Daycare Arms Dealers
How RPG graybeards enable and encourage bad play
Like all great Substack posts, this one begins…on X. If only Elon Musk would stop his pissing competition with Substack and realize that so much of what we talk about here begins on his platform. Maybe then we could stop the engagement throttling on Substack links and all of us who are active on both platforms could just glide seamlessly back and forth as we would very much like to do. Anyways, this particular incident began when Sandy Peterson, creator of Call of Cthulhu and all-around RPG legend, tweeted the following:
I've said it before, but I'm gonna say it again. If you are keeper in Call of Cthulhu, and a player snarks, "The RULES say differently!" you have my complete permission to say, "Sandy Petersen told me that my interpretation of this rule is the correct one." - Sandy Petersen, Feb 7th, 2025.
This is the kind of “Worldbuilder” GM nonsense that ensures nobody ever wants to play at your table again. This violates the ethos of a high-trust table, as I pointed out in a response thread, but that’s a topic deserving of its own article. Suffice it to say that games are only games if they have rules and the GM carries the unique responsibility at the table of arbitrating action based on those rules. The GM is equally beholden to the rules because the rules are what makes the game. If a shortstop decided he was going to tackle a runner headed for third base instead of tagging him or throwing to the third baseman, he would be violating the rules of baseball. So too would the umpire if he called the runner out instead of disciplining the shortstop for violating the rules. This all makes sense to people in baseball terms, but, for some reason, RPGs are different.
My response to Mr. Petersen received a great deal of pushback. Not from the man himself, he doesn’t engage with me because I’m not Harmony Ginger, but from a lot of room-temperature IQ randos who had one of two things to say to me:
“That’s Sandy Petersen! Who are you to criticize him?”
or
“The rules aren’t running the game! I am! The rules don’t matter so long as we’re all having fun.”
Normally, I would address the statements individually, but I think it’s best to examine how these things feed into one another. I have already described how important the rules are to a game and I have also already bestowed the honorific of “Legend” on Mr. Petersen in this article. However, what Petersen does here is reinforce this mindset that the rules are arbitrary and the GM is god. To make matters worse, he’s reinforcing it with his own reputation as a legend. It’s one thing if Rando_Calrissian404 on Reddit tells you that you can just make crap up and enforce it as law at your table. It’s another thing entirely if the man who says it has his name on the cover of your rulebook. In making a statement like this, Sandy Peterson is handing a very powerful and deadly weapon to people who have no business wielding it. It’s as if he’s an arms dealer who’s pulled up to a daycare and started handing AKs to the children. The results will be catastrophic and you only have yourself to blame for it.
When people like Sandy Peterson dispense advice like this, I think many of them are forgetting who they are in these situations. Peterson’s post is addressed to a know-it-all rules lawyer and, of course, Sandy Peterson would have one-up on that kind of guy. His name is on the book. All of it is just stuff he made up, so of course he can just make more stuff up. It’s his playground. He is intimately familiar with the blueprint and therefore knows where he can and cannot make slight modifications. This mindset breaks down when you put literally anyone else behind the Keeper’s screen though. If Joe Person is your Keeper instead of Sandy Petersen and he starts going off-script, it’s normal for people to go “Hey Joe, where you going with that ruling you just pulled out of your ass?”
If Joe were a normal, well-adjusted person he would point out where the rules align with him or say something along the lines of either “You’re right, it should be this way instead” or “Thank you for pointing that out. We’ll do it this way for now and check back with the rules later.” However, Sandy Petersen has given Joe permission to instead say, “How DARE YOU question me! I’m Joe Person! I’m the Keeper of Secrets and my word is LAW at this table!” It’s the same thing that I criticized Professor Dungeon Master for when he asserted that lite rules are better. This is veteran advice and it is best reserved for very specific instances. However, both Petersen and PDM presented it as the thing that anyone should do. So you, first time Keeper of Secrets, may arbitrarily change rules without informing your players and Sandy Petersen himself has given you the permission and even the exact verbiage to go on a massive power trip about it. Much like the aforementioned arms dealer at the daycare, Petersen has loaded someone up with a weapon they don’t understand and told them to use it with impunity which will inevitably result in the user hurting themselves.
Sandy Petersen is far from the only person who does this sort of thing. Mike Mearls, Jeremy Crawford, and Rob Kuntz do this on a regular basis. Innumerable DungeonTubers have done this too and it shows no sign of stopping. I don’t know if any luminaries read this publication but, if there are any, then this message is for you. Stop undermining your own work for the sake of being the cool parent. Stop telling people in videos and posts that they can just riff and do whatever they want rules be damned because they’re the GM. Instead, tell them to become intimately familiar with the rules you wrote. Read your book cover-to-cover, run it over and over again to the point of rules mastery. Then, and only then, can you start moving parts around. It’s that simple. Know how an internal combustion engine works before you try to take one apart and redesign it. Know the alphabet before you try to write a book. Know how to safely operate a firearm before you get into a gunfight. When you perpetuate this lie that you can just wing it and still have a great game, you poison the mind of a new GM and kill the interest in the hobby of probably several more. This hobby is in shambles right now and if we’re being honest, you had a lot to do with this. Stop giving bad advice just to look like a nice guy. Give hard but useful advice in a constructive way.