The Player Empowerment Era

Over the past decade, a huge shift has occurred, in both the NBA and among Tabletop Role Playing games. A shift to empowering the player more than ever.

In the NBA, historically, the league held most of the cards. The players got their chunk of Basketball Related Income to be distributed by the teams as salaries and contracts, but for the longest time, player movement was sluggish. Players would move teams, and even some big names, but it was often through trades. They’d then sign new contracts or extend with the current team, and then probably get traded again.

The mostly likely start of the Player Empowerment Era of the NBA came in July of 2010: The Decision. LeBron James, already seven years deep into a prodigious career, had decided to sign with the Miami Heat, alongside current Heat player, Dwayne Wade, and now-former Toronto Raptor, Chris Bosh. It was a huge move from a superstar to actually reach free agency and bend a team’s fortune around him, like a prism reflecting light.

Since then, we’ve had blockbuster moves of Superstars teaming up, either through free agent signings, exerting pressure on the team to trade them, and some players giving ultimatums about signing other specific players to gain their services. Coaches have been fired because of star players, others hired, despite them not fitting the team. James Harden either came into his last season as a Houston Rocket overweight and out of shape, tanking the team’s chances of winning with every minute on the court, or he was doing the same in a fat suit, as he looked fitter as soon as he got to Brooklyn in a trade.

The players took their power, and it shaped the league.

2010 is also the year of a landmark game release in the tabletop RPG space: Apocalypse World.

Surrounding it in the marketplace was the releases of 4th Edition of Dungeons and Dragons and it’s Essentials soft relaunch (2008/2010), the launch of Pathfinder (2009), Shadowrun’s 20th Anniversary and Fifth Editions (2009/2013), World of Darkness 20th Anniversary (2011), and even Star Wars RPG (2012). Apocalypse World though, seemed to have captured the imagination of the space and it feels like it’s affected the indie space pretty broadly since then, with several games being either modifications of the system, or ones that just use the same “Powered by the Apocalypse” engine it established.

A pretty defining feature of Apocalypse World and games inspired by it is how much control they give the players.

GMs do not roll in these games, typically. The GM’s role is pushed a further back than you’d expect in a Dungeons and Dragons or Shadowrun game. The role of the GM is also demystified and simplified to follow more fiction-forward adjudication. Less restrictions. Your class is a collection of tropes and moves that only get invoked when narratively appropriate, not a buffet list of abilities that everything slots into. You don’t deal with Hit Points as much, but Harm inflicted by the scenario that can vary from player to player. Sure it may inflict a penalty, but Death Spiral isn’t as lethal. You improve your skills through failure, or using skills, or taking desperate action, or any number of things that aren’t Find a Thing or Kill a Thing. Hell, some games will give a player XP or Benefits if they welcome trouble onto themselves.

This all leads to a set of games where the players feel like they have more control over things. They have more levers accessible to them. Not levers of builds or abilities or skills or spells, but narrative levers that control how any given session plays out. And this feels like it’s fed back slowly into the mainstream. D&D in fifth edition did away with a lot of bonuses, and brought Advantage with it, a feature used in those Powered By the Apocalypse games. Inspiration was a sort of stashable Token that could be used for Advantage. Shadowrun… went the other direction…

It’s fascinating looking at the parallels between the 90s-era “The GM was out to kill you and that’s how we liked it” and the “NBA games were better when you were allowed to push on each other and games finished 77-72” from the same time period. Most people now look at both types of people with the same mix of frustration and pity. Frustration because they’re more concerned with shitting on the present through the lens of their most formative years, and pity because they’re stuck with an era that left them behind.

At least with TTRPGs, you can still play 1st edition DnD or any of the OSR games inspired by that mentality. The NBA fan is stuck without recourse besides watching old highlights, or some college basketball teams.