Why Are You Like This?

INTRO

It's probably time to elaborate on the question I'm trying to find some answers to with this blog instead of just vaguely yelling about it on BlueSky. This might be a little bit of a ramble, and in a right and just world this would be some kind of sexy three hour long video essay, but just bear with me here because to start off with I'm going to talk about how I'm tackling what might just be the most important question in all of TTRPG fandom:

"Hey Man, Why The Fuck Are You Like This?": The Preamble

In this case, the "man" in question is a catch-all for "a person who tries to shoehorn their favorite game, usually Dungeons & Dragons, into fitting any kind of genre or playstyle" and "like this" refers to "doing the thing I just said instead of finding a game already suited to tell the story you're trying to tell." To answer that question, I need to tell you a little story about myself so you know how and why I'm coming at this question. (If you just want to skip to my thesis, CTRL+F "Hey Man, Why The Fuck Are You Like This?": The Thesis.)

So, I started my RPG life in my late teens circa 2007 playing D&D 3.5. Dungeons and Dragons was, with probably two exceptions, the only roleplaying game I played or knew literally anything about for almost 15 years - except for a very brief stint playing what was probably the first edition of Rolemaster  with some of the grognards at my FLGS and the fourth edition of Hero System with some older college friends, D&D 3.5, and then 5e, were the only games I knew anything about. They gave me everything teenage and early-20s Adam could want - solving mysteries one fireball at a time, killing monsters one fireball at a time, ignoring the Geneva Convention one fireball at a time - you know, the classics. Sure, I knew about stuff like Vampire: The Masquerade, but that was for "those weird LARP kids," and the one time someone invited me to play Fate and tried explaining how FUDGE dice worked I laughed at him until he never talked to me again, all according to keikaku. 

I was just out of college when 5e came out. The jump from 3.5 to 5e was a drastic one, but one that felt good at the time - I had lost the inclination to comb through seven thousand illegal PDFs to min-max my build now that I was a Real Adult and had Real Adult Time Constraints, and plus the wonders of a bounded target system meant that I no longer had to make number go up good - I could just play the game! Heck, the prestige classes had gotten rolled into the base classes so I didn't even have to worry about that much balancing of theming versus CharOp at all, I could just roll and go! What a miracle! Suddenly, all of the people still clutching to 3.5 or, worse, PATHFINDER, seemed like such buffoons! Could they not see the glory of the simplified but just as flavorful builds of 5e? What do you mean there "aren't a lot of options" here - there's so many choices to make that suddenly seem meaningful rather than "this makes my number go up by +1, which allows me to take this other feature"?! No more did you have to have to agonize over how to make a particular set of numbers bigger so that your character could be "good enough to play," you could just choose themes and go! Well, except for playing a Ranger, that was just bad. And then there was also trying to recreate the things from 3.5 that didn't get ported over. And then of course there were the themes that weren't covered that would have to be compensated for. And oh hey would you look at that, there's a funny interaction between how Warlocks regain their spells and Sorcerers' Spell Points and Paladin Smites, isn't that interesting? I bet you could make a really killer build like that and OH GOD IT'S HAPPENING AGAIN.

And so I continued on this way until my friend Jake, whomst I had met back in the heyday of D&D 3.5 CharOp, asked me to help him break down one of the more popular 5e modules to run over a single Halloween for our friends. Jake, someone who had Worked In Videogames and Was Good At Numbers and Had An Addiction To Boardgames, is much smarter than me - and working with him in actually breaking down and writing a module was the first time I actually had to think about how games worked. Sure, I'd DM'd games for ages at this point, and I usually did my own homebrew worlds - but I never, like, peeked underneath the curtain to understand how games functioned at the molecular level. Things like user experience while reading the book, or having good props, or really even considering the other people playing the game with me outside of the fact that they were my friends - we all trusted each other to know the rules, I trusted them to make their own little murderblorbos and they trusted me to give them an engaging story which allowed them to commit righteous violence against the unjust. What more was there to it, I thought? As it turns out, quite a lot.

By being forced to consider the actual gameplay experience of other players rather than just going on the baseline assumption that "we're all here to play the game we know with people we like and that's good enough," I began to find that really, there were a lot of things we wanted to do with the story that really just didn't exist within the confines of Dungeons and Dragons. Like, yeah, you could roll your skill checks or whatever, but what happens when you remove the ability to do that? One encounter involved having to puzzle out how to get past a Prismatic Wall, either via deciphering the clues to each layer or literally murdering a companion to get a rod to nullify the spell, and then chatting with a vampire to peel back the layers of what was really going on? (I designed the puzzle half of that, the latter half was all Jake.) Or take, for example, my alternative to having to wade through endless random encounters by instead having little narrative vignettes and expending resources to pass through the castle? Like, technically, legally, these things existed within the framework of D&D but they were not quite what you'd expect to sit down and do at a lot of tables. This was the first time I really ever considered the idea that you know actually it's quite possible to offer a different kind of experience with that game - but of course, I would never use a different system to tell this game, right? It's still D&D baby! This is still a D&D story, so obviously if something is missing from D&D to complete the experience I can just add it on. Or like change some stuff. That's still D&D right? Obviously. God I'm so smart, wow. I'm the only person to have ever thought of this. Except, y'know, for Jake, who has been teaching me about all of this while we do the design work. But other than that, wow.

Fast forward to 2022 - I'm at GenCon, I'm fumbling an acceptance speech for the game Jake and I did, and now I'm exposed to all these other games. ALL THESE OTHER GAMES? Why are there so many games! There are studios I know from their days writing D&D 3.5 content - Green Ronin, Monte Cook, Goodman Games. There are writers around who I...also knew from their D&D content, like Keith Baker. But what's this? Oh right, Chaosium! Those Cthulhu guys! That's a game that exists, sure, I know that one! But then what's this? A...game about collecting sea shanties that requires its players to sing and resolve conflict within the bounds of the song? A game that's kind of like Infinity Train but you play it...alone, and also instead of a train there are castle robots? A game where you...are animals and you go on a journey I guess, but the story is found more in the interaction between the players rather than what the GM has to say? And why do people keep describing their games as running off apocalypse power?

"What the fuck are these people doing out here?" I thought. 

I was 31 years old, and it was about time I learned what there really was out there.

What followed could only be described as a "certainly not to be used to diagnose any flavors of neurodivergence" amount of diving into consuming other games media. I had listened to a few actual plays by this point, all of which had played a critical ro- extremely vital part of being able to rapidly understand how other games worked - sure, all my favorites were doing D&D, but I also got some Monster of the Week in there, and there was that show about sky pirates my friend kept trying to get me to listen to that used some Star Wars game with weird dice as a baseline, but beyond that I really hadn't ventured out. I know I've been making joking and oblique references here but credit where credit is due, the One Shot Podcast (then hosted by James D'Amato and now hosted by Dillin Apelyan) and the Party of One Podcast (hosted by Jeff Stormer) were absolutely instrumental in onboarding me to the wider world of TTRPGs. By being able to listen to actual games being actually played, without having to spend the time learning how to run them/begging my friends to branch out into something new/have to have the mortifying ordeal of being known and go make new friends, I could just go to a booth at a con, look at a game I thought was cool, then go find an example of people playing it and see how a session might go. AND some of these podcasts included interviews with the creators so you could understand the design process? Absolutely mint. 

I've spent the better part of two years making up for the almost two decades suckling the teat of dragons that may or may not be in dungeons. I've bought way more games than I've read, and thanks to the combined power of ADHD, being able to comprehend podcasts played at double speed, and jobs with a lot of off-the-phone downtime, I've probably listened to more hours of games being played than I have ever played myself. I've been in some actual plays, I've written some other things, and most importantly, I have talked to other people who are also interested in games. With all of this in mind, I think I have a workable thesis to answer the question:

"Hey Man, Why The Fuck Are You Like This?": The Thesis

If I had to boil this down to the absolute smallest concept, I think the root cause of why people are like this is because of the sunk cost fallacy, but like a fractal version where every time you examine what cost is being sunk there are even deeper costs which continue to sink into others. In slightly more dramatic and less legible language, I believe this fallacy to have three core pieces - A Trifarce, if you will.

Piece 1: If the game that someone likes takes a long amount of time to master, they will assume that all games take a similar amount of time to master.

Piece 2: If someone has spent a long time mastering a game, the idea that spending time to master another game will simultaneously invalidate the time they spent mastering the game they already like, and also mean that they won't be able to have fun with the new game until they've spent at least that much time.

Piece 3: People don't want to spend time mastering something they're not sure that they will like, and if their only choices for telling a new kind of story are "master something new" or "reshape what you know to fit," they're going to take the easy route.

The fourth piece of The Trifarce - the missing bit in the middle of the three other triangles - represents everything that is missing that would cause you to grow: a community of peers rather than a group that expects you to be the subject matter expert; the knowledge that things can be any way other than how they already are; ideas that are not your own that challenge your own expectations.

I have one final story about me to drive this home - the day that I stared into the hole in the middle of The Trifarce and decided that it was time to fill it in. (Hah! You thought skipping the preamble would get you out of reading a story? Fool that you are.): 

Shortly after Jake and I wrote One Night Strahd, an offhanded comment he made about a setting with vampires and riverboats took hold of my mind. In his mind it was some kind of a Berlin Wall + Vampires story, but in my mind I saw a generational survival horror game where players controlled not one character but many - and while the general plot of the game would be mapped out, the players would find ways to have their stories of grief and loss while rebuilding society. But, y'know, on riverboats, and also there are vampires, and it's still a fantasy world. A year or two ago, I got some friends together to playtest this - but I had them make D&D characters, because at that point I was still basically convinced it could be just a really advanced way to tell stories inside of D&D like we had done with ONS. It was a story about violence, yes, but more importantly it was a story of community & survival, of amassing resources and unlocking further character options down the path. What I found was that despite being told all of this, the players still treated it like a D&D game. One player refused the premise of the prompt for the session completely - he had spent hours coming up with his character and his backstory and couldn't think of a single reason why his character would engage with the plot as presented. Another player just couldn't buy into the game and kept doing silly things to pass the time because there wasn't enough combat - and then was confused when combat did happen because they were level 1 characters up against full strength vampires. Despite being given a dynamic and interactable world, the players kept looking at their character sheets for answers on how to survive, because they'd spent so much time building these characters, and then were upset when some of them died because if they couldn't beat the creatures in the encounter, why did I even bother running it?

Had I known then about the Six Cultures of Play, perhaps I could have explained the premise better. If I had known about Ars Magica or Yazeba's Bed & Breakfast at the time and could have articulated that I was trying to create a game ultimately intended for either doing Troupe Style play (like AM) or Ensemble Style play (like Zeeb), maybe I could have better articulated the difference in character creation philosophy. If I had played literally any of the OSR/NSR games like Down We Go or Into The Odd I might have been able to articulate that yeah, your characters have abilities, but you should be looking at the world for inspiration on what to do in the moment, not on your character sheet. If I'd played Monster of the Week or The Between before then, maybe I could have explained the idea of defining what you want to do first and justifying it with an ability/move afterwards. But I didn't know any of those things then, and so I was unable to express myself, and nobody had a good time - but it drove me to learn, and I have not stopped. And that missing drive is, I think why so many people remain "like this" - without the drive to improve and look outward, you instead retreat inward and just keep digging yourself deeper into a hole. (And, like, probably spend way too much time writing your own fantasy heartbreaker that just ends up being D&D But Worse But This Time It Has A Thing You Like In It to release along with the eleven thousand other iterations of that each month.)

If you made it this far, you're a real fuckin' champ and I appreciate you. In addition to the aforementioned James D'Amato, Superdillin, and Jeff Stormer for their superb actual play work, I'd like to shout out Jay Dragon, Geostatonary, Quinn Morris, assorted other humans in the Possum Creek Games Discord, Tony Vasinda and the Plus One EXP crew, as well as my other friends in my Very Secret Book Club - at some point in time, something you've done, something you've said, or some time you've spent being willing to humor my ramblings has helped shape the ideas that I could not yet give proper form and I am made better by knowing you. 

Part 2 of this series will not be anywhere near as long or as unhinged. It will be short, there will be hinges. Like a pet door, or a very small cabinet. But while this post focused on WHY people are they way they are, the next one will be about the implications of that and how that manifests.