What's Your Role-Playing Game About?
A while ago I started asking the rhetorical question, "What's this game about?" in roleplaying games. Except it's not just a rhetorical question. It's a real question... and a very pertinent one.
What's this game about? The question came to me as a prompt for RPGs when I started fixing a problem with game focus in my own games a few years ago. My focus problem was buying and selling things. As in, my games tended to get bogged down when the PCs were buying and selling stuff. Partly this is a hard-to-escape consequence of playing rules-heavy games like D&D. Gear matters, gear has prices, and money matters, too. Ergo the GM can spend a lot of time adjudicating situations where players are striving to have their characters maximize what they get while minimizing what they spend.
What's this game about? Is it really about tracking the size of your coin purse and roleplaying interactions with merchants? Remember that just because the game rules may tilt in that direction- and may even make it hard to escape- that doesn't mean you have to play it that way.
What's this game about? Sure, it's easy to get bogged down in making rolls and roleplaying interactions every time a player says, "Ooh! I'm going to see if there's any magic stuff for sale in this town!" But pause and ask yourself: what do you want the game to be about? Do the GM and players really want to spend a lot of their valuable time together at the table roleplaying going shopping?
What's this game about? That was the clarifying question, the rhetorical prompt, that struck me when I decided to fix the going-shopping problem in my own games. A few of my players had pissed and moaned over the years, "We're spending too much time on shopping." Phrased as a negative like that it's not very helpful. And phrased as a complaint against what the GM's doing it engenders more negative/defensive reactions than constructive responses. But "What's this game about?" is an open-ended, non-judgemental question. It invites a constructive, positive answers.
What's this game about? "It's about exploring the unknown, matching our wits and skills against various challenges, having fun dicing combats, and trading witty one-liners along the way," the group might agree. Great! Then: "So, how do we spend more time doing that and less time on bookkeeping things like counting coins and encumbrance?"
What's this game about? The question came to me as a prompt for RPGs when I started fixing a problem with game focus in my own games a few years ago. My focus problem was buying and selling things. As in, my games tended to get bogged down when the PCs were buying and selling stuff. Partly this is a hard-to-escape consequence of playing rules-heavy games like D&D. Gear matters, gear has prices, and money matters, too. Ergo the GM can spend a lot of time adjudicating situations where players are striving to have their characters maximize what they get while minimizing what they spend.
What's this game about? Is it really about tracking the size of your coin purse and roleplaying interactions with merchants? Remember that just because the game rules may tilt in that direction- and may even make it hard to escape- that doesn't mean you have to play it that way.
What's this game about? Sure, it's easy to get bogged down in making rolls and roleplaying interactions every time a player says, "Ooh! I'm going to see if there's any magic stuff for sale in this town!" But pause and ask yourself: what do you want the game to be about? Do the GM and players really want to spend a lot of their valuable time together at the table roleplaying going shopping?
What's this game about? That was the clarifying question, the rhetorical prompt, that struck me when I decided to fix the going-shopping problem in my own games. A few of my players had pissed and moaned over the years, "We're spending too much time on shopping." Phrased as a negative like that it's not very helpful. And phrased as a complaint against what the GM's doing it engenders more negative/defensive reactions than constructive responses. But "What's this game about?" is an open-ended, non-judgemental question. It invites a constructive, positive answers.
What's this game about? "It's about exploring the unknown, matching our wits and skills against various challenges, having fun dicing combats, and trading witty one-liners along the way," the group might agree. Great! Then: "So, how do we spend more time doing that and less time on bookkeeping things like counting coins and encumbrance?"