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

Jim took me very seriously and came back with a very detailed rebuttal (each word goes to a different segment of the response). I really appreciate that, so this post follows his with some thoughts about friendship in RPGs, why I emphasize it and what it’s doing to design and culture. I brought up how the decline of friendship might influence RPGs before, and linking to it is a good way to refresh the idea and remind everyone that this is a real social problem, not an off the cuff supposition.

Naturally, veteran readers may wonder where I get off telling anybody about friendship, given the fact that I don’t play well with their pretend-happy communities and just insulted them in this sentence. Here’s what I think:

• Just because you trade big emotional notes with people over the internet doesn’t mean you’re making friends with them.
• Online communities like to model themselves on performance communities (both crave attention over intimacy) but tabletop RPGs aren’t about performing for a third party.
• While low trust groups have always been part of roleplaying, the past decade marks this being considered the best we can aspire to, instead of something to be overcome with practice.
• Friendship rot is pretty embarrassing to status-conscious gamers and geeky folks in general, and the most embarrassed react by attacking the whole project of friendship. These are the guys that quote that Geek Fallacies article all the time. They need procedural rules because they can’t hack an ethos of compassionate friendship.

(I don’t think Jim necessarily fits the bill in all ways, or maybe even any of them. If I named names, he wouldn’t be on the list. This is a general observation.)

People frequently think a relationship is friendship when in my view, it isn’t. So what am I talking about? What are the characteristics of friendship?

A friend is an end, not a means.

This is the granddaddy and heart of “indie” gaming’s failure. Its ethics are corrupt from design up, and destructive to real friendships. It assumes that relationships mutual, egoistic exploitation are the rule, and that the goal of any system is to efficiently regulate selfishness.

True friendship requires you to think of any systems, customs and tools as ways to please your friends first. Even your character exists to further that friendship, not drive an ego trip. Even if you believe that all actions are ultimately selfish, this principle remains true because in that case, a friend is someone for whom you find selfish satisfaction in their enjoyment. They are very nearly one and the same.

Friends trust each other.

This too-obvious point never seems to stick. Players don’t trust GMs, RPG theory types don’t trust game designers and people post complains to RPG boards because they don’t trust their groups to handle an issue. (Yeah, posting behind your group’s back means you fail the trust test in a pretty basic way.)

If your relationships are like this you’ll need systems that are more than toys to play with (and ignore or tweak when the spirit moves you). They have to carry the creative process because your group can’t function without them.

At one point, Jim talks about what Capes “promises” him that GURPS doesn’t. That’s the problem: Games don’t promise. People promise. Friends make promises you can trust. They’re the basis; rules are toys that provide interesting output.

(Naturally, somebody’s going to call this “system doesn’t matter” rhetoric. It isn’t. Toys matter.)

Friends place emotional bonds over ritual relationships.

That brings me to my next point. Friendship thrives in liminal moments where no one has a particularly well-defined obligation, but come through nonetheless. Nobody tells you to pass your friend the spotlight, but you do it because you want her to be happy. Telling that joke might damage focus, but it’s fun, and you want your friends to have fun.

Recent RPG designs target these undefined moments, incorporate them into formal rules of play – the RPG ritual, in other words – and steals them from the dominion of ad hoc judgments based on mutual trust. And no wonder: Without the primacy of an emotional connection, you’ll see these interstices as threats. You’ll bitch about Rule Zero all day along.

A friend sets the example for new relationships.

If you don’t have a selfless, trusting informal relationship with the people you game with they aren’t your friends – not really. You may swear friendship up and down, but your claim lacks substance. And if your self-defined friendships lack these qualities, what about the people you meet online or at conventions? If anything, it’ll be worse. That’s why in my experience, the “indie” table is one of the unhappiest at the con.

I often surprise people by being so affable in face to face interactions, and when I run games at conventions (something I’m generally reluctant to do, by the way – when it happens, it’s to support relationships I value) people usually leave satisfied.

I associate gaming with some great friendships, so my first reflex is to assume that the potential for more of the same exists with anyone I play with. I don’t worry about them being “little bitches” (to refer to Jim’s comment about actors and improve) because it’s not acting – the performance to the third party isn’t adding its unique pressures. Tabletop play is about intimate experiences. It thrives on compassion. It needs friendship, or good faith in friendship to come.

It can work with electronic games, where players need the freedom to choose their own commitment level within the structure, since they’re playing with the product as the partner, not other people they value beyond the play space, or maybe convention play where people are temporary companions in a sharply delineated experience. It can work for the odd one shot. Beyond that, sustainable RPG play happens in a zone of negotiation, where play and text conflict, produce useful compromises, and give birth to a story through the responses of participants to the crisis.

I’ve been reminded of this lately on two fronts. First, I did a search for Mage: The Awakening’s Nemean: an NPC I created to helm the game’s signature city, Boston. Second, RPGNet talked about the end of Mage: The Ascension six years later — specifically, the scenario I wrote, “Judgment.” Both of these presented cases where I wanted to provide practical stuff in creative tension with Big Ideas (or Big Ideas I thought gamers would assume were there). So, one at a time:

Judgment: The Consensus is Just a GMPC

One of the important elements of Mage: The Ascension is that reality is determined by the massed, mixed up beliefs of human beings: the game’s Capital-C Consensus. That leads to a vision of ending the game where one faction or another wins, or we get some kind of new compromise as vetted by the human majority. The problem with this is that it contradicts the idea that the PCs decide what’s happening, and it’s not much of a basis for the action-oriented, fantastical and horrific elements of the game. I suppose I could have designed a scenario where the PCs go on a massive PR campaign, shake a lot of hands, save the Computer’s baby and win it to their side and dodge Republican Technocrats with Guns, but that would have been either boring or hokey. Boring, in that having meetings isn’t very action-fantasy-horrorific; hokey in that as contrived as “Judgment” was in some places, it would require an even bigger contrivance to set up scenes where the PCs win hearts and minds based on big stunts. Basically, the Consensus takes the place of the unbeatable NPC, whose heart is only moved by the GM’s whims or whatever is coded into the adventure.

All the same, the PC-centered quest makes everybody else look like they’re sitting on their asses, being overrode with True Will. So what’s a poor boy charged with blowing up a corner of the World of Darkness to do? Telos, as conceived by Bill Bridges, was pretty loose; I probably could have run “Barack bani Obama: Telos We Can Believe In!” or the Glorious Proletarian Mass Magical Thing (some of both was in Judgment, but I didn’t have room for one and had to cut the other). But subtext slithered beneath M: TAsc‘s bombastic, thesis-first front. One subtext had to do with an increasing realization that parts of the Consensus concept were unworkable, sinister and even immoral. Ethan Skemp often spoke of how the concept undermined the idea of humanity being part of nature. Under Phil Brucato, the game said spirits wore masks, but kind of had their own thing going on no matter what anyone thought. I also wrestled with a number of disturbing thought experiments (Does a sexist Consensus make women stupider?).

Plus, I increasingly became aware that M: TAsc had a very deep mythology and one that was surprisingly well integrated for something built by people who often had wildly divergent ideas about the game and how people should get along in general. I wanted to be true to that. I wanted to answer the prophecy in The Fragile Path and build upon obscure references in Sorcerer’s Crusade (which is where the Ixoi come from — I didn’t make ‘em up). And I wanted to give Voormas his due because I knew from direct experience that he was one of the greatest antagonists for real, ongoing chronicles. I wanted to make things work with Kathy Ryan’s stuff as much as possible, after a productive, epic phone call that helped me leave room for individual personalities, since these drove her work on the line.

And of course, I wanted to exercise a writer’s privilege to make a few observations in reaction to a game that I loved. One wrestles with a good game, and I spent five years wrestling with my M: TAsc chronicle.  This gave me room for boots on the ground insights that aren’t so neat and tidy (like the Nephandi being self-deceptive, since they really come off as clowns under smart PC examination) but felt substantial at the table. I decided the best solution was to take this stuff, question the Big Idea of the Consensus, mix it up with all that canon, and bomb my players with it. I adjusted the results in the writing and Bill Bridges told me how to best fit it into the book.

So that feeling of struggling, at once accepting and questioning the basis of the game — and aiming for something that felt naturalistic despite all of the Big Scary Crap translated itself into the result, designed to be playable in the context of a game wrestling with the consequences of its development, and the PCs wrestling with the results in a structure that let them tour as much of it as possible — all while leaving something with a comprehensible basic structure, and without something as lame as “We like unicorns now. Signed, Humanity.” Writer fiat that throws an archmage in your face at least sets the stage for an unpredictable result (Protip: Voormas can probably kick your ass, and will countermagic attempts to do that 10 success Corr trick in the book unless you’re very sly). Writer fiat through 6 billion people working the Fifth Business is just lame.

The Wizard Crapped in Your Cornflakes

Ah, the Nemean. I love that guy. Mage: The Awakening went through lots of iterations. That includes the Boston section (and book). We knew that the game was going to feature lots of internecine struggle — “all against the Man” was there, but not  as big a deal as its predecessor. The preconditions for the Nemean already existed, but the Consilium structure was fairly open-ended. It could be a whole bunch of things, from a tyranny to Grownup Hogwarts. This made the whole idea of making Boston a “model” Awakening city problematic. The closest thing you could do was make it a staid academic gathering that must band together against something or other from time to time when it’s not arguing over brandy. Boring!

I didn’t want a “model.” I wanted something people would use in real games. So I designed a real sonofabitch who could be ported into these roles:

The Quest Guy: As the boss, the Nemean can send PCs to do cool stuff. Yeah, this isn’t innovative, but sometimes “innovative” takes a back seat to something people will actually use. Plus, Mage was redesigned so that a quest provides concrete rewards (Arcane Experience) even when you don’t get to keep all the goodies.

The Hammer: Novice GMs sometimes need a guy to lay down the law and declare standards, and even experienced GMs can use a guy like that. Again, this isn’t original, but it works. I knew the dangers of this (killer NPC!) which is why I declared that in the Nemean’s Boston, you can grab ass and stab each other as much as you want if you leave the city and general order of things intact. He won’t bug you except to enforce basic minimums that also happen to be what GMs need to avoid SWAT Shooting Gallery Nights.

The Predecessor: Finally — and this is the big one — the Nemean was designed to be replaced. One of the shallower critiques of this guy is that the Bad Ruler is Vampire‘s shtick (really? There can be no bad bosses outside of Vampire?) but Mage has a mortal hierarchy with no time constraints on gaining power. It’s inevitable that a PC cabal will eventually earn the power to overthrow him, and his desire to stay on top means it automatically generates a plot, particularly since he sits on one of the setting’s secrets.

This is the basic difference between writing for play and writing to satisfy somebody’s sense of structure. If I was just looking at it as filler that adhered to a format I’m sure I could have gone the fannish route and picked Guy Who Fits In, but I didn’t want him to end up on the same ash heap as so many canon characters. (Do you know who the Awakening signature characters are? I do, because I’ve got ‘em written down, but they’re not doing much. They’re not bad, but for some reason nobody ever ran with them as they did with Solomon Birch.) I wanted people to use him.

Did it work? I’ve seen him in dozens of games and writeups. There’s an early 1900s hack of him on Obsidian Portal. I’ve seen folks commiserate about dealing with him in their respective games. I love that. Not only is he getting used, but he’s generating common experiences. As for me, I actually started with him deposed in my Toronto-based game, and got lots of mileage out of a treacherous alliance with the PCs.

One thing I freely admit about the guy is that he’s not the height of eccentricity and innovation. I’ve designed all kinds of bizarre NPCs, but I didn’t want the Nemean to be one of them. I wanted him to be accessible to people just getting into the game, but giving him a strong (if mostly passive) core motivation, an easy way to portray him and ways he could move the game along, but with room to make him more complicated, if necessary. Vampire‘s Solomon Birch has a lot of these same accessible qualities. He’s got a strong personality, an unusual look, an immediate hook via his faction, and is set up to get things done.

Fighting With Yourself

In both cases I was tempted to just go with the flow, accept the Big Idea at face value and slot things in. Instead, I erred on the side of making something to play, then fought to reconcile it with all the Meta stuff. In one case I got something very complicated; in another, I ended up with something pretty simple, even stereotypical. I’m happy that people have made use of both, even if they did their own wrestling along the way. I encourage people to discover cool, playable stuff that throws the Big Ideas of their own games into question. Yeah, you’ll end up making excuses (I am, right here!) but the important thing is that they’re cool excuses.

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 . . .)

Gamers describe games in terms of problems, not opportunities. After all, there’s more to talk about when something bugs you. This isn’t the issue by itself though. It’s normal to let off a bit of steam. The proposed solutions end up being the real time wasters. Gamers love to describe things they have no intention of playing. How many people do you think really play RPGNet’s gazillion game/setting hacks?

The other issue? Games. Lots of games. RPG fans own many more games than they’ll ever play. They read them, imagine games they’ll play . . . then get back to D&D. Maybe they play these games at conventions or over Skype, (with months and months of lead time per session) then spend their downtime asserting that extended play sucks.

(I’ve been critical of the “Old School” movement before, but I do think it’s great that they’re playing regularly without a set of online or event-based crutches. )

As a result we have a community spinning its wheels, writing epic preps and hacks for games, yet doing next to no gaming. This is why actual play is so atrophied that it needs to be isolated as a category to survive (before the rise of “Actual Play” gamers actually played — it was not an exceptional activity). And in that category, online APs feature lies, creative editing and bloated preparation. Play’s on life support, but reasons to not play have a cancer’s durability. Games don’t realistically deal with what hidden elves or shotguns would really be like.  Games are “incoherent” or “illusionist.” Gamers are sons of bitches who aren’t worth hanging out with. Besides, you don’t have time.

What you have to understand, however is that these are coping mechanisms: ego defenses in the face of a larger social malaise: the decline of friendship.

Think about it. The issues I brought up here boil down to a mix of self-centeredness and contempt for others: signs of a culture whose basic platonic relationships are ailing. This problem infects the whole social discourse of RPGs and even shapes their commercial development. American friendships have been degenerating since 1985. When you think about the difference between gaming then (long term social contact, negotiation over loose rules) and now (brief or online contact, rigid rules that make cover even informal speech and story interpretation) you can see how they’ve adapted to serve people who don’t know each other well, don’t trust each other as much and have lost the will or skill to get close to other human beings.

They say 25% of Americans have no close friends at all. Think of the scene’s tendency to accept people with socialization problems, our aging, more family-focused base and that means gamers might rate at what — 30%? 50%? More? This isn’t just our problem, but we might have it worse than most. The community has certainly flocked to excuses not to make friends or pretend that the superficial online relationships they have are just as good. This is why gamers love the Five Geek Social Fallacies essay — it exaggerates normal problems with friendships into full-blown pathologies, justifying why they don’t bother with close personal connections at all.

Am I applying my own values against a transforming society? Yes, and that’s a fair basis for criticism. I have to admit I’m not comfortable with the expected, widely cast net of shallow contacts that others thrive on. At conventions I prefer to spend an extended period of time getting to know a few people. I don’t take pictures to document my handshakes. If a meeting is important, my memory is enough. But I’ll go out on a limb and say I honestly try to make up for it with intensity and sincerity. So if you meet me, have a seat and take some time to talk. Making contact is okay. Making friends is better.

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.

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.

We write rules that limit his (or her, but I’m going to say “his” from now on because the stereotype is patriarchal). We limit the idea of roleplaying to one model, and develop rules for each process within it to get him off the table completely. We want to chain or kill this incompetent, wrathful god.

Every solution creates new problems. GM-constrained or GM-less games make the game the ultimate authority, and it’s even less suited to particular group because no text can replace empathy and a shared history. Anti-GM games tend to have a narrow scope and rigid structure – without those, they can’t really take over the dead god’s reins. This doesn’t mean they’re bad fixes for the GM problem, but they highlight the fact that a good GM is an asset, not just a necessary evil.

Tabletop RPGs have failed to teach people how to be good GMs. I’ve personally failed because I’ve written numerous GMing sections and they’ve rarely had any impact. As time went on I learned to impart better advice, strike a balance between the practical and idealistic, but in professional work you always have to stick to the context of one game or supplement.

This blog is different. I don’t have to talk about any game in particular, so I’ve got the freedom to really get the essence of great GMing. Let’s talk about it in a series of posts, starting now. I’ll avoid repeating a lot of common advice and take a different direction than Robin Laws, the king of procedural GMing advice. Good GMing is one of the things that set tabletop RPGs apart from other forms of roleplaying. It may even help the hobby to survive as electronic games get better and better at replicating (or improve on) the rest of the tabletop experience.

This is called “GM as God” because it’ll talk about the traditional GM: the guy with unlimited power, the potential game breaker. Let’s get started.

“Dicework” (who apologizes for his/her English — it’s a second language for him/her), writes:

What can I do?......how to prep them? 

...any other advices?

Your friends basically already know how to roleplay. It’s the idea of doing it in a tabletop game that’s the thing to watch for. Your game should formalize the ways in which they enjoy roleplaying, pretending to be other people and getting narrative results from a situation. Once they’ve done this, then you can get together and see if you want more conventional system-compliance, which is fun, too. I think most long running groups naturally cycle between loose, custom rules and playing a game in a more”official” fashion. Restrictions can inspire people, but not consistently.

Finally, if you’re running a standard RPG, do not be afraid to use your power as the GM. Everybody says that the GM is too powerful and needs controls, but people who say that have suffered under GMs with weak, snippy personalities who needed to disguise their motives and actions with lame rules excuses. Being GM lets you do lots of stuff, like:

• Ask if an event was what the player really wanted.
• Skip past a boring scene.
• State what you’d like out of the scene at any time and invite discussion.
• Ask players about their characters secret, inner lives, motivations and what they will do in the future.
• Tell players to help each other decide on actions.
• You have the ultimate moderation tools at your disposal. Use them and throw any rule that tells you not to in the trash.