Internet DMs are Rationalists

This isn't the post of tips that I promised at the end of my last post - I still intend to write that up, but thinking about the tips and techniques themselves got me thinking about how we think about games. That is, how the people who homebrew and tinker and obsess and write blog posts about how to run good games think about games. Because I think there's what you might call a "rationalist streak" in the internet ttrpg community.

Consider this: This hobby, though surging to headier heights of popularity than ever before attained, is still extremely niche. I'd say the majority of people on the street probably couldn't tell you even the basics of how "D&D" is supposed to work, much less a "(tabletop) roleplaying game" (unless guessing from the title). Yet the sheer amount of material generated that gets devoted to how to play the game well is staggering. Forum traffic and GMing blogs abound that are dedicated to honing your game, figuring out its defects, making your prep more efficient etc etc. And that's another interesting thing: It's almost all on the GM side. For every blog about being a player, there are many more that talk strictly about GMing.

I think I know, at least partly, why this is. GMs tend to have a rationalistic streak. Rationalism is the idea that there is an underlying logic to the world, and that we can home in on it if we think hard enough, and in the right ways. That sort of thinking goes way back, but it really found its strongest statement in the enlightenment period. Modern rationalists, although they don't go by that name, talk about "carving the world at the joints" (apologies vegetarians, the world is apparently meaty); the ultimate correct science and the correct logic will map directly onto the underlying structure of reality. Rationalism often involves a certain amount of mysticism, but the main driving force is the deep-set feeling that things can be figured out - the world is fundamentally rational, and contains the tools and structures to work it out.

It's clear why rpgs attract people like this; rpgs, and especially games like modern editions of D&D, offer a set of tools or even a unified mechanic that purports to simulate an entire world. Or rather, it lays out the laws of the world themselves. Every action in D&D since 3rd ed obeys one rule, the ubiquitous "D20+mods". And everything keys off this. You can work out how hard it is to deceive someone or land a punch on them by computing the target numbers based on their attributes and other modifiers; the information is basically all there in their stat block. And modifying for the situation is just a matter of putting numerical values on situational factors, i.e.: working out the objective value, for your attempt, of each mitigating feature, to put it in terms of this one law that runs through the game.

Note that it wasn't always this way. D&D used to offer a random assortment of resolution systems for different actions (rolled using many different dice combinations). And it was open ended, in the sense that you might encounter something in the game world that didn't fit under any of these resolution systems, and have to work out how to deal with it yourself. Once you acknowledge that, you pretty much acknowledge that the die rolls being use are a heuristic, not a reflection of the natural laws of the world. The game world outstripped the mechanics, and wasn't totally bound by them, so the mechanics weren't the logic or the "physics engine" of the game world.

This could account for the apparently more relaxed, laissez-faire attitude of old-school dungeon masters (still talking about D&D here), although there are still loads of 80s White Dwarf articles posing questions along the lines of "How do I resolve x situation according to the game rules?" But this definitely does help explain the OSR focus on GM fiat. The players can't leverage mechanics against the GM, because the mechanics are an imperfect and incomplete guide to the game world, and the person who's best aware of the game world is the GM.

I think that having your game contain a determinate set of systems that explain how the world works, even if those systems are incomplete, attracts people to whom the picture of the world as following a logical pattern that can be figured out is particularly appealing. And I think that that selection process helps explain why GMs clutter up so much of the blog-o-sphere trying to work out how to run the perfect game; the trait we have that makes this sort of game so appealing to us is the same trait that makes us believe that any GMing problem we run into can be solved by writing enough blog posts about it, that our games can be honed and streamlined, that the perfect homebrew is just on the horizon. and so on.

And I wholeheartedly include myself in that camp; I'm philosophically opposed to rationalism, especially in its modern mode, but I think it's the same rationalistic streak in myself, the deep belief that anything can be figured out, and the drive to do so, that partly explains why I like these games so much, but also why I write these posts, homebrew items and enemies, and spend ages thinking about how to make my next game better.

But I also think rationalism can be harmful. It can lead to obsessive behaviour, as you try to figure out why that scene fell flat, what your games are missing. It's brittle in that way - it contains an assumption that you can fix anything by thinking about it hard enough. Sometimes you will just have a bad session. A lot of the time you'll have a pretty good session, but not a great one. The rationalist drive is to figure out why and implement a fix, but a lot of the time you just have to accept that that won't be possible.

It's not that no such fix exists per se, it's just that it might be impossible without putting in tens of hours of prep, or somehow making sure your friends had a good day at work, or it may not even be within your cognitive capacities to implement it and run the rest of the session at the same time. And if you hold strong rationalist tenets, the little imperfections are going to eat away at you, which is why it's important just to take a step back occasionally and accept it for what it is, not trying to shine the cold light of reason on your game, but simply live through it with your players.