Hi Reader,

How are you? Please, come in, sit down. Dry off. Lately, it's like all the rain we missed in the summer has come at once.

This summer, I heard from an old friend about a disastrous game she played.

Her gaming group had just introduced a buddy of hers to role-playing. After enjoying their first campaign together, her buddy wanted to GM the next one.

So he did. For a year.

It turns out that in the first campaign, Buddy bristled against its safety tools—lines, veils, a certain amount of plot armor. So he made sure his campaign had none of that.

He also griefed the players. Somehow, their characters lost nearly every gold coin they gained. Supposed allies routinely stabbed them in the back. Games like D&D are supposed to be zero-to-hero, but the "hero" part never materialized. He nerfed them as they leveled up. One step forward, three steps back.

This was Buddy's idea of fun.

My friend said she and the others staged an intervention—sort of. "It's not you," they said. "It's the system, the game system sucks." Any white lie that would pull the ejector seat on that campaign, but not the friendship.

My friend told me darkly that Buddy was teed up to run the next campaign too, in a different system. Undaunted.

I cringed to hear her story. Because I did it once.

When I was twelve, I DM'd an ill-fated game for my best friend, the only player. I'd just read about the anti-paladin in The Best of Dragon Magazine. As the game went on, I worried it wasn't hard enough, so I kept larding on grim monsters and traps. I wanted to wallow in the awfulness, you know? The power. The evil. I wanted to be edgy.

What can I say, I was twelve.

I thought I would run a supremely challenging game. But I just ended up supremely frustrating Best Friend. I drove him to furious tears—one of the few times I’ve seen him like that. He let me have it.

In hindsight, I earned it. It was an early revelation about how deeply you affect the other people at the table.

While this problem isn’t unique to Dungeons & Dragons, D&D gives the "Dungeon Master" more power than any player in any game I've ever read. Power to shape everyone else's story.

And, whaddya know, weird things crawl out of a person's brain when they get that power. Things they don't recognize in themselves. Tabletop RPGs are collaboratively built dreamscapes, and we don't always recognize ourselves in our dreams.

All of which is to say—it's not just a game.

It's the hours that busy adults carve out for it. The dreamstuff we dare to share with each other. And the friendships we lay on the line. It's the bleed—those powerful emotions that stay with us long after the game is over.

So, as we step into this magic circle with each other, let's respect its deceptive strength and honor each other's choice to be there.

And use some fucking safety tools.

Cheers,
Chris

P.S. Much of the innovation in more recent story games is about sharing the GM's authority with the others. And much of the charm of OSR games comes from putting the GM as much at the whims of the dice as everyone else.

One of my joys in Defy the Gods—a story game with an OSR feel—has been to put world-building in the hands of the players. The players build the Pantheon and the City using the magic of pick lists. And, in the World Scene, an interlude between adventures, the players signal to the GM where the story should go by playing the antagonists for a moment.

P.P.S. Have you read a game that invests one player with more power than D&D's Dungeon Master? Let me know!