Talk to your players

So I don’t know if you saw this, but on twitter this week there were a few threads floating around in response to this tweet:

In my circles, at least, these threads were mostly along the lines of “for the love of god have an adult conversation”. And they’re all right, but it’s sometimes hard to know where to begin with those conversations.

So I thought I’d talk about what that looks like and why it’s helpful (even important) to have them. Even though I frequently get assigned default GM because I’m a chronic volunteer-er and “the writer friend”, this stuff didn’t come easy to me. Not least because nobody was telling me this was what I needed to be doing. When I bought my first set of dice, for a game I was GMing, I kind of knew the guy at my FLGS (friendly local game store) and we were chatting as I made my purchase, and I mentioned I would be the GM. He reached into his pocket and pulled out a lovely d20 with green leaves around the 20 and said “take this, it’s weirdly weighted and I love using it as my GM die”, then winked at me.

That encounter, the guidance of an older and more experienced friend, and a whole boatload of bad memes led me into the exact mindset that creates the tweet above. This idea that tabletop games are “versus”. That the GM and the players are on different teams, trying to beat each other, and that we weren’t even expected to "play fair”. It was totally cool to use an unbalanced die to ensure enemies hit more often, and expected that I try to “TPK” my party.

Now, as you’re all probably extremely aware, I am not a neurotypical person, and neither were any of my players. What this meant, was that after our first session, with this hostile attitude, nobody wanted to play again. We had a rubbish time! One player rolled badly and was unable to succeed on anything, another player’s tendency to number crunch got the best of him and stopped him from making a character he gave a shit about, and overall, we were just unimpressed.

So I knuckled down and did my homework. I read through the 4th edition GM’s Guide more carefully, I consulted things that weren’t memes, I read through some books and guides I found online, and I decided to go back to my players and ask them what it was they didn’t like about the previous session.

The next one was better.

So I did it again, asking this time what kind of thing their character was aiming towards, goal wise. We actually started some roleplay, after that. (It’s fairly normal, in my experience, for new players not to roleplay much at all, there are a lot of other things to think about, but that’s a topic for another day).

A year or two later I was starting a new campaign, and we had a session where they built their characters together, and I used it as an excuse to get to know their ideas for the campaign. What did they want to get done? What kind of story did they want? the answer was Chaos. We did have an adverserial relationship at that table, and it worked. But it only existed at the table. After sessions, we’d wander a block or so to McDonalds and eat and discuss the session. What we liked, what we didn’t, and what we wanted to do next week. And so despite the fact that by the end of the campaign our paladin had turned evil and I spent every combat doing my damned best to do damage to a warlock who had completely fucked up his AC calculation and made himself impervious, we had FUN, and nobody stepped on each others toes consistently because there was no doubt in anyone’s mind what everyone’s goals and desires were at the table.

These days, as a game designer and much more experienced GM, I can do this on purpose, talk to players one on one and deliberately get at the difficulties that are coming up. But I had to learn to do it.

So yeah, if you’re running into a “problem” player, you’re more likely to actually be running into a player whose desires in play aren’t being met by the game. Quite likely because you, or another player, don’t know what those are. Ask. What do they want from the sessions? What do they want from each other? It can be as easy as going to mcdonalds after the session and talking about what was fun that day. Or you can message someone privately and ask if they’re getting what they want for their character.

But you have to ask. Or you won’t know, and they’ll keep trying to take what they need from the sessions instead of building it together with you.

Of course if you’ve done all this and someone’s still being a fuckhead, sack ‘em.

That’s almost all from me today, because this is long enough, but before I go, we have housekeeping.

Housekeeping

• We played Beacon Pines on saturday and it was so good, I highly recommend catching the VOD. We’ll be finishing it this saturday as well because we’re all hooked.

• I’m considering swapping friday’s weekly stream to The Long Dark. Keep an eye out for that announcement.

Finally, If you’re enjoying my writing, my internet presence in general, or you just wanna do something nice, consider tipping me on Ko-Fi!

See you next weekend!