Today, I’m going to bulls$&% – yes, this is my once-monthly rambling bulls$&% article – today, I’m going to bulls$&% about the game you SHOULD run. And why you shouldn’t trust the word ‘should’. And I’m going to bulls$&% about GMing advice in general. And I’m going to piss and moan about how I’m sick as f$&% of being completely misunderstood.

Two weeks ago, I wrote this article talking about how to cope with things when a player ends up sitting out play. And obviously, the biggest sidelining issue I discussed was that of PC death. I spent most of my time discussing that pain-in-the-a$&% issue in particular.

You might have noticed that the article in question was a two-for-one deal. It was two articles crammed together. One talked about the underlying issues that make sidelining such a pain in the a$&% to deal with. The problems that sidelining causes.

The other article in that little ‘buy one, get one’ deal was about how I handle sidelining events in my own games. At least, how I handle them in some of my games. I’ve run a lot of games over the years. And I’ve handled sidelining a lot of different ways. Given how many games I’ve run for how many different people, I’m pretty sure I’ve tried every reasonable, practical way of handling it there is. That’s what I do. I try things. I think about problems, propose solutions, and then try them out to see if they f$&%ing work. I wish I had the magic power some of my readers possess to instantly divine the perfect solution to every problem by thought alone. I guess I just suck at this.

Excuse me.

Obviously, that article drew a lot of responses. You can see some of them in the comments below the article. And you can see some of them on my Patreon page if you’re a supporter. And I hope you are. This site only exists because people like you choose to support it. Aside from the comments, though, I also got lots of responses nobody saw. Private messages, e-mail, et cetera, and so on. And some comments never saw the light of day. Nobody but me – the moderator – saw those. And while most of the responses were reasonable, there were a few problem responses.

For example, some respondents spent their time telling other people how they SHOULD handle sidelining. And some told me how I SHOULD handle sidelining differently at my table. And that’s what prompted this article. But there were also some folks asking me why I give so many different answers to the same question. They noted that in previous articles, I advised people to handle sidelining issues differently. And some people even yelled at me for being so contradictory. Insofar as you can yell at anyone through e-mail.

Now, I often tell people what they SHOULD do. So maybe I’m a hypocrite. But I do it differently. And that’s the point. Because the thing I do differently is actually the key to everything I do on this site. And it’s also the reason why I give lots of answers to the same questions. And also why I write so many f$&%ing words. And THAT is what I’m explaining today.

You Can Lead a GM to Advice, But You Can’t Make Them Think

Crap. On final review, I discovered that the Long, Rambling Introduction™ above isn’t actually skippable. It’s a proper introduction. So if you normally skip the Long, Rambling Introduction™ and start at the first heading, you’re going to need to go back to the top and read to catch up. Sorry. I f$&%ed up.

Let’s talk about that article about sidelining. Kind of weird that I basically doubled the length of that post by cramming two different articles together, isn’t it? Either I’m a really s$&%y writer – which I am definitely not; I’m just a s$&%y editor – either I’m a really s%$&y writer, or I had a really good reason. I mean, I could have just said, “okay buckos, sidelining is a thing that happens, so let me tell you the right way to deal with it.” It’s not like I get paid by the word. In fact, I get paid MORE if I write FEWER words. See, people provide support at a fixed amount per article. I get paid the same for 5,000 words as I do for 2,500 words. And it takes half as long to write a 2,500-word article, which means I’d get paid more on an hourly basis if I wrote shorter articles and I’d have more time to play video games.

And that book I wrote proves I can be concise if I want to be.

The reason I write the articles I do – and take the time to explain the motherloving f$&% out of everything – is because I don’t want to tell you how I think you should run games. I want you to figure out how you should run games for yourself.

There’s this jokey term we have in the biz – which is what we in the business call the business – there’s a term we have in the biz: One True Wayism. One True Wayists are people think there’s a single best way to run a TTRPG. A proper way. A correct way. It’s a stupid belief and everyone knows it’s stupid. But even though everyone knows its stupid, pretty much everyone behaves like it isn’t. Everyone acts like One True Wayists. Especially the people who insist they don’t. Well, most of them. There’s a few smart ones out there. They’re just rare.

There’s obviously lots of rights ways to run a game. But, contrary to popular belief, there aren’t infinitely many. There’s a finite number. And that finite number is smaller than most people think. And there’s also lots of wrong ways to run a game.

But if there’s lots of ways to run a game well, telling people about the one specific way I run my game isn’t super useful, is it? It’s useful to the people who think exactly the way I do about everything, sure, but how many people is that? I’m kind of an overly serious a$&hole about running games. So, to anyone who isn’t an overly serious TTRPG a$&hole, my way won’t fly.

And the same is true for everyone. Not the overly serious a$&hole part. The part about how telling people how you handle things is only useful to people who are just like you. It’s true of everyone from Chris Perkins to Matt Colville to Brandish “Runehammer” Gilheim to the RPG Pundit to Johnny YouTuber. They can tell you how they think games should be run, but that only matters to people who want to run games like theirs.

Now, some of the people I named are smart like me. And they’re worth listening too. And by the end of this article, you’ll know how to tell them apart. See if you can guess who they are.

When I write articles, I don’t want to tell you how I do things. I mean, I do. But only because I like to brag about how great I am. What I really want to do is tell you why I do the things I do. I want to tell you what facts and assumptions I started with and how I reasoned out my approach based on them. Then, even if you don’t like my approach, you get a bunch of useful facts and assumptions and an example of how to think critically and draw conclusions. It’s the same with design stuff. Like the AngryCraft stuff. Anyone – and I do mean anyone; check DriveThru RPG – anyone can slap together a subsystem for D&D and fling it into the Internet for consumption. If I wanted to, I could just sell hacks and systems and content and make my money that way. But I don’t want to. I want to empower YOU to design your own hacks and systems and content. That’s why I spend so much time talking about what I’m designing and why I’m designing it. What my goals are and why they are.

That’s why, even though I joke about not writing about AngryCraft anymore and just finishing the system, I won’t actually do that. Because I don’t want to do that. I could have done that already if I wanted to. Lots of people make crafting systems and share them on the Internet. But I’m the guy who’s showing you how to make your own.

Listen to the Experts

It’s become popular lately for people to chastise each other to “listen to the experts.” And forgive me if acknowledging that and explaining why there’s a downside to it is too political for you. Except don’t. Because I’m not apologizing. If that s$&%’s too political for you, then you’re the sort of person who can’t stop seeing politics everywhere, and you won’t be missed. So don’t let the door to my site hit you on the way out.

It’s popular for people on all sides of an issue to yell “listen to the experts” at each other. And that’s actually good advice. To a point. Experts are particularly good sources of factual information. Or at least reasonably reliable information that’s been gathered rigorously and tested instead of invented by someone and prefaced with, “well, in MY experience.” Even when an expert is making an observation from their own experiences, those experiences are usually much more extensive than those of any given layperson.

Of course, experts disagree. They disagree all the time. You have to be careful about that. And their information can be wrong. Scientific facts change with new discoveries. Predictive models fail – sometimes spectacularly – and conclusions can be faulty. Observations can still be loaded with bias. Which is why it’s important to listen to all of the experts. Especially the ones that disagree. And remember that neither loudness nor popularity nor reach are ways to tell good information from bad. But I’m not going to get into any of that crap because I’m just talking games about pretend elves here. Let’s just assume, for now, that experts are usually reliable sources of information.

Take me, for example. There’s some areas in which I consider myself an expert. A low-level expert in some cases, but still an expert. By education, degree, and professional experience, I’m an expert in accounting – especially small business compliance – and economics and certain aspects of business law. Mostly those relating to contracts and labor law. Also, by education, I say I have a passable level of expertise in film theory and literary analysis. And by years of experience, but also broadness and depth of experience, I’d say I’m an expert at running games and in game design theory. And I have to mention broadness and depth because it’s not just that I’ve been running games for three-and-a-half decades now, it’s also that I’ve run a lot of games in that time at many different venues, sometimes official, sometimes unofficial, for players of every age and every level of experience. Because, frankly, I’ve been obsessed with this s$&% all my life and couldn’t get enough.

Of course, this brings up the question of how you even measure expertise and how we tend to overvalue classroom education these days and undervalue actual practical experience and proper skill acquisition, so whatever. Anyhoo…

Point is, if I explain to you the different ways you can organize a small business in the United States or the correlation between economic depression and the increase in certain causes of death or I tell you how to properly outline a screenplay or mention how long the average player can be expected to sit quietly at the table before they get mad, there’s a good chance the information is reliable. You can trust that information. You might want to verify it, sure, if you’re going to use it to set economic policy or write a business plan or sell a screenplay on spec or design a role-playing game for mass-market release. But for casual, home use, you’re probably fine.

Likewise, I might not like how the folks at Wizards of the Coast make their games these days, but I still trust them when they tell me that, after twenty years of extensive playtesting across three different editions of D&D, they’ve found that most people are pretty happy if they succeed on about 65% of their dice rolls. And given his years of experience shepherding one of the most successful hobby games on the planet and his work with top board- and card-game designers, when Mark Rosewater says something about the nature of randomness in games or what qualities make a game playable, I’m going to listen. I’d be stupid not to.

But there’s a point where you shouldn’t blindly trust experts. And that’s the point where they start telling you what you should do with the information they can provide. And that’s true even when the advice pertains directly to the expert’s field. For example, say you want to start a small business. I might sit down with you and run through your options for how to organize it. I’d tell you the costs, risks, and requirements of each form and I’d tell you the benefits. Then, I’d ask you about your goals, your plans, and how much capital you plan to invest. And while I’d then recommend one form of business organization over another, ultimately, you might think a different option might be best for you. And, crazy as this sounds, you might even be right. Even though I’m the small business accountant and you’re not. That’s because, while there are some pitfalls and traps to avoid, there’s not really a single right answer. And even though I know the facts better, you know your goals, plans, and situation better. Even if you tell me everything, you still know it better.

Same with game design. I can believe everything the designers at WotC say about the principles of game design and I can trust everything they’ve discovered through playtesting and practical experience and still disagree vehemently about how to turn that information into a good game.

This is especially true when it comes to stuff that crosses disciplines. And most things do. I mean, as a small business accountant, I know a lot about running any given small business, but I will never be as much of an expert in your field as you are. No matter how many landscapers I provide services for, I will still never know the landscaping industry and its foibles as well as actual landscapers. Running any business is a cross-disciplinary venture.

This is why, by the way, experts don’t set public policy. I can guess how much suffering and death will result in changes to public spending or tax policies, but I can’t tell you how that’ll affect, say public health or public education. And once I start talking about how much suffering and death is an acceptable price for whatever public good you’re trying to accomplish, my opinion is just as good as yours.

As a self-proclaimed expert game master, I can tell you that agency, consistency, and engagement comprise the core of the role-playing game experience. That’s information that I’ve gained through experience and by making a study of other experts’ work in the same field. It’s arguable information, sure, but it’s still just a piece of information about role-playing games. Likewise, I can tell you that the average, reasonable player can sit out the game quietly for about fifteen minutes before they lose their mind. And I can tell you that characters sometimes die in role-playing games and their players end up temporarily removed from play. What I can’t tell you is what YOU personally SHOULD do with that information. I can tell you what I would do. I can tell you what I do do. But you might have a different answer.

THAT is why I spent the first half of that article talking about the different forces in play and telling you how your handling of character death might affect them. That was me being an expert and giving expert facts. First in broad terms and then about specific situations. After I gave you the expert facts and analysis, I told you my opinion of what to do with them. Fully accepting that any other ten gamers might look at that fact pattern and collectively offer twelve different alternatives to mine.

Which is how it should be.

Beyond Tradeoffs

Fortunately, a lot of my readers understand this s$&%. They see what I’m doing. And that my rules and recommendations and systems aren’t the point. They’re the ones who started reading AngryCraft and decided to just build their own damned crafting system. Or who used the process I outlined for analyzing design goals in AngrCraft to build a mass combat system or something. I hear from folks like that a lot. And it makes me feel good.

But even some of the folks who understand what I’m doing don’t really understand how decisions get made. They understand that design decisions – the kinds game designers make at their desks and that GMs make on the fly at the table – involve tradeoffs. But that’s all they understand. And that’s a problem. Acknowledging tradeoffs is amateur-hour decision making.

Tradeoffs occur when there’s multiple things you want – or want to avoid – and you’ve got to choose. The simplest version is the benefit-with-a-cost. Every game designer will tell you that adding new rules and systems will add depth to your game, but they’ll also add complexity. Complexity makes it harder to learn and remember how to play your game, which makes your game less approachable. That’s a tradeoff. You have to decide how much approachability you’re willing to give up to add depth to your game.

Now, that’s not always an easy decision to make. I mean, you can’t quantify that s$&%, let alone compare it. There’s no direct conversion factor between depth and complexity and no formula for determining how each correlates to the number of players who play your game and how many expansions they’ll buy. But the choices GMs and game designers have to make are usually more complicated than simple one-for-one tradeoffs anyway.

Tradeoffs are a kind of internal conflict. Actually, making a tradeoff is a way of resolving internal conflict. And internal conflict occurs when you’re faced with multiple things you want – or want to avoid – and you can’t have it all. Tradeoffs are a kind of binary way of taking an all-or-nothing approach. Give up one thing for another. The end. But the options in between all and nothing are usually better. They’re just more complicated.

Let’s use the ‘rule of cool’ as an example, here. Say a player wants to pull off some crazy stunt in your game. You have to decide whether the stunt can work and whether it can fail and how to resolve it. On the one hand, if it works, you reward the player’s sense of agency. And if the player is an expression-seeker, they’ll have an increased sense of engagement too. On the other hand, the stunt might be at odds with the game’s tone and it might create an unbalancing rules precedent. In other words, it threatens the game’s consistency and it’ll diminish the engagement of challenge-seekers.

What’s better? Agency and expression-engagement or consistency and challenge-engagement? Quick. You’ve only got a few seconds. Your game is standing still right now. The players are waiting for an answer.

See what I mean?

I’m not saying you can’t come up with an answer. You can. You have to. This is a call every GM will have to make eventually. Of course, if you were able to answer the question the way I posed it, you’re not ready to run a game. The question as I posed it was unanswerable. I’ll leave it to you to work out why.

Point is, there’s no cut-and-dry answer. Things aren’t as simple as choosing one over the other. You can’t just say “agency is always more important than consistency in my game,” or vice versa. Because there’s a complex interplay of forces at work and they’re all important.

Just because something is more desirable or more important, that doesn’t mean you can just choose it every time by default. You might not even be willing to choose it this time. Sometimes, there’s costs you can’t afford to pay even if the thing you’re buying is super important. If you choose agency every single time, eventually, your game has no consistency left and the world collapses.

Sometimes, there’s other costs too. For example, some GMs place a very high value on their friendships. Those GMs would find the idea of asking a player to leave the group unthinkable. Whatever damage the player is doing, it’s not worth hurting their feelings by excluding them. And if running games starts costing that GM their friendships, they’d rather just quit GMing. It’s too high a cost.

And that’s totally valid. It ain’t the answer I’d give. But it’s a valid answer.

As a GM – and as a game designer – you’re constantly working to keep a bunch of different forces in balance. You’re resolving dilemmas between the needs of an RPG as a game and the needs of an RPG as a story. Between the major forces of agency and consistency and engagement. Between engagement’s eight major components of challenge, discovery, expression, fantasy, fellowship, narrative, sensory pleasure, and submission. Between the needs of the group and the desires of any given individual member of the group. Between the players’ needs and your own. And between the human relationships at your table. The right balance is different at every table. And it changes from moment to moment.

Every big question GMs argue about – and most of the little ones too – are about balancing these forces. High prep or low prep or no prep? Rule of cool or rules as written? How important is game balance? Miniatures and maps or narrative combat? How do you deal with problem players? And whenever some internet GM addresses one of those questions, their answer is only useful if they show their mental work.

Since I mentioned them specifically, the same is true with gamers and their engagements. To some extent, every gamer gets off on all eight components of engagement. But every player prefers some over others. Some are very important. Some aren’t important. Some vary in importance. And some aren’t important until they’re missing.

Take me. When it comes to video games, I’m all about challenge and discovery. And discovery gives me the most pleasure by far. But I’m more sensitive to a lack of challenge than a lack of discovery. I can play action games without any discovery aspect to them, but I can’t play for discovery without challenge. That’s why Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild bored the motherloving f$&% out of me. Everything in that game that wasn’t exploring was utter s$&%. Tedious, breakable combat. Boring, repetitive puzzles. Dull dungeon design. Crap, crap, crap.

And with my joint passions for discovery and challenge, you’d think I’d be all over procedural generation, right? Nope. Because even though I don’t get much pleasure from a narrative, I really notice it when it’s completely missing. At least, when the basic components of narrative pacing and structure are missing. Procedurally generated games literally can’t provide a properly paced experience. No, Dead Cells doesn’t. Neither does Chasm. Skip the comments.

My sensitivity to lack of narrative structure is such that, even though Batman: Arkham City had a good story, I also found it completely insufferable whereas Batman: Arkham Asylum is one of my top twenty favorite games and I finished the f$&% out of it and solved every Riddler challenge.

People are complicated. Preferences are complicated. We don’t make decisions, we resolve dilemmas. And we spend a lot more time compromising based on the needs of the moment than we do making tradeoffs based solely on preferences.

Life’s Not Fair

Resolving dilemmas is hard enough, but adding to it is the fact that sometimes, you can’t have what you want. Or you can’t avoid what you don’t want. There’s lots of reasons why that might be the case. The reasons don’t matter. All that matters is that sometimes, you can’t make the choice you want to make. People have a hard time accepting this. Accepting limitations. But accept them or don’t, they still f$&% up your decisions.

For example, I hate running TTRPGS online. F$&%ing hate it. Online is the worst way to run a TTRPG. It’s worse than running a game with a car battery wired to your genitals. But the reality for me, today, is that if I want to run a game, it’s got to be online. My choices are ‘don’t run games’ or ‘run games online.’ I can bitch and whine about how that’s unfair and it shouldn’t be that way and how much I hate it. But it is.

And it’s not just the fickle fingers of fate that limit your choices. For example, there’s some things TTRPGs just can’t do well. Like mazes. The nature of TTRPGs makes it impossible to have a satisfying challenge based on solving a maze that feels like solving a maze. And there’s some specific things that some systems can’t handle. D&D doesn’t handle non-combat encounters or social encounters well. It never will. The core of the system just doesn’t allow it. And Burning Wheel can only handle simulations of playing Burning Wheel. And Fate just won’t let you run a good game.

There’s also things that you, personally, will never be able to do. There’s skills you’ll never have. Some are beyond your physical and mental capabilities and some would just require more investment to acquire them then you can ever make. I will never, ever be an artist. I can draw a map or a schematic or diagram, but I’ll never be able to draw or sketch or paint a thing that looks like the thing it’s supposed to look like. It might be beyond what I can get my hands and brain to do, it might be because my eyes don’t see the right way, or it might be that I didn’t dedicate enough hours to it earlier in my life that the artist train has just sailed. Doesn’t matter why. It’s reality.

Some people will NEVER be good enough at pulling details out of their a$& to improvise an entire RPG session. It doesn’t matter how much you tell them about how improvisation makes the game so much better. They can’t get a good game out of their s$&%y improvisational skills and they never, ever will.

We all have limitations. Some are biological or genetic and some are the results of choices we’ve made in the past that we can’t unmake. Or even choices others have made. That’s how life works. It isn’t fair. It’s very frustrating. It totally sucks. But none of that makes it any less true.

That’s why it’s a damned good thing that there’s so many different things to be good at and so many different ways to run a good game.

So What?

Let me end this screed by negating everything I said above. I’m sure you’re wondering now if all this s$&% is actually running through my head every time a player tries to throw a fireball spell underwater or to make a female dragonborn PC without boobs.

F$&% no it’s not. Are you kidding me?!

No one – ABSOLUTELY F$%&ING NO GM – thinks about decisions this way at the table. No one consciously weighs the forces agency and consistency and the eight engagements and gameplay needs and story needs and the power of f$&%ing friendship to resolve every idiot thing their players do. And most designers don’t actually think through this s$&% when they’re actually designing. They just, you know, decide what to design and design it. And before you correct me about writing design documents and evaluating designs, please keep reading. I’ll get there.

So, the above 5,000 words are just worthless then? Of course not.

Thing is that, while you can’t think through this s$&% for every decision you make, the more of it you have rattling around in your head, the more likely your brain is to spit out a good answer when you ask to it. That is, the more you’re aware of the forces and agency and consistency and engagement and the more you believe in their importance – and think about their relative importance – the more they’ll shape your thought processes. The better you know your own strengths and weaknesses and limitations, the more likely you’ll be to set goals you can achieve and develop plans you can implement. And the better you know and understand your own preferences, the more easily you’ll be able to pick out what you’ll like and what you won’t.

And the more of this you have rattling around in your head when you develop a design document, the more it’ll affect your design.

And when you really do come up against something you can’t resolve at the moment, then you will have a framework for working things out. And when you have to analyze a decision you’ve decided or a design you’ve designed, you’ve got a good framework for that too.

Moreover, knowing this s$&% helps you recognize good, useful advice and avoid wasting time on s$&% that won’t work for you. It’ll help you become highly suspicious of anyone – even expert anyones – who tell you what you should do and to trust people – especially expert people – who tell you how to figure s$%& out for yourself. Even if just by example.

At the very least, maybe you’ll stop yelling at me for giving so many different answers and finally understand what I mean when I say, “I stand by everything I’ve ever said, even the contradictory stuff.”

But I won’t hold my breath.