I’m following up on a recent Discord conversation at Adept Play on the topic of designing RPGs in terms of experiences that the designer wants the players to have. I also want to make my concerns about this clear, as I think I haven’t articulated myself very well about this topic over the years.
The starting issue is something like this: there are a lot of dysfunctional play patterns in role playing hobby culture. Ron talked extensively about this in the recent workshop dedicated to the topic. Because of such problems, the temptation for many designers is to try to write a game that’s incredibly clear in terms of how and how not to play, to the point of attempting to overengineer other people’s play experiences.
Obviously, it’s not good game design to attempt to “fix” anybody in particular or the industry in general; that’s far too reactionary for the task of positively creating a game. However, at the same time, we can’t also design in a vacuum, without any regard for the state of the culture or the hobby. It seems like there is such a thing as good design, and, at a more basic level, good communication of those designs, i.e., a player can encounter your game and have a reasonably high chance of understanding how to play it.
I learned to do role-playing in the early 2000s in Dungeons and Dragons 3.5, and the people I learned the game with and around very much had a lot of the dysfunctional 90s play patterns of the GM being the entertainer. It was seen as talented GMing to make the players feel like the challenges were actually dangerous, all the while fudging roles and manipulating the story in the background so that where the story stayed “entertaining” no matter what the players did and preventing any actual charater deaths from happening. This is the way that I ended up learning to GM and the idea of the GM as the entertainer was a habit that took me a very long time both to recognize and to break.
The only way any of that happened, of course, was meeting Ron. We spent a lot of time discussing what you might call game theory over a multi-year email correspondence, but eventually we actually just got together in person and played games. This is what really opened my eyes to what was going on: namely, that I wasn’t merely “playing incorrectly;” the whole concept of the hobby that I had inherited was deeply flawed.
Like religious conversion, perhaps, I think it is natural to have an evangelical reaction to discovering something good and beautiful, especially something that makes a big change to your life or in this case, your hobby. This is an understandable phase, I think, but it fades with time as you settle down into doing the thing that you love rather than trying to enlighten everyone else. And of course, not everyone may want to be “enlightened;” nobody likes door-to-door evangelism in really any context.
And I think that, when it comes to game design, the tendency to “GM-as-entertainer” also lends itself naturally to “Designer-as-entertainer,” which I imagine many of you have had some experience with.
But we’re not here to change the world or tell other people how to play or anything annoying like that. Such conversations never really go well anyway, especially given all of the intense subcultural identification that people often have about their particular “superior” ways of playing.
So do we just ignore all that and go on playing our games?
My concern is that, when it comes to design, you still want to do your best to provide game text that successfully communicates to prospective players how to play your game.
In my experience, roleplaying games tend to have two major hurdles with regard to this:
- These games are almost always presented as giant (often hardcover) books of hundreds of pages. At a very basic level, this makes them logistically difficult to learn and then teach, as (generally) one person has to sit down and read through the whole thing and then try to teach others how to play the game (as far as the reader even understands it).
- Side note: this is why I was so excited about the booklet versions of Ron’s games because their brevity and clarity makes them extremely accessible. This may sound like a merely logistical issue but I think it’s non-trivial when talking about the mental energy required to sit down and start playing a game (and of course, many of these larger game texts almost feel like they were not primarily written to get the players to play the game; they often feel like a series of extended prompts for fantasizing about playing the game; but that’s another issue).
- The industry has a long history of highly dysfunctional play patterns that have made it difficult for even the most well-meaning of people, if they are influenced by these at all, to actually learn to play a game as the designer intended.
While we obviously don’t want to design for the sake of “fixing the industry”, we also aren’t writing games into a vacuum of play culture. We’re living in a world where something called “Dungeons and Dragons” has become a mythical, pop-culture legend, and even normal, non-gamers who’ve (for example) watched Stranger Things are going to have preconceptions about what this thing is and how we do it. It seems like a designer has to be, at some level, conscious of his audience and potential misunderstandings that may occur. Again, not to “fix” other people or “convince” (say) the OSR people about anything at all, just to give well-meaning people the clarity they need to do the activity at some reasonable level of accessibility.
To be clear, I’m not even primarily talking about “other people,”out there,” who are “playing wrong,” even people who are playing games I’ve designed wrong. In a lot of ways I’m merely speaking out of my own experience.
I myself was the recipient of many bad play-patterns from the late 90s that I couldn’t really understand Sorcerer, or Trollbabe, or the Pool just from reading the text and trying to play it with friends. In my case, GM-as-entertainer was so ingrained that I really wasn’t aware of the problems I caused at the table, even after playing with Ron and people at Adept Play who knew better. What was helpful (to me personally) was Ron identifying the “GM-as-entertainer” play pattern in very clear terms as a dysfunctional type of play.
Many things are like this: we can’t see them until someone gives them a name.
And even then, it didn’t click for me fully until I was GMing a Pool game as an exercise in one of the recent classes and I was in a situation where I needed to decide whether something a charater did “just happened” or whether a roll would be involved.
What did I do? I actually just stopped the game and asked Ron how I would even decide this. Perhaps concealing some frustrated amusement, Ron simply said something to the effect of, “don’t think about the other players [in terms of entertaining them]. What do you feel like should happen here, given how play has gone so far? How does the fiction strike you, right here, right now?” And that’s when I realized I was stressing out over calling for rolls because I wanted to somehow “move the plot foreward” in a way that was “fun” for the players involved.
What would have helped me immensely is if there had been a short paragraph or two in the actual text of the Pool explaining this, as well as, generally, what the job of the GM wsa (and what was NOT the job of the GM).
Now, obviously, you can’t individually address every possible player’s problems through the rules of a game. That’s not the point of a game text. But it does seem like we are well-behoved to design in such a way that’s conscious at some level of the types of misunderstandings that could occur.
A good example is Tales of the Round Table. We designed the game as a kind of introductory Story Now experience, and I made the decision to adopt a rotating authority model, in other words, there would be nothing you could call a “GM” at all. The idea was that, without an identifiable GM role, it became impossible to play the game in any number of dysfunctional ways—as GM vs. players; GM as entertainer; GM as “sandbox” enabler (across many different meanings of that term), etc.
That said, I’ve still seen people play Tales “wrong”. Some people will always see their moment of being allowed to talk as performative, where it isn’t “GM as entertainer” but “take turns being the entertainer”, which is not what Story Now is about. But I don’t lose sleep over this misunderstanding, because you can’t fix the world and, on the whole, people who read the game text understand what it’s about and play it well. But we still spent a truly colossal amount of time re-writing and re-wording the game text, and testing that text hundreds of times across a wide variety of players, to make it as clear and easy to learn how to play as humanly possible.
Now I want to kick it back to Adept Play: is this distinction making sense to you guys? What am I missing here, if anything? What have your experiences been? What would you add to (or detract from) these observations?
8 responses to “Designing for Misunderstandings?”
When you say “this distinction”, what are you referring to?
(to Manu) I’m hopping in to ask for more, in your inquiry.
Zac wrote a lot of text and it’s clearly heartfelt. I’d like you to acknowledge something in it that you agree with or at least can confirm that you’ve received it. It’s not fair to expect anyone to take it as given that you’ve done that and it need not be said. Without it, basically you’re just throwing a rock at a single word, and I’m sure that’s not what you intend.
I am also certain that as a Pacific NW denizen you fully understand the difference between the bullshit vs. real versions of active listening. I’m asking for a bit of the latter.
I mean the distinction between design that’s primarily trying to “fix” the industry or a perceived group of hypothetical “bad” players vs. design that’s simply trying to teach the game clearly but in a way that conscious of the fact that there are known problematic play patterns in the hobby culture which may interfere with that learning process.
Hi Zac! Ok got it. I wanted to be clear about the distinction because that is the main question you were asking Adeptplay about, and I didn’t want to go off in irrelevant tangents for you.
Yes that distinction absolutely makes sense. Let’s call that first type “socially corrective design” until someone comes up with something better. I think some of it comes from experiences people have had playing that are bad, and they want to avoid, so they try to build from an assumption that, say, a toxic player is trying to break the game and are trying to safeguard against that. Now I imagine trying to write the rules of chess with the assumption that someone is going to try to cheat: wouldn’t there be weird, possibly bloated and confusing, rules in there? How much more so in RPGs.
Another source of problems is, as you mentioned, people having learned dysfunctional play patterns and then designing to include those, so the rules are just bad from the start.
The problem you identified, of people not being able to understand a game text properly because of their learned assumptions, is a real one. I appreciate the approach you took with your game, and I’m not sure there’s any other solution than what you did, namely to test the wording extensively.
When I first came across games like Sorcerer and Trollbabe, I didn’t get them, or rather I misinterpreted what I read: I had assumed from years of play, and reading and listening to what others did, that railroading was the way to GM. This was such an ingrained assumption I wasn’t even aware of it as such; it’s just what you did and what gaming was. It took years for me to unlearn this.
I often think about what someone could have said or done to help me come to this realization earlier, but I’m not sure I have any good answers yet. Do you have any good examples of helping people “get it” quickly?
See my reply to Ron (below) about which people texts actualy work for and which they don’t. I think you’ll appreciate.
The only thing that’s been “super effective” for me has been designing games where the mechanics that cause the most systemic confusion in the industry are simply removed. I think Tales of the Round Table was very successful in removing the GM role altogether. I assume there are many other ways to present the game MECHANICALLY that make it more difficult to cling to bad play-patterns if the players simply can’t recognize where they fit those play-patterns in.
An interesting example came from my recent pop-theology book, actually. The word “God” has so much baggage surrounding it, and people have all sorts of misconceptions about it, that I actually just called out this problem in the first chapter of the book and said, “we’re going to use another term for this entity that I want to talk about. Here’s the word I’m going to use and this is what I mean by it” and that small shift, in this case, not seeing the word “God”, was hugely effective with my readers, who said that they had never thought about God in XYZ way before.
Obviously this isn’t a gaming example but I hope the connecting is somewhat helpful. I was conscious of a bad trend in theology thinking (play-pattern) and addressed it by “subverting” it at some level (I don’t love this word, as it’s been misued a lot in the last ten years but I hope you see what I mean).
I’m breaking out the part I want to get medieval upon.
I don’t think it would have. The learning process, for anyone, is full of moments when we’re sure that it would have been so clear if only stated that way … overlooking the developmental step just prior to the moment of understanding. There are two problems in talking about this, to the extent that over-processing about it (in the course of learning) is a real danger.
Problem 1 is emotional: few people will admit that they were in fact incapable of understanding something a priori, at first exposure, or in extreme cases, that they didn’t already know it somehow. It’s apparently very easy to forget all about the process or experience which led them (us) to be able to “hear” it this time.
[Teachers do themselves no favor by insisting “yes, I did say it,” or “yes, it was in there,” especially when that’s true. That gets trapped into the person’s emotional response, and it validates exactly what should be invalidated, the notion that any person, “if they’re smart,” should grasp something and apply it masterfully upon first utterance. No one should be held to this standard; it’s antithetical to learning anything.]
Problem 2 is textual: I want to be sure it’s clear that whether the text (or whatever) had it “in there” is a non-issue. I even think that the drive for completism and precision is often badly employed, at the expense of accuracy and development.
I’ve been saying it here for a while, especially in consulting, that an instructive text is not the same as a reference text, i.e., “if only you’d said everything possible as completely as possible, I would have learned it fine.” No – you (or I, or anyone) would not. You would have drowned in a sea of opaque things or, as is common, thought you were seeing only those things you already knew, many possibly false. This is why so many introductory science texts are crap toward the goal of more students learning more about the topic.
As a final point, I think there’s no question regarding outright bad texts: dishonest, non-instructive, or papering over vapor. Discard, full stop.
The question is what makes a good one. An instructive book has to be used in conjunction with doing things and often facing assessment. It requires the user’s acknowledgment that they do not actually know how to do it yet. When integrated back-and-forth with activity and assessment, it exposes as many developmental events as possible – and acknowledges that different people will “come up against it” at different ones, which cannot be predicted or managed by the text itself.
How explicitly should the text talk to the reader in light of potential misunderstandings? I cite Dogs in the Vineyard and Apocalypse World, which as texts talk directly to the reader as a person and are quite honest about “don’t do it like X,” or “hey, I know you are used to X, but try it this way.” I expressly do not fault anything they say … but in (now) twenty years of examining their impact with some care, I have decided the textual method is not effective.
(Nitpick: I think The Pool specifically would have been improved by some amount of additional instruction for play, at least for me and the group I first played it with. The text seems to assume a lot about what the reader already “gets” about roleplaying and for us that was less than helpful.)
I hear what you’re saying, especially as a professor I have too often experienced the total lack of students “getting” it and no matter how much you belabor your writing of the syllabus you still have to look them in the eyes and tell it to them, and even then, well, you know how it can go.
So let me ask a clarifying question: are you talking about (a) people in the hobby who are self-identified roleplayers and have absorbed bad play-patterns already or (b) people who are “new” and don’t have bad play-patterns? Because I’ve seen (b) be absolutely great with learning games that are presented clearly. They actually read the text and try to understand it, whereas (a) is almost always glossing over the text in various points (which I suspect accounts for being baffled when they missed something that was explicitly spelled out).
I’m tentatively concluding that (a) is the group that needs assessment, feedback, etc., like you said, whereas (b) just needs a clear game text.
My example is that we dropped Tales of the Round Table on lots of people at conventions and purposefully let them open up the box and learn the game by themselves without any of the designers at the table (we were, of course, massively evesdropping while pretending to be busy at our nearby booth).
Our findings: Non-roleplayers learned the game quickly and easily because they read the instructions carefully like they were trying to learn a new board game. But we watched in horror as “experienced roleplayers” would simply skip parts of the text, skimming for things they recognized (or could massage into their pre-conceived notions). I actually observed one girl get to the conflict part of the scene and say, “okay, so now we just roleplay? Cool.” and proceed to ignore everything else about scene resolution and go way off the reservation.
Obviously, no text can help her with this problem. I stepped in and said, “stop, you didn’t read the text.” She said, “wait, what did I do wrong?” And I said , “read the text.” And she did, and THEN she got it. But, to your point, it took a human person, not a text, to solve the problem.
So do we just design texts for (b) and not worry about (a)? That sounds like what you’re saying.
This is really all over the place: The Pool, Tales from the Round Table, writing game texts, role-playing culture … I’ll tap a couple of minor points and then stay with the thing you asked me directly.
The Pool is not a game text, it’s scattered notes which became compromised over time rather than coherent. We can’t read it or talk about it like a game text. We can’t say whether its phrasings or internal logic are effective or not. “What it says” is not a substantive topic, and there’s no “it” to improve. If you play The Pool, you have to design A Pool, and that is the text, whether formal in words or paragraphs or informal as practice only.
More generally, I’ve come to think that attention to RPG texts is so far down the road from effective play that it’s barely worth discussing. An outright bad text may be swiftly dismissed. Any other text may be generously read and successfully used regardless of its shortcomings. That’s all I care about nowadays.
Now for the main topic, which is harsh because this dialogue with you has been going around and around for years now, and I have hit a judgment point where I’ll address you more personally than usual.
The dichotomy between pathological gamers vs. open-minded normies is your long-standing phrasing, and I do not think it’s good. I have shown you this blue and orange diagram so many times, but as the years have passed, you keep repeating that phrasing, and I think that you’re missing the point. I will present it once again and this time, please stop and look, because as I see it, you have not gotten it and saying, “oh yeah, I get that,” has become an impediment.
Orange = any degree of desire to enjoy the role-playing medium as a means of expression, regardless of prior experience and subcultural identification. The vertical line is of no real interest.
I suggest that the positive outcomes and experiences you’re describing with Tales of the Round Table support my point. They are due to the phenomenon of actually-existing people who’d like to play, with the potential for expression (orange), and you see that your textual applications speak to them. That’s why I’m not talking about Tales of the Round Table at all from this point forward in the reply.
Instead, this is about you. Your ongoing dialogue – consistently, relentlessly – is specifically preventative, as if you are convinced that various pathologies must be staved off. As if the activity is intrinsically fraught, and you feel compelled to “de-fraught-ify” play because otherwise the pathologies will take hold. (Example: your implication that single GM procedures must invite pathological control problems into play, which they do not. That’s your projection. Distributing GMing tasks across more people is neither a better technique nor a worse one.)
It’s stuck in the trap of separating things across the vertical line. You’re missing what I mean by orange entirely, in which the vertical line is irrelevant. Like this (modifying my diagram which shows a mistaken dichotomy between hobby and non-hobby subcultural background):
You’re focused hard on the dotted line people and the circle people as if they were all you can see. I think that the oppositional pairing is nonsensical from the start, and I hope you can see this is a structural point as displayed by the two different shapes of the “red.” I say all of this so firmly because this (broken) outlook is the only thing that makes your question about writing game texts possible:
It’s a broken concept. These aren’t options, nor do they relate to one another. I’m talking about any people who, given the barest opportunity, will play as a means of expression no matter what their prior experiences may be. They need no fixing, no insulating, no preventing, and no protection. Furthermore, I have no recommendation whatsoever about writing; that’s a personal decision and all I know is what I want to do with it.