You and several others I follow have written extensively on how actually reading and developing a firm understanding of a game's rules is fundamental, especially in the current ttrpg landscape where the biggest games on the market rely on deceptive advertising, second-to-thirdhand fandom folklore and the voluntary labor of GMs to paper over its flawed design.
I was wondering if you have any suggestions or advice on how to approach and digest a dense rules text to better internalize it. I'm very used to just treating the game like an open-book test, referencing it to find specific rules as they become relevant, but I feel like if I want to GM (if only because that may be the only way I can play some of these games AT ALL), that isn't gonna cut it.
Thank you for your work, regardless! I appreciate RPGs as an art form much more thanks to your posts. :)
No, you’ve pretty much got it, and if anyone thinks that makes you a bad GM, they’re the wrong ones.
Whenever I play any TTRPG, even ones I wrote myself and am therefore intimately familiar with, I also treat it like an “open book test.” I read the material all the way through beforehand, then keep the book open and reference it any time I am not absolutely 100% sure of a ruling. Not only does this make sure I get the rulings right in the moment, but it helps me memorize the rulings better too (this is why open book tests are actually better for learning than convention school tests too) and so the more I play the less I need to look things up.
The only reason this would be considered a bad thing is if you’re poisoned by toxic D&D5e and “actual play” play culture and expect the GM to be what @jburneko would call a “magician,” an entertainer more than a player or referee who is taking it upon themselves to be the game more than the game itself, and “keep the story moving” even at the expense of the gameplay. The magician never lets you see the strings, never pauses the “act,” and performs for an audience more so than plays a game with friends. The magician never expects the audience to commit to any participation beyond standing there and being amazed. The term A.N.I.M. usually uses for this kind of GM is “servitor GMing.”
“Well won’t that slow the game down and make it boring if you have to stop and look something up every five minutes?”
I have several answers to this question.
1: Imagine you’re playing a video game instead of a TTRPG for a minute. Would you rather have 15-30 seconds of loading screens every once in a while for a game that works perfectly, or would you rather have no loading screens but every time you pass a point that would normally be a loading screen, nothing is loaded and the textures are blurry and the collision bugs out and items despawn and so on? The game might even crash (this is your GM burning out and not being able to continue). Rulings made on the fly just because you don’t want to look something up (I’m not talking about when the rulebook doesn’t account for an edge case or something) can really screw the game up and lead to outcomes that really shouldn’t have gone that way, and makes it harder for players and GM to develop the ability to make informed decisions in play because the rules will not be consistent.
2: The more you look things up, the faster you are at looking things up, and often the more concretely you memorize the things you have looked up a bunch of times. So yeah maybe the first few sessions will have some stumbles and long pauses, but it won’t be like that forever.
3: Here’s the real secret. That thing I said about how I always keep the book open during a session and reference it constantly? I don’t GM that often. That’s me as a player. I know that the toxic play culture of the magician/servitor GM has deeply ingrained that only the GM needs to know the rules, but that’s not true. Players should know the rules, players should know the rulebook, and players should look up the rules. This spreads the burden of knowing the rules out around the entire table rather than relying on just the GM (who is already usually doing the most work out of the whole group).
If your players are adverse to learning the rules, try to convince them with the following arguments:
1: It’s just courteous. Like, the GM is already doing the most work, and the GM is presumably your friend, if reading a few chapters of a book would make it significantly easier for your friend to do something they’re doing for you, why wouldn’t you do that for them?
2: Even if they’re so selfish as to not want to read like 10-100 pages of text to make it easier for a friend to do something for them, in the vast majority of TTRPGs, players knowing the rules gives them much greater agency in the game. When a monster attacks, knowing the rules can save their PC’s life! If the PC is likely to get shot at, and the player knows how to identify “Cover” and being in Cover makes their PC less likely to die, they can position their PC in Cover before the bullets even start flying.
Of course both of these arguments rely on the players understanding that rules matter and make a difference to the play experience in the first place, and that the GM will actually enforce the rules rather than always bending them last minute to stop PCs from dying, both of which are counter to the zeitgeist of much of the hobby right now, but if you’ve got them to the point where they’re even going to consider another game at all, you probably already have a foothold there.
Oh and finally, for anyone who doesn't already know, there is a "tick" for more quickly navigating PDFs (that is not just CTRL+F).
💬 1 🔁 164 ❤️ 84 · How to Navigate the Eureka: Investigative Urban Fantasy Rulebook (or any large PDF) More Efficiently · It came to my att
I don’t think we ought to normalize or justify bullying as a means to keep people from being annoying — a sentiment that in and of itself could make for a whole article’s worth of conversation — but I do think we should make a habit of politely but directly telling people “hey I didn’t like that”, “that wasn’t funny”, “you are mistaken”, and the like if it’s called for, and more importantly, you should be able to take a “that wasn’t funny” for instance without taking it personally, because protecting a polite harmony where no one can criticize each other, not even politely, is also really, really bad.
The thing about indie video games is that they aren’t really exceptionally weird, their reputation notwithstanding. It’s just that for the bulk of the medium’s history, it was really only possible to produce and publish a successful video game with corporate backing, and that put some pretty hard limits on what you could get away with. Now that the technology and the infrastructure are in place for some random nobody working out of their basement to put together a full-featured game that goes on to be globally distributed and sell a million copies, video games are finally free to be just as weird as any other medium.
so you're telling me the fifa world cup is all men? its all men's teams? and so is the superbowl? and all the sports teams that states are known for and make copious amounts of merch for are also men's teams? and only 5 women have ever entered formula one since its inception in 1950 and only two of them were able to compete? and this is normal? its acceptable?
i grew up playing backyard soccer on the pc as a child in the early 2000s where boys and girls would play on the same team and against each other and you're telling me that's still an unrealistic fantasy that can't happen in real life?
so women are supposed to grin and bear the books, the comics, the movies, the plays, the tv shows, the stories, the sci-fi, the translated ancient poems, the fucking millennia of men writing about their self inserts torturing women and it being declared as High Art by other men, we’re supposed to read it in our free time, study it in classrooms, include their styles in our own writing, accept their cultural influence as natural, watch it in the cinema, write about it, talk about it, accept it, aspire it, but men can’t tolerate three seconds of female wish fulfilment of a woman snapping the wrist of a creep without feeling personally kicked in the balls.
This reminds me of something I observed in college while I was doing my honors thesis on women in modern horror films. I watched a LOT of horror during that time as part of my research, and sometimes that was done with my family around.
And my dad and brothers? Were deeply disturbed by the movie Jennifer’s Body. I was flabbergasted. It’s not scary! It’s not even that gory. But they were horrified by it. These men who grew up on 70s slashers were legitimately shook by 90 minutes of Megan Fox eating a few teenage boys, mostly off-screen.
Similarly, my all-male reading panel for my thesis? Were so disturbed by my synopsis of the film Teeth that they couldn’t even talk about it. One of them said he couldn’t look at his wife for a week after reading it.
Again, grown-ass men who study and teach media for a living. Who definitely watch and enjoy horror movies. One of whom was a huge Tarantino buff. We watched and read worse in his intro to mass media class! But one movie about a girl whose vag could bite was enough to haunt him.
Then of course you have things like the Gone Girl backlash–men yelling that Amy Dunne is evil and women clamoring to assure everyone that they know she is not someone to emulate–the backlash against Carol Danvers, and, more recently, the griping from MRAs against the upcoming film Hustlers, which is about strippers scamming their Wall Street clients.
My conclusion? Most men–at least most straight, cisgender men, who are both my sample population and most of the ones whining that Carol is a “villain”–are perfectly fine with, and desensitized to, media where men do violence to women (horror movies), or men do violence to men (horror and action movies). They’re even sort of fine when women do violence to women (“ooooo cat fight!”).
But they get intensely uncomfortable when women are depicted doing any kind of violence to men, especially in films that tilt the balance of power to the other side of the m/f gender binary beyond a single moment or scene.
So woman as flesh-eating monster with men as her preferred cuisine? Woman who responds to unwanted sexual contact by biting it off? Woman who frames her cheating husband for murder? Woman whose response to harassment–behavior that many of the loudest whiners know is both creepy and reflective of their own thoughts/actions–is to break something?
Too scary. Unacceptable. Disturbing. These men hate being presented with the idea, even in fiction, that their position of power is socially constructed, that it could easily be flipped the other way. It terrifies them.
In feeling that terror, they experience a tiny modicum of what living, existing, moving, being perceived as a woman in the world is like.
OceanGate, the deep-sea exploration company that created the Titan submersible, has removed its Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and LinkedIn a
poor things, well we should definitely make this easier on them by never repeatedly mentioning their name and deeds on the "reblog things forever" website
“The widely circulated timeline created by @Zerflin does a great job in showing how recently slavery & segregation occurred & that they lasted longer than the modern era.
“I'd like to offer this timeline as another way of viewing the same period of history to show the constancy of both Black resistance in US & efforts of the white power structure to maintain racial caste since 1619.”
I had the exact same experience the second time I looked at this picture as the first time. I was looking like "what is this green line? Like suddenly everything is OK? It's not. Racists are still trying to push us back to 1619. Nothing has been fixed. We still need to fight. Hard!
“You should have known everyone would hate you if you became a man” is victim blaming and transphobia.
“If you don’t like being treated like a traitor or a predator, you shouldn't have transitioned” is victim blaming and transphobia.
“If you can’t handle the bigotry that comes with being transgender, you must not be a real man” is victim blaming and transphobia.
"I've decided that I have it worse than you and that the pain you feel isn't real or important, so just suck it up and get over yourself" is victim blaming and transphobia.
Bigotry against trans men is just as real and just as wrong as bigotry against any other marginalized person. Being a man doesn't mean that you won't ever be hurt when people refuse to treat you with basic human decency. It doesn't mean that you'll never need help and support. It definitely doesn't mean that you deserve other people's hatred.
Trans men deserve to be respected and supported just like any other person does.
OceanGate, the deep-sea exploration company that created the Titan submersible, has removed its Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and LinkedIn a
poor things, well we should definitely make this easier on them by never repeatedly mentioning their name and deeds on the "reblog things forever" website
Never forget what Matthew Mullenweg did to Predstrogen. Never forget our sisters vanishing faster and faster, while staff jumps between denying and admitting it was them.
so youre telling me that some asshole can just throw together meaningless shit and get notes and attention yet when i put actual thought into the things i say nothing happens i am so fucking done with this bullshit god damn fuck
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