Game Balance

There are all sorts of game balance ideas and theories. Adjacent to that sense of balance is also a player balance. In Robin's Laws of Good Game Mastering, he posits the following scale:

Running a game with a mix of player types can be difficult. The group I've been playing with for the last few years heavily leans to the storyteller side of things: the rules are not as important as the story we are telling. Unfortunately, I want to run and play in games that are a lot crunchier, as I like rules and knowing how things should work. I enjoy playing all games, but I like the idea of a structure behind things. Probably why I have so many books with rules for creating all sorts of world things: Spectacular Settlements, Dangerous Destinations, Organic Towns, and so forth. All these are rules for creating and maintaining the world around you.

Are they necessary? No, we can just make things up as needed. In one of the older OSE games one of the players wanted to create some things, and I have a book on crafting and stuff like that. He firmly rejected that as being too complicated, so we dropped it. Same for Traveller: as no one in my group enjoys most of the rules, the few unsuccessful times I ran a Traveller game the vast majority of the rules were hidden from the players. Not for me, as I had the NPCs take care of it. For me, those rules are part of what makes the game fun.

The last few games we played have been so rules lite that it was essentially just a game of make-believe, with some performative dice rolling that really did not make much of a difference. Which is okay: we've some good game masters that can pull that off. But I like rules and knowing how things work. Probably a good thing since I've been in software development my whole life, and that is all about rules and how things work.

But beyond player / GM preferences for how crunchy a game is, there is a balance to the humans playing the game. Our group is pretty diverse - from a teenage girl to guys in their 60s still playing after decades. Which is great as it brings all sorts of perspectives to the table. But we are also diverse in terms of politics, education, and social skills. As mentioned far too often, I am not great in social situations. I have what I call foot in mouth disease as what I say can often come out wrong. But I also cannot continually hold back when I see something that bothers me. And to be honest, I have held back a lot over the years. That came to a head the other day, and while I did not handle it particularly well, I do stand by my opinion. Having been made fun of in the past for how I spoke (I had years of speech therapy, and you can imagine how well other primary school children react to anyone who is different like that), it bothers me when people think it is funny to make fun of other people's impediments. To me that was not funny, it was cruel. And from that, our group may be dissolved after years of playing. 

Now, I could have handled it better. How it came out was me being all preachy and making everything a huge moral issue. Sadly, for me, a lot of things are moral issues. I do a lot of thinking, and I've been trained in critical thinking - that master's in liberal arts is all about thinking about things from a variety of viewpoints. I don't accept things at face value - I have to dig into them to see what the underlying truths are. And yes, there is some correlation to crunchiness here if we want to draw even more parallels. I've not always been a good person, and I am not always a good person now though I strive to be. And we've managed to brush off differences before but this time I think the others have also reached their limit in dealing with me and my social quirks. Pretty sure (and internet doctoring here and you know how reliable that is!) had I been born 40 years later I'd probably have a few labels on me. I know it is not a single issue here, nor is it all any one person's fault. But as per a text message later: "some people just shouldn't be around each other. It's natural to discover such things." 

So: looks like my RPG stuff will be solo mode for a while. Still hoping I can get my previous co-workers into an RPG game at some point, but that seems like a vanishingly small chance. And while there are other online groups out there, as much as it often overwhelms me, I really do prefer face-to-face playing. And I'd be far too nervous around others for the first few sessions, though it may be worth it after a while. We'll see what happens: one advantage of getting older is I have learned a lot of patience, even if some of my patience for what I see as a moral or ethical wrong has apparently grown smaller.

hey, is there a game here? Raccoon on the back deck

sometimes it may be better to not get what you want: pretty sure that the turkey can beat up my indoor cat Baby Bear