WHY ISN’T MY GAME GOING LIKE I EXPECTED?

Perhaps you need to take a step back and take a look at your game - you could be having an issue with scope.

Imagine yourself in this situation. You’ve got some people together who want to play an RPG, you’ve plotted out a whole campaign already full of detailed worldbuilding and lore and NPCs, and you’re ready to run a legendary game that your players will talk about for years to come after the campaign wraps up. A few sessions in and you’ve finally left the first little village after a goblin raid, little Timmy was saved from a well, or a cave full of bandits was cleared. Now the players are heading to the next town, but you’re not having nearly as much fun as you were hoping. Things move so slow, and at this rate, they’ll never see all your cool worldbuilding and your neat BBEG, Malagus the Gray, Dark Wizard of Thunder Mountain. This isn’t what you were hoping for at all. Or, alternatively, all this GMing is a real slog. It’s like a full time job keeping up with the campaign, your players are completely off track, you’re exhausted and frustrated constantly, and now you’re not at all motivated to run the game anymore. RPGs are supposed to be fun, so why aren’t you having fun?

Or, imagine this: You’re finally getting the chance to try an RPG, or maybe you’re a more experienced player that’s finally found a game that works with your schedule. You perform the initial tasks of fending off an orc raid or learning that magic is real, or maybe you finally get to the spaceport, and now you’re on your way. But the world is bigger than you expected and your GM is excited about all this work they put into the world when you thought you’d be playing a game where you’d just be saving the village. It’s a lot of commitment, and you don’t know whether you want to keep coming back for… months? Years? Who knows? Or maybe, you’re in the situation where you’re already encountering the BBEG but it feels unearned, like you never got enough of a chance to really see the world. Maybe everyone else wanted to keep pushing through the towns and villages quickly but you wanted to stop to get some good roleplay in, or follow up on something important to your character.

 

Maybe you’re experiencing both. The GM is hurrying the players to the end because she’s tired and secretly sick of running this campaign, and players don’t feel satisfied by how they didn’t get the chance to make a difference in the plague-stricken village despite being a team of all clerics. Or, which I think is frequently the case, everyone is ambitious and wants a campaign like they saw on Critical Role or heard about from their coworker who played in a twenty year-long campaign. They get into it and everyone individually realizes how immense of a task that is, but they don’t talk about it, and nobody has fun. Finally, the group disintegrates or there’s some kind of drama caused by compounding issues like irregular availability, and people are disappointed, bored, and/or unsatisfied.

Does that sound at all familiar? There are myriad reasons for this, such as pacing, how the spotlight is distributed, and conflicting personalities. However, I think a major culprit for these situations is scope. Or more accurately, a lack of defined scope for the game. This is something that I believe experienced GMs and players figure out intuitively, however they may still lack the vocabulary.

What is scope?

Scope is a tool for managing the focus of your game. You can think of it like a lens through which you view the game world, and it can be zoomed in, zoomed out, and moved around. Sometimes, the frustrating situations we have in this hobby (like those mentioned above) are caused by a scope that is hardly defined, if at all, or misplaced. You don’t have to stay in one spot all campaign, nor do you have to have ambitious plans, however everyone should be on the same page as to what the focus of the game is.

Scope includes a few things.

It can be geographic, such as in, say, Animal Crossing where it focuses primarily on a village. It could focus on a space station and the moon it’s orbiting, or it could be the entirety of Middle Earth.

Scope can focus on time - you may have 24 hours to get rid of these bomb collars before they explode, or you may need to get an audience with the king to request aid before the next army of dwarves attacks the valley.

It can be a focus on the length of play, distinct from in-game time. It could be a one-shot, where players and the characters alike only have so much time. You may be running a handful of sessions with the aim of completing an arc or a quest. It could be a campaign lasting several months, where players have time to become very invested in their characters and the party, and where something like the end of the world has more impactful consequences.

Scope can also be more qualitative. It can focus on the motivations of your characters and their personal objectives, like getting a boyfriend or avenging their sensei (or both). The scope here doesn’t concern things like boring adult stuff like taxes or managing the day-to-day work of the family cyberware shop, it’s probably more focused on romance and cute slice of life scenes, as well as rooftop duels and dramatic villains who truly have no honor. If that’s the game you’re playing, spending 20 minutes haggling with the shopkeeper is, more likely than not, outside the scope of your game.

The benefits of defining scope in your game

One shots have the potential to become unfocused pretty quickly, and campaigns can suffer from being too ambitious. When players and the GM work together to define what they hope to focus on in gameplay, they can avoid the problems with focus. This is especially important in games where the goal isn't clear - players may become muderhobos because they don't know what else they should do, so they start experimenting with the environment and the characters that inhabit it. It's a strange, violent reaction to the blank slate problem. When they have a clearer understanding of why they're there and what they want to achieve, I think they're more likely to attempt to pursue that rather than poke around at the world and see what falls over when they hit it with a stick.

Defining the scope of your game, particularly in terms of the length of play, is helpful for keeping players committed to the game and you'll probably be able to get more people interested in playing. I'm busy with work and I don't know that I could commit to a game once a week for a whole year. If I know I’m going to be playing a one-shot that’s 4-6 hours long, I’m much more likely to sign up for it. If I understand that the scope of the game is focused on one small town, I’m fine with that because I like games that involve being active in the community as opposed to glossing over whole worlds represented only by my interactions at the spaceport.

I think a lot of people sign on for the idea of playing an RPG with friends and that's the most that they consider, while the person who wants to run a game for friends wants a game where their friends will validate the work they put into the setting. And so, players are signing up because they just want to have silly, lighthearted fun and the GM who thinks the players will appreciate the setting and political intrigue gets frustrated because they have different expectations about the game. I don’t think this is really anyone’s fault, nobody’s to blame here, there just isn’t enough communication about what the game is going to be like.

Players get sidetracked easily, it’s just the nature of role-playing games. There’s a shiny thing that catches their attention but is irrelevant to the wider world, or they stop everything because they think the shopkeeper you hadn’t even thought of until two minutes ago could be hiding something because she matches a throwaway description the players heard a couple sessions ago. If things like bartering with the shopkeeper or finding artifacts aren’t part of the scope of your game that everyone agrees on, there’s a couple options. The first is to communicate that this poor woman doesn’t seem like she knows anything and likely wouldn’t have anything to do with the plans that the orc raiding parties have. The second is to adjust the scope - remember, it doesn’t have to be and often won’t be a fixed, immutable thing. It can be moved and the focus can change; the important thing is that everyone is on board for how the scope changes.

The last thing I have to say about the benefit of defining scope in your game is that you’re more likely to actually complete the game you want to run because everyone has a better understanding of what they’re in for.

Using scope

 

Now that I’ve rambled on for a while about why scope is important, I figure I should discuss how to actually use it. Session 0 is a great place to start, or in fact, even before then if at all possible. Among your expectations, lay out what the scope of the game is. “Hey guys, so the game I’m hoping to run is going to be pretty lighthearted and take place in a mountain village, you’ll probably end up going down to the valley but it’s not going to involve trekking all over the world. In-game, things will move a little fast, we’ll be covering a year or so in about three sessions.” Like that - easy enough, right?

Likewise, if you’re a player, lay out the scope you’re hoping for. “I’d really like to play a pilot who wants to spend the rest of his life following in his father’s footsteps, so I’d like the opportunity to get to see the world,” or, for instance, “I’m hoping to play a bit of an oddball, like a gas station clerk with psychic powers. I don’t think I’d want to play that character for more than a session or two because I think it’ll get old pretty fast after that.” From there, it’s up to the GM and players to compromise and work out what game they want to play, as per usual.

If you’re in the game and you’re encountering things outside of the scope of your game, the first thing you should do is assess the situation. Read the room, who’s enjoying this interaction? Don’t be afraid to ask. If nobody’s enjoying it - neither the GM nor the players - remember that the GM controls time in the game. They can fast forward through this, or everyone can go back a couple minutes and do something else instead. Being able to fast forward and rewind are useful safety tools, but also great tools for managing parts of the game that nobody especially cares for. Does everyone hate setting up camp? Me too, I don’t care for it, and I skip straight to camp being set up. My game isn’t about realistic survival in the wild, it’s about going into the dungeon and finding cool shit, and taking the time to describe searching for a suitable tree that can provide cover for the tent, the process of hammering pitons into the ground, and arranging logs in the campfire is boring to me and not what the game I’m running is about. We set up camp, sleep for the night, and then get going - that’s it. Others may be into that and really like the detail of setting up camp for the night. There’s something that’s compelling about those scenes out in the wilderness.

The GM isn’t the only one who has a say in the scope of the game. Players can just as well decide that something is outside of the scope. They have the right to say that the town experiencing a rat infestation isn’t their problem while they’re on their way to do something that’s important to them, like kicking the BBEG’s ass. If players feel like they aren’t having fun playing out the entirety of the three day journey to the next town, especially if they’re already going there reluctantly, they are allowed to say, “Can we skip the travel stuff and work out the cost of it? It’s not something we enjoy doing every time.”

If the scope is focused on one thing and everyone’s found that they are enjoying something outside of that scope, they aren’t having fun wrong. It just calls for a discussion about changing or expanding the scope. This can be a very quick, easy thing to figure out by simply asking if everyone’s cool with the direction they’re going in. If not everyone is fine with it, that’s a good time to figure out what everyone wants to do.

Here are a few ways you can avoid things you and your players find uninteresting or outside of the scope.

You can establish super brief scenes by just stating that the party goes and gets the thing, maybe they get some grief from an NPC but they succeed and get back on time. Super simple and straightforward.

You could use a montage, especially if you’re passing through a longer period of time, and this is really just the last tool but done with a few scenes. The party goes to several shops, there’s some description about a house party they go to, they drink wildly, and cut to the present where they’re waking up on the side of the highway with their horse and buggy missing.

You could play a bit of the scene, but not the whole thing. Just focus on the things you like about those scenes that you want to play and gloss over the things that you don’t want to play. This is a great tool for running players through a situation that’s interesting or thematic but doesn’t offer a lot of actual gameplay, such as entering the gates of the city in a huge crowd of merchants and travellers. Note: I want to make clear that this is a tool for handling scope. Sometimes I’ll see horror stories about leading players into scenes with situations that are meant to establish setting tone and themes, often by GMs who are running a “dark and realistic” game, only for people to end up uncomfortable. Dragging your players through a scene where they get harassed, assaulted, and called mean names by guards when they’re uncomfortable with those themes is not necessary for realism. You can gloss over that or even just not use that idea at all. You can have a gritty setting without doing things that your players won’t enjoy.

Flashbacks are handy, and some games make liberal use of them for justifying how the characters are so well-prepared for this mission. You can also reference a scene that didn’t take place to justify something as long as it’s cool with everyone. For example, “Well, it’s a good thing I stopped by the hardware store and got this rope and box of hammers before heading over here.”

Last, you can just handwave the things that you and your players aren’t interested in and aren’t the point of the game. Again, if you’re running a game very concerned about realism, that doesn’t mean you need to go through every mundane task. It’s not important to the game unless the game is about experiencing real, mundane tasks like going to the bank or your insurance company putting you on hold for two hours after they didn’t process your payment correctly. This is a narrative tool. How many action movies has Denzel Washington been in? And how many scenes are there of Denzel spending 15+ minutes in the bathroom scrolling on his phone or reading a book? That’s realism, but that’s not important to the scope of the movie, and thus it is not included.

Game developers may have a scope in mind

I’ll wrap this discussion with a brief few thoughts about the idea that games have their own sense of scope. There is no shortage of D&D 5e fans whose concept of TTRPGs is a long-form campaign that’s epic (in the literary sense) and involves all the staples of mainstream, Tolkeinesque fantasy. It’s fine for that to be the scope you want. The Player’s Handbook and Dungeon Master’s Guide both use a lot of language that advertises this style of play. The progression system for players as they level up, and the speed at which it happens, lends itself toward the scope of a long-form campaign. It’s designed to be that way, and that’s alright, but it’s not the only way to play the game and one-shots and short adventures over a handful of sessions aren’t uncommon.

Likewise, I don’t know how well-suited most microgames are to longer campaigns or even, for some, multi-session arcs. However, I don’t think that’s really expected of them. Plenty of them are good as party games you can pull out and use to run a one shot with, and that’s the scope that many of those developers had in mind when they wrote them. The formatting constraints, limited detail, and often a slim progression system don’t imply that they’re designed with long campaigns in mind, but it doesn’t stop people from playing them that way anyway, which is another valid gameplay choice because it’s the scope that the players and GM have settled on.

I have some issues with games like 5e and Pathfinder, but not in the scope of this post. I don’t think playing them is bad or that anyone is having fun wrong by playing them. However, by virtue of their popularity, I do think that those games end up being strong influences on the default game assumptions for many GMs and players, including the idea that you’ll be able to complete an epic campaign, which can end up leading to the situations I described at the beginning of this post.

The point I want to get across here is that agreeing on the scope - the focus of your campaign and the expectations that follow - can help keep your game from falling apart. It won’t stop things like your players not showing up or GM burnout, however it can keep your game on track. Keep in mind that scope can change and likely will several times, especially if you’re playing a longer campaign. You can always change the focus - you can start small and go bigger, and if you’re not having fun playing a globetrotting campaign, you can just as easily go smaller and focus on the things that are important to your gaming group and their characters.