Player types and catering (or not)

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The concept of “player types” pretty much predates the hobby and occupy a large portion of thinking in game studies generally. Especially with the rise of video games as a money-making industry, a heavy emphasis has been placed onto identifying player desires, and finding ways to cater to these wants.

There are a variety of taxonomies - we have Bartle Types (originally for MUDs), Robin Laws’ Gamer Types, The M:tG psychographic profiles, WotC’s quadrent categories based on the largest survey of player types in RPGs. Then we have less “categories” and more loosey-goosey associations - GDS and GNS (which wasn’t exactly meant to apply to players, but ended up doing so almost to completely overshadowing both models), MDA’s Eight Kinds of Fun, the idea of the “vanilla” player within any categorization of a observed Play Culture (e.g., Cuthburt’s Favored Goo Drinker in the OSR), etc.

Do you as a referee, or as a player, ever think about these in play? I know I have a kind of loose association for most of my players in terms of what they do and don’t seem to enjoy in game. Given that my day job often has me in MDA land, I kind of think about “preferred aesthetics” a lot, but I don’t exactly write down some detailed psychographic profile for my players. More so “this person loves challenge and laughs when they die, this other person likes to express power and victory but is more sensitive to detriments, this other player just likes adopting weird little guys, etc.”

In terms of “catering,” I definitely structure or interpret random results with those priorities in mind, although I try not to deal out 1:1 matchups, necessarily. Since I don’t see the referee as being beholden to anyone’s fun, I don’t think its my job to make anything work out one way or the other, but if I know so-and-so likes a challenge, its most likely that the enemy general will choose that player’s character for the one-on-one duel, as an example.

What about you? Do you find you have similar practices around play archetypes and player preferences, something else entirely, or do you find such a model to not be something you think about or prefer some kind of alternative?

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This is probably about as close as I get to those “Types” in terms of recurring themes over the years with my Players. I do tend to notice that there’s often one who likes to Interact with Specific NPCs, one who Cook/Track Food, the Zookeeper that wants a menagerie of Pets, the one that wants to Conquer/Raise Armies, and so forth.

In terms of catering, I see my Role as a way to answer those questions and help them identify the steps they need to take to meet their goals/wants in this way. They’ll still need to do the legwork :slight_smile:

If the Zookeeper wants a Gryphon Mount (and Gryphons are a thing in the Setting naturally) then I’ll find a place on the Hex Map somewhere to place a Roost of them, add a few Rumors to the Rumor Tables about some Fierce Crag Goblins that know the esoteric secrets of training them, and then it’s really up to that Player to continue to pursue it.

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I don’t really think in these types when it comes to players. It’s usually enough to figure out each person’s interests and comfort level, and make sure to highlight opportunities to play into the things they like.

People are intricate, you know? A player may fit into some power gamer/murder hobo category, but the moment I focus on that I forget they’re afraid of spiders or have hang-ups about priests and confront them with a battle against spider monks.

Where the taxonomies come in handy for me is trying to explain something more complicated about myself to relative strangers. That’s where a shared vocab can help approach the more complicated truth.

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I generally do not care for, have interest in, or cater to “player types” in any way when I organize and run my games.

For my money I think a lot of this stuff gets sorted through simple self-selection. I try and be clear what my game will involve, for example: “It’s open table, you can play every time, or skip, or only play once. You start at X level. Most of the game will be focused on doing dungeon crawling.” etc. And from there if anyone shows up and they enjoy the game, then they’re right for that game. If they don’t? Well they only wasted an afternoon, they’ll live.

Obviously you work deeper in the games industry than I do, Justin, so tell me if I’m wrong here, but I’m fairly sure basically all this focus on “player types” is purely marketing-related in trying to find a demographic to sell your product to.

As I don’t have something I’m selling, at least not for actual money, I’ve found little need to care about any of it.

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Feeling similiar about this
I dont think these categories are usefull for individual tables.
Most of my experience is with my my multiyear running group so it might differ for people that play with more unknown players.
Categories are made when engaging with large groups of people that need to be abstracted but the abstraction process ignores so much about the actuall individuals at your table

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Yeah I agree, I think the main usefulness is not so much as catering to specific players, but as a player to realize, oh here’s some vocabulary for describing some of the things I enjoy or don’t enjoy in a game.

What I think would also be useful (not sure if it exists) is if there was more discussion about “GM types” in terms of what GMs find fun or not, e.g. rolling on random tables, or coming up with new houserules, spitting out setting lore, funny voices, or similar. The focus of these discussions usually seems to be on players

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Something that is often looked over in many of these models is the “color” preference of players, as well as some more of the broader emotional, social, and material concerns that players have. This is something I think about a lot in my “day job,” that often the industry forgets the more broad picture important stuff for the more mechanical designy bits.

Same. It’s one of the (positive) things I took from Burning Wheel, players tell me what they want, I tell them no via the world’s status quo/current situation and then dare them to defy that.

Yeah, this is actually a little bit where the taxonomies help for me in that I can describe the base activities and be like “if this sounds like you would have fun doing this, this might be the game for you.”

Most definitely are. A few fell out of trying to identify how to structure games or how to find like minded players, but 90% are “how can we get the biggest return on our pitch.”

I actually think about this a lot. I kind of buy into the MDA “aesthetics” model where the dynamics of interacting with the game-in-action produces different emotional responses from players. I often wonder if there is a correlation between my own preferred aesthetics, and seeing this aesthetics reverberated among the players. I.e. does a referee who enjoys the “Exploration aesthetic” (discovering things, learning lore, seeing new places, items, and monsters, etc.), are they always going to push for that in their games, and get bored if the players don’t key off it?

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