Blogwagon Summons: How to Be a Good Player
Most advice on the blogosphere is advice for referees. And when the advice isn’t for referees, it is for game designers (often, but not always, a subset of referees). This is not unexpected. The way the hobby works for most people is sort of a vortex where most people exist on the outside ring, mostly content to play in their weekly game and not think about the game much when they aren’t playing it. But then you get the forever-GM types (of which I certainly am, although I enjoy being a player too) who think about the game a lot between sessions, be it actual prep for future sessions or just idle worldbuilding. I fully think a lot of the forever-GM stuff that happens between sessions is a type of play, even if it is not part of the game. Beyond even the forever-GM, you have the ones who are so TTRPG obsessed that they go on the internet in their spare time and read blog posts about them. And then you may be so far gone that you actually write that sort of stuff. That’s when you’ve been pulled to the innermost spiral of the vortex.
Because it is only the most hobby obsessed who write blogs and the most hobby obsessed are typically the ones running the game (and even the ones trying to convince their players to play more and weirder games instead of brand name D&D), it follows that blog writers focus on the referee advice. But just as there are best practices, tips and tricks for referees, there are absolutely best practices for players. We all have players who, when they are in the game, we know they are going to improve the session but what is it that makes them a good player? We also have likely had players who are, well they’re at least there, but they aren’t supplying whatever juice your star players are. How can they improve? What makes a good player in the first place?
That is the topic of the latest declared Blogwagon: what is a good player and how can you be a good player? And basically anything on the topic of “player advice” as opposed to GM advice. The window for this bandwagon is October 24 through November 7 (speculate as to why in the comments), and I will do my best to scour the internet for blogs participating in this bandwagon and, like past ones, I will round them up for your reading pleasure (or so you can send the full index of posts to your players as a passive aggressive call to action).
Sidenote: by “player” I mostly mean it as a shorthand for the non-referee players in GMed games. I have always contended that the referee is also a player and it’s just as important that the referee has fun (nebulous term but I’m already defining one term and don’t want to get stuck in a rabbit- or foxhole, so pretend we agree what that means) as the rest of the players. However, not all games have a referee (or maybe are GM-full games). Maybe the same player advice holds true there or maybe it differs. That’s also a productive vein to mine in service to this prompt.
