Look, ma, I can do clickbait titles. I’m a real boy content generator now.
I wasn’t going to call the article that. It’s very much what I’d use if I was 20-30 years younger on Youtube and forced to try and engage with that hellscape. Instead, I am on a blog: an elegant weapon, for a more civilized age. I don’t need to do it. I am, because while the blog is a lightsaber, it is a lightsaber made of shits and giggles.
This post was born of a period circa Covid Lockdowns, where everyone and their dog was trying to play RPGs, and coming to me disappointed that it wasn’t working as they hoped. They thought I was an knowledgable expert, instead of just lurking on the Open Hearth slack and seeing what the smart kids were up to. This is what I’d do.
First thing I’d tell them: don’t play RPGs with your dog. Or any house pet, really. I understand you’re very lonely, but it’s never going to work.
Secondly, I’d listen to the specifics of their whine. The details varied, but the general theme remained. All of these were players frustrated with their GMs. Literally all of them. Mainly about railroading, sometimes about too much of a certain kind of content, mostly about frustration of feeling trapped in a game which wasn’t quite doing it for them but not being able to back out.
Of course, there’s a simple answer to this, and it’s the advice which everyone says – you just talk about things directly and openly. The solution to in game problems is almost always an out of game conversation.
This may work for you, if you’re not – for example – British, and so entirely resistant to the idea of anything which feels like an actual direct personal confrontation in any way.
All my friends would rather let someone hit them in the face from now until the end of time than be so rude as to ask them to stop.
So I tell them to suggest adding Stars & Wishes” to their game.
Stars & Wishes is Lu Quade’s remix of the earlier Roses & Thorns, to semiotically soften it. It works like this – at the end of the sessions all players (including GMs) may say Stars (“things that happened in the game which they really loved and want to applaud”) and Wishes (“Things they’d love to see in the future.”)
The first half just builds camaraderie. Games can traditionally just end with people wandering off. This gives closure, and makes everyone feel seen. From the GM’s side of the table, people expressly saying they dug something is just great. Building space for a Yay Us is an absolute Yay. Adding Stars and Wishes is my basic advice to improve any game group for this reason anyway, even if the group has no problems whatsoever. It’s just a good thing.
The other half of the Wishes is the idle dreaming of the future, and works as many things. It’s a great place for the GM to mine for ideas (“I really can’t wait to catch up with that asshole who stole my shoes”) and a great place for players to signal to one another what’s entertaining them (“I can’t wait to see what you do now you have no shoes!”).
But relevantly, it’s the softest, easiest, kindest way to say you want to try something else. “That was a huge fight and felt like a climax – I’d really love to do a mystery soon or have some downtime” is a different thing from saying “Can we just stop fighting these fucking hobgoblins and do anything else?”. “This town is under an awful theocracy and I think we should tear it down” is different from “We’re just following your plot here. Can we have some agency?”
But while they are different in approach, they also signal the same thing. This would interest me. I would like to see this. Can we please do this?
(It’s interesting that Heart: The City Beneath actually uses something very like Wishes to define player advancement and the core of how the GM structures sessions. Players pick things they’d like to do from their advancement list – “from kick someone off a high place” to “Slay a beast that’s at least five times your size” to “Find the final secret you have so desperately sought and destroy it so no one else can know of it.” The GM simply makes sure these are things that can happen, and the players advance when they achieve each one. This works so well that I basically was able to wing the Heart: From Death Do Us Heart actual play, which I should write about at some point.)
The one problem is, that for certain more macho tables, “Stars & Wishes” sounds a little Princess Sparkle and the Forest of Foobleflop. The solution there is, like Lu Quade did when making Stars & Wishes, a semiotic one. To one player who knew the group would be resistant, I suggested he renamed Stars and Wishes to “Fuck Yeah!” and “What The Fuck Now?” and go. Apparently it worked really well.
Anyway – that’s what I told them. If it doesn’t work – well, at least they tried.
There’s a lacuna in this line of thought though, which you probably spotted.
This was born of players approaching me seeking advice. What if a GM approached me with a similar broad problem?
Well, I’d probably tell them it may be too late already to approach correct easily, but if you didn’t, you should try CATS to ensure everyone is on the same table.
CATS is a device to create buy-in from the players.
At the start of the game, before you explain anything else, you go through the CATs checklist explaining (and everyone agreeing) on the games’ Concept (“What is this game?”), Aim (“What are you meant to be doing?”). Tone (“How are we going to be doing it?”) and Subject Matter (“What sort of stuff is in here and what isn’t?”).
Because listening to the players’ whines, I mainly thought “honestly, the GM sounds fine here, and is doing a completely accepted form of play – it’s just not the one you want to play.” I’m more than a little resistant to the play culture that treats the GM as some kind of glorified games console that spits out entertainment. Partially as it infantilises the players, partially as it turns the magic circle of a game into a echo of the consumerist world and partially as the GM is allowed to have wants too, and believing they have to be entirely subsumed to be a better content provider is some bullshit.
What CATS does is make sure everyone is ready to play the same game. It works best before the game starts, but if you haven’t done it, doing it later is worth a shot. Punk rock is fine. Jazz is fine. Someone playing Jazz when you’ve all agreed to play Punk is as rude as someone playing punk when everyone’s trying to do Jazz. Playing Jazz-punk is great too, but you have to all want to play Jazz-punk, or someone’s going to have a terrible time. Like, in the case of Jazz-punk, your neighbours.
It’s also interesting when all these assumptions have all been stated, you’re more able to accept and play towards those goals. Or choose not to play. Or to discuss whether there’s a midpoint between it begins. This is a combat heavy game? How combat heavy? And so on, and so forth.
It’s one of the weird problems, right? We talk about how the cultural domination of D&D warps what RPGs are in people’s minds, but there’s worlds inside D&D that require delineation too. “I want to run D&D” is a thing which means different things to different people, and ensuring what that even looks like is the first thing a table needs to decide.
Which doesn’t mean it’s set in stone (Even without Stars & Wishes, the table’s dynamic will form) but CATS provides a basic social contract for everyone, and when we all understand the game we’re about to play, we can actually play it.
This article is dedicated to all my friends who run RPGs who are now wondering whether their players are talking behind their back. No, not you. It’s one of the other ones. You’re the best.
Kieron Gillen lives in Bath, for a certain value of the word “lives”.