Trying to Be Brave
I got into the hobby late compared to most folks, no dad that grew up in the advent of the hobby or brother to let me play at his table jealously. Tabletop games occupied a purely non-existent role in my mind. They were just things the uber nerds on sitcoms got serious about it. For even though I was a nerd child in a lot of ways most of my socializing and game playing was done through sports. Other than one combat in 5e done on a whim in high school, I never touched a d20.
Covid times a video got pushed to me: a pair of disembodied hands reviewing some black, white, and yellow thunderclap. (I have come to dislike that pair of talking hands, but am grateful they at least plopped me in OSR sphere) Mork Borg captured my attention. I bought the book and read it front to back, started poring over blogs and printing off my favorites, listened to actual plays to see how the game was run, and even picked up some (very dog) books about running games as a game master. Eventually after taking 100s of pages of notes I ran the adventure in the back of the book and it went very well. Some of my players were RPG veterans and they said it was one of the best sessions they have ever had. I was so delighted. I would say that 98 percent of what I read to get ready for that game was pointless. I wasted so much time trying to figure out the perfect way to do something even though I had never even attempted it. I had imagined greater struggles than I encountered. Most of the problems I had with running that session weren't covered by blogs or in those raggedy books. I continued to run. I became more and more "tuned in" to the community at large. I read the newest posts, I argued about them, I worked them into my game in the most clumsy ways. That game eventually died though from a number of issues. Too many ideas, a poor understanding of how to handle the logistics of a campaign, relying too much on fancy VTT bells and whistles: the greatest of those problems was that I just lacked the requisite amount of failure to understand how to do things better. I don't think anyone is ever going to run a campaign healthy enough to go on for years without issue off their first go. All that prep, and all that reading came back to me as a fear of trying to engage with something Wrong.
Since these games are a social endeavor I never wanted to waste time. My friends were showing up each week to play so I should make each session as close to Perfect as I can. So I struggled more and more to add more hooks, more emotion, more dynamic levers to pull for their characters. We played a few different systems and things were fun but would fall apart after a while. I needed more time under tension. I got convinced that the issue was with Mork Borg and Dungeon Crawl Classics. I started trying some of the PBTA, BITD, and other games suggested to me that "fixed" the issues I was having. Those games crumbled even faster. Burn out started to hit pretty hard at this point. I was bitter at my players for not showing up to sessions, bitter at the games I spent money on and hated, bitter at myself mostly for not understanding RPGs better.
Then I read the Thinking Adventure Principles by Luke and felt a deep and all encompassing shame that I had been engaging with the hobby wrong. I read more posts on his blog and felt defeated. I was never going to run games right, I would never get it, I was destined to be someone who engaged with something without thinking. That's what really ate at my insides after reading those posts, that I lacked some insight on how to overcome being stuck outside "playing absentmindedly" Coinciding with burnout from my home table I stopped running games for about a year or so.
After some time I wanted to understand the intent more so I joined the TA Discord and lurked. What I came to find, other than the endless tangents about bodily fluids, was a group that supported one another earnestly and were selfless in their efforts to teach and further each other's art. The whiplash was immense. I read the principles again and Against Incentive. I thought about them. I studied them. I discussed them. But I never understood them until I sat down and tried to run a game where they principles were around me. The act of play revealed to me how important they are. No amount of reading and stewing on them could help me understand what it meant to "Spit in their eye if they try it." But running Delta Green with these principles I made things tough! I made things mean. Players faced cruel odds and dire moments. But it all encouraged an engagement in the fiction from them that wasn't there before. They latched onto the world and treated it as "real." The principle that I find myself going back to the most is the one about bravery- Try and be brave. This principle is used at every part of the process now.
When I first read the Principles and the rest of Luke's Theory posts I was not that dissimilar from the people who get mad about them now, I existed in the popular or catered to part of the hobby and was experiencing great discomfort by ideas that represent sliver of total players in the hobby. It's an extremely selfish way to treat outsider voices. Now that I am one of the refuseniks I finally get why it's so exasperating to see people who get countlessly catered to by the trends of the hobby go nuclear over a small collective of people trying to think outside of what's established. If it wasn't for actually chewing on these ideas and applying them to what I do I would almost certainly not be playing RPGs anymore. Thinking Adventures lessened the weight of creation on my shoulders tremendously. But only with the struggles of that Mork Borg campaign and being let down by the popular advice would Luke's words have come to mean so much to me. Now when I look across the hobby I see plenty of people doing things scared. How many reviewers treat what they run as a factory line, giving the most rudimentary judgement to a book before looking for the next thing to farm engagement from? An awful goddamn lot because actually taking the time to write about something you ran and grappled with as an object of play takes effort. How many dungeons tirelessly repeat the BOLD and BULLET POINT style of keying because it's whats popular? So much of the apparatus that treats our hobby as a figure to be flensed for cash comes from this proud cowardice a lot of them employ. Good Design and Best Practices have quickly become words to flaunt there isn't much inside that's going to be terribly different than anyone else. People are often fooled about this though when they see striking art or gauche mechanics. Those are the sugar for the poison.
I can't make things look pretty, I struggle with books that have good design, I have been at tears with books people love because my eyes can't process them. The one book I am able to run with no issues is Wolves Upon the Coast for the simple fact that Luke was brave enough to put in markdown files. My legally blind twitchy orbs could have the perfect edition for them! This act is not a popular one in the hobby. It's certainly not something where Luke made a path for others who continue this tradition. Which is a crying shame because a lot of folks go on about accessibility in games, but really most folks like myself have systems in place to handle what our disabilities need. It's RPG PDFs that are the problem and this fear to be seen "naked."
In what I am working on and running I try to keep it in mind. I have played games scared and it doesn't feel right. In what I am trying to create I present my ideas to my best reader and hope that's enough for someone to run it and have a blast. And if they don't understand what I meant fully then the struggle is part of what makes the hobby make more sense to them. Because there is no hobby where there is a way to achieve any sort of confidence in doing the work without struggle. Advice and input can help you process what the issues are, but only embracing the struggle brings the effort to become better.