How to Run a Game (Part 25) - Just Do It

Everything in this series so far has consisted of things I've learned by running games, things I've learned by participating in games run by other people, or things I've learned from hearing about games that friends have been involved in.

If you only ever play in series of games run by one person, using one system, and the same group of players. All the tensions on the narrative are going to be similar no matter how many sessions you play. If you judge all roleplaying by that set of narrow experiences, it's a bit like judging all  TV shows even thought the only thing you've ever watched is the 90s sit-com Friends. If you say that it's rubbish, or you say that you've become bored of all TV because you've become bored of the one TV show you know, you may not realise that there's a lot more potential that you haven't explored yet....and you can even make your own. To further the analogy, if the only TV show you've watched is Friends, then the only kinds of TV shows you'll consider making will be derivatives of that particular brand of 90s sit-com. To pull the analogy back to gaming, if you've only ever played D&D with a particular person controlling the game, you'll think all games will have the follow that formula. 

Try different things, look at other games, look at the way other people run games. Identify what works for you, consider the thing that will pull the game in the kind of direction that promotes the type of experience you're aiming for. 

Don't be afraid to try things that might not provide the type of experience you want. The worst that can happen is that you'll now know that a specific combination of players, narrators and rules doesn't give you the experience you want. Yet, if you're experimenting for the sake of experimenting, you might happen upon an element in the game that does have the potential to be reused...and if you get a few of these from different systems, and different people involved, you might be able to refine them into something that's uniquely suited to your preferred session style.   

Don't be afraid to try new things.

So, if you're a player, try a few different games, and then step up to rnning a game of your own using techniques that you've enjoyed other people using. If you're narrating a game, don't get discouraged if your first attempts are erratic, just try something different.

There's a principle in education called the zone of proximal development. It's where people learn best, and where they have the most meaningful experiences. If a person is too embedded on their comfort zone, nothing much changes and no real development can occur. Conversely, if a person is too far out of their comfort zone, in a world where they have no grounding, anything they experience or learn has no context with their existing understanding... they may encounter dozens of new things, but nothing new has a solid point of referenced to the things they've previously encountered, and currently understand. Someone struggles to learn things when they're too far out of their comfort zone. So there's this point on the edge, between comfortable and uncomfortable where learning is most likely to happen.

Do things that are out of the ordinary? If they work, try a variation on them to work out why they worked? 

Side Note: a few of the facebook groups I'm in have had a spate of people asking questions about games that I've directly addressed in this series... 

Part 20 specifically handled this, but if was also basically covered in Part 18 and Part 9. There's still a thing about "game balance" in many groups, and a sense that everything should be "fair", yet I've often found that it's often in these groups where the most hard-core min-maxxers and munchkins hang out. Just one of life's ironies I guess. 

Here are all the issues I have with D&D laid out by someone else... There are much better game systems to introduce players to the hobby than D&D, but that's the one everyone knows, and arguably the one with the most gatekeepers lingering around it's groups. 

I guess that kind of makes it a good segway across to where I've been aiming to go with the next series here on the blog. I've been considering a return to the "Game Mechani(sm) of the week" concept, trying to focus on some new ideas that have arisen in the past 15 years (....really....it was 15 years ago that I did that series...???...). However, I'm thinking of doing it with a bit of a twist. I'm going to look at a bunch of ideas that can be ported across to different games, and consider how they might impact the flow of the game. Much like I suggested with the "Red-Amber-Green" light system. There are plenty of quirky little systems that can be found in assorted games, and quickly plugged into other games that dramatically change the experience and show that system does matter. I might even throw the ideas together at the end into some kind of book... we'll see.