# Getting to The Meat of Play tags: #thoughts ![[Go Straight to the Dungeon (illo).png]] Hey, it's been a while since I threw anything up on *Grim Tokens*, but today is the day. Surprisingly, I was motivated by a Twitter thread—so it goes, right? Today we are off in the land of *"right idea, wrong direction,"* or at least incomplete direction. ---   I'm sort of on the same page as you, but remember, we're talking to people who are generally fantasy-oriented with a very specific mode of play which involves heavily pre-planned, almost pre-scripted interactions and a large dungeon into which a whole bunch of GM work has been created and poured. The players, by and large, aren't interested in exploring inter-character interaction. Their focus is external, on the setting in general, in their very specific situation, and the players all know that there's a dungeon that they need to be getting to at some point because that's why they got together to play. Now, you and I might find that a little too much like playing a game specifically designed to be a video game where it's actually done better, but I think there's some wider, more interesting discussion to be had here if you step beyond just *"hurry them along to the dungeon."* At a broader scale, at a higher level, *"get the players to the game they came to play"* is absolutely important information and some of the best GM advice you can get, if they came to carry weapons into an underground hole, meet interesting monsters, kill them, and drag out their gold. Then don't dilly-dally. Let them get to that. Likewise, if they came to *"figure out how these dangerously unstable people got together to risk their lives against the things that horribly traumatized them,"* you don't want to really dick around when getting to that either. You want your *[[Kult]]* characters to have an interaction with the supernatural, one that probably pulls them together, or at least makes them aware of one another, and then you let them work it out from there. You want that meet-and-greet between *[[Call of Cthulhu]]* characters, where they shake hands and then start making preparations for the investigation. Those are the meat of the experience, and you don't want to waste the player's time doing other stuff when that's the stuff they came to do. From my perspective, CF's advice leaves out a vital part of the process of play. It ignores Session Zero, which is where you should be sitting down and finding out what the players actually came to the table to do. This is ideally part of character creation, where you find out what these players want to do with their group, even if that group hasn't been fully initiated yet. I prefer when the group pre-exists Session One—that is, they have a reason to know one another, at least in the general sense. I truly believe the way that [[Blades in the Dark|Forged in the Dark]] games do it, with the group as a whole having a mechanical presence, is ideal. That gets created during character generation is a huge plus to making sure that when you kick off, you're doing stuff that the players want to do right away. If you are fantasy inclined, *[[Fantasy World]]* probably does the best job of that I've seen in that space. That conversation has been had; it's been had vocally, clearly, and it's been reified by filtering it through mechanics. Clarity is absolutely 100% crystal. Now, when you start play, you start play doing what the players came to do. Taken from that perspective, seen as a wider commentary on the importance of sitting down and doing what the players came to do, this is very good advice. But first, you have to know what the players came to do. --- The response to this has been sort of kicking around in the back of my head since I saw the original post yesterday. It bothered me, but I put aside the reply I started writing because I was pretty sure it wouldn't be responded to well. Sometimes even I can learn restraint. It's rare, but it happens. But here's the thing, sometimes restraint is unnecessary. Every D&D adjacent GM in the world has the core belief that what they should be doing is driving the players around the world. Even when they ostensibly want to run a sandbox campaign, which by all rights should be about as character-focused as game experiences come. It never quite ends up that way. Instead, it's just like a classic fantasy exploration video game. There are things happening in the world. The players can go to those things and interact with them, but they aren't expected to be the initiators of things. They are almost wholly reactive. Things happen to them. Their motivations are not their own. The GM prepares things. The players look for them. Those things happen to the players. They survive or they don't. They move on to the next thing. Notice what is almost entirely missing from this: character agency. The characters may have some motivations, but they are less important than what happens to them. This is far better done by a computer than by a human being. At least there's no expectation that the computer cares who you are or who the character is. Why are video games structured like this? Well, it's kind of funny. They learned it from D&D. Then they decided to do it better, more comprehensively, deeper, with better graphics, better audio cues, better soundtracks, better teams of writers, and the D&D-adjacent GM has not got the resources to do those things, nor really the time if they are real people with actual jobs and families. Not to put too fine a point on it, but if you want to play a game where character agency and player agency are important, you don't want to play a D&D-adjacent game. Can you play one in which those things are first and foremost? Sure. But the system is not helping you. Hell, the way that the settings are set up is not helping you. No part of character generation helps you. You are working at cross purposes, even shockingly, when we talk about D&D 2025, despite the fact that the old heads decry it as some abomination of story gaming influence from a story gamer perspective. It's still just crunch, which has borrowed a few streamlining mechanical systems from better games. It doesn't talk about character motivations or player intent. It tries not to kill characters on a whim because it starts with the assumption that the characters exist because the players came to the table to play the game, ironically enough, but it still exists to fulfill that slinging spells and swinging swords fantasy, however poorly. In this context, *ShadowDark* is no better. In fact, it's just differently bad. Does that make it a bad game? No. It makes it a game which is not geared toward truly being better than a video game that you can sit down at the table and play with your friends while looking at them. It does what it does. The important thing that you can do as a GM or facilitator (because not all games are GM'd) is to actually start and know what everybody else at the table has come to do and experience. That applies to every single person at the table. Everyone should know what every other person at the table came to do in terms of play. If everybody wants to get together and go plumb some dungeons with a rough-cut outline whose character depth is no further than, "I'm the ranger and I use arrows." More power to them. They know what they want. Get to it. Play straight to that. If everybody wants to work out a complex psychological thriller where every character has a public motivation and a private motivation, and the game is really about the exploration of the pull and push between characters who need wildly different things with the backdrop of going into a dungeon and risking their lives being how those motivations get realized. Don't go straight to the dungeon. Have those characters interact for a bit. Let them play out their motivations and communicate the things that they think are important about their characters to be perceived as. Let the tension build. Show how some characters may have wants and needs which are at direct odds with what a different character has, and then take that tension and move it into the context of the dungeon where small decisions can have big impacts. If you went straight to the dungeon, you would be giving up on what the players came to the table to do. But first you have to ask. And if you don't ask, don't be surprised when the players just don't care what you throw in front of them. Again, this is why Session Zero is such a big deal and why the conscious exclusion of that portion of play and the story games that inspired it is kind of a rot at the heart of traditional play. They'll never get beyond being a video game with paper and pencils because computers do all that stuff better. Humans are good at motivations, interactions, social ploys, and understanding the delicate balancing act of characters and their subtext, at least for now. GMs, you are better than just being a wannabe computer. Use the thing on the front of your face with the flappy thing inside of it and find out what your players want, and then give it to them good and hard. That's your job. Nothing more, nothing less.