An Overly Long (and Probably Overzealous) Thank-You Note to the Players in Our Game

This article is going to be very stream-of-consciousness and disorganized… I have tried to write it four times now, always starting over at the beginning each time. No matter the new angles I take, it seems as if the things I want to say are too big for words to wrap around. I have settled for my best attempt to attach words together to encompass this idea, like a bunch of paperclips linked into a chain around a very big tree. Maybe, by looking at these paperclips, you can get some idea of what the tree was like.

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Almost exactly a year ago, I asked a group of players to help me play-test and design my own tabletop fantasy RPG.

Another group of players might have said, “No,” or asked, “Why don’t we just play one of the many good games that already exist?”

The group of players I asked said, “Yeah, sure.” And I am thankful to them for that.

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I don’t remember how I initially got the idea to write my own rules system.

I was playing Pathfinder and D&D 5e concurrently, back then. And I remember wanting to make house-rules to each one. And perhaps that’s where the idea came from, when I was house-ruling so much that I thought it would just be easier to start from the ground up.

I was wrong, of course. Starting from the ground up was not easier. But I thought it would be, at the time.

Regardless of where it came from, the idea happened. And once it took root and sprouted, I could not stop it. It became a compulsion. It didn’t matter if anyone liked the game. It didn’t matter if anyone ever played the game, even myself. I could finish it and put it on the shelf and never use it. What mattered is that it was made. I had to make it, because it had to be made.

Perhaps you can identify with this? I doubt it’s just peculiar to me. But sometimes there’s an idea in your head and you have to make it real because you can’t keep it inside your head. You have to take it out of yourself and put it into the world, like pulling off a leech – only if the leech was attached to your brain or your heart or your soul. When this idea to make a game happened, it became a brain-heart-soul leech that I had to pull off.

And my players allowed me to do that.

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I am not a perfect referee. Many times, I don’t even think of myself as a good referee. My mind is hopelessly single-track. I struggle doing something even as simple as writing and speaking at the same time. That poses a major problem as referee, where you have to keep many plates spinning on top of plates on top of plates.

I also have problems being people. It’s what other referees might call being “in-character” or “role-playing,” which is an issue for a role-playing game.

People have never made sense to me. I don’t even make sense to myself. And trying to anticipate what people do in the real life is hard enough, because people don’t make sense. It’s even harder when you have to imagine unreal people in your head facing unprecedented scenarios in a fantasy world.

Our present campaign raised both of those challenges to the fore. I myself had trouble with how often we revised the rules (even though I'm the one who wrote them), and the open "sandbox" nature of the game challenged me to engage with our game in ways I never did while running adventure paths or modules.

But the players put up with those shortcomings and showed up on Monday nights for a year, anyway. The players gave me their patience, trust, and time for the past year as I repeatedly changed rules to make inscrutable improvements.

And they did so while remaining highly invested in our game world, as we explored it.

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When the Angry GM wrote his article on the eight kinds of fun in games, I always assumed I was a challenge-seeker, or a discovery seeker. As a result of this experiment, I have learned that I am a fanatical expression-seeker.

And I think that is why I feel so drawn to the role of referee, although I’m not always very good at it. As a player, you express yourself in the game world through your character and their actions.

As the referee, then entire world – its characters, locations, events – everything about it – become tools of expression. It’s like painting with a palette of infinite colors, because you can make up colors.

And perhaps the reason I feel so drawn to refereeing games is because I have so much trouble otherwise expressing myself. I’ve never been good at the normal things normal people use to express themselves. But if you give me the chance to write an interactive fantasy adventure… that is a language I can speak.

When my players gave me permission to write my own rules system, they gave me a whole new spectrum of colors to use. Like infrared or ultraviolet light, I could change the things invisible in the game world: the rules.

The rules tell you the most basic laws about how the game-world works. The rules set up the fundamental structure and order of the game. The rules tell you what the game is about.

As a referee, rules are the edges of the sandbox. Every rules system is a different sandbox, of a different size and shape. Sometimes you can spill sand over the edge of the sandbox, making it slightly bigger. Or take sand from one sandbox and put it into another. But if you do that too much, then you’re not even playing in the sandbox anymore. You’re just making a mess.

And my players gave me license to step outside of the sandbox. “Get a real shovel and start digging in the dirt,” they said. And I am thankful to them for that.

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I’ve settled on a rules system I am happy with. The rules are one of the many kinds of games I want to play. The rules I made certainly won’t be for everyone, and they’re not really for anyone. Others might want to play it, but will want to change it in certain ways. 

And that’s fine. I expect that. Every table – heck, every campaign – needs different rules.

But this past year has been one of discovery. I read so much. I learned about the diversity of existing game systems, I learned about the history of certain rules and why they are the way they are.

I also learned that my favorite part about being the referee is giving the players a difficult decision and watching the players work through it. They sometimes did so in-character, other times as themselves, but they always engaged with it and always managed to surprise me with their solutions.

Some of my favorite examples from this campaign include:

·         What do you do when a gingerbread man full of razor blades tries to crawl down your friend’s throat?

·         What do you do when an attacorn asks you to leave one of your party members behind at his cabin as a sacrifice?

·         What do you do when you accidentally destroy the skull of a disassembled wizard you want to reassemble?

·         How do you wake up a dragon sleeping under a lake?

·         What do you do when a group of mysterious cultists is creating a superweapon you need, but they try to charm the dragon you woke up?

·         What do you do when the villain sends you an invitation to his feast?

·         What do you do when you learn the villain has burned down your hometown, after sending you an invitation to his feast?

And perhaps that’s what I’m most thankful for: the sheer joy and entertainment I’ve gotten from this process of both playing an open sandbox campaign and designing a rules system alongside it. I'm most thankful for the happiness that comes from playing a great game with a group of great players.

So, if you're one of those players: thanks.