It’s rant time. You know the drill. Once in awhile – but no more than once a month – I take a break from dispensing useful advice about building and running great games and hacking the motherloving f$&% out of the mess that is D&D 5E and just kind of piss and moan and rant and pontificate. I mean, I like to pretend it’s useful stuff like me thinking through a problem and inspiring people to look at things a different way. Or like me sharing super-secret thoughts about how I’d make an RPG if I were making an RPG which we all know I am so everything I share constitutes a really early, super teasy preview of a pre-first-draft that’ll probably get revised to hell and back a dozen times before it’s anything close to a beta playtested I’d ever let another human being see. But mostly, it’s just me pissing and moaning and ranting and b$&%ing. Or, more politely me, me navel-gazing and pondering.

Look, I rewrote the entire f$&%ing monster and encounter design system in one f$&%ing weekend for you people. And if you’re a Frienemy level Patron of the Angry of Arts on Patreon, you also just got a massive dump of house rules pertaining to downtime and adventuring supplies that are too untested for me to share with the masses. And I’m heading off a convention tomorrow. And I have a lot on my mind. So, I get a break.

Sort of. I mean, I’m still writing instead of trying to beat the f$&%ing devil in Cuphead. So…

Anyway.

I make it a point in these rants never to rant about the players in my home games. At least, lately. Because they read this s$&%. I miss when I had players who couldn’t be a$&ed to read my articles every week and didn’t give a s$&% about gaming beyond just showing up every week to kill some green-skinned monsters and collect some loot and gain some levels. But my current players are also readers so I can’t risk hurting their precious little feelings.

Actually, that isn’t true. Honestly, my current players are really… well… nice. They are nice people. Sickeningly so. They take everything in stride, they let me get away with a lot of crap, they let me suddenly rewrite 20 pages of rules at a pop just because I want to, and they put up with my spate of cancellations, my emotional instability, and my struggles with online gaming. In short, they have the patience of some four-headed Medieval saint. Which is why I feel bad for putting them through one of my games. Because, let me tell you, my games are rough the self-esteem. I beat the PCs to death saves every week. I make them watch children get devoured by burrowing ankhegs and tell them it’s their fault for not acting in the one surprise round they had they prevent it. Or watch as a witch turns an innocent widowed halfling mother into a murderer and then tortures her by telling her it was her own damned fault and if she could handle her life better, she wouldn’t have to keep putting people in graves. Or paying witches to stop people from ending up in graves.

No, really. That was the climactic ending of our most recent session. I mean, they did have a chance to prevent it. But the way I write my games, there’s usually layers of objectives in the game. The most basic objective is usually pretty easy to complete. Like “lift the curse on the village.” The other objectives are harder. Like “and prevent the villagers’ interpersonal problems that have been festering for years from tearing apart the community if you take too long.” Or “and don’t let that one person visit the witch because the witch will make her do something terrible and that will definitely tear the community apart.”

And they just keep taking it. And they take it happily. They take it with good humor. They take everything with good humor. That’s why I can poke fun at players like Arnold R. – wait, that’s too obvious, let’s call him A. Russell – for forgetting to buy food when he created his character despite the fact that his origin story was literally “and then you left your life as a cloistered scholar and started wandering the world” and despite the fact that if you buy literally prepackaged set of goods for your character in D&D 5E except one, you get 10 days of food for free, so you basically have to purposely avoid buying food to end up without any.

That said, I do try to avoid ranting about my players. And I’m not going to start now. It’s just going to look like I am. Because lately, I find myself dealing with a particular pattern of behavior that is f$&%ing endemic among players and also, it turns out, endemic among GMs. And f$&%ing game designers. It’s a pattern of behavior that literally every gamer around me seems to engage in constantly. Except me. And it keeps wrecking my s$&%.

Wow, that was the Longest and Ramblingest Introduction™ yet. Holy crap.

But who cares? This article is bulls$&% anyway.

I want to talk about why deliberation and thought are a waste of your f$&%ing time as a player and as a game designer.

Decision By Committee

Now, despite my personal rule against ranting about my players that I referenced in the Long, Rambling Introduction™ that you probably skipped, I’m going to rant about my players. But I’m just using them as an example of something literally every player I’ve ever seen, run for, played with, or eavesdropped on does. So they aren’t special. They are totally, completely normal players except for a higher than average tolerance for bulls$&% killer GMing and emotional torture.

The situation was this: there was this witch. I can’t share too much about her because she’s an ongoing factor in my game, but she’s a very traditional witch. Slavic mythology witch. The kind who seems to be older than time and is basically the natural force of chaos incarnate. The kind who is totally amoral. The kind who people go to when they are desperate and whose help always leads them to a bad end. Except the bad end is always poetically just and exemplifies the person’s basic sins and failings. So it’s never clear whether the witch is evil and corrupting or whether she just represents a really twisted version of natural, karmic justice. You know the type.

The party ended up tied up in the witch’s schemes. Sort of. Other NPCs were tied up in her schemes and the party wasn’t trying to figure out just what the hell the scheme was and who was getting screwed and therefore decide what side they should take and what they should actually do. The witch had offered to actually solve all their problems if they just sat tight and let nature take its course. And yes, to you now, it seems obvious that that is absolutely the wrong offer to accept. But it’s a lot harder to solve a Rubik’s Cube from the inside and the party didn’t know everything about the witch that I’ve just told you. Because she might have been a perfectly normal spellcaster hermit who was legit just offering services in return for payment.

The point is, the party just didn’t know what the hell what was going on. They were in the heart of witch territory and once the sun went down, they’d be stuck there overnight for reasons I can’t go into. The witch seemed to be the only source for particular information they needed because they’d accidentally killed one other lead and totally missed another different one due to some failed skill checks. The NPC they needed to talk to was already on her way back home to make some “final arrangements” and she’d be returning to the witch in the morning, ostensibly to sacrifice her own life to buy safety for her town and her kids.

It was a very ugly situation. And the ugliest part was just the sheer number of things the party didn’t know.

And so, the players did what players always do in this situation. They called for a sidebar. They decided to discuss, at length, what they thought was going on and to try to decide what their next course of action should be. And they sidebarred for a long time. And eventually, they decided they didn’t have enough information, so they brought the witch into the sidebar. And then they had another sidebar alone after they sent the witch away again. And they ended up sidebarring so long they lost their opportunity to leave witch country before the sun went down and had to spend the night. And the next day, the scene played out and it was bad. The witch had played the NPC. But the witch did deliver the villain of the adventure and the party killed him and set everything right. Yay.

Afterward, the party realized the witch was probably pretty evil and dangerous after all and that she’d actually done some s$&% that made her worse than the villain of the adventure and they should probably do something. All except A.R. He liked the witch and thought everyone had gotten what they deserved for dealing with a F$&%ING WITCH. But then, he’s a warlock with a world-ending Cthulhu snake in his head. So what can you do?

My point is that I’ve noticed that players – all players, not just these players – have a particular tendency to turtle up whenever they find themselves with a difficult decision and when they are lacking in useful information that provides a clear right answer. They tend to drop into committee mode. Now, that’s understandable. I am not faulting anyone for making a group discussion a part of the group decision making process. But as a GM, I am sure I am not alone in saying that it (a) often leads to them spending about five times as long as they need to make a decision and (b) that it almost invariably leads to the group making the worst choice possible. Like, group decision making is fine. It’s necessary. But players are really bad at it. They are almost as bad at it as GMs.

You didn’t see that one coming, did you?

The Curse of Sharing Ideas

It may surprise you to learn that I like to create gaming content. Who f$&%ing knew, right?

But yes, surprising no one, I love making gaming content. Especially news rules and mechanics. I love hacking me some rules. I love creating new systems. Sometimes, I get so excited about a new idea for some new hack or system or rule that I totally forget that I had three other things in progress that need finishing and launch myself into the next project. And that’s why I either write an entire subsystem in a weekend or I forget it forever. I am racing against the clock of my own next idea.

Point is, I throw a lot of ideas at the gaming community. I put out articles here. I invent new house rules for my games. I share some of them in my secret stash for my patrons as mentioned above. And I also jump into my discord community randomly to spit out 500 words of a random idea and then watch people beat the hell out of it.

But here’s the thing: I also like testing s$&% out. Ideas are a really good starting point. But that’s all they are good for. So, you see this problem or need in your game. Or in some hypothetical game you’re designing. And you work through the problem or need a bit in your head. And then you have an idea that might fix it. Great. And here is where I disagree with basically the entire rest of my f$&%ing community.

I take that idea and I bash into something I can implement at the table. And I mean bash. I slam that s$&% out as quickly as I can. I don’t try to write around weird interactions or unintended consequences. I don’t try to get the wording just right. I don’t try to make the document pretty. I try to get the idea into the bare minimum state it needs to be in for me to hand it to my players and say “we’re doing this now.” And then we do it. And then I gather a lot of data. And only then, when I have a lot of data, do I actually start to polish the idea.

Eventually, by the way, if you do this often enough, you do develop a bit of a talent for spitting out some first draft, bare minimum crap that looks like what other people would call a final draft. But you never stop spitting out ugly, half-formed crap that fails. And if you’re afraid of ugly, half-formed crap that fails, well, you’ll never develop anything good.

See, the rest of the community loves to talk. And think. And then talk some more. They talk and talk and think and talk and think and talk. Give them an idea and they will just talk and think and talk some more for hours or days or weeks. A lot of times I fling an idea into my Discord chat and they start talking and thinking. And I spend the next two days turning the idea into a playable system I can try. And I come back and I’m like “hey, I made this playable system out of that idea” and they are still talking and thinking and talking. And talking.

Now, I love me some talking. And thinking. I do a lot of both. I love to listen to myself talk. And I love to sit and think. I love being bored because it gives me more time to think. And when I leave my brain alone to think, a lot of really good ideas come out of it. And talking is great too because talking is just thinking out loud while you watch someone else’s face react to your talking. But there’s a time for talk and there’s a time for doing.

Talking is great when something is wrong or something is missing and you don’t know what that something missing is and need to figure out what you’re missing. Thinking is great when you know what’s wrong or what’s missing and you need a way to fix it. And talking and thinking are great once you’ve got a working solution that needs to be polished, refined, edited, and cleaned up for general consumption. But talking and thinking have some major limitations.

Thinking will never get you information you don’t have. I know some pedantic, overly rational a$&hole is going to point out that thinking is how new information is created. And that’s another problem with talking. Sometimes you have to talk to overly pedantic, rational a$&holes who are in love with their own brains and think the human brain can do anything. No. Here’s what a brain can do: it can reach a conclusion based on existing information. And usually, it’s not done just by thinking alone. Albert Einstein recognized a weird inconsistency between the fact that there are no preferred frames of reference and the fact that moving charges induce magnetic fields. Those things can’t both be true in the same universe unless there was some fundamental piece of information missing. And then he had an idea that maybe it had to do with the fact that space and time themselves were not constants. And then he did a f$&%ton of math. And then he derived the special theory of relativity. He didn’t just imagine it into being. He worked out a solution. Which isn’t the same as just thinking. He experimented. He tested different mathematical ideas until he found the ones that worked. And even then, all that gave him was a testable hypothesis. Because that’s how science works. And it’s important to understand that. There’s a difference between thinking and doing.

Talking will get you some information you don’t have. It’ll get you some different perspectives on a given problem, for example. And if someone has already recognized and solved the problem, it’ll get prevent you from having to reinvent the wheel. But unless you’re specifically talking an expert who has specific, specialized information that you lack, talking doesn’t get you much actual information. And that, by the way, is not talking anymore. That’s called research. And it’s important to understand that. There’s a difference between talking and research.

People overvalue thinking and talking. And the people who overvalue thinking and talking the most are – if I can say this without melting any snowflakes – the people who overvalue thinking and talking the most are the people who spend all their time thinking and talking about stuff and never actually produce anything. And, let me tell you something, I say that as one of those people. I overvalue talking and I way, WAY overvalue thinking. I spend a hell of a lot of time thinking up s$&%. It is extremely hard for me to sit down and produce. It’s a skill I’m still learning. How the hell do I think less and do more?

Anyway, this little diatribe should help explain why I suddenly lose my f$&%ing cool and start yelling at people who are thinking and talking at me about something that I haven’t had a chance to test yet. Or why I yell at people who have a perfectly good idea all ready to get tested and then they keep thinking and talking and they invite other people to think and talk and there’s nothing but thinking and talking happening. If you’re one of my Discord people and you’ve seen me suddenly flip out over too much thinking and talking, now you know why?

A Problem Shared is a Problem Halved

Now, this whole topic of how overvalued deliberation is a really unique topic in the history of all the topics I’ve covered. First, it’s unique because it’s a problem that I admit that I, myself, have and still have not completely managed to overcome. Which is weird. Because I don’t admit my f$&%ing weaknesses. But here we are. Second, it’s unique because it’s not really something that GMs have to worry about. GMs make all of their decisions alone. Unless they are one of those crappy, terrible GMs who involve the players in every f$&%ing decision and require positive consent for everything they do at the table. But those people aren’t reading my blog anyway and they’re beyond my help besides.

No, this is a topic that’s unique because it’s a problem that game designers and RPG players share. Remember, not all GMs are content creators and game designers. But some people who are GMs at the table are also content creators and game designers when they’re not at the table. That’s why I say this isn’t a problem for GMs, but it is a problem for players.

Funny thing is, though, that both players and game designers can actually learn how to cope with it by looking at how GMs deal with things at the table. But before we get to the solution, let’s talk about the real problem behind overvaluing deliberation. Because it isn’t just a harmless waste of time. It’s dangerous. It’s insidious.

What Harm is It?

I’m collectively using the term “deliberation” to refer to all of the “thinking and talking about how to solve a problem.” And I’ve tried to be as specific as possible about what I classify as thinking and talking about how to solve a problem. Basically, deliberation is what happens when you’re trying to evaluate a solution based on existing information. You’ve got all the information you’re going to get. You know what the problem is. You have one or more possible solutions. And now it’s time to evaluate the solutions. Or implement them.

For example, the players are locked up alone in a room trying to decide whether to go along with the witch’s offer of a solution if they just sit tight for eighteen hours or whether they go after the NPC who just left and try to stop her or whether they try to cut a better deal or whatever. Or for example, when you’ve recognized that encounter and monster building is a mess and that it would probably be better to classify creatures by broad power level and organizational size and use that as the basis for encounter building.

The important thing about deliberation is that it cannot introduce any new information into a situation. Once every member of the party has voiced their own perspective on the best solution, there’s really no more information that’s going to come into that equation. And if the information at hand doesn’t immediately and obviously point to one solution as “the most likely to succeed,” the problem is really that you just don’t have enough information to make an informed decision.

So, what happens? Well, the party spends a lot of time talking and reasoning and trying to “figure out” what is essentially an unsolvable problem. But eventually, they do come to some sort of decision and take action. And the only harm is that the party wasted more time than they had to reach a conclusion, right?

Well, first, let’s not undervalue wasted time. See, people tend to view time as pretty cheap. If you spend a little extra time making the right decision, it’s totally worth it, right? Because time is free, but getting things wrong is really bad. Right? Well, any self-employed person who actually manages to make any amount of money can tell you that time is actually very, very valuable. In fact, it’s one of the most valuable commodities there is. Through effort, time can be converted into almost any other resource. But once time is lost, it can never be replaced. It can never be recovered. Time is the most liquid asset there is for a conscientious person and it is the most limited asset there is for a mortal being.

Wasted time at the game table is actually pretty awful. Because game time is limited and wasting a lot of time deliberating on an issue means you’re not spending your game time actually, you know, gaming. Having fun. But you’re not actually having fun. And have you ever watched a group of players go through such a deliberation? How’s their energy level by the end? It ain’t great. Whatever solution they finally implement, they aren’t excited about it.

So, wasting time isn’t anything to take lightly, whether you are a content creator or whether you are a player. But that’s not the only cost of overvalued deliberation. Let’s talk about thought murder.

Here’s the thing: there is no such thing as a perfect idea. No perfect idea springs fully formed from anyone’s head. Not even mine. And unless you’re dealing with a matter of pure, unvarnished factual truth – like math – there is no such thing as a perfect solution to any problem. And, hell, even math is suspect. Thanks’ Godel. Every solution is a tradeoff. Every solution is a compromise. Every solution is based on prioritizing certain things over other things. And absolutely everything you do has unintended consequences you can’t foresee because you’re not a chrono-synclasticly infidbulated Tralafamdorian. Sorry. Which is why you should never trust anyone who can’t tell you the flaws in their own ideas.

That means that, when you’re deliberating over an idea or a solution or whatever, you’re going to start seeing problems and flaws and possible unintended consequences. It is very, very easy to rip into an idea. And if you’ve got a group of people helping you do it, you’re going to reduce any idea to bloody shreds with the efficiency of a school of piranha dropped in a kiddie pool. If it’s a game design idea, you know, an imperfect idea that needs testing and refinement before it’s going to work anyway, you’re going to mangle that idea to utter s$&% and then throw it away as useless. I’ve seen it happen. It’s horrible. And if you’re, instead, a group of players trying to come up with a plan, you’re going to end up with a pile of totally unworkable plans that can’t possibly succeed because of their flaws.

Here’s the thing, though: first, you never need a perfect idea or solution. I mean, in terms of game design, you know – or you should – that game design is 10% coming up with a neat idea and 99% iterating that idea until it works. It’s not like you expect the idea to work out of the gate. So why the motherloving f$&% are you looking for the perfect solution to begin with? What good does that do if you also know you’re never going to start with a perfect solution?

In terms of players tackling a game situation, there are no perfect plans. There are lots of things that are going to f$&% with your plans and there’s lots of stuff you don’t know or can’t predict. You know your plan isn’t going to go right. They never go right. If your plans went right, the game would be boring. Because you’d never have to make any frantic, panicked decisions to pull a victory out of the s$&%storm that is swirling around you. You’re going to have to adapt on the fly. That’s how the game works. Looking for a flawless plan is pointless because you will never find it.

But, so what? So what if you discard some bad ideas that might have turned into good ideas if you worked them hard enough. Because eventually, you will pick the best of the bad ideas, right? And in the meanwhile, by thinking and talking, you’ll eliminate all the ideas that are definitely unworkably bad because of their flaws. You might be cutting a bit too deep, but the lawn still gets mowed, right?

I’d buy that if you weren’t absolute s$&% at identifying flaws. And by you, I mean absolutely every single person ever. You’re awful at picking out the bad ideas. From a game design perspective, it’s important to always remember – and this is a proven, psychological fact you can look up in the journal of just f$&%ing trust me when I say this for once – always remember: people are good at knowing whether they like something, bad at knowing why, and completely worthless at predicting what they will like. And when you’re designing a game mechanic, you’re trying to design a mechanic that will somehow create a certain feeling in the majority of your audience. You’re using game mechanics to create emotions. Do you have any idea how un-f$&%ing-predictable and un-f$&%ing-reliable things like game mechanics and emotions are? The only way to be sure if a set of game mechanics will actually produce a certain emotion in people is to start flinging it at people and see what they actually feel. If you’re seeking opinions on a game mechanic, you’re asking people to predict based on solely on reading an incomplete version of a single mechanic in isolation and out of context how their emotions are going to feel if they experience they mechanic as part of an unspecified and ludicrously complicated game experience at some point in the future.

Yeah, that’s a useful f$&%ing survey.

And look, even the ideas it doesn’t kill, it maims. See, deliberation has a tendency to identify the wrong flaws. It has a tendency to identify potential problems and weaknesses that don’t turn out to be serious. Or that turn out to be easily fixed. Or that turn out to be corner cases. And if you start refining your idea based on those flaws, you are not only fixing non-problems, you usually end up introducing all sorts of other unforeseen problems. That’s why polish, refinement, and iteration are done through testing, not thinking and talking.

As for players trying to predict where their plans will go wrong? Well, if you’re a GM, you’re just laughing your a$& off right now at the idea that might be a thing. Because no. Players, look, I love you, but you’re really bad at figuring out what’s going to happen. Partly because you can’t predict the future and partly because the capricious god-being who controls the outcome of your plans is listening in on your plans and has a vested interested in making sure something goes wrong. It’s called “dramatic tension.”

All sarcasm aside, here’s the problem: you can’t actually tell the good ideas from the bad ones. If you could, you wouldn’t be stuck thinking and talking. You’d already know. Oh, sure, occasionally you’ll see an idea that is very definitely bad on the face of it. But those ones don’t get deliberated for long. The plans that survive that initial smell test are all equally likely to be good and bad and you can’t tell the difference. But in looking for the bad ones, you tend to fling away some really good ideas.

I know. I’ve watched players do it. I’ve watched players come up with plans that I knew – KNEW – were really clever, brilliant, exciting plans that would totally have a chance of working and then argue them to death by imagining all sorts of hypothetical possible ways they could fail. Worse, though, I’ve watched people on social media, on forums, and in my own Discord kill their own ideas because a committee of well-meaning thinkers-and-talkers argued them out of existence. Or else, they argued for so many refinements and adjustments that the original idea buried at the heart of that mess has no chance to get a fair test. And I found myself wondering what would have happened if they had just flung that half-formed bit of potential brilliance at a group of players.

I don’t get sad about a lot of things. Because I’m a GM and an accountant and so I pretty much have no heart. But one thing that does manage to hit me right in the dark, twisted, blackened blood pump that I call a heart is watching the last bit of life fade from the bloodied, beaten corpse of an idea that might have been great if it had been tested, refined, iterated, and polished. Hell, I find myself wondering a lot what D&D 5E might have been if they hadn’t asked the entire internet to join in the committee design s$&%-show.

“Of all sad words in deed and pen, the saddest are these: it might have been.”

Overthinking and overtalking doesn’t just waste time, it kills ideas. And it is indiscriminate in the ideas it kills. It can’t tell the difference between a good idea, a bad idea, and an idea that needs effort or improvement. It just kills. And what it doesn’t kill, it maims. It cripples.

What Every Good GM Knows

Deliberation is a trap. It’s a dangerous, insidious, time-wasting, idea-killing trap. It is to be avoided at all costs. And even though all players and all game designers are pretty much completely blind to the danger of the deliberation trap, there is one person at the table who – if they are at all good at what they do – they know precisely how to avoid it. Amusingly enough, that person also tends to end up impaled on the bamboo stakes at the bottom of a deliberation trap the minute they live they table and then turn into content creators on the internet again. They are GMs.

During the game, there always comes a point where the GM has to make a judgment call. They have to resolve an action that the rules don’t cover. They have to deal with an interaction between two mechanics. They have to decide how an NPC reacts to some crazy action some idiot player is insisting on taking. Whatever. The point is, GMs are always encountering problems that require a solution in a situation where they don’t have all of the information they need to pick the best solution. GM judgment calls are just as prone to disaster as any game design or player plan. They can lead to all sorts of unforeseen consequences down the road. They can break the entire game. They can upset players. They can ruin the delicate balance between player power and challenge. They can ruin everything.

And yet, good GMs rarely fall into the deliberation trap. Because they know that an okay call implemented now is better for the game than a perfect call implemented after three hours of flipping through f$&%ing rulebooks. They know there are no perfect calls, only calls and consequences to deal with later. But they know that if they don’t make a call as quickly as possible, their game is going to die around them.

The first thing a GM does is recognize when they don’t have enough information to make a call. Which is something a lot of players and game designers don’t recognize. That’s why they fall into the deliberation trap. They think that talking and thinking somehow creates new information. It doesn’t. Once all the information is on the table, everything else is guesswork. And it’s bad guesswork. You don’t know how powerful the witch is. She might be third level or thirtieth. But no amount of talking about it will let you figure it out. There’s nothing to solve there. It’s not a puzzle. It’s a blank spot. And you don’t know how a group of players will really feel about the bookkeeping of a particular encumbrance system. And neither do they. Not until they actually start trying to do it during a game.

Once the GM realizes they don’t have enough information, there’s only really two things they can do: they can make a decision based on the information they have or they can seek additional information to narrow down the options. Now, seeking additional information is NOT asking people for opinions. Opinions are not information. As I mentioned above. Information is facts and data. Concrete s$&%. You know, like the s$&% written in the rules.

So, the GM might decide to check the rules for a solution. Of course, the GM is still keenly aware that quick is always better than correct because no solution is perfect anyway and any problems can be dealt with later. So, generally, the GM goes to the rules if they are pretty sure a specific piece of information exists that they can quickly and easily locate. The GM doesn’t just stop the game to read the entire combat chapter; the GM instead knows there is something about obscurement somewhere in that book and if they flip to the index, that’ll probably help them find it. Unless it’s a D&D 5E book. Then the index is a crap-shoot.

“Let’s gather more information” is not the same as “research.” Gathering information is a stalling tactic. Research is seeking a specific piece of information that will differentiate one solution from another.

Alternatively, the GM may decide that they aren’t sure such a piece of information exists or they may not know where to find it. So they may just decide to make a decision. And, once again, the GM knows that most solutions will probably work just fine. Sure, a bad judgement call might lead to a problem down the road, but it’s not like the GM can’t go back and say, “look, I made this call three months ago and now it’s a problem and I’m going to fix it” or even “that judgment call killed your character and I’m sorry, so let’s declare it a big-ole whoopsie-doodle and bring your character back to life.” And yes, I did just say “whoopsie-doodle.” What of it?!

And that’s really the point. The GM can’t fall into the trap of looking for a perfect solution because he doesn’t have time to look for a perfect solution, but he knows he doesn’t need a perfect solution. The same is true of player plans. No offense, players, but this game is a pretty low-risk endeavor. It’s kind of hard to actually kill-kill a PC in D&D 5E. At least, to do it fairly. I know. I’ve been trying. You can drop a PC to 0 HP pretty easily, but getting them dead is a lot harder. And, I don’t want to be mean, but, it’s just a character in a game about pretend elves. Yes, it does hurt to lose your character. Yes, a lot of work went into that character. But it’s not like that work didn’t have a payoff at the time. You had fun the whole time you were paying that character in return for the work. So it’s not a waste. And don’t tell me it is. And, look, most GMs are going to do their damndest to keep you alive anyway. Hell, most GMs will not even put anything in their game that the players MIGHT fight if it’s not a balanced f$&%ing encounter according to the stupid-a$& mess of balancing rules in the DMG.

Moreover, you’re supposed to be a damned hero. Act like it. Take a f$&%ing risk.

Or, alternatively, recognize that if the party is sitting in one place deliberating for more than about five minutes, the party does not have enough information to make a good judgment call. So, instead of going back and forth and talking and talking and thinking and talking and thinking, identify a fact that would lock in one of the solutions as the good one. And then figure out how the hell to obtain that information.

As for you, the game designer, there’s only one way to find out how an idea will play out at the game table. Can you guess what it is? It rhymes with PLAY IT F$&%ING OUT AT THE F$%&ING GAME F$%&ING TABLE! F$&%! Don’t ask the internet for opinions. The internet has s$&% opinions. I know. I live there and I have s$&% opinions. We all do. Write it down. As simple and as straightforward and as unpolished and as raw as you can. Write. It. Down. Now, use it. Use it in your home game. Or ask your players to play a one-off so you can see it in play. Or organize a playtest game with some random group of strangers on the internet or hobos at the train station.

The key is to recognize when you’ve fallen into the deliberation trap to realize that there are no perfect solutions and deliberation couldn’t find them even if they did. And once you realize that’s happened, do whatever GM does when they have to make a call and the seconds are ticking away: trust your gut and take action.

And to my players: I’m not yelling at you. Seriously. I’m using you to yell at everybody. Especially the Design Lab channel in my Discord. And especially every player in the world. I wouldn’t yell at you. I love you. And I’m sorry about what happened with Calla and I’m sorry about that other kid and I’m sorry about the wererat thing and I’m sorry I rolled those two crits in a row in the first round of the ogre fight. And I’m really, really sorry about what’s coming next session. I’m going to feel REALLY bad about that.