Thread by @madpierrot

I fell asleep super early then woke up in the middle of the night and haven't been able to go back to sleep because I'm also sick so let's do a thread! Mute this if you're uninterested.

Today's topic: player buy-in, how to earn it, and how to keep it.

So, while playing For The Queen (which is very good and you should try it) at GPNW, I came to a really stark realization: all these small "easy to play" games that I love to play and design so much have a pretty fatal flaw. You need some deep buy-in to make all of them work.

What is buy-in? Suspension of disbelief, engagement, connection. Whatever you want to call it. It's players saying, through words and actions, that they want to play the game being offered and they care about what's being built. Cool shit, right? Just one problem with it...

Buy-in is extremely intangible for a lot of reasons. Maybe a social contract makes a player feel they have to say they're interested while not actually feeling it. Maybe something has made them uncomfortable or distracted outside the game. Maybe today is just an off day.

The reasons someone may not buy into the game being played are myriad. Sometimes, it's impossible to regain if it's lost. Sometimes, the best way to get it back is to stop for some amount of time, which in itself might be impossible in the case of a scheduled convention game.

And that makes these wonderful, small games with minimal mechanics so hard to play for some. You are, essentially, building up the rules of the world through a set of social contracts that may be presented by the game or by the mediator then acting within them to collaboratively-

-tell a story of some kind. In the case of For The Queen, it's about a retinue accompanying a queen on a dangerous journey. In H E I S T, it's about pulling off a theft of some kind. Tofu Kingdom is about finding a food wife. All require a fair amount of buy-in to function.

Something like D&D or even Blades in the Dark needs far less buy-in because you can, in essence, ask the mechanical systems a question and it will provide a method of discerning an answer. Is this the "right" way to play those? Probs not, but the mechanical underpinnings of-

-those and similar systems keep the give a way to respond to most given questions. If you ask Blades "can I hit this person", you can get an answer. Same with D&D. FTQ can't answer that. HEIST can, but only sometimes. I don't think Tofu Kingdom has that sort of violence usually.

So now that we know what buy-in even is, how do we earn it? First step is to play a game that your fellow players also want to play. Someone who has only ever played Pathfinder isn't going to necessarily look at FTQ and say "ah, my brand at last".

Matching players to the right game is hard and take knowing a person. Then you need the right GM for the group that forms, which is a whole other imperfect science. Sometimes, you've got to skip all of those, such as when running a game for a pre-set group at a convention.

Another good way to create buy-in is simply to turn over some directorial authority. Get players to feed you details of what they want to see in the world. Ask for details that surround their actions to make them feel truly a part of the telling.

Some people just don't function that way, however. Asking them questions might lead to swift dead ends or closed loops (which doesn't allow others to add and augment). There are other ways to help them buy-in, like working in a genre they enjoy, but a game may not be for them.

You can also try things like mood music, leading questions, giving open-ended suggestions, or surrounding them with others who already have buy-in.

So you've got your elusive buy-in. How do you maintain that? Continuously work to have them buy in. Just keep doing the same thing until they simply walk on their own and buy into the world. Some people may never be capable of doing that and it's fine.

So yeah. Some of my thoughts on buy-in. Pretty geared to tabletop but applicable to other areas. I'm getting sleepy so I'm gonna go do that. Will chat when awake again.

When I wake up I'll (hopefully) come back to this and get more into tailoring a game around its buy-in.

Okay, I’m awake and eating breakfast so let’s come back to this: how do you make your system or game to help promote buy-in for the world it creates.

A lot would be highly individualized to the game you’re making and what you want it to do. D&D sometimes promotes buy-in for spellcasters by asking them to describe how their spells look different from others. That’s a really tiny example though, let’s look at something bigger.

Blades directly involves all players at the table in world and scenario generation at any point they wish to step in and provide that input. It’s not in the most obvious ways all the time. After character and crew creation, there’s devil’s bargains, downtime, and engagement.

All of these are less obvious but all determine how the world around the characters works and focuses in on things they wish to focus on. In the end, though, it’s up to the GM to keep track of things and incorporate them into the larger world.

So what about when you don’t have a GM to do this, like in For The Queen? In that game, every player is both player and GM. The game’s instructions explicitly encourage making suggestions, collaboratively building the world, making a complex and multi-faceted queen, and-

-there is an explicit mechanic for removing material that makes you uncomfortable or that you simply don’t want to be a part of the game experience. The game also tells you how to use it, right when it’s telling you how the game works and how to play.

For The Queen also asks you simple but complicated questions that prompt each player to tell a personal story of you and the Queen. Other players can give suggestions (and it totally works for when you look totally lost) but you have final say on it.

This in turn invests you in the world and game, provided you could buy in enough to get to that point in the first place.

So yeah. You can build buy-in into your design by providing ways to invest players in what is being created. But it’s hard, some people struggle with it, and it’s fragile. But when you get it to work, it’s amazing and beautiful. Anyways, food and orange juice are gone now so...