If you'd asked me a decade ago which contemporary tabletop RPG was most likely to do the AD&D-versus-BD&D "two versions of the same game being published simultaneously, one of which is ostensibly a stripped down version of the other, but in practice they're really two separate forks of the same core system that fundamentally disagree with each other about what kind of game that system should be" thing, I definitely wouldn't have guessed "Exalted", but in retrospect it seems almost inevitable.
I think that dungeon crawling is to TTRPGs what shooters are to video games. It's a structure that has been around since almost the beginning of the medium, that persists because it fundamentally works, and it fits well with the affordances and limitations of the medium. And like shooters, its ubiquity leads to a certain amount of backlash, some of it warranted, and a lot of it less so.
Looking at it from that perspective, people who denigrate dungeons as not being real roleplaying or storytelling feel a lot like the gaming nerds of the mid 2000s, sneering at bros who play Gears of War and Halo, and insisting that they play real games.
Except that those nerds were, at least somewhat, responding to the state of the video games industry as it actually existed. And, notably, they were actually playing the non-shooter games that existed.
By contrast, the dungeons-aren't-roleplay 5e players feel like if those gamer nerds were on their "all shooters are brainless pablum" bullshit now, in a world where some of the most praised narrative games of all time are shooters, and where shooter mechanics have been used to make wildly inventive puzzle games, horror games, speedrunning games, roleplaying games, etc.
And instead of playing any of those amazing shooter games, or even any of the fantastic non-shooter games, they were insisting that real gamers who care about narrative make Halo machinima.
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 think the whole “make ruling and move on” type of advice is generally outdated. If you’re dealing with solely physical copies of books, yeah it makes sense, especially if those books are badly laid out (WoD). But with the internet, it takes somewhere from just searching it, if the game is big enough and has websites dedicated to its rules, to a quicker hunt through a pdf, which can either be done by heading or ctrl + f.
The only time I make rulings are when the system doesn’t cover it or it is genuinely taking a while to find, the latter of which rarely happens because I know my main system (3.5) inside, outside, and front to back.
I’m sure it’s still useful in “actual” plays, but unless you’re streaming it live (!?) you can just cut it.
I think it still makes a lot of sense for ambiguous worded rules interactions, stuff where rather than being unable to find the rule you're unable to figure out how to resolve multiple rules relationship correctly. Arguably this is somewhat a flaw of the game if this ever happens but I think it's unavoidable in dense trad-games, even those that use clear keywording and such over natural language. On the opposite side of the spectrum, if you're playing something that intentionally relies on GM rulings such as many more rules light OSR games, it also makes sense as advice on how to make rulings - make a quick one now with the caveat that you can change your mind later. This still would come after ctrl+F ing the rulebook.
Above everything, I think the best benefit to smooth play is a player that knows the game about as well as the GM and is as effective at searching the rules as them. I started running shadowdark this year and having a player able to do that has been such a blessing.
I have posted before about how sometimes well-meaning attempts at running D&D without some of the more unfortunate dynamics can often backfire but in a way where most people don't even register it backfiring. Because when you take the step of "oh D&D's various 'evil humanoids' don't just exist in a vacuum and given the renfaire colonialism on display it's kind of impossible not to read them as somewhat racialized" many people will then go "okay but we still need some people who player characters should be allowed to kill guilt-free, so let's replace 'orcs' with 'bandits' because killing bad criminal people is perfectly ideologically neutral." At that point it's like "okay so your characters are no longer the racist kill squad, now they're just the Tough on Crime Vigilantes."
But I feel I should make clear that D&D the game itself is not exactly at fault here: like, okay, it is sort of at fault in the sense that it is a game of fantasy killing people with swords and magic. And it is easier for people to accept the killing with people with swords and magic part when they can imagine that their characters are at least to a degree justified. That is sort of just built into the game (and the game has built into its lore varying levels of making the fantasy of killing certain types of guy justifiable).
But D&D is not at fault for making people go "okay so it's bad when you kill orcs simply because they're orcs. It's better when you kill people who are bandits, who are a class of evil criminals where killing them is actually wholesome and sensible." Like, yeah, most people probably don't think about it that deeply, but the reason people don't think about it that deeply is ultimately ideological.
And the ideology is basically "it is bad to be racist but it's good to be a tough on crime vigilante."
My general solution to this is to acknowledge the problematic aspects of the game, let that discomfort pass through you, and just enjoy the game for what it is.
I think there's merit to making things less problematic in half-measures. I mean like the number one thing is accepting that "adventurers" aren't exactly morally perfect heroes, they're like, a swashbuckler archetype. Really I think this is actually kinda textual to all editions of D&D given the character options given - it's more a community thing to have unambiguously heroic parties. I mean regardless of if a given edition mechanically backs this well, it's always made pretty clear that gold /should/ be a major motivator.
In a similar vein you can just have, like, evil faction with revelry (even associated with a specific species) that the players take as "enemies as default". There's some serious amorality to all the merciless killing, but you can just stop and accept that, and it doesn't nesicarily need to come with worldbuilding assumptions that some people are "biologically evil" or whatever - in fact, with regards to that, I think the want for dungeoncrawlers to be unambiguously moral often helps solidify worse tropes like innate evil and stuff. Cus I do think there's merit in moving away from racialised aesthetic tropes for the "generically evil bad guys" it's just trying to make stuff squeaky clean is often counterproductive.
Due to its surprising popularity on the many places it's been posted and reposted to, I decided to finally complete this little wlw sketch that I had kind of given up on. I'm hoping to have it riso printed soon !
