We Didn't Scare the Normies

How club-style player-driven play actually appeals to normal people

Nerds ruin everything. Absolutely everything. I could end the article right there but I feel obligated to expound upon my statement because some of you pay money to support my writing and, considering the source of this statement, I need to actually justify my position. After all, am I, an RPG blogger and publisher who named his child after a Batman character, not a nerd too? Well, no. I don’t think I am a nerd. I think I was at one point in my life, probably for a majority of my life at least from the time that I was 13 until just a few years ago. These days though? Well, I certainly still enjoy fantasy, science fiction, comic books, etc. I dedicate time to interfacing with these things. I like to spend time with people who like these things. At the end of the day though, these things do not define me the way that they used to. Do your consumer habits and interests define your personality? Congratulations, Urkel. Are you a complete person apart from those interests who is able to carry on a conversation about something other than your niche interests? If so, congratulations on being a normal person. Unfortunately, normal people are becoming more and more abnormal as consumer culture has turned vast swathes of people into nerds. There’s no difference between the guy in the dandruff-covered Star Wars t-shirt who can’t hold a conversation not centered on that franchise and the guy in the football jersey who can’t hold a conversation not centered on sports or gambling. Every person who constantly gushes about the latest show that you totally have to watch? Nerds. The girl who suddenly becomes a homicide detective whenever the latest docu-drama drops onto Netflix? She’s a nerd too. Nerds are consumption machines who have organized their identity around consumer brands and hold them sacred. These people ruin everything. This snapped into sharp focus during a conversation with another normal man during a church social event I recently attended.

As I chronicled in a recent article, I have been searching for a regular in-person game since I moved back to North Carolina. My Father, himself eager to begin the campaign, has been helping me get this started by introducing me to potentially interested players. I was speaking with one of these perspective players over beers at a local brewery when I laid out my vision for the game. You will all be familiar with this if you read my articles. It’s a Shadowdark campaign set in the city of Nighthaven. Players will roll up 3-4 characters, pick the one they want to start with and hold the others in reserve. We’ll start off with my adventure Corpse Walk as an introduction to the factions within the city and immediately the entire city will be open to them to explore. Each week, players will be able to group up, pick an activity or a location to explore and then we’ll run it during game time. Outside of sessions, the world moves in 1:1 time. Factions will interact with each other and with the players as they act. So far, so BrOSR. The players direct the world and the world responds. There’s no weekly “story” and there’s plenty of room for players to dip in and out as their schedules permit so long as they’re okay with the world continuing to move without them. When I described this plan for the game, the guy looked at me and said;

“That sounds great! Last time I tried to play there were a bunch of conflicts with schedules and the GM was always frustrated about what to do with characters who weren’t there. This sounds great though. Do most people play this way?”

It hit me like a lightning bolt. “That sounds great! Do most people play that way?” No, unfortunately they don’t. For some reason, the most pro-social version of the game, the one driven by players themselves and open enough for players to come-and-go as their schedules permit, is seen as some kind of niche within a niche and the people who champion it are consistently shouted down. Why though? Why is this style of play so odious to the RPG cognoscenti? As a player, you get as much or as little playtime as you want. As a GM, you consistently have a quorum of players so that you actually get to run a session. There’s barely any prep involved. Just roll on some tables. The world is dynamic so it’s nearly impossible for things to be repetitive. Even if your players go back to the same dungeon 5 times over, there will be something new to find there if you’re tracking time correctly. Players will be the center of the universe and everything done will be interesting to them because they are deciding what to do. If they’re bored, it’s their own damn fault. What’s more, this style of play directly incentivizes recurrent play because the players who show up most often and engage with the world will get more out of it than those who are in-and-out. With factions, your players have a source of constant drama that will drive action. They will feel ownership of this world because it is driven by their actions making it their world. This is a damn-near bulletproof operation. What’s the problem here?

The problem is nerds. The nerds cannot handle this style of play. Firstly, this is an intensely social style of play. It’s club style play and, eventually, there will be a hierarchy of high-level players that basically direct the game with their actions. You see this develop in Vampire LARPs, although those have their own set of problems. Suffice it to say that players will have to learn to collaborate with each other, make deals with each other, and ultimately be able to shake hands and say “Good game!” when the session is over for the night. This is a competitive game and the kind of nerds that have infested this hobby hate the idea of competitive games because they hate competition. If the game is competitive, it means that a character can’t be special just because it’s written on their character sheet or in their backstory. You become special by doing exceptional things and getting people to support you. In a club-style game, there may come a time where multiple Fighters are of lordly rank and may be vying for a throne. This means that one player will have to convince enough of his fellow lords to back his play for the throne. That requires social capital and it requires all participants to be cool and remember that, once the session ends, they aren’t real kings or nobles. Normal people have meaning outside of the game. They have good jobs, loving families, children, etc. The game is just a bit of fun for them. Nerds have nothing and must retreat into the game to avoid the stark reality of their meaningless existence. If they can’t even be King of Fantasyland, what’s the point? They can’t leave it up to fate, they must control their status through iron-fisted tyranny of the table.

Players and GMs fall victim to the curse of clinging to their power in the game. This is the real problem with the oft-vilified Rules Lawyer. A well-adjusted player practicing system mastery and book control gently admonishing a fellow player or GM over a misapplication of a rule is very different from the frothy-mouthed bark of the Rules Lawyer. Rules Lawyers often don’t practice system mastery because they only know enough of the book to twist it in their favor. That’s the difference between a Rules Lawyer and a player with system mastery, by the way. Another expression of antisocial behavior designed to control the table from players is the Power Gamer. Once again, this is not the player who has optimized their character from careful study of game mechanics and a clear notion of what their character should be able to do. No, this is the player who cannot shut up about all of the cool stuff his character does, demands the spotlight, demands the coolest gear and the best loot, and then screams bloody murder when the dice deny them their moment of glory. This is also expressed in the overly horny player who must sleep with everything. They can never just play smart, get better and take Ls on the chin when they inevitably come. They must be the coolest, strongest, smartest, sexiest character in the game at all times regardless of reality. This is frequently the source of the infamous “I shouldn’t even have to roll” cope. These attitudes will drive other players from the table in droves. This is poor sportsmanship plain and simple and it’s the source of the continuous downward spiral of the hobby.

I did mention that GMs exhibit these poor behaviors too. There are two common ways that this expresses itself from behind the screen; The Author and The God. The Author GM is someone who’s tried and failed over and over to write a fantasy novel and turned their half-baked world and plot into a campaign. That in and of itself isn’t a problem though. The problem comes when they can’t let go of their role as the author. When the players don’t find their “cool” NPCs cool, aren’t interested in their political intrigue, and don’t want to pursue the objective laid out by the remaining plot structure of the aborted novel, the Author GM fumes. The God GM takes this to a whole new level by directly intervening in the game by breaking rules, altering stats, or fudging dice to achieve certain outcomes. As I have discussed numerous times, doing these things violates the ethos of the game and is not acceptable behavior. When normal people see things like this, they rightly recognize it as cheating and don’t want any part of it. They don’t see this as “your story” or “the table’s story.” It is a game and the GM is the referee. Video games do linear stories better than RPGs, so all you’re doing is creating a crappy video game with no graphics that you can only play at certain times. GMs have to relinquish power to the players to dictate the direction of the game and adjudicate accordingly. If your players are enjoying what they’re doing, they’ll prioritize doing it as much as they can.

The BrOSR and other advocates for player-driven open tables are not the ones who scared the normies away from the game. The scariest thing about this hobby to normal people is being committed to a weekly activity where they’re forced to interact with poorly-adjusted weirdos who are constantly fighting out-of-game for the upper hand within the game. They don’t want to be locked into a mediocre version of something they could watch on TV, read in a book or play in a video game because their time is at a premium. It has nothing to do with the subject matter of the game except for the fact that the subject matter of fantasy has been linked in their minds with socially maladapted weirdos. Much of the standard practices of RPG play that have been hammered into us since the early 80’s are just ways of protecting people with poor social skills from having to be social in this social activity of group gameplay. That’s done though. We’ve reached the absolute nadir of that play style and it’s high time we went back to club-style play. RPGs will be competitive and player-driven like other social games. They will adhere to standardized rules and they will be accessible to normal people who are willing to engage with them fully. Why did Jeffro Johnson spend so much time talking about dancing? Why does Crossface primarily focus on discussions of martial arts? These are activities done in groups that are accessible to normal people with normal schedules. People who are willing to dedicate themselves to learning the steps or the moves will get the most out of the activity and the whole community built around these activities will benefit from having more partners available for practice. These communities serve as a way to meet people socially but with an associated activity that’s designed to bring people together. All of this hinges on being open and friendly so that a community can flourish. For all of my harsh rhetoric today, that’s really what I want and I hope to provide that for the people who will be playing in my game.