Freelancing Life -- Playing Games With Strangers (Patreon)

I have worked a lot of game conventions for a lot of game companies. The companies I have done that for the most often are Wizards of the Coast and Paizo, most often at Gen Con and PaizoCon, but I've done a lot more than that. Sometimes conventions invite me as a guest. And, no shock for a professional game designer, one of the things conventions as me to do is run games. And one of the things convention organizers often do FOR me is offer to include me in a game they are running.

And that means I have played a bunch of games with total strangers. Nor were all of them any form of D20 game, or even RPGs. I have played, and observed others play, of a broad range of people of different ages and backgrounds.

(Art of a cool-looking but imaginary board game by Alexandr Bognat.)

Now, I am an introvert. Being in public at all is tiring. Talking to people I don't know is terrifying. I have spend decades getting GOOD at doing these things, because I see them as crucial to advancing my career. and before I practiced, they were things I often could NOT do. I'd vomit at the thought. Make myself so sick I'd cancel. Cry just offstage.

(And for a quick plug, toastmasters International was the main way I overcame being incapable of such activities. I still get a sick feeling sometimes, but at least now I can smile and power through, and not cry until I get back to my hotel room later. I have learned to cosplay an extrovert... for a few hours at a time, anyway.)

So playing games with total strangers in distant conventions is till exhausting, but also amazing.

I think it’s really important for game designers to play games with people they don’t know at all from time to time, outside of formal playtests. Especially in a “fellow player” capacity, where you aren’t the facilitator or teacher of the game. You can learn things about how people interact with games it’s hard to pick up without this kind of empirical experience.

(It's even better if you can play games with people who have no idea who you are or what you do, which can be hard to schedule but is both useful and humbling when you do.)

For example, over one weekend I was shown that if you have a game that ever requires someone to add three numbers, and the sum is going to be a double digit or higher value, there’s a segment of competent, reasonable adults you are excluding. Those people will never, ever, enjoy any activity that has that basic level of math as a requirement. And the more often you require that in the game, the bigger that segment of people is.

And I'm not saying these people can't do that level of math (though such adults DO exist). The people I'm discussing totally can, and with reasonable speed, and total accuracy. They just don't WANT to. It is never fun for them. They will avoid any game that askes them to, even if it fill other benchmarks of fun for them.

And I'm not discussing something like 1-in-10,000 or 1 in-1,000 people. Even at a game convention, the number is much closer to 1 in 20. Ask them to roll 20d6 and count successes? That's fine. Ask them to roll 1d8, 1d6, and add the total to 9? They HATE it. If you design a game that requires that, they won't want to play it more than once.

Now that doesn’t mean no game should do that kind of math. It’s okay for a game not to be for everyone. Heck, there are people who hate 'counting successes,' hate being asked to roll more than 2-3 dice at once, hate games that use miniatures, hate games that DON'T use miniatures. No game appeals to everyone.

But it’s important to remember that our individual experiences and preferences are far, far from universal. And talking to, or even gaming with, a few dozen other designers, or friends, or members of a game club, still is not a "broad" experience compared to gaming with hundreds of people you don't know, from dozens of states, in many hundreds of game sessions.

None of that means you have to change the games YOU like, or the kinds of games you design. I just find it really useful to even just be exposed to that many attitudes, styles of play, group dynamics, and reactions to game events. As a game designer, I've added “Play Games With Strangers” as one of the critical activities I need to make sure I engage in from time to time.

This Freelancing Life article is open to Patrons with free memberships. That's true for half these articles, and the next one will be exclusive to paying Patrons only. Also, the paid tier costs are going up in June, but if you join now, your lower rate is locked in!