On Meeting a Game Where It's At

Sometimes, simply reading two things in quick succession can lead to a bit of clarity where there were only a few nebulous thoughts before.

This happened to me today when I first read Lonely Star’s post about how the OSR destroyed their games and then Kieron Gillen’s post about how he thinks about running Mythic Bastionland immediately afterwards.

One post is about how someone struggled for years trying to run their games in a specific way which they understood to be what it meant to run something in an “OSR fashion”, trying to mould their GMing style into something else, based on what they thought they were seeing online.

The other is an exploration of what Mythic Bastionland is actually about, when you get down to it. Culminating in this great paragraph:

I don’t mean this is a story game – I mean narrative as a series of events. Story is what is created retroactively, from looking at those events and taking joy in them. And, at its best, Mythic Bastionland creates History – a saga of a realm and its people, their struggles, their failures, and how they survive and are transformed by the forces of Myth. And that emerges if you just do what the game asks you.

There’s a lot of other stuff Mythic Bastionland “is about”, of course. But I feel like this might be a pretty good attempt at boiling it down to the bare essentials. The rules of the game exist in the way they do to support you in creating a realm with a sense of history. Not pre-existing history, but history that you, as a group, have actually lived through.

I actually hadn’t thought about this so clearly before. If you had asked me what Mythic Bastionland was about before reading it, I can’t even tell you what I would’ve said. Probably something inelegant about arthurian knights, travel, etc.

Having this newly won understanding will make it far easier for me to run Mythic Bastionland in the future though. Because I can better meet it where it’s actually at.

Two Sources of Frustration

I think there’s a lot of frustration coming from two things:

1. Not meeting a game where it’s at, trying to turn it into something it’s not
2. Trying to meet a game where it’s at, but not being clear about where that is

These are not the only things that might frustrate you in games, but they are the ones this post is about.

Don’t get me wrong, I truly think that the folkloric nature of roleplaying games is beautiful. And I’m all for home-brewing all the things. But it helps to be very clear about what it is you’re actually doing when you’re porting over rules from other games into the one you’re playing: you’re designing a game. And not every design makes sense, meaning not every combination of systems, procedures, and rules leads to the result you might have hoped to achieve. Trying to run a classic dungeon without resource management because that feels cumbersome will more likely than not feel flat. You will have to find something to fill its place as the generator of decisions and conflict.

This is also why for the longest time, I struggled to run fifth edition. Before even playing it the way it’s intended to, I tried to turn it into something it very clearly struggled against by adding in OSR procedures and taking out stuff I didn’t really care for. Only when I actually accepted what it was designed to do and simply did that did the system begin to make sense, and I could make my peace with it.

Understanding a Game

This is why I think it’s a very worthwhile thing to think about what culture of play a game belongs to. And why it makes sense to explore what it’s trying to do as well as what it’s actually doing, even though that might often feel rather theoretical and academic.

Understanding a game can be a decades long process. It’s probably never really finished. People try to do it with D&D to this day, for example by exploring what its language rules imply.

A game might be designed with the intention of being about something which it then turns out to not be about at all, due to a myriad of factors.

Conclusion

Look, I’m not your boss. If you’re having fun, you’re already doing it right. All I want to say is that if you’re not enjoying a specific game or even a whole play style, even though it feels like you should, sometimes it’s worth asking if you’re meeting it where it’s at.

Maybe you’re unwittingly trying to change it into something it’s not. Maybe you’re not doing what you think you’re doing. Both can lead to a lot of frustration in the “right” circumstances. It happened to me many times before.

This is why I love a good distillation of what a game is actually about.

Cover image: Illustration for a Book: Meeting Between a Pope and Doge by Giovanni Battista Tiepolo