I declared the blogwagon for player advice but I was not sure what advice I could bestow since I have never considered myself a particularly good player when I am not in the seat of the referee. To toot my own horn, I am a damn fine referee, and it is that aspect of the hobby that keeps me coming back. But as a player, I always felt I am either stealing the spotlight or too easily distracted and fidgety when I’m not stealing the spotlight. So how could I, a mediocre player, deign to give out player advice to others? I have to get better if I am going to be proffering advice worth listening to.
As funny as “My DM put me on a PIP” is to me, this post is part charade. (Sidenote: for those who don’t work in, or are blessedly unacquainted with, a hellish but fake email job, a “PIP” is short for “Performance Improvement Plan” but in practice is an ass-covering technique for your job to fire you for cause with documentation that they did their absolute, honest-to-god best to not fire you so don’t you dare sue them.) I knew I would be playing in two sessions of Tricks & Treats (an annual Halloweentime tradition), so I asked the referee, Dwiz, “Can I be put on a PIP where between game 1 and 2 you critique me as a player and in game 2 I try to improve in the areas you critique? Only if that would be fun for you, but the idea of ‘my GM put me on a PIP’ is incredibly funny to me”. Mr. Dwiz responded in the affirmative. However, my haters will say that this wasn’t a real PIP because the stakes were too low. This is a 2-shot, and I’m being evaluated in session 2! There is no chance for me to be “fired” and replaced past session 2 because there are no such sessions planned. How can you have a meaningful campaign without player death? My haters have a point, but the experiment must go on.
I played a character named Eric, the same character I have played in the previous three annual installments of this game. Eric is an obscenely wealthy and strange child. He’s a bit of an asshole which makes him easy for me to play. Maybe one day I’ll play a sweetie pie. Without going into full play report mode, this session involved (from Eric’s perspective) going to a middle school dance, breaking into a teacher’s office, attempting to score some Four Lokos (the session is set in 2010), impressing his date to the dance, entering a costume contest, slamdunking a disco ball into a basketball goal, and paying $800 to a teacher to leave. Games of Tricks & Treats start off very mundane and slice of life until whatever sinister horror element starts to slowly seep its way into the childhood reality of the characters. When the session ended, there were various thermostatic clues along with a strange sentient slime that indicated the paranormal would soon be showing up, but all of that is a problem for next week’s session.
After the session, I went into the referee’s office, and he put on his most stern expression and walked me through my various failings as a player and where there was room for improvement. (Unlike me and every character I play, Dwiz is a sweetie pie, so the criticism was not as harsh as a real hard-ass referee might have leveled at me.) I want to go through those points, with some editorializing from myself (and some from the other players who stayed on after class to witness me get a tongue lashing) about how I and perhaps you can step up your game when in the player’s seat. Some of the points may be obvious, some are perhaps very specific to my personal foibles, but hopefully all provide some pointer on how we can all become the Platonic ideal version of a capital-p Player:
#1. Read the Rules. While the referee wrote me the next day to cage his advice by saying, “I’m keenly aware that so much is just, like, personal preference and I’d be reluctant to say that some of the advice I gave you would be something I’d insist all players should do all the time.” However, he added, “reading your character creation instructions is probably an unalloyed good”. This is because, when creating my character in advance and submitting to the referee for approval, per his instructions, I omitted inventory. Before the most OSRish of you die of shock, this isn’t the sort of ten-foot-polemical games where equipment is basically the very most important thing worth listing when making your character. It is very much about the kid, their costume, their personality, their goals. But the rules do state in the character creation steps under “Come up with a costume”: “You can include 1 or 2 handheld items” and the referee added in their instructions: “For equipment, as always you need a costume. In addition, you have a locker at school! It may contain a few textbooks, notebooks, and writing supplies, plus 1-3 other belongings of the player’s choice.” I did add a costume (I was Jake Sulley from the first Avatar film), I omitted my equipment and had to later amend that I had football pads, $1,000 in small, unmarked bills, and a fully charged iPhone 4. Mea culpa.
I agree that this one is basically an unalloyed good. There are often complaints about the mental load placed on referees, part of which is being the rules-expert. The more the players know the rules, the smoother the game will go for both the referee and the player. And there is a joy in learning (and perhaps in exploiting the rules). How can I improve before the next session? I could do a quick refresh on the rulebook before the session. Even flipping through it 5 minutes before the session is likely to do me some good.
#2. Refrain from Rules Lawyering. It is not enough to know the rules. You also need to know when and how to deploy your rules knowledge. Already knowing how grappling works in your D&D 3.5 game when you play a character that has all the grappling feats is great (and, frankly, should be standard). Arguing with the referee about the rules, even if you may technically be correct, is not great. Tricks & Treats is an exceptionally rules light game so there aren’t many rules to lawyer in the first place. However, there are rulings. As mentioned above, I forgot to list out my equipment in advance, and the referee decided that meant that all of my equipment was not on my person but was instead in my locker. “Surely not my cellular phone,” I protested, “what self-respecting 8th grader would keep their iPhone in a locker instead of their pocket?” But this was too much pushback. In a game with a traditional referee/player dichotomy, it is best to accept the ruling of the referee, even if it isn’t the ruling you would have made. It is easy to make fun of the rules-lawyer type players you see on forums and in the worst convention games, but rulings-lawyers are just as bad but underdiscussed. Rules lawyers typically come from the permanent player ranks, but rulings lawyers are more likely from the forever GMs who are taking a turn in the player’s chair. Enjoy the ride, but you gotta mind the bus driver.
#3. The GM is Not Your Adversary. The referee said this was not particularly evident in this session but something he had noted in our many other prior sessions. In his paraphrased words, he feels that I am often not playing against the fictional scenario, per se, but against the referee and trying to knock him off his game by doing things like asking about hyper specific details of the setting or an NPC that I know he doesn’t know the answer to, making a point to explore ancillary locations that are clearly irrelevant to what is going on (there was apparently an old church I insisted on exploring in a prior year’s session), or finding novel ways to break the game (like swinging around a knocked out enemy as a weapon in a recent combat focused game [there is another post in the drafts that discusses that incident in greater detail]). In my defense, which is never a good opening clause for a sentence, this may be more specific to my dynamic with this referee who I enjoy razzing as if he were a younger sibling (or, as they call them in his household, dwibling). Although I cannot chalk it all up to that, I do exhibit a bit of an “ain’t I a stinker” Bugs-Bunny type verve when in the player’s seat. And because I don’t want to get FIRED, I will attempt to keep this demon in check.
#4. Remember Character Motivations. The referee was too midwestern-nice to present these critiques without making it a compliment sandwich. To live up to this exercise, I will note as something I am doing well but need to continue to do well. He noted that the entire group of players, but “you, especially” were good at following our character motivations and were very self-motivated instead of reactive. We are self-starters! As a referee, there is probably no greater joy than players who set their own goals and go after them with little direction.
This motivated style of play is the norm in OSRy games, but if you play in a very trad-style game, you will so often find players who are totally reactive and waiting to be prompted by the referee (or, let’s be honest about which game we are talking about: the dungeon master) to do something, they react, then they wait for the referee to tell them what the next thing they should react to is. This is commonly thought of as the “railroad” style of refereeing and, because online advice is geared toward referees, it is considered something that referees do to players. They build the railroad and tie the players to the train like some mustachioed dastard. But just as often it is the players who almost necessitate this style of game by not “playing their characters like they’d drive a stolen car” (player advice from Monsterhearts) but instead by treating their character the way they’d treat a car they’re just sitting in the passenger seat of. Take the wheel and drive where you’re excited to go if you don’t want to sit on the tracks of a railroad! An open-ended, player-driven game is not solely on the referee to produce. Player agency requires players to exercise that agency.
Anyway, we proceeded to have our second session, and the referee “didn’t detect problems” but also noted that I had less opportunity to be a problematic player given I spent about a third of the session inside the belly of a large worm. He said he would not fire me and would in fact hire me for more sessions. One thing he noted, which connects to my last ranting paragraph above, is that I am particularly good at always having something to do. Even when my two main goals set out at the start of the two sessions were either unachievable (although I sort of did it at the end via a post-script epilogue) or already achieved, my character was always coming up with new schemes and setting about accomplishing said schemes with no prodigy. There is a type of player who is content to just go along with the group, to say “I swing my sword” at appropriate times, and to be as much of an audience member as they are an active participant. And, honestly, there is nothing inherently wrong with that type of player. I’ve had some of those players who were my most consistent attendees for long-running campaigns and, without whom, the campaign may have faltered out of the gate. Those types of players can often be the glue for the group. I’m not much for glue myself. I am more of the matchstick. But a good group of players (players are a herd creature, a much more social animal than the solitary referee) requires all kinds, be they the easy going glue players or the combative matchstick players. Find out what type of player you are, sure. But most importantly, be the best player you can be, regardless of player typology.
This post is part of the Player Advice Blogwagon. You still have until November 7 (Saturday) to jump on the bandwagon via your own blog. Don’t have one? Start one!
