My Mental Health and the Indie TTRPG Scene
(cross-posted from my substack)
My Mental Health and the Indie TTRPG Scene
How I feel, and how I feel about it
Mental Health
I have ambivalent feelings about talking about mental health. One one hand I am uncomfortable with a lot of the ways that it’s discussed online, where I feel there’s a lot of unwarranted certainty about things and some potentially unhealthy overidentification with disorders, but also I think there is stigma in society against mental health challenges, and also sometimes against normal, healthy emotions. And the way to push back against bad discourse norms is to talk about things that should be OK to talk about.
I’ve been going to therapy for a few years, to deal with depression and anxiety (mostly related to social anxiety), and at one point one of my therapists thought it would make sense to look through the diagnostic criteria for Avoidant Personality Disorder and we concluded that that seemed to be an accurate assessment. The way that “disorders” are defined often incorporates the idea that, whatever “it” is, it interferes with your ability to function in society. So even though we often think of a disorder as something “you” have, it’s in some ways based on the relationship between “you” and “your environment”. This is where the idea of spectrums, typicality, and divergence and can come in. As an analogy, somebody who was extremely tall might have problems in their life even if all their biological systems were operating normally: they might end up bonking their head on doorways, find that they have to uncomfortably contort themselves to fit into a car or use their office furniture, etc. Do they have “too tall disorder”? Or is their world just optimized for people that aren’t like them? I have trouble initiating social interactions with people, so if I don’t have other things that help bridge that gap (such as routines that cause me to interact, or interactions that feel ongoing rather than things the feel like they need to be initiated) I tend to end up avoiding it. So is the fact that I have more anxiety than average regarding this aspect of life a disorder of having too much anxiety, or is my problem that the world is optimized for the way gregarious extroverts like to interact and the things that would make things easier for me are deprioritized?
Probably the biggest things that have helped me in therapy so far happened after starting the Dialectical Behavior Therapy approach. DBT has elements of mindfulness, which I’ve found helpful, and the idea of observing the physical sensations associated with emotions as a lead-in to engaging them has been very helpful for me.[1] I have had the habit of trying to suppress or “tough out” difficult emotions, which ends up blunting their harshest impact but then puts me in a situation where I’m feeling constantly ground down by things I’m trying not to feel. The RAIN of self-compassion exercise was introduced to me in one of my DBT skill training classes and clicked with me as a technique to follow that helped me bypass the habit of suppressing and instead engage with my emotions in a healthier way, even when they’re difficult emotions like deep sadness.
My ambivalent feelings about the indie TTRPG scene
Even though my instincts tend to lead me to avoid social interactions, humans are social animals and being socially isolated is difficult. Because I have very little confidence that other people will find me likable or interesting I find “freeform socializing” to be very intimidating. I’d much rather have an activity I can feel confident in to form the spine of the interaction, so I don’t feel like I have to carry all the load myself. So being able to engage with other people in order to play a game ought to be great.
Unfortunately for me, historically most mainstream tabletop RPGs have had a somewhat tenuous relationship with their rules, so that throws a big cloud of social uncertainty over the thing I want to be my reliable foundation. And even if that rule uncertainty wasn’t there, many mainstream games have an “adventuring party” arrangement, which ends up incorporating some more freeform social interaction into your game contributions and invites my self-consciousness about the social interactions with the other players – Am I talking too much? Not enough? Am I dominating the planning? Am I being sufficiently diplomatic? Am I giving off nonverbal cues that others might not like?
The “system matters” approach of Forge games seemed like a much better fit to me. The ethos of the indie TTRPG scene in that era seemed to be a desire to play each game on its own terms, so it seemed a lot more approachable and potentially fun to me. I didn’t know anyone locally to play with, but I did connect with some people for online play (audio-only in those days). But over the years those groups broke up for various reasons, and I found it hard to form new ones. For one thing, the scene actively resisted being put into a genre – it wanted to maintain the position that it was doing the exact same thing as all other RPGs, including the “trad games” that I found unappealing. For another thing, the concept of playing each game on its own terms was being ground down by the forces of “improv” (which is in effect it’s own version of the old system-doesn’t-matter True Roleplaying where you should consider the rules of any particular game a mere approximation of the thing you were really trying to do) and the Powered-by-the-Apocalypse marketing juggernaut which reduced the diversity of design approaches in the scene (and also mostly appears to the players to “work just fine” if you use a trad game approach). So trying to get a game going seems like I’d need to solve extra challenges around “convincing” people to play in a way that would work for me, and maybe even constantly convincing people to play the game by its rules. I find trying to convince people of things to be emotionally tiring, and I have little confidence I’m any good at it, so there’s a huge psychological barrier to this seeming feasible to me. Plus, the social norms of the politically-charged social media era have made things feel a lot more fraught.
Game Design
After being involved in the indie TTRPG forums for a while I got the itch to try my own hand at TTRPG design. It really seemed like it could be an artform for me, since it sits at the intersection of a lot of things I care about, like systems thinking, imagination, psychology, etc. Being able to be creative in a way that feels meaningful to me would be great for pushing against my feelings of hopelessness, helplessness, and low self-efficacy (and if I could bring in some money that would also be extremely helpful). Unfortunately my efforts at engaging with TTRPG design have been like talking into a void, or playing a game where you keep doing something and everybody else just passes their turn so you have do to something again, until eventually you wonder what the point is. Now it’s certainly possible that I suck as a designer and people are too passive-aggressively-polite to say so. But I think the more likely scenario is that people only want to read and play games they already believe they’ll like, and since most people don’t even know me let alone like me, why would they choose to engage with my stuff rather than something from a designer they’re already a fan of or based on an IP they already love? (Or if they do know me it’s probably as someone who hasn’t been successful, so that’s a mark against me). Now, people are allowed to like or dislike whatever or whoever they want, but it kind of sucks to end up being completely isolated. And it’s hard to not carry resentment about that – even if no individual person is choosing intentionally to reject me as an individual it still feels like being rejected.
Microcosm / Macrocosm
As I mentioned above, my relationship to the indie scene feels like being stuck playing a poorly designed game. And it seems pretty similar to the struggles I have in other aspects of my life, so it may just be a microcosm of life in general. So on one hand it would seem to make sense to give up indie TTRPGs as a failed endeavor, cut my losses, and try to focus on something else. On the other hand, when I cut things out of my life that I feel genuine enthusiasm for (or at least remember having enthusiasm for) there’s no guarantee that other things pop up to take their place, and some evidence that nothing does. And if I’m going to encounter the same problems everywhere, wouldn’t it be worse to start from zero somewhere else? So I feel like I’m always one-foot-in and one-foot-out of the indie TTRPG scene. It feels like the kinds of things that would make the scene healthier for me would also be beneficial for almost everyone, but it also seems that the scene is unlikely to change.
[1] I tried to incorporate some of my experience with the DBT emotion model into the design of my Heartfelt social interaction subsystem.