Games Are Not Existential
Luke Solves TTRPG Discourse With Allusions To Sartre
This post has been bubbling in my mind cauldron for a while now, and has finally boiled over after reading Mr. Mann's post this morning about adventures that require the referee to do some potentially heavy prepwork to bring them to the table. This will largely be a post about how I think we need to be less dogmatic about how games and adventures should be written and make more space for variety of expression in our space. However, I'm going to start with a brief digression about how I actually agree with the core of Mr. Mann's argument. If you don't care about that, you can skip to the next section for the bigger point.
It's Fine Actually If An Adventure Makes The Referee Do Work
When I decided to get more intentional about writing and publishing adventures a few years ago, I decided I wanted to do it the right way and do my research about what people thought was good in adventures. At that time, there was a lot of discussion about the OSE house-style and the bullet-pointy style in general that would let you easily run a dungeon at the table from the book after a single quick read. A big part of this was through the Between Two Cairns podcast, but it was far from limited to that outlet. There's nothing wrong with that style, and it's still rightly popular for a lot of people, but I always found myself grating against in trying to write adventures. I think the closest I got to it was Midnight in Bonetown and even that doesn't really fit the mold. I more often have found myself writing bigger paragraphs with bolded words and bullets below for a few of those with specific information. But while working on my current adventure for Perils & Princesses, Luke Gearing of Thinking Adventures fame was kind enough to read it and gave some feedback that really made me question why I was trying to do it that way. So I've stopped and embraced the wordier style I find myself naturally leaning into.
This is all to say that it's OK to have more than one way of writing adventures. It's OK to write more like a work of fiction for the referee to read and discover alongside the player. It's OK for a referee to need to digest and then reconfigure the content of an adventure to actually run it. It's also OK to have a succinct bullet-point setup that lets you run it right from the book with almost no work. And that's cool. Diversity is good. People need different things. I'm going to stop digressing, but I'd be remiss if I didn't also reference this post from J. at Orthopraxy, which much more comprehensively goes into a defense for this style of adventure.
The Actual Point About Existentialism
With that digression out of the way, let's get to the point I really wanted to make here, which is more of a metadiscussion of TTRPG discourse rather than a discussion of the specific topic that's going around right now.
In his 1946 lecture Existentialism is a Humanism, Jean Paul Sartre said the following about the principle of subjectivisim in existentialism:
When we say that man chooses himself, we do mean that every one of us must choose himself; but by that we also mean that in choosing for himself he chooses for all men. For in effect, of all the actions a man may take in order to create himself as he wills to be, there is not one which is not creative, at the same time, of an image of man such as he believes he ought to be. To choose between this or that is at the same time to affirm the value of that which is chosen; for we are unable ever to choose the worse. What we choose is always the better; and nothing can be better for us unless it is better for all.
There's some parts of our life where this viewpoint is incredibly relevant. Choosing your beliefs about human rights, for example, is actually relevant to what is "better for all."
One place where this isn't relevant is games.
Choosing one type of game or adventure you prefer over others has no implications for what is good for other game players. None.
It's fine to find the thing you like and play it. It's fine for other people to find something they like and play that.
It's fine even to say "I like it this way and there should be more of this because I like it."
What's not fine is to say "I like it this way and everything should be like this."
I don't actually have much more to say about this. Just, you know, think about how you phrase things when we talk about this. Discourse can be fun. But it's not existential.