Are you ready for some bulls$&%?! Because I’m ready to fling some bulls$&% at your eyeballs!

Sorry…

I just wanted to raise the energy level a little. Because this one’s a thoughtful one.

Sometimes, these bulls$%& articles are like journal entries. Not in the sense that I’m working through my feelings and insecurities. I’m not a prepubescent girl. Just in the sense that I’ve got a vague something in my head and I’m trying to work it out. I’m grappling with a question or I’m trying to finish forming the other half of a half-formed idea. I’m trying to make a connection or tease out a pattern. Whatever. And I just need to talk it out.

Problem is, no one named The Angry GM has a bunch of friends to lean on. No one wants to be friends with a GM. They’re insufferable. I don’t even like talking to GMs.

So, I’ve got no one to talk to. And thus, I occasionally have to use these bulls$&% articles to work out my problems, stream of consciousness style, and hope that I end up with something that ain’t a waste of three to five thousand perfectly good words. You know, something people will feel good paying for. Thanks for your support, patrons!

Anyway, let’s get ready to….

BUUULLLLLLSSSSSSSSSSSSSS&&&&&&&&%%%%%%%%%%%%%$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Dear Diary…

A funny thing happened the other day in the awesome Discord community I maintain for my Patreon supporters. Someone — I don’t remember who — someone — okay, that’s not true, I definitely could remember if I tried — someone — or at least, I could scroll back to the conversation in question — someone — I don’t care who — said something that got me thinking. Or at least someone started a discussion and other people responded with things that got me thinking. Something like that.

Look, the details don’t f$&%ing matter. It’s not like you’re here to read other people’s words. You’re here for me. The things other people said that triggered my brilliant insights? They don’t matter. I don’t have to quote that s$&% verbatim.

So, the other day, in the Discord community, some people were typing things that sort of vaguely said something like this:

Let’s say you’re doing the trainer thing like Angry said you should because he’s a sexy gaming genius and you should do what he says. Every class needs a trainer with whom they can cash in their XP and gain levels. Fine and dandy. The problem that occurs to me is that, from a world-design perspective, it’s weird to have a class-appropriate trainer for every class in every settlement in the world. But if you take that into consideration, players playing rare or obscure classes could end up screwed depending on where the party is. How is that okay?

That whole vaguely summarized conversation other people who aren’t me had? That got me thinking about some pretty high-level campaign-planning s$%&. Because the answer is obvious if you’re a sexy gaming genius. The problem is that, for reasons I have yet to explain, I can’t actually tell you the answer. Because the answer doesn’t mean anything unless you come up with the answer yourself. I know that’s weird. But you — my reader — are likely not a sexy gaming genius. So, my conundrum is how can I help non-sexy gaming non-geniuses answer a question that requires gaming sexiness and genius to answer.

The thing is, I had a vague feeling that showing people how to answer this question would actually resolve a lot of different questions about how to structure a TTRPG campaign. Like, there’s a bunch of interconnected issues here and if I could find the lynchpin at the heart of all of those issues, I could make it easier for GMs to plan campaigns and decide how to run them.

But before I launch into that crap, I have to address the trainer thing. Because I’ve taken a lot of s$&% for it. And a lot of people are being really stupid about it.

The Trainer Thing

At some point — I don’t remember when and I don’t really care — at some point I told everyone that, in my games, characters don’t just automatically level up when the XP counter ticks over. The characters have to spend some time in training. Not only that, I think I might have actually told everyone that there’s so many good reasons to do the trainer thing that GMs who don’t do it are wrong. Kind of like my stance on milestone XP.

Now, maybe I used the word trainer. Maybe, I specifically said characters need trainers. I don’t think I did. But, if I did, that’s my bad. I’m pretty casual and flippant when I’m explaining s$&%. Specificity is bad for game design. It kills D&D. Like, I talked about how I classify s$&% in my open-world game as Resources, Threats, Mysteries, Stories, Tasks, and Problems, right? Those are good, basic, high-level design terms. They keep me focused on the reasons why I’m including this or that gaming element. That Naïve Exposition Bard I often throw at new parties is a Resource. It provides information about the world.

But the Naïve Exposition Bard is also a person. A fictional, nonexistent person. But a person nonetheless. They’re not just a game construct. They have other traits and qualities. And they often evolve beyond their initial purpose. So, the Naïve Exposition Bard also represents a Story at the very least. And if the party gets attached to it, the Naïve Exposition Bard might drive future adventures. It might also be a Mystery or provide a Task. If they give it a bad review, the Naïve Exposition Bard could become a Threat.

In my game, for example, I included a Disappointing Son and an Unpleasable Father as a Story. But my players decided it was a Problem. They decided they wanted to help Disappointing Son earn the approval of Unpleasable Father.

Point is, while it’s useful to have a shorthand for concept design, that shorthand doesn’t actually describe the s$%& in the game world in any useful way. So, when I said characters need training to level up, I meant that each character needed an external resource to help them reflect on and practice the s$&% they learned during their adventures. The actual resources they need? Those vary from character to character. You don’t need a higher-level member of your class to train you. I mean, otherwise, sports coaches and university professors wouldn’t exist. Those are people who can’t actually do the things they train and teach others to do.

You don’t even necessarily need a person. Okay, for combat training, you need a sparring partner or three. There’s no way around that. You can only get so far hitting dummies and working forms. Fighters need training buddies. But rogues? Well, stealth and combat rogues probably also need buddies. But tinker rogues need a workbench and a bunch of tools and things to tinker with. And thief-acrobats need obstacle courses. But they can probably get by doing parkour s$&% along the city rooftops. Wizards need a library and a laboratory. Clerics, paladins, and druids have to spend time in reflection, prayer, worship, or communion at holy sites. Warlocks need to conduct arcane rituals to deepen the connection with their patrons. That sort of s$&%.

Now, some of this s$&% is DIY s$&%. Characters can train on their lonesome. But most of it requires people and places and resources that characters just can’t carry around with them. Magical and religious rites and rituals? Those require all sorts of esoteric supplies. Sacred sites only stay sacred if they’re properly maintained. That’s part of what priests and shamans and shrine maidens do. They do the daily rituals and light the candles and clean and bless the site every day. Even sites sacred to primal spirits aren’t that easy to find. You can’t deepen your connection to the spirit world in any old dirty patch of forest. What the hell do you think the Illuminati are doing at Stonehenge every full moon?

The point of this s$&% is threefold. First, this training s$&% forces the characters to deliberately stop adventuring and return to a non-adventure place when they want to level up. They can’t do it in the middle of a dungeon adventure. That’s just good game structure and pacing. And it creates a logical stop in the game so the players can leave the table to do the bookkeeping s$&%.

Second, training provides space in the narrative for the characters to suddenly master new tricks. From a narrative perspective, it’s weird for a character to suddenly and inexplicably master a totally new ability or trick in the blink of an eye. Especially, like, wizards who suddenly and instantaneously have new spells written into their spellbooks? When the hell did that happen? The training requirement adds some off-screen time in which the characters can learn new tricks. The wizard doesn’t suddenly just know how to fling a fireball. Through his adventures, he figured out how he could probably throw a fireball and then spent some time in the library working out the actual, exact formula for fireball throwage. Which he wrote down in his book. The sorcerer’s power grew and he felt like he could do more with it, but he had to spend some time learning how to unleash it in a controlled fashion.

Third, training requirements force the players to think about and interact with the game’s world. Wizards need to think about where they can buy magical supplies and how they can access a library. Is one available? Can I befriend another wizard and use their personal library? Pay dues to a wizard college? Or can I buy a little house and start building my own library?

Basically, training ties the utterly mechanical level-up process to the game’s narrative and the game’s setting. And considering this is a f$&%ing role-playing game we’re talking about, forging solid connections between mechanics, narrative, and setting seems like a pretty damned good idea to me. That’s what matters. And that’s actually all that matters. The actual form the training takes? Who gives a s$&%? As long it’s doing the things I said, it doesn’t matter how it does them.

In my game, the party’s wizard befriended an NPC with their own small but serviceable arcane library. The rogue’s built relationships with a tinker-smith and with a treasure hunter who invents his own lockpicking tools for dealing with exotic locks. The cleric and the paladin both have access to the village shrine and that shrine is tended by the cleric’s friend, the young acolyte. The paladin also has a sparring partner. At least, he had a sparring partner. He kind of broke that relationship. This will probably be a problem once he’s got the XP to level. The requirements themselves aren’t specific or concrete. It’s not like I have rules that say, “this is what counts for training.” The rule is just “you’ve got to have something that seems appropriate to me.” And if a player asks, “what does my character need for training,” I can toss off a half-dozen ideas easy.

So, I definitely recommend the whole training thing. I absolutely did suggest that everyone do the training thing. But I also recommend that you lighten the f$&% up about it and stop overthinking it. Understand what it’s there for. As long as it’s stopping the game and the story while the characters gain levels and as long as it’s forcing the players to interact with the world, it’s doing its job.

For the remainder of this article, I’m using the term training facilities. Anything that I’d consider good enough to let a character level up? That’s a training facility. Could be a person or a place or access to a resource or even just a market with the right supplies available. The form of it doesn’t matter. Not one tiny little bit. It matters less than how many days are in an in-game week.

Now, back to my story…

This Isn’t Just About Training

Even using the broadest of broad, vague definitions for training facilities, availability of such facilities could still be an issue. Arcane characters might not be able to find appropriate training facilities in the smallest of towns. Clerics of obscure or non-human-worshipped gods might not be able to find appropriate holy sites in the wider world. Primal characters might struggle to find seclusion and spiritual connection in big cities. And obscure, stupid classes other GMs include — like gunslingers and monks — might be hard-pressed to find whatever the hell they need in a nice, normal fantasy world.

But this ain’t just a training problem. Let me give you a for-instance. One that’s about to bite my open-world players’ in their characters’ collective a$&es when they come back from their current dungeon delve. In D&D 3.5 — the best D&D and the one I’m running currently — there’s rules for what’s available where and how much economic activity a settlement of a given size can handle before it shuts down. You can’t buy and sell expensive goods in tiny, sleepy hamlets. And if you take too much cash out of or dump too much cash into the tiny, sleepy hamlet’s economy, it just sort of shuts off for a few weeks to stabilize. The locals get by on barter and trade, but cash transactions become impossible.

My players are off to plunder a local dungeon. And then they’re going to come back to the sleepy little hamlet. They’re going to try to sell a bunch of gems and objays du artte. And they’re going to want to buy better armor and masterwork weapons and scrolls and potions and all that s$&%. In other words, economically, they’re about to outgrow the hamlet of Perrin’s Mill.

It’s cool though. There’s a bigger settlement within a few day’s walk. And it’s got a more robust economy. But a few days is a few days. So, they’ll have to trek away from their adventuring goals and then trek back. And the longer the game goes on, the more that’s going to be an issue. As a general rule, the best adventure sites aren’t in the most civilized parts of the world. So the biggest economies are pretty far away from the biggest sources of adventure revenue. Hence, as the characters grow up, economically speaking, they spend more time traveling and more money on supplies. That’s just how it be.

Of course, my players might stay in Perrin’s Mill for a while anyway, hoarding their treasure, and then move on to the bigger settlement once they feel done with Perrin’s Mill. Or they can take a break for a week or two to visit Graybridge and then come back. It’s up to them really. But this is the same as the training facilities issue. Both issues are part of a bigger question:

Should the players always have immediate access to the resources they need? And if not, how hard should it be for them to get access to those resources?

Online GMs are Dumb

Let me jump ahead a bit and then I’ll circle back to why whatever comment you’re drafting in your head is stupid and wrong and will probably end up deleted. There is nothing inherently wrong with a game in which the players don’t always have immediate access to necessary resources. There is nothing inherently wrong with a game in which the players do always have immediate access to necessary resources. Both are perfectly fine. In fact, both are equally good.

Online GMs — most GMs actually — have this problem wherein they forget, first, that there’s lots of different ways to play fantasy adventure role-playing games and, second, that a preference is a personal and subjective thing. So, you tend to see a bunch of screaming morons using idiotic hyperbole when discussing issues like this.

If you require training and then don’t make training facilities available in every town for every character, you’re punishing people for their character-building choices!

But if you put a wizard trainer in every teeny, tiny little backwater town, you’re destroying suspension of verisimilitude and your world-building sucks!

And between those two screaming morons are a bunch of reasonable GMs asking a much more reasonable question like:

So should I make training facilities available in every town or not? How can I win this no-win scenario?

The problem is the screaming gamer morons have created a false dilemma based on stupid assumptions. And the question itself is gibberish anyway. It’s a completely worthless question to ask.

When you say, “what should I do,” you’re assuming that there’s a right answer and a wrong answer. Or at least a more good answer and a less good answer. But that ain’t how any of this s$&% works. There’s no moral imperative or value judgment here. There’s no “right thing to do” here.

Does one option lead to a more realistic world? Yes. Does one option create potential obstacles for certain character classes? Yes. Does that mean the first option is bad for role-playing and the second option is unfair? F$&% no. What’s unfair about adding obstacles to a game about fantasy adventurers overcoming obstacles? And what’s wrong with sacrificing a small amount of realism for a fun gameplay experience?

It’s all down to the style of play. And that is entirely down to individual, personal, subjective preference. And anyone who says otherwise is a screaming gamer moron.

But if it’s all down to style of play, that implies that one choice is better for one style of play and the other is better for another. Very good. You’re catching on. But before you get too excited — and try to pin things down too concretely — let’s talk about this style thing.

This Style Thing

Style’s another one of those things gamers like to talk about in concrete and definitive terms. But you can’t actually do that. See, style’s kind of like genre. In fact, it’s the GMing equivalent of genre. It’s descriptive, not prescriptive, and it’s holistic. And it’s emergent. A game’s style is the sum total of all the individual decisions and ideas and game elements that go into that game. Everything the GM includes or excludes, every decision the GM makes, that’s all part of the game’s style.

A GM can aim at a certain style the same way an author can aim at a certain genre. But there’s no formula to it. No precise combination of things that’ll equal epic fantasy or cosmic horror. The choices you make can steer your game toward that s$&% and when you get close enough, you’ll have a game most people would describe as cosmic horror or whatever. But it’s down to how the whole thing feels. As a whole. As you play.

Look, you can add all the tentacle monsters and cultists and sanity meters you want. If you don’t have the right themes and the right tone, you’ll never actually get cosmic horror. On the other hand, if nail the tone and themes, you can get cosmic horror without any tentacles or cults in any setting you want.

You have to understand this. Let me try an analogy. It’ll be a weird one. Just stick with me.

Imagine there’s this big multidimensional hyperspace defined by a bunch of crisscrossing axes that represent every important decision a GM can make. There’s an axis for linear vs. open, an axis for player-driven vs. plot-driven, an axis for the amount of magic in the world, an adherence-to-the-letter-of-the-rules axis, and so on and so on ad infinite nauseum. Point is it’s possible to map any GM’s game to an exact point in this Gamestyle Hyperspace, right?

Every decision you make moves your game through that hyperspace. And we can draw lines around certain regions of that hyperspace. And those regions all contain games that feel similar enough in play that we’d say they have the same basic style.

Problem is we can’t actually do any of that s$&%. It’s utterly impossible. So, we use imprecise language and invented terms to define certain broad regions of Stylespace. But it’s kind of like standing in a field and waving vaguely to the north. “Yeah, over there? That’s player-driven gamespace.” If you walk in that direction, you’ll get to games that feel mostly player-driven. But you can’t really aim any better than that. Especially given there’s a practically infinite number of axes and they all define subjective emotional experiences.

That’s style. And that’s why it’s stupid to be too definitive or concrete or categorical about style. Because it just doesn’t work that way.

That said, hypothetically, there is some region of Stylespace in which it’s okay for you, the GM, not to make training facilities available in every town in the world. And there’s some region of Stylespace where it’s definitely not okay. Where there must always be trainers everywhere. Hell, there’s probably a region of Stylespace where the whole training thing is, itself, a bad idea. It’s probably way, way down the negative side of the “actual good, fun game” axis. Just past Milestone Experience Space.

Should My Game Have Tentacle Monsters?

Guess what, reader? I’m starting a new campaign. Should I include aberrations in it? You know tentacle monsters. From the Far Realm or whatever the hell we’re calling it now. They’re usually psychic. Usually eat brains. Or they’re made of brains. Illithids? Intellect devourers? Gricks and grells? Aboleths? S$&% like that. Should I feature those in my campaign?

Wrong.

If you had any answer at all, you’re wrong. And you didn’t pay any f$&%ing attention to my last thousand words. Or maybe the concept of Hyperdimensional Stylespace confused you. Sorry.

Point is, you should recognize first that you can’t possibly answer that question without asking me a bunch of other questions first. Not even conditionally. Even an answer like, “well, if you’re moving toward cosmic horror in the hyperstyle thingum then yes,” is wrong. Because it ain’t that straightforward, is it? Before you can give me any good useful advice — not subjective opinion because your opinion of my game doesn’t matter unless you’re playing in it — before you can give me any good, useful advice, you need to figure out where I am in the Stylespace and where I’m trying to go. And that takes a lot of questions.

Now…

I’m starting a new campaign. And I’m requiring character training because I don’t want my campaign to suck. Should I make training facilities available in every settlement?

Now do you see why I can’t actually answer that question? But because I am a sexy gaming genius, I think I can tell you how to answer that question.

You Are Here

Remember how I said that there’s got to be a hypothetical region of Gaming Stylespace in which it’s a good idea to limit access to training facilities? If your game is in that region — or you’re aiming for that region — then you definitely should limit access to training facilities? And there’s some other region where that’s a terrible idea and you absolutely shouldn’t limit access to training facilities?

The problem is Gaming Stylespace is incredibly complex. And every decision you make changes your course. And the regions of Stylespace are really complicated and fuzzy and impossible to plot. One tiny decision along one of the practically infinite axes could carry you out of Epic Fantasy Space and into Fantasy Horror Space. Or even into Sucky Game that Sucks Space.

Fortunately, you don’t need to know exactly where you are or exactly where you’re going in Gaming Stylespace. You just need a simple way to determine whether you’re probably within one big, broad region or another. It turns out there’s a sort of litmus test question you can ask to find out if you’re in Limited Training Facility Availability Space or Freely Accessible Training Facility Space. And man those are a chore to type out.

It turns out though, that this particular test question is useful for resolving a lot of “is it okay to…” questions that screaming gamer morons fight about online. For example:

Is it okay for the world to level up with the characters such that, wherever the PCs go and whatever they do, they always encounter challenges appropriate for their level? Or should it be possible for the PCs to blunder into both overwhelming and trivial challenges depending on where they go and what they do?

It turns out that question — one that has plagued gamer forums and message boards forever — is totally related to training facility availability. And also to that thing I was talking about where some settlements are too small to economically absorb a bunch of PC plunder. And you can determine whether you’re in the right Stylespace for all of that crap with a simple question:

Do you want to run the sort of game where the players can and will suddenly stop whatever they’re doing and go do something else instead? Possibly to never return?

Call it open world. Call it player driven. Call it whatever you want. Ultimately, that question is the personal and subjective preference that lies at the heart of that region of Stylespace. The region where it’s okay that the players can’t find the thing they need in this town or they might get attacked by an elder chartreuse dragon if they wander too far from town. If you’re okay with the players dropping their current adventure or goal or whatever to go find what they need somewhere else — if you encourage that s$&% — then yes, you totally should limit training facility availability.

Limited resource access? Basically, all that means is that, at any given moment, something the players want or need might not be available in their immediate environment. Thus, they’ve got to either find a way to go without it or else go find it somewhere else.

Too-powerful monsters? Basically, all that means is that, at any given moment, there’s places the PCs can’t safely go. Thus, they either need a very clever way to even the odds or they’ve got to wait until they’re more powerful to go there.

Trivial monsters? Basically, all that means is that, at any given moment, there’s places that aren’t challenging or rewarding to adventure in. Thus, the players either need to be okay with unrewarding adventure or seek out adventure somewhere else.

In my AOWG, I want the players to drop what they’re doing and go do other things sometimes. That’s part of the whole player-driven open-world adventure thing. That’s the Stylespace I want my game to float in. And that’s why it’s okay that the players can’t buy masterwork bastard swords in Perrin’s Mill. And why it’s okay for their interactions to wreck access to a training facility. That’s why it was okay for me to include a lock in a first-level dungeon the PCs didn’t have a prayer of opening. And why, now that they’ve got a way to open it, it’s okay for me to put a beholder on the other side.

Oh. Spoiler alert. If you’re one of my players, skip that last sentence.