Unpleasant Design

"Who are you excluding, and why?"

~ Roman Mars, 99% Invisible.

Unpleasant design, usually attributed to architecture, is a design strategy intended to purposefully guide or restrict behaviour that is unwanted.  While I like the video above, I think it fails utterly to notice that fortifications, iron doorways, secret doors and prisons are all examples of deliberate unpleasant design, all from a time when the words were not coined.

Another form of design I'd like to mention are fees and tariffs, which are designed specifically to discourage the entry of goods and persons into towns and regions.  I don't include tolls, as these were put on roads to pay for the making of the road, and were thus of such small value that it did not discourage traffic.  The most important fee with regards to unpleasant design is the fee that must be paid before a person "belongs" to an organization or a club.  Generally, depending on how exclusionary we want the club to be, the fee varies.

Your local community hall just wants enough money from its neighbours to pay the rent and maintenance, and to that end it wants everyone to join.  On the other hand, organizations like the past Murder Inc. want you to actually kill a person before you're even considered able to join ~ and most highly exclusionary clubs want you to back up a few dumptrucks full of money, even after you've passed the smell test.  That's because we don't want any untoward people access, for obvious reasons.  The wrong people are, well, the wrong people.

To bring this around to D&D, we've been searching around for reasons why players should accept rules regarding encumbrance, acceptance of the game rules and the fact of death in our campaigns.  These are design features that a specific type of D&D player doesn't like ... and as DMs, we have many conversations about how to encourage players to accept them, and how to set up session zero moments in order to give notice that the game will include them.  We do this, like good 21st century socialized people, with the desire to include as many people as possible in our campaigns.

Maybe, we shouldn't be doing that.  Maybe, we should be looking at the problem as a way to exclude people.  Given that I see so many people online complaining so often about that specific type of player that ruins everything, either because they don't take the game seriously or because they're simply rude ... then I see plenty of argument for why encumbrance should be seen as Unpleasant Design.  Rather that soften encumbrance, for which we've made an argument for why it should be there, perhaps the real solution is to Harden the hell out of encumbrance in order to drive off the wrong kind of people.

I think I've been doing that for decades, without thinking in those terms.  I do have a tendency to draw a hard line in the sand as a DM, as some online have witnessed.  I take the game seriously.  I don't like boors, clods and louts.  I don't like random racist remarks at my gaming table, or the sort of assholes who don't like to play with women.  I am ready to boot such people.  And I am quite sure than many of them stay away from my game because I am clear about whether or not I'm going to use encumbrance, or insist on obedience to the rules, or kill player characters.

Which, I think, is why my games are so goddamn satisfying for people to play.  I never have any trouble finding players.  All my regular players will ask, and often, if some friend of theirs can join, because they've been chatting up my game and now the friend is interested.  I have no doubts that I could charge people to play my game online, particularly if I set up a video conference on a given night, which I now have the power to do.  Frankly, though, I haven't got the time.  My point is that making games exclusionary, through the use of unpleasant design, is Not a bug.

It's a selling point.