Tanya DePass talks a bit on Todd Talks, covering a lot of social contract in playing/running RPGs. (I Need Diverse Games Patreon)
https://player.twitch.tv/?autoplay=false&video=v401102039
Watch Todd Talks with Tanya DePass March 25 2019 from DnDBeyond on www.twitch.tv
I’ve been playing in two consistent games a week for over a year now. One is rotating GMs, the other is me, GMing and it’s generally prep heavy. Between that, work, life… things were getting hard. However, playing/running in a game that is effort light while also running a game that is prep heavy is a pretty great way to start seeing places for contrast and what options you have.
System
The first and biggest impact is the system you play by. (As always, this also includes houserules or modifications you are actually playing by.) There’s some games that only run on improv and give you good tools to play, and there’s some games that require significant planning ahead, and design work by the GM.
For example, if you’re playing a game that involves tactical combat, maps, and encounter balance – you’re doing the equivalent of videogame level design. Except you don’t get to play test it, and you will only use it once. And you’re not getting paid like a videogame dev would be, so… yeah, it’s a bit of work.
Alternatively, if you’re running a story-focal game but the GM is the primary producer of “story”, and the one who must always push the pacing and action, then yes, that’s effectively the same thing, even if there’s less math or maps involved.
The easiest games to run make it easy to improvise in play, whether that is because the prep stuff is all done for you, like a prepared dungeon for a dungeon crawl, OR, if the rules make the players the primary pushers of new events and conflicts. This distributes the workload, but also allows players more input and ability to shape the direction of play.
Reduce Time Cost to Play
There’s a ton of things in life I’d like to go do more of, but there’s a time cost around the actual activity that makes it a very hard choice.
For example, I may want to go see a music show, I just don’t want to have to be out and about and still away by 12:30 am when the band I want to see finally gets on, then drag myself back home, and get up for work the next day. The actual performance might be 45 minutes, but whew, it’s the stuff around it that make it hard.
For your games, consider both the direct logistics of play – travel time for face to face games, actual time spent playing, hangout time etc. but also consider the time cost of what people might be giving up instead.
If you pick a time that overlaps with other social possibilities, people are choosing to give up another thing to play with you. Perhaps they have to schedule even more time out of the day to make it work – travel time, when to eat, making sure they get enough sleep, and so on. That’s before we talk about anything like child care for parents, or extra accessibility needs for disability.
Part of why this is important to burnout is that if there’s a lot of extra requirements around the game itself, that also contributes to the burnout for both GMs and players. If there’s people cancelling, understand some of that time cost might be taken up still – driving out to someone’s house to discover the game isn’t happening still means driving back home.
I like to make sure that everyone tries to give as much advance warning as possible for disruptions (understanding, of course, that life happens). But there’s a far difference between “Oh, no, got food poisoning this afternoon” vs. no message at all, or, worse, “I went to a concert that I bought tickets for 3 weeks prior”. Basic social contract of respect for everyone’s time – TTRPGs suffer from the fact that, much like playing in a music band, they are easily disrupted when one member is gone.
One thing that helps is to have a central means of communication. This could be a group chat on a social media site, or a group email or whatever. If everyone knows there’s one place to look, and one place to post if something comes up, that’s easier to work with.
Schedule Break Time
Plan break time for weeks to not play. Holidays are the obvious thing, but also regularly ask the group what things look like in the next month or two. Special events like vacation trips, weddings, or life events like moving house or having visits from friends and family might force you to take breaks.
This planning ahead also allows everyone to avoid that extra time cost we just covered.
I’m starting a new practice as well, for my weekly game that has the highest prep, I’ve decided to take one week out of the month as a skip week. It gives me a little more time for prep, but also just recovery time in general from things like work stress and so on.
This pre-emptive time scheduling allows other people to get that time too, and then you have less cancellations from illness or people being completely burned out. For me, I was hitting a point where work stress + trying to meet deadlines to keep up prep for play was combining and my health was not doing great for it, and, my ability to stay focused while running was also suffering. When it stops being fun and starts being work, you need a break.
Life Comes First
Many years ago, one of the things I wrote as a pushback against broken gamer culture was my “Fun Now Manifesto” and part of it was that this is a game, not a marriage. Games are fun, and so is hanging out with friends, but you should never have to feel guilty or bad that you might have to take care of other things first.
It’s easier to realize up front you don’t have time for games right now, but you might in the future, than it is to try to force it to work and make yourself unhappy both in the time spent gaming and the stuff you need to do outside of it as well.
No Magic Solution?
There’s no magic solution to burnout. There’s no infinite well of energy and time you can draw upon, despite the fact there’s a million and one “productivity” articles everywhere you look promising to let you make the impossible happen.
The real solutions I pointed out above are all variations of “Do less”. However, much like pacing yourself for a marathon – planned doing less is more functional and valuable than unplanned doing less (burning out and collapsing).
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When you watch a movie, or read a book, one of the highlights in a story is finding points where an event or situation is highly meaningful to the protagonist(s). But, part of the thing is, until you know the characters, what is meaningful, or the weight of the events, might not be clear to you. As you get deeper into the story, you know the characters better and understand how significant some things are and what it means in that context.
“Who is this character and why does the player care about them?”
For Narrativist play in RPGs, this is a core point of play. The juicy part is where the fictional bits are meaningful to the character, and all of that is meaningful to us – the people playing/creating/witnessing the game. To be able to consistently deliver on that requires an understanding of the character(s) which I’m calling Character Intimacy. (There may be other people who have coined this idea, maybe with better terms? I don’t know, I’ve been out the theory circles for a long time.)
Being able to answer “Who is this character and why does this player care about them?” is how you can set up the right kinds of pressure and conflicts that allow us to see those points in play where the character (and player) is dealing with something that is laden with meaning. But getting there isn’t instantaneous.
Getting fluent in the character
The first issue is that you don’t know the character until you play the character. You might have an idea, you might have some backstory, but the real personality of the character is something that will only really come out when you have to see the character in play – a lot of ideas about who this character is can only be improvised in the moment.
Depending on the game and the player, becoming fluent in the character depends a fair amount on what kind of pressure(s) and situations the character is placed in, and the players’ own investment and desire to express the character through play.
In many long-form traditional games that are not set up for explicitly Narrativist play, I see a lot of times it takes 5-6 sessions for characters to get any kind of expression up to where players can start figuring out what matters. (Given that most of these games are set up for Illusionist/railroading play, the ultimate fact is that what matters to the characters or the players is irrelevant and never really tested in play.)
But in games that are better at it, I usually find it’s a 2-3 session turn around (maybe it could happen over the course of a single session if I still ran/played 4-6 hour sessions instead of 2-3 hour ones.). The first session is everyone asking “Who is my character?” and the second session being “Who is my character in relation to your character?”, sometimes well enough we get a good feel for them.
Designed Solutions
There are some ideas that allow you to do this more reliably and/or faster. The common one I’ve written about in the past is Flag mechanics. However, I’ve also explained as well that usually the Flags you see at the beginning of a game are guide posts and your job is to better nail down more accurately what is the real emotional punch for the players.
A second solution is games that tie a high pressure Narrativist bit to a core play mechanic. Ben Lehman’s Drifter’s Escape, for example, forces the player to choose between bad choices most of the game, so the pressure tester of “who is this character?” comes out relatively quickly. These mechanics, however, still depend on the group to quickly pick up character intimacy and better apply the pressure mechanics as you play, otherwise it rings hollow like most “morality choices” in videogames.
A third mechanic is anything that lets players set up the scenes and conflicts. While it is not interesting to a person to constantly be the only one setting up conflicts for their own character (see the Czege Principle: “When one person is the author of both the character’s adversity and its resolution, play isn’t fun.”) – it can be helpful sometimes for players to be able to set up their own character’s adversity in order to highlight to the rest of the group what kind of things are important to them as a player and what conflicts/pressure is fun for that character to be enmeshed in. And, of course, if players can set these up for each other, it allows players who are invested in each others’ characters to also set up things as well.
Obviously, this is not a full list, but a few common examples.
“Are we there yet?”
You’ve hit character intimacy in a game when a situation pops up and you can immediately identify what it would look like as “This THING is the worst possible thing to happen for THIS particular character”. (“Frank finds out John has been lying? OH BOY.” “They’ve just given Mary the perfect chance for revenge?!?”) It’s that sort of thing you can see coming in a TV or movie drama and you just know it’s going to be intense.
Character intimacy is when you can identify the overt motivations of the character, but also see the nuances that complicate it – their doubt, fear, conflicting motivations, and so on. And, of course, beyond just understanding what makes the character tick, being able to reliably put them in situations that turn up the pressure for their particular needs/desires/fears.
For me, I find this is easier to attain in the conversations and down time between game sessions. Taking time to reflect on what choices the characters made, asking questions of the players that are out of character but highlight motivations, and so on. If the game depends less on a singular GM, it’s helpful for those ideas to be available to everyone – no reason you should be stuck to only learning about a character during play, if you can extend some of the play time to provide ideas outside of it as well.
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I’ve been spending a bit of time watching videos on games criticism, most of which haven’t been particularly stand out, but I do notice that a major difference in quality of analysis depends on how well a person can figure out what issues they’re pointing at and to what level these are solved or solvable problems. So, some categories for thinking about game issues, both useful for analysis or design.
Baseline Function
The first question is whether the game is possible to play at all. For videogames, this is obvious, since the game crashing, freezing, control problems, deleting saves, etc. is out and out unplayable. For tabletop games, the question is about whether the rules are communicated well enough that people can play.
In Tabletop RPGs, this particularly is a hard one to mess up, since so many people are used to just fixing issues on the spot or simply inserting play expectations from other games. My stance that you shouldn’t HAVE to do design work for a game you paid for has been one of the most contested ideas, but it’s one I stick to.
This category is pretty rare to find as a major concern, though a lot of gamerdom likes to take any issue and say “This game is completely unplayable”, which, of course, means you have to try to pick out exactly what they’re talking about.
Actual Design
Assuming the game functions (which is, the lowest of bars to meet), then you can actually get into what kind of game you have created, where the fun parts are, what choices or skills you have to develop to play it well, and where it challenges you and what feelings the game can induce.
For a good understanding here, you have to be able to identify – what kind of fun the game is aiming at, how it does that and whether that’s working for it or not, and to separate whether it’s your preferred kind of fun or not. Again, unfortunately, we see a lot of people say “not MY type of fun = broken”.
Content Length
Content length is probably one of the best things to get a grasp on in all forms of media, games included. What makes a great (movie, book, tv series, videogame, rpg campaign, etc. etc)? It knows when to stop. Every kind of thing has a limit to about how much good you’re going to get out of it, and beyond that, you just dilute what is good with time wasting badness.
For example, there’s been plenty of comedy movies made where you take some joke or schtick that is probably great for a 5 minute skit, where it would be hilarious, but it’s painful to watch as a full movie. Or a TV series hits the point when it’s not good anymore, because they’ve mined out the good stories (or, at least, the stories their team is capable of envisioning.). Videogames and tabletop RPGs both suffer the problem of often working backwards – “X part is fun, therefore if we add another 50 hours onto it, it will be 50 hours of more fun, right?”, which isn’t true. Other types of games are usually much better at realizing different types of fun can only put out so much, and to cut it around that.
Game analysis about content length is usually… not great. That pitfall of “Well just give me 50 more hours of what you gave me in the first 10” is something a lot of gamers get into, as well. The reality is that anything that is really fun, leaves you wanting more because it stops before it stops being fun.
Artistic
There’s definitely something to be said for games as visual, auditory, or crafted materials done right. We love a great sound track, a good sense of visual style, illustration or character design, animation, a great set of cards, a crafted token, etc.
Review on these grounds typically tends to be more informed, if only because all these artistic aspects we already have existing critical language and tools of analysis for.
Media Violence
First – I don’t mean “oh no, this game depicts violence” but rather, when the game is a propaganda piece of emotional violence – racist, sexist, homophobic, etc.
It’s not hard to see the problem if the whole game has an overt premise along these lines, but what often becomes the point of contention with the usual gamer population is when a game is about a normal game thing (“Save the Kingdom” “Fight the aliens”) and throws in these things on the side, mostly because the creators have internalized the bigotry so deeply they don’t even SEE what they did as wrong.
Nothing kills fun as fast as getting randomly hit with “You people should know your place” equivalent when you were, you know, playing a game about racing or something.
Communicated Expectations
Understanding what you’re getting into with a game is more important than many other types of media – because the commitment level is higher. You may have to learn new rules or mechanics, develop skill to play the game. It may be hard to tell how long you will be playing the game overall, though the more time you’re expected to put in, the more you need to communicate what kind of game it is.
This is also why short games can be more experimental. If you have some weird one-trick pony game that gives a unique experience, but isn’t that “fun to play”, and it’s only 5 minutes long, that’s not so bad. If you have a game that is 80 hours of play, I want to know what to expect ahead of time before devoting time to it, much less 80 hours.
You also need to understand the longer the game is, play itself creates the expectations – switching it halfway through, or at the end, might actually anger players. (Much of the backlash to the Mass Effect games was that a core game loop – make a story decision, get a cutscene or NPC acknowledgement about those choices, was removed for the end of the trilogy.).
Some of the communicated expectations happen in the lead up to the game being released, as well as the advertising and imagery around the game. You can find a lot of criticisms about games where these things mismatch – whatever genre you tell people to expect out of a game, that’s what they’ll be looking for. And some of it might be having to deal with existing preconceptions – if your game seems “close” to something that exists, you’ll need to highlight what it does different so people don’t get caught up expecting it to do what it’s not about.
When you create a game, you’re creating an experience. Like any kind of art, it need not always be fun or enjoyable in the immediate sense of the word, but it should be something people are generally glad they experienced.
It’s also true that sometimes, unexpected experiences* are part of what you are crafting.
That said, the more time, energy, effort, cost, someone has to commit for the experience? The more you should be giving them in the way of information about expected experience so they can decide if they want to put the commitment in, or not.
This is critically true of games, if only because games usually require more investment for someone to play them (learning rules, possibly mastering some level of skill) and, unlike most other media – there’s no standard for how long a game is (especially when we talk about games played over multiple sessions).
This is why, media that keys off an unexpected experience, usually works best if it is short. If I play a fun little puzzle videogame, that turns out in the end to be really dark and heavy, but it was only maybe 30 minutes long – if I didn’t like the experience, I also didn’t invest too much time and effort into it. If I play a game that demands 90 hours of my time, then turns around and changes the expectations drastically, I might be actively pissed, since I put a lot of energy into getting whatever I was getting from the majority of the game.
(Longtime readers might remember my analogy of people wanting to play Hearts and getting Poker suddenly thrust into their face – this same logic applies to a game design as well, especially where the game dictates specific experiences.)
A well designed game makes the experience of playing it part of the reward – it’s fun to play. And, of course, if you pull that out from people to something they don’t enjoy, you have effectively “punished” them for the effort of playing your game.
*Obviously, I mean the overall experience – such as a genre or type of story or gameplay, not, say, “Wow everyone should know the entire plot of a story before experiencing it”. If I watch a comedy, I don’t expect heavy tragedy.
We’ve been playing a Universalis game, and we’re about 7 sessions in so far, and the game clearly has legs for a lot more, if we wanted. One thing that occurred to me is that we’ve always managed to do a good job finding the juicy conflicts we all enjoy, without the need for a Flag mechanic in the system. Which got me thinking a bit more about what is happening differently here?
Flag mechanics in action
Flag mechanics are used a lot in Narrativist focused games where protagonists are controlled by a single player, and circumstances of fictional conflict around that protagonist is created by someone else (usually the GM, though other players often can contribute as well, through other characters’ actions and dialogue, if not authorial level mechanics).
What the Flag does, is allow the player controlling a protagonist to say “Here is where I think the fun conflict is for my character” to everyone who can bring that conflict into play. You can take the same character – “Master Swordmaster” and have very different games and stories depending on whether their Flag is:
Both could be really fun and interesting – but again, very different.
Alternatives to Flags
Other games have different means of getting around this. Ben Lehman’s Polaris, for example, uses the antagonist player’s declarations and the bargaining mechanics to allow people to hone in on what conflicts are actually meaningful rather quickly (if a player isn’t fighting back against the conflict, it doesn’t matter to them.).
Universalis, takes a very different approach – everyone can be the generator of character motivations, declarations of success/failure, and circumstances that create conflict.
You don’t need a Flag because there’s no separation of who is the one controlling character motivations and who is the one creating conflict throughout the game – you only make the division potentially within a specific scene, and, often enough, we might take up the side of characters we don’t actually WANT to win the conflict, but in order to just see the most interesting thing happen.
For example, if I want to see two brothers end up in conflict, I could, simply spend points to set up motivations that are at cross odds. Because this is happening in front of all the players, and everyone has the potential to challenge or block me, it’s not like I need a singular Flag to point it out – people go “Oh! I see where you’re going!” and either stand aside or drop more points in to further cement/twist that situation, or oppose it.
Underlying Play Structure
Ultimately, in all these Narrativist games, we’re basically looking at the classic story formula:
(A Character) -> (Has a Motivation) -> (Takes Action towards that) -> (Thing in the way of the Goal) -> (Outcome, potentially with costs) -> (feeds back into Character to change or stay true to their current self).
So the question is, where and how do your mechanics help the group walk through each of those steps?
Flags fit well for games with traditional player/GM roles because they tell everyone the Motivation (sometimes which Actions might make sense or not) and also allow the GM to come up with fitting Obstacles and Outcomes in that chain of events.
In the case of Universalis, however, every single step in that chain can be passed around the table, so players are not stuck trying to “throw messages over the wall” to the GM, but can, take direct action and give traits/facts to characters producing Outcomes as well as changes to the character leading all the way back around.
