You Can’t Run Games in Anger

I’ve been formulating this post in my head for years. I hope it helps someone run better, kinder games. Including me—I’m talking about lessons that I have learned the hard way and still struggle with at times. This is mostly for the LARP side, as I’m going to talk about game committees that TTRPG GMs generally don’t have.

Anger

If you’re a gamerunner, you are absolutely, 100% going to experience frustration. The best kind of frustration is the one where everyone involved in your game is so excited that they want to talk to you about it all at once. Descending from there, you have the frustration of people wanting things from you, whether we’re talking about item tags or follow-up on in-game things or rules tweaks. There’s just so much to do, before, during, and after events or game sessions. (Most tabletop games don’t have the level of logistical lead-in or follow-up that LARPs do, but I don’t know your life.) I can’t begin to enumerate the other kinds of frustrations that can lead to anger.

Obviously, if your experience of LARP-running is strictly about one-shots, you still face frustrations and this is still for you to some degree, but maybe it’s different. Not my lane, ultimately.

No matter what, though, you can’t run a good game from a place of anger toward any of the players. No exceptions. Not when they’re breaking the rules (this needs a private conversation about sportsmanship, but you can’t have an effective conversation about sportsmanship in anger either), not when they’re doing something unsafe and your anger comes from fear for their health.

I am in no position to say that I’ve got anger all sorted out. None of us are perfect. But I’ve seen too many good things fall apart because the pressure of gamerunning ran someone out of patience. Within a LARP, this is why you have the rest of the committee: when something frustrates you, talk it out until you’re able to approach it with kindness, or delegate it to another staff member who has some distance from the issue.

Anger absolutely stops you from making good rulings on the fly. While you’re angry you can’t see past this moment to the other likely consequences. To put that another way, we can’t see past what will make us not feel the way we feel at that moment, so we’re gratifying our feeling. You’re also likely to cause negative consequences or bad outcomes for people other than the actual target of your anger, and I shouldn’t need to explain that collective punishment is wrong.

A very wise friend of mine once said, “If it feels good, don’t tweet it,” and (taking it out of its original Twitter context) that very much applies here. This part in particular applies not just to TTRPG GMs, but to TTRPG designers—if you’re replying to potential future players in frustration or anger, you’re not helping yourself or your game.

Sometimes this does mean saying “I can’t resolve this right now” or “I’m upset and can’t give you a fair answer right now.” “I need to consult with the rest of staff first” is a good response even when you’re not frustrated, because you owe it to them to keep them abreast of issues that are coming up.

Anger stops you from being a fan of the players. This one absolutely applies in TTRPGs as well as LARPs. If there’s no other piece of advice you take from anything in my entire corpus of writing, it’s that you need to be a fan of the players (a phrasing that I have obviously taken from Apocalypse World by D. Vincent Baker and Meguey Baker). Right now as I write this, I think that means putting effort into understanding what they want and why they want it when they’re doing something that causes you frustration.

Punishment

Break out of the punishment-based mindset. I know all about tabletop GMs punishing characters for players being obnoxious; I know all about “stupid should hurt” as a gamerunning idiom. There’s a crucial distinction to draw here: punishment is not the same as following through on established stakes. Being sure of the difference means thinking about exactly why you’re making choices as a GM.

Following through on stakes is when you’ve telegraphed that a choice in the game might have negative consequences for the character. These choices can be wonderful, exciting, heroic choices—like making sure that the negative consequence falls on your character rather than another PC or NPC—or just the price for accomplishing another goal.

In a recent session of our 4e game, my revenant PC walked into the bonfire that would carry him and the ghost of an innocent into the Lands of the Dead. It killed my character. Now, because he’s a revenant, I was pretty sure the DM would work with me to tell an interesting story about coming back to (un)life, but I also knew that this gesture of care and sacrifice would mean nothing if it got wiped away too quickly or easily.

Similarly, I’ve seen plenty of players in LARPs make intentional bargains with sinister powers, whether we’re talking about cannibal cults in the Weird West or the wicked Baron Ystorin and his Bone Archers in Wildlands South or undead pirates in King’s Gate. (…all three of these are the same player.) This isn’t stupidity and a punishment mindset won’t help you bring about a satisfying story. At the risk of speaking for that player—if you include that content in your game, be prepared to support it and have it go somewhere interesting. Otherwise, give clear “this is the point at which we think the character must become an NPC” guidance. Don’t just go full steam ahead on escalating consequences; that creates a situation of one-upsmanship where both sides go home unhappy.

Instead, have an out-of-character sidebar with that player about the gameplay experience they’re looking for and the gameplay experience you have the resources to support. You probably can’t support a ton of encounters where they get to do evil stuff in secret, without any other PCs knowing. It’s also not really fair to the rest of the players to pressure them to accept actions that violate their characters’ moral stances, just so the edgiest player in the room can have a good time. If the player wants an edgier game than you’re able to support (in gamerunning resources, or emotionally), say that. They can either make a new choice or look for another game that does support that approach to play.

Okay, that covers heroic choices and dark bargains. What about other kinds of bad choices that characters make? First off, ask yourself how well you signaled the consequences, and whether the player had a way to understand the choice they were making. There’s nothing wrong with revealing story and characterization through consequences, resulting in unexpected consequences—but instant death isn’t a good choice here, because that character doesn’t get to do a lot of learning.

Also consider that not every player is read into your story to the same level, no matter how hard you’re trying. Some players are deeply invested and great at putting the pieces of their own experiences and the stories they’ve heard from other players into one coherent story. Others are invested in the thing in front of them right now, and no one has explained the broader story to them, or someone did but this player didn’t have enough context to follow it. You don’t need to sculpt all game consequences to the least-informed player, of course, but when the consequences of an action don’t need to be immediate, it’s okay to ask yourself whether the player might have acted out of lack of understanding.

Policy Violation

There are, of course, also ways for players to make harmful choices that need a different kind of consequence. No amount of “don’t run games in anger” should be taken as “so you have to tolerate sex pests or harassers.” Creating and maintaining a safe community is more important than anything else in this post. These kinds of problems often do result in temporary or permanent bans from a game. It’s still important not to act out of anger if you can instead make sure you have the facts in order. I’m stopping my point about this here, though, because it rapidly moves outside the scope of what I want to say with this post.

Conclusion

So, to recap:

Out-of-character anger isn’t a constructive emotion for collaborative storytelling.
Your job is not teaching through punishment, which is a bad approach anyway.
You’re here to present the world and the story, which has consequences that are usually well-established in the narrative—not punishment.
Punishing a group of people for a small number of them doing the wrong thing is wrong even if you’re pro-punishment.
Even when you need to protect people within your community, anger and a punishment mindset aren’t leading you toward the best exercise of that duty.

Brandes Stoddard

Harbinger of Doom