Player Expectations and Why They Matter

This is Part 2 of the Play Something Else (If You Want) series. Check out Part 1 here.

Dear All Powerful Finn, Who Dispenses Such Profound Wisdom on Her Little Blog Which is Definitely Read by Real People, pray tell us, we beseech you: why do player expectations matter? What do game systems have to do with player expectations?

I hear you whispering amongst yourselves in my court, oh DMs of Dragons and Dungeons. I am feeling magnanimous. I shall grant you this boon.

TL;DR - Player expectations are about consent. They define the parameters of play. And beyond the mathematical and practical effects of a system (how likely success is, what can players do), systems come with embedded expectations, thus shaping the parameters for play in ways both obvious and subtle.

Now for the long version. Let's look at an example.

Let's say you want to run a homebrew D&D 5e campaign, but you don't like the vibes of the Tolkien fantasy ancestries. They make the worldbuilding too generic and samey, and you've had the burning desire recently to instead focus on just humans and turtle people and maybe a rat. So you go to your regular group during session 0 and tell them, “Here are your options, have fun.” Most players will be pretty chill about this and will happily go make their ninja monk turtle character.

They might start to be a little less chill about this if you're also banning monks, though. You might decide - ideally before Carravagio the Turtle Monk is fully built - that your setting or story is really not served by a lot of the traditional classes. Maybe you want your campaign to exist in a very high fantasy world where everyone has innate magic. So you go back to your regular group and ban the martial classes, and your players go make Carravagio the Turtle Sorcerer and his compatriots. There's maybe a bit of grumbling from your pop culture or sword-happy players, but it's alright. At least the premise is interesting.

Well, let's say there's one more change you want to make here in this Session 0. You want this game to be really deadly. You want to tell a story of outmatched survivors going to their graves to protect the world. So you up the CR of all of your prepared encounters by 10. And to really make an emotional impact, you decide not to tell your players this.

So Caravaggio and his compatriots set out on their little adventure, end up on the long narrow bridge with a horde of enemies coming towards them, and one of the players goes “Hang on, can we even win this? What the heck?” They TKO, you lose your table, it becomes one of those Reddit D&D horror stories, the end. 

Dear audience, you might be reading this thinking, “Yes, but this seems like a super avoidable problem. Just talk to your players.”

And it would, in fact, be super avoidable because you innately know something about setting player expectations. You can run your all-sacrificial magic turtles campaign in D&D as long as you set the player expectations clearly before you start. And for something this far from 5e's standard play experience - AKA deadly and with limited choices - you need to do that in the initial pitch, not even session 0.

Player expectations are about consent, and I don't just mean the very narrow kind of consent referring to NSFW content. Players need to consent, or buy in, to the basic constraints of the world and the game that you're creating. If a player won't enjoy playing Carravagio the Easily Killed, they need to know that's what they're signing up for before the game starts, before even session 0, so they can opt in or out. Otherwise, at some point or another, you're going to need to change either your game or your players along the way, which is a lot more inconvenient than filtering people or ideas out in the pitch or session 0 phase. (This obviously doesn't mean telling players all of the possible campaign plot spoilers before you start or that games can't evolve over time. You just need to update players’ expectations as you go so that they can continue to buy in.)

Let's look at how this is related to the idea of parameters of play. I define a game's parameters of play as basically: “What is allowed during play? What isn't?” Microscope, the worldbuilding game, has a similar idea called ‘building your palette’ - What exists/is allowed to exist in this game/setting? What's not?

The parameters of play inclues both gameplay - literally, what do the rules say that the PCs can or can't do - and tone - what are players willing to experience emotionally and interpersonally at this table? So for examples of gameplay: can PCs fly? Can they hit things? Can they read minds? For examples of tone: will players be okay with depictions of sensitive content or is this game staying light and silly? Do players want to experience a power fantasy or a struggle to survive? Do they want to feel awe and confusion while encountering a fantastically strange setting or confident and familiar in a traditional fantasy setting? (Oftentimes there's no clear line between tone and gameplay - do players want zippy, high-octane action or to play a slow-paced, tactical battle? The tone of your combat depends on your gameplay.)

But oh Great and Noble Finn, you rustle and whisper amongst yourselves, “how do you actually use the idea of parameters of play in game?” I mostly view it as a conceptual tool for your prep, pitch, and session 0, especially in system selection. You can think to yourself, “what are the default parameters of play with this system? Does my pitch contain relevant information about tone as well as plot? I want to run zippy combat. Is 5e really going to let me do that? How comfortable are these players going to be in this game, and if we move away from that comfort zone, what are their soft and hard limits? What do I need to talk about with them in session 0?” And once prepping, pitching and session 0-ing is done, you can also use this idea to check in with players if the game tone changes in game.

I love an example, so here's one from a conversation my players and I had: 

PC: “Originally we said that although there would be a mafia in-game, they wouldn't be the center focus and the tone would be light. It's definitely more mafia-focused now; is it going to remain light?”

DM: “How would you feel about that? Do you want it to?” 

PC: “Yeah, I think so.”

DM: “Honestly I'm really enjoying it being a little darker than we'd initially said, but I also don't want it to get too dark; it's still a high school rom-com game. Is it okay if it's a little bit darker than our initial expectations, but still remaining overall light?”

PC: “Yeah, that's fine.”

And then we talked specifics about lines and veils to make sure we were on the same page about what that looked like in practice.

Understanding player expectations and defining the parameters of play matter in every game. But these ideas are especially important for certain kinds of more sensitive content. I played in a public oneshot of a system designed to play chill, nostalgia-oriented games. The vibes were super cool, the GM was great, I was having a blast. Until suddenly one of the other players grabbed my character - and my arm in real life - and threatened to murder-suicide us by jumping off the boardwalk into the sea. Needless to say, as a woman, I was not pleased to have my arm surprise-grabbed by a strange man. But also as a player, I wasn't particularly happy about the tonal shift. I definitely under other circumstances would enjoy the fear that arose during that experience, but as it was, I just felt uncomfortable. This wasn't what I'd signed up for! My expectations were being transgressed. I was promised nostalgia, dammit, not psychological horror. (This goes both ways tonally by the way. You may also annoy or disappoint players if you promise them grimdark in session 0 and then in game just run uninterrupted goofy tavern nonsense.)

This isn't about censorship, safe spaces or players being too sensitive these days. It's about understanding your game's parameters of play. It's about communicating well and from the very beginning. It's about making sure that the game you want to run and the group you want to run it for are the right fit for each other. It's about heading off potential future conflict. It's about having fun, my dudes.

So if you decide you want to run the dead turtle campaign, here's what you do. You clearly define the initial pitch: “Come play expendable magic turtles in a gritty and tragic high fantasy campaign of deadly encounters and heroic sacrifice.” You recruit people who specifically buy into that premise and/or tweak the premise to match your regular group's expectations. You have a nice session 0 and campaign, the players die heroically, everyone cries together but in a nice way, and no one ever logs into Reddit ever again. And maybe you use something other than 5e to run it.

Here's the thing. Your system, regardless of what you say or do, shapes your players’ expectations. Because the 5e ruleset gives options for a multitude of races and classes, players expect to have access to those choices during character creation. Because of D&D's focus on (reasonably) balanced combat and its origin in wargaming, players expect their fights to be winnable, or at least to be warned by the DM when they should flee. Because of the number of their abilities and the way the story is framed around the PCs as the main characters, they expect to be powerful and not to die unless they're really stupid or unlucky. And even when a DM clearly indicates that those expectations won't be fulfilled in the proposed game, they're still kinda there, embedded in the system or its play culture. I call these embedded expectations. 

I talked about some of the characteristics of 5e in the last blog post. Those system characteristics all become player assumptions. The ability in D&D to scale up and eventually become quite powerful creates the expectation of scaling up and eventually becoming quite powerful. The existence of a taxonification of magic and monsters and thus spells like Detect Magic creates the expectation that players will be able to identify the school of magic or creature type. (This is normally fine, but it's a bit of a problem in a horror game when your delicious uncertainty about the strange, ominous entity lurking in the darkness is shattered by some nerd with the magical equivalent of binomial nomenclature. Kill the wizard first.)

And I should say, lots of things contribute to embedded expectations other than the rules themselves - for example, games’ reputations and vibes, game book art and design, the most popular let's play-ers, the demographics and subcultures that play them. Everyone knows the Matt Mercer effect, where a bunch of newbies who watch Critical Role come to the table with some very specific expectations, but every system - and edition of a system - has a whole culture of play around it. If you and I are talking online about the OSR (Old School Revival/Renaissance) systems, you might make some very different assumptions about my demographics and politics depending on if I say my favorite system is Mork Borg - an artsy, black metal, quite recent system - versus one of the remakes of 2nd edition played mostly by dudes in their 50s and 60s.

These embedded expectations are powerful. Going back to my previous example, it particularly struck me as off-putting that the guy tried to murder-suicide me because the system we were playing was literally built for exploring feelings of nostalgia. It wasn't a 5e game, where there's an embedded expectation of PCs facing violence. So it felt even more shocking to go against the system's structures as well as the DM's pitch and basic norms of playing with strangers. And I've been in situations where I can feel the tension between the system's embedded expectations and what we players agreed we wanted to play or experience. For example, I'm in a horror survival game in Pathfinder 2e right now where we agreed we wanted to be low level and struggle to survive, but then during play, we got impatient and decided to level up quicker because the Pathfinder system, through its power scaling, encourages leveling. (This was no problem at all in this particular case, but just as an example.)

My point is this: you should consider how your system’s embedded expectations will shape the story you want to tell and define the emotional and gameplay parameters of play even beyond the conversations you have with players. You need to consider if there's alignment between embedded expectations, your conversations with players, and what you want to run. If there is friction there, how manageable is that friction? If you are running something that goes against a system's embedded expectations (like running “Mr. Can’t Catch a Break” Carravagio in 5e), you need to consider how to negate the system's embedded expectations and ensure players’ consent throughout.

But I'm running out of steam a bit now, so I'll call it quits while I'm ahead. My glowing audience probably needs a bit of a break from the suffocating air of my courtroom as well. So to summarize: player expectations matter for setting your game's parameters of play, and although pre-game conversations can mostly align everyone's expectations, sometimes systems’ embedded expectations also really matter. So I'll leave it there for now and see you next time, when I (hopefully) conclude by talking about getting past embedded expectations and what types of stories you should really really really just tell in a system other than 5e. 

Ciao!