Captain Anorak's Guide to Gaming
Dullness in Routine
Anything in a game which becomes routine runs the risk of becoming dull. Shooting fireballs from your fingertips to slay your enemies is a pretty bloody exciting idea, and the first time you do anything like that it's fun. But once you've cast a hundred fireballs your attitude will be more like 'Oh, some orcs? I'll just fireball them.'

I get a lot of fun in roleplaying from working learning tactics. I should make an important distinction here: I like learning tactics that feel like something a real person could do, not exploiting the rules system. So concepts like 'min-maxing', working out how to get the most powers for my character with the minimum input of points, hold no interest for me. What I like is the learning how to operate in a game-world; this is me the player learning the same things that my character would be learning.

But it's being on the learning curve which I find enjoyable. When I've reached the top of that curve I have little interest in using the same tactics, at least in a situation that's not challenging. I find myself saying, 'Oh, right, I'll just use such-and-such a tactic again', and realise that I'm bored.

LACK OF CHALLENGE

Having said that, a lot of this does come from a lack of challenge. If I was using well-rehearsed tactics but I had to get it right to stay alive this would be a lot more exciting than if I know I'm going to live through it. This is my experience with many simple wargames: although I know how to play them to my best advantage, I feel the tension of a game if I know that there is a big risk of losing.

LACK OF INVOLVEMENT

Another factor that leads to dullness in something you've done many times is a lack of the feeling of involvement. I imagine that in reality fighting your way through a mass of your enemies would be really exciting, with the blood pounding in your head and the feeling of the blade in your hand cleaving flesh. It would hold my attention because I would be involved in it. A game frequently fails to simulate this feeling because the involvement is not there: the player doesn't have to do anything but roll some dice occasionally. Hacking my way through a mass of foemen becomes a dull slog for me if all I have to do is roll hit dice every round and roll damage when I hit. In such a game I could go away and make a cup of tea and let someone else roll my dice for me, and the game could carry on just the same. This is a sign of lack of involvement.

On the other hand, if I have to make decisions that will affect my survival chances in a big way every combat round, I feel a lot more involved. This could be something very simple: a game system might simply ask me to choose two actions every round, which could be two attacks, two defences or one of each. I would then feel more involved because I was then maing to make choices every round to stay alive.

NEW EXPERIENCES IN ROLEPLAYING

When I write RPGs I tend to try to write something that has not been done before. I try to create a game that gives the players a new experience which they will not have had in games they've played before. For instance, I might write a game where magic works by contacting spirits and persuading them to help. This sounds like a really interesting thing to do in a game to me. But I imagine that once a player has bargained with spirits to obtain healing a hundred times it would become routine and dull.

Similarly, when your character sees something, the excitement of this gets less every time. In my earliest roleplaying experiences, meeting a monster was scary and therefore exciting. Nowadays when I meet something big and ugly, I may think 'Oh, that's going to be hard to kill', but the sting of excitement has gone. Since meeting big monsters is no longer exciting, I try to give my players some new experience by thinking of something different. One thing I try to do is to give them enemies to fight (or - shock horror - maybe even not fight but negotiate with instead) who are just ordinary humans but who have a good reason for fighting for their cause, rather than just being in the scenario for something to hack and slay. Or I might