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Table(top) Manners: top tips for good play
Following on from my Ten Commandments of Game Mastery, here is some advice for how to help the game move more smoothly as a player. Note that by game, I mean both the in-character story and the out-of-character gaming session.
These are presented in no particular order. I’ve skipped ones like ‘don’t hit people’ and ‘don’t cheat’ because my underlying assumption is that you’ve learned those things. If you are seven or younger, welcome to the hobby! Don’t hit people when you don’t get your way, and don’t cheat at games. Enjoy yourself!
Play the genre and tone of the story
I have talked before about the importance of a GM and players discussing genre and tone, as part of ‘session zero’. We all know that genre is a woolly term with many border cases and overlap, but if I say that a game will be in the ‘cosmic horror’ genre then you know the big differences between that and the ‘fantasy comedy’ genre.
Horror protagonists go off alone with nothing but a flashlight…
I have just begun a new campaign which I describe as ‘high fantasy pulp space adventure’. Of course that is courting controversy because ‘pulp’ isn’t a genre, but when you put it with the word ‘adventure’ it conjures associations with Raiders of the…
