I feel there is a certain arc that you see among tabletop gamers, especially those who get their start with D&D. D&D is, like anyone’s first RPG, the gateway to a new world, a new mode of expression and imagination. While lots of people enjoy games, some end up enraptured, vibrating at the thought of what they can do and create. So they become a DM and start writing, start doing as much as they can with the game. And they start hitting walls. Some of the walls are from the game; the sort of ‘game logic’ of D&D only tells a limited palette of stories no matter how much the marketing says otherwise. So they try another game. And another game. In most cases, game logic still prevails. Some of the walls, though, are from the other players. Even if the DM wanted to try another game, the players wouldn’t necessarily go along with it. And from the perspective of the person who was most excited by the game, it certainly looks like the other players aren’t taking it seriously enough. The stakes that our aspiring writer sees in their worlds, the other players…don’t. So how do they fix this? How do they make everything feel serious to everyone at the table? How do they make the players feel the way they feel?

This story is a familiar one, and I know that because it’s my story. I was the one who was vibrating out of my chair with excitement at the idea of creating worlds in D&D, and my disenchantment with how D&D actualized those stories led me to Cyberpunk. And when it seemed like the intrigue of the stories wasn’t resonating with my players, I tried to make the game more serious, more internally consistent, more “realistic”. And years later, when I found a literal generation of heartbreakers and retroclones dedicated to making D&D more lethal, making wizards less powerful, and generally making the game more difficult, I finally realized two things. One, there is a nearly universal desire for grounding and meaning among those who tell stories, whether they do so with TTRPGs or something else. And two, for those of us working in the TTRPG medium, making the game ‘grittier’ is usually the answer to a different question than the one actually being asked.

Grounding and Meaning

When it comes down to it, the role of the GM in a traditional TTRPG is relatively simple: You throw a challenge at the player characters, who then try to overcome it. In that interplay, a story is born. There is an issue with this basic layout, a giant issue which is the basis of most GM problems and advice at some level: The GM is all-powerful and the players are not. No matter the exact ruleset or genre or premise, the fact is that the GM has the license to make things appear at their whim, to introduce plots at their whim, and to kill at their whim. In this way, no matter how much people say things like ‘the GM is a player too’, for all practical intents and purposes the GM is not a player in the game, they are the game administrator. They create the bounds of the game by which everyone else plays.

The reason it’s important to reemphasize this particular point now is that the GM-player power dynamic creates two very different impressions of what’s happening when you try to make a game ‘grittier’ or ‘more serious’. On the player side, it distinctly looks like the GM is trying to make things harder for everyone and, when considering what sort of player-induced events such changes are in reaction to, it can often seem like the GM is trying to make things less fun. They’re punishing player flights of fancy, they’re making success less likely. They want to make the game less fun, clearly! On the GM side, they know their ability to say ‘rocks fall, everybody dies’ exists, but that’s not what they’re trying to do. What I was trying to do, at least, was make players pay attention. This circles back to the enthusiasm, to the vibrating with ideas, to the worldbuilding. When the new GM and new worldbuilder first encounters players, they see players who immediately point their noses directly at what interests them specifically. This means walking straight to the plot hook, key location, or combat encounter while giving the worldbuilding as much attention as an ad plastered in a subway station. While this likely has nothing to do with the content or quality of the worldbuilding itself, it will still provoke frustration in our new GM.

On the other side of the screen, the easiest thing for new players to engage with in a game, really, is the math. Somewhat paradoxically, more complex games are often more beginner-friendly because they, through math, tell the players exactly what their characters can do. And doing things is exactly what players want, hence the focus on hooks and setpieces. This does create an issue, though, where GMs, incentivized to spend time creating, and players, incentivized to spend time optimizing, end up spending their time on, well, different things. The players are running to the next mechanical checkpoint while the GM desperately wants them to stop and take a look around. And what’s the easiest way to make a player stop and look around? Have the things around them try to kill them.

Beyond trying to get players to stop and engage with the worldbuilding, a push towards houseruling in ‘realism’ is often an attempt to nudge the players into creating characters in line with the GM’s vision of the world they created. In one conversation I had with my group (though this never materialized in an in-game fashion), I lamented the fact that, in point-buy games like GURPS, you never saw players put any amount of points into skills that reflected a basic education; even ‘nerd’ characters were completely zeroed in on their in-game abilities and never took things like basic math or geography. One of my players pointed out the reality of the situation: When games are even partially about combat, stopping to balance out your character in the name of realism is likely to make them less survivable later…especially if none of the other players do the same. If the GM wants characters to have these skills, they should just give them the skills. Indeed, when you look at the evolution from Cyberpunk 2020 to Cyberpunk Red, that’s exactly what the game did, choose a palette of skills that everyone would always have because it wouldn’t make much sense not to.

And that gets into the actual problem around ‘houseruling for realism’ and why it’s more often than not something associated with beginning GMs: None of these games are intended to be realistic in any sense. As much as Cyberpunk pinged as ‘more realistic’ to my teenage brain, the world of Cyberpunk 2020 is easily as outlandish as D&D, just in a different direction. There’s nothing wrong with that: Games are meant to be fun, and even games intended to reflect back realities of the world do so with funhouse mirrors. That does mean, though, that many of the GMs who go through a phase of ‘houseruling for realism’ move on to a phase of running games actually meant to be intensely detailed and unforgiving.

Actually having fun with a gritty game

I’m not going to fall into the trap of calling games like Torchbearer and Twilight:2000 ‘realistic’; every game produces its own fantasy and these games do so with a nod towards presenting a harsh world. However, these games are designed in a way that is well-aligned with the vision of ‘realism’ that many early GMs seek: Characters have more to care about in the world, and there is no practical way to bypass things like food, water, and the environment. One of the main differences between the setup of a game like Torchbearer and trying to graft on harsher rules to another, existing game is one of social contract. While a player researching a game like Torchbearer should easily be able to see the intent of its design before playing, there’s also a strong psychological difference between having your character waylaid by a procedure that’s already in the book and one that your GM tacked on themselves.

That social contract, if you think about it, is the throughline through most of the issues with being a ‘realistic’ GM. The perception gap between how the GM sees the world and how the players see the world should be managed through (stop me if you’ve heard this before) talking to your players rather than managing through mechanics. If a GM wants a more reactive, more grounded, more dangerous world, they should put forth a campaign that employs one. What said world isn’t, though, is intrinsically better for gaming than any other setting being used for a TTRPG.

The most interesting thing about looking back through my “nothing is realistic enough” phase is that now I have run those grittier, harsher games, and once everyone was on board and we started playing…I found I had a fairly limited appetite for them. I ran Twilight:2000 for nine months, and you can read about my experiences with Torchbearer. While these games certainly do ground the experience, they also intensely care about everything, from light sources to supplies to sleeping arrangements. There is a fun in that; really detailed, gritty games create a huge amount of emergent storytelling and can be a joy to play and GM. They also create that storytelling in part because everything has a potential to be a crisis, and you need to sign up for that sort of game in the same way you need to sign up for a game that’s all dungeon crawl or all political intrigue. What many people find, though, is that what they’re actually looking for from the games they run are mechanics and players who care about the same things that they do. A push towards more detailed or more grounded mechanics is often a request: “I want you to treat this setting with the same care that I do.” Actually seeing a GM worldbuilder come to a common ground with their players on such a request is more difficult than simply constraining the players with more detailed rules, and conversely, more detailed rules are not necessarily going to achieve the desired effect if players don’t understand or have a stake in the worldbuilder’s vision. Playing a game like Torchbearer will get your players to lean in and care about all those things the mechanics emulate, but that might not actually be the goal you’re aiming to achieve.

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When it comes to addressing the root desires of the frustrated GM who wants things to be more ‘realistic’, it’s important to think about what that perceived lack of realism is giving them. First, games focus only on what the game is really about. Second, there are parts of the world the GM has created which they want to be important that the game or players are not treating with importance. While some of this does fall on communication, other elements do fall at the feet of the game being used or preconceived notions on the part of players. We live in a world where most TTRPGs are wargames and, until recently, the most common outside introduction players had to the mechanics and procedures of a TTRPG were video games. Traditional games are still mostly about combat and, despite what Actual Play tries to show, D&D is still a game where 95% of the rules are aimed toward combat. Having a player read those rules and then have to learn that the game isn’t actually 95% about combat is a shortcoming of the game, but one that we’ve been working around for years. At the same time, the points of introduction into RPGs are getting better, even if D&D itself is pretty much as bad a representation of the hobby as it’s ever been. In addition to Actual Play, a significantly more character-driven medium than most video games, the video games themselves are getting better and broader. The difference between Baldur’s Gate 2 (which came out when I was in middle school) and Baldur’s Gate 3 is fairly profound, especially when you consider that the most memetic aspect of the newer game has arguably been the romance options. We’re also in an era where Disco Elysium is a breakout hit, and that’s a game which aligns more closely with how I’d run my tabletop games than virtually any RPG video game before it. As long as D&D is the main entry point into the hobby there will continue to be GMs (new and old) striving for more detail and grounding in their games. As the hobby touchpoints expand, though, there will be more players who are ready to go on that ride as soon as they sit down at the table.

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