I know… two Bullshit articles in one month? That’s against the rules!

Screw the rules; I have money…

… is something I’d say if I weren’t a niche hobby blogger in the post-blogging era.

Technically, this isn’t a Bullshit Feature, it’s an Office Hours Feature. It fits very nicely into my True Campaign Managery series and it’s actually a direct response to discussions of and feedback to that series. But it’s still a bunch of ranty, rambly Bullshit.

Enjoy…

Professor Angry’s Office Hours: You Ain’t a Behavioral Engineer

Before I tackle the next part of my True Mechanical Managery module — the one about… well,… I’m going to say it’s about Character Death right now because I’m not sure how to tell you what it’s really about — before I tackle the next part of the True Mechanical Managery module in my True Campaign Managery course, I need to do one of those informal discussion things. You know, where I sit on my desk and tell you all to close your books and say, “Okay fellow kids… let’s rizz.”

That’s what you say, right? We’re rizzing now.

The thing is, I’ve heard some of y’all talking about this whole True Campaign Managery thing outside of class and I’ve read your comments and your non-comment feedback and I gotta say, I’m kinda worried. Some of you have a really effed-up idea about what Campaign Managers and Game Masters are supposed to do. I think you need an intervention.

The catalyst here was a three-day discussion in my supporter Discord Server about Experience and Advancement Systems. It took place before I posted the second half of that lesson. Two things kept coming up over and over and over. One was using Experience and Advancement Systems to get the players to consistently attend game sessions. The other was how not awarding Experience Points equally to all characters in the group no matter what punished players for missing games.

A few side discussions also flared up. There was this whole thing about how group-based equal Experience Points for all systems either fostered strong teamwork or else sabotaged team spirit or something. There was also this undercurrent about how all the different decisions Game Masters make affect player behavior and so, therefore, Game Masters should make their rules and mechanics and policy decisions to drive player behavior or avoid conflicts or whatever.

It was all frigging insane and I’m terrified that some of y’all think I taught you this absolute utter garbage. Some of you seem to believe that Game Mastering and Campaign Management is about winning a game of psychological 4D chess against your players so they’ll play and act exactly how you want them to. Am I being hyperbolic? Kinda, but also no. Honestly, I’m worried that, even if you wouldn’t say it exactly that way, you — yes you — believe there’s at least some truth to this.

I gotta put the kibosh on that.

A Space for Gaming

Let me say this plain so there’s no frigging confusion: as a Game Master, you are not a psychologist or a therapist or a social engineer. You are no one’s teacher or babysitter and you’re no one’s mother or father. Well… maybe you’re someone’s mommy or daddy, but you’re not players’ mommy or daddy. Unless you’re running a game for your kids which I know some of you do and this metaphor is really getting away from me. Damn it.

As a Game Master — or Campaign Manager or whatever — your only job is to run a game of Pretend Elf for people who enjoy pretending to elf. Of course, anything worth doing is worth doing well and if you like your pretend elfers you want to run the best game of Pretend Elf you possibly can, but your job begins and ends there.

I started this course with a big-ass speech about how Game Masters are social club presidents and responsible for their game and accountable for the people’s interactions at the table and how they should give their game the best chance to succeed and how they have to do some conflict resolution and behavior policing along the way, but some of you are taking that shit way too far. Everything I said was just in aid of giving people who want to pretend elf the opportunity to enjoy a good, fun game of Pretend Elf for as long as anyone cares to play it.

Now, part of that’s running a game of Pretend Elf that fits your situation. If your pretend elfers can’t attend reliably, for example, you can’t ask them to pretend to be chosen elfs picking an intricate mystery apart for months or years. Instead, you ask them to pretend to elf their way through short, stand-alone adventures that work regardless of who shows up and that don’t rely heavily on continuity.

Part of that is establishing expectations that people can actually meet and giving them the tools to meet them. So, you tell your pretend elfers that you expect advance warning whenever possible if they have to skip a game of Pretend Elf and you provide a channel for emergency communication they can use to do just that.

All this shit’s just about creating a space in which your game can grow. In which it can hopefully flourish. It’s about preparing a garden. You fence off the space, you aerate and fertilize the soil, you set out sprinklers, and so on. You do the things you can do insofar as you can. Unfortunately, you might not have a yard that’s big enough for a sprawling vegetable field and so you might have to settle for some potted succulents in a corner and call that your garden. More unfortunately, you can’t guarantee your garden will thrive. One late spring frost might kill it no matter what you do. That’s gardening.

The same’s true of the plants themselves. It’s down to the plants — the players — to choose whether to put down roots and grow. You can’t always keep them in the neat rows you planted and you can’t force them to grow in the right direction. You can’t guarantee that one of your plants won’t have blight or root rot or whatever. Hell, you’re dealing with mystery seeds here, so you have no idea whether you’re going to get a bunch of beautiful lilacs, some delicious potatoes, or a bunch of kudzu that’ll strangle the life from every other plant around it.

Of course, it’s possible to exert some control over how the plants grow. You can set up neat rows and you can use stakes and trellises and frames and cages, but the more of that shit you do, the uglier the garden. You absolutely can stake every plant and cage it and prune it every damned day so it grows exactly how you like it, but that’s a lot of work and the plants won’t be happy and all those stakes and cages are just ugly.

Worse yet — and this is where the metaphor breaks down — most plants just don’t like that shit. If you’re lucky, they’ll just pull out their roots and leave, but they tend to rot and ruin the soil and kill all the other plants for a long time first.

Your job is not to manage your players’ behaviors. You can’t. Not overtly and not subtly. The more you try to use your games mechanics and systems to manipulate your players into behaving right instead of using them to make a good game, the crappier and uglier your game’s gonna be and the less your players are gonna like it. That’s why I said you shouldn’t use Experience and Advancement Systems to drive player behaviors. It never works and it tends to ruin the Experience and Advancement system.

You don’t set your policies or make your mechanical decisions based on driving good player behavior.

Player Behavior is a Player Problem

There will come a day when a player’s behavior becomes a problem. It happens to every Game Master eventually. Maybe your player misses too many games without calling or maybe they’re selfish in their play or maybe they ruin the mood and tone of your game with inappropriate jokes too often. The actual behavior doesn’t matter; all that matters is that there’s a plant that’s wrecking your garden.

Here, again, the garden metaphor breaks down. Unlike plants, you can actually tell players they’re doing something to wreck the garden. You can say, “This thing you’re doing? It’s a problem. Fix it.” In fact, that’s all you can say.

Every player — every person — is responsible for their own behaviors and their own actions. You are only responsible for communicating when a player’s behavior creates a problem for you or your game. Once you’ve communicated that, it’s the player’s job to change their behavior. Or, instead, to decide your sucky game isn’t worth changing their behavior. Or to conclude that changing their behavior is impossible and therefore withdraw from the game.

None of this shit’s pleasant. It would be wonderful if you could engineer a game such that your players just naturally settle into the behaviors you want. It would be wonderful if I had a magical, flying pony to carry me to the Land of Infinite Zero-Calorie Chocolate Donuts That Taste Exactly Like Actual, Real Chocolate Donuts. Sadly, there is no such place, and trying to create such a pony just leaves you with a dead eagle and a mangled baby horse that won’t stop screaming. I know, I’ve tried.

Obsessing over how your game’s systems and mechanics drive your players’ behaviors is the equivalent of tearing the wings off an eagle and stapling them to a horse.

The truth is, all this shit about setting gaming policy isn’t about driving player behavior. It’s not about making a social contract. It’s not even about being fair and just. It’s really just about avoiding work. Seriously. Your Scheduling and Attendance Policy isn’t about driving player behavior but, rather, it’s about flagging the behaviors you consider a problem in advance so that, hopefully, you don’t have to intervene later. It’s also about mitigating the impact of minor, incidental problems because that shit’s unavoidable and it’s easier to work around the occasional problem than turn every last one into a fight.

Even Conflict Resolution — a skill I promise I will eventually teach you — isn’t really about learning to win arguments against your players. It’s not about learning how to make your players behave. It’s just about making the interventions as quick and painless as possible. It’s about communicating in such a way that you can get quickly to the “Thanks for changing your behavior” or “Get out of my house” outcome with a minimum of emotional bullshit.

Do I sound suddenly way more utilitarian and pragmatic than I usually do? Do I sound tired of this crap? That’s because I’m a realist. I know I can’t control my players’ behaviors and I also really don’t want to have to deal with this shit ever. Dealing with it is the price of running games, so I just want to find the path of least resistance to anything that looks remotely like a successful outcome.

Because I know I can’t actually control player behavior, I also don’t wreck my game rules and systems and policies by trying to drive player behavior.

You Can’t Read Minds But It Doesn’t Matter

You know what else I can’t do? I can’t read minds. I will never actually know what’s really behind anyone’s choices, actions, or behaviors. Why do I bring this up? I bring it up because some of you fixate way too frigging much on your players’ intentions and motivations.

On the one hand, I’ve got Game Masters arguing against firm Scheduling and Attendance Policies because players sometimes have good reasons to miss games or because things aren’t always a player’s fault. I’ve also got Game Masters excusing problems based on their deep analysis of the root psychological causes of their damaged players’ behaviors.

On the other hand, I’ve got Game Masters who see their players’ problem behaviors as proof of a total lack of respect for the Game Master or the game or their fellow players. Every behavior is down to disrespect, selfishness, or malice. I remember one Game Master telling me how a player skipping a game to attend a non-mandatory work-related social function was proof the player was just looking for any excuse to skip a game. Since the player was not required to attend the function as a condition of employment, their choice to go anyway was proof they were selfish. There was no other possible motivation.

You can’t know what’s in anyone’s head. You can’t guess it; you can’t deduce it. Reacting to people’s actions based on your assumptions about their motivations is fallacious and toxic and any cognitive behavioral therapist worth a damn will beat that behavior out of you. That shit’s on a list of Cognitive Distortions and it’s called Mind Reading.

As a Game Master, your job isn’t to know, guess, deduce, or even understand the motivations or intentions behind your players’ behaviors and you couldn’t do it if it were your job. Fortunately, it doesn’t matter what your players think. The only thing that matters is what they do.

A ridiculously hyperbolic example is in order…

Say I’m about to cross a street when a car comes racing up the road. I know that pedestrians have the legal right of way in marked crossings at uncontrolled intersections so I stride confidently in front of the car… and wake up in the hospital to find I’m never going to walk again. It doesn’t matter that I was legally or morally right. It doesn’t even matter whether that driver hit me because he was texting or drunk or because he was racing to the hospital with his child bleeding to death in the seat beside him. I’m still broken. That’s my life now and forever.

Behaviors, actions, and outcomes are all that matter. They’re all you can rely on, all you can judge, and all you can address.

Save your comments; I’ll get there. Just let me make one point at a time.

My Scheduling and Attendance Policy isn’t a moral or philosophical thing. It’s not there to prove my players love and respect me and my game. It’s there because if people don’t show up, I can’t run a game. It’s there because if people don’t show up, the time I spent prepping my game is wasted. It’s there because if some people don’t show up, the other people wasted time attending a game that didn’t happen. The reasons why people don’t show up don’t change any of that shit. It doesn’t matter whether you skipped my game for a medical emergency or because you were in the best Helldivers match of your life and didn’t want to quit, the game session still got wrecked.

Of course — and I can’t believe I have to say this explicitly — of course, if you let me know a few days later that you did, in fact, have a medical emergency and you apologize, I’m gonna forgive you. I won’t make an issue of it.

But what if it’s not a one-time thing? Say you’ve got a player who misses, like, half your game sessions or more. Sometimes they call ahead, sometimes they don’t, but they’ve always got a valid and provable excuse. They bring a note from their doctor every time or whatever. Not that you should ever ask for proof, it’s just a hypothetical. The point is, they’ve got a reasonable excuse every time, but they’re still missing every second game session, sometimes without warning, and sometimes causing last-minute game cancellations.

It doesn’t matter that they’re the unluckiest bastard ever and that every absence is excusable, you still just can’t keep a game running under those conditions. It just can’t work. Something’s got to change. Either you have to change the game or the player has to somehow stop having emergencies or they’ve got to accept they can’t really be a part of the game.

When I say intentions and motivations don’t matter, I’m not saying you should throw all your sympathy and understanding out the window. You absolutely should forgive folks their trespasses as they forgive you yours. You should always — and I realize it’s insane that I’m the one saying this — you should always make room in your heart for compassion, compromise, sympathy, empathy, forgiveness, and negotiation. But it’s actions, behaviors, and outcomes that cause problems. Intentions don’t screw shit up.

Moreover, by the way, it’s rarely the good-faith players with good intentions and selfless hearts who cause ongoing and repeated problems. But I digress.

When you tell a player to change a problem behavior, it’s because the behavior is a problem. Somehow, the actual action they’re taking is negatively impacting the game. You’re trying to preserve the game; you’re not acting in spite or anger and you’re not sitting in moral judgment. If you are, by the way, that’s a problem behavior and you’re responsible for fixing that.

Everything Ain’t a Reward or a Punishment

Some of y’all use the word punishment like a schoolboy on the playground who learned a new swear. Everything is a punishment to you. There are also lots of you overusing the word reward, but not nearly as many.

A fair few Game Masters have made it clear that they think not giving Experience Points to characters whose players miss the game is punishing people for missing games. Such Game Masters weigh every Game Mechanic as either a punishment or a reward based on whether it’s got a desirable or undesirable consequence, real or imagined. They think the fact that a player whose character dies ends up sidelined for a bit is punishing players who get their characters killed.

It isn’t and you sound like a petulant child.

Punishments and rewards are deliberate actions taken to modify behavior. If someone does something they shouldn’t, a punishment is a deliberate act to teach them not to do it again. If someone does something they should, a reward is a deliberate act to teach them to keep doing it. I’m speaking generally here; this ain’t a thesis on operant conditioning. You don’t need to lecture me on the difference between positive and negative reinforcement and punishment. That ain’t my point.

Actions have outcomes, choices have consequences, and causes have effects. Those ain’t rewards or punishments, they’re just what they are. If the rule is that only characters that participate in encounters earn Experience Points, that’s not a punishment. That’s just how the game works. Why? Because if it doesn’t work that way, then Experience Points aren’t an extrinsic measure of growth, progress, and accomplishment. For them to do what they’re supposed to do, Experience Points have to work that way. Otherwise, it screws with the feel of the game.

Game Masters, Campaign Managers, Scenario Designers, and System Designers aren’t in it to modify player behavior so they’re never punishing or rewarding player behaviors. That doesn’t enter into their heads. They don’t design mechanics or set policies based on rewarding or punishing player behavior.

Did you notice, for instance, that my Scheduling and Attendance Policy doesn’t have a single word about punishing players for their absences? That’s because it ain’t my job to punish players for their behaviors. If a player’s behavior negatively impacts me or my game, I intervene, but only insofar as I’m trying to fix the damned game. I just want the player to either show up or quit the game so I stop expecting them to show up and I’m not using carrots or sticks to make it happen. I’m just saying, “This is the rule; to be part of the game, you must follow the rule. If you don’t follow the rule, therefore, you cannot be part of the game. It’s your call.”

Some players have a real problem seeing shit that way. Unfortunately, some people just don’t get the difference between consequence and punishment or between accountability and responsibility and fault. Humans are supposed to learn this shit as children but some kids these days just didn’t get the memo. Such people are really hard to deal with. If you try to correct their behavior, they feel attacked or accused and get defensive and it gets ugly.

Ever had this conversation…

GM: You missed the last three game sessions and you didn’t contact me either before or after. It’s really hard to ru…
Player: I didn’t mean to miss your games! It wasn’t my fault! You can’t blame me!

If you haven’t, you will. I promise. Eventually, you’ll not only have that discussion but you’ll find yourself totally unable to resolve it. Or, after an hour, you’ll just be too exhausted to keep trying. On that day, you’ll become the villain in someone else’s Worst GM Evar Reddit post.

You — a Game Master or a Campaign Manager or whatever the hell you are — you can’t afford to reduce everything down to reward and punishment. If you don’t break out of that mindset right now, you’re going to find yourself totally unable to provide any sort of consequence or outcome in response to any action or rule or anything. You’ll be too afraid of accidentally punishing people. If you run games like that, they — and the players — will be totally insufferable, but you’ll probably just quit because running games will make you miserable and you won’t know why.

Don’t Forget to Be a Human

Let me end this ugly bunch of hard, ranty truths about what is and isn’t your job with a completely different admonishment. Way too many of you are taking all this policy and procedure to mean you have to be a cold, unfeeling monster.

This side discussion arose in my supporter Discord Server about a player missing a critical session. The discussion was about Experience Point imbalances, but I seized on the opportunity to teach a different lesson.

Imagine your campaign’s building to a major, climactic event. Your next session will be the culmination of weeks or months of adventure. Maybe it’s a big, important boss fight or maybe it’s a huge plot reveal or maybe it’s just an awesome setpiece encounter you’ve been foreshadowing for weeks. Doesn’t matter.

Imagine it’s the day of that big session and you get a text from Adam. He’s got an emergency; he can’t attend the session. He understands, though, that the game will go on without him. There’s just nothing he can do and he’s sorry.

Let’s really lay this shit on thick. Let’s imagine the climax is super important to Adam’s character’s personal story.

Adam knows you’re gaming without him. He knows your policies and procedures. You’ve got a quorum; you can run the game. Adam will miss the awesome session, and Ardrick won’t earn any Experience Points, but he’ll only end up lagging a level behind the party and that won’t break the game. By every written rule and policy, there is no problem here. Everything is working as intended.

And yet, if it’s my game and I’m the Game Master in that situation, I’m totally canceling the game. You can ask my players. I’ve done exactly that. I’ve sent messages like…

Look, gang, tonight’s session is supposed to be a big-ass climax. No spoilers, but trust me, it’s huge. The problem is that Adam has an emergency. He can’t be there. I really want all hands for this particular session so I’m cancelling the game tonight. I’ll reach out in a day or two to see if we can schedule an extra session. Otherwise, we’ll just get together for the next regular game session and pick up from there. Meanwhile, I’ll be home tonight. If anyone wants to do the pizza and board game thing, let me know. I’m really sorry but thanks for understanding.

In all these talks about rules and policies and procedures and game design and shit like that, it’s really easy for us — some of us, anyway — to forget that, in the end, this is just a hobby. It’s a fun thing we do together with people we like. Yeah, it’s fun with a purpose and it needs rules and structure and you gotta take it seriously — it’s serious fun — but there’s got to be room in your head and your heart for humanity too.

There should be room for breaking the rules for someone just because it’s the kindest thing to do. There should be room for forgiveness and second chances and for helping a friend who is genuinely trying to manage their time better and for letting lapses go uncommented-on from time to time. There should be room for compromises and room for favors and room for adapting and adjusting. How much room should you leave? I can’t tell you that. It’s your heart.

You do have to be a hardass to run a good game. You have to take your job seriously. Lots of kind, compassionate people really struggle with that and my community has a lot of kind, compassionate people. Hell, I’m pretty sure most Game Masters do what they do out of a selfless desire to make their friends happy, so it’s natural for Game Masters to be kind and compassionate. Because of all that, I have to remind you to grow a frigging spine and assert yourself for the sake of your game.

But please don’t jerk the other knee in response.

As with all social things, Game Masters need to find a middle ground between assertiveness and kindness. If someone’s causing problems, you gotta yank on their chain. If someone’s willing to meet you partway, it’s okay to compromise, even if the outcome’s not exactly ideal. If someone really needs to hear an apology, it’s okay to give it even if you don’t think you did anything wrong. If following your written policy genuinely makes you sad, it’s okay to make an exception.

Given the choice between the player who lets me cancel a rare, special session so everyone can be a part of it and someone who gives me shit for not sticking to the letter of law and costing them a game session, I know who I’d rather share my table with. It’s the person I’d rather see when I look in the mirror.

And that’s it. Speech over. Now get the hell out of here, you dumbasses, and think about everything I said. I’ve got a mask to put back on.