went to a monastery on Mount Olympus for a litlte while. Yes, there's Orthodox monasteries on Mount Olympus. And my friend went there. He had an elder, who helped him on the way to salvation. Part of this meant helping my friend deal with "bad" thoughts. Think a psychologist, but... well honestly a lot better. This dude lives with you, has seen it all, and knows your bullshit better than you do. There's a level of "Yeah been there done that do this" these elders have that most laymen simply can't comprehend.
So my friend was having really dark thoughts. And he brought them forward to his elder, knowing the man wouldn't judge or take advantage of him. His elder looked at him, and then said with a bit of a wry smile: "Go take a nap. Take the afternoon off."
If all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.
And sometimes, you just need a nap.
In a recent, widely circulated video essay,
Vindicta RPGs delivered a poetic eulogy for the burnt-out Game Master, diagnosing our collective fatigue through Nietzsche's Three Metamorphoses. It’s a compelling piece of mythmaking. But it harbors a critical, unstated error: the assumption that GM burnout is primarily an attitude problem.
It isn't.
The causal arrow runs in the opposite direction. You cannot simply "will" yourself into the mindset of a child at play while operating a mechanical beast that demands the bandwidth of an air-traffic controller. The tools you bring to the table actively dictate the posture you take.
This entire video is exactly the problem with conventional play. You can't deny that. He describes conventional play with an exactitude that only the utterly stupid or brainwashed could disagree with. The GM pours his heart and soul into something literally nobody can take the time for, using a bad rule system, with methods that are way too intensive for what they provide. The problem is that Vindicta is way too poetic, and goes into some really pretty verbiage for what's in reality a series of bad design and social decisions.
Bad rules systems
do exist. There are objective standards you can measure a bad game by, and they're pretty simple:
Given your goal, the design requires more work than you feel it gives back.
You can't just
ask if something works. You have to ask what the goal of the design is and what its parameters are. A random encounter table is going to be terrible if your goal is to resolve whether you hit someone or not. It's a lot of work for "yes" or "no".
If your goal is beyond "Yes" or "No", that changes how you evaluate it.
You need to ask what the goal is. If you can't answer that question, from examining the text, you got an objective problem on your hands.
The amount of work,
given your goal, is absolutely a part of the equation. RPGs are by nature an improv activity, and improv requires processes that can be used with very little effort... because you're going to be doing a lot of them.
The output
must be more than what you put in. You have to feel rewarded! You have to feel like something that took so little to get so much back is like cheating. At that point you're actually able to enjoy the results, because you actually have the brain space.
Yeah that's a lot of subjective
reactions, but look at what we're looking for: does the process itself yield a pretty consistent subject response? The objective part isn't how the person reacts it's how the mechanics cooperate with the person to create that subjective experience. Objective evaluation means looking at the things not a part of you to see how easy it is to interact with, given your goal.
There's a very easy metric
one can use for figuring out if a design is objectively good , given you know what the goal is. I use this rule when designing. I have footage showing this works. It ain't about my opinion at that point. You can go look at what I'm doing.
If you can't easily handle the rule consistently while drunk or tired, it's bad design.
That's not saying you can't make a rules-heavy game. I don't make lite games. I just don't. I'm simply saying that if you're having a bad day and are tired, there's no actual difference between that and being drunk. If you're having a bad day, and therefore aren't really thinking clearly, the game should not be compromised.
If your game doesn't assume a flawed user, what's the point of playing it? Because I don't know about you, but I almost never at fully optimal when playing my games.
Notice how that completely bypasses
most of what Vindicta is saying? And that's before we get to the quiet part that Vindicta isn't saying ,but I'm in the habit of saying such things loudly.
System mattering isn't
necessarily part of his "camel-lion-child" setup. Going "hardcore OSR" isn't the only answer to realizing that modern DnD sucks absolute balls. Sometimes you go in a different reaction: realizing that mechanics can help an attitude problem. People show up tired, and if they find the experience lacking, they're not going to invest anything in it. Games are supposed to help you get energy back, not lose you more!
If a common theme of modern DnD is scheduling... guess what that means.
The system doesn't give back more than what it takes.
Which means it sucks.
And we know Vindicta knows this
because he's designing his own system! I'm not poo-pooing that, for the record. I too am designing my own stuff, and I think there's plenty of room for differing systems. So I am not just nitpicking here. If he didn't think system mattered, if he thought it was merely a question of accepting the inner child and producing questions for the players to respond to.. he wouldn't be using rules. Or making his own.
On some intuitive level, Vindicta knows that. Poetry won't fix a engine that burns more fuel than it produces. If a game system expects its GM to be a heroic martyr just to keep the gears turning, the system is broken, no matter how elevated your mindset is.
I know Vindicta is addressing a central attitude problem on the part of the GM, but the unstated "Your tools determines you mindset" is a critical error.
So the next time
you feel that familiar dread settling in over a canceled session or a bloated prep folder, don't default to self-flagellation. Don't look for a grand spiritual transformation to endure the weight of an unyielding campaign.
Look at your tools instead.
Ask if the engine you're feeding is actually returning the energy you pour into it. If it demands that you be a hero, a martyr, or an air-traffic controller just to get through a Tuesday night, set it down. You don't need a new philosophy of the soul. You need a system that assumes you’re human, tired, and just trying to play a good game—and maybe, before anything else, a good afternoon nap.
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