The Culture: How To Git Gud, Part 2: Reviewing The Footage

(Following from yesterday's post.)

Once you've read the manuals and worked with the machine to get a sense of how it works, it's time to do it for real.

I'm not talking about running a campaign. I'm talking about playing at someone else's table, and in particular I want you to do more than just show up and mindlessly play the game. I want you to go in, to do your best, and then--regardless of how well (or not) you did--review your performance after the fact to see what you can do better.

Successful athletes know this. They can summarize it as "reviewing the footage", something taken from professional Football (both kinds) where footage from last week's game is made available to the teams to show players and coaches what they did and allow them to analyze, critique, and identify places for improvement.

Advanced Dungeons & Dragons 1st Edition puts this into the rules (DMG pg. 86) by having the Referee grade player performance along a set of objective metrics- a practice that every hobby game ought to have. Even without such a hard-coded procedure, players benefit from deliberate anaylsis of their performance with an eye to improve it.

This is expecially important when you fail.

Iterative Improvement Works

For the player, the best thing about the hobby is that--being the source of Rogue and its offshoots--each time your man dies you have the opportunity to learn from that failure when you reroll and go again.

Best example on film of the ethos in action.

You don't have to have your man die to make those incremental gains, but most people get the concept when explained that way. The point is to review how you played after the fact, identify errors that you made, figure out what the error is and remedy it by changing up your emphasis when you practice.

What This Looks Like

Reminders.

Get hung up on Order of Actions in combat? Look that up, write it down and put a citation somewhere for easy reference. Take some time while away from the table to practice that by running some combats solo (see yesterday's post), and ensure that you run through the procedure properly- including all the corner cases such as Charging/Receiving Charges, when Weapon Speed applies (and how), and Surprise.

(You'll want to do some practice with Surprise anyway; that's a condition that comes up a lot, and turns out to be very powerful to have- and terrible to suffer.)

Or maybe you're playing something like RIFTS, and you need to know how to handle interactions between giant stompy boys and Bob the Very Okay wiggling his fingers at it. (That way lies madness, for the record.)

In any event, this is--like reading the manuals--something you can do on your own. Once you get good at identifying what to focus upon, your time spent fixing gaps in your acumen and improving your skill at the game will drop (less time spent getting to the point; more time spent doing the work).

But that's not the only benefit you gain from this practice: you learn to stop lying to yourself. You cannot improve yourself if you cannot be honest with yourself, and that is Yet Another Transferable Skill that carries over to your everyday life- especially what you do to pay the bills.

Conclusion

It's this simple.

First: Review what went down. If you made errors, identify what went wrong; fix it if it's your fault, either by mastering a rule you flubbed or by practicing similar scenarios to see how to avoid them (when you can) as well as to beat them (when you can't).

Second: Put together reminders, notes, reference sheets, whatever needed to get the knowledge and skill to stick. Regular practice helps, especially when it concerns corner cases of critical importance.

This doesn't take a lot of time; just regular, persistent, and deliberate effort aimed at mastery.