My submission for the RPG blog carnaval. This month's topic is Over the garden wall - Beyond the OSR.
My job is being a teacher, a philosophy teacher to be specific. The course I teach is very language heavy and the answers I want my students to produce are very specific in how they should be formulated. One of the biggest frustrations I encounter at work are the poorly worded answers my students produce and their inability to read texts efficiently and comprehensively. From not answering the question itself and solely providing justification for an implied answer, to asking me to clarify the meaning of a word that is explained in the very next part of the sentence, the current generation of teens are particularly bad at dealing with academic language.
There are times when I run RPGs where something similar happens, especially when running games for people who are completely new to the OSR playstyle. They word their actions poorly and ask questions in inefficient or ineffective ways.
In both cases I try to coach the people involved towards the sort of language use I want from them, but the amount of help different students and players need vary greatly within the same group and I tended to primarily use verbal descriptions of what sorts of things I wanted them to inform me of. This meant that some folks would get stuff explained by me despite already knowing this, while others are still somewhat at a loss because they don't know how they formulate the information I want to know.
A recent training at my job gave me some very concrete tools to use to more effectively help my students deal with the kind of language that I expect them to produce and read for my course. The topic of this month's blog carnaval made me wonder how I could apply some of these ideas to RPGs to provide optional support for players who themselves feel like they can't effectively engage with the OSR playstyle or whom I might find somewhat lacking in the formulation of their actions and questions.
An important note before I explain the idea: The relation between the GM and their players is not the same as that between a teacher and their students. There is a different level of familiarity and a different distribution of authority. Also, students tend to be children and I doubt your fellow players want to be treated as such. Still, it is often the GM who is expected to instruct new players on the game, so I find there to be sufficient overlap to consider this potentially fruitful.
If you are already familiar with the concept of scaffolding, feel free to skip to my thoughts on how this could be applied in RPGs.
Scaffolding: what it is
In education we use the concept of scaffolding: Tools you provide students with to aid them at particular tasks which are intended to be taken off bit by bit. So they start with lots of aid, but as they gain familiarity with the task they are asked to perform they lose access to more and more of this aid until they are expected to perform the task without any aid whatsoever.
For example, my students have to write a essays in which they give their opinion on a certain statement, such as "It would be preferable if people could upload their concsiousnes unto computers, that way they'll live forever".
If you would read an essay on this subject, the first thing you would read (if it is a good one) is an attention grabbing sentence and a somewhat interesting lead up to the opinion of the author of the piece. But writing an essay on this subject, it would be impossible for most students to come up with an attention grabbing sentence and lead up to an opinion they haven't formulated yet.
Rather, most students should write their opinion first, then their arguments, the summation of these arguments in the conclusion and only then should they start thinking about an introduction, lest they get stuck on that first sentence for the entire 50 minutes they have to write the essay. .
To help them achieve this, the first time they have to write an essay we give them a form which walks them through the writing process: 'Do you (partially) agree of disagree with the statement?', 'Rewrite the statement in such a way that it fits your opinion', 'Outline the reasons for your opinion in a few keywords', etc. This then gives them all building blocks they need to assemble a decent essay within the alloted time.
In future essay assignments they don't get the form with the test, but they do get the form in the digital school environment and, as they are allowed to make and bring a cheatsheet, those who need it can bring the questions of the form themselves instead.
The training at work gave me a bunch more tools to provide such scaffolding, such as partially finished sentences students can slot the two words into that would normally be the entirety of their answer, to signal words you can start certain kinds of texts with (such as summations, or arguments in relation to a conclusion).
Some colleagues complain that this is pampering the students too much, but they forget that the entire point of scaffolding is that it comes down. So rather than accept poorly worded answers at the start of a students academic carreer and over the years expect better and better worded answers, assuming students at some points just develop the skill of producing those, you give students the tools to always produce answers that are worded correctly and slowly expect them to do more and more of the formulating work themselves.
Scaffolding: applied to RPGs
First I think it is important to acknowledge that some of this is already being done by certain games and GMs.
Pre-made characters to get people into a game for the first time is a great example of scaffolding, as is recommending people start with 'easy to play' character options such as the fighter class in D&D.
Starting equipment that all adventurers get is also a good way to telegraph to new players that this is stuff that is always important to bring (like torches, rope, bedrolls, etc.). As these supplies and tools deplete, players will naturally want to replenish them, as they have now learned their usefulness.
But during my OSR games I still run into problems specific to players inexperienced with the playstyle, some particular to those who are new to the hobby to begin with, some particular to those who come from different playstyles, and some that apply to both. So let's try to offer some scaffolding tools:
Formulation templates
Templates that can be used to properly formulate actions and questions is one of the first things that comes to my mind.
For example: "I want to roll insight." or any similarly formulated action by folks familiar with 5e adjacent playstyles is what I would consider a horribly formulated action for OSR playstyle.
I find that even when I explain that I want to know what you want to achieve and how you go about it, some players will still find it hard to formulate an action that contains that information. So instead, it might be worthwhile to provide players with a little reference card with some templates for common player-GM interactions.
An example of how I as a GM would want players to formulate their actions is: 'I want to achieve X by doing Y using Z'. To make that more concrete for those who find abstract examples such as this one difficult you could add an example: 'I want to get to the top of this cliff, by climbing it using my grappling hook and rope.'
Here are some great examples of a way to formulate questions from a recent post on Roll to Doubt: “I want to borrow a phone so I can talk to the office about the investigation. Is there someone on the street nearby who I can ask for?” and “I’m planning to start shooting up the door so we go in. Is there someone on the street nearby who could cause trouble or do we have some spare seconds?” are good, while “What’s on the street?” is poorly formulated.
We could create a similarly abstracted sentence as the one I made above: 'I want to do X so I can achieve Y. Is there a Z that would allow/hinder me to do that?' and, again, use of the examples above could be added to the reference card to help folks understand what is expected of them.
Questions and actions are the primary interactions my players have with me, but if I am missing any other obvious interactions that are common to the OSR playstyle feel free to make suggestions for formulation templates for those as well.
Strategies to common tasks
Another difficulty I see some players struggle with is tactical infinity. 'I am just not very creative, so I prefer having buttons to push like in a videogame' is the most overt way this difficulty has been phrased to me, but I have seen it in milder versions as well. Not only folks who came from 5e struggle with this, when I ran games for students at my school one of the players had autism and clearly had a lot of difficulty deciding what to do, given the openness of the situation.
To help with this it might be usefull to provide a list of common strategies to tackle common situations you encounter in OSR games. For example:
When dealing with a hostile creature
Can you kill them without risk (both immediate risk, potential future fallout and lost opportunities)?
If yes:
- Go for it.
If not:
- Consider if you can manipulate your environment so you can kill them without risk.
- Consider if you can reason with them.
- Consider if you can intimidate or trick them.
- Consider running away.
- Consider distracting them with food or wealth and then running away.
- Consider if there is a better place to fight them and run away towards that place.
- Consider if there is something that can kill it for you (like an unsprung trap, or some other creature) and run away towards that.
If none of the above is possible:
- Attack them and after the first exchange restart this process from the top of this list.
I seem to remember a blogpost fom either Weird Writer or Cosmic Orrery in which they gave some of these, but I can't seem to find it. Just know that the examples above are probably stolen from either one or both of them.
Concluding remarks
If I was willing to spend the time, there is probably more legwork to be done. However, though the efficacy of these sorts of laguange aid tools is pretty well established in education, I have no idea if this would work as intended at the table. Moreover, I can imagine some players would be borderline offended by providing these tools to them. So before I spend any more time developing something that might see no further use, I am going to try to use these particular ones in future games and continue from there.
If other scaffolding tools like this already exist for RPGs I am either completely unaware of them or have forgotten they exist, so feel free to direct me to ones you have already encountered in games or blogposts. And if any of you have tried tools like these, I would love to hear how your players reacted to them and if they improved your game in a noticable way.
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