There’s a blogwagon going around about how to be a good TTRPG player, hosted by the always-eminent Prismatic Wasteland. I was very excited when the blogwagon was announced, because it felt like something I could actually contribute to. I was also excited to see the advice that people would come up with for this. Of course, I have proceeded to not read any of it. But that’s a sort of advice in and of itself, isn’t it? Starting there then, I guess the advice I would offer to players, on how to be a good player, would be to look for advice on doing it. You’d think that would be a pretty shallow well, wouldn’t you? After all, the blogwagon has only just begun. But when you think about it, there’s tons of player advice out there-- it just isn’t usually crouched in the form of advice. No, no, what I’m talking about is good ol’ GM Bitching.
Yeah, all those hundreds (if not thousands) of threads from places like r/rpghorrorstories, or the old ENWorld forums, all about how terrible a particular group of players were? The ones that make you cringe, and think “God, at least I’m not saddled with those poor fools”? Those are, albeit indirectly, perfect player advice. Some of them are admittedly about horrible game masters, but I’m pretty sure the majority are about, or at least include, terrible players. By reading one, you’re sort of vicariously consuming player advice-- becoming saddled with the knowledge that, no matter what you do, you should never, ever be like the anonymous “Richard” who decided that purify food and drink should let him cure a gay gnome of its homosexuality because “technically it would be food if you cooked it.” (That’s a real example by the way; it took me 30 seconds of scrolling on r/rpghorrorstories to find that.) Other examples of people with excessive backstories, an insistent case of main character syndrome, or faking their deaths to win pointless internet arguments about.
Really, a GM could only hope to be so blessed as to have a player who sat down before session 0 and spent an hour reading horror stories, in order to make the deliberate effort to not be like that. So, you wanna know how to be a good player? Learn by (anti-)example, and go figure out exactly what you shouldn’t do. Because the rest of it from there is pretty easy. It’s a game-- all you’ve gotta do is sit with friends, follow the game’s rules, and have fun. (And of course, you can also find horror stories about people refusing to even do one of, or all, of these three things, so there you go!)