Building Foundations 4: Taxonomy of Unfun
This post is part of a series of posts on foundations of game mastering. First post in the series can be found here, and next one here.
As usual, if you are confused about any terms, make sure to check out the glossary.
Final essential component that goes into emotional management the GM has to do is what I call “Unfun”. This is, quite literally, the opposite of fun - things that can significantly reduce someone’s enjoyment of the game. One obvious component here is boredom - broadly, not getting hits on the fun categories that are important to you - but there are others as well. Let’s go through them.
Cultural artifacts: this broad category has to do with all issues that come from the current cultural context of the players.
Sex: for various historic reasons, a lot of people have significant hangups in regards to talking about sex or even acknowledging it as a concept. This is a potential problem - sex and sexuality are pretty central facets of human condition, and so will inevitably come up once in a while in any game with a sufficiently broad topic. Nonetheless, there isn’t much to be done - some people are just made very uncomfortable by this topic. How close you can get to it depends on the players - I would say that most players would be fine with sex-related topics being implied to be happening behind closed doors (so-called “fade to black” - describe a character heading into the act, but do not talk about the act itself). Anything more obvious poses a potential problem.
Current Politics: take almost any group of 5 people, and I guarantee that they will find some topic from current politics on which to violently disagree. Furthermore, because of how personal a lot of people consider their politics, most people see such strong political disagreements almost as an attack on their identity. This is obviously a very easy way to shatter the gaming group. Be aware of what rough political persuasions all players have, and only involve current politics in the events of the game if you are sure this will not lead to people trying to bite one another’s heads off.
Religion: similar to politics, religion has the dubious honor of being very close to people’s identities and also being a relatively common topic of disagreement. While I would guess that topics involving religion should not come up as often as topics involving politics (how many PNP RPG games have anything to do with e.g. theodicy? Now compare that with how many PNP RPG games have things to do with falls of authoritative regimes, and the question of what is considered a good government), it is nonetheless a danger, especially if one of the players is highly religious. Be aware of it.
Racism & other bigotry: there are two issues related to racism being portrayed in fantasy worlds in PNP RPGs. First one is that some players - due to cultural friction faced in real life - find the concept of racism to be sufficiently distasteful that mere presence of it or similar bigotry (sexism, homophobia, et cetera) can drop their enjoyment of the game fairly quickly. Second issue has to do with disempowerment of player characters - see below. In regards to the first issue, however, the answer is to be aware of your player’s preferences in regards to this topic.
Dark shit: rape, pedophilia, slavery, etc - a broad category of all kinds of darker aspects of the world. Depending on the level of - frankly speaking - naivete of your players, or alternatively their mood and desire for escapism, introducing any of these aspects into the game can significantly drop players enjoyment. Slavery is probably the easiest of these to deal with, due to a large history of it in media: just be aware that it can provoke an intense emotional reaction in the players and make them switch their personal goals solely to fixing that problem.
Specific triggers: this category covers everything that doesn’t fit into 1) and 2) - any topic that an individual player finds triggering, for reasons of personal trauma, phobias, some kind of unpleasant personal history, personal beliefs or otherwise. I think that these should be rare, but if they do exist you really should know and account for them.
Loss of control: this is a very important category. While the previous ones can be avoided relatively easily, and shouldn’t come up that often besides, this one is fairly common among the cries of dissatisfied players and GMs alike. There are, in my opinion, two sub issues here:
Loss of story control: this one covers all issues related to feeling you have lost control over the story. Do note that this dissatisfaction affects both players and GMs - players exert control mostly by controlling their characters, while GMs do so by preparing plot. It is very common to be hit with this dissatisfaction - for example, players may find that GM lets a bad guy get away, even though players feel they have done some amazing action to prevent them. On the other hand, GM might be dissatisfied in this manner if he expected the bad guy to get away, but the players managed to snatch his life away. Way to avoid this feeling is complex - partly this is expectation management, partly allowing the other party to win occasionally, and partly improved planning. I will talk about this in later posts.
Loss of character control: this one has more to do with the players. Due to the tight bond players form with their character, any perceived loss of control over them, even if temporary, can feel extremely dissatisfying. Classic example is GM saying that a character does something and the player disagreeing, claiming their character would never do such a thing. A less central example is mind control spells of various types - memory modification, and straight up puppeteering. Depending on the players, they may be fine with this kind of control. Finally, another example is a character being forced to do something through old-fashioned power plays: for example, guards arresting one of the characters, or ordering them to leave their weapons. Remember how I mentioned disempowerment due to societal racism? If one of the characters is prevented from engaging in a social encounter because e.g. their society doesn’t allow drow into restaurants, they may risk suffering this dissatisfaction.
Loss of importance: this category is also fairly similar to disempowerment, but in a subtly different way. While loss of character control is primarily about losing ability to do something or not do something, this one is about perceived loss of reason to do something. That was a complicated sentence - let me give an example. Imagine that players are engaged in a fight with the villain who is trying to destroy the city. At some point in the fight the villain unleashes a powerful attack, but it is stopped by an NPC - let’s call him Gandalf - who appears out of nowhere. Gandalf then stomps the villain into the ground. At this point the players may (rightly) ask themselves: why are we doing this adventuring stuff? Why doesn’t Gandalf just deal with all the problems himself? This category of dissatisfaction is especially devious because once players get a thought into their heads that their actions do not matter, this idea worms itself deep into their mind and refuses to leave. It is very difficult to restore the sense of importance to the players once it is lost. While perceived loss of control can be resolved by returning control (over the story or character actions), loss of importance fundamentally relies on the relative power of player characters and the world they are in, which is much harder to modify on the spot.
There is a related, but subtly different version of this dissatisfaction which has to do with losing the feeling of importance within the party. This can happen, for example, if one of the players feels that their relative contribution to the proceedings can be entirely replaced by another character from the party. This is a very big problem, because while making the entire party feel more important is somewhat feasible, making an individual character feel important relative to another character without fundamentally changing either of the characters is an order of magnitude harder. I have no general advice here - act based on individual circumstances.
Boredom: as mentioned above, this category has to do with a failure of fun management in regards to the previous two taxonomies I talked about. If GM keeps in mind the emotional needs of all players and themselves, and makes sure to fulfill them often enough, this should, generally speaking, not happen. However, “fulfilling the needs often enough” can be a challenging problem in certain situations.
Mental effort: on the other side of the coin, some players “use up” all their mental effort during the day, and come to PNP RPGs to relax. As such, requiring a lot of mental effort from them - in terms of complicated combat, or complex decisions - can be a turn-off.
Inconsistency: blatant inconsistencies can pretty quickly ruin the fun of various kinds of players. This ranges from story inconsistencies - enemies forgetting or acquiring abilities as plot demands it, etc - to inconsistencies in the character motivations and behavior, to inconsistencies between the world and what the players consider “realistic”. I will talk more about this in a dedicated article.
Anti-fun: reversal of the fun aspects - sometimes players don’t just not have fun during the game. Some aspect of the game feels so contrary to their preferred fun types, that it is actively offending their sensibilities. I call this Anti-fun. Imagine that, for example, one of the players really enjoys involved tactical combats, but all the combats in the game are extremely straightforward with zero challenge. This is not just a lack of good combat: this is bad combat pretending to be good. Fortunately, the way to control this type of dissatisfaction is very similar to control over the normal types of fun, and so in principle should not pose a huge challenge.
Anti-fun: other players - similarly, sometimes actions or preferences of other players grate strongly on one of the players. For example, you can imagine a situation where one of the players loves discussing very mathy exploits found in the rules, while another hates math. Every time the first player is discussing math, the second one will be actively losing fun. This is a huge problem, and potentially unresolvable if you can not get the players to agree to tolerate one another or split the times when they enjoy their brands of fun somehow. Ideally, you find out about this far before the game starts, and resolve the problem on the stage of picking the players.
Interpersonal issues: finally, we have a broad category of all forms of interpersonal conflicts that may impact the enjoyment of the game.
Cheating: when players play PNP RPGs, they all, collectively, subscribe to an implicit set of rules that dictate their behavior in the game. A core part of this set is the mechanical rules of the system you are playing, but this is not the whole story. Other elements include implicit understanding of what parts of the system are allowed in play (e.g. can you reference non-core materials?), degree of exploitation of these rules, and even things completely unrelated to the rules like what information GM can conceal from the players. A perceived violation of these rules by any party can lead to dissatisfaction. Ways of dealing with this problem are as varied as the violations. Some examples include:
GM using enemies perceived “stronger” than expected
GM giving too little / too much loot
Player or GM being perceived as lying about the rolls (Note: Perceived! It is irrelevant wherever they actually are lying, all that matters is the perception)
Player or GM being perceived as lying about the rules, or changing them unexpectedly
Player putting too much effort into optimization contrary to the expectations of other players
Conflict: some players really hate anything they perceive as “conflict” between people. This can include anything from simply disagreeing with one another, to heated arguments over an issue, to something more severe. In this case dissatisfaction may come from one of the parties in the conflict, or from a third party who has to be present while it is happening. Do note that the third party may be dissatisfied even if both people who are arguing do not think any conflict is happening! For example, I like heated arguments on philosophy or politics - but this doesn’t mean I am in conflict with the people I am arguing with! Some of my friends have similar dispositions, but I have had people try to get in the middle and stop the - very enjoyable! - argument from proceeding.
Inter character legitimacy arguments: this is a complement to anti-fun from other players actions. Imagine a situation where two players - A and B - are together in a party. A does something that goes contrary to B’s ideas of fun in a major way, to the point where B’s enjoyment is reduced. Let’s say that B has strong opinions on how paladins should behave, and A, playing a paladin, does something very contrary to these ideas. B subsequently gets into an argument with A about this. At this point A’s enjoyment may be reduced specifically because B is questioning his choices in regards to his character - characters are in a very real sense “property” of the players, and questions of their legitimacy can be taken very close to heart.
This concludes the list of all the types of unfun that I have been able to come up with. If I think of something else in the future, I’ll add it to this list - this blog is a living document in a lot of ways. Now that we have both a taxonomy of fun and a taxonomy of unfun, we can finally begin to discuss how to use these two chopsticks to eat the meal of PNP RPGs.
Next up: Session zero!
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interesting read!