The Gilded Griffon stands at the village’s edge, deep in the unexplored frontier, its weathered stone walls are bathed in torchlight, the sign of a majestic griffon hanging above the door. Inside, the scent of roasting meat and exotic spices fills the air, while shadows dance across scarred oak tables. A grand hearth crackles, its mantle adorned with ancient weapons and relics of past adventures. Patrons from distant lands murmur in hushed tones, and a minstrel’s haunting melody drifts through the room. Behind the bar, a silver-haired barkeep watches with a knowing eye, recognizing you with a nod as adventurers looking for work.

DM: What do you want to do?

This is the moment, this is how D&D kind of started for me. Not this exact start, but it’s how I imagined it. I was 10 years old, it was 1985, I was for the first time invited to a D&D game, I had my 1st level fighter (Darius) character sheet in front of me and all I knew about the game I was about to play was that my job was to pretend I was this fighter in a fantasy world in which terrible monsters existed.

It was a magical moment, one that would define how I would spend my free time over the next 4 decades. It made me a prolific reader, it drove a lifelong passion for creativity, and resulted in the most memorable friendships of my life.

As far as the game went there was an important discovery that I would not make until nearly 40 years later about how and why this moment was not only unique but why I would spend the next 40 years trying to re-create it every time I sat at a gaming table.

See the magic of this moment is not about nostalgia, it’s not really about old-school gaming, or the OSR, or something about the “edition of the game” or game mechanics specifically either. There were many theories I and others would come up with that would try to explain this moment and why D&D back then was different than today and what has changed and why but they would all turn out to be dead wrong.

The magic of this moment it turns out was simply that, I didn’t know what was about to happen and I was not following any script filled with assumptions. There was nothing that happened before the game other the mechanical work of producing an abstract character which we knew nothing about except a race and class and maybe a name. Meaning, I had virtually no information about the game I was about to play. All I knew was that I was a “Fighter” and that meant I knew how to use weapons and armor, a generalization at best. I knew that the goal of the game was to explore the game world (somehow) and we were told by the DM that “you can do whatever you want, go wherever you want”.

The question was “Why”? Why would I go anywhere? I was instructed that as a 1st level fighter, I was not very good at fighting yet, that I would need more experience (which notably I was unsure how to get), and that the world outside of the tavern was dangerous and you could die easily.

Here was the thing, It was scary and though I just made this character, I was already quite attached to Darius. The act of writing down his name on a funny looking, but intriguing page called a character sheet had built him up in my head, he wasn’t just a “character”, he was a person I cared about and I didn’t want him to die, I didn’t want to do anything “stupid” that would put him at risk. The DM was well known for cruelly tearing up character sheets of dead characters right there at the table, we had all heard this rumor, so I knew and believed in the danger of the game.

But the DM of course did not make my life easy. He said, “You are hungry and thirsty and tired as you have traveled many weeks to get here and are low on supplies”. The DM told me that you can die of thirst and hunger and you can even die from exhaustion. So we did the natural and perhaps predictable thing, (we being a couple of my friends in similar situations with similar characters in our adventuring party) we walked into the tavern, ordered food and drink, and asked for rooms so that we could rest. It seemed logical and it was our idea, our plan, we made the decision to do that, our first act as role-players. It felt powerful, even though it was very simple.

The DM then, in the voice of the tavern keeper told us that this would cost 2 silver for the food and drink and 3 silver for a night in a room. And in that moment, that split second of pretending to exist as characters in a fantasy world, we all realized what this game was really about. We were about to spend the rest of the money we had collectively together just to eat and sleep for a day. If we didn’t get more money soon, we would probably die of thirst and hunger, it was the harsh reality of the game.

We….. needed money!

And so a purpose was born, we were adventurers, fighters, clerics, and thieves and we needed money because we were just about out of it and we had no jobs and no way to make more and so the game truly began. We were promptly approached by an old thief who had a treasure map of a ruin nearby and offered us 100 gold, not to explore it, but just to find the entrance hidden somewhere in the nearby forest. You can’t imagine what an exciting moment that was. We had a mission..ney, a quest and it felt real, it felt important. We were role-playing and it didn’t take much to get us there.

There was no session zero, no elaborate rules or explanations, no backstory writing, and no “defining” anything about what was about to happen. We relied on our natural and very basic instincts and imagination to create a game of make-believe that we would make every bit as real to us as the world we lived in. We were playing Dungeons and Dragons, a magical fantasy world of pretend, not rules.

This was Dungeons and Dragons to me from 1985 well into 1995. That little gaming group was together for over 10 years and though my fighter from that first session would quickly perish in a terrible incident with a Gelatinous Cube as did many characters that followed, I will never forget him, his adventures, or any of the characters I played in Dungeons and Dragons during these years. Oddly, I never wrote a single word about them down, yet I remember each with crystal clear clarity. I remember their deeds, their adventures, how they grew into power and often how their story ended tragically in some dungeon as we (the avatar and I) pursued our ambitions in the game.

This is Fantasy Adventure, this is what D&D was and I have to be honest and this will make me sound like an old Gronard, but it was so much better, so much more fun and narrative than anything that happens at a gaming table in the modern day. A fact that would plague my group for the many years that followed.

Is it possible to learn this power?

In 1995 my group had been together for 10 years, we had played through 1st and 2nd edition AD&D and while we loved our games, like all gamers do we started noticing that there were “other games” and everyone wanted to try their hand at some new stuff. After all, we loved D&D and we loved role-playing so, doing it with other settings and rule systems sounded awesome. It sounded amazing to be a Jedi in the Star Wars universe, or a Highlander or a Star Trek Captain. The opportunities of other games were very attractive to us and we began exploring them.

For about 5 years we went through what I would call a sort of “role-playing ring around the rosy”. We played everything that wasn’t D&D you could think of. All the world of darkness stuff, various science-fiction games and every system under the sun from GURPS to Warhammer Fantasy. You would be hard-pressed to name a game my group and I didn’t try, we did it all, and nothing was off the table.

It was fun, and I really want to nail this point home here that no one was disappointed, we really enjoyed these games, but….. We all realized by around 1998 that we didn’t get together as often, campaigns didn’t last as long, people got bored and often games died when people didn’t show up to sessions, and really, the entire “magic” of D&D that kept our crew fully dedicated for 10 years prior was missing from all of these games. These games were all a bit empty, absent of the magic and wonder that we found in D&D. By 2000 we barely even played RPG’s anymore.

Then 3rd edition D&D came out and we of course got excited again. We all got back together with fresh new books in hand, everyone read every rule, cover to cover and we were ready to play, invigorated by the hopeful return to those amazing and magical D&D games which at this point were distant, nostalgic memories. There was a promise of a new golden age, a return to the wonderful world of Dungeons and Dragons that we all missed, that in our eyes was “true role-playing”, the only game that ever really gave us that intangible gaming experience.

By 2002, role-playing in our group was all but over. 3rd edition D&D, even though it was Dungeons and Dragons and felt very familiar just had no magic in it, that much was clear. There was no excitement, no mystery, and no mystical spirit in the game. The rules were convoluted and far too explicit and we argued about their abstracted representation of the game worlds living in our head constantly. These rules killed the imagination because they sought to place it with game mechanics.

In many ways, the rules of the game became the only point of any conversation about D&D between us, we no longer wondered about what D&D was, or what mysteries were hidden within its intangible imaginary words. We spent an ungodly amount of time instead trying to fix the rules as we fought among ourselves and the world (internet) over them. To put it plainly, it just wasn’t fun anymore, the year was 2002 and Dungeons and Dragons was over, it was dead and 3rd edition would create 2 decades of terrible game design that would slowly drown out any life D&D had in it. I know that is cruel to say and one might even challenge its accuracy given the popularity of 5th edition, but, modern D&D is popular in the same way McDonalds is popular. It’s a processed and manufactured game for the masses, reduced to the most basic, lowest common denominator. When I tell people about the intangible magic of D&D, they call be a Gronard, a relic that doesn’t know what he is talking about. For a time, I almost believed it.

Our group was pretty much fully disbanded by 2003 and I would not play D&D or anything else with any of those guys until nearly 2 decades later. I did continue playing with other groups myself though. As much as I enjoyed the many people I shared RPG experiences with over the years the games were simply never as good as those original AD&D experiences of the mid 80’s and 90′.

In fact, most of the time I was quite bored and have continued to be quite bored with most role-playing games since, it’s really a rare game that even marginally excites me these days even though I’m constantly chasing that dragon. I still like playing them, I still enjoy the pursuit, but more in a conceptual and philosophical way rather than actually playing. When I play, most of the time, I’m just disappointed that these games are just not as good, not as much fun and lack that intangible spirit of the classic D&D that we played for over a decade in the 80’s and 90’s.

So what really happened? What is the problem with other games? Why is there no magic, no spark, no heart in any of these other RPG including the latest and greatest versions of D&D from Wizards of the Coast? Why did Dungeons and Dragons die around the 00’s? Did it die or did I change?

Not from a Jedi..

I have contemplated this for years, I have researched, I have reflected, I have tested a wide range of theories to try to understand what was so special, what it was that was so unique and/or different that altered the experience and made it so much better in those 80’s and 90’s D&D games that I find missing in modern RPG’s and the modern RPG experience?

For a time I wrote it off as nostalgia and my age. I was between 10 and 20 years of age when I played AD&D, I’m nearly 50 now, it was during a much simpler time in my life and I just presumed that back then I just had more imagination, more energy, and more appreciation that today I lack. The game didn’t change, I changed.

It seemed like a fair and reasonable assessment, one I could accept, but…. then something magical happened. Almost like a fairy tale, as if some genie appeared out of thin air and granted me the wisdom I needed to understand and to find perspective and of course a little help from a little show, maybe you heard of it “Stranger Things”.

A friend of mine called me up, an old friend from my old gaming group and said “Hey, the old crew wants to get back together and play some D&D, we want to do an AD&D 1st edition one-shot”.

I thought to myself, holy shit yes.

I have the high ground..

In the first 30 seconds of our first session, I was back in 1985 as a 10-year-old playing Dungeons and Dragons for the first time. It required nothing more than the DM using the old formula, the most basic introduction and the simplest core element of D&D to bring it all back.

There was nothing to it, we made characters, essentially randomly generating them as one would in AD&D. Made some basic choices about equipment and who would play what roles, we gave our characters names and we were dropped into the game world with a very basic plot hook to “investigate the evil temple”. It all fell perfectly into place like dominos.

That moment I realized that this game had more story, those characters had more meaning and this game had more role-playing magic than everything I have done at the table for the last 20 years combined. I recall writing entire books of lore, of story, players writing 20-page backgrounds in preparation for a game, doing session 0’s, and endlessly preparing mass plots for my players and none of it compared to the simplicity of the game we were about to play. By comparison, those experiences were lifeless husks, meaningless, about the equivalent of doing your taxes for fun.

So, what was the secret? How did I go from RPG’s feeling dead inside to being back in 1985 as a 10-year-old playing and feeling Dungeons and Dragons again? What did this magical DM do to bring it all back?

Actually, it was pretty simple. It turns out, that it’s not nostalgia, it’s not age or some sort of expertise of the DM, there is no secret knowledge or method. It wasn’t even the system or an edition of the game really, though I do hold that 1st edition AD&D allows classic Fantasy Adventure to happen a lot easier. In the end it was just the simplicity of the role-playing philosophy the system brought to the forefront, plain and simple. It didn’t need to be AD&D and you didn’t need weird old-school rules, what you needed was a system that just got out of your way. That cleared the path for the imagination and allowed you to experience the world in your mind without a lot of input and rules to govern your thoughts and instruct you about what you can and cannot do.

In our game we didn’t have skills and feats and countless “buttons” to press. We had to make decisions, use our imagination, and form plans and our actions weren’t mechanical executions, they were narrative ones. This is what Fantasy Adventure was and in a sense, I feel always should be. I was filled with regret because I realized in that moment that we could have been doing this all along for the last 20 years. There was nothing keeping us from playing this way, but we got distracted and wasted 20 years of gaming out of stubbornness.

For years I had been playing every system under the sun, every game, under every DM, every format, every style, using every method you could imagine. Oddly enough, it never occurred to me to pick a system that just did a lot less, I always thought the more robust the mechanics and infrastructure of the game the more direction you had. So it was just about finding that right system that had the right balance of mechanics. It never occurred to me that the only thing that I actually ever had to do was just to apply the old Gygaxian philosophy about running an RPG, good old 1st edition AD&D thinking was all that was needed.

The feeling, the intangible quality, and the wonder of that moment that made D&D this unique, one-of-a-kind experience, it was all right there perfectly preserved and it wasn’t in rules so much as it was just a philosophy, a way to think and a method to approach the game.

Make a character, give them a name, drop him into the world and see what happens. That’s it…. that’s the magic.

The dark side of the force is a pathway to many abilities some consider to be unnatural..

It’s true and I have to be honest about this, it was awkward. Playing 1st edition AD&D after years of modern mechanics felt strange but It was the philosophies of AD&D that made all the difference, which in modern game design and modern gaming culture are seen as barbaric and out of date. Hell some even consider using such philosophies antimine to role-playing, as if using them somehow makes you a terrible person.

Does that mean I like THAC0? Am I fan of descending armor class or 1 gold = 1 XP? Am I ok with female characters having reduced max strength or racial ability scores?

hmmm… I want to say no, I really do. I feel like AD&D is like the dark side of the force, that lures you to it by some dark power, some evil energy that is quick, dirty, and easy to attain. That somehow by using this game I have become a lesser man… but then I think about it and realize that…. well, it’s only a game and I think that is the trouble I have always had.

You see, in around the 90’s “being a role-player” became this very serious thing. It was an identity and there was a definitive “right way” to role-play and the right way to setup an RPG campaign. You had to write a really big backstory for your character, it was absolutely paramount. Your DM was expected to take those backstories and write a massive plot with twists and turns that incorporated your backstory into the campaign. You needed to have many many books of rules and options to make sure that the players could “fine-tune” the vision of their characters. There were so many new cultural RPG requirements, things that still persist to this very day that if you don’t follow you are not really role-playing, you are not a good GM or player and, probably you should just not be playing RPG’s if you can’t follow these cultural norms. It is considered virtuous to play this way, it makes you a better person. This is the weird mindset of modern gamers.

More than that, in modern gaming it has become synonymous with using old game systems like AD&D to be a bigot, sexist and homophobic, so not only are you not a virtuous person for not buying into modern gaming cultural norms and expectations, but you are clearly an evil person if you play these old games that teach this old philosophy.

I realized recently however that this is a hobby, I do it for fun, and I think a big part of the reason why I and so many role-players feel kind of lost in finding the game is that we have created way too many rules for ourselves as barriers to entry. Both culturally and literally. I mean as players and GM’s we have far too many expectations, and place far too many demands on the games and as gamers, we demand way too many rules and mechanics to “support role-playing”, a concept that should never even be part of a conversation about the game in my opinion. We have sort of broken the spirit of the original D&D game and modern games never really tried to understand, how and what this spirit was and so it never found its way into other RPG’s. We sort of killed the magic with our own ignorance and pride.

What I want is to feel the energy and the magic of D&D, that thing that Gary Gygax and his cohorts invented not how the pretenders that followed him tried and failed to re-invent. I want to have THE D&D experience and the only way I know how to do that is with these older systems like AD&D and B/X systems which have that magical simplicity instilled in them, but I don’t think that is the only way to do it.

Today gamers and game designers are making the same discoveries and it catching on. ShadowDark for example won 4 Ennie awards, a game that instills the classic gaming philosophies and uses a modern, digestible system to do it and actually does a masterful job of bringing that magic to the table.

I am Vinz, Vinz Clortho, Keymaster of Gozer. Volguus Zildrohar, Lord of the Sebouillia. Are you the Gatekeeper?

It’s the original, it’s the classic, it’s the only true D&D experience and this is not conjecture, it’s not opinion, it’s not even objective truth, it just is AD&D and games that follow its philosophy like ShadowDark. I know that sounds like gatekeeping but it really isn’t.

To gatekeep you have to want to keep people out and I’m trying to do the opposite, I’m trying to let people in on this strangely kept secret. There is a game that exists and you probably haven’t played it, even if you have been playing role-playing games for years, even if you have been playing D&D. It’s truly a magical experience but it only exists under one philosophy, using one very specific playstyle built into the classic game of D&D. Its a very explicit act to play AD&D and games like it, it doesn’t follow any of the cultural gaming rules of modern RPG’s and lives outside of the sphere of influences on which most modern RPG’s actually function today. Modern RPG’s are not based on AD&D, they are based on 3rd edition D&D which is an entirely different thing.

For this magical, intangible experience, there is only one path, only one way and it lays between the pages of the 1st edition Advanced Dungeons and Dragons Dungeon Masters Guide. It took me 40 years to realize it, hopefully, you won’t have to wait that long and thankfully that magic is finding its way into other modern games so you don’t even have to go out searching for copies of 1st edition AD&D.

In the last 30+ years, I have experienced a wide range of role-playing games both from the perspective of the GM and the perspective of a player. Many were successful, but quite a few were not while some only marginally so.

Today I’m going to talk about what I think separates a great campaign from a mediocre one, the pitfalls and traps that lead to failed campaigns, and perhaps most importantly what a good GM should be doing to ensure their campaign starts and ends on good footing.

Now I will admit that I have a very unique take on running role-playing games, it definitely does not fall into the “normal” advice category. I would imagine in fact that the instinct of most GM’s as they read this article will be to disagree and that is fine, it’s just an opinion in a sea of opinions. More advice is better than less advice, so I humbly submit my take on the subject, do with it what you will.

Role-playing games are not about story

We start with the most controversial but in my opinion, most objectively true thing about role-playing games and the universally hardest truth to bare for GM’s. Good role-playing games are never about good stories. They are always about gaming systems.

So here is the thing, if you ask any player why they want to play a role-playing game almost all will tell you “for the story” and in large part, I would imagine it’s also why most DM’s would claim they want to run a role-playing game. It’s the greatest lie always told, but it is always pure, unadulterated, utter and complete bullshit.

The test is quite simple, pick a system a player or group doesn’t like and see if they still want to play. They won’t want to play that game and even if they do, the game will fail no matter how good the story is. Why? If the game is about a story, why would what system you pick matter or cause your campaign to fail if you have done a great job on the story? Why do so many people choose D&D and not GURPS? Why do people pick complex systems like Pathfinder 2e, rather than simple systems like 1st Edition Basic?

The answer is simple, system is everything. Role-playing games are first and foremost games, it’s the systems that get people to sit at the table, it’s what is exciting about the gaming experience and hobby that is role-playing. If I propose running 1st edition Basic to a 5e group, they will reject that game and likely viciously attack me for even suggesting that their precious 5th edition D&D could be replaced by another system. Vice versus, if I walk into an OSR group of old school gamers and suggest that we play Pathfinder 2e their would be absolutely no chance. They would simply rather burn all of their books and never play a role-playing game for the rest of their lives again, than play in a modern gaming system. System matters a lot to people, its not just a game often times, its practically an ID card, your identity as a role-player. People don’t just have strong opinions about what systems and playstyles they like, they are irredemably loyal to them.

Why? I’m a great DM, I have been running games for my gaming group that they themselves without any prompting from me called “the greatest role-playing experience of their lives”. Why would my group with so much faith in my ability to run a great role-playing experience outright reject a game I want to run based on the system I’ve chosen if the game is in fact about story?

The reality is that story is a byproduct, an important albeit side benefit of playing a role-paying game. We all love story, I do not question that, it’s very much a core desire/outcome of the game and why we are drawn to the game, even so far as to stretch the truth and claim it to be the main reason for wanting to play to begin with. The harsh reality is that RPG hobbyists are gamers first and foremost and the game mechanic is a central component of what creates the experience at the table. The story lives as a layer that becomes the output/outcome of the experience, but no one can ever be excited about entering into a gaming social contract without a system they are excited to execute it with. The story will never save your game, a good system always will.

Why is this important knowledge for any GM? It’s very simple. Never, under any circumstance convince yourself that the system you want to run is going to create a good role-playing experience for your players unless they are excited about the system as well. Your players have to choose the system, they have to be excited about it, and they have to love it and bare its torch. If a group has even the most minor complain about the system you have chosen, your campaign is already dead and you will never be able to do resolve that. It’s the single most important decision you will make that will define whether your campaign will find success or failure. The system matters that much, more than any other choice you make.

Remember that, accept it, and embrace it. You can write a shitty, linear story in a system your players love and it will be a booming success, alternatively, you can write a masterpiece for a system your players hate and the game will fail miserably. Never forget that, it’s the best advice I can offer after 30+ years of running games. There is no fix for this and the reality is that most games that fail, fail because of this one reason. Don’t let it happen to you.

The busier the system, the shorter the campaign

Most GM’s, when they sit down to create a campaign for their players imagine playing it for years, spinning an epic tale that puts the players on a journey of discovery with twists and turns, exciting reveals, epic battles, shocking events and so on. We all dream about running that Lord of the Rings epic for the ages.

The issue is that the overwhelming majority of systems out there are very specifically designed not to allow that and the reason is quite simple, there is no money in it.

To give an example, I ran a nearly 3 year Vampire The Masquerade campaign for which all I ever purchased was a core rulebook and a setting book. That was it, that’s all white-wolf managed to get out of me for what amounted to hundreds of hours of entertainment. If a gaming group of 5 only buy 1 or 2 books every three to four years, all role-playing publishers become completely unsustainable, and even if they are set up for a low volume, they are not getting rich doing it.

As such, most modern systems are setup to be complex, with tons of design space to create “options” and that is the name of the game for modern RPG’s. Selling option books requires you to be constantly re-starting new campaigns, so you can create new characters and buy new adventure books and so on, all so that you have a desire for more options. It’s a cycle.

The reality is that complex systems with tons of options will usually result in what I like to call “dead system stops”. This means the system kills your campaign because it lacks the stamina and structure to survive a long campaign as power advancement is at the center of the core mechanic. This is particularly true for most class/level systems that become unwieldy and unbalanced as you rise in level. It is particularly a problem with these systems not just because the increases in level creates unbalance, but because the players have an expectation to constantly level up. They effectively push for the inevitable power creep that will end the campaign early. Play D&D for three months without leveling up and your players are going to start complaining.

The best systems are those that have progression without major impact and are simple so that the character sheet is just a “log” of your character, rather than an elaboration of what your character is and isn’t, or what they can and can’t do. What I mean by that is that if your players are constantly looking at their character sheet to see “what they can do” they are also finding a list of things “they can’t do”. You are playing in a busy system that is designed to create options for players so that they can do stuff, out-level the game and start over.

A good role-playing system is not going to be about what the system does or doesn’t let your character do, it should be about what your players want their characters to do. It’s not about action economy, but about telling a story, taking “actions” should not be a mechanic in a role-playing system. What characters do should be a story definition, a conscious thought of a player imagining a scene and doing what comes naturally to them with any mechanical elements being customizable and reactive rather than something governed by strict (you can and can’t) rules.

Such systems are becoming rarer and rarer these days, people simply don’t make them that much anymore, which is why we have the OSR because there was a time in the hobbies history when all RPG’s were designed to be free-flowing and free-form story games. The character sheet was an outline of the player’s imagined avatar and it did not define them in any certain terms, it was just a sort of categorization, a layer upon which a player would create their character’s story and what actions they took had nothing to do with the system.

You picked “Fighter” and that could be anything from a Samurai to a Swashbuckler. You did not pick background, you created backgrounds through direct writing or through gameplay. You didn’t select feats and fighting styles, you imagined those things and brought them to the table through the narrative of your character’s interaction with the world. What your character could do was as much an invention of the story as the plot created by the GM. We talk about players always claiming to want the game to be about story, yet, they often choose systems that deny them the opportunity to be creative.

A system like that has no beginning or end, your character is the person you imagine and create and while they will have subtle growth in such a system, it will not offer much in the way of unlocking powers, actions or other gaming gymnastics. Your character is your avatar in such games, the one you created at the start and their progression is their story in the world they occupy, not the mechanical power level they achieve.

In such a system, your campaign can theoretically run forever.

My suggestion is that if you want to run a long campaign that stays healthy no matter how long you run it, stay away from systems that see character progression as a “power” element. That is usually the sign of a busy game not made for longevity, if advancement = power, the game has a definitive beginning and end and the faster that power creep is, the shorter the campaign will be.

At the very least you should asses the system and calculate how much life it will have, at what point you reach the dead stop so that you can plan for the campaign’s inevitable end.

Meta Gaming Is Where Good Stories Come From

As a long-time GM, one of the oddest gaming culture developments that has taken place over the last 30 years is player and GM attitudes towards meta-gaming.

For posterity, we should define what Meta-Gaming is, as there are quite a few definitions and variations of the term. To me, meta-gaming is the act of the players using player information to influence results in the game world. Meaning, the player knows what a typical Orcs AC is and they use that information to their advantage to illustrate the most basic of examples. More commonly the use of meta-gaming is less about the game mechanic and more about the game’s story. For example, a player knows that the prince is secretly a vampire, but their character doesn’t, however, they use their player knowledge to expose him as a vampire breaking the continuity of the game world. Their character is behaving as if they have information that they don’t, because the player does. A more complex example, but typically more along the lines of what people mean when they say meta-gaming.

The modern attitude and culture towards meta-gaming is that it is associated with a really negative result. Meaning, people get pissed about it and the insinuation is that it’s akin to cheating at role-playing.

I’m here to tell you that meta-gaming is the most positive thing you can add to your game and here is why.

The object of a role-playing game is to tell a cool story, but cool stories can’t be told consistently out of a vacuum or through random dice outcomes. Cool stories come from our imagination and that requires a certain level of control. Meaning if you want to make cool things happen, you simply need to decide that they do and this is the collaboration that should take place at the table between players and between players and the GM.

There is a very natural resistance by both players and GM’s to simply side with the system, despite any insistence that the story comes first. Often players and GM’s alike want to side with the dice results or with realism (what would really happen in a situation) or worse of all, with the intent to control the path of the story so as not to derail the pre-ordained set of events. In this struggle, gaming culture has vilified meta-gaming as a negative, but it’s meta-game information that actually allows cool things to happen.

What’s more interesting, a player having to pretend and act intentionally ignorant to the fact that the prince is actually a vampire, or a cool scene where the character appears to be a brilliant investigator and makes the discovery creating a feel-good and heroic moment? Who or what is hurt by the latter?

I don’t know about you, but I love feel-good moments. I want the players to succeed, to do unexpected and fun things that create unique story’s and outcomes. I want large story progressions with each session, I don’t want to delay or make players impatiently wait session after session, sitting on information they have as players because things haven’t worked out for them as characters or worse yet make them feel like they are being punished for being or acting foolish in an RPG.

This also ties into the concept of “yes” GMing. Meaning, creating a game in which the players, no matter how silly and outrageous the things they do are, let them progress, succeed, and move forward, let things work. I don’t want to punish players for doing something stupid, I want everything to appear to be smart, I want everything to be a “Han Solo” plan, something so crazy and outrageous that it works, no matter how unrealistic it is, no matter what the dice say. I want the characters to be the stars of the show, not the victims of circumstance.

My point is that meta-gaming is THE best tool that the GM and players have in their tool bag for creating a great story. Let the story happen and not just that, but push it to happen, resolve the story in such a way so that it’s always a feel-good moment. That doesn’t mean everything that happens is positive, but that the story feels good, like that feeling you get when you just watched a great movie, whether it’s Lord of the Rings or Shindlers List. You want that great storytelling impact at every session, in every scene. It should be happening all the time and meta-gaming is a fantastic tool that allows the players to help you on collaboration of creating that effect at the table.

The Game Has To Feel Threatening

Fear of losing your character has to be foremost on everyone’s mind, you have to make that fear real but you should rarely ever execute anyone. Make an example to prove the point if needed, but remember that the game is all smoke and mirrors,

This last point is short and sweet and self-evident, the question I think that needs to be answered is why I think this is critical enough to put on the list of advice.

Before I answer however, I will say that this advice lands in the “style of play” preference category more than the rest which I consider “general good practices and advice”. Still, I’m quite convinced that my preference here stems from my experience of trying all the different methods and landing on this one by default of it being the most optimal and practical for any RPG.

The other thing to note is that this is not a system thing, it’s not about “choosing” a deadly system, quite to the contrary, I would advise against using that as a crutch, this is more about perception which can be created with any mechanic. It’s a conscious choice as a GM to create an environment of high risk, not a gameplay thing, this danger should not be decided by dice.

Ok enough disclosures, why do I think players should fear for their character’s lives. The answer is actually quite simple, it creates tension and drama at the table that exists in the minds of the players. By creating an environment where the players have a legitimate reason to fear losing their character at the hands of their enemy every time they fight or face other dangers, these things become a tough, dramatic choice that comes with potentially the ultimate consequences and this tension rises up the longer the campaign goes on. The more attached the players are to their characters, the greater the drama.

More than that though, players will steer their characters very differently with such high stakes at the table and this draws the game that much closer to a role-playing environment instead of a mechanical one. Further still, when fights break out in a high-risk game, players will have the natural tendency, as will you as a GM, to elaborate on the events of the fight. You are going to want to squeeze out that last ounce of story when you know that the story of your character may very well end right then and there. You are going to want to make every in that fight a scene of deliberate and player-driven (rather than mechanic-driven) actions. It’s how you make fights less a miniature combat game and more of a role-playing scene, even if the system itself is a very tactically oriented one.

Setting Specific Games Are Better

The final piece of advice which I know most people will hate hearing, but systems made as generic genre games like D&D is for fantasy are never even close to as good as specific games with mechanics designed specifically to a setting, for example what The One Ring is to the middle-earth setting.

The reasons are many but it boils down to the fact that a setting-specific game only needs to think about how the rules apply to that one world, theme and atmosphere. Generic systems need to have this broad coverage and you always end up with an overcooked system which despite being overcooked is missing a lot of stuff you may need once you choose the specific setting you will use in your campaign. Its the default problem that systems like D&D have.

This is particularly true if you are using a setting that is pre-defined. For example lets say you want to run a campaign in Westeros, using the story of Game of Thrones as your backdrop. Now you have a lot of detail that whatever system you choose needs to cover. Could you run D&D for example using the Westeros setting? Sure, but there are no fireballs in Westeros, in fact, very little magic at all. How do you handle running your own house? Mass combat? You get the idea. The robust and complex system you picked, suddenly has massive gaps in the infrastructure you will need to run your setting and story.

A game designed to serve a specific setting is always going to give you much better results and what you will find is that most systems, even when they are in the generic category, serve a specific styleof play best. D&D for example is great for high fantasy adventure games, it is, its bread and butter.

My advice is always to do this. Figure out what world/setting and style of game you want and then pick the system that supports that, don’t try to squeeze shit into systems that are clearly not designed to support what your looking for. This advice is very much in turn with the opening advice for this article but this is a bit more specific.