# RPG a Day 2026 - 28: Devotion tags: #thoughts #thoughts/RPGaDay/2026 ![[RPG a Day 2026 (illo).jpg]] ![[28 - Devotion - The Zealot (illo).jpg]]  Look, I had to do it. You all saw that I had to do it. It was imperative that I do it, so I did it. There are so few references to devotion in the proper canon of geek media. This one was going to be right here. It also reinforces and deconstructs the particular theme that I want to touch on, which suits my inclinations all the more when you get down to it. When we talk about devotion, we mean a dedication to an idea or an ideal, a lack of exploration in a sense. The devoted do not wish to learn of things beyond the realm of their devotion. An idea that competes with it must be expunged from their minds and preferably from others. The devoted will crusade against that which they find foul and Other. However, their worst calumny is dedicated to those who are apostate. It's one thing to be heretical, but it's quite another to have seen the true way and turned from it. You know what we're talking about. If you've been in the hobby at all for longer than 15 minutes, you have seen that there are some absolute zealots out there. The kind of people who jump in when someone asks, "Hey, what's the best system to do X in?" and then they come up with their pet system every single time. It doesn't matter what X is. It doesn't matter what kind of structure X has. It doesn't matter what kind of storytelling X shows. It doesn't matter what kind of world X exists within. The zealot will show up and not just suggest their favorite system, but they will insist that their favorite system is perfect for it. They won't actually support that contention, mind you. They will simply assert it over and over again as loudly as they can, and often quite aggressively. I hate zealots. I'm not going to put too fine a point on it. I have an active, aggressive antipathy to them, which might strike you as a little ironic considering how much I champion certain systems here. But the truth is, I'm sharing these ideas with you because I think they represent tools that do a particular job extremely well, but I am more than happy to toss one over my shoulder and reach for something else when the job changes. In fact, I like the job to change, so I have an excuse to look for different things that satisfy the need extremely well. Sometimes it's just fun to make things that don't work, work within that context. But that's because I'm a tinkerer and an engineer, and I don't take that kind of exploration of the space seriously as something everybody should be doing. That's putting a rocket engine on a sled. It's fun, but it can be unsafe for those who aren't trained in the dark arts. So what do you do when you run into one of the zealots who find your lack of faith disturbing, who want to jump into an actual discussion of method and means with the brute force assertion that yes, you can totally do it like this? You should do it like this so that you can be compatible with all these other things that do it just like that, even if doing it like that doesn't fit what you want to do. Because doing it somehow in a different way will mark you as different, and you don't want to be different, do you? If you're smart and a normal person, you just disengage. You don't have any reason to deal with them. You don't have anything that you're going to get out of it. Nothing you say is actually going to register with them (and you've probably seen this a couple of times in previous exchanges). You are making mouth noises into the void, hopefully for an audience that's appreciative, while this guy grandstands and proselytizes. Be smart. Walk away. Put your hands in your pocket and whistle happily. Go find someone who actually wants to have a conversation with you. Your suffering will not make the world a better place. If you're smart and not a normal person, you might decide to simply mock them outright. Public mockery is both a talent and a skill. You can make up for a lack of talent by devotion to the art, ironically enough, but you have to really want to. Zealots are easy enough to drag out and spin around. It's like bullfighting with a dumber animal. Let them make their pass. Give a rhetorical flourish, imply that there's another target for them to rush at, and then snatch it out of the way as they come by. If you can land a good shot on their flank as they do so, so much the better. You're never actually going to make them bleed out or collapse to the floor of the arena. But if you're really good at it, you can make them stomp, huff out their nose, and then turn away to walk off to a different part of the arena, and you can consider that a win. This is left as an exercise for the self-indulgent, the masturbatory, and potentially self-destructive. I'm a long-time participant. Perhaps you should not look to me for guidance on what you *should* do, but as a beacon lighting the way toward what you *could* do. How do you avoid unwholesome devotion in yourself? This is surprisingly harder than you might think. It actually requires paying close attention to how you talk about things. One of the clearest signs that you are descending into an unwholesome devotion is realizing that you reach for the same idea every time something comes up. It's not even *"I have a book for that,"* and then reaching for a different supplement but literally going to the same book all the time for different issues. Once you build that habit of only going to one place, then you realize sometime down the way that you have missed lots of opportunities to fold in other things and learn other techniques. You have misused your tools and passed over jobs. This is one of the reasons that I try to give at least three options whenever somebody asks how something can be done or what game is good for it, because I know my old standbys are always going to be there. It's easy to reach for them. I need at least one or two other things that I haven't referred to recently to put in the mix and solve the problem. This is going to force you to dig deeper into your pile, and if you don't have a pile, to maybe think about creating one. I firmly believe that every member of the RPG hobby should know about and be able to play at least five different systems. You don't necessarily have to own the core book for them (though [in these days of beautiful games being available for free all over the net](https://itch.io), there's really no excuse), but you do need to be conversant enough to play if someone asked you. Think about how each of the things that you are familiar with is different from the rest and what it does better than the other things that you like. This goes beyond *Gedankenexperiment* and out into serious contemplation of what it is that you enjoy. You ought to do it on a regular basis. Think about what you're doing, how you're doing it, and why this thing that you're doing is different than that thing you're doing, and why you enjoy both of them. I'm not going to say that such contemplations alone will keep you from becoming an obsessed zealot who bangs the same drum at the same beat to every song, but it's a good start. There is no way to avoid the devoted in any fandom. They are the loudest, the pushiest, and the ones with the most time to do both of those things. There's no way around that. That is the way of the world, but we don't have to become them. If we catch ourselves at it, we don't have to *remain* them. If we educate ourselves, we can stave off the onset. The things that are most important are to enjoy the games that you enjoy, seek out more things that you enjoy, share the things that you enjoy while enjoying a panoply of things. Do that and you're safe from the bear trap of devotion. Fail in that task and you will be forever mired in being that guy screaming about that system every time any question comes up. You know how we all feel about *that* guy.