I interrupt your regularly scheduled, useful content for this bulls$&%.

See, this whole Angry’s Open World Game (AOWG) thing has created quite a stir in the ole Angry community. And I’ve been hearing a hell of a lot of feedback about it. Most has been the nice, normal discussion that accompanies all my most brilliant articles. The ones that say nothing revolutionary or controversial — or even particularly new — but nonetheless change the way everyone sees their f$&%ing games. That feedback’s usually of the “I kind of think I already knew this s$&% but I needed you to explain it” variety which is, frankly, kind of insulting when you dig deep enough into it. I prefer the “in hindsight, I should have figured this stuff out for myself, but I didn’t” sort of feedback.

Let’s be honest. Nothing I’ve said so far about my AOWG is really earth-shattering. I mean, the next two lessons will offer some truly unique ways of planning and structuring games that everyone will tell me were really obvious and nothing special, but the first two lessons were, in my view, pretty foundational to the whole GMing thing.

Despite that — despite the fact that this AOWG s$&% is neither revolutionary nor particularly advanced — I’m still challenging everything everyone understands about how to run games. Somehow. And nothing shows that better than what happened the other day in the Angry Discord Server. That’s the private community site-supporters gain access to as a way of saying “thanks for making it possible for me to write these articles every week.”

Today, I’m going to bulls$&% about the Quicksand Incident. That’s what happened in the Angry Discord Server the other day. Because I think it’ll help you run a less worse game. Not just a less worse AOWG. A less worse any game at all. The problem is, there’s a growing faction in my fanbase who will take this whole Quicksand Incident story as further proof that something’s rotten in the state of Angry. Or, at the very least, Angry has changed.

See, people are becoming increasingly convinced as I write each new article that I’ve gone through some radical transformation. That the Angry who’s been writing my articles for the last few months isn’t the same Angry who’s been ranting and swearing at them for over a decade. Trust me. They keep emailing me. They want to know why there’s suddenly two Angrys.

And yes, it’s totally legit to pluralize a proper name that ends in ‘y’ like that instead of using the more conventional ‘ies’ ending. Don’t grammar Nazi me. It’s my f$&%ing name. I’ll pick the plural option I like best.

Anyway, I keep getting e-mails demanding an explanation as to why I’ve changed my position on absolutely f$&%ing everything I’ve ever said. Or demanding to know who the hell I am and what the hell I’ve done with the real Angry. Or at least begging me to reconcile the s$%& I’m saying now with the s$%& I’ve spent the last twelve years spouting. This is why, after I tell you about the Quicksand Incident, I’m going to tell you A Tale of Two Angrys. And why you’re all f$%&ing wrong. Because there aren’t two Angrys. And hopefully, when I’m done, everything I’ve ever said about GMing will be woven into an elegant tapestry of understanding.

Probably not though. I’ve said a lot of contradictory s$&% over the years. On purpose. But that’s fodder for future arguments and articles.

The Quicksand Incident

Last week, I posted the second in my four-part series of lessons about running an open-world game just like your sweary pal Angry. That’s the one where I told you what you’d find in my bag of tricks if you illegally seized and searched me while I was on my to one of my Angry Open-World Game (AOWG) sessions. I told you there’d be a Monster Manual and a DMG and a folder of published monster and trap and magical item stat blocks. And I said there’d be a crappy overworld map that looked like a toddler’s drawing of amoebae covered with stolen names from Hyrule and Westeros. I also said there’d be lists of all the s$&% that adventurers might find in the map-amoebae and I gave an example of just such a list.

And on that example list — the list of s$&% waiting to f$&% up PCs wandering the Misery Mire — I included the word ‘quicksand.’

That was the start of The Quicksand Incident.

A few days after I published the article for early access — my Patrons get to read this s&%$ a week early — a few days after I published that article, the Angry Discord Server blew up over that word. Quicksand. There was this big thing about how the hell a GM could actually run an encounter with quicksand. How could a GM make such an encounter interesting enough or fun enough or even protracted enough to warrant wasting table time on? And what kind of rules might a GM use to adjudicate such an encounter.

I know. I know. It hurt my brain too. Because I specifically wrote that first lesson about the Three Pillars of Angry Open-World Gaming to prevent this kind of s$&% from happening. I explicitly told each and every last one of you f$&%ers to stop worrying about whether something would be interesting enough or fun enough or protracted enough to warrant inclusion in your game. I told you to just f$&%ing run the damned encounter.

But that’s easy to say. “Just run it.” When you’re actually down in the GMing trenches, how do you “just run it?” How do you “just run” an encounter with quicksand? Like at all. What would it actually look to run that s$&% at the table? On the fly? With no rules to fall back on aside from whatever you remember from the PHB and whatever you can invent?

I went into overdrive here. Not only did I read the whole discussion, but I also quickly reached out to a couple GMing friends. Yes, I have friends. And fortunately, they have even less to do than I do and they’re always in front of their computers or attached to their iPhones or whatever. So, within a few minutes, I had some hot takes. Which is precisely what I wanted. I wanted a few quick viewpoints before I opened my fat gob. I wanted to make sure I knew what was actually broken in everyone’s brains before I tried to fix it.

The consensus among all the broken brains was that it just seemed like a dull encounter. Either the PCs would just walk around the quicksand — and there’d be no drama — or they’d trip and fall into the quicksand and then they’d roll some saving throws and then the ones that didn’t die with their lungs filled with mud would just keep walking. Done and done. Either “you see some quicksand and go around it” or “you fell in quicksand, roll to not die, then go around it.”

And those two consensi — because I like irregular plurals — revealed exactly what was going wrong in everyone’s brains. Their brains had no actual idea how to run a role-playing game. “Great,” I thought. “Just f$&%ing great. I have wasted the better part of twelve years teaching people nothing. Thank you all.”

Hyperbole? Maybe a little. But not much. See, there’s two really fundamental problems with those hot takes. First, there’s a metric f$&%-ton of assumptions and skipped steps which result in the GM demanding die rolls to see how s$&% plays out. But there’s nothing about the players. Second, there were a lot of little mechanical bits and pieces. Lots of people mentioned Strength saving throws and Wisdom (Survival) checks, but there’s nothing in there about quicksand.

Let me repeat that: while trying to figure out how to run a role-playing game encounter between the player-characters and a patch of quicksand, every f$&%ing GM who claims to be a protégé of mine — or worse, a f$&%ing peer of mine — every one of them left out the players and the quicksand.

What do I mean? Well, let me illustrate first by telling you how I responded to the Quicksand Incident.

Now, this s$%& happened on my day off. Because I don’t live in my office, contrary to popular belief. I wasn’t even at home when this all started. But I’m so f$&%ing dedicated to my community that, when I did spot the discussion, I went into red alert mode. I asked the aforementioned folks for their take and even made Tiny stop yammering about engagement ring preferences or whatever bulls$&% she was going on about so I could discuss how my social media friends were screwing up their pretend elf games. And once I was home, I slammed out 800 words of response.

Basically, I banged out this unedited stream-of-consciousness essay where I figured out what the hell would happen if I was sitting behind my screen running my game and my party was traveling through Misery Mire and the single word quicksand came up on the die and I had to get some game out of it.

Okay, here I am. I’m at my table and I roll some dice and, uh oh, the party’s about to run across some quicksand while they wander through Misery Mire. Now, I’ve got to figure out how to handle that. Right now. The players are waiting.

Well, what’s going on in the game right now? The party’s traveling across Misery Mire, a swamp. And they’re setting a fast travel pace. Making a beeline. Maybe I laid it on too thick when I told them about the poisons and diseases and terrible beasts lurking in the murk of the mire. Because they sure don’t want to be here very long.

Now, quicksand. What’s quicksand? What’s its deal? What’s its cinematic deal? Well, it’s basically just a patch of normal-looking ground. But if you step in it, you get stuck. And you start to sink. And if you struggle, you sink even more. Eventually, you’re nothing but an entombed corpse in a mud sarcophagus and a conspicuously abandoned fedora hat sitting in the middle of a patch of normal-looking ground.

So, how does an encounter with quicksand start then? Well, it depends. It depends on whether the PCs walk right into it or whether they notice something’s amiss. Fortunately, D&D has rules for whether PCs spot things. When they’re traveling, the PCs not occupied with other tasks automatically notice anything that’s got a Wisdom (Perception) DC that’s equal to or less than their passive Perception scores. If the party’s traveling fast, those passive Perception scores are reduced by 5. What’s the DC to spot something amiss? Something that might suggest quicksand? Well, quicksand’s basically just a concealed pit trap. I know the DC to spot signs of a concealed pit trap. And if I don’t, I can just assign a DC.

My notes tell me Alice was in the lead, but she’s navigating. So she’s not on alert. Bob and Carol are in the middle rank. Bob’s on lookout, but Carol said she was busy taking notes about the local flora because she’s being all scholarly and s$&% for role-playing purposes. So, she ain’t paying attention to the road ahead. Dave’s in the rear and also on lookout.

In my hypothetical, imaginary Quicksand Incident here, I imagine Bob spots the quicksand. At least, he spots something wrong with the ground ahead. Maybe it looks unnaturally flat and smooth compared to the muddy ground nearby. Or maybe the surface ripples very slightly as a breeze passes. I say something like, “Bob, as Alice is blazing the trail ahead and looking for landmarks, you notice a patch of odd-looking, unusually flat, smooth earth in front of her. It ripples slightly in the breeze. Something’s odd there.”

Notice that I didn’t tell Bob he saw quicksand. I told Bob what he perceived. What’s odd. But there is a chance that one of the characters with the right background and training might recognize quicksand on sight. There’s rules for that too. So, right away, I’d ask Bob to make an Intelligence (Nature) check or a Survival check or whatever. And if he succeeded, I’d tell him that he recognizes the oddness as quicksand and I’d tell him all about what quicksand is and how to deal with it. Based on my cinematic understanding of it.

And now it’s up to Bob. He’d probably stop Alice. I hope he’d stop Alice. I hope he’d say, “whoa there, hotshot. You’re about to lemming march your a$& right into some quicksand.” Or say, “whoa there, hotshot. Something’s up with the ground ahead. I don’t like the looks of it. Let’s stop for a second and poke and prod at it.”

Now, everyone’s eyes are on the quicksand. So, everyone who isn’t Bob would get that same Intelligence (Nature) check or Survival check or whatever to identify the quicksand. But let’s say that, oops, no one rolled good enough. But maybe Carol — the player — loves herself some Indiana Jones and Pitfall Harry and Guybrush Threepwood. And maybe she’d say, “I bet it’s quicksand.” And that’s perfectly fine.

And if the word ‘metagame’ is about to spill out of your stupid noise hole, shut it up. Shut up your stupid noise hole. You don’t know how to run a game.

Now what? Well, now the party would likely poke and prod a bit and find the edges of the scary ground and they’d eventually go around it. And then I’d say, “good job, you narrowly avoided blundering into muddy death because you got lucky and spotted this quicksand pit. Now what? Do you continue on your way?” And maybe the party says something like, “let’s slow down a bit and stop tear-a$&ing through the swamp. And Carol, put down your stupid notebook and pay attention.” Or maybe Bob would say, “well, we know what quicksand looks like and we know we can spot it, so let’s just keep going the way we’ve been going because we’ll definitely spot any more quicksand pits in our path because we’re invincible player-characters!”

And now that I’ve established the party’s in an area with quicksand pits, I’d probably put a few more in their way. With variable DCs just to teach the party a thing or two about hubris and defying danger. I’d probably even pair one with a monster encounter. Maybe willy wisps. Those are fun. After all, the party’s been warned now. I can f$&% with them however I want as long as it involves quicksand.

But hold on. Let’s back up. That’s how I’d have run it if the party spotted the hazard. But what if they didn’t notice the quicksand pit? What would that look like? It’d look like this.

Well, those inattentive goobers don’t see the quicksand coming. So, how does an encounter with quicksand start when no one sees it coming? Well, it starts with someone getting stuck. Alice is in the lead, so…

“Alice, as you’re blazing the trail, you take a step and your boot sinks into some deep mud. Almost to your ankle. As you try to finish your step though, your back foot won’t come free. The ground’s got a hold of it. Your front foot won’t come up either. You’re stuck. What do you do?”

Alice would make some noises now and I’d maybe call for a Strength check. A really hard Strength check, probably. Meanwhile, the rest of the party would come to a stop. Alice would fail. I’d tell her that she’s stuck in the mire up to the top of her boots now, her struggling only making it worse. And now, with the party’s eyes on the hazard, maybe someone would identify the quicksand or maybe Carol would guess it’s quicksand. And then I’d ask everyone what they do. Maybe Alice would struggle more and fail another roll and get stuck even deeper. Or maybe everyone would start yammering about their options and trying to figure out who had the rope and then discover that none of them has rope written on their character sheet and they’d start arguing over who’s fault that was and I’d interrupt and tell Alice that the mud’s up to her knees now. And round and round we’d go with the party trying to help her and with Alice struggling or not struggling or whatever. And each time the party took a round of actions or Alice failed to free herself or the party wasted time bickering, the mud would suck her down a little deeper. Eventually, either she’d be free or she’d be a permanent part of the landscape.

After that, it’d be pretty much the same. I’d point out the party either narrowly avoided this quicksand pit or that they’d fed their friend to the swamp thanks to their haste, inattentiveness, inaction, bickering, and failure to put points in the right skills. And they’d decide how to proceed and the game would continue. Probably with more quicksandy fun very soon.

Now, that’s a pretty damned accurate rendition of what my brain would sound like when the party crossed paths with quicksand in my game and all I had to go on was the word ‘quicksand.’ That’s not something I’d write up in advance. But I totally could. Because designing an encounter is basically just figuring out how you’re going to run an encounter before you actually have to run it. Which you totally don’t have to do.

Notice also the mechanics are totally unimportant. Every GM’d handle this s$%& different. I mean, technically, I’d be running this using D&D 3.5 rules. This means that I’d be using hidden, secret Spot checks behind the screen instead of passive Perception scores. And, personally, I put a lot of stock in actually training skills. So I wouldn’t give anyone a chance to identify the quicksand unless they’d actually invested some points in the right skills at character generation. And you might call for rolls because you hate passive Perception for some irrationally stupid reason. Or maybe you’re the sort of GM who’d punish Carol for bringing her brain to the game and for her love of adventure stories and for her willingness to try to solve problems without flinging dice at them. Maybe you’d tell her, “your character doesn’t know what quicksand is so shut up and watch Alice die.” That’s a great way to instill a love of gaming.

The key is that I’m only using the mechanics to answer questions. Very small, very specific questions. And only in response to the s$&% that’s actually happening in the game world. I mean, sure, in the end, all I’m doing mechanically is using a check to see if the heroes see the hazard, another check to see if they identify the hazard, and then a check to see if their attempt to escape the hazard is successful. But it’d also be totally wrong to say that’s how I’m “handling the encounter.”

See, “roll a spot check to see the hazard, a check to identify the hazard, and a check to escape the hazard” is a mechanics-first approach. That’s what I ended up doing. This time. But it started with me asking myself, “okay, so what is quicksand and how would an encounter with it start?” And then saying, “it depends on whether someone saw it coming or not.” Then I asked the game if anyone saw it coming. And then I said, “okay, they see it coming, but what would they see?” And then I said, “once they see it, what might their characters know?” I asked the game that one, but I also let the players override the answer if they knew something their character didn’t. And so on. Once Alice got stuck and she said she wanted to pull herself free, I asked myself if that was possible and if it might fail and blah blah blah Strength check.

Narrate, adjudicate, transition. That’s all this is. Here’s what you see, here’s what you know, what do you do? Can that work? Can it fail? What’s the result? Here’s what you see now. Here’s what you know now. What do you do? That’s running a game. Not in a nutshell. That’s everything there is to game mastering.

The hot takes I got from others? The ones that said “the party goes around the hazard” or “the player has to roll a Strength check?” They’re not technically wrong. I mean, that’s basically how my hypothetical brain diarrhea played out. But it’s wrongheaded. It’s backward. Because I don’t believe any of those takes started with questions like “how would an encounter with quicksand start” and “what would the PCs see?” And none of those hot takes stopped to ask the players, “okay, what do you do?” It was all pure adjudication. What the hell happened to the narration? At what point were any of you inviting your players to act? Where the hell is the role-playing game?

And that’s what I meant when I said the hot takes ignored the players and ignored the quicksand. Of course it looks boring as hell. Because it’s just flinging dice the way you’re doing it. You don’t even need the players there. Just their dice and their character sheets. And it doesn’t matter that it’s quicksand. It could be anything.

The Three F&$%ing Pillars

All this s$%&’s why those three pillars exist. In the cold, sterile game lab where you design your Quicksand Incident, sure, it looks boring as hell. It’s just a check to spot a hazard, a check to identify a hazard, and a saving throw. At the table, though, it’s about whether Bob’s keen eye saved Alice’s life. Or whether Carol’s bookish obliviousness killed Alice. Or whether Carol’s love of adventure serials helped the party out of a jam. It’s about whether the party learned their lesson and slowed down. Or whether they ignored nature’s first warning shot and force-marched their way to disaster.

That’s what I mean when I say the fun and the interesting will show up. If you give the players some space to play the f$&%ing game, fun and interesting things will happen. And, you know what? If fun and interesting didn’t show up for the Quicksand Incident? If the party just saw the quicksand and said “oh, that’s quicksand, we go around the quicksand,” it would have wasted two f$&%ing minutes of game time. So, who cares? When fun and interesting don’t show up, things move quickly. Unless you drag them out trying to force them to be interesting and fun.

It would have been impossible for me to spew that stream-of-consciousness bulls$&% from my imaginary game table without inserting a hypothetical party and imagining their responses. Because guess what? You can’t run a role-playing game without the f$&%ing players. You cannot handle anything at the table without their input.

And that’s also why I said mechanics don’t make the game. It’s all just Perception and Nature and Strength checks on paper. But the play-by-play where Alice is sinking and the party’s arguing over who’s job it was to buy the rope? That s$&% right there? That’s the actual game. And you know it’d happen too. You know the players would start chewing each other out over bookkeeping errors while the swamp swallowed one of their own. I watched my own players argue about who was supposed to buy rope and where the party’s crowbar ended up while Vestra the wizard — remember her — while Vestra’s prone, helpless body was being literally torn apart by skeletons at the bottom of a pit. And she’ll be missed. But I’m sure her replacement will be a lot of fun.¹

Could you design a good, mechanically rigorous quicksand encounter? A quicksand system? A quicksand stat block? A quicksand minigame? Of course you could. And there’s nothing wrong with building mechanical systems for encounters. But — and this is going to hurt a lot of precious feelings — but, if you can’t run a perfectly fine Quicksand Incident without the special rules, you sure as hell can’t design a mechanical system for running a really good one. If you can’t handle running something at the table, you’re not qualified to build mechanics that’ll make it run better. You don’t have the skills.

And that’s true of everything. If you can’t run a passable social interaction encounter on the fly with just ability checks, you can’t build good social combat rules. If you can’t handle mass combat at your table with just narration, adjudication, and transition, you can’t build a mass combat engine that’ll do a better job.

This brings me to my second story.

A Tale of Two Angrys

When you strip the thousands of extraneous words away, all this AOWG crap — and a lot of my articles lately — comes down to “just run the f$&%ing game.” Forget prep, forget planning, forget thinking, forget designing, forget all that crap. Just sit behind the screen with whatever published crap you can scrape together and whatever notes you can scribble onto one page and just run a f$%&ing game. And that’s great advice. Except, it’s also the opposite of everything I’ve ever said about narrative structure and game design and custom monster building and critical path mapping and every other f$&%ing thing I’ve written in the last twelve years of my sad, pathetic life.

Except it’s not. And maybe you already see it. Maybe the Quicksand Incident helped you see how those two approaches — how those two Angrys — can peacefully coexist in the same brain. How they can work together to run great games. Because they can and they do.

Not getting it? Let me spell it out.

First, part of the answer’s that all this Angry’s Open-World Game s$&% is about running a specific kind of game with some very specific design goals. Run a game that’s as open-ended as possible with as little prep and planning as possible. You’ve got to fit everything I’m saying now into that context. That’s why every f$&%ing one of these AOWG articles starts with, “if you want to run a game like AOWG, then you must…” If-f$&%ing-then. Do you speak conditional? Do you? Do they speak English in conditional!?

Except, second, you don’t have to fit everything I’m saying now into that context at all. And I frankly shouldn’t have to start my articles with if-thens. Because this AOWG s$&%? This isn’t advanced GMing. It ain’t expert-level, galaxy-brain game-mastery. It’s not something that only a certain extra special GM with just the right brain can run. It’s running a role-playing game at its simplest. At its purest. At its most fundamental level. Describe the world, ask the players what they do, and figure out what happens. Do it over and over and over. And just keep the game running. A game that’s merely good enough.

This AOWG s$&% ain’t a master-class in running an RPG campaign; AOWG is like the comprehensive final exam that comes at the end of Introduction to GMing 101. It tests your ability to narrate, adjudicate, and transition. And to think on your feet. And to do all of that well enough to run an okay game. Not a great game. Not the best game ever. Just a game that can keep you and your friends happy for four hours a pop, once a week.

You want proof? Angry’s Open World Game is the game I decided to run when I was so burnt out on all the heavy crap that was making GMing feel like a miserable f$&%ing chore. I’m literally running it because it’s easy. It’s the sort of game I ran back in high school. And that’s why I got so confused when this AOWG thing threw so many of you off balance. I mean, it wasn’t me trying to explain how to use a centuries-old style of Korean poetry and real-time-strategy game design principles to structure a campaign. It’s just about running a fun game that you just crap out from one week to the next. No grand plan. No great narrative. No set-piece encounters. No amazing villains. Just the slapdash crap you run with your basic GMing skills and whatever prep you got done during study hall.

All the other crap I’ve ever tried to teach you? That’s the advanced stuff. The stuff you’re supposed to layer over this basic s$&% once you’ve got it down cold. That’s why I started this off all those years ago with Adjudicate Actions Like a Motherf$&%ing Boss. You could have stopped reading my s$&% right there and you’d have still spent the last twelve years running good games. But you kept reading. And I assumed you kept reading because you got good at that basic s$&%, not because you forgot that s$&% and were looking for ways to replace it.

Of course, you weren’t all here twelve years ago. That’s fine. And I understand most of you aren’t willing to dig back through the over 1.5 million words I’ve written since then. I don’t blame you one f$&%ing bit. That’s why I took them all and condensed them down to a 60,000 word, 180-page book. But even that’s not enough.

Here’s the point. It’s a cold, cruel point. But it’s also an utterly honest point. And I’m nothing if not brutally honest. If you’re looking at this AOWG s$&% and you’re thinking that you can’t possibly run a game like this? If you’re thinking you need all the prep and rules and systems and s$&%? Well, you’ve got it f$&%ing backward. It’s time to throw out all the prep and rules and systems and work on your fundamentals. If you don’t think you can run Angry’s Open-World Game, then it’s exactly the game you should be running. Because you ain’t ready to run anything else.

Or maybe you’re just not confident enough to run anything else.

¹ To be clear, it wasn’t the bickering over ropes and crowbars that killed Vestra. It was just a crappy situation. By the time the party was fighting over ropes and crowbars, the dice had already killed Vestra dead. The players did their best. I normally wouldn’t stick up for my players, but Vestra’s demise was a pretty emotional moment. Which is exactly why I used it as a joke to illustrate my point. Because I’m an a$&hole.