It’s been a while since I sat down and shat down some bulls$&%. I’ve been putting out some pretty meaty stuff lately. Well, I’ve been putting out a mix of meaty stuff and updates about how my meaty stuff is going to be late because that s$&% takes time and because my things, my brain, my body, and my family keep breaking and I have to keep taking time off to fix them.
I like putting out meaty stuff. I like doing solid design work. And talking about it. And I like actually finishing things. That’s why my plan is to start putting out six articles a month. Because then I can make sure to get two AngryCraft articles and two adventure design articles done every month and still have space to cover other topics and to put out bulls$&% like this. Bulls$&% like this is actually really important to me.
See, my approach to gaming and my gaming goals have been gradually shifting over the last few years. I’ve been growing and changing as a gamer, as a designer, and as a human. And I’m trying to drag you all along for the ride. Unfortunately, I can’t always get everyone to come along. And that makes me sad. I was actually going to write an article about that particular topic, but it just didn’t work. I don’t think I’m ready to write it. I’m still figuring out what’s changed and why. But eventually, I’ll work it out.
Now, don’t worry. I’m not changing how I do things or what I write. Not significantly anyway. I’m still gonna keep trying my damndest to turn you into a less worse GM while simultaneously and desperately fighting to unf$&% D&D because the designers at WotC sure as hell can’t be trusted to unf$&% it. Most of what’s changed for me is internal s$&%. Things I used to like, I don’t anymore. And things that didn’t excite me very much before now do. I used to love running games. But these days, I don’t get as much pleasure from it. I still do it. But I do it because it’s part of my job. I have to keep my skills sharp and playtest s$&% and keep an eye on the current attitudes of players. Every job has fun parts and chore parts. Actually running games has become a chore part of my job. But that’s not as sad as it sounds. Trust me.
But, if I don’t focus, I’ll never get through this Long, Rambling Introduction™. Because this article is not about how my personal enjoyment of D&D has changed. It’s about dilemmas, costs, tradeoffs, and conflicts. And it’s a bulls$&% article. Which means it’s literally just ABOUT that stuff. It’s me just babbling about the ideas of those things. Thinking out loud. It may not amount to anything useful, which is why I try not to write too many of these bulls$&% articles. But they are, nonetheless, important articles. For me and for you. And that is why I’m willing to increase my output by 50% to make a little more space for bulls$&% without letting any more projects die unfinished.
And now that I’ve tied a neat little bow on this Long, Rambling Introduction™, I can crap out the even longer, more rambling pile of bulls$&% that is this article.
Playing Meaningfully
In my last article – a good, meaty article about adventure building – I said that one of the keys to building a meaningful adventure was to make sure that the players’ goals weren’t all in alignment. Because the players are always trying to keep their characters alive while exploring every room in the dungeon, you can’t make a meaningful adventure that can be won simply by staying alive and exploring every room in the dungeon. You need dilemmas and internal conflicts.
I talk a lot about that s$&%. About conflicts and dilemmas and tradeoffs and costs and meaningful choices. And a lot of people parrot those words right back at me. But I’m starting to think that, while people USE those words, they don’t really understand them. They can say something is a tradeoff, but they don’t know what that actually means. And that’s because of some of the other words they use. Words like punishment. And frustration. And feeling bad.
Likewise, people talk a lot about meaningful choices and meaningful adventures, but they don’t actually understand what makes a choice or adventure meaningful. And that means, even though a lot of people recognize how important it is to make things meaningful, they don’t know how to do it. And some of the things they do to make the game fun also sap the game of meaning.
The big problem, though, is that everyone thinks they’re smarter than they are. Even though they don’t quite understand all those ideas I mentioned in the last two paragraphs, they think they do. And that’s why it’s hard to teach anyone anything. Because everyone thinks they don’t have anything to learn. And everyone thinks they understand what they don’t. And the only exception is me. I know exactly how smart I am and I know that I understand everything I understand. And that’s why you should listen to me.
But I’m done trying to convince people that they’re people and their brains work a certain way. Especially when they think they don’t and wish they weren’t. I’m actually done trying to convince anyone to listen to me at all anymore. I had this big bit here about how many people I actually interact with regularly as a result of my readership numbers and the amount of correspondence I receive so that people would understand that, when I say things like “a lot of people think this” or “a lot of people have asked me about that,” my definition of “a lot” is at least an order of magnitude bigger than anyone thinks it is. But I hated writing that part and ultimately deleted it because I hate keeping score like that. And because I’ve never bought into feeding my content creator dopamine addiction by tracking my numbers. And I have never, ever fallen back to arguing from authority or popularity and I ain’t going to start now. I want to keep liking myself. So, I’m just putting my words out here. I’ll explain my reasoning thoroughly, but I’m not going to prove every assertion. You can either trust me, do the research yourself, or ignore me. But whatever you choose, it’s your problem.
And the assertion I’m going to make is this: lots of GMs are getting really burnt out on D&D. It’s going to become a serious problem if it hasn’t already. But that’s okay because I don’t think as many people play D&D as buy it and put on the ‘gamer life’ costume that it comes with. And Wizards of the Coast is spending a lot of time and energy trying to appeal to people who aren’t actual loyal customers and who won’t remain long-term players. And I think they’re going to pay for it.
And no, this has nothing to do with any culture war bulls$&% either. It has to do with what I’m talking about. Meaningful play. And costs and tradeoffs and dilemmas and conflicts. And I’m not actually going to connect the dots between those things and the above assertion. I just wanted to make an assertion like that and refuse to argue it to drive some of my ‘favorite’ readers nuts. But if you’re smart enough and if you care enough, you’ll be able to connect the dots yourself.
So, what the hell am I talking about? What is meaningful play? What is a meaningful adventure? Or a meaningful choice? Well, something is meaningful if it’s FULL OF MEANING. That’s literally how words work. Duh. But what does it mean to be full of meaning? It just means that the game or adventure or choice is about more than just the game or adventure or choice. There’s some value to it beyond the immediate, intrinsic pleasure of playing the game.
It’s probably easiest to compare and contrast meaningful play to something else. Let’s call that something else indulgent play. Indulgent play is gameplay that’s just about the pleasure of the moment. It’s about doing whatever feels fun. Whatever creates the most pleasure. Indulgent play varies from person to person, of course, because fun is subjective. A competitive challenge-seeker gets pleasure from winning. All of their choices will be about increasing their odds of success. And a creative expression-seeker gets pleasure from being in the spotlight. All of their choices will be about getting the most applause or drawing the biggest response from others.
Indulgent play is concerned with short-term moments of pleasure. Moments of fun. Whatever does the most damage right now or whatever gets the biggest laugh, that’s the optimal strategy for the moment. Sure, some indulgent challenge-seekers look at the big picture and concern themselves with the longer-term win, but once the win is won, there’s no more pleasure to be had. And there’s nothing fun about losing. Indulgent play is about maximizing pleasure. It’s about the intrinsic value of play.
Meaningful play is more complicated. It’s about all the other values of play. All the other payoffs that gameplay offers. Even when those payoffs require a sacrifice of immediate pleasure. What kinds of other payoffs are there? There’s a f$&%-ton. People play games to acquire and practice skills. Or to condition their minds and bodies. Or to socialize. Or to improve their ability to socialize. Or to explore ideas. Or to explore themselves. Or to explore other people. Or to gain different perspectives. Or to test themselves. All of those things and many, many more represent the extrinsic values of play. The things you get out of playing games.
Evolutionary biology suggests that it’s actually the extrinsic rewards that gave rise to the wiring in our brains that enjoys playing games intrinsically. Play is a great way to learn and practice vital skills. It keeps our brains, bodies, psyches, and social…ies in tip-top shape. And we need those things in shape to navigate the dangerous, chaotic world we have to live in. The primates who played more – the ones wired to want to play – they outlived the ones who didn’t. We’re the end result of millions of years of nature selectively breeding the most playful primates.
It’s the same reason why we’re wired to crave fats, sugars, and salt. Those nutrients are actually rare in the wild, but they’re vital. Fats insulate our bodies, protect our cells, and lubricate our nervous systems. Simple and complex sugars provide the energy we need to think and move and breathe. And salts help us regulate fluid pressure, fluid flow, and conduct nerve signals around our bodies. Among many other things. The primates that were best at finding sources of fats, sugars, and salts did very well. And now we crave that s$&%. A lot more than we crave easy-to-find and less-nutritionally-important vegetables. I’m not saying sugar is good for you and vegetables are bad. I’m saying sugar is more important for you and it used to be a lot rarer than vegetables. And it takes a lot more energy to extract any nutritional value from vegetables than it does to extract it from sugar.
The problem is the world we live in is a lot different from the one we evolved in.
Getting back to meaningful play, if you really want a nice, practical test for whether something is meaningful or indulgent, just remember that meaningful things are usually difficult or revelatory, and indulgent things are usually easy and insubstantial.
Imagine you’re in the store and you want to buy a video game console. There’s three consoles available, but you only have enough money in your pocket for one. But imagine that you have a nice, reliable income. You make enough money that, in two weeks, you could come back and get either of the other two. Or both. You make more money than you know what to do with. Now, make your choice.
Which console do you choose? Who gives a f$&%. The choice is meaningless. It’s just an arbitrary preference. And arbitrary preferences say very little about you. You might struggle with the choice, but only because it’s so meaningless. And whatever you choose, you’ll invalidate the choice in a few weeks anyway.
Now imagine a different scenario. Imagine you’ve pulled your life’s savings together and moved to an entirely new city. You haven’t had any luck finding a job, but you run an entertainment-based website that produces a regular income. The income fluctuates a lot and it’s not secure. It could go away at any time. You’ve been struggling to meet all of your expenses – food and rent and stuff – and to pay for the medicine you need to manage your chronic medical conditions. One day, you come home from a failed job interview to find your apartment has been robbed. All of your electronic gadgets have been stolen. Including your collection of video games and consoles that you built up over many years. Fortunately, nothing you need to live was stolen. But everything that gave you pleasure is gone.
Do you scrape together some money and go to the local Gameschlock and buy a used video game console and a handful of games on the cheap given your financial situation? And what does it say about me that I did, even though I was digging myself into a deeper financial hole by doing so? Particularly when I was already rationing prescription medicine at the time.
The first choice only says that you like video games and it says that you like certain video games over others. The second choice reveals something much more complex. And it actually reveals as much about you – the audience – as it does about me – the person who, five years ago, was in exactly that situation. For example, you might judge me as financially irresponsible and frivolous. Or as a foolish risk-taker. Or you might understand that a life without some kind of pleasure or fun isn’t a very valuable life and that it’s worth the risk. You might try to imagine yourself in my situation and figure out what choice you’d make. You might even ask me why I made the choice I did to gain some perspective. And you might learn something from my perspective.
That, right there, is the power of role-playing. Because whenever I say, “imagine this situation and tell me what you’d do,” I’m inviting you to role-play. Role-playing games let us explore ideas, concepts, situations, values, morals, and beliefs. They are like thought experiments that are actually fun to play. We don’t have to sit around in togas talking about what the hypothetical, moral man might do with Plato’s Ring of Gyges. We can just play D&D until we find a ring of invisibility and find out. Thus, we can explore the nature of good and evil from many different angles without actually hurting anyone or doing any real evil. We can see how people with different values and priorities might see the world. And discover that we can disagree very strongly with other equally good people about which values and priorities are highest. And we can do so in a less cluttered, chaotic world by reducing certain aspects of the world down to simple representations. Tropes, if you will. And we can do all of that without actually, consciously doing it. We play the game and have fun, but the meaning gets into our heads.
There’s lots of ways that RPGs make you a better person. I actually think sometimes about trying to figure out all the good qualities I have that I can attribute – even partially – to my decades of D&D play. And the reason I could even consider making such a list is that D&D tends to be a highly meaningful game because it’s built around an inherently meaningful activity: role-playing.
Though you can probably guess – based on my doom and gloom assertion – that I think D&D – and role-playing games in general – are losing a lot of their meaning in favor of indulgence. But that begs the question: so what? Who gives a f$&% if D&D is meaningful or not? Just because something can be meaningful and make you a better person, that doesn’t mean everything has to be meaningful. It’s totally fine to just do some things for pleasure. D&D is just a game after all. Who cares if it’s played meaningfully?
Well, you should. Because pleasurable indulgence doesn’t pay off forever. And without meaningful play, your brain rots and dies.
McChicken Sandwiches for the Soul
Click the Goblin’s Jar to Leave a Tip
Human brains without meaning and purpose just suck. There’s a crap-ton of psychological research on this. I hope you’ll check it out before you start screaming about how wrong I am. Human brains need meaning. Without meaning, human brains latch on to literally anything that looks like meaning, however irrational or illogical. And they’re easily manipulated by primal emotions. Using the twin choke-chains of fear and outrage, you can drag a brain devoid of meaning anywhere and unleash it on anything. With extraordinarily little provocation. And if your brain lacks meaning and no one is trying to yank it around, you’ll just end up a depressed little ball of anxieties or a hedonistic pleasure-seeker trying to fill the hours. You’ll either define yourself by pleasures or your neurological issues because you’ve got nothing else.
And then you’ll get addicted to them.
Now, I’m not saying that if you run a bad game of D&D, your players will turn into an angry mob or a bunch of insatiable hedonists. I’m just trying to show you that the human mind is wired to crave meaning. And if it doesn’t get meaning, it becomes addicted to base emotions and the gratification of those emotions. And because brains build up tolerances to their own chemicals over time, it gets harder and harder to get that gratification.
If you’ve been running games for any length of time, you’ve seen the microcosm of this behavior. I guarantee it. And if you’ve spent any amount of time on social media, you’ve seen it too. You’ve seen it in the indulgent spotlight hog who just wants to show off her quirky or cool character at the table so everyone can clap for how quirky and cool it is. She does what she does to get attention because she doesn’t know how to pursue an actual goal in the game or to find any deeper meaning or purpose in it. And she has to keep upping the ante on her crazy behavior to keep getting a response. It’s the equivalent of signaling for likes and retweets on social media.
Or maybe you’ve seen it in the player who’s always looking for the next cool option for his character. The option that will make him feel the most powerful or the most unique. The one who buys every sourcebook because he feels like he’s played everything and he doesn’t have enough options to customize his character or to make his character the most powerful anymore. He doesn’t know how to define himself with his choices in the game. He can only define himself with his character sheet.
That indulgent behavior leads to selfish behavior. And I don’t just mean that indulgent players derail the game with their attention-seeking or overpowering gameplay. I mean those players have no interest in what anyone else does at the table. The game, to them, is the means to an end. A means to indulgent pleasure. Whatever doesn’t feed that is irrelevant. Those players are the sorts of players who know very little about the other characters at the table and don’t care to learn about them. Those are the players who zone out when it’s not their turn, who leave the room when they’re not in a scene, or who spend their gameplay trying to garner likes and retweets by posting about their game on social media. If the game isn’t giving them immediate pleasure, they don’t know how to find any meaning or enjoyment in it.
Meanwhile, that person isn’t adding anything to the game. Showing off is only good for the showoff. Personal pleasure is personal. When players are playing meaningfully, anyone can find a reason to watch. But when they’re playing indulgently, it gets really boring really fast. You can only watch someone being improbably awesome or wacky-quirky for so long before you get tired of it. Unless you’re just waiting for a trainwreck. That s$&%’s hilarious. And it’s why reality TV works.
If you have an entire table of indulgent players, it can sort of work. Each player can play their own game and have their own fun. No one has to care about anyone else. And the GM can indulge himself by providing a playground, assuming he can find indulgent fun in that. And that’s how you end up with what I call ‘the dicking around game.’ That’s where everyone is just trying to one-up each other with wackiness or overpower each other while the GM tries to sustain the wackiness or challenge levels. And I suspect a lot of online games work as dicking around games because the sorts of people who stream their games aren’t doing to enjoy their games but to enjoy the attention.
The problem is most GMs aren’t inclined toward indulgent play. It takes a lot of work to run a game. There’s easier ways to have indulgent fun. Ways that afford a lot more freedom than providing a playground full of squeaky toys for a bunch of thankless, hedonistic primates. Indulgent players tend to burn out their GMs very quickly. And they burn out meaningful players too. And they also burn themselves out.
Indulgent play isn’t healthy. That’s why I made that comparison to sugars and fats. Our brains evolved to crave indulgent play and to crave sugar and fats in a world where it was exceedingly difficult and dangerous to indulge ourselves too much. Survival was a full-time-and-more job. Sugars and fats were hard to come by. The cravings evolved so we’d prioritize those things despite the difficulties or apparent meaninglessness of the activities. But our lives today in the developed world – the part of the world that can waste hours reading websites about games involving pretend elves – are infinitely easier. Most of us can have all the fat and sugar and attention and pleasure we want.
Indulgent play is like candy for the psyche. It’s tasty as hell – and it’s totally okay in moderated amounts – but if it’s all you eat, you become a massive blob of flesh who needs three different medications to help my heart pump the equivalent of maple syrup through my veins and who, after losing almost 200 pounds, is merely considered obese.
Indulgent play makes you selfish, bored, and irritable. It drives your GM to quit and it makes all the other players hate you. And indulgent play has become increasingly, awfully common in the RPG community. Because modern RPGs are designed for it. Even the little indie games. Sometimes especially those. They’re all designed to maximize player pleasure and minimize meaning.
Meaning Through Constraint
It probably won’t surprise you to learn that, in my view, it’s tradeoffs, conflicts, dilemmas, choices, costs, and constraints that add meaning to games and adventures and characters. I mean, it’s not like I didn’t telegraph that s$&%.
D&D’s design has shifted in the last decade. It’s moved away from tradeoffs, constraints, choices, and costs. Players rarely have to give up anything to make the choices they do about their characters and their actions. It used to be that if you wanted to play a non-human, you had to give some s$&% up. You paid for bonuses with penalties. You accepted constraints in your class choices. S$&% like that. I know some people think this is a moral issue. That’s fine. But I don’t. And I don’t want to talk about it. I’m just talking about choices having costs or imposing constraints.
Playing an elf wasn’t a mere, pleasurable indulgence. It meant something to play an elf. And if you wanted to play an elf, you had to give something up for it. And if you did, that meant you valued playing an elf. It invested your character with meaning beyond pointed ears and a pile of superpowers.
Same with alignment restrictions. And alignment itself. Once upon a time, you couldn’t be a lawful barbarian or an evil paladin or a chaotic monk. You had to obey some rules. And that constrained your play. The choice said something about your character. And, more importantly, it said something about you. It showed what you valued in the game – and probably in yourself – and what you were willing to give up for it.
I can provide lots of examples. Like how costly and limited magic was at low levels and how difficult it was to get a wizard to high levels and how that injected wizardry with meaning. But I’m not going to bother with too long a list. And I’m sure you can probably argue that there’s a good reason for removing every one of those constraints.
But it’s important to understand that those constraints didn’t just provide balance or define the game’s world, they injected the choices players made with meaning. And even if removing those specific costs and constraints – whichever ones you want to discuss – was the right choice, replacing them with NOTHING was the wrong choice. Because each constraint and cost and limitation and tradeoff and drawback that got removed took some of the sense of meaningful play from the game.
People say, “why shouldn’t players be able to do whatever they want; it’s just a game.” And they think that’s a rhetorical argument in favor of total freedom. But it’s not. There’s an answer. And the answer is because it leads to selfish, indulgent play that’s anathema to cooperative, group play and also decreases players’ own long-term satisfaction with the gameplay experience. Players don’t enjoy indulgence, they become addicted to it. And addiction always destroys the addict in the end.
What saddens is me is the many GMs who have internalized the design ideas that lead to indulgent play while also lamenting how increasingly meaningless and frustrating running games has become. There’s a hell of a lot of GMs in the community who have called out the increasing self-indulgence and self-interest infesting the RPG player base. Players are less attentive. They’re less engaged. They’re less open to experimentation. They do not take the game seriously. They’re argumentative. They balk at constraints and rules. Those were things we used to complain about occasionally; they were always there. But it seems like they’ve become constant refrains among GMs these days. Questions related to that crap – along with questions about how to convince players to try anything other than D&D – represent the vast majority of the questions I receive these days.
But the same GMs and homebrewers and independent designers who complain about all of that crap also describe costs, tradeoffs, dilemmas, and constraints as punishments. As in, “I don’t want to punish a player who takes this option with a penalty,” or “I don’t want to punish players who want to play this race by taking away a class choice.” The logic is simple. Players don’t like penalties or costs or constraints or restrictions so a game – a thing done for fun – shouldn’t have such things. Except the logic is based on a faulty assumption. Fun doesn’t create long-term investment or engagement. Fun doesn’t create meaning.
That’s what bugs me. It ain’t my job to tell WotC – or any other publisher – what they should do. But it is my job to teach you – Joe Schmoe and Jane Schmane, average GMs – how to run good games you can be proud of. And a lot of you Joes and Janes talk about tradeoffs and constraints, but you don’t talk about them right.
If you refer to a penalty, cost, setback, downside, or constraint as a punishment, you don’t get it If you talk about things players won’t like or won’t enjoy or won’t let you do, you don’t get it. And if you e-mail me to point out how a thing I said today contradicts a thing I said five years ago, you don’t get it.
Tradeoffs aren’t things you have to deal with it because you have to figure out which of two important things are more important. Tradeoffs aren’t regrettable things you have to deal with because you have to balance conflicting goals. Tradeoffs are how you define who you are. Or who you want to be. As a GM. They’re how you learn what kind of GM you are and what things are most important to you. They’re how you find out what you feel about the game and what the game means to you. They are where your GMing style is born. That’s why my advice contradicts itself so often. Because I can’t tell you who you are as a GM. I can only point out the dilemmas and explain the issues and then allow you to define yourself. It’s hard sometimes. It’s uncomfortable. It’s revelatory. But it’s the thing that makes your game – specifically YOUR game – worth playing. And running. It’s why you do what you do.
And as a GM and a game designer, it’s your job to do the same for your players. It might deny them some short-term, indulgent pleasure, but it’ll give them an amazing gaming experience if they stick with it. And if they don’t, maybe they aren’t the player for you.
P.S.: The game also has to be fun in the moment or players won’t stick it with long enough to have an amazing game experience. Good luck with that s$&%.
+1 for the bit on the importance of roleplaying.
One thing that sets humans apart is our power of imaginative play. It’s a *key* survival trait.
We can create imaginary copies of ourselves and then ‘see’ what happens if these copies try dangerous activities – such as crossing an piranha-infested river, or attempting to leap too-wide crevasses, or fighting off a deadly predator using different strategies. Our imaginary copies die in droves, but we don’t.
Movies, Theatre and Literature are all driven by this vital imaginative power. We get to put ourselves – without any risk – into the place of Hamlet, or Elizabeth Bennett, or John McClane, or a million other characters.
Modern RPG games are an extension of the same principle: we get to drive our character through fantastic dramas: we get to experience vicarious dangers and survive the experience.
All these forms of drama require constraint to make them meaningful. Two brief examples:
Early Die Hard: John McClane has to win desperate gunbattles while barefoot & bleeding. Later on – in the far less meaningful sequels – he’s hitting helicopters with cars. Yawn.
Early Superman: the man from Krypton is able to run fast and lift trucks. Later Superman: he can turn back time and push planets around.
When there’s nothing the hero can’t do, there’s no drama. No meaningful conflict.
Thank you for the insightful post. I have been wondering why I’m not clicking more with the current incarnation of D&D and your thoughts clarified some things for me. Still unsure what I’m ultimately going to do about it all.
Last D&D game I’ve played I’ve limited cantrips to a number = to level + Int modifier, only allowed humans (who were childhood friends), and the classic classes (fighter, wizard, cleric, rogue). I’ve also tweaked some rules so that long rests only recovered hit dices (no full HP heal). I’ve also given the worst initial equipment possible instead of average equipment like in the PHB.
We played twice a month, for a year. Best game I’ve had in a decade
All very interesting ideas to make the game more gritty and have more consequences. Thank you for sharing Oniguma!
Reading the comments and part of the article again, I just had a moment of insight about a previous article Angry wrote (and has restated more than once along the way): What is the purpose of your encounter?
WotC’s advice to the DM on encounter building is very lacking. If you aren’t careful, it could easily lead to it being a slog instead of creating a richer story. Pondering this today has lead me to the following conclusions:
1) I have a significant temptation to customize the a lot of the rules because the whole thing just seems off. This makes me very sad on multiple levels. I don’t recall having this urge on this type of scale for other editions (or systems) I have played. (For better or worse, I skipped 4th edition entirely.)
2) It caused me to search out sites to figure out why it feels like 5e games are not satisfying on either side of the screen for me. I’m grateful to have found this site and all the interesting ideas Angry has on improving GM’ing skills. It wasn’t what I was searching for but I have plenty to learn on that front because I never had a good teacher ..
I think WotC did come up with a rule set that is relatively easy to onboard new players into — just as long as they don’t look too closely at certain things in the system like the hot mess of inconsistent resolution mechanics for various spells and actions. (Another example is what is the purchase price for more powerful healing potions? DMG and Xanthar’s Guide aren’t consistent in their advice. Then they used yet a different mechanism to price them in Dragon Heist apparently. I only learned the latter from the D&D Beyond forum.)
3) I worry that people new to the hobby will get a really poor view of what it could be and that they will miss out on the full potential that exists in playing RPGs.
This is quite a heavy piece to digest. I don’t see the emails you get but from my end I think there’s only so much that can be gained from reading and talking about running a meaningful game, the rest has to come from putting theory in practice.
I find it hard to do and I currently find it even harder to assess whether I’m succeeding or not, because we’re not in the same room. I know that two of them probably aren’t very engaged because they’re frequently late.
Two others are far more engaged but feel like they’re stealing the spotlight by stepping up too much. The third has a blast but doesn’t say much, probably because of language barriers. Managing this is also quite a challenge.
Hi Rijst
On the subject of assessing how well one’s game are working – I may have mentioned this before, but I found that recording my games was *really helpful*.
I play my sessions back weeks or months later: listening for moments of poor delivery, confused narration, incoherent description, attritional or repetitive sections and so on.
This makes it much easier to self-correct, or to gauge problematic player behaviour.
(Of course – ask your players before recording any sessions, and stipulate that no-one else will ever hear the recordings).
Hope this is helpful.
I might do that actually, thanks. I’ll probably end up blaming poor delivery on keeping my voice down so as not to wake up the little one. Even playing in the pub allowed for better use of voices before lock down.
Coincidentally, I’m just re-listening to a pivotal game from 2017.
(Shudder)
It was at a time where my monsters had too many hps, too high a defence (AC in DnD terms) and relatively low offensive power.
Unsuprisingly this was the recipe for some looong, dull fights :0(
This one recording showed me that I needed to drastically change the offence/defence ratio of my monsters.
That’s interesting actually, do you think you’ve changed much in terms of speaking, delivery, pacing etc? Apart from the sack of hp that is..
I use the table that angry published a while back for 5e and can definitively recommend it. It seems that monsters having a fair number of hit points but a medium AC works well. Easy-ish to hit but requiring two or three to drop stops players from getting bored too quickly. That and interesting abilities that sets them apart from other monsters. Pair and solo monsters need a slightly higher AC to make them impressive and keep them alive long enough to do anything though.
Good question.
Reviewing recordings has helped me to spot confusing/overdone exposition: also to reduce backseat driving by players: also to reduce my propensity to railroad: also to improve NPC voicing.
But the most significant changes come from the moments when I’ve detected player frustration or rules confusion. These led me to change my game as follows:
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As discussed earlier I moved to monsters with much better attacks/damage but with low AC and medium hps. I tuned the various ACs so that the best party fighters would hit them ~ 80% of the time.
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I used to use multiple types of player resource: Resolve Points, Fate points, Exploit points and others. This was very confusing for the players – what was I thinking? So I’ve cut these down to the bare minimum now.
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Most importantly: I realised that having 5/6 players was sucking the life out of my game. There was way too much time between rounds.
So I changed from a 5/6 player game to two parallel games for any given scenario. Group A (3 players) play a session, then Group B (2/3 players) play a session using the same scenario.
To preserve group cohesion I invite Group A to observe Group B’s game (kicking Group A out before they encounter spoilers).
When I start a new scenario, I shuffle the members of each Group to keep them fresh.
This change has been *revolutionary*. I get twice the play for any given scenario, and the 2/3 player dynamic is intense.
Hope this is helpful.
It certainly is! I’ll try to set this up for next session because between running various aspects of the game and running an online game I haven’t managed to pick up on things like that during the session. Thanks a million!
Thanks Rijst – I appreciate your kind remarks.
If you happen to be using Skype for your online game, then ‘MP3 Skype Recorder’ is a solid choice for the recording.
(Cautionary note: users of this software should put their speakers to ~ 50% before recording, or auto-balance may wipe out the players’ side of the conversation).
Cheers, I’m on discord for audio and roll20 for virtual tabletop but I’m sure there are recorder apps for discord too. Google will help.
I found it implicit in the article, but I’ll put a point on it anyways: telling an entertaining, collaborative story requires skill and empathy. I think the rules can lean “indulgent” if the players care about entertaining one another, and that provides plenty of meaning to lean against. (and that’s intrinsic reward and not selfish and so it’s not indulgent, blah blah)
An example: the party was surprised by ghouls while camping (because the warlock on watch passed the perception check to hear them feeding in the bush, but asked what they were/how far away, failed that check bad (racoons maybe?) and said “Great, I ignore it”
The rogue decided he was mortally afraid of the undead and refused to do anything but hide on his turn.
After the battle the fighter berated the rogue. The rogue was contrite and promised not to run again. Battles that deserve fleeing now require a bit of cojoling.
On the other hand, the fighter didn’t want to participate in a battle against pirates later (he’s an ex-pirate), but having berated the rogue for not joining a fight, reluctantly entered the fray after a round.
It was a series of entertaining scenes where the players played off each other. And I think some of the “gaps” in 5e made it easier. Players can skip a round or fight a round too long without overly risking a TPK. The lack of deeper questions in “ghouls attack” gave the rogue a chance to inject his own meaning “that’s horrifying, I’m hiding”.
I think that’s part of the reason why I’m so addicted to mechanics and why I’ll reinvent something five ways to sunday because it’s too complicated, overspecialised, and burdensome to implement. The costs, the process, the tradeoffs, the “ritual of meaning” is concrete and spelled out. Unlike in more narrative games and systems where I’m playing Voltaire’s USS Let’s Make S&^% Up in the back of my head while the ST indulges in his grand story and the characters try to figure out what zany crap they can do in between being led around by the nose by the plot’s needs. Is it because I have an engineering mindset and I’m so used to rules and instructions that rules are an indulgence? Is it because I’m burn out on games feeling listless and meaningless as we make a bunch of stuff up as we please with no apparent rhyme, reason, or organisation and those constraints are a safe haven to avoid feeling like the game is at the mercy of other people’s irrational and indulgent whims?
Do they have therapists that specialise in tabletop neuroses?
Yes but you’ll have to lie on a tabletop full of d4s instead of a sofa so it’s quite uncomfortable.
Started playing the Lankhmar variant of Dungeon Crawl Classics last week. First time with that system, first time with a non-D & D fantasy system in a few decades.
That’s a hard game that’s all about tradeoffs, starting with your incredibly average stats (roll 3d6, do nothing else). Roll up three or four zero-level characters; if any survive the initial “funnel” dungeon (make it through the funnel) you’ll play one. Where you’ll probably die quickly. Elves are cool, but are allergic to iron. The spellcasting system is one of the most gonzo I’ve ever seen in any game, including Call of Cthulhu. Mess things up and you can literally grow tentacles where your limbs used to be. Oh, your *patron* is Cthulhu? Have we got some fun for YOU! Etc.
We’re having a blast so far. Of course, this group came up during the old school, choices are tough times of gaming. That is indeed what makes gameplay meaningful.
I’ve not been enamored with 5e’s (and everything since v3.0) “anyone can be anything, at anytime” attitude of game design. Now, some of this might be because I started with Holmes D&D, and later AD&D 1e, but I always thought trade-offs were important (Angry has now been able to delve deeper and explain WHY to me).
Even now, when I run a 5e game (set in Greyhawk) I view the races and classes through the lens of choice and what I call “Campaign Expectations”. Meaning that in a campaign set in Greyhawk, certain classes, archtypes, and races may not be available – and certain combinations might not be available. Because, as the GM, I’m trying to create a specific feel and experience for my players. Races are not just “humans with funny ears (or humans with funny nose-ridges, as in Next Gen Star Trek). I want them to have a wide-open world to explore, but one with internal rules (like all worlds) and ideosyncracies that the players must accept, challenge, or overcome. It creates a specific feel for the players, forces them to see/act/react in ways maybe they’ve never had to before.
Gonzo can be fun. But more times than not, gonzo is indulgent. Setting guidelines, themes, and boundaries – when they are meant to place players in a certain mind set or challenge them – is meaningful.
I think this article misses something, and I think the alignment restrictions you bring up highlight it. You say that is used to be impossible to play a lawful barbarian, and that is good because it means that playing a barbarian was a choice that had meaning.
But playing a Barbarian who has a strict code of honor, who pledges his life to the man who saved him from death, is a trade-off, a meaningful choice, and completely impossible if you say all barbarians must be chaotic.
I played a gnome cleric a few years back, did I care about what “superpowers” I got? No, I wanted to explore the idea of being a cultist. This gnome was devoted to the idea of the “Lost Goddesses” of the gnomish pantheon and was questing in part to prove they existed. Something completely inapplicable to other races who don’t have that lore.
Seeing rules like “if you play a dwarf and can’t play a wizard” don’t make me feel like playing a dwarf is a more meaningful choice that will say something, it tells me that the idea of a dwarven wizard is unwelcome, unneeded, and pointless. But, is it? Is it really? Could you take some of the culture and ideas of Dwarvish life and apply them to wizardy in a unique way? Clan and history a big deal, maybe you are supposed to recreate your father’s and grandfather’s spellbook, following tradition, but that tradition runs face first into an adventure where it is detrimental. What is more important, family and tradition, or adapting to the new world?
I find it is less about hitting the dopamine button as hard and fast and possible, and more about asking “hey, that thing you said was impossible? What if it wasn’t?”
The most useful theme that came out of The Incredibles was this: when everyone is special, nobody is.
More relevantly, the answer to that question is: “Sure, it can be not-impossible. But in order for it to be not-impossible, you have to pay a lot in real character terms to be that. You have to give up a limb. An eye. Your vision, altogether. And you can’t use the massive panoply of magic, which already is a major problem in D&D 3.0 onward, to ameliorate those drawbacks or penalties; you have to accept those costs as the path you decided to walk in order to be a dwarven wizard.”
The DM is not punishing you, or interfering with Your Artistic Freedom, or your God Damn Constitutional Right, to play a dwarven wizard when he indicates that the setting pretty much says a dwarf would rather have unmentionable things done to his unmentionable orifices than ever be accused of being a wizard, that dwarven clans ruthlessly throw babies with magical abilities off cliffsides wherever they’re found, and accordingly says that if you want to run that line, you will suffer constant and appreciable penalties or drawbacks to wanting to so play.
a meaningful character. It’s not about “You can’t”, it’s about “You can, but what sort of things are you going to accept in order to do so?”
That thing you said was impossible? What if it WAS?
Any decent GM–and almost all of them aren’t–will realize that the dwarven wizard ruins the fabric of the world. You’re trying to get people to believe in a made-up place, and if your sourcebook for that place lays out some ground rules in order to make the experience of pretending to be elves minimally coherent and comprehensible, you need to follow it. Now, you the GM may be doing a crappy job with that world fabric. It’s likely, in fact. That’s one way the dwarven wizard creeps in. What’s there to ruin?
The second way is just more of the “Look at MEEEEE” that Angry points out above. “Yes, there are no dwarven wizards…except for MEEEEE!” Let’s face it, a lot of characters are embarrassingly obvious attempts to deal with childhood or adolescent issues. This one is like Divergent or Percy Jackson or any number of those crappy, crappy, crappy books about an adolescent Chosen One who will Show All of You The Way. If you’re running that kind of indulgent schtick, a book will put up with it. Other people around a table will be less tolerant. So the game is about your investigation of whether some gnome goddess is real? ‘Cause if the group is also there, it has become that for them too. Also, did/does your GM have any ideas about what the game was going to be about?
And yes, of COURSE barbarians are chaotic BECAUSE they have elaborate personal codes. Pre-complex societies use these codes to settle disputes and generally make sense of the world. These codes tend to be highly personal, capable of sudden change, and very narrow/specialized (hours of explanation on how to approach a duel with ritual cleanliness and observing all forms and taboos, while “marriage” involves picking someone and dragging them off to your hut). Laws, which is what a complex society uses, are universal, stable, and comprehensive, with specific mechanisms to encourage that they become more and more of these things. They are also administered by specialist, professional, usually disinterested individuals, not the parties themselves. Thucydides gives great examples of both societies.
Yeah, I really don’t see a dwarven wizard ruining the fabric of the world. First, I’m not sure why “dwarves despise magic” has to be a foundational principle. If we go back to norse mythology, creating magical artifacts is a pretty defining characteristic. A world where the highest calling for a magical dwarf is to smith, and so an adventuring wizard is failing his parent (i.e. why are you becoming an X instead of a doctor???) sounds fine and interesting to me.
Then, if we accept “dwarven culture hates magic”, there’s so many source materials with mixed-race cities. Hell, DnD has cities with mixed planar beings. A dwarven orphan raised by humans? A greedy father who says “forget my culture, this kid could make me rich”? A kid who finds a spellbook on a dead adventurer in the underdark and studies it in secret? Maybe a scheming uncle arranges for the young prince to be schooled in magic, so he can reveal it and have him cast out later?
Or how about a barbarian who visits a city, and is like “this is sooo much better than freezing out on the steppes. I love everything about this civilization, these laws are so smart. I’m going to tirelessly uphold them. He still has the combat style, the deep rage, the knowledge of survival in the wilderness. But he’s bedazzled by a civilization that perhaps will never accept him.
As a GM, I try to use “nope, I won’t allow it” as a last resort. “Dwarves hold magic in very low esteem. You need a backstory for how you came to be, and realize that you’ll be a pariah in dwarven civilizations.” Great, that’s story fodder. A source of obstacles to throw at the player. As the GM You have so much control over the story, it feels unsporting to deny the agencies the players do have in their own characters.
So how is the dwarf wizard different from an elf? Where are the tradeoffs? How would the player approach a dwarf wizard with a level cap? If he has a problem with that, his justification is BS.
How is the “I love laws!” barbarian different from a non-barbarian? Serious question. His powers are owing to his rejection of civilized law and adoption of some pretty serious constraints. Otherwise, he’s a town fighter. Who is allowed to ride any gender of horse, can sleep inside, and is able to accept food from a non-related woman.
So if you’re organizing improv dinner theater, excellent! Half-gnome tiefling paladin assassins are peachy. I mean, when you think about it, they don’t really even need hit points. But if you’re trying to run a *game*, like Angry says, there have to be tradeoffs. The ME!!! approach also isn’t great for the other players.
Encourage players to follow the strictures of the world they’re in. Hell, even improv does this. Creativity needs constraints.
I don’t understand how dwarven wizard is too close to elven wizard, but halfling wizard and human wizard and gnome wizard are peachy. Or how is the dwarf fighter so very different than the elf fighter?
Nor do I see how losing the lawful option is a tradeoff to get to play a barbarian. First, if we’re talking metagame, neutral is a more useful choice anyways. Second, it’s not like barbarian tends to be a better class than fighter. I can be any alignment of cleric or wizard, who are basically always objectively better classes. But the barbarian needs a trade-off?
Mechanically, the barbarian is different then the fighter. Rage and bonuses without wearing armor but usually fewer attacks, etc., etc. That’s a tradeoff. They approach a fight differently. Thematically, the town fighter was born there and the barbarian is an immigrant. That’s a tradeoff. It opens and closes narratives. The city barbarian is a stranger, an oddity. He may never be accepted and trusted. On the other hand, he doesn’t need this civilization. He can slip off into the wilderness as needed. Decisions. Consequences.
I agree with the value of constraints, but to me, that’s session 0. That isn’t the sourcebook pointing out random areas and saying “nobody tell stories about barbarians trying to integrate into civilization, ok?” If a player says “My character is a dwarf who found a spellbook in the underdark and fell in love with magic, but has left home and will never return because he’ll never be accepted again”, I’d say “great! Sounds interesting” The game is no easier for that player. If anything, they’ve got more constraints to work within then the “I’m an elven wizard” guy. And having an interesting backstory isn’t shouting ME!!!! Demanding the world revolve around your backstory is. Different things.
I dunno man, the Barbarian class isn’t really about being a Barbarian. He’s a Berserker. If the Barbarian didn’t have the rage mechanic as its core iconic feature I’d fully agree with you, don’t restrict the fantasy viking from being lawful. But if the point of the class is he looses himself to the battle rage it feels like a pretty legit constraint.
Maybe it’d be better to just rename the Barbarian to a Berserker and if you want to be a barbarian make it more of an addon to your race. Like you could make a barbarian feat that means you come from the wilds, like giant axes and have the bodybuilder body.
It’s like paladin’s. In 5e you can make a chaotic neutral paladin. Would you be ok with restricting that?
Agreed Marcus.
Constraint & limitation are dramatic. ‘Anything goes’ is just dull.
Constraint – or perhaps I should say artistic REstraint – gives our subcreated worlds shape and meaning.
Take the lowly human fighter. He’s effortlessly dramatic. He is an archetype, bouyed up by a thousand myths. Even if we could only see his silhouette, we would still know who he was.
But a hobgoblin airbender or a genasi were-tiger? Nope. Hopeless.
I agree wholeheartedly with those GMs who heavily restrict what classes their players can play – e.g. “just Fighter, Thief, Muser, Cleric or Elf”. These GMs understand that drama comes from limitation.
The moment we impose limitation, players get to ‘lean into’ what makes their apparently standard human thief special and interesting. These tend to be story elements rather than powers.
For instance: we get things like ‘my thief wages a secret war against shapeshifters in the slums of Westcrown’ rather than ‘my thief has a 4d6 breathweapon and can fly three times a day’.
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On the dwarf thing – yes. If we want Dwarves to use magic, then there are plenty of potent archetypes that *don’t* involve shoehorning Dwarves into the classic Dnd wizard slot.
The skald who speaks Galdralaag: language of dragons: he can kill with a word.
The god-speaker, his eye removed by ordeal, a black raven perched on his shoulder.
The grim runemaster who has forsaken love in order to gain the secret of gold.
These ‘classes’ – types of Bard or Cleric I guess – wear armour and carry heavy weapons. They (kind of) work better for Dwarves than for other races. They are also better grounded – being mythically *upstream* of the classic DnD wizard.
Hope this was useful.
So what meaningful choices did the human make to become a wizard? Or how about the elf, did they have to lose limbs to be a wizard?
If the game is all about meaningful choices, then why let those choices be meaningless?
The thing is, some of these are about tradition and not meaningful play. Halfling thieves are fine, because Bilbo Baggins, but being a thief or a criminal is something any race could do. And the meaning doesn’t come from that racial choice, but from actually being a criminal with a criminal record, with dealing with being a criminal. That is meaningful, saying “elves can’t be thieves” isn’t meaningful, it is arbitrary.
Elves and Humans don’t have to lose limbs to be wizards or thieves. This is because they already fit the archetypes.
“Elves can’t be thieves” would indeed be arbitrary. In fact, it would be *wrong*. It would fly in the face of the archetype.
We all know that Elves work well as thieves. The classic thief archetype – clever, deceptive, somewhat magical, somewhat unprincipled – has more than a touch of Loki. Who of course wasn’t a man.
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“Dwarves can’t be Wizards” – on the other hand – is meaningful. It recognises – it resonates with – it forces us to draw upon – the myths from which classic DnD draws what strength it has.
Obviously as long as you set expectations for your game up front, you can place whatever restrictions you want around race/class combinations.
In older editions, Dwarves could be clerics and have always been portrayed as being capable of creating magical items. Given those facts it seems weird to me that the line was drawn at their being a wizard in the earlier editions. (I’m not sure in 1st edition they could have become a Bard.)
My two cents, though is if you really want Dwarves to be anti-magic then you should ban them from all spellcasting classes ala Dragon Age.
It’s an artistic choice of course. But just for myself, a genre where Dwarves were just ‘anti-magic’ would seem tragically limited.
I prefer Dwarves to embody the deep secrets and truths of Gods and Runes. Their magic is potent and bound up with the hidden substance of the world – not like the flashy and faustian sorcery of human mages.
There are other sucessful genres of dwarves, like for instance the machine-worshipping Mostali dwarfs of Glorantha. But I think that the Tolkienen dwarf – obdurate, loyal, vengeful, who’s magic appears in his craft – works very well.
Loki isn’t an elf either? I think you could make as strong a case that elves are creatures of the land and forests, of communal societies, and stealing just isn’t in there nature, as you can that dwarves can’t be wizards. I mean, if we source Tolkien wizard is its own race. If we take Odin as the prototypical wizard (raven familiars, hooded wanderer with staff), he hung himself from the world tree to learn the secret of runes. I’d argue dwarves are a lot more connected to runes then elves.
Angry urged us not to consider limitations and costs as punishments, which I agree with, but when we only apply costs to specific combinations we personally don’t like as GM’s, that kind of quacks like a punishment? These are fragmentary myths with tons of cultural variants and literary re-imaginings: trying to hold up “no, this is clearly the correct interpretation of the dwarf and anybody who wants to play a different take must pay an extra price…is this really about helping the player have a fulfilling experience?
Because, ultimately, I think these are the weakest tradeoffs to demand of a player. 95% of the time the paladin is going to be lawful good and the wizard is going to be a human or elf and the tradeoff will literally never come up. The player isn’t going to feel connected to their elven nature because, had they been a dwarf, they wouldn’t have been allowed to be a wizard. A good tradeoff has repercussions: the human curses his lack of darkvision in the cave. The dwarf smiles as his oversized liver makes short work of the viper’s venom. It comes up again, basically.
If a GM declares that Dwarves can’t be Wizards, or that Elves can’t be Thieves – or that there will be no Were-Bat Duellists in his game – then none of these are *punishments*.
Accepting these constraints is *the price of admission*.
The GM imposes constraints on the game to fit his artistic vision. In this sense he is an Author, and this is his area of Authority.
If a player doesn’t want to accept these constraints then there’s no harm done. He can become a GM himself or join another game.
I agree, banning combinations is not a punishment. Allowing them, but demanding special dispensation as some have been arguing for, kind of is. If you don’t want dwarven wizards, just forbid them at session 0.
And yeah, if this is just house rules, do you do you. It’s the idea that this is right and proper and should be codified at the sourcebook level I object to.
The Genasai pull from Middle Eastern mythology. Werecats exist throughout locations that, you know, have big cats: India, Africa, South America. By the same token, there’s so many variations on the dwarf, both in mythology (all the Nordic countries have their own variant) and in literature. I think this instinct that “the tropes I am familiar with are right, and the tropes I’m not should be banned” isn’t terribly helpful. It’s kind of understandable at the table, where maybe you say “I just don’t feel comfortable weaving middle eastern narrative elements in”, but as like “this is correct” or “this is how the rules should be officially written?”
But also, I think the idea that we, as the GMs, are the Author is a conceit that can get in the way of running a good game. If a player has been reading “A thousand and one nights” and wants to play some sort of genasai, I kind of think it’s the players job to convey what these tropes are, to pull those narrative elements into the story. Like stepping back, is that really going to ruin your story? If it is, fine. Maybe tell them why. But, is it really?
GMs must always have final say on what character tropes, classes, types of magic etc are available in their game.
Just like any Author worth the name they *must* have final creative control.
Let the players explain their idea(s) – of course. Players sometimes submit awesome concepts that would bring the game to life – if only the GM were to adopt them.
And sometimes they have great concepts – that just don’t fit the GM’s vision.
And sometimes the Player’s ideas are half-a$$ed nonsense that would break the 4th wall or taint the whole narrative.
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Whatever the idea, good or bad, the GM gets the final decision on whether it gets into his game.
He can certainly get it wrong, mind you. We’ve all encountered GMs with severely limited vision.
But no Player can *insist* on bringing in a character idea if the GM decides against it.
Or if the Player *does* have have a way of insisting (for instance: due to emotional blackmail or due to some out-of-game power relationship) then the game will be broken and toxic from the beginning. It will not be salvagable.
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If (as frequently happens) a putative player doesn’t like the GM’s vision, or can’t accept his constraints then … Roll20 is right there. It’s literally free to use.
Thwarted players can start a game, do the work and prove how wonderful – or how disastrous – their creative vision really is.
Tradition and meaningful play are very powerful ways to establish a consensus milieu quickly, a critical goal for roleplaying games.
From a design standpoint, you can make all races the same, which feels wrong somehow: a bad simulation general enough to mess with even a non-simulation game. Or they are different, which must mean that they have unique strengths and weaknesses…which means that almost always, one group of strengths and weaknesses will be, on average, better than the others. If not, there’s your samey problem again, from the other way round if you will.
Players whose character conception involves setting themselves against some kind of milieu authority from the get-go are generally not good players. They are *never* worth the effort or the hassle. They can hang out with the orc-orphaned folks, the assassin, and the chaotic neutral half-minotaur necrobard at the kids’ table.
Abstract: Races have limitations for balance purposes. So do classes. The “fluff” supports those limitations, it doesn’t create them. And that creates some meaningful choices at character creation.
Re: Meaningful choices for human or elf wizard
In the ancient days of yore the human could be anything but was great at nothing. Elves had grace and intellect, but weren’t exactly resilient. Dwarves were hardy and strong. Consider also the characteristic of the class. Wizards are fragile creatures, in part because if they survive and thrive, they become incredibly powerful.
This particular combination of races and classes answers the question. The dwarves are excluded from the wizard class because their native inclinations (hardiness) mitigate the class’ balancing feature (fragility). So why didn’t the human or elf lose limbs to get to be Gandalf’s little brother? Because they don’t bypass the limitation of the class.
So you could consider the race limitations of wizard as the meaningful trade you are making. Potential for limitless wizardly power means you can’t be a dwarf or orc. Much more obvious when you consider classes like the paladin. Biggest trade-offs? Nope, not the alignment or the code (at least not back in AD&D days)…it was the charisma and race requirements. If you get to ignore those, the other limitations are window dressing.
Ignoring these restrictions – or the release of them – helped feed optimization and power gaming. Stormwind fallacy? Nope – if you’ve got the players that can manage both well, to hell with the restrictions, you can all play pink ninjas. Not the case for most groups.
Thanks for this, Angry. I’m only a few months into my first serious campaign, and this is the sort of theme I want to keep in mind. I listen to a lot of podcast and read a lot about GMing, and I get pretty tired of hearing “As long as it’s fun and cool just let them do it”.
How is the campaign going then? I’m in the same boat and although rewarding, it’s a lot of hard work.
I think it’s going pretty well, though I do find it harder over Skype and being two players down. I’ve been trying to use the tension pool to introduce consequences, and also plan my XP and loot progression so that they need to actually make a proper choice about what to spend it on.
It is a fair bit of work, but my players have been pretty good to me. Plus I like building systems, so that helps a bit. I’m also not a huge fan of the Lazy DM philosophy, though it has some good ideas about deciding on what is actually important and what’s not.
THIS.
I DMd a lot in the late 80s and through the 90s. And ran Paladium games as well. That set me up for life in being enthralled by what games are, what they’re for, how they work and why people would want to play one. Throughout most of the 2010’s I took over a small fantasy MMORPG, and omg weren’t my players all whiny indulgent children. Everyone was addicted to the ‘pound my enemies to nothing’ mechanics. Cause the game had no meaning whatsoever. I tried very hard to add some, but it was too late and everyone resisted. The game has now been put on ice until I decide what to do with it. Or someone else might. Whatever.
In the meantime, I’m back to DMing, woohoo! (And taking Angry Advice.) And I am running DnD5e and definitely have noticed the change from when I ran DnD 20+ years ago. It’s all a bit… homogenised? I definitely find that I have to make a whole bunch of extra crap up to stop the game seeming like a blander, slower version of a generic video game, despite all the extra content. I hope WotC are getting this feedback somehow. (Surely someone there reads Angry?)
Azmodean, the reason 5e is so successful is because it’s a highly effective product designed by people with professional product chops, more so than any RP product I’ve ever seen (and I started in the very early 80s). It’s player-focused because DMing has always been a problem: finding them, supporting them, etc. It’s not a particularly great *game*, especially if you have old-school experience. But like a Duncan Hines cake mix, it’s great if you’ve never had a pro-baked cake. Most 20-somethings haven’t. And what they HAVE had is lots of video game “rpgs,” which ironically invented skill trees, etc. to make up for all the crappiness inherent in a non-intelligent, non-flexible medium. “We can’t have a real storyteller with all that richness and improv and reaction, no matter how good our writers are. And the rich PC back-and-forth won’t be happening, even with Discord. So let’s make up for it by loading on character features and combos and elaborate behind-the-scenes calculations, ’cause computers are good at that.”
BECMI is probably your best bet overall. It’s pretty mod-tolerant too. I’m kinda crushing on Dungeon Crawl Classics right now, although it will lead to a certain specialized type of (fun but weird!) game.
I do not agree with any of this. Except the part about BECMI. There is no way to know that 5E is proportionally more successful than any other edition in terms of player ship. Puff pieces in media and cheerleading from the publisher are heavily biased and always have been. 5E’s design is terribly inefficient, bloated, and poorly presented. And the design process was demonstrably a mess. If you like it, good for you. But everything you said – and everything I just said – is editorial masquerading as objective fact.
I might not be understanding where you’re coming from. I based my thoughts on my professional experience (I do product strategy, research, and some design) and on figures such as Icv2’s and self-reported plays from Morrus. It’s possible that there are thousands (there would have to be thousands) of players who aren’t reporting plays, are using older, nontracked, or other unusual systems, and aren’t buying many, if any, roleplaying products. That is a tight, tight Venn. I do know a DM, a 30-year veteran, who fits this model. On the other hand, I’m not sure he matters. He’s not part of the roleplaying market in any meaningful sense, no matter how often he runs his 2e games, and I’d totally ignore him and anyone like him if I were trying to sell a product to remain in business. He’s probably the best DM I’ve ever known, far and away capable of running expensive pro games if he weren’t making so much lawyer bank. Passionate, he Gets It, his game makes you rethink your entire gaming life. But he’s not a good customer.
Design is always–always always always–a tradeoff between power and flexibility. The first very hard thing is understanding the difference in a specific design/product context. The second very hard thing is doing it. A sign that you’re close is that people are easily able to learn your thing, especially people who have no domain experience, and that power users will accept the thing with only typical grumbling. 5e does this, and so it’s a successful product.
That doesn’t mean it’s a great or even very good game. But you’re a pro chef ripping on Ghirardelli brownie mix. One reason they made brownie mix is because the first brownies were chocolate cakes that had fallen. Trying to do that on purpose is HARD. Eventually they worked out a recipe, but the mix is still faster and just about as good for nearly every purpose. I’ll be frank: my table, a group that includes a mechanical engineer, a neuroscientist, a successful writer, and a public policy official, doesn’t have trouble being smart. But they don’t have the experience to savor a weirder, more powerful system, so they get really good brownie mix. And I’ve added a few chef tricks to make it even better. But I’m not all that great a customer either.
Also, quick fun fact: the RP market was $65 million in revenue yearly for 2018, a 7% increase (fairly respectable for this kind of vertical).
Or, and I’m not making this up, what Google made in three and a half hours this morning. ($161B annual/365/24.)
And that growth was down from the supposedly explosive 22% growth of the previous year to $55 million in estimated revenue. A single-year growth number is not a trend. But compared to the growth trends in other sectors of the board and hobby game industry, it still lags behind. Which is why I said proportional growth. Compared to other sectors in the same industry and year-on-year trends, RPGs are small potatoes. And let’s keep in mind that, because the company that accounts for 2/3 of the total sales of RPG products in the industry is not a publicly traded company and can keep its data close to the vest, the actual numbers are estimated based on surveys of retailers and distributors. And that means that doing year-on-year comparisons over the long term can be much more difficult. I have access to all the same data that you do. And I can also pull the “long term veteran card” if I want to and my professional experience prior to my becoming an independent game designer. But I don’t play those dick-waving contests. Nor do I wave the dicks of the professionals I game with or work with.
Your points are taken, but I disagree on your assessment of the design of 5E. And you kind of make the point yourself with the brownie analogy. That they have made a lot of tradeoffs for approachability. The problem with an RPG product is that there’s approachability of character design and approachability of play on the player side and approachability of running games and approachability of designing games on the GM side. And I would argue – extensively – that they have not acheived a good balance between those elements, leading them into conflict with each other. And they have prioritized the wrong elements.
And let’s also consider the fact that, because we’re looking at revenue numbers and because a new sort of D&D fan has entered the market – the lifestyle consumer – we don’t know how those sales numbers actually translate to play numbers. And we have to add that to the number of people who stop purchasing products once they have the core rules and then play the game for years to come. While I appreciate and agree that, from a business perspective, revenue numbers will determine the success of the company, lacking those figures, it’s impossible to assess the actual playability. And as a designer first and a businessman second – for the moment – who is writing about game design, I’m more concerned with the latter. Well, mostly. For now.
It’s becoming apparent that RPGs are a pretty unattractive industry. The “buy the OS and never buy anything else” is tough. The bright spot, which WOTC is trying, is probably for-pay public play events. Still not a great business though–it won’t scale, even if it could be a good lifestyle business–and I’m not sure why they can’t/won’t get it together on open-the-can adventures/modules. That doomed them the first time.
My game is as close to an old-school game as I can make it. It works insofar as most of the players do not exploit potential fanservice abuses (they’re too new). It is MUCH easier to learn because so many of the critical subsystems are simple variations on a very few basic principles. It feels like a holistic product, in a way that no other edition has. (Well, maybe 4e, but they overdid power at the expense of flexibility, hardcore…and why not just play DOTA or WoW?) I can route around or fix most of the stuff I don’t like, with the exception of healing, which is too intertwingled with too many other critical systems. The game allows you to leave a lot of fanservice stuff out–classes, races, bogus multiclass rules, dwarven paladins–without affecting play, which is a pretty good design trick. I’ve even allowed treasure for EXP–if they use it for EXP, it disappears from the game. They inevitably use it for that. Makes advancement a bit faster, but with modern schedules, that’s no big deal. If we weren’t playing 5e, we wouldn’t be playing. Too hard to learn/too hard to obtain/whatever.
It’s a brownie mix. And trust me, the tradeoffs WOTC made were solely about making their market bigger, not improving the game or balancing or whatever. Your cavils are those only a professional chef would notice 😉 Not to say you’re wrong. It just may not matter as much to the market and the business.
Then again, I insist on a 4:1 martini.
5e was designed to sell to more PLAYERS, and since people these days are increasingly indulgent the design for that purpose was well executed. Short term gain. It does very little for GMs. 5e is NOT fun for GMs unless you take hefty measures to keep your players in check.
Naturally I find I have to be the GM because I cannot be satisfied as a player in anyone else’s games due the too much dicking around as Angry points out. I feel the burnout and I expressed this to some of my players. Its just not as fun for the GM for all the effort I throw in just to have a bunch of primadonnas crap all over it. I feel the resistance to change when I attempt throwing meaningfulness into the game. I just can’t stand the emptiness and the void that is lack of difficult choices. I feel like an abused spouse. Most players expect the GM to operate as the machine that sets up the pins in the bowling alley. Its such a draining thankless job these days.
I long for like minded players. I feel like I’d really enjoy playing in one of Angry’s games. I already use a fair amount of his adaptations such as the dice pool.
This article really resonated with me, and I’m going to have some introspection as a result. I’m happy to see the return of your bs articles, and I really like the ones in this vein which talk about issues in how people approach and think about fundamentals.
Here’s the thing: …
What is the acknowledged single greatest cause of suckage in all TTRPGs whatsoever? What one DM/GM behaviour is agreed by everyone in the RPG community to be the ultimate DM/GM irredeemable sin?
Railroading. Why? “It removes player agency.”
However, so does making all player choices costless, and devoid of a capacity for possible meaning.
What does it matter whether a player has or doesn’t have agency (i.e., choice), if no choice matters?
It’s that tautological. To take away a difference in cost among choices, is to take away choice.
GMs who indulge (so to speak) indulgent play are denying players agency.
That “meaning” thing Angry discusses in the OP, is an emergent property of player agency (in action).
I was thinking about this some more after I made the above comment, & I think I can distill it down even further, hopefully with more clarity:
Players’ choices for their characters (stats, actions, etc.) matter, but the GM won’t allow the players to exercise them: railroading,
The GM allows players to exercise choices for their characters, but the choices don’t matter: what Angry is calling ‘indulgent play’.
Players make choices for their characters without the GM being a dick about the range of choices, but definitely being a (sort-of) dick about the costs of choices: what Angry is calling ‘meaningful play’.
[Player’s choices can neither be made, nor do they matter, … can that even happen in any RPG? :*\]
Railroading.
Railroading.
There is no more common, contemptuous and –utterly fatuous– complaint made about a DM.
The only situation where it applies where the DM has mistaken an RPG adventure for a story and the players’ avatars as characters in that story. And even then some of these entitled nerds should head back to 1985 and march through all 12 AD&D Dragonlance modules.
A modest proposition: no DM with sufficient testicles will ever be accused of railroading.
No, you fools, I don’t mean the DM has a surplus of them, I mean a DM who possesses them as opposed to not.
Here’s how I would modestly propose a DM handles a serious complaint that he’s railroading: let the party go off the rails.
No, seriously.
When said party that heads off in the opposite direction of the intended adventure, run a meaningless fight encounter. And give them well above wealth-by-level than they’d get for that fight. Then drop in a mention that the sky seems to be getting dark over in the direction of the intended adventure. Then have another meaningless fight. And this time give them even more rewards. Hell, let them even level up off it. And mention the sky over in the direction of the intended adventure seems to be getting darker. Then have one more meaningless fight. Hey, a dragon, who seems to have cracked his wings and has bronchitis, so he can’t breathe, and he’s unconscious! Coup de grace, wow, there’s his loot pile, enjoy even more wealth!
Then announce as follows: “The sky grows fully dark over in the direction of the intended adventure. There’s a sudden sinister laugh that splits the sky open. Shortly after, the sky splits open literally as well as metaphorically. The sinister laugh turns into a voice: ‘At last! I have recovered the MacGuffin Ring! Now my scheme is complete!’ Then there’s sudden white light, then sudden darkness, and then nothingness. The world is over. And so is this game.”
Then pack up your manuals, and damn well leave.
What? Railroading? But you did exactly what you wanted! Okay, only until the world ended because you weren’t there to stop it happening. But hey, at least you got to have agency, am I right?
Having got that out of my system:
How to combat an accusation of railroading is, ironically, to do exactly as Angry is saying: provide consequences for the players’ choices. That is, provide a failure condition for the adventure. A player who accuses his DM of railroading, absent the most extreme cases, misunderstands that the DM does not offer an entire world to be played in. That’s the perception, that’s the misconception, but he doesn’t. A DM offers an adventure, and if you’re lucky, a series of adventures. If your adventures have failure conditions attached to them, and the players know them, and you are resolute in triggering those failure conditions when they arise, then you will never be accused of railroading.
Railroading is usually the DM invalidating the player’s choices to make them run through the adventure. In a perverse way, it is hand-holding. It is not trusting your players to fail. So, trust your players. Let them fail.
Those are really interesting “defences of [non-]railroading.”
Food for thought.
This one, especially: “A player who accuses his DM of railroading, absent the most extreme cases, misunderstands that the DM does not offer an entire world to be played in. That’s the perception, that’s the misconception, but he doesn’t.”
Many layers it has, this +3 Onion of Illusions called RPG.
Thank you.
If one of my players ever manages to give a dragon bronchitis before fighting it he can have all the treasure he likes.
I feel like Railroading is one of the terms that makes Angry angry because people throw it around often not knowing exactly what railroading is.
In a lot of games I’ve experienced players are so obnoxiously dumb that I feel like I have to present hooks in such an obvious matter that I might as well be railroading them. From my seat it feels that way because I can manipulate the hook in such a matter that I can make them bite. Just the other week I had several hooks, and one I was not prepared for. If they went that road we were in for a train wreck. They did. So I had to up the ante on the other hooks with some quick thinking and they danced to my tune. I worried that it felt like railroading but I must have been sly because they didn’t pick up on the subtle manipulation but I was definitely, purposefully, actively attempting to steer the ship away from the rocky shore!
Its a facade where they think they’re making choice. I suppose that’s the difference. If you can direct the game in a way where the players can’t detect it that’s not railroading. If they feel there’s an invisible force pushing them in a certain direction, then it is? The whole thing feels kind of subjective to the IQ level of your players I suppose…
I was originally going to disagree (I think railroading is a “first world” problem – suffered only by experienced or deep-in-the-community players) and say without question the greatest cause of suckage is the Monty Haul sin because it removes the value/satisfaction of actually earning things in the game, destroying the potential for those great edge-of-the-seat dice rolling moments, and hard fought victories. (Yes, that probably reveals my age as much as anything)
But then I realized we got to a similar place. Having no ability to make meaningful choices can suck. Having the world handed to you feels good for a second, but destroys the value of the world later, because none of your choices were meaningful.
Yes. I don’t think you and I disagree about the fundamental point at all.
These concerns also come up a lot in Minecraft modding. There’s definite indulgence in adding weapons and armor (and monsters to match) that outclass anything in the base game by orders of magnitude, trivializing anything that chooses to play in a different scale. As for purpose, Minecraft as a nigh-infinite creative sandbox tends to get reduced to a series of checklists when new content is added in, with players doing one of everything on the list for the sake of having done everything and then wondering why there’s emptiness inside at the end of the list.
Vazkii is a strong voice in that community for game design respecting precisely these tradeoffs, having caught a lot of flak for some early changes to their mod Botania. Botania is very much about providing a set of tools and presenting puzzles – the theme is ‘flower magic’, with a large assortment of flowers which generate mana under different conditions (one burns fuel, one eats food, one absorbs explosions, one plays Conway’s Game of Life…) as well as a bunch of tools that perform elementary operations in the world in exchange for mana (one places items dropped nearby, one breaks blocks in a given area, one puts nearby dropped items in a chest, put them together and they can plant and chop down trees for you). There was a definite subset of players who bypassed the mana generation puzzle by taking the simplest “generates a tiny amount of mana from sunlight” flower, which gets you started but is intended as a stepping stone to more interesting and productive options, and then plopping down a couple hundred of them. This wasn’t particularly effective, but it was so cheap and easy that people did it anyway, and considered this a boring one-time chore to get at the pieces they wanted (invariably the one item that let you run faster, ignoring all the other puzzle-solving tools because other mods give single blocks that do everything for you). The change made these ‘passive’ flowers burn out after a couple of in-game days, forcing you to either do something interesting or continually play catch-up. General outcry was that this stopped people from playing the way they wanted; Vazkii stuck to the decision because the way people wanted to play was boring and a game designer’s job is to set constraints so that players do something interesting.
For a “bulls**t” article there is a surprising amount of deep thought in here.
What I take away from it:
Game companies (such as Wizards) are currently catering to a play style that is focused on a lightweight “fun” experience. This is apparent in the removal of limitations/drawbacks, but also in new publication that add more and more options for creating funny, unique characters and optimized builds around new sub-classes and spells.
But these are not the decisions that add value/meaning to a true Role-Playing-Game.
Tough decisions made in character at the table, that teach us something about ourselves do. So do game challenges that help us develop skills which do not only apply to the game.
If Players no longer (know how to) seek this kind of meaningful experience and only focus on “indulgent fun”, then those GMs that build their games around this ideas will become disappointed and might abandon or go down with the ship.
It is difficult to co-create a meaningful gaming experience at the table. I have attempted adding meaningful choices/dilemmas to my game, but it did not go as well as I would have liked.
Angry, what advice can you offer to a GM that wants to make sure the players find goals worth pursuing?
How can I create and present both meaningful choices and the consequences they bring with them? (starts dancing)
I’m not Angry but there seems to be a parallel with what he said on creating NPCs players care about, you can’t force it. Give players many opportunities to care about something and see what sticks, then build on that and start injecting dilemmas related to it.
Not speaking from a wealth of experience here, but that’s impression I’m getting.
Thank you for the response. The part about noting down what the players do care about and expanding on that is good advice.
I recall reading the article you mentioned and the parallel you spotted can be drawn.
True, it is impossible to “make them care”, but then in the same series Angry also listed a couple of things that make NPC more relatable (fears, hopes, vulnerabilities,…) and gave examples of how he employed them.
If possible I would like to see something similar for meaningful choices and consequences.
There’s a YT video on the ‘How To Be A Great GM’ channel that I was watching last night, that it seems to me touches on that question: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1OXoGrIVA6M
HTH
Thanks for the response.
Maybe my summary of the points that stuck with me from the article gave you the impression that I am dissatisfied with my game. If I was, this video offers a different perspective that is worth considering.
It seems to be describing a scenario in which one or several players only want to be entertained by the GM and don’t appreciate the GM’s work, want to be entertained and do not really pay attention to the GM or other players.
It also touches on the topic discussed in this article in a way.
If D&D (and similar games) are marketed mostly as a fun game where you can do whatever you want, then yes, these kind of issues will become more frequent/pronounced.
Luckily, this does not so much apply to my table.
I asked about advice, because I felt that when I tried to give players a hard choice (two NPCs asking for the same thing to be exclusively given to them) it did not feel like the players thought it was a tough choice. Maybe the stakes where not clear to them, or maybe they felt like something else was more important at that time.
That’s why I was hoping for some examples of how to make a choice feel more important and how to present it in a way that it is less likely to be pushed aside for later.
The choice is only as important as the thing asked for and the npcs asking for them are (to the players). If they’re both strangers asking for a random statuette the players found in a dungeon they’re not going to care. If both npcs are dear to the players and they’re asking for a single use wishing ring it’s a different matter. Context is everything..
I misunderstood your comment. Thank you for clarifying.
I understand your opinion (and situation) better now, I think.
I don’t know the answer to that one. I suspect it (the answer) might be specific to the particular players.
Irreversable choices – even if they have only minor consequences – are a good way to build up a party’s taste for meaningful choice & limitation.
Something as simple as : “do you travel to the White Tower by the Old Road or will you take a short cut through the Mire?” will gently test the party’s decision-making.
Later on you can present them with choices where the stakes are more overt and poignant. They know that whatever choice they *don’t* pick will lead to some future evil, but least they can try to solve one problem.
For example: “The war against the Draugr Horde is going badly. You can either travel north to prevent an Yx-Beast from being summoned in Robbers Gorge, or go south to rescue your friends at beleagured Fort Thorn. Or you can split up and try to do both! But whatever you choose, you must be swift!”
Players tend to respond well to these type of ‘choice of battle + choice of unfought evil’ dilemmas.
Plus they can split up and try to solve both problems – this is a very useful degree of freedom if the party really can’t decide. Also: it’s easy to run split groups in Roll20.
Split groups are double the amount of mental effort though..
I ran this same dilemma for two parallel groups (you know my setup).
Group B decided to try and solve *both* issues.
As there were only two PCs in group B, this involved one guy going to Robbers Gorge while the other one went to Fort Thorn.
Which was easy to handle in Roll20. The PCs are on different maps. You just enforce simultaneous starts to any battles and switch between them so that both players get to watch both battles unfold.
The effect is very like the action scenes in Star Wars movies where the plucky heroes are fighting in multiple locales: e.g. one on the Forest Moon, one in space and one in the Emperors Throne room. The GM just switches the action every few rounds.
(note: the GM need not switch over every round. For best results: switch over when the current fight has just increased in drama – e.g a new monster has appeared, or the PC has just had their weapon knocked away.)
So it’s easy – in fact, its *hugely enjoyable* – to run parallel fights.
BUT you are right: if the party remains split for a long period after the incident that splits them, then the GM will have more work.
I prepared the ground by making sure the PCs had some form of long-range comms so they could agree where to meet up.
But if necessary I could have run single sessions for each PC until they met up again.
Did you alter the difficulty of the fights? If my players try such a stunt in my current adventure they’ll probably get torn to pieces.
Good question!
I had three versions of each encounter:
* one for (3-person) Group A
* one for (2-person) Group B
* one for solo play
——-
Short preamble: I use an Encounter Point system (EP) system in my game.
32 EP is roughly a ‘standard adventure’, whatever that means.
PCs gain 1/4 of all their rechargable stuff (Spell Points, Resolve, magic item charges etc) back at each ‘Milestone’ – these happen at 16 EP, 32 EP, and then at each 14 EP after 32 EP.
A 6 EP encounter is pretty tough/memorable. 2 and 4 EP fights are much more common.
I used ~4 EP fights for the standard encounters, and 6 EP for the solos.
Note that a 6 EP fight for a solo is less monsters than a 4 EP fight for 2 PCs, which in turn is less monsters than a 4 EP fight for 3 PCs. Hope that makes sense.
——-
The players knew they had deliberately chosen tougher fights, and (being solo) were scared of dying alone, far from healing. They played very carefully and (having no one else to extract) were ready to run at any moment.
It was *epic*.
I admit that I wasn’t well-prepared to run a chase scene if one of them *had* run off. Something for me to fix there.
This article is very profound, and resonates deeply with my own thoughts on RPGs. Thank you for all that you do for this community. To me, you are representative of everything that makes RPGs meaningful and separates them from other media. I know you often trivialize the work you do on this site as “just a game about pretend elves,” and it seems to me that you are often dismissive of your own work, almost like a parent chiding a kid for wanting to finish the level on Mario before doing his chores. I understand that angle and often do the same to myself, (at the end of the day, it is “just a game,” after all) but you really are making an important contribution to our culture, and upholding important aspects of this game that are representative of critical aspects of our humanity that seem very close to being lost at times. I believe I’ve understood some things you’ve left unsaid here, and I agree strongly with them.
Well goodness that got grandiose. Don’t let it go to your head! 🙂 After all, none of this is life advice, right? It’s all just a game about pretend elves.
“After all, none of this is life advice, right? It’s all just a game about pretend elves.”
Another GM that I know once said: “Usually you are just a GM, but remember that also every now and then, you are in reality a therapist disguised as an imaginary goblin.”
Well said, +1
I would love an article on incorporating meaningful choices in your game.
I feel like whenever I try, it either ends with completely meaningless choices (like the “which console do you by” from this article) or choices related to how to best come about your goal (like the “how do we get to the dragonborn before he gets away” from the Shower Scene). Choices that reveal something about you/your character/both (like the “do you use your last cash in a console” from this article) seem rare and hard to set up
Maybe I’m just missing something, but I have problems with my player’s characters not really having any personality, and I think it’s because I’m not providing meaningful choices.
It might be the other way around: you not being able to provide any meaningful choices, because your players’ characters don’t really have any personality.
I mean specifically this: I don’t really know 100% what Angry is talking about, because it is based on his gaming experiences, which I do not have. But my understanding of the game says that the most “meaningful” choices you can put in front of a player, come from you (the GM) strip-mining that player’s PC’s backstory for hooks and seeds, and, especially, hooks and seeds that conflict.
Similarly, strip-mining two or three players’ PC’s back-stories for hooks and seeds that conflict.
Then you flesh that out, then you put that on the (game) table, and now they PCs face choices that they can do A, but that will cost them B, or do B, or that will cost them A. That’s “meaningful”.
One-shots aside (let alone a one-shot with noob players), where back-story lacks the immersion that comes from prior gaming sessions (nothing, IMHO, immerses a player in immediate play like the reincorporation of prior game sessions’ play), and indeed is by almost definition basically non-existent — I would argue that the single greatest *player* sin, is giving the GM no backstory and/or ignoring the attempts by the GM to incorporate/reincorporate PC backstory into the ongoing campaign. Actually, no: and then complaining. There, fixed it.
Mordar is right: Monty Haul runs neck-and-neck with (true) “railroading” as the first and second GM sins. IMHO the third GM sin, is failing to use players’ PC’s backstories as part of the world and part of the plot. The whole point is collective story telling. The players have, really, barring the cases of the rare and unusual GM who incorporates world-building questions into the Session 0, only two ways to contribute to the construction of the Imagined World: their actions in play, and their ideas as to their PC’s backstories. A player who gets annoyed at a GM who ignores the latter, has as much of a right to be annoyed at the GM, as a GM does who is annoyed at the sort of players who send their PCs exactly south, in *immediate* response to the GM saying: “Your characters see the goblins in front of you grab the +7 McGuffin of Doom and run off to the north by the Old Royal Road; what do your characters do?”
I also think the “fun brownie mix” nature of the game is the way it is to paper over the fact that a LOT of games nowadays are one- or two-shots, not the ideal “real campaigns” lasting a year or more. Again, it’s hard to attract players, get everyone on the same page, and coordinate schedules when you’re no longer 14. And nowadays, most 14-year-olds who’d love D & D have more elaborate schedules than I do.
Part of meaningful choices is complexity, usually achieved by more detail in the campaign.
Think of Skyrim again. Join the noble Nords trying to free their land from the huge, uncaring empire! Except the Nords are really pretty much racist dicks, and the Empire is trying to build more roads and help the people with trade, even if they do impinge on people’s freedom somewhat. Oh, and you’re a Nord. Oh, and you live in a town that’s pro-Empire. People on both sides are looking to you. Well, screw this! Let them fight it out. Cool cool, you go off and murder some dungeons and stuff.
But they do fight it out, and one side wins. Both remember you noped out. Now that original choice is back, except neither side is nearly as willing to believe what you say.
This is going to force the character to act. He STILL doesn’t have to join one side or the other–that’s really important to remember. But he’ll have to take the reality of the situation into account. He’s caught up in events. And more groups and people will pop out of the woodwork as time goes by.
This might be too much work for you–no shame, it eats time like popcorn. It might not be what your group wants, either. If I could pass along one tip, it’s that your group is the most critical thing about the game. We assume that GM and players are pretty much together from the get-go, but in real life they often aren’t. And sometimes you can fix it and sometimes you can’t.
Hey, Angry! Love the article, but I want to congratulate you on on losing all that weight. What a huge accomplishment!
This article really put works to something I had been feeling for awhile. I still take joy in some of the DnD settings or certain things, but the game just feels empty.