Welcome to this week’s blog club. This week we are looking at “How to awesome-up your players” from 2006 by Jeff Rients.
Next week we’ll discuss “Philotomy’s OD&D Musings” from 2007 by Jason Cone. You can see a list of previous blog club posts here.
I really enjoyed the vibe of this one. For the most part I can get on board with what he is saying here. I do think that there is a bit of an attitude that the GM is there to service the players.
I think it is healthy to set boundaries (in life in general) so making restrictions to preserve tone is generally fine so long as everyone is on board. Many games avoid this problem by not having too much bloat in the way of PC options anyways.
But I do like that this mentality opens up the possibility of not letting the rules be the end all be all of what is possible in the game, and to keep the momentum going.
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I struggled with this one a little bit, I 100% agree with not getting too tied up in the rules. But the undercurrent of “serve the players” keeps rubbing me the wrong way. But sure, I guess I generally agree.
This one didn’t feel quite as deep as some of the other things we have read so far, maybe that’s just the benefit of time being on our side?
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2006; “System Matters” was something people were already talking about by that point but I don’t think it was as broadly accepted/understood as it is today, after a decade or two of the indie boom really leaning into the idea. And the “storygames” movement with its wild ideas like putting fiction forward and supporting player narrative agency (things that this blog seems to be arguing for, if not necessarily using the language we’ve come to associate with those ideas) was still a few years off as well.
That being said, this reads a lot like the kind of apologia I see for, “I’ll just hack 5E into a slice of life cyberpunk romance game”: at the end of the day I think you can only do so much with what you’re starting with, whether you’re codifying rules or floating the bulk of the game on fiat and narration. For me, a game that survives on the GM fluffing up the players sooner or later starts to feel hollow, and the value of a rules-light, rulings-over-rules approach is that it gives you ample space to build something in, not that it gives you wiggle room to escape from the mechanics when they don’t suit you.
I like to think that nowadays we have more refined, more elegant ideas about how to achieve the end-results that this blogpost is aiming for.
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It’s hard to keep the time this was posted in mind, as it might have been a more useful post in 2006. Reading it now, this feels like a long-winded version of the rule of cool.
If you’re unfamiliar with the idea, this is likely useful, but it doesn’t give much real guidance to anyone who isn’t already good at that vibe.
Compare this to advice like, “Shoot your monks,” which notes a specific thing that a GM can do to help their players feel awesome (namely to figure out what their characters are good at and give them fights where that will be useful).
On the whole, I didn’t find a ton to draw from this blog post.
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I read this not just as “the rule of cool” which was a popular bit of advice in the early days of the OSR, even if it’s somewhat discredited now - but also as a pushback against two sensibilities common in 3E and 3.5E era:
- “Railroading”
or - Antagonistic Refereeing and formal structure of campaign advancement.
I’m looking at exactly what Jeff says - he refers to typical D&D (presumably A&D based so 2E or even 3E I’m guessing?) as “hack-n-slash gamist pawn-stanced D&D game”. What I think he means here mostly based on his suggestions at the end is that one should have space for strange and exciting things happening in game, player creativity should be encouraged and player successes allowed and celebrated. That one doesn’t need to roll for everything and keep players mired in metagaming and paranoia to survive - in some ways it’s an anti-Gygaxian (or at least anti his meanspirited evil twin Xygag). It is a very “OSR” one - that the world can be strange and adventures rather free form at times with creativity valued above process.
I think we see a lot of the attitude that Jeff is railing against even today in people who love “RAW” or that gatekeepy fandom/plebian OSR that flocks towards constantly replaying B2 and insisting that on AD&D is a the real manly RPG (which is funny because it was clearly written for 12 year-olds who want to feel smart).
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It did strike me that this blog post was an early expression of the rulings over rules ethos, or really just letting players perform actions without getting bogged down in how to adjudicate them. I don’t have a background in playing 3E or the play culture of that era so on initial read it seemed like he was asking GMs to just let a lot of crazy stuff slide, but the general ethos is sound, which is to be a fan of you players and not actively work against their interests
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I wasn’t gaming in 2006 so I guess I’ll approach this post from the perspective of how relevant each point feels to me today. To follow up on what some people said upthread the path of GM can be one of service… and of burnout. If GMing is not a role that’s being switched between friends or you aren’t running for new players I’d say its an mentality that should only be used short term.
Focus on the Main thing: Here is an instance where I am going to fork things from Jeff. Campaigns can have many types of goals besides just kicking butt and saving the world, but whatever goal you have stick to it with a laser focus. I see variants of this advice commonly today as start in the dungeon! No matter how many times I am told to focus on the main thing I feel like I always need another reminder. Its easy with D&D and building imaginative worlds to swing towards maximalism for me, to put hats on Hats. I need this as a sticky note on my GM screen.
Give the players the sun and make them fight for the moon: I’m curious to see how i would interpret this advice in BX game. I feel like victory isn’t assumed so you need to fight for the sun. This point feels much more applicable to my trad / OC campaigns.
Also I don’t like his advice on tailored campaigns options… so I’m just going to ignore it. Provided the players buy into the campaign premise and expectations are established i find that weird bespoke settings, d&d variants, strange limitations are how people who DM for long periods of time stay passionate about the game.
Sucky NPCs that will die: I resonate with this maximum. I tell my players to never to use a character that they love too much to lose, so its only fair that GMs should recognize that their villains will be humiliated, their cities set on fire, and their gods desecrated.
the game is neither the mechanics nor the rules This is true for the GMs and players I enjoy the best. Some new to the game players believe “the game are the rules”. Sometimes they dislike any deviations from whats on the page and struggle with the concept of high trust environment. I do what I can to help change these peoples minds and if I can’t offer to play video games with them instead. For GMs this can be rule of cool but for players this can be seen as “bite the hook” because it can lead to fun.
When in doubt let a player roll some dice: something I like in NSR titles is to let the die of fate and randomization play a bigger roll in the game. I enjoy this and feel like it keeps me honest. As a GM who plays many kinds of games, sometimes I am subconsciously directing the flow of gameplay to the typical beats of a narrative. Die’s of fate can disrupt this flow. I really enjoy overloaded encounter dices to help let chaos and the player response to those situations direct the flow of a session. (Thank you to Gus L for demonstrating this method thoroughly through his writings and his games!)
Last impressions: I feel like overall this advice is best for people who are new to DMing or those who are shaking off the rust after a long time away. I see a throughline of letting players have fun, not overcomplicating things, and not being over controlling. To paraphrase my favorite sketch comedy show riffing old movies with robot puppets “its just a game, you should really just relax”
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I’m not certain I even finished reading this one when I first encountered it. That whole “allow any bullshit PCs or you’re doing it wrong” just grated so hard. Sorry, dude, I respect my settings enough to not allow turds in the punch bowl – it’s part of that “basic simulation that provides consistency” approach. The players can run off and write bad fiction about cyber ninja PCs in a medieval-ish fantasy world if they really want that; it doesn’t happen in my games.
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