(Adam West voice) "Actually, Robin..."

So this book, Robin's Laws of Good Game Mastering exists. Moreover, Robin Laws, its author, exists. And designs games.

There is a lot of good in Robin's Laws and much that is worthy of respect. It's presumably based on the kind of playing-different-games-over-and-over-and-over-with-lots-of-different-people kind of experience that few folks outside industry veterans really have. It has many excellent tidbits of wisdom for a volume of its relative slimness.

But, naturally, I'm going to talk about the stuff I don't like. Mostly because the stuff I don't like is the kind of thing that shows up in GM advice a lot. And if it was worth Robin Laws writing this book (which enough people thought it was that it won an Origins award), it is worth talking about the grain of salt it should be swallowed with.

There are two basic things I don't like and one is more practical than the other but I think they are (unfortunately) related.

The less practical one and more annoying one first. It is so familiar and such a cliche you hear it about RPGs from people outside the gaming world all the time. Laws says this:

The vast majority of successful roleplaying games are power fantasies. They give players the chance to play characters vastly more competent than themselves -- or, for that matter, anyone else in the world as we know it. In power fantasy, PCs always have a good chance of vanquisihing foes; in some games, players can even assume that their enemies will be conveniently distributed by threat level. The power fantasy lies at the very heart of the adventure genre, in books and movies as well as games. It offers a generally optimistic view of life,. There's no shame in enjoying this fantasy, and GMs who embrace and understand it tend to keep players longer than those who don't.

This is sloppy thinking and kinda condescending. I, for just one, would way rather be me than a lot of people I've played in an RPG (you could make a decent case that, other than climbing walls and picking locks, I am better at pretty much everything than Blixa the thief) and I know I enjoy my game in a way that is in no sense unique.

Now:

maybe many...

maybe most...

maybe the vast majority...

maybe the commercially most important segment...

...of adventure genre fans are in it for the power fantasy, but this analysis fails to account for so many of the essential details of so much of what goes on in a good adventure story that it's harmful to base a philosophy of gaming (or adventure stories in general) on it.

If I was gonna put Robin on the shrink couch the way he has just put all gamers on the shrink couch I'd say he's just internalized the embarrassment people have wanted him to feel all his life about being into nerdy things and so is having trouble seeing them as performing pretty much the same function all creative things do and seeing that as an essentially good and worthwhile thing.

Also, like peeps in or near any creative field, Laws--like so many gamers--has taken the perfectly reasonable and accurate observation that most things in the medium were not designed for people like him and turned that into the understandable (and pretty universal) emotion I kinda don't like a huge segment of this hobby and what they want and then turned that into the unreasonable proposition there must be something fundamentally reptile-brain about the activity itself and I don't feel entirely good about feeling good about it.

Some of the smartest and most creative gamers I know feel this way. They are afraid if they start to admit gaming isn't basically just escapism then they might get a swelled head and start putting on airs, which terrifies them because then they'll be the segment of the gaming population (theoretically) responsible for everything they hate in the hobby. Better to maintain a certain reserve, like Wallace Stevens did about his poems--continuing to sell insurance even after he won the nobel prize, or like some fantastic horror movie director who moans about never having made a "serious" film.

A lot of this may simply be because, being properly reverent of their favorite movies and writers, they haven't realized that art isn't actually serious.

Long story short: No, gaming isn't fundamentally any less ambitious and real than anything else you do for fun, it's just like in any creative endeavor--most stuff is going to suck if we assume the standard is the taste of an individual observer.

The term "fantasy" has (I'm sure I've said this before) two parts: "wish fulfillment" and "inventions". "Wish fulfillment" makes you feel better about yourself (and then, afterwards, possibly much worse--as in coming down from a dream), "inventions" make you think about stuff.

Tales of invention very often are centered around adventure for a great structural reason: Because adventure allows you to see way more of an invented world and how it is put together than psychological drama or a comedy of manners or any other literary genre. This is true for adventure fiction even in worlds that are not invented: crime movies are about all the internal bits of how cities work that you get to explore if you try to subvert the normal day-to-day life it's there to support (this is how banks verify peoples' identities, this is how international shipping works, this is where heroin comes from...), Indiana Jones and James Bond see the world and interact with cultures and animals and machines in it because they land face first in it and then have to run, even Godzilla movies are partially about architecture and how Tokyo is interconnected and about the audience getting to see all of that in action in an intensified way (and notice how much worse Godzilla movies are when they stop being about that, Matthew Broderick). (And notice that the kind of adult who would happily watch a Godzilla movie is often the same adult who would happily watch a documentary about how Tokyo works.)

Adventure is always as much about the world and its contrivances and the complex joinery that holds it together as it is about violence. The same way history and technology and all the other nonfiction things people who are into adventure fiction also typically dig are.

Maybe it's because I paint all day for a living and so exist in a field (unlike game design) that has centuries of people explaining why it's totally worthwhile behind it, but it's pretty obvious to me that a picture I like is no more there to stroke my ego than a meatball is.

If you play basketball, and like it, a big part of that is some chemicals in your brain that genetically know that what you are doing is exercising your muscles and that is good for the organism's survival and so the organism sends you chemicals like "Hey, this is fun, keep doing this! It's exercising me."

Good stories do the same thing: you are exercising your mind. (Tell it like it is, Pollux.) Unfamiliar, exotic propositions and ways of looking at things are pinging around in your brain and that feeling of anticipation is the unconscious feeling of all your neurons firing off trying to figure out where it's all going and make a pattern out of it and try to use what's going on to dream up a way to kill leopards or find fruit or score. Now it may result in insights no more useful to you than the calories in your breakfast, but if you aren't bored, it's because you're exercising the system in a significant way. Art that is genuinely involving makes you smarter.

Now, yes, there are ways to set up aesthetic situations so that they appeal to peoples' egos (like the fancy wine trick where you tell stupid people that wine is expensive and it literally, in their brain, tastes better) but that is, at most, half the story. Your PC is an alternate you, yes, but it is also a tool to explore and help create an adventure--it is your eyes and ears as you watch a story unfold, and a tool to invent with using that framework.

This is not just escapism--this is doing what all creative things do, and saying "The power fantasy lies at the very heart of the adventure genre"--unless the author is only referring to crappy airport novels--is selling Jack Vance and HP Lovecraft seriously motherfucking short along with all the games derived from the kinds of things they wrote. And most schlock fiction is schlock because it takes for granted innovations made by genuinely good fiction: that is, there is something of artistic merit at the bottom of any genre. What lies at the very heart of adventure fiction is invention. Invented things, invented situations, and inventions of language that give those things intellectual and emotional impact.

Now, yeah, crappy airport novels based only on letting people pretend they are someone and somewhere other than who and where they are sell well, and I'm sure many gamers just play paladins so they don't have to think about how they are air conditioner repairmen, but getting to the awesome part of this hobby (like getting to the awesome parts of adventure literature) means understanding and having respect for the part of it that is not that at all.

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Now the second thing, which is more practical as a GM and that I think is kinda based on the first thing:

Laws, like many people in the history of GMing advice, treats players--structurally--as problems.

Like: there are these different kinds of gamers and you need to entertain different ones in different ways and they may become bored if this or that and they need to be fed these things and these ones need systems like this, etc.

Now this is understandable for two reasons:

1. Robin's book is a book of GMing advice and advice usually is about solving problems,

and

2. As a con-game-running RPG pro, Laws may be kinda forced, more than those of us for whom "friendly" play is the norm, to think of players in an assembly-line sense and as people he works for.

However, this point of view has practical effects on his gaming advice (and on gaming advice in general) which makes it less useful than it could be.

The big idea of the book is familiar to probably everybody reading this: there are categories of gamers. For Laws, in keeping with the "you are here to deliver the power fantasy" philosophy, gamers each have different emotions they need to experience, these are:

The Powergamer, who wants an ever-more tricked out PC.

The Butt-Kicker, who wants to vicariously kill shit.

The Tactician, who wants to feel smart.

The Specialist, who wants to feel like a certain kind of character (a ninja, a catgirl, etc).

The Method Actor, who wants to have a chance to act.

The Storyteller, (three guesses), and

The Casual Gamer, who just wants to roll with pals.

Now Laws readily admits most player defy easy categorization and that overlap is possible, but the problem for me is that, even as elementary particles, these categories are at worst caricatures, and at best descriptions of some actual extant people who nevertheless suck and are a drag on your game and the first law of good game mastering should be: Do not play with anyone who matches the descriptions here.

He doesn't show what's going on in the players' heads here as creative or inventive or expressive, just as wells of emotional need. In the most literal sense: negative (there to take stuff) and not positive (there to give stuff and make stuff).

Every player's heart goes pitpat when they hear about a shiny new ability they can have--but if you have a player doing that just because it will make the person in their imagined fantasy life have more superpowers and therefore that will make them feel more awesome than they are and there is no (conscious or otherwise) element of "Wow, if I can do flying ninja kicks for triple damage, that means we're going to be expected to have a crazy new kind of Big Trouble In Little China adventure where flying triple damage ninja kicks are necessary to survive!" then that person needs to get away from your table, go away from all other game tables, and go where they belong: onto a forum on the internet where they can sit down and complain about their fictional impotence full time.

I think a good book of GM advice needs to remember that players are not just an audience (though they are that) but also a resource:

I don't have a Power Gamer who just wants to trick out his or her PC, I have a Power Gamer who sees tricking out the PC as the key to getting to play the game a whole new way with whole new tools every few levels and that's neat, I don't have a Butt Kicker who just wants to kill shit, I have a Butt Kicker with charismatic, expressionistic, totally metal bloodthirst and heedless doorkicking that you wouldn't trade for 100 Klaus Kinskis because of the energy she adds to the game, I don't have a Tactician who wants to feel smart, I have a tactician who actually is tactically creative like any chess player and enjoys exercising that ability and getting better at it because it's a useful way to be able to think, I don't have a Specialist who wants to feel like a special snowflake, I have a Specialist who extends her imagination to the world described and can appreciate it because she responds to it like she's really in it and thereby notices stuff nobody else would, I don't have a Method Actor who wants to hog the spotlight in the scene, I have a Method Actor who can create a scene out of some half-assed random encounter by deciding it's important and engaging it and so make it engaging for everybody else, I don't have a Storyteller who wants to warp the game to fit some story arc, I have a Storyteller who is able to show everybody else playing where the story is in what looks like a chaotic mess, and I don't have a Casual Gamer whose detachment makes her just sit there bored with what everybody else is doing, I have a Casual Gamer whose detachment makes her really fucking funny.

And that's the half of designing an adventure and running it that's neglected all too often in GM advice, from Robin's Laws (feed the animals on time!) to GNS theory (keep the animals separate!) to DMGs (remember you're the boss of the animals!): the players and you and the game have been assembled to have a kind of fun that is more than the sum of its parts. And the GM and the game product are not the only positive coefficients. While convention GMing all day may have turned some RPG pros into machines capable of receiving, reading and rewarding a player in minutes flat unaided, what most of us need is a way to use what the players bring to the table to help each other have fun.

Design your adventure so the Power Gamer tells the Butt Kicker why they want the thingy and the Butt Kicker gets the Tactician to make a plan to get the thingy so she'll have something to hit and the Tactician asks the Specialist to reconnoiter the thingy and the Specialist gets in there and notices the owner and tells the Method Actor to distract the owner of the thingy with weird drama and the Storyteller volunteers to run right past while they're talking and the Butt-Kicker is fighting because dying would still be pretty cool if it was in the name of getting the thingy and the Casual Gamer is like Seriously you guys are freaking the fuck out about this thingy and it's funny, have a beer and let's fucking do this thing.

And you can't help them do that if you are condescending to the whole business. You are not just escaping and helping them escape, you are making. Making what? Making fun--which is the best thing there is to make. It is human existence's most important activity and you just do all the things you are "escaping" from in order to support it. As well you should.

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