Building Foundations 2: Taxonomy of player fun
This post is part of a series of posts on foundations of game mastering.
As usual, if you are confused about any terms, make sure to check out the glossary, and if you are looking for other posts, check out the blog map.
Finally, we can talk about the core thing a GM has to think about - fun. By “fun” I mean any kind of enjoyment that is had by people at the table. We will start with the kinds of fun that is had by everyone, then kinds that are had solely by the players (for no other reason than that there are more sources to reference, as this topic is well-studied), and then talk about the kinds that are exclusive to the GM.
Let’s start with the universals. Everyone at the table is (probably) human. Most humans share common characteristics that lead to common ways to have fun. Some of them are:
Hanging out (with friends): Simply being in the same room or otherwise engaged in the same activity with the people you respect and like is enjoyable.
Jokes: Making jokes based on a common sense of humor with friends is separately enjoyable.
Fortunately, these ways of having fun are “free” - that is to say, as a GM, you generally don’t need to put any effort into making them happen. They will generally happen automatically, if they happen at all.
Next we have ways of having fun unique to the players. There are plenty of studies done on the subject of fun in video games - for example, look here. I do not think Bartle specifically is 100% correct - in fact, I think his taxonomy is a subtype of what I call “horoscopes for nerds” - but it does point to some true things, such as several major areas from which players derive fun. For information more specific to PNP RPGs, we can perhaps look at this reddit thread. I have also asked some of my friends who play PNP RPGs, and got similar results.
Now, some of the following categories might sound like I am judging players for deriving enjoyment from them - this isn’t true. There are very different kinds of people out there, and just because someone enjoys something people traditionally assume is bad, does not mean they are a bad person.
Here is the most comprehensive list (to my knowledge) of the types of engagement you can get from your players. I tried giving each type a catchy name, and added sub-types to some where grouping the types made sense to me.
Growth: People like growth, both numeric and not. Numeric growth comes in obvious spots - growth in levels, stats, money, magic items. Non-numeric growth comes from harder to quantify assets: recognition from NPCs, amount of allies, land, titles, and so on. Dopamine is a hell of a drug, and you get a hit every time the numbers go up.
Objectives: Achieving concrete objectives in accordance with their player’s motivations, and explicit or implicit objectives of the party, likewise falls into this group.
Planning: A certain kind of player enjoys planning ahead in anticipation of various kinds of problems that may happen, and preparing for those eventualities. This is a related kind of enjoyment to Puzzles (see below).
Puzzles: Solving “puzzles” in the world or otherwise is another common desire for some players. This can take very classic puzzle forms (e.g. a door with a puzzle lock), finding unusual solutions to the problem at hand (e.g. “solving” a puzzle door by disintegrating it, or “solving” a combat encounter by making the roof collapse on the enemies), solving broad strategic challenges (e.g. finding a way to compromise with the main antagonist of the campaign in ways GM had not thought of and that the antagonist has no reason to refuse), finding efficient ways to build your character, or even just shopping for good items.
Exploits: Discovering “exploits” in the rules of the game (and acting them out) can be intensely enjoyable for some people. Think of this something like putting together a puzzle - you can see two separate pieces that clearly go together (such as two passages in the rules that, when combined, result in an unexpected effect), but the most enjoyment happens when you actually click those two pieces together. Here I call something an “exploit” if it is a combination of rules that deviates from the player’s conception of the overall power level of the system, or overall intention of the system - the combination they have found may be entirely expected by the developers and by the game master, but as long as it is unexpected to the player, they will derive enjoyment. For example, imagine that there are two abilities in the rules - one stuns enemies, another deals extra damage to stunned enemies. The combination may be entirely expected by the developers, but the player may still derive enjoyment from independently discovering it. Furthermore, the “exploit” may actually be less effective than more normal methods of using the rules, but as long as it’s unusual, it counts. For example, imagine a system where typically, you can only throw one throwing knife per round of combat, but a player has found a way to throw a dozen. Throwing knives - even a dozen of them - may be very ineffective at dealing damage, but such an exploit may still count. Players who derive fun from this will generally enjoy learning rules of the system, as this leads to these perceived increases in power simply as they accumulate skill at the game at hand.
Character building: whereas “exploits” aims at making as powerful a combination as possible, this one has to do with arriving at a specific goal as efficiently as possible. This may mean creating a character to fulfill a particular goal or backstory idea, or trying to explore a particular facet of mechanics. Whatever the goal, this is likewise very enjoyable for some players.
Shopping: even shopping can be a puzzle! Going through a huge list of options and picking the best ones - while not traditionally viewed as a puzzle, can scratch the same itch for some players.
Tactics: Combat in PNP RPGs can be highly tactical, depending on the system. Some players derive a lot of enjoyment out of this: combat becomes a “puzzle”, like in X-COM, with all characters and their various abilities being simply puzzle pieces. Enjoyment from this is directly proportional to the difficulty of the “puzzles” and the effectiveness of players at solving them: if the difficulty is too low enjoyment is low, but if it’s too high then it’s also low.
Improvisation: Similar to a previous category, but related to solving problems that come from unpredictable interaction of player actions, GM plans, and randomness from dice: coming up with novel solutions to problems on the fly.
Immersion:
Imagination: Imagining their character in various novel environments, helped by the narration of the GM, is also very enjoyable for some people. Likewise, facing various unusual magical creatures for no other reason that you want to imagine them looking cool falls into this group. A related facet of this is deriving enjoyment from immersively imagining their character as part of a scene - with all the smells, sounds, and et cetera that come from this.
Anthropology: Learning various facts about the world - details of culture, society, politics and so on - can be enjoyable to some players, as long as those details are sufficiently unique, novel and help them be immersed in the world.
Systems:
Observation: this is a hard one to nail down. Essentially, what this comes down to is observing some large system, making sense of it, and seeing how each individual part of it fits together, with none being amiss. This is the kind of enjoyment one can derive from watching a very complicated machine at work, reading about agriculture and seeing how it fits into the environment at large, and so on. Enjoyment here, in my opinion, is derived from how simple the system appears to be once it is understood and how “complete” it seems - i.e. that nothing seems to contradict it and everything seems to fit it. I really would like to make a claim here about how your brain enjoys finding a convenient data compression method for the environment and rewards you for it, but I am not sure if I am just making this up or not.
Disturbance: this is in a way a complete opposite of the previous one, and yet is related to it. This type of enjoyment comes from sticking a crowbar into that complicated machine and seeing it go awry. On the simplest level this is, I think, what some types of players are looking for when they decide to kill an important NPC - seeing how well GM can adapt to this sudden change, and how much the story would change as a result. More complicated examples can be players making a minute change to political or economic system of some kingdom in order to see the effects this would have. See also: Political power fantasy.
Storytelling:
Plot: this is a very common way to derive fun: just as it is enjoyable to read a book or watch a TV series with a good plot with a lot of twists, it is likewise enjoyable to take part in a PNP game with a good campaign plot.
Collaborative storytelling: One aspect of the enjoyment mentioned above is that in PNP RPGs the story comes out as a result of a collaborative process. As a result, players can derive the same type of enjoyment as a writer of a story, while skipping some of the more “tedious” parts of the process - worldbuilding, editing, etc - and having the option to relax and let the other people drive the plot for a while.
Scripts: Some players come up with “scripts” - like a movie script - that they want their character to go through. This may be as simple as a single scene (they imagine their character, in a tavern, really enjoying a pint of ale: they want to make that scene happen) or as complicated as a whole character arc with rivals, unique locations, artifacts, and all that good stuff. Obvious way to fulfill this desire: make the scene, or an equivalent to the scene, happen.
Character tropes: some players come up with one or two traits for their characters - e.g. “is afraid of horses” - and want to, occasionally, roleplay those traits. Depending on the trait is, this can be as simple as occasionally throwing NPCs and minor events in the direction of this player to proc the interaction.
Chatting: Some players really enjoy interacting with NPCs specifically. This can take various forms - from talking a lot with the plot-relevant NPCs to enjoying smalltalk with a barmaid in a tavern. Players who derive fun from this may often be found reaching for diplomacy as a first solution to problems, and initiating conversations with NPCs around them to pass the time. Offering opportunities to solve problems via diplomacy and to have small scenes where PCs interact with shopkeepers and such will go a long way towards providing ample fun for this kind of player.
People watching: A related enjoyment comes from seeing what other players and the GM can come up with in regards to novel character personalities and descriptions. Depending on their creativity, the archetypes you may see can be extremely unique and not like anything you would see in a TV show (because Hollywood can be very stale at times)
Escapism: This is a very broad category. Due to a variety of reasons, lots of players find some aspect of their lives to be unsatisfactory, and seek to psychologically correct it by roleplaying a character who doesn’t have the same problems. Due to the nature of problems, this can take a myriad shapes that can’t all be listed here. However, if you figure out what is the specific problem at hand, you can typically easily service this desire.
Power fantasy: Some players want to enjoy a “power fantasy”: they want their character to feel powerful and in control, often in combat, and typically relative to enemy characters. Giving them opportunities to do so by occasionally presenting them with somewhat weaker enemies (relative to their level: if they optimise heavily, this may be just normal, or even very powerful enemies. If they optimise badly, this may be underpowered enemies instead.) usually fulfills this desire.
Political power fantasy: A related, but different brand of power fantasy is what I call “political power fantasy”: imagining yourself as someone whose decisions can have a major impact on how the world functions, contrary to what is typical in real life. If normal power fantasy is about being strong, this one is about being important.
Art: Some players use PNP RPGs as an imagination source for their artistry endeavors - drawing, music, and crafting. This is another “free” source of fun - generally, GM doesn’t have to do anything to enable it.
Respect: Another broad category: some players seem to derive a decent amount of enjoyment out of various forms of respect and recognition other players grant them, and suffer somewhat when they do not get this recognition. This typically comes hand in hand with another type of fun from the list: for example, some players like to discover exploits partly in order to show off their cleverness in front of other players. Others may be writing songs about their group’s adventures, but most of the fun for them comes from singing them to the rest of the group.
Riling up: Some players quite enjoy getting a rise out of the GM. There isn’t a lot to say about this - this is an emotion that comes from character interaction, and as such is almost completely unconnected to the events in the game. Depending on the importance of this type of fun, it can be very easy to satisfy by feigning being riled up, or be fairly disruptive to both the game and your own enjoyment if you aren’t capable of separating out your own emotions in this case.
Emotion: This is an even broader group than Escapism - I am not too happy with my work in refining my understanding of it down to fundamentals, but I think it’s important to include. The basic idea is that sometimes players want to feel a specific emotion, and PNP RPGs provide a way to do so. I am thinking of cases like playing existential horror games for that existential horror feel, and nothing else.
Typically, any particular player will derive fun from several aspects outlined above (some of them more important, and some less), and different players may derive it from different ones. Furthermore, aspects important to a particular player may change over time: due to change in mood, life circumstances, or taste. Keeping a handle on the aspects important to every single player is, in my opinion, the second most important job for a GM.
The most important job is, of course, keeping a handle on the aspects important to yourself. I will talk about the fun that is had by a GM in the next post.
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