Spent the past couple weeks poking at the idea of good faith in roleplaying. I have a couple other pieces I’m working on, more technical, but I wanted to start somewhere. It’s a big sprawling topic, and it touches more stuff than I realized.
Wikipedia has this interesting entry defining good faith: A sincere intention to be fair, open, and honest, regardless of the outcome of the interaction. It’s also a legal term with interesting implications: the implied covenant of good faith is a general presumption that the parties to a contract will deal with each other honestly and fairly, so as not to destroy the right of the other party or parties to receive the benefits of the contract.
I’m going to ramble a bit about both the intentional part and the implied covenant.
Fair. Open. Honest.
I’ve been playing games, well, a long time. It’s kind of astonishing, looking back over my roleplaying (1980 to present), at how much of it I did in bad faith. Some combination of unfair, sneaky, or dishonest. When I wrote for ’90s-era game lines, bad faith gaming was everyone’s default assumption. The players are always gonna try to win so you need to balance the rules and close off loopholes. Someone’s always gonna try and beat the GM, or the GM’s gonna try to beat the players. It’s a zero-sum game. The results were obvious on several fronts, looking back on it. We frequently wrote rules with mechanical balance front-and-center. Everyone entered play confrontationally, GM versus unruly players. The whole enterprise was, looking back on it, pretty unpleasant. Worse, we gave very little effort to actually making the rules good, when all we had to do was make them balanced. Those aren’t the same thing. Frequently they’re mutually exclusive.
These days, I do my level best to engage in good faith gaming. That means radical transparency, for starters: not just about what I intend as a GM, but also understanding my players’ intentions. That transparency comes with some costs. The big one is the loss of the Big Reveal. I’m sure there are methods for doing a Big Reveal in good faith, but I haven’t solved that yet. Pulling off a Big Reveal is always a risk in good faith play, because everyone has to trust that you’re all playing in good faith, right? If you’ve got one distrustful player, they’re gonna dig in and try to defend themselves against something they fear is coming their way.
Bad faith comes from fear, competitiveness, and distrust.
Good faith gaming is pretty prevalent at convention events I go to, and the exceptions always stand out like sore thumbs. You know: the trad player who scoffs at storygame rules because there’s literally nothing stopping them from running roughshod over the whole game. Thanks for the heads-up! It’s also no surprise that preregistered events in the main gaming hall come with tons of bad-faith red flags for me. I go in assuming my GM and fellow players are going to play in bad faith: everyone’s on probation and I’m old enough now that I give no fucks about ghosting a toxic table. But that’s on me! That last sentence? Totally written in bad faith. I try to keep my eyes open for good-faith play. Storygame-oriented spaces like Games on Demand or the Indie Arcade coming up at RinCon in a few weeks, those kinds of arrangements typically draw good-faith players and, just as important, repel bad-faith players.
At home, we’ve spent years building good faith (after many years of bad faith). Sometimes we fail. Sometimes we get worn out. Sometimes a player gets so wrapped up in what they want for their character that they fight over rules so they can get what they want. Or they’ll carry out the rules in bad faith, hewing close to the letter but not the spirit of the intended outcomes. Or play gotcha with my imperfect rules memory.
Faith and the Rules
The biggest difference between roleplaying games and boardgames is that you must engage an RPG in good faith at every level: that the players will want to achieve what the game (and its designer(s)) want it to achieve, that the GM wants the same things the players want, that the rules don’t have to be written in such a constrained way that nobody can “cheat.”
There was, for a time, a desire in the indie scene to stridently insist that roleplaying games are “just like” any and all other games. The good-faith requirement, to my mind, says that just isn’t so.
Side trip: My spouse worked for many years in companies with incentive plans for their sales teams. There was a constant struggle to ensure that nobody was abusing the plans or exploiting loopholes. Whenever they wrote a plan that couldn’t be abused, though, overall engagement fell off. They’d go back and rejigger, and keep an eye open for abusers. The lesson, she said, was that you can’t write a plan so tight that nobody uses it. Write rules for the good-faith players, not the abusers. I think about that all the time.
Boardgames are faith-agnostic, which to my mind is the single biggest difference between them and RPGs. I don’t really buy the usual “humans can interpret the game more freely than procedures” bit, since you can have humans evaluate freeform descriptions from players: that’s Braunsteins. In a boardgame, there are the rules, and there is the objective. You operate within the rules to achieve the objective. Obviously there are boardgames that rely on negotiating, deal-making, deal-breaking, reading people, straight up lying. You should negotiate with open eyes, but to my mind it’s not bad-faith deal-making if the game is premised on somebody at some point breaking a deal. But the rules themselves? They’re just the rules. You don’t have to overlook occasional edge cases or play to the spirit of the thing. You just have to use what you’ve got to win.
Designing and playing games with an eye toward good faith play opens up so many possibilities. Stating play goals up front? Marvelous, let’s all get behind those. Throwing “balance” out the door in favor of more evocative procedures, fucking great. Let’s share our understanding of what we’re playing toward. Let’s be radically open, radically fair, radically honest. Funny how it’s “radical” when you’ve got decades of training that say otherwise.
The thing is, right? You can nitpick literally any RPG you can think of. Even in a relatively airtight transaction like you see in, say, Burning Wheel, if you play to the letter but not the spirit of every step, the game will be unfun and will quickly fall apart. If you have a tightly designed tactical game like most editions of Dungeons & Dragons, there’s not much breathing room left for the other stuff.
There have been some RPGs that have tried to straddle that line, to feature boardgame-like qualities while still being an RPG. We’re currently playing one: Band of Blades. It’s a game you can lose, and it’s a game you can try and earn a good score at. Consequently, I have found my players in a head space where they’re thinking boardgame thoughts and not roleplaying thoughts. It’s such a delicate balance, making sure the fiction matters, that consequences play out, that everyone try to embody their characters as much as possible. Burning Empires tried a similar thing a decade ago, and while I absolutely adore the game, you needed to bring so much good faith to playing it that you can’t really treat the win/lose aspect of the campaign the same as you would a boardgame.
Bad Faith is Misery
This past summer, a dear college friend got a chance to join us for a big stretch of Godbound. He’s dropped in and out of my Tuesday regulars for quite a while now, mostly because he’s a teacher and lives on the other side of this vast megalopolis. Godbound, being in the OSR camp, relies on rulings-not-rules. I was skeptical about that, but I was super open, honest and fair with everyone all the time. My stated goal was that I’d engage with my players and the game itself in good faith.
My sometimes-drop-in player? Quite dubious that good faith was even a thing. I was mildly aggravated feeling the subsonics of his distrust thrumming through me and the table every step of the way. “Oh, shh, you can’t make plans in front of the GM!” but not in a joking way. Over time he saw that, yeah, I’m totally on board with hearing his plan and seeing it work rather than scheming to beat him. The underlying structure in Godbound supports good-faith play as well, providing lots of guidance on how to deliver rulings (per OSR doctrine) and not just a mandate that rulings must happen because the rules can’t cover every contingency. The gaps left in the rules seemed more purposeful than “well, we can’t put a thousand page book out, so make it up if you need to.”
I still deal with players who aren’t exactly bad-faith players, more…faith-agnostic. Sometimes they don’t want to have to be fair, open and honest but also doesn’t go out of their way to be unfair, secretive or dishonest. They don’t want fairness, openness or honesty to be required. But they are. And the table is better for it. Interesting when they can’t see that.
Whenever I read a new rulebook, my good-faith radar is turned way up. Sometimes a game is so loosely written and poorly playtested that it relies on good faith to not break them. That feels like an abuse of my trust, you know? I’ll happily engage with a game in good faith if I can trust the rules to do their thing. I know other folks have different thresholds. Like, there are loose bits in Band of Blades, but that looseness isn’t a show-stopper for me while it definitely is for others. I get how the underlying game works and we’re all eager for the experience. But lordy, going into it with a table full of players eager to exploit every inelegant or incomplete rule? I’d rather play a boardgame.
And that’s exactly what we do from time to time, when we find we’ve exhausted our reserves of good faith. Those reserves replenish over time, but enough moments of dishonestly, opacity, or indefensible pique is enough to wear anyone out.
Good Faith is a Prescription
I know efforts to define what a roleplaying game “is” are terribly fraught and gatekeeper-y. That’s not where I’m coming from. My conclusion here is that players and designers need to be aware of the role of good faith when roleplaying takes place. And how the absence of good faith makes all this so much harder.
If you play with intentional good faith, you’re reinforcing good social habits. You just have to trust me that whatever trade-offs you think you need to make by being transparent and honest are more than made up by the other good stuff: greater clarity, fewer misunderstandings, everyone headed the same direction down the same road. Good faith is how you build your magic circle.
If you design with the assumption of good faith, you’re free to put your creative efforts into evocative, exciting procedures. It doesn’t let you off the hook for a game that can’t deliver an intentional experience to players engaging it in good faith, though. I think we can design looser than we think, is all I’m really saying.
Finally: across this spectrum, from player to facilitator to designer, good faith is also key to establishing credibility. I’ll write about that next.
Share this:
Discover more from The Indie Game Reading Club
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
Great article!
Over the past year, I’ve had the interesting experience of running several games at a conference (not related to gaming) for groups composed of players who mostly have never played an RPG before and each game has had at most two veteran players. Now, it’s been D&D because that’s what these newbie players have been curious about because of Stranger Things or the cultural moment that D&D is having, so that skews toward “bad faith” play as you note.
But what I’ve seen based on this anecdotal experience is this: completely new player embrace good-faith play, perhaps default to it, and veteran [D&D] players totally suck at it and default to bad-faith play. The simple explanation is that they’ve been actively conditioned to do that through their experiences in games, or that they’ve passively absorbed bad-faith gaming culture. The newbies look to me as the GM to instruct them on ways to play that make the game fun and smoothly functional.
So, hypothesis: maybe the most good-faith play is seen in those who haven’t yet had the gaming experiences that acculturate them to bad-faith play, or in those who have enough perspective (through exposure to different styles and systems of play) to reject bad-faith play?
I mean… Yeah. I agree that bad faith play is learned. Which is heartbreaking.
This Article was mentioned on indiegamereadingclub.com
It was my 50th birthday last week, so here are 50
lessons I’ve learned about roleplaying. Some of them might be short lessons! If
one of these jumps out as interesting, let me know and I’ll write a longer
piece about it.
You can’t fix real-world problems between players in your make-believe space.Enthusiasm will paper over any hiccups you may have about formal procedures.No idea is so great that you can’t rewind and do something different. Ideas are cheap and easy. Play as many different kinds of games as you can to learn more about your favorites.Nothing hits your players harder than reincorporating their ideas in surprising ways.Game designers are usually middling-fair GMs at best, and discovering they’re downright terrible (even at their own games!) should not come as a surprise. Every designer I’ve met is perfectly nice and talented! But actually running a game is a different core competency.Always roll out in the open.Be transparent about your intent, both as a player and a facilitator. If transparency fucks up your game then something weird is probably going on.Streamed games are a related but different activity than games played at home for nobody but you. You can enjoy both separately. When it’s time to spotlight a character, reframe the game situation so they’re clearly, obviously the primary protagonist. Treat every player like a star when it’s their turn.Playing, engaging, evaluating and listening in good faith is a skill worth practicing and mastering.If you want to get better at playing, facilitate more. Feel the freedom of playing your NPCs to lose, and bring that back to your own playing.If you want to get better at facilitating, play more. Feel the constraints around you when you’re a player, and think about how to address those constraints next time you run.Always have a visual focus in the middle of your table is powerful: a map, a prop, a relationship map, anything. Everyone stays more focused on the game when they have something to look at together.Change your seating arrangements to manipulate your social space. I sit at the end of the table when I want to project authority and at a long side when I want to invite collaboration. Break up the players who are thick as thieves. Arrange players to be near who they’re emotionally closest to in the game.To learn a new game: read through, cover to cover, once. Make two different kinds of characters (if it’s that kind of game), without looking up answers to your questions. Read a second time, keeping your unanswered questions in mind. Play the first session. Afterword, read through a third time with actual play context.To understand a game: synopsize the rules for your players in the clearest, shortest cheat sheet possible. Teaching is learning. To master a game, pay attention to: reward cycles (ie what incentives the players receive for various intentional actions), fulfillment cycles (ie what patterns the players complete through play), and the frequency of intermittent rewards (ie random prizes). Sketch it out if you need to. Recognize that not everyone is incentivized by the same things. Advancement and empowerment aren’t the only incentives! Sometimes folks are so surprised when players don’t chase obvious carrots.If you’re the type of gamer who reads blogs like this, or Twitter, or fan communities, or publisher forums, understand that you’re 100x more invested in this activity than anyone who doesn’t. That is, most players. Don’t be disappointed that they’re not up on the latest talk, theory, design, etc.The best part about going to conventions, for me, is being reminded of how good my home game situation is. The creative and social challenge of playing with strangers or friendly acquaintances is fun! But it’s not as consistently good as playing with the folks I know.“I don’t play board games” is the roleplayer’s version of “I don’t watch television” snobbery. Board games are orders of magnitude bigger than all of roleplaying. Indie games are a rounding error under the D&D umbrella. Storygames are a tiny subset of indie gaming. This thing we’re talking about is a fringe of a fringe activity. We have so much to learn from the wider gaming world.The absolute best players you’ll ever have at your table are the ones who have never played before. Old calcified gamers are the literal worst. Deprogramming bad habits is a lot of work.Occasionally recontextualize the abhorrent acts players put their characters through. Go ahead, yes, put this village to the sword. Later, remind them how civilians feel about genocide. Go ahead, yes, tromp around your fantasy village strapped for war. Remind them of how folks react when someone open-carries an assault rifle into a grocery store.Children are part of any believable make-believe world. It is startling how many folks forget this.When you’re facilitating and get creatively fatigued, ask the players for ideas. It’s really okay. You don’t need to be infallible. Everyone knows we’re all just making this stuff up anyway.Do not fucking make fun of anyone’s play. Ever. Don’t draw attention to their inconsistencies, or hand/body/facial gestures, or anything. The magic circle we draw around our game relies on trust. You will have a devil of a time redrawing your magic circle once you’ve lost it. I GM at my best when I start prioritizing good questions over good answers.Good, engaging facilitation is as much about table theatrics as it is about knowing the rules and maintaining pacing. I don’t mean funny voices (please no)! I mean drawing new additions on the relationship map with a flourish, or dramatically dropping a new clock on the table, or quietly placing a sad index card somewhere prominent. Everything a facilitator does is a show.An oldie but a goodie worth repeating: finding the right matches of system, players, and runner is an art. If any of those things is a mismatch, it’s going to be more work. System matters (but it’s not the only thing that matters).Play with as diverse a range of players as you can find: gender, age, culture, disability, anything and everything. Go to conventions if you don’t live in a place conducive to variety and can afford it. Play online if you can’t go to conventions. Challenge yourself and your play will improve, because roleplaying is a fundamentally human activity and being a better human makes you a better player. You’ll make mistakes and that’s okay. Nobody is going to cancel you if you’re playing in good faith.Give folks at least 30 minutes to bullshit before settling down to play. Try to get them gathered early to make that happen.Debriefs after sessions are so important that you’re better off cutting the game short 30 minutes just to fit it in. Probably most of my adjustments and ideas come from debriefing, not the session.Give everyone at your table the explicit privilege to stop the campaign at any time for any reason. Life is too short to be bored, or frustrated, or angry about games……but don’t give up too easily. My biggest gaming regrets always involve stopping a game too soon.No matter how deep in the weeds you get with procedures, no matter how antsy you get to get through a scene or a moment, always ask: what does this look like? The minute you decouple the rules from the fiction, things get weird. Even if the players slip into a planning fugue, ask: where is this taking place? What is going on around you? Grounding everything in the shared fiction enriches everything, even if it takes more time.Tent cards for character names and pronouns, every game, no matter what. Put the names on the back as well so the folks next to you can see too.A break every hour works magic. Not sure why we think we need to muscle through every minute of a session. Take a break, let things percolate in your brain.Unless you’re playing in a morally stark setting (like our current campaign, Band of Blades), villains and heroes are super boring. Anti-heroes are the worst! Relatable people with incompatible goals, that’s where the good stuff is.Don’t run a game when you’re not feeling it. Take breaks. A week or two won’t let the fizz out of the bottle, but if it does then maybe there wasn’t that much fizz to begin with.I used to get really upset about folks fiddling with non-game stuff at the game table (phones, doodles, knitting for crying out loud), but I’ve made peace with the fact that sometimes players need small distractions. Still, check in and make sure they’re still engaged.If I don’t have an RPG in my head – if I’m not thinking about it, chewing on it, obsessing – in a couple weeks I start feeling uncentered. Like the gyroscope of my life has tipped over. Weird! But it’s proven to be true over and over, even when I’m feeling burned out. If I want to generate interpersonal heat or a big reveal, sometimes I’ll just start tossing in topics and ideas that are just adjacent to the characters’ backgrounds, cultures, affiliations, existing relationships, whatever. You don’t need to set up the heat right out of the gate! Once that ingredient is on the table, the table takes over. The heat will reveal itself. The fact you look like a genius who knew what was going to happen all along is a bonus.Bait and switch in RPGs! Just … no. It never works. It doesn’t work out the way you think it will. The players resent it. Don’t hit them where they’re weakest.Players, thank your GM and each other. GMs, thank your players. Recognition is rare but so nice. Splash it around! It’s free!Biggest red flag at new tables: when a player acts squirrelly about the inclusion of sexual relationships as a factor in the game setting. Not even the sex itself! Just repulsion or fear of the idea that fictional characters have intimate relationships.As a player, I find procedure and embodiment are a zero sum game. The more procedurally intense the game, the less embodiment I feel, and vice versa. As a GM I anticipate that behavior from the players as well. Try running sessions of an ongoing campaign with the same intensity as you would a one-shot. Play for keeps! Don’t be afraid to crank the stakes up! Try running one-shots with the same intensity as you would a campaign session. Play for investment and satisfaction! Not every one-shot needs to end in a blood opera!GM from the bottom of the org chart, not the top. You’re there to support your players. Give until it hurts.
Liked it? Take a second to support The Indie Game Reading Club on Patreon!Share this:FacebookRedditTwitterTumblrPinterestEmailLike this:Like Loading…
Related
This Article was mentioned on indiegamereadingclub.com
This Article was mentioned on indiegamereadingclub.com
This Article was mentioned on indiegamereadingclub.com