An Ode to Red Barrels

07 Dec, 2025

Trying out a micropost, typed on my phone to the tune of some Jerma stream highlights.

I just beat Half-Life 2 for the first time. What a fucking game. I can’t stop thinking about those red barrels. The second you see those barrels for the first time, a generous handful of Not-Stormtroopers clustered around, you know exactly what you want to do. No, you know what you need to do.

For a while, as an “auteur GM”¹, I wanted to impress my players with my creativity and avoid cliche at all cost. I think this is a common instinct, even if the motive just pure creativity for the sake of it, not my desperate attempt to impress other random dorky college kids.

The problem is that my players rarely found themselves embedded in the system. When I saw how much easier it was for players to play to the world in historical/realistic settings like Call of Cthulhu, I realized a weird world of fantasy subversions had a problem: nobody knew what the hell was going on.

Put cliches in your game, use them boldly and with pride. Limit any twists on your fantasy to one-per-object. Dwarves carved from stone are sick, but then when those dwarves also have a hive-mind and experience time in reverse, you have something too difficult. Take two of those traits out and give them to something else.

Cliches are a shortcut to understanding. These shortcuts help the game run more smoothly, If your players see a red-bearded Scottish-accent dwarf in a tavern, they know some ale will probably get him on your side, and insulting his pride as a warrior will get him spurring into action.

If your red-bearded Scottish-accent dwarf refuses that ale, meekly tells the party he’s not much of a fighter anyway, you’ve implemented a red barrel that doesn’t explode when you shoot it. You can use this as a storytelling technique, a way to make an NPC stand-out and/or drive a point home, but eventually if you refuse to give in to the expected cliches, you’re just yanking the football out from under Charlie Brown’s foot, every session.

This wasn’t really that micro, was it? Damn…