Genre Police: High Esteem

I’ve written about how to keep players engaged with a game and mainly centred on how a mechanic from a game can provoke interest or how you can make an exciting narrative. Or how you can bolt an additional thing onto a game to make it feel different. But I’ve never really looked at what games can do for players and how we can use that to build in engagement. 

Recently, I had someone introduce me to Michele Borba’s five building blocks of self-esteem. This is an outline of the things someone needs to have in order to feel good about themselves and self-secure. As they explained it to me, the relevance to good RPG practice made me smile – it was evidence that running RPGs is helping people. I saw the things I could prioritise to make people feel like that games are worth staying for – because they give them good feelings.

So let’s take a look at how we can boost players’ love of your game.

The Blocks 

For the purposes of this article, I’ve vastly simplified and approached specific ideas generated for my interaction Borba’s theory and narrowed it down in order to approach each of the blocks of a person gaining self-esteem, defining Borba’s blocks in this way –

• Security (Knowing things won’t change on you and that you have a safe place that respects the rules you have agreed on)
• Selfhood (Knowing who you are and having a sense of individuality)
• Affiliation (Interrelatedness with others, a sense of being part of a community that respects you)
• Mission (A sense of purpose, being able to chart your progress, taking on the consequence of actions because they denote agency)
• Competence (Proven success and feeling of having accomplished something, knowing that you are able to learn from mistakes)

This blew my mind. I’m lacking some of this in my life sometimes. I’m sure some players in your games are, too. Ever have that player who is an amazing table player but finds it hard to see how much of an amazing human they are in real life? But the beauty of this is you can give it to them. In fact, the wonder of an RPG is that you can give it to them TWICE.

What Do You Mean Twice?

To begin with, we can provide these things in the game for players inside the fictional worlds they inhabit. This allows them to live out the feeling of having self-esteem that they might lack in real life. 

Secondly, by introducing these building blocks to how we treat players, they can also gain esteem by being part of a gaming group community. In a game that people want to be part of, some, if not all, of these blocks are being answered almost by accident. If we choose, we can consciously work towards these on purpose. 

Let us take a moment to first break down the easy bit. How can we meet these blocks? What can we do? Well, let’s go back to the definitions above. 

I’m going to approach them in an order that makes things easier to explain.

In Game

Selfhood: This is maybe the easiest thing roleplaying delivers. After the first few sessions, a player knows exactly who this character is. They’ll be able to make decisions with them and know who they are and what decisions they’d make. They made them and are playing them; it’s built-in. RPGs are great, aren’t they?

Affiliation: Players need to know that they are making a difference. In contrast to selfhood, it can be something we miss in games. It’s important to build a community of NPCs and places that recur and change for the better for NPCs. A sense of belonging is something that develops over time. If you want players to feel like they belong in a fictional world, they have to have communities they belong to. A faction, a location, and some friends. Make it so their characters have Allies. If they’ve saved people or righted wrongs, have NPCs respect them and be friendly. Let them build a hub they can maintain. Show the difference they’ve made and let them make a difference in people’s lives. 

I’m going to talk more about affiliation in further articles because I think it might be a key to what RPGs can offer to people.

Security: In games, security can be offered in two ways. First, it can sometimes come with the occasional slowing of pace or even giving game groups places they can retreat to, again linking to affiliation sometimes if it’s a place full of friendly NPCs on the players’ side. 

It can also come from the consistency of the universe. Within the agreed rules of your world, you don’t change to much too soon. Don’t always go for status-changing rug pulls. Characters need to know where the ground is for it to feel safe. Then they know if a plot goes really weird and outside of those agreed rules, it’s an exception, and they trust it will return.

Mission: Of all things, this should be self-explanatory. Most RPGs have a ‘thing you do’ because otherwise, why are you playing it? Characters are often working towards a goal. 

One of the things I suffer from here is that I often sandbox my games but offer too many options. A clear personal mission can sometimes keep players more invested. 

So I’d suggest that you occasionally look at your campaign and ask, ‘Where are they going? What are they doing? How can I make that clearer and more focused? What drives the game forward?’. It can help a game develop a sense of narrative.

Competence: Don’t make characters consistently look like goofs. Give places in the narrative for a character to look cool and make choices that make a massive difference. Show that in-game abilities were good choices by giving them places to be useful. 

You don’t have to let every roll succeed, but players should be able to make use of the cool stuff they’ve got. Some of these games are power fantasy. Some people don’t feel like they are good things in real life, and a central part of the power fantasy in RPGs is being able to see what it feels like to be hyper-capable. Give that desire room. It’s so important.

Out Of Game

Selfhood: This is much harder. You can’t give someone a sense of who they are in all of their life. But during this time at your game, they are inhabiting the character. We’ve talked about player roles before, and I think they’re important here for a very simple sense of self – you’re the one who heals everyone. You’re the one who takes notes of the game. You’re the one who supplies food. You’re the one with the funny voice. 

The same way a clear role in life can help, sometimes a clear ‘this is who I am for the next few hours’ can feel rewarding. 

I think that is why class-based games are sometimes very rewarding: you know who you are. So if you’re running a game and you see someone fulfilling a role, keep showing you trust and rely on them for that role. That builds Selfhood and – Affiliation.

Affiliation: So, if you’re part of a game group and have a role, you’re building affiliation. You’re making a community. If we make it known to others in our group what the group means to us and how it makes each of our lives better, then it builds the sense that the group matters on a deeper level. 

I know for sure that sometimes my game groups help people get through the week, keep in touch with friends, or just have somewhere where they make decisions that matter. 

So be vulnerable. Tell your players how much you love the game, what it does for you. And don’t be surprised when they share back. 

Security: Be consistent. In rulings and fairness. People need that to trust you. Set table safety limits and make sure the game world runs on a ruleset that benefits everyone. 

Also, be on top of your scheduling. A game people can rely on actually running with a few people is way more secure than one that always waits for everyone to be available and never runs.

Mission: The beautiful thing here is the in-game sort of delivers the out of game feelings. Players get a sense of focus. They are here to complete the mission. Aid the feeling of missions completed and progress made by making in and out of game callbacks to previous adventures. Give players an chance to look back on what they’ve done. 

This is why players do that ‘do you remember when we?’ stuff at the table. Engage with it occasionally – it adds to a sense of them creating a feeling of ‘ongoing mission’ with chronology they can see, which adds to purpose.

Competence: Don’t block players ideas. Seriously. If someone comes up with something incredibly creative you had thought of, or a good plan, don’t always counter-program. Just let it happen if the dice support the theory. 

Do the same an be supportive when a player learns something new about the system, or has an in character revelation. At the end of a session, praise the players. You have no idea how much this is going to make people’s self-esteem skyrocket. They might float for days. Just picking a different player at the end of every session and be complementary or helping them feel like they learn something. will add so much to your group overall.

I know this was a long one. Thank you for sticking with me. I honestly could write an entire doctoral thesis on this. I hope it allows you to think about your games in a way that allows you to improve player engagement and the general well-being of everyone around the table.