Rob Donoghue is one of my favorite rpg gurus, and I’m just now figuring out that the reason I resonate with him so much is that he often provides a counterpoint to my emo gut-punch tendencies. Never has this been more clearly illustrated than in a recent post on his LiveJournal called “Why I Try Not to Go to 11″. Here’s the gist of Rob’s post, after which I’ll share my own thoughts on it:

note: I’m blockquoting a good portion of Rob’s post here but I really encourage you to go read the whole post, along with the comments, because there’s a lot more there than I’m focusing on here.

Shingu, Secret of the Stellar Wars is an anime I enjoy a lot … I had a repeat on in the background tonight, and there was an exchange I enjoyed. Two characters have a pretty close bond, but one of them has been keeping a secret. The other one has suspected this is the case, and the issue of this secret comes out in the conversation.

Now, in a more melodramatic story (by which I mean most other anime and the ideal put forward by many indie games) this would have been a point of tension and conflict, something that would have pushed issues and driven the interactions between those and other characters because conflict, meaningful emotional conflict, is the gold standard.

In Shingu, the other character basically said, “Yes, I knew you had secrets, but it’s ok, I trust you.”

I love stuff like this, and I love it in my games. On paper, and by any number of rules, that’s weak sauce. The numerous story opportunities were wasted, and whatever potential there was for conflict was promptly resolved. But to me, that was all about strengthening and redefining bonds. That expressed a level of trust that had not previously been laid out between the characters – it’s a small, subtle thing, but important.

I’m not a gut wrenching emo porn kind of guy. Sure, I like it from time to time, because it provides a potent contrast, but I prefer a baseline of building, strengthening and exploring relationships much more than pushing them to the breaking point. Without that baseline, I tend to feel like the higher octane emotional stakes are forced and false. But with it, those moments gain real teeth.

via Robert Donoghue – Why I Try Not To Go To 11.

This really drives home a good point. Because although I DO occasionally enjoy going to 11, I could not stand it if I had to play with the dial cranked up like that all the time. Furthermore, without those more subtle low-key moments, the emo stuff not only gets old really quickly, but it loses a lot of its oomph, too.

So yeah, although I think it’s fair to say that I probably jack things up toward 11 more often than a lot of players do, and I tend to make soap opera out of things whenever I’m not reined in, I hope I don’t go there too often. I have worried sometimes that I pushed the dial up on a few occasions when others at the table seemed, in retrospect, a bit off-put by it. I don’t recall anyone ever outright telling me to amp it down, but I can think now of several cases during my year with the Rolemonkeys when Chris Heim would undercut my amped-up drama-pushing ways with some sort of goofy or silly response, and I used to get kinda miffed about that but now I think he was just trying to get me to cool the hell down and take myself less seriously. I think maybe Chris Perrin was working a similar angle when we played together for the first time.

Then again, I think Judd Karlman makes a really good point in the comments to Rob’s OP when he points out that a lot of the amped-up emo porn that we hear about when people write/talk about their play experiences is due to people focusing their memorable (and thus most sharable) actual play tales on the big emotional stuff. Certainly I do that. Most of the roleplaying stories I’ve shared are the big emotional ones. But that doesn’t mean they happen all the time, even when I’m in emo DramaMonkey mode, and it doesn’t mean that I want them to happen all the time, because I don’t. It’s just easier for people like me to communicate those emo moments than the more subdued ones. Guys like Rob who write well enough to make “Yes, I knew you had secrets, but it’s ok, I trust you” still sound compelling, they’re pretty rare.