Is It Bad To Be Good At RPGs?
Header Image: Dungeon Master’s Guide 2 (2009) by Wizards of the Coast / Wayne Reynolds
After watching a video by Folding Ideas for the third, fourth, or maybe sixth time about why it’s rude to suck at Warcraft, it got me thinking about the relationship between metaknowledge and role-playing games like Dungeons & Dragons, Pathfinder, Blades in the Dark, Monsterhearts, and many others. These are games that I have played, created homebrew, and enjoyed. But to get to any level of ability to make homebrew for a system, you have to be good at that system. You have to understand the system, how it works, how it flows, and more.
But is that type of metaknowledge actually… good?
We see people complaining about meta-gamers, about min-maxers, rules-lawyers, about how people will suck the ‘fun’ out of a game by trying to make the most mechanically strong character that they can. These are the people that have learned not just the rules surrounding their class, but the rules surrounding other classes, spells that they can’t cast, rules for jumping that won’t ever come up, and even learned monster design and how they function. Are these people making the game worst because they have learned everything?
What Does It Mean To Be Good?
When I talk about someone being good at a role-playing game, I am talking about how they know how to create a character in an effective manner. They know the meta-strategies of the game, what is mechanically sound and what is only fluff that won’t be useful in game. They understand that Strength is good if they want to be a melee fighter with heavy armor, but they can drop Strength if they just want to be a melee fighter cause Dexterity is just that much more powerful. In fact, these players may even make Strength a dump stat because it ultimately won’t matter in the game because it isn’t an important ability, along with Intelligence.
These ‘good players’ have an inherent knowledge of the system where they can decide whether an option is mechanically sound or would be making their character just a slightly bit ineffectual. And this isn’t restrained to just mechanically deeper games like Dungeons & Dragons or Pathfinder. You can find these types of mechanics in Blades in the Dark where one ability might be fluff about how people forget that they interacted with you and another ability is all mechanics about how you take less stress when you use a certain action over another.
They are good at a system, in that they know how to utilize it to make mechanically efficient characters. But is that a good thing?
Being Bad
When I say ‘bad’, I’m not talking about making mechanically questionable character choices. When I say ‘bad’, I’m not talking about knowing that most monsters are resistant to fire, so you don’t take only fire spells. When I say ‘bad’, I mean are you taking the fun out of the system from the table as a whole.
When a ‘good player’ plays the game ‘good’, are they making it a ‘bad experience’ for the table? Are they just too ‘good’ at the game?
I say no, they are not. But many people across the forums might disagree. A min-maxer is only focused on maximizing their abilities that mechanically matter while minimizing everything else. A power gamer is so focused on a single ability, like dealing damage, that they fail to notice anything else in the game.
For many people, these players are not playing a game. They are exploiting the game, which makes what they are doing ‘bad’. They are no longer enjoying the game from its merits of teamwork, playing with friends, enjoying a story, or anything else. They are only playing to ‘win’ the game, whatever winning means to that player.
What Is The Real Purpose Of RPGs?
When you are playing a role-playing game, what is the mean reason for doing so? Is it to live out the life of someone else? Spend time with friends? Defeat monsters? Visit new worlds? Or is it to play out the role of someone else?
If the real, shared consensus of playing a role-playing game is to Role-Play, seeing as how that is in the name of the genre of game, then focusing on the mechanics could be seen as ‘bad’. If your only focus is on getting good at the rules of the game, then you are conceivably ignoring the roles of the game.
But on the flip side of that, why can’t a player’s min-maxed warlock-paladin multi-class be playing the role of someone who has a problem with sticking to one class and is a powerhouse? That is that player’s fantasy, to role-play as someone whose very force of will is wielded as a weapon.
What Does It Mean To Win?
Everyone wants to win, it’s just that everyone has a different idea of what that means. For some, it could be dealing the most damage in their party, knowing and learning every NPC’s name and their favorite cookie, hanging out with friends, playing out a story, and more.
Winning is not a single thing. It is on a table-to-table basis and even player-to-player. One player is not going to be happy if they dealt all the damage in a single session, but didn’t get a chance to play out their character in a role-playing situation, just like another player is not going to like shopping episodes when all they want to do is learn about the story and continue the plot.
Winning is a unique condition for each player, and there are no good or bad ways to win at the game.
How To Be A Good Player
Back when I was running Adventurer’s League at my local game store, I had a player who I think most people would call a ‘bad player’. When they were fighting a monster, they’d pull out a Monster Manual and try to figure out the creature’s statistics. When I was running an adventure, they’d read the adventure ahead of time. When I called for rolls, they might ‘test’ a few dice to see which one was rolling better and ‘forget’ to make their check or give me a number that wasn’t ‘entirely’ random.
That player is… a bad player. But why? When you play a video game, you might look up ways to beat the boss or find where that hidden key you need is located. When you face a troll, you already know to use fire (but will perform a performative dance to ‘trick’ the table into thinking you don’t). When you read a book, you might sneak a peek at the ending if you are worried about a beloved NPC. You might restart a quick save file when one of your characters dies from an unlucky crit against them. You might adjust the printed rules of a game at your table because you prefer your homebrew rules.
In all those instances, does that make you a bad player?
Good Players At Bad Tables, Bad Players At Good Players
In truth, there is no such thing as a bad player or a good player. There are only mismatched players for your table. Some tables are more than willing to have players with copies of their Monster Manual out, while others will simply take the Monster Manual out of the player’s hands, close it up, and put it on a high shelf until the end of the game.
This goes back to the ‘win’ condition for each player. Everyone is motivated to reach what they consider ‘winning’ at the game, even if the win is something weird, nonsensical, or seems like a ‘good’ way of playing the game. When you have a mismatched expectations at the table, where the players want vastly different win conditions that will make them labelled as ‘bad’ players at the table, then you have an unstable table.
When everyone at the table has the same ideas around winning, they all agree that it’s fine to have your Monster Manual at the table because… well, they want to win, then no one at the table is a ‘bad’ player. They are all ‘good’ players.
We can see this all the time on competitive games and games with a lot of paratext and information written about them. You have games like World of Warcraft where everyone knows the best strategy to win, but that doesn’t make any of them ‘bad’ players. We have guides for how to defeat bosses in Dark Souls, but it’s not bad of you to look up those guides and find a strategy to defeat the boss.
It’s only when people sit around a table where everyone has mismatched expectations for winning, where everyone has mismatched knowledge of the game, and more - that people start thinking that knowing more about a game is bad. That the player is meta-gaming too much because they know more strategy and mechanics.
In part, I think this comes from the fact that a Game Master may not be as rules-knowledgeable as one of the players and be hit with an intricate strategy that requires a deep knowledge of the game to know how it works… and even if it does actually work based on rules as written or intended. This can create a knee-jerk reaction where the Game Master might call that player ‘bad’ - because the player knows more than them and it scares them, or it ruins the Game Master’s plans for the session or story, or any number of things.
The Game Master, as much as anyone else, wants to win the game too - which typically comes down to telling a story, using powerful monsters, entertaining their friends, or just have fun being the narrative of a story. When a player with knowledge that threatens any of those win conditions for the Game Master, we as Game Masters and players can get defensive and lash out.
You Are A Good Player
No matter your play style, you are a good player - you just have to find a table to match the way you play. Be honest and upfront with your Game Master, and with the others at your table about how you like to play the game. Maybe it takes you a little longer to find a table, but what it means is that when you find a table that matches your playstyle, you’ll have so much more fun. There will be less frustration at the table, and you’ll have truly become the good player you always wanted to be.
You can’t play a role-playing game wrong, but what you can do is play at the wrong table.
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