of blame.

And if I decided — for some reason — that I needed an encounter that challenged the players to escape from a dragon — say, as it reduced a town to smoldering ash — I’d deliberately build the encounter with that clear, unambiguous, and achievable goal. I’d give the players time to recognize the danger and choose to flee before their characters were in urgent danger. Not a lot of time, but enough. They’d see the dragon attacking the town’s outskirts, say, and observe that its breath was hot enough to melt rock and turn people to ash. I’d use clear terminology like, “Everything caught in the inferno unleashed by the dragon is destroyed utterly. If you were caught in that blast, nothing would remain but a pair of smoking boots and a cloud of ash. Fortunately, the dragon is still well away from you, giving you time to make good your escape. What do you?”

I would not drop the dragon in the market right in front of the characters. I wouldn’t say, “Suddenly dragon! And gosh it looks dangerous! Way too dangerous for you! Quick, what do you do?”

Thus, in every practical way, my world levels with my players. Unless they purposely ignore multiple implicit and explicit and increasingly obvious warnings and make a deliberate and reasoned choice to enter a situation their characters can’t survive, they will never, ever face an encounter that is not equal to the characters’ statistics and their own skills. And when they do face an encounter, the encounter clearly conveys exactly what is expected of them. What the goal is.

And if the encounter seems like one the players might assume they can win with violence, the game screams that they can’t and gives them plenty of time to recognize and act on the warning signs.

Because that’s good game design. And I’m a Game Master. That means that, whatever else I do at the table, I’m running a good gameplay experience first.

Now, there are several other very strong reasons not to drop a threat on your players and force them to recognize it’s too much and run away under intense time pressure. But I ain’t discussing them today. Nor am I teaching you how to properly build good Run Away and Evade and Sneak Past encounters. Not today. Today’s about a totally different thing.

Today is about an important Game Mastering philosophy…

Game Design Über Alles

By this point, I imagine some of you dumbasses who disagreed with my last rant are nodding along and saying, “Well, that sounds way more reasonable than what you said last week. I can even kind of agree.” But I don’t think you’d say that if you really understood what you were agreeing with it. And I don’t want anyone on my side unless they grok the full reality of what I’m saying.

Game design is paramount. It’s the alpha and the omega. It’s the I Ching. Game design is everything. Game design is the one, true way. You are to put no other god before game design.

There are lots of people in the gaming space who blather on about all kinds of motives for running and playing games. They’ll talk about how they’re in it for the story or the roleplaying or the collaboration or that they’re simulationist or narrativist or whatever. And they’ll call me a gamist.

So, I’ll say something like, “Good game design means providing clear goals and communicating them to the players,” and I’ll get something like, “Well, that’s one way, yes. But I run open-world games about discovery so I let the players wander around and do whatever they want.” Or I’ll say something like, “Don’t let the players trip over something that looks like a fight but that can’t be won like a fight,” and some mouthbreather will vomit forth some bullshit about realism or verisimilitude or simulationism or some horseshit like that.

I can give you ten thousand examples of me saying, “Design a good game,” and getting back, “Pft. There are other priorities. Not everyone’s in this for a good game.” And that response is wrong. It’s absolutely, categorically, axiomatically, provably, totally, irredeemably, stupidly wrong. It is always about a good game first. If you make good game your top priority, then you’ll end up with a great experience regardless of your motives and the motives of your players… with one really complicated and tricky exception that isn’t really important today. And if you put good game second to any other priority, you’re far less likely to accomplish whatever top priority you actually put above good game.

You have to understand this. And if you can’t grok it or don’t or won’t agree with it…

Normally, this is where I’d say, “You’re running a crap game,” or “You’re a dumbass,” or even something soft like, “You’re deliberately choosing to run a subpar roleplaying gaming experience and you could do better.” But I ain’t gonna say any of that today. Instead, it’s like this…

If you ain’t willing to sing, “Game design; Game design; über alles; über alles in der spiel”, that’s a you problem. I ain’t gonna chase you. I ain’t gonna fight you. I’m obviously going to make the case below, but I ain’t gonna debate. I’m offering you tools, advice, and instruction and I’m telling you exactly what I’m trying to achieve. You either want it or you don’t. And if you don’t, I don’t care.

I refuse no one who comes willingly, but I chase no one who leaves.

But if you do accept the Game Design Über Alles philosophy,… well… I’ll get to that at the end.

Game Design First, All Else Second

The Game Design Über Alles philosophy is simple. It dictates that whenever you have a choice about how to run or build your game or adventure or campaign or scenario or whatever, you make the choice based, first and foremost, on solid game design principles. Every other consideration, criteria, motivation, and preference comes second to, “What makes for the best gameplay experience?”

For example, it’s totally reasonable to expect a party of 1st level-characters camping alone in a wild forest to get ambushed by displacer beasts in the night. And because those fuckers are fast and stealthy — even ignoring the displacement thing — you’ll probably have a TPK on your hands. The lookout might not even have time to wake anyone up before one or two characters are just dead. That ain’t a good gameplay experience. That’s a screwjob.

And when the players make an enemy of the King of All Londinium, it is totally reasonable for the king to use his vast resources to hire a dozen Faceless Assassins from across the Jade Sea who will put lethal contact poison in their bedrolls while they’re partying in the common room so they’ll just go to sleep one night and drop dead. But the King won’t do that because it’s a sucky game.

And if you want your players to know the world has powerful and dangerous challenges the characters can’t face today, but can aspire to face someday, you’ve got to find a way to present them that makes for a better gameplay experience. And just dropping it in your players’ laps and hoping they figure out to run ain’t that experience.

I’m not saying you should never consider your emerging, collaborative, narrative story or the versimilitudinous realistical consistency of your holoworld. Those are really important and I’ll get to that. What I’m saying is that game design — the gameplay experience — must be given its due first. And it can veto anything. It doesn’t matter if something’s realistic or makes for a good story. If it ain’t good for the gameplay experience, you gotta find another way. And you can always find another way.

I demonstrated above that I can build a world whose challenges are always appropriate for my players that nonetheless feels realistic and consistent and obviously contains powerful threats to aspire to face. And I don’t have to resort to shitty game design to do it.

The Path of Bad Advice and Stupid Questions

You can reveal a lot of crappy Game Mastering advice for what it is just by applying Game Design Über Alles. Consider the crappy, “Encourage players to fail; failure is more interesting and makes for a better story.” That might be true. From a storytelling perspective, setbacks and failures are important. But it ain’t fun from a gameplay perspective. People don’t like failing at things. And if the players aim to fail, the game breaks. Any Game Master whose had one or two players who think failure is more fun than success knows just how that breaks a game and breaks a group.

Meanwhile, a lot of questions people absolutely frigging obsess over can be answered very simply with the Game Design Über Alles principle. Like questions about the world’s economy and why rich, powerful villains don’t just use their infinite resources to effing demolish the player characters. The answer is, “So the game doesn’t suck.”

And that really is the correct answer. If you feel you need to explain, in-world, why the rich villain doesn’t murder the players — though, news flash, your players don’t give a shit — by all means, explain it. Justify it however you want. But you are making an excuse. The correct, real, true answer — the only one that matters — is because you’re trying to make a good gameplay experience.

Which brings me to…

Knowing Your Limits

Game Design Über Alles is a very powerful principle, but it is sometimes limiting. And you’ve got to accept that. You have to understand how your medium — which includes your game system and its genre and the assumptions its players bring and also the nature of tabletop roleplaying games — constrains and limits and restricts what you can do. You have to accept there’s shit you just can’t do.

That’s why, in my rant about not dropping too-powerful monsters in front of low-level losers, I specifically called out modern D&D. Modern D&D starts with v.3 and encompasses everything thereafter. Including Pathfinder and many other TTRPGs that take their cues from D&D. Those games are built around the assumption that the players can take whatever you throw at them. And there are a lot of reasons. I can build a solid, six-point argument for D&D 5E alone that the system isn’t designed for, “Wow, this shit ain’t working; we need to run.” And only one of those points has to do with movement rates and action economies. Mechanically, thematically, and presentationally, D&D just ain’t designed for that kind of crap.

I’ve mentioned other kinds of challenges, in the past, that TTRPGs just can’t really handle by their nature. I ain’t gonna call them all out here. But I am going to call out one very specific thing some of you need to be reminded of. An essential element of Modern TTRPGs — especially D&D — that lots of older, harder Game Masters forget. One many of you think I don’t appreciate. But I do.

I’ve reminded y’all that everything I talk about on this site pertains to sitting around in a basement pretending to be an elf for pure funsies. And thus, this shit is pretty much the lowest-stakes thing you’ll ever do in your entire life. But, compared to all casual, basement, hobby games ever — including video games — tabletop roleplaying games have very high stakes for most players.

What do I mean? Consider the Asylum Demon from the first Dark Souls. You encounter this hulking, thirty-foot-tall fat-as-hell monstrosity in the tutorial area of the game. It drops from the frigging sky, waves a club that could crush a Chevy, and towers roaring over you. And you’re a naked, burnt hotdog armed with a broken sword. You’re supposed to run away. And the setup is designed to communicate that fact. It even uses environmental cues to point you to an obvious escape route. But some players miss the clues, misunderstand the situation, and try to kill the thing. And they get smashed into paste in one hit.

And that’s okay. Because your character respawns five feet away, no worse off, and you can try again. And you can keep trying until you get it right.

Dark Souls for all its feels, is actually very low stakes. Death is cheap. Not so in D&D. In D&D, death is an extremely high price to pay. Now, I’m a pretty callous Game Master. And I firmly believe it must be possible for characters to die. Players must be prepared for that loss. But I also know it’s a big deal. It’s final. It’s permanent. And it hits many players very hard. It’s not just losing the game, it’s losing something you created, something you built and developed over time, and something you were emotionally attached to.

The point is that character death — as a possibility — is good for the gameplay experience. At least it’s good for fantasy adventure games to be overhung with the grim specter of character death. The question of how often such deaths should happen is a very complicated one with a lot of answers, but given the stakes, those answers should cluster around, very rarely. Regardless, the one thing we can all agree on is that the players shouldn’t end up in a situation where one wrong move — one mistake — spells death for a character. That should be a very difficult situation to end up in.

Don’t misread what I’m saying, though. Because this ain’t entirely about game mechanics. I ain’t condemning, for example, Save or Die effects. It’s fine for medusae to exist and they should be able to kill with a glance. But if the medusae ain’t used with care, you end up with a shitty gameplay experience, and thus you can’t let your players blunder into a medusa, but… I digress. I’m just saying, this ain’t entirely about game mechanics. It’s about… well,… I’ll get to that at the end.

Why Game Design’s the Best First Principle

I promised I’d make a case for the Game Design Über Alles philosophy. Why it’s the best philosophy for every Game Master regardless of their — or their players’ — intrinsic play motivations. And I’m gonna. But it’s a pretty simple case, none of my four points will catch you by surprise, and I ain’t gonna belabor it or fight about it.

Why am I suddenly talking about high-concept philosophy, but brushing the arguments under the rug and doing the whole, “Here’s the philosophy underpinning my advice, and if you don’t like that, don’t use my advice,” thing? Well, there’s a reason. But,… well,… I’ll get to it at the end.

Point 1: Game Design Encompasses All Other Motivations

I’ve talked about gamer motivational models and intrinsic gameplay aesthetics before and I’ve shilled for some of my favorite models. I ain’t gonna do it again today. Partly because that song’s overplayed on this station and party because every time I play it, everyone takes a very black-and-white all-or-nothing view of the whole thing that just pisses me off and partly because it’s all kinda useless from a practical design standpoint. So I’m just gonna say this…

In the actual, academic study of game design and gameplay psychology, several models have emerged that describe a variety of intrinsic motivations satisfied by games. Basically, the psychological warm fuzzies people get from playing games. Different games give people different combinations of fuzzies and very successful games satisfy most or all gamer motivations in some way though every game leans more heavily on some than others.

Those lists all include shit like collaboration and player expression and narrative and immersion in real-seeming imaginary worlds and exploration. Game design is already all about delivering the best stories through gameplay and the best immersion through gameplay and the best exploration through gameplay. That’s what it is.

If you call yourself a simulationist or a narrativist to distinguish yourself from a filthy gamist or if you say something like, “I’m more concerned with giving my players the chance to pursue their own goals than I am with designing a good game,” you’re just proving that you’re a dumbass who can’t be bothered to know what game design is. You’re assuming that because game design doesn’t put one, single motivation above every other aspect, that game design isn’t about that. It is. And when you focus too much on one, single motivation — like, say, narrative — you’re not only wrecking the totality of the experience, you’re not even providing the best possible narrative experience. It’s like making a cake entirely out of sugar because you like sugar the most. You’re not just making a shitty cake, you’re also serving something that even sugar lovers won’t really enjoy.

And the people who are truly focused only on narrative — or whatever — aren’t the ones you want to please anyway. Because they’ve got other options. They ain’t going to choose a roleplaying game when they could watch a movie or read a book or write a novel.

Point 2: Whatever You Run is Going to Turn Into a Game Anyway

Let’s say you decide you don’t give a single, solitary crap about the gameplay experience. You just want to run a narrative, open-world experience. Drop the players’ characters into your fully realized world, let them do whatever, and chase after them. What’ll happen?

Normally, the players will dick around for a while. They’ll have a good time exploring and interacting for a bit. And then, they’ll settle down and pick something to work toward. They’re gonna find a goal.

And you — if you’ve got any kind of brain in your head — you’re gonna realize you can’t just say, “Good job; you did the goal.” That’ll end the fun and shove them back into, “Dick around looking for something to do” mode. So, you put stuff in the way of the goal. Obstacles, challenges, or just shit that happens on the way.

Now you’re running a game. And, if you’re smart, you’ll drop the delusion that you’re overseeing an open-world, narrative, collaborative experience and do the job of an actual frigging game designer. And you’ll do the best job you possibly can.

There are, of course, other possibilities. The players might dick around for a while until they realize there’s nothing going on. They’ll keep poking and prodding, thinking there’s something somewhere to do, and you’ll mistake that for them doing whatever they want to do for funsies, and the game will fizzle. Or they’ll just engage in increasingly ridiculous, zany antics for shits and giggles until that gets stale — and it will — and then you’ve got nothing because you can’t come back from that kind of thing. Or they’ll go the Agents of Chaos route and burn down the world because what else is there? Which also gets stale and can’t be recovered from.

I ain’t saying you can’t run a game wherein the players pick their own goals. You absolutely can. There are good game design ways to do it. Ones that’ll lead to satisfying, long-term gameplay experiences. But you need to be a game designer to use them.

Point 3: Games Smooth Out Rough Social Edges

Tabletop roleplaying games are social activities. You can’t do them alone. And the idiots who keep trying to make GM-less, solo RPGs are dumbasses who can never succeed because the collaborative, social, teamwork-oriented thing is part of the whole TTRPG experience. You ain’t doing roleplaying gaming if you’re doing it alone.

The trouble is people don’t always social good. Personalities clash, goals conflict, social skills vary from person to person, all that crap. Social activities can get messy. And the single, best way to mitigate the messy — you can’t eliminate it completely because people — the best way to mitigate the social messy is to get the participants together with a focused, defined, constrained activity and a shared goal.

Do you know what a game is? I’ll bet you know what I’m gonna say. That’s right, games are focused, defined, constrained activities with shared goals. And part of game design is knowing how to get people playing together and chasing the same goal.

Point 4: There are Lots of Ways to Git Gud at Game Design

Finally, the reason to approach Game Mastering as a game design problem is that you’ve got lots of resources to help you do it well.

Between video games, board games, and our niche little hobby, games are a bajillion-dollar industry. They’ve surpassed every other entertainment industry. This means lots of really smart people are putting lots of time and money and energy into figuring out how to do them right. Thus, it’s easier today than it’s ever been to learn the basics of game design and the psychology behind it.

I ain’t saying it’s an easy thing to learn. It’s tricky and there are lots of moving pieces and it’s an alchemy and all that crap. But there are lots of ways to get a basic proficiency. And considering one of those ways is to play lots of games of every kind, it’s fun to learn.

By making even a casual study of game design, you’ll learn a whole host of things. You’ll learn about simulation and narrative and psychology and social interaction. Whatever motive you’ve got for gaming — and whatever motivates the players you’re trying to please — game design will give you the tools.

And with that…

The Thing at the End

And now that thing I promised I’d get to…

All this game design shit? It’s not about mechanics and systems. It’s not about hacking games or building roleplaying game systems. Game engines are just piles of naked, writhing, squirming mechanics. There are game design principles in there, but they’re not really game design. And, as a Game Master, you shouldn’t be poking and prodding in there anyway. Just use the tools you’ve got.

The game design shit I’m talking about partly shows up in how you run your game at the table. And, insofar as your moment-to-moment, Game Mastering decisions are concerned, I’ve already given you all the tools you need to make the right ones in accordance with Game Design Über Alles. That’s what True Game Mastery was all about. You’re armed as well as I can arm you for that front.

The real game design part of this hobby isn’t in the game mechanics and systems and it isn’t in the decisions you make at the table. Instead, it’s in building your own game content or modifying existing content to suit your needs. It’s in building encounters, scenes, adventures, and campaigns for home use or for publication. D&D ain’t a game, after all. It’s an engine. The game is the thing you’re running at the table.

The Truest of the True Game Masters are the ones who can build games from the systems and elements they’ve got. Either to bang together an extra encounter on the fly to pick up a flagging game or supplement a published module or modify a module to suit their needs or build their own adventures and campaigns.

And that is why what you’ve been reading today is actually the secret, introductory preface and goal-setting for my True Scenario Designery course.

Surprise; class is in session, bitches!