Unturned Hovel

12 Random Reasons to Never Listen to a Stranger

Caveat Emptor EXTREME: This is a post about ignoring the advice that is given to referees and designers about what to do. I want to tell you clever folks that yes this blog post is telling you not to listen to blog posts, but I also offer the things I listened to that went poorly for me to hopefully show you that it's important to follow your heart, not the trends.

When I read WW's An Illiterate Hobby, I started getting that itch of seeing something that happens all over the hobby. We all have our dice dogmas we hold to be true: strict time records, overloaded dice, realtime torches, the list gets longer and longer with each new system, blogpost, and video that gets shot out into the hobby. All of that can be a lot of pressure on someone's mind as they're trying to figure out the hobby or work out a new scene. Hell I used to work myself into knots for not having a proper "Thinking Adventures" system to use for my games when I was digging into that style of play. That mental tugging is fairly common when you're new to a hobby and haven't figured out your own voice just yet. Unfortunately a lot of people sacrifice the need to figure it out for themselves and give into the group thought without understanding how it relates to them. I would argue that this is one of the driving factors for why so many people in the hobby seem to be frustrated with what they're playing or endless fussing with things. There is some fundamental disconnect between their confidence in what they play and how that relates directly to what they input into the game. For most of these ideologies they are just staking a claim in what the best way to run a game is. Some of these I have run into myself that I found to be false in play are showing players the map makes them more engaged, players will engage more with a game they can directly contribute to, and that "complex" systems get in the way of playing the game. There are more I have encountered but most of them bounce off and I don't recall them. These though, are the ones I tried to follow because I thought they'd make things better. I bought into the promise and when I didn't get to the expected outcome I felt disappointed.

The only thing that gave me an understanding of what was wrong was time under pressure! I just started running and playing things as much as I could and the improvements started coming easy. Not that it should need to be said, but all those schools of thought are just principles from play (hopefully, some of these people put out things that haven't been played and that's no good!) that somebody else came to as a by product of their gaming. There's a chance it will fit into how you play but those lessons coming from your first hand experience will set an even stronger understanding. Part of this comes from the endless questions that rotate through a space from people who openly admit they haven't gone through the act of play to figure it out. Or in some cases run things so close to the advice they have been given that they leave no room for their taste to speak in their play.

Especially due to how proud, precious folks are about how this is a tradition akin to something folkloric. I would hope that if we really believe this, and it's not just some cozy platitude we utter to feel good about engaging in something that can be perceived as an utter waste of time, that the hobby would do better not to show all the one true wayisms or 7 tips to be a more immersive GM to prospective referees, and instead help referees take ownership of their games. Cause I promise all you new referees and wannabe designers, the people doing the most interesting stuff out there are folks who have forged an understanding of their style through relentless play.

How do I plan to help in this? Well I've had a bad couple of months here so I am gonna start by being more patient and less flippant to what I see as silly questions and the like. But beyond that I want to focus on more processes for creating rather than the best way to create. My vision disability gives me a pretty unique set of wants for how create maps and the like. I want to start outlining my process and why it works for me so that others with similar issues might have an easier time solving what they need to do to run a game.

People want to overthink the hobby. They wanna tie all this philosophy and analysis to it. While all of that ornamentation is pretty to put up and admire it's not contributing towards sitting down at the table and figuring this thing out by playing it.|

This is supposed to be a post for Prismatic Wasteland's Randomness Blog Event so I guess I will make a d12 list of dice advice that I found to be bunk and what worked better.

  1. Delta Green should be totally serious and have no pulp! DG is a game I really do love a lot and reading through a ton of the adventure creation advice you see people repeat this fairly often. Usually they go on about how the game is a serious take on governmental power and that a good scenario should have some kind of theme commenting on that or be serious in nature. I followed this advice and made some truly boring, tedious adventures. This one is partially true because having a good grounding in history, politics, culture makes a DG investigation POP. But a little bit of Pulp is what makes the terror all that stark and draining! An example is an MJ12 kill team that my players got the jump on once in a casino. They pulled out a gun that shot "air" and caused people to pulp. This weapon is pulp through and through, but this drop of pulp in an otherwise serious investigation made them freak out as they HAD to contain that threat. People will cry about balance or whatever and that is such a boring way to approach the hobby. Say it breaks on a failed roll then!
  2. Let your players contribute items, NPCs, monsters, and rewards to your game. I tried this in my first campaign I ran which was Mork Borg! It worked great for player engagement and retention until about 20-30 sessions in. After a while the excitement of seeing something that "you" contributed was much less exciting than what would have been random before. Nowadays if I do this I just ask a player a question about their character's background and if there's no issue I take it as truth and shit like that. Mechanizing that shit is lame and makes a game feel too familiar.
  3. If you're playing online you should make the game feel more immersive and exciting since it's not in person. Fuck VTTs. Foundry, Roll20, Fantasy Grounds, Demiplane, Talespire, Story Engine, all of them can burn. A lot of folks who run online talk about the benefits of detailed maps, automated character sheets, and all the endless baubles. My players have been the most keyed in and focus with physical dice, webcams on, and TLDraw or some other shared whiteboard. If you need a gimmick to get a game over with your crew or get them to pay attention I feel great sorrow for you.
  4. Simple systems get more done in the same time as a complex one. WOAH SWERVE THIS A MICRO BLOG IN THE MAIN POST WELCOME TO THE POST TITLED: D&D isn't Faster, you're Just SLOW. People bang the drum of how fast OD&D is and others about how Cairn/Oddlikes are faster still. I hear by 2028 we will have a D&D so fast we need but only roll once for combat to be decided. And that speed is used as a knock against learning something crunchier or different. Well yeah those things are faster because they have the full inertia of 50+ years of the hobby behind them on how to make them resolve faster. If Traveller, Tunnels & Trolls (okay, not this one), or Runequest had the same body of official/unofficial work done to refine the game then we would be talking about how much faster they are! When a game is slow it's often not because of the game itself but because you lack structure, procedures, and doing the work to make the game make sense for you! Just use bears also works in other games just saying!
  5. Pick games that reinforce the themes you want the campaign to have. This is a good way to pick games that you find miserable, inscrutable, and obnoxious just because they're said to emulate a genre or touch on some theme very well. This is how I ended up running GUMSHOE. I love investigations, I love noir. They are maybe my favorite style of play. Running GUMSHOE made me hate investigations. THe skill system is at the same time simple and convoluted, the combat is a messy smear of "Uh I guess we trade harm", and the Core Clue rule that people harp on is such an OBVIOUS thing to do when running a game it feels silly an entire system has put its hat on it. Why do I hate it so much? Cuz GUMSHOE isn't an investigation game, it's a investigation genre emulator much like Brindlewood Bay. It wants to give folks the on rails experience of drumming up clues and hitting the streets without the crucial element of any good investigation, getting it wrong or getting it right for the wrong reasons. Cuz often you can solve the mystery but can't solve the crime! I stopped playing genre emulators after the experience I had with GUMSHOE.
  6. It's extremely important to have maps for everything. This is one I have struggled with recently with my ongoing Classic Traveller game. Due to the Out of the Box nature of the game I don't often know where or what players will do week to week. While this might freak some GMs out I have handled it quite well and we've had a number of barn burning sessions. But I felt the nag at the front of my mind that I needed to have maps for my starports, planets, ships, et al. It really started to weigh on me to the point I thought about pausing the game to make the maps then resuming. I brought this concern up to my player's and their response, if I may interpet it a bit, was "what the fuck are you talking about don't stop running CT or we'll cut you motherfucker." A lot of the prep pressure we feel from taking in outside sources can conjure up problems at the table that aren't real. Trust your gut, trust what's fun.
  7. Show your players the dungeon map. I tried it a few times and it just turned the game into a board game. People weren't interested in acting with the space as a shared fictional understanding and instead just poked at it like the intractable objects in a video game. Shared mapping with corrections, and helping with complex shapes. It's not GM vs Players or fucking them over for a bad map. It's about building the shared understanding of the fiction together.
  8. Troika! is a silly game that is hyper lethal game that's only good for one shots. Simply not true. Troika! is in large part what you choose to do with it. If you wanna go full gonzo go ahead, but it can handle standard D&D dungeoneering just fine. And in a 20 session megadungeon game we only lost two PCs and one was because a Rhino Man thought he could take on two invisible stalkers. RIP TIM. Don't let others dictate to you what a system can do or is for. Those mofos wouldn't run Wolves in Delta Green.
  9. Write for your best reader Sike on this one. Do this.
  10. Don't start your PCs with a ship in Traveller. I see this one a lot and it's honestly kinda confusing. I get wanting them to work up to a ship, but even if they start with a ship they probably lack the money to keep it flying for any period of time. With or without a ship the party is gonna be sweating until they get a fat stack of cash.
  11. Go with whatever your players say is the solution to the mystery or next clue. This kinda stuff might make players feel clever but it's a lousy trick, cheap heat. Don't do this. Reward careful play, reward paying attention. One of the best investigation moments I ever had was a player following their gut on a clue I barely hinted at. A scientist kept a portion of a very dangerous specimen and through the vaguest hint ever a player honed in on it and figured out she kept it. It was an AMAZING moment for the table and not one that can happen if you are afraid to let them miss it.
  12. Most OSR dungeon design advice. Most of these folks are overthinking it, relying too much on (bad) video game design, or selling you something. Make a place you think would be fun to walk around in and surprise you. It doesn't need to be more overthought than that.

So hopefully you can learn from my mistakes. Not really though. Play is practice for what we end up making. So go practice, go fuck up, and learn something. Share it with me if you want.