This crap ain’t what I meant to write and publish today.

At 5:30 this morning, my local time, I was breaking my fast with my customary oatmeal and idly scrolling through my supporter Discord server to make sure no one was trying to kill each other as is sometimes the case when you leave an Internet forum alone overnight. And I spotted a comment that changed my whole plan for the day.

I’d found my New Year’s Post.

I like to start my year — or end it — or both — with something personal and reflective. Or forward-looking. Something meditative. Something with a message. You know what I mean, right? In the past, I’ve talked about gaming resolutions, I’ve reflected on the good aspects of bad games and the bad aspects of good games, I’ve discussed why I’m even in the hobby, and I’ve talked about how I wanted to change and grow.

I didn’t have anything like that this year. But now I do.

Now, I started this endlessly running joke last year by quoting a favorite book series of mine, The Expanse by James S. A. Corey. Remember this…

One means never; twice means always.

It’s brilliant, yeah? And it’s funny to boot. But it’s not always true. I mean, it isn’t really true at all. That’s the point. It’s about human perception. But never mind that. The point is, when it comes to people asking questions, most teachers will tell you that, usually, once means lots. When one person asks you a question, they’re usually speaking for lots of people. Why? Because it takes balls to ask questions. Asking questions means admitting ignorance. And it means opening yourself to ridicule. Asking a question means saying, “Here’s a thing I don’t know” and you hope you’re not the only one who doesn’t know it.

People who ask questions deserve respect. They’re courageous people and they’re often speaking for a bunch of cowards.

That doesn’t stop me, of course, from abusing the hell out of every dumbass mouthbreather that spews a question in my direction. But that’s just because I’m in this for my own fun and, well, I’m kind of an asshole.

But, enough Long, Rambling Introduction™… let me get into it.

The Secret Sauce

In my Features these last few days, I’ve talked a lot about narratives and how to do them right. How to run games and tell stories that resonate. Hell, that’s been the theme of this month. It started with that playstyle horseshit — which I am definitely returning to someday — and continued in my Mailbag speech to Mendel about why tropes were so damned wonderful and then culminated in my long-ass screed about racial stereotypes and good and evil and how much I loved the noble spirit of mankind.

This shit’s created an ongoing discussion in my supporter Discord server about why people engage with what they engage with. Why do people remember the stories they do and forget others? Why do people remember events and characters from games they played years ago but not ones from last week? Why do some movies release to massive accolades only to fade from memory a month later?

If you’d actually read the discussions, though, you wouldn’t think we were talking about any of that shit. I mean, we were talking about the Book of Job and the redemption of Dark Heart in Care Bears Movie II: A New Generation and making fart jokes. It took courageous questioner and Frienemy @mAcChaos — who takes a lot of my shit for his willingness to question me but never, ever lets that stop him — to boil all this crap down to its essence…

I do wonder about… player engagement. I watch the same players sign up with one GM and be relatively disengaged while they sign up with another GM and their behavior [does] a total 180. I don’t know if it’s something in the game or if it’s the attitude the GM projects or what; it’s something I’ve puzzled over for years in trying to harness the secret sauce and to make it a reproducible effect.

Thank you, @mAcChaos, for that brilliant, heartfelt thought. And thank you for being brave enough to give it a voice. Because I know you’re not the only one thinking that. And so, with deep respect and out of the kindness of my heart, I say this…

WHAT THE MOTHERLOVING FUCK DO YOU THINK I’VE BEEN TRYING TO GIVE YOU FOR THE LAST FIFTEEN FRIGGING YEARS?!!!??!!!!!!!!?!!!!!!!!???!!?!?!?!??!?!!!!!!!!!!!!!11?!?!?1!!1

Everything I’ve written — everything I said about orcs being evil and about using character names and calling on principal players and about not worrying about telling a story and just running a properly designed game on instinct — every word I’ve published represents one of the ten thousand ingredients in that Secret Sauce. You just can’t see it because you don’t get how this shit works. And I even tried to tell y’all that a year ago.

And if you’re nodding along right now thinking you grasp this shit and that @mAcChaos just wasn’t paying attention, buckle up, bucko, because I’m sure most of you still don’t actually get it either.

Eleventy Billion Herbs and Spices

What we’re talking about here is Investment. Investment isn’t quite Engagement. They’re close, but Engagement’s a momentary, fleeting, passing thing. You can be temporarily Engaged when something catches your interest, but when the moment passes, so too does your Engagement. Investment is your willingness to stay engaged even when nothing Engaging is happening right effing now. It’s your willingness to care knowing that your caring will be worth it later.

Investment is something you feel. It’s an emotion. Or rather, it’s lots of emotions. There are lots of ways to care. You can be curious or excited or anxious or joyful or despairing or grieving or tense or relieved or a thousand other things. Investment means you’re feeling something about something. You’re happy you won, you hate the villain, you’re sad a character died, you’re afraid of what your party’s going to find when they get back to town, whatever. That’s all Investment. At least, if those feelings stick around, they’re Investment.

Investment is feelings. Which means it’s subjective. Different people feel different feelings about different things differently. That part is obvious and yet, everyone always feels the need to remind me of it. The part that ain’t obvious — the one people forget — is that, while no two special snowflakes are precisely alike, most people are more similar than different. Emotionally speaking. Most peoples’ emotions follow the same general patterns. You can discuss them across populations and groups of individuals.

But because this is all feelings, discussing it ain’t easy. Feelings defy conscious, rational explanation by definition. You can’t be categorical or definitive or prescriptive or predictive about feelings. The best you can do is describe what you see and guess at a pattern.

Movie A makes many people feel scared. Despite being very similar, Movie B doesn’t make many people feel scared. So what are those two movies doing differently and does that difference tell me what I can do to make people feel scared? Let me try it and find out.

That’s about as categorical and definitive as you can get with this shit. If you try to be any more analytical than that, you’re barking up the wrong ass. You don’t get it.

I do talk a lot about psychology — a point I’ll come back to below — and a good grounding in human psychology can sometimes help you see what Movie B is doing differently from Movie A and which of those differences is likely to matter. It can help you guess what experiments to run and why those experiments were successful. But, mostly, I talk about psychology because it fascinates me. You don’t have to know how humans are wired to make games or tell stories. If that’s how it worked, psychologists would make the best games — they don’t — and game designers wouldn’t all be so psychologically screwed up — which we are.

This is one of those science versus engineering things. You don’t have to understand the underlying scientific principles to build a working machine. Does it help? Yes. Do science and engineering work well together? Yes. But they don’t mean the same things and there’s a point where too much science distracts you from building shit.

Of course, this analogy doesn’t apply because we’re talking about subjective, irrational, human emotions here, and both the psychologists and the creative types banging out games and scripts — note the dichotomy — will all admit this is all kind of a crapshoot.

My point is that Investment is irrational and emotional and subjective. All you can do is look for patterns and then try shit out to see how people respond. You can’t predict what will work. But that’s not all that makes this Investment shit so hard. Investment is also emergent. It’s holistic. It arises from the dynamic interplay of elements in a very complex system. And doesn’t that sound like a load of academical psychological bullshit?

Every creative work — be it your game of D&D or Baldur’s Gate III or The Expanse novels or Star Wars — is an infinitely complex mish-mash of many, many elements. We give certain categories of elements names like Plot and Character and Setting and Theme and Tone and Genre, but that doesn’t mean this shit is countable and definable. All we’re doing is describing the broad, general shapes of very complex things. Usually, in a comparative way.

Tiny differences between two otherwise very similar works can produce drastically different emotional responses. Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope and Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens were practically the same films. Same Plot, same Themes, same Characters, everything. One resounded for five decades and has numerous academic works written about why it was a cultural touchstone. The other sold a hell of a lot of movie tickets, but it was kind of forgotten six months later. And no one bought any of the toys. Except BB-8. People inexplicably loved that dumbass robot beach ball. See? Emotional responses are a crapshoot.

Why did one movie resonate across multiple generations while the other came and went like a fart in the wind? It doesn’t matter. Don’t answer. You don’t know the answer. If you can answer in less than ten thousand words, you’re wrong. You don’t get it. And don’t post ten thousand words in my comment section.

My point is that the Secret Sauce of Investment is a finicky, complex, delicate recipe with eleventy billion ingredients. You can’t even taste most of the flavors in the end product. They’re beyond human perception. That’s just how it is.

And that’s what makes it so hard to notice when the flavor’s off…

When The Secret Sauce Spoils

You can’t tell when you’re making the Secret Sauce wrong because you can’t predict emotional responses. You can guess and you can hope, but that’s the best you can do. The most successful creatives are the best guessers and most of them can’t tell you how they’re making the Secret Sauce because they just make shit they think people will like.

Worse, you can’t even tell when your Secret Sauce has gone bad. By the time it stinks enough for you to know, it’s been so bad for so long that there’s no knowing why it spoiled.

I get hundreds of questions from people whose Sauce has gone or is going bad. And as I noted above, every question someone has the stones to ask represents ten or a hundred people too afraid to ask the same question. That means that there are thousands of people reading this right now — maybe tens of thousands — whose Secret Sauce isn’t passing mustard. And many don’t even know it.

Investment doesn’t break. It doesn’t snap. It doesn’t crack or collapse. It just fades. Slowly.

Disinvested players can still enjoy the game they’re playing. They can be Engaged. The problem is the Engagement doesn’t last beyond the game. So, Adam’s having fun, but he isn’t really Invested. And this week, he’s feeling a little under the weather. So, he decides to skip the game. It’s not that the game isn’t fun, it’s just that thinking about missing the game doesn’t hurt bad enough to overcome his headache. Meanwhile, Beth suddenly remembers mid-battle that she forgot to order coffee pods. It’s not her turn and she’s not too worried about what Chris and Danielle are up to, so she just alt-Tabs over to a browser window and shoots off an Amazon order quick-like. And Chris? When his turn is over, he decides to post a picture of his new dice on Instagram while he waits for Beth to figure out what spell to cast.

But maybe that’s not your table. Maybe everyone does mostly show up and everyone’s attentive. But suddenly, during a serious confrontation with a nasty devil you’ve been building toward for a week, Beth cracks a dumbass joke, ruining the mood. Or maybe the party’s just not really sympathetic to the questgiver. Or Chris figures he can pickpocket the town burgher because, “he’s probably got good stuff and he’s not an important character, really.”

I ain’t saying every lapse in focus and every sick call means your players have checked out. I ain’t saying a player willing to crack a stupid joke at a tense moment means you run a shit game. But if they start becoming more frequent occurrences, it’s likely your players’ Investment is fading. If you’re really into a game, you don’t want to skip a session unless you absolutely have to. The easier it is for you to just pass this week, the less into the game you are. The more invested you are in the tense, terrifying negotiation with the pit fiend, the less your brain is even capable of coming up with a stupid joke. All else being equal.

As a GM, you feel all that shit. You know something’s off when the players are canceling a little too often or when their attention is drifting or when you can’t reign in the jokes when it really matters. And if, on the surface, everyone seems to be having a good time, you’ll assume these are minor behavioral issues that just need some fixing. But your efforts to fix them will fall flat and you won’t know why. And so, you start to feel Disinvested. You’ll say you’re tired or stressed or burnt out and maybe you’ll blame outside factors — and maybe outside factors are part of the problem — but your Investment isn’t driving you to overcome your stress and tiredness. Which is weird. Gaming is a hobby. It’s a thing you do to relieve stress. When you get stressed, you should want to game more, not less.

The point is, now you’re burning out. So you cancel games. Or you just don’t put the effort in that you should. And that leaves your players even more Disinvested. And now everyone knows — subconsciously at least — that the game’s circling the drain and everyone’s just going through the motions.

The ending of this story varies. Sometimes, a totally unrelated conflict breaks out that snaps the game. And it seems like the conflict is what did it. Other times, one player quits and that triggers an exodus. But often, games die with a whimper, not a bang. A session gets canceled and it never gets rescheduled. Someone will occasionally say, “Hey, maybe we should try to schedule a session,” but the session never happens and the game just goes away.

Of course, that takes a while. A game can get stuck in a Mildly Disinvested state for months or years. Hell, people can even play through entire campaigns in that state. Game Masters running those games e-mail me about their attendance issues or their players’ murderhobo tendencies, but they always start with, “My game is going well and everyone is having fun, but…” Of course, some GMs can run games for Mildly Disinvested players happily for years and years. But many GMs — especially the sort of GMs who seek advice about running better games — can’t really stay happy for long like that.

Again, though, none of these problems prove categorically that your players are Disinvested. Hell, these problems happen at every table. People are people. But there’s an inverse correlation between the frequency of these problems — and many other problems — and your players’ Investment. I’m not saying that if you mix the proper Secret Sauce, you’ll never have an attendance problem or a murderhobo. What I’m saying is that if you have an attendance or murderhobo problem that seems to defy solution, mixing a better batch of Secret Sauce is very likely to mitigate it.

Investment doesn’t cause problems and it doesn’t solve them. People cause problems and problems will always happen. Investment just reduces the problems to a manageable level.

My Secret Recipe

This site — speaking as broadly and generally as possible — is my Secret Sauce Recipe. Everything I’ve written — and everything I ever will — is just me tinkering with the recipe and sharing my results with you. That’s why I’m here. When I say, “Speak to your players about their characters,” I’m giving you one of the eleventy billion secret herbs and spices I’ve discovered.

I know it sounds like I’m saying, “The key to solving your attendance problem is to make all your orcs — except one — evil,” and that’s because that is exactly what I’m saying. Want your players to be more attentive? Start your game in a tavern. Want them to treat your NPCs like people? Yell at them for taking too long in combat. Does that sound crazy? Of course it does! I know it does! It sounds absolutely frigging bonkers! But that’s how this Secret Sauce Shit works.

Except…

I’m also not really saying that. Because that would be crazy. Yes, the recipe is complicated and yes, it is delicate, and yes, if it spoils, it’ll spoil in ways that don’t seem to have anything to do with the sauce and won’t be visible for months, but it also isn’t actually a recipe. And it’s definitely not the kind of recipe you can just replicate.

You can leave out ingredients. You can change the amounts. You can add ingredients of your own. You have to make your own sauce. The problem, though, is that it’s never obvious which ingredients do what and you can’t tell which ingredients you can fiddle with except by changing the mix and then waiting six months to see if your game dies. Seriously.

I’m telling you which ingredients and in what amounts I know will lead to a good Secret Sauce. It’s up to you to tinker with the recipe.

Now, you might ask — and rightly so — how I know I’ve got my recipe right. Well, first, I know my recipe isn’t right. It’s not perfect, anyway. I’m constantly tinkering with it myself. That’s why my advice has changed. Fifteen years ago, when I started this shit, I wasn’t even trying to make Secret Sauce. I just had a fun idea for statting up boss monsters. And this was just a side thing. I was just writing thousands of words a week for fun to take the edge off the fifty or sixty hours I was working as an accountant.

But I kept writing. And people kept reading. And they discovered my recipe seemed to be working. And they told me so. And they told their friends. Eventually, they — and maybe you’re among them — were willing to pay for my recipe. Meanwhile, I kept running games. I kept experimenting with my home games. I eventually started running official games at conventions and game stores. I’d go to conventions and spend three days straight running games for groups of strangers. I also started spectating. Watching games at conventions and stores. I also immersed myself in game design and psychology and behavioral economics. I didn’t study that shit officially or academically — I was just a lay person — but I’ve always had a tremendous appetite for knowledge.

My audience kept growing and people kept putting my advice into practice and telling me how it worked and how it didn’t. To the point where I’ve got a lot of people testing my advice pretty much all the time.

Remember how I said the best you can do with this shit is to just look for patterns and run experiments? That’s what I’m doing here. I’m just watching for patterns and running experiments. But I’m doing it very deliberately these days. See, once this Angry thing took off, I started running games and consuming media much more critically. I discovered I had a good eye for the patterns and that I was good at guessing which experiments were likely to give what results. I had a talent for it. Actually, I didn’t believe that until some design professionals I deeply respect got very mad at me when I suggested I was going to give this shit up. But that’s beside the point and I don’t want this to turn into a bunch of bragging.

The point is, I was lucky enough to have a talent for this shit. Some people have a good sense of balance, some people can sing, I can analyze and explain game design. But talent isn’t worth much by itself. Once I started doing it deliberately and consciously, well, I was practicing. I was cultivating my skills.

I talk a lot about psychology, behavioral economics, and game design theory. And I try to explain why I think the patterns I see exist and why the experiments that work work. And people eat that shit up. But I think it’s muddied the waters. I think it’s created some confusion and maybe some impossible expectations. The truth is, I have no idea for sure why my advice works. I’m confident, at this point, that it does, for the reasons I’ve stated above, and I have what I think are pretty good guesses for the reasons, but I don’t actually know. I can’t prove from base assumptions that “speaking to the players about their characters” should work. The fact that it works isn’t a conclusion I’ve drawn, it’s an observation I’ve made. And the reason is irrelevant.

I’m often asked to prove that my recipe for Secret Sauce is a good one. That is, people want me to convince them that “speaking to the players about their characters” will work. I can’t do that. I can only say that I have very good evidence that it does work and guess why I think that’s so.

I think many of you forget that.

Implied in @mAcChaos’ courageous remark is the idea that there really is a recipe that can be distilled and written down and codified and I’m pretty sure I’ve implied that’s the case just by how I talk about this shit. But there’s no actual Secret Sauce and there’s no recipe. There are just a million tiny decisions Game Masters make and each and every one nudges the players’ Investment up or down by an imperceptible degree. And all I can really do is say, “When you make this decision, it seems to nudge Investment up; when you make that one, it seems to bump Investment down.” And my justification will always come down to, “I’ve been doing this for a long time and based on my own experiences and feedback I’ve gathered for many years, I seem to have pretty good instincts for this shit.”

But that means I also have to admit that my recipe isn’t the only way to make Secret Sauce. There are lots of ways to make the Sauce. Probably. I just can’t speak for them. I can give my own instinctive guesses about how an ingredient might affect the sauce based on my experiential wisdom — and you have to decide what you think that’s worth — but I can’t actually speak categorically about any recipe but my own. If someone else you trust is offering you a different recipe, give it a try. Maybe it’ll work too. Maybe it’ll work better.

I honestly don’t care whether I have the best Secret Sauce recipe out there. I only care that I have a good recipe. I just care that I’m offering a quality product and that I’m always trying to improve the quality.

Why Are You Here?

Let me end by saying that none of this shit matters at all unless it matters to you. I’ve told you now why I’m here — as the title of this Feature suggested I would — but the other half of that title’s on you. Why are you here?

I assume you’re here because you — like me — want to run the best game you can for the people at your table. I assume you want more than just four hours of functional fun every week. I assume you think this hobby is worth being good at. But maybe that’s not the case.

So, there’s this fight I get into a lot. It starts with someone questioning something I said and with me explaining my reasoning as best I can. Then, it turns into a debate. They ask more questions, I answer them, they raise objections, I provide counterpoints, and so on. And on and on and on. See, people don’t realize that I don’t write anything down until I’ve given it a hell of a lot of thought, energy, experimentation, and/or research and so, by the time they pick a fight with me, I’ve already kicked the shit out of my own ideas harder than they ever can, and thus the debate they’re starting is one I worked my ass off to prepare for and…

Sorry… I got sidetracked.

The point is, I have these debates with people, right? And at the end of it all, sometimes after several hours, they’ll say, “But that thing you’re describing isn’t important to me, so your advice really doesn’t matter.” That’s when I black out and wake up two days later in a jail cell with another assault charge on my record.

If you ain’t here because you think Game Mastering is worth being great at — or if you don’t think that Investment is the single metric by which you measure Game Mastering Greatness — then I don’t have anything useful to offer you. I’m only speaking to people who are aiming for the same end game that I am. If you just want to have a good time pretending to be an elf with your buddies and don’t care about making your players actually cry over their imaginary elves, then, by all means, take this entire site as the mad ravings of a lunatic that takes all this shit way too seriously.

But if you do want to be a great Game Master and you do think Investment is the be-all and end-all aspirational greatness goal, then stick around. But understand that all I’ve got to offer is a method that I’ve found works through hard work, good instinct, and luck. A method that, thanks to the size of my audience, has been playtested thousands of times. Is my method guaranteed to work for you? No. I can’t guarantee that. But I’m willing to bet it probably will if you give it a try.

And that’s really all I can offer you.

Happy New Year.