In my experience, gamers thick into the hobby love being literary, cinematic, or genre-y because they think (but might not admit) that tabletop RPGs are inferior pastimes, and that they need to redeem them by hitching them to more prestigious art forms — or failing that, to “real games,” defined as either popular games like CCGs or family games like Settlers of Catan or Monopoly. That’s the inferiority complex I talked about in the Suck article, and it’s driven much last two decades of RPG design.

Back in the Suck post I talked about three factors that combine to make RPG play experiences distinctive. Individually, they’re nothing special, but mix ‘em up and they provide the best reasons to play.

Place: Place is the sense of being in a fictional location. It’s the easiest part of the triad to nail. That’s the dungeon and hexes on the map, but it’s also about the relationships between places, such as trade routes, magical gates and war torn borders. Although RPGs focused on place early on, systematic work on place is uncommon, and often leans a bit too much on conceptual translations from video games (“zoning”). I think non-systematic work on place has led to a thick stew of ideas that newer systems fail to pick up — and since new game designers like to basically talk about how terrible what came before was, looking back isn’t usually a priority unless it’s for sentimental, anti-intellectual reasons — y’know, OSR style.

Society: Society could be the dynamics of a clique or a fictional nation — anything that helps us figure out what the fictional moral agents of the game think, do and relate to each other. Vampire: The Masquerade represented a huge step forward in thinking about society by using relationship maps and social rules that were gameable inside the story world, and not just in systems removed a step from the fiction.

The society concept has really degenerated due to systematization. Most social resolution systems aim for a false equivalence with violence, which is both sad and vaguely offensive (do I really “attack” someone to woo them?). This is not to say that social systems are bad, but they say things about the game’s world view.

In system or fiction, society sets expectations about the game’s values. My AD&D game’s social break points make mercy and negotiation central assumptions of the world, and leads to some powerful moments when enemies (like undead) don’t follow them. In Indigo, the anarchist command staff needed to present arguments that went to the mass of the ship’s crew. In Vampire, manipulating the rules of an Elysium or Conclave is a game within the game.

Time: Time — momentum in the story world — is probably the quality most in danger of being sacrificed to the gamer inferiority complex. Time is tricky, because we can let it just happen as something purely attached to character actions, but that leads to a hollow, repetitive play experience. Nowadays, people are so afraid that anything the GM does will make our inferiority-battered players feel even worse that nothing of consequence can be allowed to happen outside of characters’ pond.

Let me use visual metaphors. Conventional story is looking through a microscope. You can’t see much in that little circle, but you can see it exceptionally closely. Creators need to pack information into that tiny field, and imply things about the world beyond it, but rarely get to tell the reader that she’s insignificant because she can only see one tiny, bounded territory. You never want to imply that some microbes 1 mm outside the specimen dish are in the midst of this awesome epic that’s way better that the amoebic drama you get to see.

In RPGs, you stand up from the microscope, get a magnifying glass and look around. It’s impossible to build these contrived tableaux “on dish.” You’ll shove your magnifying glass anywhere! GMs have tried to solve this problem by screaming, “No, look at the fucking dish!” The newer, “indie” method is to create a tautology where looking at the dish is the only permissible form of looking, and didn’t you contractually agree to it, and isn’t asking what’s over there exactly like caning a child? One retro method is to talk about how In Ye Olde Days, Hexe I-10 Didst Hold Paramecia So Fierce,” and then boot everybody into the nearest dungeon, where the GM could constrain your vision again.

A dynamic setting allows things to happen that are not merely backstory, but matter to the world on its own terms — and yes, even letting important things happen to *someone else.* We do not do this to upstage the protagonists. We do it because we want the players to feel less constrained about where they point the spyglass, and so that they have the opportunity to create their *own* sense of importance. A world that’s all hooks is always less interesting.

So I was running a supers game. It was okay, but not great. I didn’t like it. I loved worldbuilding with my friends, talking about alt history and fiddling with systems, but I didn’t feel like actually running the game.

I ditched it!

I used to think that any roadblock in a creative effort deserved double the effort. I’d push and experiment and play hard until a breakthrough. But as I’ve matured I’ve learned to tell the difference between something where cool stuff is just around the bend, and one where you’ll recover mediocre play. If that happens repeatedly through the same campaign (or story, whatever) it’s not serving its purpose. Move on. Put it in the trunk. Change medium. Don’t hate your work but don’t go fucking that cactus all day long either.

In the case of the supers game, I collaborated with the group on the setting. It ended up as gritty, low key setting that drifted somewhere between Watchmen and Aberrant. I thought it was pretty cool, but I’m really more into Grant Morrison’s psychedelic remixes. I realized that as much as I wanted to explore this world I didn’t really want to curate it. So I’m turning

1. Peer pressure.
2. An unacknowledged desire to dominate others through the game’s text.
3. A misunderstanding of how it works (which is often contrived due to the influence of the other points).

The first two problems  are pretty easy to fix unless you get caught in a destructive scene, which happens frequently when people start gaming as teenagers. Teenagers are status and peer group focused to the point where it mutes individual moral and creative agency, but that’s not their fault. The second and third points stick around because of Graphocentric cultural biases and poor explanations in the books, respectively. They reinforce each other in a pretty insidious fashion.

What do I mean by “Graphocentric?” We belong to a literate culture where certain texts are privileged as sources of revelation. These texts typically have teaching roles, are the focus of communities and are not written to be chronologically sensitive, like newspaper articles. At the simplest level, we have a tendency to revere texts, but once you combine that with a slightly educated middle class its members discover that they can jockey for position over who gets to tell you what the text means. Either way, power doesn’t flow from the text, but from us. One really dangerous aspect of the Graphocentric perspective is that even though hermeneutics are subjective, we are reluctant to admit this because it makes the text look weak and undeserving of its central role. That’s where you get a lot of chapter and verse bullshit about what things really mean, but make no mistake: It’s really a social control strategy using the text as an instrument. To express it simply:

People use RPGs to tell you what to do because we all like to pretend the RPG is really telling us what to do, to the extent that even the folks telling you what to do through the RPG believe it’s all the game, not them.

Vague advice about fudging doesn’t help, though it’s vague for a reason. In their own way, game designers understand the triple threat and usually advise fudging as a way to escape it and take ownership of the game. Many know (though some have forgotten) that the most serious play issues have little to do with differing agendas or any of that bullshit. They stem from hermeneutic conflicts between people aiming for the same thing. These people fail because they put the rules at the center of the relationship instead of each other. That’s why designers who advocate fudging are reluctant to codify the process. They fear that text will just assimilate the specifics anyway, making them a new source for dispute, but it should be obvious by now that people are so twisted by Graphocentrism that they’ll use any bit of text to reflexively impose their wills.

(Once we acknowledge Graphocentrism we can also see that hitching your wagon to a text is a foolish way to cure social problems, that expressing the group’s relationship as a contract [text] of any sort isn’t significantly useful compared to a bunch of other things, and how poisonous in-vogue advice to do either of these things is.)

This insight frees us to talk about what fudging and fiat really are. Let’s begin by looking at a common but incorrect formulation:

Fiat happens when the GM ignores the results of the rules in favour of what s/he wants.

or

Ignore the system for a GM-determined result.

But when you observe fudging and fiat in the wild it generally doesn’t go down this way. The GM is usually very concerned with the rules, and rarely makes a decision that ignores them in such a simple, binary fashion. (If you haven’t taken the time to sit by a game as an observer, there are a bunch of places you can read about this stuff. I recommend Over the Edge 2nd Edition to start, though it’s more about in-world consequences than where the dice fall.)

It’s more like this:

Rules results + player input + GM input + story needs = result

Changing your perspective answers the question of why GMs roll dice if they’re going to make a ruling that ignores them – they aren’t! GM-adjusted/”ignored” dice rolls (or equivalent system outputs) are extremely useful. Let’s look at a classic move: Changing a hit that will kill a PC if left as is. The rules results tell us that the monster hit and inflicted 20 HP damage. The target character only has 8 HP. Depending on the exact situation this could tell us the following:

• The encounter might be too difficult if the scene’s function was to drain resources. This teaches us to use the system better and recognize any issues that require our ongoing attention.
• If it’s a fluke result we get a better understanding of how variable rules results can be.
• We might learn more about the player’s competence as a tactician, or whether s/he even cares about that aspect of play.

With this information in hand we consider the player’s input. What does s/he want? What did s/he do to get there and how does it relate to the situation at hand?

• If the player really wants to be thrown to the wolves for strict tactical gaming we might let the roll stand. If not, we’ll consider fudging it.
• If the player wants something in between or is at a critical stage where s/he’s testing the waters of tactical play but also feels very invested in his/her character or a certain narrative arc, it may be more useful to use the result as an inspiration, scaling it back to an incapacitating blow, to send a signal to the player that this is a serious situation without killing his/her character.

GM input exists throughout the whole process in this instance, but it’s easy enough (though not always desirable) to open this up to group discussion and reduce the GM”s direct input. In terms of traditional GM responsibilities s/he may consider the following:

• The whole encounter might have come about due to players ignoring or misinterpreting signals. If the campaign is meant to impose serious penalties for error or question player agency in course of events (concepts that many people are terrified to bring into play, but which can work well) then it might be time to let the dice stand. If Frodo and co. head in through the Black Gate, they’re screwed.
• Then again, it just might be the GM’s fault for any of the reasons above or because s/he communicated the situation poorly. S/he may be forced to tweak the entire encounter to compensate for the mistake, starting with this roll. After that, s/he revises monster stat blocks accordingly and inserts the possibility of new narrative threads that stem from this encounter.
• The GM may have something special planned for that particular character, and sticking with it would be more interesting for everyone than dropping it upon that PC’s death. S/he fudges the roll, but takes its existence as a hint to foreshadow or even implement the special event. In some situations s/he could pull the trigger on the event without fudging the roll. S/he might bring the character back from the dead – it worked for Jesus!

Fudging is the sum total of these influences, so it really is silly to say that the dice or player actions are meaningless. They’re usually more important than the GM’s intentions, though the GM has some serious responsibilities in the whole equation. I should also note that this flood of information doesn’t wait for the decision point. Most of it happens in the run up, as the group discusses its situation and play unfolds, so it’s already done most of the “work” required. It’s not that hard when we compensate for the Graphocentric perspective, put the game in its place and trust each other.

That’s it for now. I was going to delve into objections that hiding fudging and fiat is a bad thing, but it struck me that the arguments against these are so value-laden (like getting mad at costumes in plays, erasing wires with CGI and a host of other craft techniques) that it’s probably a waste of my time to deal with them. The idea that fudging and fiat can be eliminated by better design is dumb, but I’ll talk about that some other time.

Players like to think they can go anywhere and do anything with their characters unless there’s a mechanism in place to solidly prevent them (and make them like it) or trick them (also, to make them like it by preserving the illusion of freedom). The desire for freedom versus its practical impossibility is an enduring tension so it’s easy for RPG designers/thinkers/grognards to score cheap points by railing against restrictions in one game, or designing a solution that is really way of disguising restrictions.

The oldest restriction is the dungeon crawl. Gamers like dungeons because they have pretend physical walls. For some reason, pretend matter trumps other kinds of pretending, and players don’t mind it getting in their way much. Classic dungeons are usually flowcharts that push explorers toward some signature encounter, even if there are some pass/fail encounters, backtracking and general screwing around to deal with in the interim. The only exceptions are random dungeons, and even the old generators enforced some rising tension with the character level to dungeon level equivalence.

(Wilderness encounters in old D&D were interesting in the way they weren’t level dependent, but the need to get from location to location was restriction enough.)

The dungeon’s flaw is that many people eventually get bored of them, or learn to despise increasingly dodgy rationales for hauling ass through a flow chart. These types accused GMs of lacking imagination or defying realism, and complained they wanted to focus on character portrayal and romance and things, but they had to deal with the Maze of Peril of the Week.

Eventually angry players and inventive GMs figured out that you could do without physical walls and simply outline the rough course of play, but they kind of blundered into this with a healthy dose of denial, because nobody could really admit that the whole point of these structures was to remove the freedom to do anything you want.

Unfortunately, without pretend walls, GMs were forced to get honest or desperate. Some asshole would always ignore the signals and wander off. This happened in dungeons, but the jerk couldn’t get far, because he had to walk the flowchart. When the only restriction was linked to story flow, it was harder to develop a pretense to keep everyone on the rails. Designers provided theme and mood and setting tools to help GMs roughly delineate what players could do (plot against the Prince in Vampire, say) and couldn’t (all kinds of stupid shit that Vampire players did anyway).

One of the tricky elements of this scheme was that it required the GM to show his hand as an artist instead of ascribing it to a trick of the dungeon. But people have been educated to be suspicious of art. They believe it’s something social deviants make to subtly mock them, or it was something created by mighty white men in days of yore, such that it would be arrogant to follow in their footsteps with art of your own. Certainly, modern people are not allowed to manipulate signs meaningfully unless it’s for large commercial interests. Some companies tried to convince gamers that they were some form of social deviant and allowed to dress oddly, dye their hair and make art, but this was only semi-successful and generated resentment that would simmer over the next decade and a half or so.

At some point, people playing through these plot and trope-based restrictions started to believe the GM was making all the decisions (which was pretty much bullshit, but these players have been around since the dungeon, when they kept walking the wrong way up the walled flowchart). Interestingly, many of these players were total book bitches. They didn’t want to be told what they couldn’t do, but vaguely understood that they needed to point to some basis of unity, even if it wasn’t the other players. If they were going to do anything, it was what the book told them. If things went bad, it was the book’s fault.

Eventually, this heady mix of misanthropy and ad hoc textual criticism met the Internet and formed a community. Members wrote their own games. Naturally, they  (like so many others in previous eras) half-knew that the central problem was keeping people from doing whatever they wanted, but this group was even less likely than the last to explicitly admit this. They did however know what they would obey, which was whatever was in the book. They’d ruined play by picking text over people, so they thought they could probably solve it by tinkering with the text.

Naturally, the games that resulted were more restrictive than all prior games, but this could be ignored if you believed that “playing the game” was equivalent to “obeying the book.” In the dungeon era, you’d throw up physical walls inside a mountain to kick people to a final confrontation with an evil witch, but some bastard might run away and get drunk in a tavern, and the best you could do was ignore him, give him a loaner character or kill him. The new games were designed so that there was no support for ever going to a tavern – that doing anything besides getting up the mountain to face the witch was meaningless, stupid, and possibly a moral violation resulting from abuse or brain damage.

Game designers like feeling like they’re making people they’ve never met play a certain way, so this approach became quite  popular. People who’d left the business to do something more profitable wished they’d thought of it, and some folks working in the commercial end of game design realized that it was terribly simple to come up with contrived metrics for design success by using this style. If it didn’t work, the players were obviously doing it wrong.

Unfortunately, these new strictures didn’t sit well with everyone, and newer games were designed to be unplayable if you didn’t accept your inability to wander off to the pub. These malcontents stuck with older games. Some of them went right back to the dungeon, where the old Flowchart Made of Rock would provide some solace. Some of them stuck with plotty games. The community was a house divided, except for the shared belief that if they played some other way, they’d lose their freedom but if they obeyed their school, they could pretend this wasn’t really happening. It was happening, though. To everybody.

What’s the solution? In some special play groups (though more than you might think) participants crossed the watershed and realized two things:

1) Restrictions were necessary.

2) It was natural to fight against them.

And in these special groups, the participants realized that this tension was never a flaw, but a remarkable source of inspiration. This tension created novel solutions. The group needed to develop new mechanics to support leaving the beaten path, but in such a way that the wayward player returned. The GM learned to moderate his vision, or figure out what happens when the group leaves the dungeon half done. They accepted that some disputes were inevitable, even passionate ones, as people are liable to be passionate about their creative efforts. Through forthright talk, compromise and above all compassion for every participant, these groups accepted the problem and turned it into another toy to play with.

So I put it to the group. I didn’t do a great job of explaining what exactly I wanted in some respects. Some of my players read a rules change as learning a new system (I want to stick to the D20 base) and maybe more complexity (obviously, I want less!) but I got the basic idea across. They had . . . mixed feelings about switching.

(Incidentally, I hope my players who read the blog click the Microlite link so they can see the kind of thing I’m talking about – maybe that’ll make it clearer.)

Aside from the aforementioned adaptation issues, the main concern was niche protection. We have two Jedi, and the rules are good at letting them develop in different directions. And y’know what? It was a fair point. I could design some loose systems to develop this sort of thing but it might take some time (though I do think I would do it.

So I think some things are definitely going to get axed (some skills, the injury track), but the Saga system is going to stay more or less intact. I’m pretty happy with the way the discussion went even though I didn’t get my way. I’ve often talked about the importance of listening and cooperation, though I have privately wondered if it has really come down to the fact that we’re all friends who have developed complementary interests. Now I’ve had the first chance in a while to put that to the test. We didn’t agree, and that’s okay. A better game will come of it.

(Though I must say, really guys, wouldn’t rules-light be snazzy? I have plenty of other ideas . . .)

I don’t just mean the love and friendship themes groups often have trouble getting comfortable with (though to be clear, I’m not excluding them – these are huge). I’m talking about times when what you eat or the particulars of going to the bathroom temporarily consume you. I may sound picky here, but the combined effect boots you out of any pretence of simulation (which is why the identification of “simulation” in RPG theory never worked to begin with, and is still treated as a dust heap for things people have trouble with).

RPG settings can’t provide a simulation of what an authentic narrative would be like in a speculative world, but that doesn’t mean they can’t feel authentic. Suspension of disbelief enters the picture here, because despite everything I’ve said, the players need to be able to commit to sincere participation. It’s your job to work with your resources and the game’s, producing an end result your friends can jump into with gusto.

The two basic ways to do this are by either changing the setting (and sometimes the rules, where players believe they represent game “reality” – they don’t, but this semiotic shorthand is pervasive and often even useful) or by identifying implausible points, explaining why they exist and moving on. Aeternal Legends features the latter method in action, as we explained that the supernatural is hidden but pervasive just because that’s really cool.

(Let’s be clear, however, that players are expected to make a good faith commitment to getting into the game. You don’t have to constantly appease unreasonable players.)

Beyond suspension of disbelief, authenticity comes from setting up the rules as a point of tension against traditional narrative structures. We all know how traditional stories work because we’ve been educated to anticipate their structures. We expect writers to build stories with a certain rhythm and economy. Instead of looking at a rules set’s defiance of these as a flaw, we should see it as an opportunity – the opportunity that makes tabletop RPGs worth playing.

It’s not easy. It means that sometimes a failure is just a failure. It means that sometimes an NPC upstages the PCs. Looking at these events as RPG failure modes is a huge mistake, but an understandable one, because these are hard situations. They represent an encounter with the kind of anti-story situations that appear in real life. It’s the GM’s responsibility to help players make the most out of these difficult but powerful creative opportunities.

Emphasize that player characters are important because they get the most attention, not because of some in-world power play. There was an RPGNet thread recently where folks complained about Divis Mal being central to Aberrant. This is only true if the GM goes on an on about Divis Mal as if he’s being played at the table. It doesn’t matter if they don’t beat the bad guy or if anything procedurally interesting happens. The characters sitting and chatting is inherently more important than what some NPC is doing, no matter how impressive it is. Instead of using in-world events as a crutch to demonstrate to players that you like them and are interested in their characters, get genuinely interested. Use your omniscience to ask probing questions and help them apply the results to their portrayals.

It’s like being in love. You don’t make artificial demonstrations every day, but you’re interested. No word is wasted, even when the talk isn’t about poetry or storming the castle.

This one was inspired by a Youtube video. It’s extremely silly and incredibly nerdy, and I may not be able to communicate my message because of it, but what the hell: at least it’ll be good for a laugh.

I want you to watch a video where William Shatner talks about Star Trek V.

Are you done laughing? It’s pretty funny. It’s important, too. Not Shatner’s specific thoughts, but the fact that he articulated them.

He was at the height of his power. V was his movie. Kirk was his character and nobody could take that away from him. So the video above probably represents the apex of self-indulgence — but think about this: William Shatner could have sleepwalked through this part (who else was going to play Kirk back then?) but he didn’t. He actually prepared a deep motivation for Kirk despite the fact that it’s a silly film with a silly character in a bizarre situation, and there were no penalties at all for not preparing. Say what you want about William Shatner’s acting chops, but you can’t accuse him of laziness.

I’m not. Talking. About dramatic. Pauses. Players have very Shatneresque privileges because you need them to commit to the game. You trust them to play their characters as they see fit and for those reasons, it’s very easy for them to sleepwalk through the part instead of developing it. Fight that. Raise the inner Shatner on the Mount, and then bind it.

Raising the Shatner: Push the players for meta-reflection on the game constantly. You know the off-topic punning and and crap that happens in tense scenes? That’s you and your group doing it wrong. You’re reflexively seeking that meta-reflective (beyond the in-world perspective – and isn’t that phrase back there a mouthful?) space to get a handle on things, but without an articulated goal you just spin your wheels. You can use humour here, by the way. Instead of Monty Python, topical political satire. Instead of puns and impressions, cultural references designed to speak to who the character is. In all cases, You have to force the players to back up for a sec and consider motivations.

Funny thing: You will effectively end up breaking in-world narrative progress all the time by asking players about character feelings and stances, or riffing off OOC moments to dig deeper. But post-session players will often report that they felt more immersed and in more of a flow state. As I said, Raising the Shatner works best when we piggyback off of cyclical micro-retreats from focus that naturally occur in the game. Open these up into a new, free space for exploring the game, where you prepare like an actor in the moment, instead of doing the heavy lifting before play. You want them to feel as free to elaborate on their roles and as unsself-conscious as Shatner himself.

Binding the Shatner: You may want players to use their power to feel free like Shatner does, to wax poetic even about being an elf, which on another level is Trek-silly, but you don’t want them to go too far and be Star Trek V silly. That’s the danger. Don’t just veto or name-call stupid ideas. Challenge, challenge, challenge. Your job is to turn even crap characters into gold be assailing them with condistions under which they must evolve into something better. Challenges can either come from within the world or from the metagame level.

Give brooding loners brothers. Tell people with Mary Sue concepts to justify their combination of competence and lack of formal social power (Mary Sues are awesome, but usually not in charge). Does Mary Sue have an enemy? Is she incredibly unpleasant in a couple of key situations (and not just by being annoyingly awesome, since you want to fix that). Toss out life-changing ordeals, strange, fictional social mores. Bind the Shatner.

Find a balance. Tell players to take charge of the Shatner within – but carefully, carefully now.

A Free Modern Fantasy RPG From Us

I’m offering the PDF of Aeternal Legends for FREE (click the link) until the end of Gen Con — and if you download it you can get the book at 11 bucks off the print version ($15.95 instead of $26.95). This offer ends when Gen Con does. Details at the link.

Poor integration causes a lot of frustration – so much that groups could fall apart without ever understanding why. The stereotypical antisocial character is often born of a player with so little trust in the world that deviant, amoral behaviour is the rational fall back. Being a bastard elicits information, because everybody has to deal with the bastard and reveal their tactics and resources thereby.

(This works both ways. Bastard GMs are often this way because they don’t know the players’ interests, so they poke, prod and slap to get that information.)

In a traditional RPG the goal is an immediate, deep experience, akin to actually being there. Literary critic Roland Barthes described a state he called punctum (with connotations of puncturing – wounding) in his book Camera Lucida, where the barriers between a sign and what it signifies (in Barthes case, photographs and their subjects) break down, so that (for example) you see a picture as a person. Game procedures tend to be very good at creating a sense of being in the world, but portraying the world on the fly is a challenge. If we had a real “picture” we’d get right to punctum, but RPGs give us ethereal worlds in our heads.

It doesn’t matter whether the game world is very much like our own or an odd fantasy setting. The critical difficulty is that it’s incomplete. There are plenty of commonsense things about the world that don’t come into focus until somebody asks. Look out the window and you know who’s walking down your block now; you don’t always know that in the game without the cumbersome process of “declaring” that you’re looking.

Think of heist scenarios. These involve milking setting information for advantages. The guards will be here. The festival crowd will move down the avenue there. They sound cool in theory but in practice, in-character heist plans often lead to confused, circular discussions. Players just don’t have enough information to take confident ownership of the scheme. They don’t know if they can get lost in the crowd of the festival. They don’t have an accurate picture of the rooftops they want to leap over.

“You know” is a powerful pair of words. Be prepared to fill in gaps in player knowledge by telling them what you consider to be common knowledge and common sense. Don’t both with game systems on anything the players need to know to authentically function in the world. By the way, this is why licenses and genres are so popular. They provide big, ready made sets of signs and assumptions: basic “navigation tools.”

“What do you need to know?” is this technique’s companion. Step in and ask a version of this question whenever players reach an implausible in-character sticking point (plausible sticking points are another matter – it’s not your job to constantly undermine tension). But don’t rely on the players asking common knowledge questions and don’t treat common knowledge like an asset to bargain for. You should use multiple methods to volunteer information about both the particular scene and the world as a whole.

Barthes talked about punctum, but also studium, which is a more analytical relationship. Punctum relies on not only a global perception of the sign, but a detail that’s placed in a powerful enough context to hit hard. A great GM loads the players with information to permit analysis, but in such a way that the action of the scene resolves it all into those telling details – “punctures” between the player/character divide. When you do it right, you can drive an emotional, memorable experience.

Let’s get started.

Though the forceful GM looms large in the imagination like a petulant god, the truth is that many GMs don’t use force wisely. GMs have access to more force in the game system, have more information about the game system and are part of a social setup where you have to listen to them – but they often miss the opportunity to learn what the players are thinking.

It reminds me of playing at Tai Chi push hands. Push hands is an exercise where you try to maintain constant contact with the other person with the end goal of staying balanced while knocking the other person of balance. It’s easy for larger guys like me (I’m 6’5″) to use physical strength to just blow through your partner, but there’s always a bigger or more skillful guy. You can’t improve without learning to sense pressure as well.

But this isn’t about “Yielding to get your way, Maaaan.” Tai Chi players sometimes fall into dysfunctional ideas about power. You need to push, too. You need to learn from that response. Otherwise you have two weak people barely making contact and falling into fixed patterns.

Yeah, so it is with GMing. You have incredible power, but you need to use it to draw out information. Here are three examples, techniques, whatever – just read ‘em:

What’s Your Intention?

One of the most common destructive patterns in game play happens when players treat their characters’ inner lives as a secret from the GM. That’s when you get a surprising “I stab Ally McBuddy in the back!” and grumbling that quiets down as soon as you look at the player in question. Get in there and ask the player what her character is thinking, what her hopes and dreams are – they should have no secrets from you. If the player wants to keep it a secret, stick to email or private conversations.

Stop thinking of yourself as the World and NPC Guy alone. Your dominion goes right into the characters’ heads. This also helps players by getting them to better define their characters.

Opinion Polls

I figure that about half of your mistakes are going to feel like they’re going to be a screwup before you even do anything. You have the power to stop at that point and get player feedback. This is especially handy when it comes to difficult bits of the rules that intersect with very subjective aspects of play. For instance, I almost always do this before pushing a Morality check in World of Darkness games, because the system really does rely on a community standard of what’s right, wrong and psychologically taxing.

A word of caution: Don’t provide an easy channel for player gratification here. People do not always want the same thing in the long term as they do in the short term, and sometimes suffering is necessary for a meaningful session. Save this one for when you’re genuinely stumped. Also, this is not a vote. You can’t use democracy. As GM, it’s your job to build participatory consensus. Note that I said “participatory.” That means that nobody “stands aside.” They all get on board.

Post-Game Notes

Many groups automatically fall into a post-game bull session about what worked and what didn’t. Add some structure and detail to this. Elicit opinions and manage the spotlight so that everyone has room to provide detailed feedback. It’s a good idea to jot questions down before the session or while it’s happening, but once the session’s over use these as an inspiration, not a list. Otherwise, the post-game chat feels like tedious work, when it really should be an extension of normal socializing.

In a troubled group this kind of thing can generate recriminations. I have to admit I can’t tell you much about what to do here since I haven’t experienced this since I was a teenager. The best solution, I think is never to leave any feedback hanging without a constructive solution that draws upon the responsible party’s strengths. It’s your job to observe and suggest those. Players are often not aware of their own merits.

You are the godlike GM. You are omniscient, but sometimes you talk before you can listen. That’s your duty and privilege. Take the role of a benevolent inquisitor and get to it.