Fragile Crystalline Structure

Today's #RPGaDay2016 prompt is: Which gamer most affected the way you play?

This is kind of a tricky one. When I'm a player, I tend to hang back and just enjoy the gaming ambience. I like to explore the world the GM creates and see what crazy stuff the other PCs do. As far as I know I didn't pick this up from any specific gamer. I suspect I'm hardly alone; most players figure out how to play as they go, picking up cues and behaviours from their formative gaming groups.

This is -weird-. There's a staggering amount of information on good GMing, and there's a fairly regular interest in classifying types of players and researching gamer personalities. But I've seen little on what we can learn from specific players, or on how to be a good player in general. In fact the only thing I can think of offhand is Grant Howitt's piece. And somehow, roleplayers cobble together a feel for how gaming works.

So if we don't learn how to play by modelling good behaviour, how do we learn? Well, maybe we all learn from -bad- play. As a gaming group coheres socially, part of that process is figuring out what doesn't work and what isn't acceptable, gradually and intuitively, from each others' mistakes.

I played in a game once that lasted maybe three sessions. The three players had strong and divisive personalities, and the GM was not yet practiced at maintaining the peace. The game world was a detailed homebrew fantasy setting, with kingdoms and economies and a unique pantheon and such. One player spent gaming time poking holes and criticising the world building. We managed to play through an adventure fine, but the atmosphere was less fun than it could have been, as we would often argue about some setting detail.

It came to a head when the GM explained that the currency in this kingdom was crystals. The nit-picking player started criticising this, and then explained how he was going to use low-level spells to destroy as much crystal as possible, with the specific intention of destabilizing the economy to prove how stupid crystal currency is. The argument between him and the GM raged to the point where the third player and I had our characters commit suicide. Total game meltdown.

I'm not sure I -learned- it from that game, but it solidified for me that buy-in to the setting is up to the player. It is -more fun- to accept the world on its own terms and explore, rather than try to destroy it from within with some kind of reductio ad absurdum apocalypse.

The behaviour of that player also influenced my thoughts on GMing--I have an intuition that making too many setting details is dangerous, either because of inconsistency or more likely because they misdirect players away from stuff that actually matters. Today I really like to give players input into the setting so that they can actively contribute rather than simply discover what I've come up with. It's possibly contradictory, but I think the same intuition drives the way I play, of just taking the GM's setting on board as-is, for better or worse. The play experience at that table, how one player just not giving a shit destroyed the game, shows how important buy-in can be.