I'm a Lazy TTRPG Player

I don’t pay a huge amount of attention to the on-line culture of RPGs (is there any other kind, these days? Why am I asking you? You’re reading this in an email or on an on-line blog…). I’m subbed to a handful of mostly very small YouTube channels that I am connected to more or less directly through a sort of parasocial online relationship to the creators (who I like and respect) and because I sometimes play in their streamed games. I’ve never been on Twitter or Instagram or TikTok - all of which seem from the outside to me to be dystopian hellscapes. If a search query sends me to Reddit I might follow the link and spend a few minutes marvelling at how silly a lot of the ‘conversation’ (sic) is. So I think it fair to say that what follows is - at best - anecdotage.

There’s an awful lot of GM advice out there. In one way, this strikes me as strange because, as Wizards of the Coast made clear in their market research, the proportion of players to GMs in the hobby is something like 10-1. But, from a certain point of view as a ‘content creator’ (bleurggggghhh) I can see the logic of offering GM advice because, as WotC also observed, GMs account for the vast majority of sales and, impliedly at least, also for the bulk of attention - clicks, views, likes and engagement. GM advice is (or can be) universal in the sense that many tips and tricks and techniques are of more or less generic application at the table - can we recite the list yet? Spotlight control, player agency, when should you be rolling dice, lazy GM prep, ‘Yes… and/No… but’, failing forward et cetera et cetera et cetera. And before anyone gets the wrong idea, I hold my hands up and say I’m as guilty as anyone in the space of proffering this kind of unsolicited opinion. Don’t be misled by my low-status framing of the conversation. When I say how bad I am at doing X or Y and why, what I’m really doing is conveying my beliefs and preferences and prejudices about RPGs, just like any other schmuck.

Player advice is - from my own impressionistic and probably unreliable experience - less common. This is perhaps because of the previously mentioned ‘attention economy’ but also, I think, because offering advice to GMs means only needing to connect with (to use WotC’s figures) 1 in 10 members of the hobby. Since there are almost as many ways to run a TTRPG as there are GMs, it sort of follows that there must be something like 10 times the number of ways to play in them. The odds of providing content that anything like a majority of players will find useful are, therefore, proportionately, longer. But here goes…

A feature of recent-ish GMing discussion has been the formalising of the notion of ‘low GM prep’. Of course, this was always a thing, but it was for a long time amorphous and ad hoc with individual GMs arriving at solutions for their table. This changed with the emergenge of TTRPGS blogs such as The Alexandrian and, as access to digital downloads and print on demand increased, the publication of works such as Sly Flourish’s The Lazy Dungeon Master which collated and advanced these techniques and with clever analytic tools like those in Johnn Four’s Five-Room Dungeon both of which contain genuinely useful and interesting ideas. Of course, we all recognise that GMing is, to some degree, work, and so the use of the term lazy is here undersood in the positive sense to mean labour-saving. But is it possible to be a lazy player?

Of course, we all know that it’s eminently feasible for players to be lazy in the opprobrious sense of the word, who can be relied upon not to pay attention at the table, to neglect doing any down-time book-keeping or constantly to be asking ‘how does my character do [insert core class ability here]?’ But my question here is whether one can be a labour-saving player.

I have a friend who is perhaps the best - and certainly the most experienced - GM and player I know. Like all relationships, what keeps this one interesting and stimulating is that there is a certain amount of grit to encourage the seed-pearl. We do not agree on (or, at least, have different approaches to) some aspects of the hobby and our long and amicable discussions have prompted me to sharpen up my own thoughts and provided material for a number of my previous posts and, with a little luck, will continue to do so.

He is a conscientious player. By this I mean that, when he sits down to create a character, he labours to produce something like a three-dimensional entity that goes beyond the mere mechanical requirements to include less substantial elements including a past, goals, desires, capacities, quirks and flaws. This does not mean that he comes to the table armed with reams of ‘charismatic deep and edgy’ back-story, nor that the character remains fixed in aspic, unmoved and unchanged by events in play. Rather, the depth of his characters at creation gives him a firm foundation that informs how they interact with the world and the plausible ways that they can change through those interactions. All of this is laudable and highly, highly effective. But, my goodness, what a lot of work.

As previous posts have probably amply demonstrated by now, I am not a conscientious GM or player. When I sit down to create a character, I emerge with an indistinct sketch, a garish cartoon, a two-dimensional meeple. Then, through the process of play, layers and depth and solidity are added, defining the character in response to events, encounters and circumstances. In other words, my character creation process is emergent.

I am loath to bang on about tales from my games, as these sort of narratives are almost always as dull as someone narrating in inordinate detail that really weird dream they had the other day. The telling of the tale - detached from the vivid personal experience that is being related in clumsy words - in itself denudes it of any glitter and immediacy. But I fear that, this one time, I might need to provide a concrete example.

In a current game of Maelstrom Domesday that is actually being run by the same conscientious player previously mentioned, I am playing a Saxon, a carpenter in his youth who is now an aging Benedictine monk, slowly going blind. All of this was established mechanically through Maelstrom’s stats, skills and life-path system. The core plot of the game revolves around a young Norman knight (another PC) and his efforts to win over a Yorkshire hamlet that suffered greatly during the Harrowing of the North and to protect it from a half-understood supernatural force that lurks in the countryside. My character acts as the lord’s steward and the point of contact with his Saxon and Danish vassals. You would think, therefore, that I came into the game knowing what my character’s attitude was towards the Conquest, the Norman overlords, the imposition of the new feudal order and the fate of his fellow Englishmen. Not a bit of it. Didn’t have a clue. Was he a Norman collaborator or a secret rebel? A sympathetic steward or a petty tyrant? No idea. Not a scooby.

But now, after months of playing through events and encounters, interacting with the players and NPCs, I know exactly who Aelfsige of Kirkdale is. It doesn’t even matter for the purposes of this dicussion exactly what he is. The point is that I, the GM and the other players now have a pretty clear understanding of what he is likely to think and feel about matters, how he will react to people of varying qualities and what his attitude is likely to be in most given circumstance. We know his character. Now, I could, perhaps, claim some high-fallutin’ theoretical justification for this methodology - I really don’t know, since I find so much of ludology to be bloodless, arid and, by turns, facile or wilfully obscure and so it just passes me by. But what is inarguable is that this is much, much less work than the diligent alternative and that, personally, I find this emergent character creation a lot more fun.

It also has a couple of more or less objective advantages. First, and notwithstanding the growth in the use of Session 0, stars and wishes and other techniques, we have all, I suspect, encountered a situation where something goes awry, when a player’s character and some element of the story are incompatible. No blame necessarily attaches to such a common hiccup, since it is clearly impossible for groups playing with any meaningful degree of player agency to avoid this issue. But emergent character creation reduces this risk by allowing the player to tailor his character’s development to the story as it unfolds rather than coming in to the game with already defined parameters that have to be awkwardly squeezed, palpated and finessed in response to events in play.

Second, it avoids the issue where a player, with a character created in such detail so many sessions ago, suddenly looks down on his sheet and realises that he has something written there that he has never given expression to in play and now finds is directly relevant (and perhaps in tension with) the present circumstances. Of course, this can be ret-conned and the player can simply erase the element of the back-story. Since it has never come up at the table, there is no issue of consistency. But my word, what a lot of effort and angina when, if they’d never committed the detail to paper in the first place, none of this would have been necessary.

Third - and related to the above - is that character traits and details that emerge in play tend to acquire more solidity and memorability for the player, the GM and the others in the group than those written down in the abstract before the game starts. This is, I think, a truism about how we, as higher primates, create memories and embed them more efficiently through interaction rather than recitation soto voce. A line or two on a character sheet stating that ‘Darro the cut-throat despises bullies’ is a rather anaemic abstract. ‘That time when Darro beat the odious pimp nearly to death’ is a visceral, meaningful and memorable event that establishes his character and contributes to - and perhaps even changes the course of - the story that is being told.

Finally, this method of emergent character creation allows characters to respond to the world with a greater degree of subtlety and variety that reflects the fact that ‘real people’ are bundles of hazily defined, inconsistent, inconstant impulses, drives, heuristics and opinions. The very act of writing down ahead of time an aspect of a personality in some senses freezes and flattens it and means that, in play, there is - whether conciously or not - an inhibition against doing anything that goes against that quality. But we don’t work like that. Our responses to people and events are much more malleable and can depend on very finely calibrated differences in circumstances of the kind that RPGs are almost uniquely placed to explore precisely because they are capable of presenting such an enormously wide variety of situations.

Next Time: Medieval Astral Magic for TTRPGs - Part Six - Venus