We Lose Our Way
Posted on: 26 May 2026
What is the color of your story? What are the themes? If you're running a game for friends, you hold a great deal of responsibility in guiding the narrative, and in the act of telling the tale you are dictating its bounds. Where does your lens linger and why? Ultimately you have to look at yourself and the material you're running at some point and say: "What are we even doing here?" Look at your average dungeon game and the answer is pretty obvious: you're killing monsters and acquiring resources. But you, as the storyteller, are the one who gets to decide what is a monster.
The dungeon game, the Mythic Underworld where parties of of adventurers delve into the mythical dark and overcome trials in places larger and older than them, is near and dear to my heart, but as a recent post (first post?!) has pointed out, the modern incarnation of the most popular form of dungeon game treats violence as the default mode of traversal and play through these environments and spends the majority of its sessions in the enactment of said violence, and I could not be less interested in telling that kind of story.
"My empathy for the goblins bubbles over much more often - and I can see them as merely Goombas no longer. They do not deserve the fate so often delivered to them, with rapturous applause, cheers, and laughter."
- Ripley Matthews, How Do You Want to Do This?, 2026
Violence is a tool you can use in a story, and it's one that must be used carefully or you'll make your story all about enactment of violence. One picked from the mountain of reasons I don't like running 5E or Pathfinder is that I ran a great deal of it and discovered that the game is about combat and its enactment but largely waves its hand around the question of whether or not combat was a good thing. Part of this is a cultural perception where your players bring in preconceived notions of what a dungeon game is and part of it is a structural problem in that 5E is a game very specifically designed around its combat sequences. And frankly, it bores me to tears. To my tastes, tactical combat to that fidelity belongs in software alone and we can do better and more at the table.
Goofy stories of bumbling demigods having a lighthearted time in a world with a veneer of high fantasy and an avoidance of too heavy concepts while smashing skulls are completely fine and can be fun. Many people enjoy the cozy experience of a soft fantasy story, just as many people enjoy the texture of a visceral bloodbath game competing to see who in their party can collect the most elf ears. This is roleplaying after all. And there's certainly room for stories about that- pulp exists for a reason and trashy games shouldn't be discarded. It's good to eat garbage, particularly when building taste, but you need to be able to recognize the difference between garbage and plastic.
"Kids will devour vast amounts of garbage (and it is good for them) but they are not like adults: they have not yet learned to eat plastic."
- Ursula K. Le Guin, Dreams Must Explain Themselves, 1973
What Are We Even Doing Here?
This isn't me saying the games I run are better than someone else's. I am but a Crab and I just told you that eating garbage is good for you, after all. But here's the situation. You've gathered a group of people, real world people and possibly friends who exist under the yoke of modernity but have persevered and carved out time to spend together, and they've placed their next couple of hours in your hands. What kind of story are you going to tell?
A wonder and burden of the TTRPG for the game master is that the story is as wide as your imagination. "For but the price of a dream" you can coax your players into whatever situation and setting you have spun from your very own dreamstuff, bringing them in to explore a corner of your world, poke it with sticks, test its flammability, and negotiate its travails. This is the power of fantasy and the pleasure of autocosmology turned outwards to become a social experience. I won't tell you what to put where or what direction the rivers should run. This is fantasy, the ultimate act of introversion, and everyone should have the opportunity to explore those inward regions. But when it comes to making the inner a social experience you become the director of a collective fantasy where you're everything from script writer to camera operator to intimacy coordinator.
The stories we tell matter, even if it's only to the few people at your table. Sometimes the greatest fantasy is a world where words do always have meaning and actions do always have consequences. I don't like to run games with mindless goblins and no name bandits to be slaughtered because I don't want to tell a story- to bring us into a world- where that's the state of the world. There's a phenomenological experience of being the thinking creatures in my worlds and I strive to make stories that have something to say and that deny the gloom and doom of prevailing contemporary trends. I like taking risks, challenging my players and their characters to examine their beliefs and understandings of the world around them, and using these collective stories as an opportunity to explore fantastical worlds.
There's a great deal of contemporary fiction and published settings where the tendency is to have these cut and dry huge battles between defined good and evil and the impositions of a presumed moral certainty are either in the introduction or printed in bullet points in the appendix. When we talk about the Mythic Underworld in OSR and adjacent spaces we talk about the journey downwards and inwards into the strange dark places where there are no easy answers, where violence could easily end in someone bleeding out in a dusty corridor far from the light of the sun, and where ingenuity and clever thinking are rewarded more than the swinging of the sword. Killing three dozen goblins in a two hour long combat may give someone a sense of briefest catharsis, but the Mythic Underworld to me is about catabasis. When you reduce the game to combat, you risk telling a story of a world- your fantasy world- where all problems are reduced to those with violent solutions- and I am not interested in exploring such a bland and sad state of being.
The Dungeon Game
Of course, I still enjoy our dungeon games where parties of adventurers with swords at their hips contend with dangerous beasts, the unquiet dead, and more in fantasy worlds, preferably in a dungeon with some large firebreathing lizard nearby. None of this ramble is meant to deny that adventuring and running adventures can be fun, because it is! The romance of the adventurer down on their luck who overcomes great trials to return from the underworld- well that just hits the spot. This is an adventuring game, people are going to hit each other with swords.
Still, I was mulling over what voiceless has to say about Matthews's article:
"...creating creatures only for them to be a slaughter fodder seems to be cruel, even if this is all just imagination."
- voiceless
And I completely agree (and so here we are)! I think it comes down to this: If your game involves killing beautiful things and you don't address it then I think you're doing your players and your world a disservice. There's no easy solution to this other than to examine your world and what it's saying- what you as the author are saying- when your players kill something or someone. Personally, I really grapple with creating a plausible world where the players- cast as protagonists or antagonists or what have you- are able to function normally despite being mass murderers or even the fantasy equivalent of big game poachers. And, it should be said, even goblins can be beautiful little creatures.
There are ways to soften your game and make it less bloody. I've seen quite a few people support the idea that combat should default to participants who go to 0 HP being knocked out instead of dying, requiring specific player intent to kill anything. This can be effective, depending on the tone you're aiming for. One thing I've done is to invert what Matthew Mercer does in his "So How Do You Want to Do It" technique (once lovingly derided as "Look at What You Did") and portray the death of a creature as what it is: something living and part of this world dying in violence. Importantly, I really don't advise doing this in a game that is already about typical fantasy-fare gameplay, as it will look more like a sudden moralizing against what is the explicitly intended mode of play. But, I will say when I started running a game with this specific tone, this specific vision of the world in mind and portrayed violence as brutal, dirty, and ugly: my players immediately adapted and started treating the world with the same seriousness. And, treating the world seriously doesn't mean ripping the humor out- every game deserves levity- but I do find that when you embrace the world seriously and your players respond in kind then you've got a good group at the table. Ultimately, we're all real people carving out our time to induce a collective fantasy and tell stories. Maybe I've just changed my idea of what stories I want to tell.
"A man, to be greatly good, must imagine intensely and comprehensively; he must put himself in the place of another and of many others; the pains and pleasure of his species must become his own. The great instrument of moral good is the imagination."
- Percy Bysshe Shelley, A Defence of Poetry, 1821
Postscript
I've been thinking a lot the past year or so about this idea, revisiting the trend in the blogosphere from a few years ago when there was a great deal of writing about soft games that seemed to culminate in Under Hill, By Water. While that didn't quite hit the spot for me, it's pretty good! But I think I'm more interested in games more about adventuring out and seeing strange things, interacting with strange people, and mysteries. I cannot stop making every game I run heavily involve mysteries- they're too fun! I linked to the Phases of the Gackling Moon above, and that's just about the perfect spot for me for an RPG product, painting a strange world full of interesting opportunities for play. Maybe I'll gush about it later.
This whole thing is probably a natural result of me turning the power level way down in most of my games after embracing some design philosophy from Bastionland and I've been pretty happy with the results so far. Really though, I don't think you need to change much about the systems you use if you as the GM shift the way you describe your world and the consequences of player interaction with it to make it less of a game about psychopaths. Unless you want to run a game about psychopaths- I'm not gonna tell you how to run your elf games but I am going to plead that people do a little bit of evaluation about what they're saying with the stories they're telling, how they're telling them, and what they're putting out into the world.