One of my guilty pleasures is following advice columns: Miss Manners, Ask Amy, the Love Letters column in the Boston Globe, Carolyn Hax, Dear Prudence, a fair number over the years. (And half the fun are the ones with comment sections; the peanut gallery for Love Letters is especially raucous!)
One is a column by a chap named Harris O’Malley (doctornerdlove.com), whose particular specialty is dating/relationship advice as directed to geek/nerd subcultures. He’s got a particularly pithy, jocular style, and advice I wish I’d had 40+ years ago, so as to have dodged some bad decisions and notions. An example is one of his standards: to wit, it’s not that Nice Guys Finish Last, or that women really get off on Bad Boys treating them poorly. It’s that while the Nice Guys are moping in silence, hoping against hope that their virtue will be rewarded -- without them ever sticking a toe in the water -- the Bad Boys aren’t hesitating to actually ask the women out. Using their words. Unambiguously. Go figure.
You may be asking yourself, by now, what the merry hell this has to do with tabletop gaming?
Simple. Just read on, and I’ll run some bulletpoints of the good Doctor’s standard lines:
1) Stop Taking Advice From People Who Hate The Folks You Want to Date: Something O’Malley riffs on a fair bit is the incel crowd, especially on places like Reddit. To quote: “The appeal ... isn’t advice so much as catharsis. It’s about having people tell you what you want to hear while also yelling at the folks who stubbornly insist on dating people who aren’t you. So much of the advice is a tell, revealing their own fears, angers and insecurities.”
And doesn’t this apply to gaming forums, in spades? Posters are screaming constantly, inflating minor misunderstandings to cause celebres, debates to rage wars, and disputes to “Gaming is ruined forever!!!” Every issue needs to be war to the knife. A game system that doesn’t reflect your every prejudice and preference is worthless and needs to be discarded. Paizo putting a couple LGBT NPCs in with a hundred straight NPCs means that they’re taking over!! How dare WotC make racial alignment optional???
It's not actually "discussion." It's baying at the moon. No one needs to fall into their rabbit holes. Beyond that, the Internet being the Internet, controversy drives page views. Start a thread titled "I Like D&D" on a popular forum, and it'll get a dozen laconic responses and peter out in three days. Start one called "Only Losers and Scum Like D&D," and that'll be a hundred posts deep in four hours flat, rage on for weeks, and provoke permabans.
2) Know What You Want (And Own It): To quote O’Malley, “A smaller pool that consists entirely of folks who want what you want is far better than a huge pool of people who don’t. The former means that you’re dating people who crave the things you have to offer. The latter is a series of bad first dates and frustration for everybody.”
This is likewise one of my common riffs, if applied to gaming; I’m a staunch partisan of the premise that no gaming is better than bad gaming. I’ll compromise on the things that don’t much matter to me, one way or another, but not on the things that really do. At my age, I’ve had my fill of settling.
Does that mean I have a smaller pool of potential players? Yes. Yes it does. But it also means I have far fewer false starts, people who don't click with my style, people whose style I don't want at my table. Especially with gaming going online, though, that pool is FAR larger than it ever was before. One of my current players lives in Croatia; one lives in Germany. I've never met them in the flesh and likely never will.
3) Embrace Honesty and Clarity: “We all have a tendency to assume that we’re all reading from the same handbook and playing by the same set of rules. It’s all too easy to think that our understanding of the rules and definitions of terms are not only the correct ones, but that they’re universal ... If you want dating to suck less, then you need to focus on clarity and mutual understanding. In fact, you may need to do so to the point of bluntness and beating someone about the head and shoulders with a clue-by-four. In practice, this means saying what you actually mean in a clear and understandable manner, rather than talking around it or using colorful but confusing or misleading language. If you’re saying “yes” to something but what you say doesn’t actually include the words “yes”, “I agree”, “let’s do that” or something equally clear, you’re going to run the risk of being misunderstood ... Somebody who dodges direct questions or won’t give you a straight answer has a vested reason to prefer confusion to clarity, and it’s never in your benefit.”
A long bit of quoting there, but once again, remove dating from that, substitute gaming, and this remains very sound advice. Beyond that, a common feedback O’Malley gets from people asking for his advice is that if they are clear about their wants, needs and dislikes, they’ll scare people off. To which O’Malley’s common response is: good! Because, he feels, someone who just isn’t into the things you are is self-selecting out of your dating pool. Do you want to date a heavy drinker if you’re a teetotaler? Do you want to date someone who desperately wants children if you desperately don’t? Do you want to date a rabid red-stater if you’re a rabid blue-stater, or vice versa? Not unless you’re planning to waste that person’s time and yours for something that won’t end well.
And the same thing applies to gaming. If you just can’t handle hack-and-slash, be honest about it. If you absolutely have to play D&D 5th or bust, be honest about it. If the thought of gaming over Discord leaves you cold, don't agree to it. If you hate the thought of being in the same gaming group with That Guy, don't sign off on it. Don’t be afraid to advocate for your must-haves/can’t handles. Don’t be afraid to walk if you don’t get an answer you can hack. There's always another table. There are always people looking for games/GMs on Reddit or Discord. There's your local FLGS, your local gaming convention, your local college gaming club.
4) Take People As They Are (Instead of Getting Mad For Who They Aren’t): “Part of dating means accepting people as they actually are, rather than trying to mold them to your expectations. It doesn’t matter how universal you think your expectations are, nor how much better things would be for them if they would act just the way you want them to. Letting your expectations overrule their reality is a recipe for conflict and heartbreak ... Demanding that they stop being who they are for you is a bad idea and – spoiler alert – it never works anyway ... You don’t get to force them to change. And if you can’t accept it or respect it… well, hey you know where the door is.”
And this is the corollary to #3. Something to which O'Malley alludes is the danger of assumptions: that what you're used to is the only way to go, that the mores and practices of your social group are universal standards. This is far more prevalent in gaming circles: so many of us play in small, insular groups, taught by our friends, with a hazy grasp of the printed rules, going by the houserules and customs of the band. At my table, PvP is a mortal sin; at many others, backstabbing is standard operating procedure. Romance is a common element of gameplay at my table; at many others, well, I've posted about that one. I get very frosted if a player gets it into his head that I'm the enemy; at a number of tables, the players who don't recognize that the GM is out to get them are fools.
Something that often crops up on gaming forums are people who are just plain mad at those chowderheads who Just Won’t Game The Way I Want. They won’t read the rules, or they won’t give me face time, or they won’t try the Great New Game I Just Bought, or they just won’t play the way I want them to play, on and on and on.
And one just gets the idea that they’re just waiting for a bunch of strangers on the Internet to agree with them, so they can whirl in righteous vindication at their gaming group, and cry out “SEE?!?”
Spoiler alert: it never works anyway.
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