It Would Be Easier For You Not to Click This

Hey folks, Sylvan here. This one is going to be a little weird, and quite long.

Originally, I was planning to continue my series on the Loom system this week. I have most of that post drafted, actually, and it's going to be the next one that goes out. This week, though, I want to focus on something different. This is a topic that's been on my mind for a little while now, and if you're at all tapped into the indie TTRPG scene, you'll understand exactly why I think it's so important to talk about.

Today, we're going to be learning about a key theory in Information Science: the Principle of Least Effort.

Stay with me.

You may have encountered this principle before in other domains or fields of study, but for our purposes, the Principle of Least Effort (PLE) is as straightforward as it gets: readers gravitate towards the path of least resistance, not towards the richest or most accurate source. In other words, once you find a result that's "good enough," you stop looking. In information contexts, this means that users pick the most convenient source and the least exacting search method, regardless of their expertise, and quit when minimally acceptable answers appear.

I want to talk about three different ways that this principle affects us within the indie TTRPG sphere: design, play habits, and discourse.

Designing Low-Effort Bridges

If we're centering our design around PLE, there are a few major takeaways that the principles has for us on how we can design games to be accessible and readable to our audience. For one, it tells us that players generally favor documentation that's easy to access and skim. Snippets, callout boxes, examples, bulleted lists... think about what your eye is immediately drawn to on a page of rules text, and whether or not you're going to want to keep reading afterwards. Players often stop reading as soon as they find a procedure that they deem acceptably functional.

This section is mostly aimed at designers who are looking to make their games more accessible to the average reader or player. These are not universal pieces of design advice. I'm specifically talking about trying to design a game that prevents playgroups from yelling "read the fucking manual!" Some players really enjoy a game that incentivizes high-effort engagement! I am one of these players! I dream of Invisible Sun at night sometimes, and mentally page through its rules as if I am counting sheep.

However.

Most players aren't like that. Statistically, overwhelmingly, players take the path of least resistance. PLE is applicable to most players, even though there are exceptions, and games made for those people that are exceptions. For now, though, let's take this example:

Horace is playing The Game Ever with her friends. Her character, who is a Crystalline Freak-Rogue, has just fallen from the top of a building onto the ground. Horace wants to know whether or not The Game Ever has fall damage rules, so she flips to the chapter about combat, because she knows that there's a section on how to calculate damage. In the damage section, she finds a yellow box labelled "Fall Damage" that reads:

If a character falls from a height, they may take up to 1D100 Pure Damage, depending on fall height, weight, and velocity. For complete fall damage rules, refer to page 274.

"Good enough," Horace thinks. She rolls a d100 and marks 32 points of Pure Damage on the sixth page of her character sheet (you know, where HP is marked in The Game Ever) and proceeds with play. Little does she know that her character could have taken as little as ONE point of damage if she had calculated the damage using weight and velocity, given that Crystalline characters have hollow bone structures! How foolish! Perhaps if she had read all of the rules as instructed, she would not have been burnt to a crisp by the Psychic Demagogue Humpdragon in the next session.

I can't really blame Horace for failing to check the full rules on fall damage. For one, she's a strawman I constructed myself for the purposes of illustration, and assigning fault to her feels particularly cruel. But more importantly, Horace hit what we call an information gate, and it's not unusual for that to stop her. If anything, it's entirely expected.

The moment that a player is asked to flip to a different section to get more information, there's a really high chance that they simply... won't. When information is gated behind a series of actions that you have to take (clicking from one page to another, flipping to another chapter, checking another book, looking back and forth from a reference card to a page in the manual), people just won't do the action. The path of least resistance is to do what's "good enough."

The really big takeaway that I want designers to have from PLE is that they should be designing what information professionals call low-effort bridges. Low-effort bridges are access points that are easy to step across (as opposed to an information gate, which serves as an obstacle) and give incentive to seek further information. Indexes are a great example of a low-effort bridge. So is a table of contents. Even though these are technically cross-reference points that ask you to flip to other pages, they don't offer the reader enough information for anyone to deem the index to be a "good enough" source of information on its own.

There's more you can do, though. Prioritize key rules and procedures early in the book so groups can start playing quickly, then layer optional detail later (repeating the previously established fundamentals with their added context). Avoid layering many interdependent subsystems (conditions, tags, edge cases), since these tend to force players to track too many moving parts and constantly reference the book.

A lot of this sounds daunting, and more than a little of it may come across as vague. But there are tons of great examples out there of this sort of solid information architecture... they're just mostly not in TTRPG manuals. They're in technical writing: documentation, how-to articles, tutorials, walkthroughs. Fundamentally, TTRPG design is a form of technical writing. We just often don't treat it as such because what we're writing is supposed to be fun.

No Thank You, I'll Stick With The Game Ever

PLE applies to habits of play just as much as it applies to design. Effort, in this case, is married strongly to comfort—systems and patterns of behavior and play that are comfortable for someone tend be less effortful. To me, the principle is one of the simplest and most straightforward answers to the age-old question, "why don't people try out indie games if they like D&D so much?"

Familiarity breeds comfort, comfort breeds routine. When the choice is between playing a game you're familiar with and a game you're not familiar with, it's no surprise that the more popular choice is to stick with (or modify) what you know, instead of starting fresh.

For those of us embroiled in the indie scene, learning new systems is a bit of a different ballgame. Like any other skill, learning and adapting to new systems can be mastered with practice and repetition. The first time I played a PBTA game, it took a lot more effort to figure out than when, a decade later, I ventured into games Forged in the Dark. Even though Forged in the Dark was a new system to me when I first picked it up, I had years and years of experience rifling through game manuals, learning rules systems, and fitting together mechanical pieces into a cohesive whole.

That first step, though, is mighty daunting. I've heard people talk about "gateway RPGs" for D&D fans, and that's a great example of a low-effort bridge like I was talking about before. For some people, maybe that was Pathfinder or Daggerheart. But I've found in my anecdotal experience that if a bridge is too short (a game too similar to what's familiar), you won't end up stepping off that bridge into truly unknown territory. In my experience, games like Wanderhome, Mothership, or Fiasco have been much more successful at converting one-game exclusives into multi-system enthusiasts. They're different enough from what's familiar to be a meaningful bridge to cross, but they lay out information clearly enough and with a minimal amount of required buy-in that players can sit down and start enjoying the game quickly.

(I would be a fool not to mention that I've witnessed my own game, Gravemire, do this for people at conventions on multiple occasions)

Let's take this a step further, though. In addition to applying to what games we play, PLE also applies to how we play them. In recent conversations with friends of mine, I've come to the realization (or rather, I have been informed by people who play with me frequently) that I have an inexplicable but unstoppable penchant for creating diplomatically-minded, transient chroniclers and postal workers. It's very specific, and yet I keep. On. Doing. It.

I'm not the only one with a character type. Most people I talk to that roleplay frequently have an archetype—something they naturally gravitate towards when creating characters. Unless I work actively against impulse, I will make some variant of my stupid little busybody mailman every single time. The archetype delights me, it's easy for me to play, it's just got The Sauce, you know?

It's not a bad thing that we tend to follow the path of least resistance in creating and embodying our characters, but it's definitely something that I like being aware of. Knowing what I tend towards can give me the power to intentionally play against type when the game demands it, and understanding how the rest of the table naturally leans can help me to craft stories that are fun for everyone involved.

My point here is that patterns of behavior are reinforced by our tendency to retrace familiar paths. I return to what a friend of mine charitably called "larping the pony express" time and time again because that's what I've already established to be easy and comfortable for me, which allows me to focus on other elements of the game that I otherwise might not have the capacity to pay attention to. As long as we're aware of the play path we're on, familiar or otherwise, and as long as we're taking steps to make sure that everyone is being taken care of at the table, retreading familiar ground should be entirely welcome.

What's most important to remember is that a familiar play path for you may not be familiar for everyone else at the table. My weirdo mailman characters and your weirdo mailman characters may hit all the same key aesthetic points, but if I assume that you're fulfilling the exact same archetype that I am, we're both going to be in for a world of hurt. Where my representation of a character in that niche might be nosy and pensive, yours might be lofty-minded and oblique. If we assume our patterns of play to be the same just because they seem at first blush to be similar, we risk leaving with a half-baked understanding of each other, the characters, the game, and our experience as a whole. And unfortunately, the reality of the TTRPG scene is...

"I feel like no one can handle any nuance"

I was talking to a friend of mine in the TTRPG scene a few days ago, and something that he said really struck me: "I feel like no one can handle any nuance." My first instinct was to argue with him: I can handle nuance, and you're talking to me right now. What gives?

The more that I thought about it, though, the more I realized he was right. The indie TTRPG scene is a corner of the internet absolutely embroiled in discourse. Every few weeks, a new fire is stoked. Every few months, another person is shattered. It's a tense, contentious space, as is the case for many small and insular internet communities like it. And with that tension and friction comes a frightening speed of communication. Ideas and opinions are exchanged at breakneck pace, and much of that occurs in unmoderated or unmonitored spaces: direct messages, Bluesky posts, Discord servers.

Because the pace of information exchange is so rapid, opinions come to a boil quickly. Conflict bubbles and pops at the surface of the discourse cauldron, but the pace of formed opinion does not always lead to breadth of the same degree. Within days (if not hours) of news breaking, lines have already been drawn, arguments have calcified, and everyone is expected to have Something To Say.

To me, this indicates PLE at work. The emphasis is not placed on having the most thorough opinion on the discursive subject of the week, but having an opinion ready that conforms to one side or another of the argument. Participants in discourse are encouraged to gather their information quickly so that their voice is not drowned out by the oncoming tidal wave of posts that inevitably follow in the wake of discourse breaking on the shores of our fair city.

When speed is what matters most, people tend towards whatever source is "good enough," not whatever source is "best." If you have a choice between reading two paragraphs that give you the gist or sixteen paragraphs that give you the details, you read the synopsis source first. And when you're approaching your sources with the goal of forming an opinion, as opposed to the goal of informing your opinion, your priorities shift. Persuasive sources becomes more valuable; informative sources become less so. If a source tells you how to think, that's less effort that you have to take in order to formulate your own perspective.

This, I think, is what my friend meant when he said that no one can handle nuance. As a community, we're capable of nuanced discussion. Time and time again, one-on-one conversations with my colleagues, peers, and mentors have proven to me that on the whole, the indie TTRPG community is whip-smart and deeply passionate. When we want to, we can dive deep, we can tackle multi-step problems, we can handle nuance.

But discourse prioritizes quantity. Arguments require alacrity, lest you be caught flat-footed. When so much effort has to be put into defending your position, paradoxically, less effort can be put into building that position in the first place. Passion can turn to poison, and poison can be amplified to an astounding degree.

While these three subjects (design, habits of play, and discourse) might seem unrelated on the surface, I hope that it's a little clearer now that all three of them are driven by the same underlying principle. If rules are hard to understand or unclear, our first instinct is to filter out what we consider to be too much effort to be worth it. The filter that we apply is the fundamental lens of our own bias: what we believe to be important and what we believe we can discard. Our patterns of play are the same way: we build our characters on familiar foundations, leading to familiar houses. We miss a lot when we approach problems with the goal of solving them quickly and filling in the gaps fast. We miss even more when our methods to backfill those gaps are to grab on to what is already familiar.