Most TTRPG Groups Don’t Fail Because of Bad Rules. They Fail Because Nobody Talks About What They Want.

If you’ve ever watched a tabletop RPG group implode halfway through a campaign, odds are it didn’t happen because the rogue broke the stealth rules or someone forgot how grappling works. 

It happened because the group never agreed on what kind of story they were telling. 

That’s the real killer. Not bad dice rolls, not min-maxing, not even a toxic player (although that’ll do it too.) It’s mismatched expectations. One player wants a deep, interesting story where their backstory matters. Another just wants to vibe and roll for soup. A third is out here trying to trigger every combat encounter because they thought it was going to be dungeon-crawl heavy. 

Nobody’s wrong. 

But when nobody talks about it ahead of time, the group ends up playing three different games on the same night. And resenting each other for it. 

A while back, I ran a Star Wars campaign set aboard a derelict research vessel in deep space. The tone I was going for was budget Event Horizon but everyone’s tired and no one trusts each other. No heroes. No clean uniforms. Just scavengers trying not to get pulled apart by a haunted ship with bad wiring and worse intentions. 

The first character to show up was perfect. A burned-out salvager with a busted EVA suit and a cybernetic eye that twitched when the humidity got too high. Total grunge vibes. Paranoia baked into the character sheet. We were locked in. 

Then came the next player.

They introduced a rogue Jedi who was–how do I put this?–absolutely unhinged. 

Imagine if Charlie Day got knighted by accident and now he has a lightsaber and a working knowledge of Force Push. He talked a mile a minute, stole rations from NPCs for “training,” and once used his telekinesis to hurl a toilet at a hallway camera for reasons I still don’t understand. His entire backstory hinged on being kicked out of multiple Jedi temples for “philosophical differences.”

Now, this wasn’t a bad character. It just didn’t belong in this game. 

By the third session, the tone was wrecked. One moment we were crawling through vent shafts trying to avoid a sentient virus, the next he was trying to telepathically convince the ship’s AI to adopt him. The salvager’s player pulled me aside, asking if I could “get things back on track.” The Jedi’s player thought they were keeping things fun. 

Neither of them was wrong.
But we never had the conversation.
And by the time we tried, the tone whiplash had already torn the party apart.

The game died a couple of sessions later. 

It’s the same in leadership, by the way. 

Small teams don’t fall apart because the spreadsheet formatting was wrong. They fall apart because no one agreed on what success looked like. No one clarified how they wanted to work together. Everyone just assumed their way was the default. 

You have to talk about it. 

You have to talk about tone, pacing, player buy-in, safety tools, table culture–all the boring stuff that keeps your game from catching fire three weeks in. It’s not exciting, but it’s essential. 

Same goes for coaching.
Same goes for management.
Same goes for any environment where human beings are expected to collaborate and make something together. 

If you’re leading a game–or a team–you are responsible for helping people articulate what they want. And then you’re responsible for guiding the group toward a shared direction that honors as much of that as possible. 

Because if you don’t?

You’ll end up with a group of well-meaning, creative, passionate people–who can’t stand playing together.