# RPG A DAY 2024: Peerless player / Acclaimed advice tags: #thoughts #thoughts/RPGaDay/2024 ![[RPGaDAY2024-024x723.jpg]] Well, at least I get alliteration in my duo today. I can't complain about that over much. That's fine because I actually have material for both prompts. Maybe. It's notable that I spent a good couple of hours today sorting through my dice bag to prepare for going to Con. In fairness to myself, that's at least 300 dice. I am absolutely taken aback by the number of **[[Fudge]]** dice that I have in this collection. It's obvious and clear why I have so many D6s. I play a lot of games, and have played a lot of games, that use D6 in dice pools all the time. Unfortunately, I don't play nearly as many games that use **Fudge** dice.^[I'm going to tentatively blame it on **[[Bliss Stage]]**, which I used to run all the time. Let's go with that.] I love them. I love **Fudge**. But I have no idea why I've accumulated so many, except that they always feel a little more dense and a little better in the hand than other dice. I can't explain it, but there you are. ## Peerless player We all know who the most peerless player that we have ever played with is. It's ourselves. We are always the superior player. No game that we participate in is bad because of ourselves. No mechanics are incomprehensible to our powerful minds. If we have trouble dealing with them, it's because they're poorly designed. There's no point in debating who is the superior player. Who has no peers? It is we, ourselves. So let's don't. *What is a peerless player?* It's somebody that you want to spend time at the table with because they pay attention to you and your character, as well as their own. It's someone who knows the mechanics well enough not to interrupt the rules lawyer when he's digging a hole for himself. It's someone who recognizes what the rest of the table wants to do and plays along, even if it's not in the interest of their personal character. The peerless player recognizes that they are there to entertain and be entertained by all of the other players at the table, not just the GM or not just everyone else. They are the person that shows up prepared, ready to be focused, ready to enjoy themselves, bringing a good time in their back pocket. The peerless player is not just someone who knows what they should do, but what they shouldn't do and when they shouldn't do it. On their best days, that's exactly what they do with a smile on their face. The great player is in tune with the system and knows how to make it sing. He knows how to reveal what comes next, even when they aren't deciding. They always bring extra dice to a convention game, and if they borrow yours, they give them right back when the session is over. The player of awesomeness knows how to pick really good background music for tonight's game. They know exactly when to turn it up. They know exactly when to turn it down so that the whispered conversation and intensity don't get diffused. The great player knows that everybody has an off day, even themselves. And when you are having an off day, they're willing to smile, lean back, sip their Mountain Dew and nod appreciatively. Even when your joke doesn't land. The peerless player helps you clean up after a session. They put all the miniatures back in the right slots in the fishing tackle box. They bag up the damage and the stun counters separately. They separate the expansion card decks from the core card decks. They don't complain about taking out the garbage. Above all, the peerless player knows that you are his peer and acknowledges that you are part of his personal circle. Someone they intentionally choose to spend time with, and that you choose to spend time with in turn. They don't waste your time. They don't want you to waste theirs. They don't consider spending time with you to be a waste. Be a peerless player. And if you can't be a peerless player, at least aspire to be. Aspiration is the best we can do sometimes. ## Acclaimed advice I love gaming advice. Mostly, I love ignoring it because most of it is completely useless at the table. It sounds good; it's made up of things we want to believe about ourselves. It's largely composed of anecdotes and recollections that don't really apply out of context. A lot of wishful thinking. A lot of flattering the listener. Not a whole lot of real advice, which you can make things work better by leveraging. There are a few pieces that are worthwhile, and sometimes they show up in strange places. ### Play to Find Out ![[Apocalypse World (cover).jpg]] For me, personally, the best piece of advice I've seen in a modern game design is very simple and straightforward. And for me, it came from a surprising place, **[[Powered by the Apocalypse|Apocalypse World]]**, a game I have no particular love lost on.^[I took it a lot better when I saw it in **[[Blades in the Dark]]** later. Or at least enjoyed seeing what it was couched in.] *"Play to find out."* That's it. That's the advice. The whole thing. The whole enchilada. *"Play to find out."* It's simple. It's straightforward. It's almost too simple to be useful. Or at least, that's what I thought when I first heard it. After all, that's what we come to the table for every time, right? We play games to find out what's going to happen. We play games with other people to find out what they're going to do. We play games solo to find out what inspiration is going to strike and how we are going to respond using the tools at our disposal. Of course we play to find out. That's all we ever do when we come to play a game and actually engage with it, right? Of course we do. Of course, we don't. A lot of classic gaming is not about coming to the table and playing to find out. A lot of gaming is about coming to the table and expecting to be entertained by the GM. Or coming to the table and showing off how much better at pulling the levers and pushing the buttons of the mechanics you are than everybody else. Or coming to the table and showing off how good an actor you are and how much you deserve to be on *Critical Role* way more than those guys on the show. Or any number of things which are not spending time with your friends or your journal and expecting to find out.  When Luke asked, *"What's in there?"* and Yoda responded with *"Only what you take with you,"* that had resonance because all of us are going into the cave and taking with us whatever's on our back and whatever's in our hands. It's just that it's not a dark side cave, it's [Plato's cave](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allegory_of_the_cave). We spend our pleasurable pastime standing between the fire and the wall, making fascinating shadows. Sometimes we forget that it is a cave and that we brought in everything that's in there with us. The reason that we're throwing shadows is to see how they dance with a fire behind. ### It's Your Game ![[5150 - Known Space (cover).jpg]] Another significant piece of advice that I've picked up over the years has come from Ed Texiera of [[Two-Hour Wargames|Two Hour Wargames]]. He's been writing what is currently thought of as *"adventure wargames"* for many years now — a whole pile of years. He's also a really good guy, a fine writer, and the fact he has actually paid me on time for doing work for him doesn't hurt my opinion of him not one little bit. THW has produced some of my favorite games over the years, and are literally responsible for me owning half of the D6 that I own. Maybe more, maybe considerably more now that I think about it. There's always been one piece of advice in every book, in every chunk of rules, every time one goes to press, and it's something that I really appreciate, in part because it's something that so many game designers and so many authors, and frankly, so many players have forgotten if they ever knew it. They don't think about it. A lot of the time, they act like it's essentially untrue, but it is an incontrovertible fact. *"It's your game."* Just that, the reminder that the game isn't owned by the writer or the publisher. No one's going to come busting in your window if you want to do something different than is written in the text. It's not some sacred religious tome from which you must receive wisdom, and with which you cannot engage in a dialogue of equals. It's your game. It belongs to you. You're the player. The only one whose opinion matters when it comes to the gameplay you get out of it is you. You're free to do whatever you want to with it. There is no moral obligation that comes along with purchasing a game and playing it. There is no requirement that you believe a certain thing. There is no necessity that you agree with the author on any particular point. It's not a work of orthodoxy. It's your game. It belongs to you. It's easy to forget that in a lot of online conversations about RPGs and wargames. A lot of the current generation of games creators believe that they have a sacred requirement to be moral arbiters, to tell you that you're a good person or a bad person because you play a game a certain way, or even that you're a good person or a bad person outside the context of the game, simply because you don't think like they do. Hades forfend you want to customize the rules or change your experience. Or press outside the box. Their box. The simple admonition and reminder that *"It's your game."* goes a long way with me these days. It shouldn't be necessary. It should go without statement. And yet that it is stated that it is shown, that it is the text, means something. It's not just advice to the reader, but advice to the writer from the writer. The game belongs to the players. ### Roll or Choose One / Envision ![[Starforged (cover).jpg|400]] I would be deeply remiss if I didn't make reference to something from a more recent game design. Not everything of the last several decades is bad. I'm not one of those members of the RPG community who thinks that anything written after 1986 is garbage. Quite the opposite. I am a great aficionado of modern game design. One of my favorite designers is Sean Tomkin. **[[Ironsworn]]** and **[[Ironsworn - Starforged|Starforged]]** are two of the best game design I have seen in a long time. If you've been reading anything on [this digital garden](https://grimtokens.garden) at all, you've probably noticed there are a *lot* of references to both. There is a lot of excellent advice across both texts, and a whole lot of real enjoyment to be gleaned. But I want to talk in particular about something that's not really called out as specific advice, but which ends up being really good advice. Not just in these games, but in all games. On pretty much every random table, every random mechanism of selection, there's a little bit that says, *"Roll or pick one."* It's phrased differently in multiple places, but it's always there. I think my favorite example is in the Truths section of the **Starforged** book, because Tompkin has taken the time to actually make a graphical asset to explain that you have the ability to just choose, to just make up your mind and pick one if that's what you want. To go ahead and customize it. But as importantly, that you can just choose whatever seems reasonable. ![[Roll or Choose One.png]] This is sort of a callback to *"It's your game,"* in a sense. It's a simple thing, but it occurs all over the place in these games. Because of the repetition, it becomes something greater than itself. It is more important, more impactful than just telling you that you can roll on a table; it goes out of its way to remind you that you can just pick one. It's okay. If there's an obvious outcome of something, do that. If you don't like one of the outcomes, don't do it. If you come up with something else, go for it. Fill your boots. This, coupled with the repeated admonition to *"envision the outcome"* and to *"envision the fiction"*, drives home on a repeated basis that there is something more than the mechanics happening in play. There is an experience happening that the mechanics are facilitating, not dictating. You as the player are literally in the driver's seat. If you want to go to a place, you go to that place. The car doesn't tell you where to drive. You tell the car where to drive. I can't escape the feeling that this shouldn't be something that hits home as seriously important advice in the context of RPGs and wargames with me. I really feel like this should be something that is intuitively understood by everyone in the hobby. Somehow, it's not. Somehow, it's never really been understood. Not everywhere, not all the time. ## Exunt Well, *that was a lot*, certainly more than I expected to have to write about these subjects, but some days you just get caught up in the act of creation. Hopefully, my rambling has been of some use to you. Maybe you've learned something you didn't think about before. Maybe you were led to learn more about games you wouldn't otherwise. Maybe you are thinking about experiences you've had at the table and how they've shaped what you think of as good advice. Maybe you're thinking about places you could get more good advice, or at least more entertaining bad advice. Either way, you're ahead of the game. If you've enjoyed it, let me know on one of the innumerable social media platforms you've no doubt linked to this from If you've hated it, definitely let me know, because that's where I get my joy in life. Until next time, exunt stage left. All dancing.