RPGaDay 2023 #5 RPG With Great Writing

Just like great art, great writing hasn't come at me in a while. It certainly may be just me. As I said yesterday, I've been in a bit of a funk. So again, I'm charting my own course today and taking about my Second Law of Gaming.

I've been looking for some pithy and clever way to phrase it, but it's always been too clever for its own good. The simple way to phrase it is: Put the players in the driver's seat.

I think this goes a bit further than most standard anti-railroading diatribes. Because it's not just about giving the player choices, but giving them control. This doesn't mean letting them run roughshod over your campaign. It means that once you've laid out the core activity of the game, let them do that thing and see where it takes them. Which should be right into the arms of the adventure.

While I learned this lesson from my Castle of the Mad Archmage campaign, it's also something that I've tried to keep in mind as I run other games. I found that campaign very freeing, as I never needed to push or prompt the players into action and the players had a huge amount of room to explore and find things that appealed to them.

Though I don't know if players are really accustomed to having that level of agency.

During COVID, I tried to run an online Old School sandbox hexcrawl. Trying to keep with the roots of the hobby, I tried to run with a pretty open table. Two players that I found (not entirely sure where anymore) had mostly played 5e, but were willing to give the Old School a try. This was my "blank map" campaign, so it was very much on the players to decide what to do. It was still early days, so there was only so much that had been discovered. So they could have gone on to explore on their own, but when they heard that a previous exploration had discovered a dungeon, there was almost a relief and certainly a clear purpose when they decided "Let's explore/clear the dungeon." Maybe in a few more sessions, that would have led to some new confidence, but things fell apart not long after that.