Gamemaster Personality Quiz at Gunpoint
I have an instinctive revulsion for personality quizzes.
I know it's not serious. There is no way a quiz stuffed in the spare pages of a teenage magazine (or its bastard descendent, bred to the point of its snubbed face depriving it of oxygen as it sells your answers to data brokers under the table, The Buzzfeed Quiz) can encapsulate the breadth of human experience. There's only so much room on the page: to get ten-plus questions in there, you can only have three or four options for each question.
What's more, the mechanisms are flawed: generally the results correspond to "mostly chose option A", or else lower options on the list give more points and the results are on a spectrum with two poles. Once you apprehend this, you can choose whatever answer you want. (That's ridiculous to say, right? "You can choose whatever answer you want." It's a magazine. You could already do that. You can lie to the magazine with your little waiting-room golf-pencil and get whatever answer pleases you most, if that suits you.)
It doesn't stop at magazines. I am troubled by astrology. I don't like the idea that the time of year I was born somehow has bearing on my essential being (which, I am assured, is less important than what I do——but the matter troubles me anyway). Mostly it's harmless, but occasionally you meet someone who leans in way too hard, filling their social circles only with people whose parents fucked in the wintertime——someone who hears you're an Aries and says "oh, yeah, I totally see it," because of course you do, every archetype is designed to be vaguely relatable to everyone.
Of course, this is a reactive position to take. I've not identified anything truly heinous in the personality quiz because its purpose isn't to identify you: it's to make you reflect on yourself and make decisions about who you are. What traits feel like you? What traits don't? If I tell you that you're argumentative, do you accept that assertion or push back against it? If I insist you have bad taste in lovers, will you go break up with your longtime boyfriend and subscribe to my magazine instead?
The poison doesn't lie with the quiz. It lies with me: I'm mad because someone has the audacity to tell me they've apprehended me at a glance——that I am so simple and digestible they can know my inner contours with one game of Twenty Questions. I see the categories presented by the author and rail at where the lines are laid. What authority do you have to sever me down the middle? (A. None.) Who has given you the bricks to separate me from my sisters? (B. I did, by participating in your quiz.) Why the fuck does it matter how many hours I wait before texting someone back? (C. It depends, because of course it depends.)
I sometimes wonder if there's a cultural element to this feeling. Being a North American in this particular era primes me for intense individualism——the tyranny of one, made perfectly unique and lonesome by the apparatuses that want to sell everyone separate washing machines and tailor advertisements based on our fingerprinted porn history. Do collectivist cultures have the same skepticism of personality types I do, or are they more willing to accept that people fall into broad niches that mesh together? Is this me being not like other girls?
If it's a cultural trapping, it might as well be subcultural, too. Storygamers do this, while OSR freaks do that; rules lawyers are always controlling egotists, and if you don't use encumbrance rules you have commitment issues; if you kill bandits you're a monarchist, and if you roleplay romance you're trying to fuck your friends. But there's good news! No longer will the personality quiz be confined to the player side of the table. Referees can get in on the fun too by taking this bespoke quiz to sort you into your comfortable little box! It's real quick——takes less than ten minutes, and you don't even need a pencil. Just skip all the pop psychology bullshit and pick the result you want from this list. Ready?
The Gamemaster
You're the gamemaster (or sometimes gamesmaster), as neutral and inoffensive as they come. You're willing to play any game your table asks for——even though they won't do the same for you——because you know the game is less important than spending time with your buds, having a laugh, maybe shouting at each other for a bit. Your best games are in a cardboard box in your attic. You put them there last fall, when you needed to make space in your guest bedroom for all those novels you haven't been reading. You're between creative surges right now——spent everything in the tank but not quite ready to ingest something new. You're on an island in the shape of your desk and the ocean is so, so deep. You stay awake at night thinking about your finances. You're a Virgo.
The Dungeon Master
You're a real referee, an expert who cut their teeth on locked doors, ten-foot poles, and dead hirelings. You always play something with an edition number on the end: sometimes it's very old, and sometimes it only looks very old, and sometimes it was made by someone who liked those old things but secretly wrote about Caves of Qud instead. Whether the page has got a single paragraph of room dimensions or a full page of bullshit about flesh-eating slime, you can get anyone excited about danger and exhaustion and deprivation by spotting keywords and making up what's in the middle. (This is called "imagining.") You think a lot about the last house you lived in, and the group you played games with there. You went your separate ways after that last autumn session. It was bittersweet; you let them each take a figurine from your bin to remember you by, and they each gave you one of their dice——your own mismatched polyhedral set. You don't use it, because you like your metal ones better. You're a Virgo.
The Master of Ceremonies
You're a real referee, a master storyteller with an encyclopedic knowledge of genre, character, and narrative structure. You couldn't care less about games with numbers or lists of items in them——those are vices for players who can't look at a short plot summary and a list of one-sentence NPCs and make up what's in the middle. (This is called "imagining.") Every game on your bookshelf has a title that's two esoteric words slammed together or an entire sentence from a Faulkner novel, but nothing in-between (except your well-thumbed copy of the Pathfinder Core Rulebook with a coffee stain on the back cover). For each of those books, you have two PDFs in a folder on your desktop. You tried to watch television last night and couldn't make yourself sit through it. It was a show you'd seen before——one you liked, even——but for some reason it didn't connect with you anymore. Did they get new writers? Did the story change, or did you? Why can't you connect with a character anymore unless you hear your friend's voice behind their words? Is everything supposed to feel so artificial? You're an Aquarius.
The Administrator
You're part of the new wave, building games that run like sleek and thematically sharp machines. Nothing is too sacred for the cutting room floor: fuck dungeons, fuck dice, fuck character sheets——hell, fuck referees. You play games that evoke. Your players are chasing a specific high and you're the dealer that gives it to them: a shock of trauma, an erotic tease, a bit of guilt, something confusing and carnal and compelling. If the game doesn't literally involve bleeding on the table and spitting in someone's mouth, it's not enticing enough for you. (Mostly they have robots in them.) You like the queasy feeling you get when something is new. If you don't feel that often enough, you get stale and brittle inside, and everything within arm's reach starts to feel like tinder. A fire like that chases you across the country——makes everything from your old life hot to the touch——forces you to tuck them away where you can't see them anymore. Anything to get your mind off that. You're a Virgo.