Todd Grotenhuis

I suspect you’ve probably had an experience like this at your game table:

GM: “Orcs of the Red Moon Clan have AC 18”

Player: “Ok, wish me luck. Rolling to attack!”

…later…

GM: “Let’s make that pick lock a DC 18 check.”

Player: vents, complains, debates, bickers, argues, or becomes sullen

Why does the player accept AC 18 without issue, but pushes back against DC 18? After all, these are mechanically equivalent!

Because psychologically, they are not. Games are played by humans, and humans react to dynamics, not just mechanics.

The example above is what I would call a shift to “external blaming”. Here you have someone behaving ok when they perceive the system as providing the adversity, but reacting poorly when they perceive the person as making it hard. In both cases, the system and the GM together shape the difficulty—regardless of how it feels. (e.g. the GM could have given that orc different armor, or chosen a different adversary.)

Blame isn’t always directed outward. Sometimes, players turn it inward instead. We might call that “internal blaming”. You’ve probably seen this occur most in systems with “bennies” (where you spend currency to do better on a check) or with “push your luck” mechanics (where you decide how much you want to risk for the result). Maybe the player hoards their bennies, afraid to ever spend them. Or chide themselves when they spend and still fail. Whereas before they blamed the GM (or in some cases other players), in this case, they are hard on themselves.

Both external and internal blaming usually decrease the fun for everyone involved.

“But Todd” you might say “why don’t you just not play with people who aren’t emotionally mature enough to not succumb to these patterns of behavior? Maybe those games just aren’t for them?”

Fair question, hypothetical-responder-person! But I refer you back to the point made earlier that “humans are who play games”. It’s hard enough to schedule a group to play, and most humans have something they are dealing with.

Like the old saying about places of worship, I haven’t found a perfect gaming table, because once I join, it’s no longer perfect.

Perhaps a more useful question is: “what kinds of games do we bring to the table?” In other words, we can select for games that are more resistant to the types of blame that people in the group are prone to. Or maybe in #gamedev we can design for more blame-resistance in general, especially since we don’t always know the people we’ll be playing with.

But how?

It helps to remember that #TTRPGs are not just a game, they are also a conversation. Conversations benefit from affordances or “doorknobs”.

(I’m giving you a moment to go read.)

So we can build in more affordances. A game can design for multiple routes to success (e.g. inventiveness/problem-solving, equipment/tools, skill/system mastery, careful planning, quick-thinking, stat-improvement, NPC-help, etc.) allowing different ways for players to tailor their experience towards the achieving outcomes. A game can have “dials” that can be adjusted to dial up or down the GM/player input on difficulty (e.g. how often are bennies granted). A game can shift more things to have the feel of being “the system” than the GM/players (e.g. roll-under stat vs. roll vs. DC). These, and more, can help mitigate the blame game.

As in most design, this is a spectrum and there are tradeoffs.

Even in the games I’m working on, I have a variety. There’s a card-based RPG that is more susceptible to internal-blame, because players choose the next mode of play and the card(s) they deploy. I also have a troupe LARP, which are notorious for external blame due to downtime-action decisions. I’ll seek to minimize that with clarity around downtime possibilities and resolution processes. I also have a D20 hack that is very blame-resistant due to player-facing rolls, roll-under, and many-modes-to success.

I am mostly wary of games that go very hard in one direction. They can devolve into arguing with (or silently resenting) the GM (i.e. external blame), or to frequently feeling anxious about your choices (i.e. internal blame). In my experience, games designed this way often sound really neat on paper, but are not fun for many groups of humans that you would bring to an actual table.

What about you? Have you experienced this at the table? Has it changed what you play, how you play, or how you design?