Valeria made a great observation in her recent review of Daggerheart:
TTRPGs have utterly failed to communicate how lighthearted this hobby is to outsiders. When I tell my coworkers that I play D&D, most of them are imagining […] a Lord of the Rings LARP mediated by complicated math. Therefore, most new converts to the hobby - intimidated by the serious game they imagine D&D to be - try to pull the game in a direction more comfortable to them. They play clowns and humanoid bears to protect themselves with a layer of detached irony.
But the real irony is that this is the most popular way to engage with the game! The most beloved D&D stories are all absurd bits! So the same cycle keeps playing out at table after table. New players enter the hobby expecting D&D to be the butt of their jokes, realize everyone else is also doing bits, then become so emotionally invested in the joy the bits brought them that the game acquires genuine narrative weight.
This got me thinking about my own experiences—not so much my own early ones as a player (deadly earnest, I'm afraid; please pretend to be shocked) but the several times now I've seen other folks sit down at the table for the first time, and in particular my experiences with first-time GMs. I've thought about related questions a fair bit (like, what's a good first system for brand-new players, and what sort of adventures should I, as the GM, send them on?) but I'd never thought directly about what Valeria articulated. It struck a chord, obviously, and it helped me clarify something that's been bugging me lately.
I've been reading through a ton of Mothership stuff. As is tradition, I've gone way deeper than the group (which has for the time being moved on to Tales of Argosa anyway) ever needed. It's just fun! It's a great scene, there's a ton of creativity out there, there's a ton of diversity to what people are writing, and there's loads I'm looking forward to running. But there is a thread running through a lot of third-party Mothership material that I find a bit irksome: a tendency to get jarringly silly. Goofy names, obvious references to popular media, zany gags, all manner of unserious stuff that takes me out of the immersive space I'm building in my imagination.
The part that has bugged me, to be clear, is my own stuffy reaction. Am I a spoilsport? A killjoy? As we established above, TTRPGs are silly, and writing silly stuff is fun. Who am I to scoff at somebody else's silly fun? The sort of dork who approached his early experiences with D&D 3.5e and 4e in deadly earnest, of course. What suits me definitely isn't for everybody! And yet…
* * *
This week, I also serendipitously happened across a video gently poking fun at director Robert Eggers for how disappointed he is by his much-lauded feature debut, The Witch, and how relentlessly negative he is about it on the film's commentary track. Punctiliousness about historical accuracy matters to Eggers to a degree that seems borderline pathological even to the sympathetic video creator.
For my part, I'm an admirer of Eggers, love The Witch, and am all for pathological devotion to historical accuracy in film. For me, The Witch stands in stark contrast to one of the recent films I've been most out of step with critics and other cinema dorks about, The Brutalist. I hated the latter for any number of reasons, but among the things that most immediately upset me, and then just continually galled me throughout its voluminous running time, was the film's sloppy disregard for historical accuracy. Any movie whose Holocaust-survivor protagonist emerges from Buchenwald with eight-pack abs has burned up all of my goodwill right from the jump, but this one also featured a slew of anachronistic dialogue and had very obviously been filmed in Central Europe (I correctly guessed Hungary during the intermission and have witnesses who can corroborate that!) despite being set in Pennsylvania. I used to live in Germany and spent some time in Poland and Hungary. I recognized the architecture, the trees, even the damn dirt. It quickly destroyed whatever ability to be immersed I had left after the abs.
In an interview clipped in that video above, my man Eggers says, “I didn't obsess over Puritan buttons just because I like buttons. I didn't obsess over the saw marks in the floorboards because I like saw marks. […] It's in the purpose of telling the story. It's about immersing you in the world. If you can't be actually transported to the 17th century, then you can't actually be transported into the mindset of these English Puritan Calvinist settlers, and if you can't do that, then you can't believe in the witch, and the whole movie just doesn't work. […] The more you let things slide, the more the whole thing doesn't work.” Now, it's certainly possible that you can set the bar too high; errors that are only in frame for a fraction of a second, things that only a subject-matter expert or a world-class pedant would recognize, it's probably fine to let them slide. (There are a couple King Hu movies set during the Song dynasty, which ended in 1279, where people have dried maize hanging in their homes despite the fact that maize didn't exist in China until after 1492; this only bothers me a little bit and has not diminished my adoration for Hu or his work.)
The thing is, though, that although nobody will ever notice any of the work that went into raising the bar higher than it needed to be, everybody's going to notice all of the work you didn't put in if you don't set it high enough. The bar depends on the audience, and it depends on the subject matter, but it's always there.
The immersiveness and tone of any roleplaying game depend on a lot of factors, and of course the overall composition of the group is an important one, but nothing is more important than the example the GM sets. Let's carve it in stone right here: My First Law of GMing is that the players will always take the game less seriously than the GM does. This is almost always true on a one-on-one basis (i.e., each individual player in your game will take it no more seriously than you do; nobody wants to out-nerd the boss nerd), but it is always true in the aggregate. I have never been in a game where the average player seriousness (or earnestness, or “buy-in”) was greater than the GM's, and I am 100% confident I never will be—at least not for long. If it ever happens for even a couple sessions in a row, the game probably falls apart.
As a filmmaker, if you're trying to immerse your audience, you want to err on the side of being too punctilious. As a GM, you're definitely trying to immerse your players, so you want to err on the side of being embarrassingly earnest. You can always tone it down! It's a lot easier to relax and let your players inject some silliness into the proceedings (which, again, they're almost always going to do) than it is to tighten things back up. Like a jury tainted by impermissible evidence even after it's been officially stricken from the record, players are probably going to stay in the silliest headspace they've been in even if you enjoin them with “Come on, guys, take this a little more seriously!” Start earnest and let things find their level. Be the straight man to the players' comedians.
By that same token, if you're writing TTRPG material intended for GMs to use, obviously they don't have to run it exactly as you write it and are welcome to revise it to make it more immersive, serious, earnest, or anything else for their table…but you might as well err on the side of earnestness, because it's a lot easier to make things more silly than less. Give your reader all the tools they need to play the most earnest, serious, humorless version of your material possible. They, and especially their players, will have no trouble finding humor at the table.
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