Because I’m the sort of person to randomly launch into massive discussions with online strangers without any consideration for how mad I might look, I recently had a really interesting conversation about how we differ in designing a session of a game. They were suggesting that D&D is a complex game to prep for and even a fight with a group of Orcs takes forever. There was some serious agreement.
Now, I’m the last person to defend the Ampersand game. Still, I was like, ‘Isn’t it just, imagine the area, look at some orc stat blocks, make sure there’s some terrain placed in a way the orcs charge abilities can be outmanoeuvred but also can catch the players unaware, describe carnage until the enemies are defeated?’. I was met with some resistance, citing that a map was needed, they had to provide a balanced encounter and that because there are literal books printed about monster tactics, then the game must be complex.
I tried to explain that the game could be played without a map, that balance is something you don’t always have to worry about, that there’s a load of stuff you can divest yourself of and still have a great time, make it easy for yourself. And I got a reply that stunned me into introspection.
The GM mentioned that if he was playing D&D, his players had come expecting a certain type of experience. That experience involved maps, miniatures and combat encounters that worked a certain way. If they wanted an experience that didn’t offer those things, he’d run something else, not strip down D&D. I was gobsmacked. It revealed a truth to me I hadn’t thought of before.
I’ve often talked about how finding the right system for the story you are telling is better than converting a system you have until it only barely resembles the original game. But I hadn’t thought that a game might be more than just the ruleset. That actually in running theatre of the mind D&D with no miniatures and no more than a cursory thought to balance (I tend to just design what might live in the space and eyeball if it’ll kill the PCs based on damage output) am I also sort of delivering a completely different experience? Am I already playing a totally different game?
Game as Genre
Yes, to some extent, thinking about this is more in the academic, game design space rather than applicable to day to day RPG play but there is something in this about where we change the expectations and where we meet expectations of players. When we talk about session zero, we often talk about it as a way of explaining to players how we are pitching the game and how we understand the campaign. But do we also talk about how we understand the game we are playing.
For example, I recently started the build up to run Call Of Cthulhu with a group. I’ve run one shots of it with these groups before and they’ve often been savage and unforgiving with players trying to make decisions that are clever in order to stave off madness long enough to solve the mystery and escape alive. I realised I had educated my players into playing a game one way. So I set out in a document how in a longer game, sometimes making the dangerous and slightly insane decision is the way forward. That sanity is not always the thing to be protected, but also a resource to be given away at the right moment to gain what you need to combat the darkness.
I hadn’t thought about it before, but this was me unpicking an expectation about the system and game I had created in previous games. And it’s something we need to really think about. As new players come to out games, the concept of what the game is could radically differ.
If we look at different players for just D&D, we could have a table made up of someone who came from the 3.5 era and feels this is a game about stat builds & maxing tactical combat someone from 5th ed who is expecting a Critical Role style game about emotions and feelings with less focus on combat and a new Baldur’s Gate inspired players who wants to be able to replicate the branching narrative and have the game resolve itself with minimal math. They all have different ways of looking at a game before we even get to the actual specifics of the campaign. The best way is to smooth out those experiences and understand that we have to find a common ground. It’s important a table is singing from the same hymn sheet.
So should I be picking up a different game for my fantasy adventures? One where that the players have less expectation of miniature based play? Should I play D&D only in one way so the expectations of my player base is met? Who dictates what the ‘correct experience’ is here? Is it me? Is the players? A larger community consensus?
There’s a further problem, which has to do with D&D‘s cultural hegemony. The exterior expectation of what ‘roleplaying games’ are is set by the Dragon in the room, as it were. Most people discovering RPGs are going to have those expectations set by Wizards Of The Coast. This means that this one game dictates our version of the framing of discourse, creating a ‘Overton Window’ of what an RPG is. Then, discussing anything that falls outside that experience is a harder fight to bring to the table. It’s tremendous power WoTC have. And it’s slowly becoming a problem.
As game community experiences become more curated by the existence of digital tabletops owned by the people selling us the game, we run a very real risk of a game not being allowed to exist outside of the parameters of how someone else dictates the play experience to us.
Hasbro have decided my new D&D should care about pre-ordering (so we can play the game the week it comes out, like that matters) and getting digital frames for my online campaign backgrounds.
While I feel most of that is irrelevant to the actual experience of gathering with your friends and inventing a narrative, I can see what is happening to our expectations as a community. I can see the ‘Window’ is being pushed towards an expectation that doesn’t resemble my table at all. This is going to mean recruiting newer players might come with an expectation gap I can’t cover.
As you can see, there’s a lot to think about. One comment has made question so many things to do with how the future of our hobby might go and how we’re going to need to think about our games. Thank you for listening to my concerns and thoughts. I’m going to come back to this next time and approach a few of these topics in a way that’s applicable to our gamemastering.
Creative Commons art credit: “Isometric Chest” by Sephiroth-Art, “Dungeon Delver” by edgarsh422 and “Le temps des finances” by Apolonis.
