My Life As A Gamer: Errors In RPGs (Part One)- The Group Dynamic Error

(h/t unboxedcereal)

(Editorial Note: If you are not yet subscribed to Primeval Patterns on Substack, please do so and add it to your blogroll for all matters regarding what a tabletop role-playing is and how to play them correctly. This week's series will be better for the reader for having read these two posts at that blog.)

As I said this past weekend, the tabletop role-playing game medium is a derivative (at some remove) from Kriegspiel and takes its core gameplay loop from it.

I hit upon one of the major errors in that post: the group dynamic is wrong.

Passive Players, Active Dungeon Masters

The dynamic promulgated by Duh Industry is Passive Player/Action Dungeon Master (DM). This dynamic is one of the major factors supporting the idea that RPGs are a Narrative medium because narrative media does not require active participation on the part of the audience.

The mindset proclaims that only the DM needs to be an active participant in the campaign. He alone decides what will be played at the table. He alone needs to knows what the rules are and how those rules work- and thus he alone needs to know what is going on. Players need only show up, do what they are told, and their range of action is constrained to what the DM alone allows so that no matter what happens the game's progress continues to its inexorible and inevitable conclusion.

You will find this, with variations, exhibited throughout the online RPG space- again, including from parties who otherwise show that they know better.

This mindset is not just an error, but one of the biggest errors and its consequences have proven to be disastrous for the RPG medium and hobby.

Consequences Thereof

The information disparity, and the insistence upon the game being what the DM says it is no matter what, has lead to so many instances of RPG campaigns being indistinguishable from the experience of a visual novel or a typical AAA videogame release (Eastern and Western alike) that "How do I make my game better than (videogame)." is hardly an uncommon topic online.

Passive players also have no investment in the campaign. This lack of investment means that they feel no commitment to it either, as they have no skin in the game- neither literal nor metaphorical. The consequence is that player attendance is also a perennial problem that is also discussed online, and videos are cut often about it.

Players that deal with DMs who exploit their disparate position to full extent in this errant mindset find that mastering the rules of the game means nothing; they have no consistency from session to session, and sometimes not even moment to moment, due to DM fiat. DMs that have players who fully exploit their passivity get frustrated at players that never learn how to do the most basic of procedures.

A second-order consequence has been that RPGs are published presuming that this dynamic is normal, such that--by now--it is difficult for many to comprehend that it is not.

The known issue of RPGs being incomplete rulesets with missing gameplay procedures, undermining the claimed gameplay loop, institutionalizing the dysfunctional dynamic by forcing product users to do what the publisher should have done. The other, more recent, response has been to publish RPGs whose gameplay loop itself is a railroad that negates player agency by design rather than DM fiat.

Publishers and influencers alike are disincentivized from rendering an effective remedy to all of these problems because they profit from selling products and services that exploit the dysfunction by promising a solution to a problem that they benefit from. Yet there is a remedy, and it solves all of these known issues.

The Correct Dynamic: Active Players, Passive DMs

Recall Kriegspiel. The Referee is a passive party. All that he does at the table is to report information that the player is entitled to know, receive orders from players on how their men proceed, and to adjudicate the results of interactions that arise due to those orders. Away from the table he briefs the campaign's total participants on results and checks to see who will attend the next session.

The DM does not determine what will be addressed at that session; the agenda is set by the players. The DM does not worry about players learning the rules; he encourages it, and fosters their mastery of the game. The DM does not worry about players "anti-climaticaly killing the villain"; he praises them for their savvy play, stroke of luck, or both- especially as the players are not One True Party.

Active players recognize that their men are historic figures in the making. They rely upon the consistency of a properly-mastered ruleset to guide their actions, knowing that indentical inputs always leads to identical outputs such that anomolous results are a sign that something new is in play.

Active players recognize that they have to come at the campaign with a plan, an agenda, an ambition that drives them and thus informs the objectives that they pursue and how they go about doing it. This means that they will align, and realign, as needed to do the best possible to succeed in their efforts despite imperfect knowledge (i.e. Fog Of War) and limited resources (i.e. logistics).

Players play different characters at different times for a variety of reasons, so sessions can and will have different players present.

The following issues are fixed by this remedy:

• SOLVED: Player ignorance and incompetence. Players are required to know how to use the rules to get what they want done.
• SOLVED: DM power-trips and Frustrated Novelist Syndrome negated by making him the reactive party in the dynamic, handling pure administrative tasks in the campaign.
• SOLVED: Content creation burden on the DM. It's shifted to players by having them play the major Patrons and running their Domains independent of other characters in the form of an ongoing Diplomacy style of minigame. This alone negates Muh Storytelling narrative logic by having players engage in conflict with each other.
• SOLVED: Time commitment issues. By rebalancing what work is done by whom (and how), and removing what does not belong at all, the campaign returns to being a hobby shared by all participants (and thus equally invested in its existence) instead of a second job by one participant and competing with MMORPGs, other videogames, and other entertainments of like nature by the others (and losing to them as often as not).

Why play a tabletop RPG in that dysfuntional manner when I can just play Final Fantasy XIV and get a superior version with superior convenience instead?

You don't. You play the MMO. Therefore tabletop RPGs cannot be like that and justify their existence. Returning to how RPGs actually work solves the problem. Apply the solution and you will find the gameplay experience that RPGs long promised but have not delivered upon for decades.