# RPG a Day 2026 - 30: Pride tags: #articles #articles/RPGaDay/2026 ![[RPG a Day 2026 (illo).jpg]] ![[RPGaDay 2026 - 30 - Pride (cover).jpg]] Pride goeth before a fall,[^1] or at least so I am reliably informed. I'm not sure if I believe it. There has been no one who has accomplished much in their life without pride in it. Pride is a motivator that it's difficult to feed other than with successes, and as such it is discarded at your peril. Like Spite, Pride has been painted in dark colors by those who have been bitten by it, either allowing it to grow out of control in their own hearts, or curdled into jealousy by someone else's promotion of it for themselves. Sometimes both. It's a complicated emotion, but like all emotions, it's a fine tool, one that can be used for many purposes, good and ill. It has no moral content in itself. Instead, it is merely a direction to be explored. Now, I know what you're thinking. This is way too philosophical to be involved in a tabletop role-playing game website, where we've made characters off the cuff and played through some short scenarios all in the last month. What's with all this heavy shit? That's actually a really good question. What *is* with all this heavy shit? It's because without thinking about how people behave, how people think, what people want, how people act, that you can't really play a role-playing game. In the absence of those bits of understanding, you can't play a role. You can't even understand a role without them. When you get right down to it, a role-playing game is where one person pretends to be another person and talks to someone else within that framework of mutual understanding. Everything else, the dice, the rules, the maps, the tokens, everything is just a technique or a tool to support that primary operation of engagement. When **[[Blades in the Dark]]** says that the game is a conversation, it's not merely saying that the process of the game is one person talking to another. That's part of what it's saying, but there's a deeper meaning: that there is a conversation being had, understanding is being exchanged, there is a to and fro, and the process of play requires that you understand that the person, the character, their place in the world, and how they feel about it are the primary elements that you should always have in your mind. I would maintain that this is true even outside the bounds of traditionally conceived RPGs. Role-playing is part of playing a wargame, as most people think of it. After all, why have factions with different interests and goals and methodologies and units unless the idea is to put yourself in the place of someone who is not you, someone who is a member of this faction, who accepts those premises, and then to take action through the proxy of the elements on the map or on the screen to achieve aims that are desirable to the character that you are now embodying? This too is a conversation. In order to get out of it being a conversation, you have to strip away all of the elements that give it theme, that give it character, that give it uniqueness. You have to drag everything down to being a bare game with no elaboration. **Chess** doesn't even escape without embodying character. Each piece has a part to play in the story. I think the closest that you can get may be **Go**, which literally just has tokens that have a black or a white side, and they can be at a point on a grid. All the character has been stripped away. All of the conversation has been removed except the barest elements. This thing does that thing, and then we count up the numbers. Even within the context of playing **Go**, entire stories have been written about playing **Go** and how the process of the game can be read as a conversation, thanks to externally applied context.[^2] It's fitting that this discussion of Pride comes at the end of RPG a Day 2026, because one either has to be a madman or an egotist to say to themselves that for a solid month they are going to write their thoughts about role-playing games inspired by another person's prompts and put it out in public for everyone to read. In my case, I am *both* a madman and an egotist, so it was easy, but that's not everyone's path. If your path is that which keeps you playing TRPGs or adventure wargames or whatever it is that brings you here on a regular basis, I want you to embrace your pride. I want you to take pride in what you do. I want you to take pride in the fact that you can get better, that you can refine your processes, that maybe the last thing you did wasn't perfect, but you see a way to make it better, and you're going to do it, and you're going to achieve it because you're proud of it already, even before it's been done, even before it's been completed. You are proud of it and yourself. We can't talk about pride without touching at least a little bit on its inverse, shame. If pride goeth before a fall, does shame come before a climb? I would argue that's the case. Shame has been vilified in Western culture for a very long time. You should never feel ashamed. You should always be proud of what you've done. You should never shame other people, because they're just individuals trying the best they can, and shame will only make them feel bad about themselves. If you've been reading me for any amount of time, you know how I feel about this entire field of advice. I think it's fucking stupid and destructive. Just as pride should be cultivated and elevated, because it gives you motivation to cultivate and elevate yourself, so should shame be recognized, pointed out, used. I don't just mean using it on other people. I mean applying it to yourself. If you're not shaming yourself on a regular basis, you're probably not actually getting better at what you're doing. Just as you should be proud that you've achieved something, that you've done something, that you've made something happen, you should also be ashamed that it is not as good as it could be, and that you yourself aren't as good as you could be. You should be ashamed that you did something bad. You should hope that other people are shamed by their failures, and there is no shame to be had in pointing them out and helping them cultivate it, just as there's no shame to be had in helping others cultivate their pride. This is as true within the hobby as it is beyond it. This is just good advice for life, which is the last thing you probably should have expected coming here.[^3] Once you have pride in one hand and shame in the other, once you are ready to flog yourself with one hand and hold the carrot out in front of you with the other, keeping you moving neither too fast nor too slow, as long as you're moving, you're in good position for everything to work out better, from your tabletop experience to the world beyond it. Other people at this point would say emphatically that they are proud of you, that they want you to know how proud they are of you. I'm not going to tell that to you because I'm not a liar. Odds are I don't know you. I'm not proud of you because you don't exist in my world. You could start a conversation, be proud of yourself, share something that you're proud of. Hell, share something that you're ashamed of. If anything creates bonds between people fast, it's sharing shames. I'm not going to tell you that I'm proud of you, but I will leave you with this. Theoretically, in a perfect world, I could be proud of you. You could be proud of yourself. You could even be proud of the fact that I'm proud of you. But to do that, you have to do things. You can't just sit there staring at the walls, wishing things were different. You have to pick something every day and say, "I'm going to make this something to be proud of." Maybe it's a month-long series of prompts in your particular favorite hobby. Maybe it's a single project that you decide that you're fascinated by, and you want to learn everything you can about it and have something to show for it at the end of a couple of weeks. Maybe there's this thing you've been meaning to write for the last six years, and now it's finally time to sit down and do it right. Maybe there's someone you've been meaning to talk to. You just haven't taken the chance, and you feel ashamed of yourself for that weakness. It doesn't matter what it is in particular that you choose to do. It doesn't even have to fit what I think is morally just or socially desirable, but you're always going to be better off seeking to elevate that sense of pride in yourself. You'll have done something. Having done something, you can evaluate it. Having evaluated it, you can understand it. Having understood it, you can do it better next time. It is the true virtuous loop. It is the one thing you can always count on. No gods, no masters, just the act of doing. For that, I could be proud of you. [^1]: Well, "Pride goeth before destruction, and an haughty spirit before a fall" — [Proverbs 16:18, KJV](https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Proverbs+16%3A18&version=KJV). Close enough. [^2]: The banner example is *Hikaru no Go*, the [anime](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hikaru_no_Go) about a schoolboy who gets a master Go player's ghost in his head and is dragged, kicking and screaming, into the game. On the literary side, *[The Master of Go](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Master_of_Go)*, Yasunari Kawabata's novel of a fading master's retirement match, reads the game as a conversation between a man and his own impending death. The *[AlphaGo](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AlphaGo_%28film%29)* documentary does the same for a machine and Lee Sedol. [^3]: If you do find yourself coming here on a regular basis looking for life advice, I appreciate your faith in me, but I think you might be knocking on the wrong door. Can I interest you in a lovely path of descent?