Vanilla Ice and Kurt Vonnegut's Inadvertent RPG Advice

There is a lot of advice about how to be better at playing RPGs as a PC or a GM. A lot of the advice focuses on feeling more comfortable with your character, the setting, the rules, and vocalizing your dislike of things to the others. These are all good, but they aren't meta enough for my tastes to be used widely for all games.

To me it seems like a lot of the advice is focused on how to handle a specific type of game. How to run D&D better or how to be a better D&D player are popular topics for RPG bloggers and Youtube channels. They are filled with advice on how to get the players to engage with the system and how to make a GM's prep work a lot shorter and less intense. It's still too specific though. Not every game required loads of GM prep work, so advice on how to make that task shorter doesn't help everyone.

That brings me to this blog post. I wanted to try to come up with some kind of advice that could be used more universally to make it easier for PCs and GMs to enjoy the game. What better way to do that than simplifying it by borrowing the words of someone who has never looked at an RPG in their lives:

Stop. Collaborate and listen.

The opening lines of Ice Ice Baby are ingrained into my brain due to a kid in my neighborhood listening to that damned cassette on his crappy boom box until the tape wore out. Aside from that it's secretly solid advice for how to deal with issues in any RPG you might run into.

Stop, collaborate, and listen is the basis for a solid gaming group. Stop doing whatever you're doing when the game stops being fun. Collaborate with the other players to ensure you're all playing the game you want to play. Listen to what other players say about what they want or what they don't want in a game. If you listen to another player tell you what they want to do that doesn't mean you're forced to accept it. It means you collaborate until it works for everyone.

I'm not done though. Vanilla Ice is not the only one giving out inadvertent RPG advise. The Great Old Fart himself Kurt Vonnegut gave players the best advice they will need for how to RP a character:

Every sentence must do one of two things — reveal character or advance the action. 

I'm sure people will argue over the purpose of RPGs, but I don't think many people would argue that there is no point to RPGs or coherent adventures. To that end, as a player, you should also make an attempt to help the adventure happen. 

That funny thing you came up with to have your character do to make everyone laugh may SEEM like a great idea, but does it reveal who your character is or advance the action of the session? If not then don't tell the joke. I can remember every campaign or adventure I was part of, but for the life of me I can't remember a single joke/aside/unrelated interjection that happened that people talked about after it happened in a positive way. As a player it's as much your job as the GMs job to ensure the game keeps moving forward.

This isn't the only information you ever need to get the most out of RPGs. It's a solid foundation though and it'll point you in the right direction to have the most fun possible from your game nights. At least, that's how it's been working in my game nights.