General player advice
Time to try to be a part of the blogging community again, this time regarding Prismatic Wasteland's blogwagon around good player advice, which I'm going to contribute to by saying that it's really hard to give good player advice, in the same way that it's hard to give actually useful GM advice. Not just because, as Mr. Wasteland also mentioned, a lot of players aren't really reading blogs, but also because it all just depends so much! I think the closest I could get to it is just... Have fun?
Even though Bankuei says that their "Fun Now" manifesto is outdated, I still believe that at its core it must be one of the single most important pieces of general ttrpg advice on the internet. It's simple, it's direct, it's not rpg-exceptionalist and, would you look at that, it's true. Everyone is playing a game, we play games to have fun. We can play games to discover things about ourselves, solve fictional problems, engage in tactical grid combat, flirt with your friends' OCs, tell a story together, endure imaginary harm, but... If you're not having fun doing that, you're not really playing a game anymore, are you?
There's like, so much GM advice going around that assumes a certain culture of play, I'm not going to hop in the bandwagon and start spewing out advice to players, when I know that with each I game play, I'm going to look out for different things. I could not possibly try to come up with advice more specific than "talk to your friends/players" or the aforementioned "have fun", because I think it would be a disservice. A disservice to the readers who would go into their next game thinking about squaring their circle to do what I said1, and a disservice to myself, since I'd be wasting time accounting for completely unreasonable possibilities for the sake of completeness.2
It's why I think "having fun" is so effective. "Having fun" is human, both personal and empathetic. I don't know if it's a me thing, but I don't really have fun if I see that other players are not having fun as well. Part of having fun in any game is knowing what game you are playing, knowing what's expected of you, and making sure everyone's on the same page.
So for players, both GMs and non-GMs, here is my non-advice advice: have fun, talk to your buddies, and like, give a shit? Should be good enough.
anb
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Bold of me to consider people would follow my advice, but we have to give ourselves some credit every now and then.↩
A good example of this is what I mention in my recent Heart post: our GM was doing a lot of turn-based stuff even though Heart has no turn system. What's the correct player behavior here? Follow the rules and ask for the GM to change? Change your playstyle to fit the way the GM is running the game? Maybe you shouldn't even know the rules since you're a player! Should you just go along with what the other players are doing? Suggest a different game? Well, that all depends on how much fun you're having, right?↩