[AD&D] Fun in Preparations

[xenopulse]

The following is an example of why I initially thought that the group I am currently playing with is Sim oriented (but it turned out that, when push comes to shove during the actual gaming time, it's old-school Gamism).

The GM had this sudden interest in the characters' rations. He first wrote up several pages on food as it's currently in the AD&D 2nd Edition rules. But that wasn't enough; he wanted to figure out more about the food.

So he sat down and figured out what a balanced, preservable meal would be, according to the nourishment needs of an average adult and common medieval foods. Then he gathered the foods: dried fruit, dried and salted meat, and other things. Only he couldn't find the right kind of hard, lasting bread that people in the middle ages would have taken on their journeys. So he went online, found a recipe, and baked a loaf of bread just to add it to the pile. Once he had measured it to match the requirements of carbs, fiber, vitamins, etc., he weighed it.

Yesterday he informed us via email that our characters' rations will, from now on, weigh not one pound, but 1.75 pounds.

Now... this is not your typical part of "actual play." This is stuff he figures out outside of play, but nevertheless for play. It belongs to our gaming experience as much as his preparation of the adventures we get involved in. He also spends hours of time drawing topographical maps, and figured out the purpose of every single building in the main city we play in--and there's a few hundred of them--based on data of typical medieval cities (modified by the presence of magic).

For him, this is part of what makes roleplaying fun. I think that, if we are going to talk about why we roleplay, these kinds of things are just as important as our actual "agenda" during a given play session.

So, should we look at these "individual" ways of enjoying the hobby as separate phenomena from the shared interactive enjoyment? What if two players do this together or this level of exploration actually happens within the game, with everyone doing it together or negotiating it (say in Universalis)? Can we further individual enjoyment with particular design features?

[Mark Woodhouse]

This is totally common, as far as my experience goes. For me, it's situations - I spend plenty of time carefully constructing these nifty little crucibles for games that will never get played, or will get totally changed around and remixed with player input. I enjoy the process of thinking about tension, characters, and situation - the fiction-writing urge. This only becomes problematic when it goes from "look what I made" to "look, dammit, and I demand you work just as hard at what I find cool."

I do wonder, sometimes, if this kind of individual enjoyment is MORE important for a lot of players than the much trickier and less reliable kind that tends to come from play. The rewards of play are in showing off what you did on your own, not in doing something together.

[ScottM]

The same was true for me; I enjoyed a lot of raw creation seperate from sessions.  Mine tended toward intricate maps of my fictional places: political maps over time, temperature zones, material production, migrations and the like.

They never really became a solid part of anyone's play but mine, even when I was GMing.  While I might have a reason for things to happen, I rarely communicated the background clearly enough for anyone to use the information creatively.  Since high school, my planning has tended toward the directly useable bits-- villians and their plans, people the PCs interact with, and other things that have a more direct impact.

[Callan S.]

I think it is play, but such solo play lacks lumpley style agreement. For example, imagine that instead of him working alone, he had been playing with another group. And during their play, they destroyed kingdom X that your group were deeply invested in building up.

Imagine him coming to play and suddenly saying "Well, with Kingdom X destroyed, your all at a bar and...". In that sentence is the implicit referal to an agreement between him and yourself, which just doesn't exist. He made that agreement with someone else. And in solo play, he only made that agreement with himself.

I think as much as the seperation between two seperate groups play can be seen through the agreement divide, solo play is seperate in the same way.

[Vaxalon]

Every game, I think, gives license to the participants to prepare things outside of play, and bring them in without fear of censure.  "Dungeon Masters" have this power in higher degree, surely, but the players do too, even if it's just to pick out aspects of appearance and personality.  There is a kind of tacit agreement to it; the participants agree that certain aspects of the game are under their exclusive control.

Callan, you say that the agreement doesn't exist, but tacit agreements of this sort DO exist.  The conflict comes when one participant has different terms in mind than another, and the boundary gets crossed.

[Storn]

...

They never really became a solid part of anyone's play but mine, even when I was GMing.  While I might have a reason for things to happen, I rarely communicated the background clearly enough for anyone to use the information creatively.  Since high school, my planning has tended toward the directly useable bits-- villians and their plans, people the PCs interact with, and other things that have a more direct impact.

I usually don't do a ton of prep outside of the first episode of a new campaign.  I use a lot of visuals... but that takes very little time.  I don't usually enjoy prep for an episode, although do like the map drawing, the relationship map drawing for the overall campaign.  But coming up with "tonight's adventure" is always a chore.  I prefer a rough outline and wing it, let the players fill in gaps.

Recently, I did do a ton of prep for my most recent evening of gaming and I had a blast.  But the whole tone was to get the info into the Players hands as easily as possible.  So much of my prep was thinking ways of communicating motivations and the background DIRECTLY (as you say) through as many avenues that I could predict.  Or put another way, each clue, each signpost had 2 or 3 different ways the players could recieve the info.  The actual adventure itself was pretty simple... investigate suspect noble family drug use and sorcery practices.

And of course, they came up with their own approach at least twice.  But the prep I had done allowed me to quickly jigger things around and their direction revealed clues directly to them with a minimum dice rolls and GM stalling.  They also bypassed things I had written because their understanding of the situation was so on target, they didn't need those scenes, npcs, extra motivation revelations.

I had so much fun thinking of ways I could make my complex web of motivations be exposed... I think it carried over to the game too.

Was the prep BadWrongFun?  No.  Was the prep impactful on the evening... yeah...absolutely.

So, was the baking of the bread fun to your GM... gee, I hope so.  Did it impact the evening?  Well, at the very least 3/4s of a pound of impact <g>.

I feel that prep is part of gaming.  I feel that joy of prep for some GMs should be treasured at the same time, watching out for how it can trap us GMs from time to time by listening to our own creations and not listening to our players.

[Callan S.]

Hi Vax,

Exclusive control? I think "The GM exclusively controls the story, the players exclusively control their characters" fits under that. So I don't think that particular tacit agreement is possible.

I think there are tacit agreements for players to try and hold their opinions in check while listening to the person designated to give input about X. And an effective reason to try, is for some reward (like the broadening of ones mind to a degree).

[Vaxalon]

No, it's not that broad, Callan.

The things that are under the GM's exclusive control are background color; things like your example distant kingdom.  Things that are under the players exclusive control are things like their thoughts, emotions, etc.

That kind of tacit agreement is not only possible, but common.

[Josh Roby]

Christian, I've noticed a similar phenomenon -- one of my old gaming buddies used to draw the wood grain on the combat maps, and so 'wood grain' has become a byword for 'obsessive GM prep'.  In any case, the way I make sense of this is to say that such extensive prep is certainly play, it's just not roleplay and it is certainly not collaborative play.  Whether or not the product of the GM's pre-roleplay, non-collaborative play has the weight of credibility or authority falls into the realm of social contract, I think.  For some groups, the GM's word is truth and so whatever crazy stuff he comes up with alone is what happens in game.  For other groups, the GM can only create plans, not the real facts of the world, which have to come out through roleplay.

I think the important point here is that, yes, this stuff is fun to do, and yes, this is part of the gaming experience.  This is one reason why games  like Primetime Adventures that remove this phase of the game experience just don't click for my "wood grain" friend -- he likes tinkering with a fictional setting on his own.  That's his preference.  On the other hand, I don't see why this sort of play must be non-collaborative in other games for other people.  We've got a few examples of this already, in the aforementioned PTA and in... damn, that torch game about constructing mythologies that is totally escaping me right now.  Universalis facilitates this sort of play, as well.

Whether the game operates like PTA in that this creation process happens parallel to roleplay (although it's important to note that this is not roleplay itself) or separates it out to a phase before roleplay begins as with the torch game and Universalis, it's more than possible to create credibility mechanics that apply to this play.  Credibility does not only apply to roleplay.  Actually, Dogs is a good example of a game which provides a mechanic (Town Creation) to dispense credibility (or more accurately, authority, since it can be abandoned) to content that the GM comes up with on his own.  Which suggests an interesting question -- can a GM's non-collaborative play ever have credibility, or can it only be weighted with authority so that when he introduces it to the other players he's got a stronger case for getting the content ratified?  Taking it a step forward, what if the GM works with one of the players, and they introduce it to the others?  What if a gaming group adds a new member -- what's the status of all the play that's gone on before, as far as the new guy sees it?  Does he have to grant credibility to the proceeds of their play?

[Callan S.]

No, it's not that broad, Callan.

The things that are under the GM's exclusive control are background color; things like your example distant kingdom.  Things that are under the players exclusive control are things like their thoughts, emotions, etc.

That kind of tacit agreement is not only possible, but common.

I think such agreements exist, but usually because the right circumstances haven't come up to show thier impossibility.
GM "And now you enter the magical kingdom where everyone who enters is happy!"
Player "My character is sad."

[Larry L.]

Christian,

It's solitaire play that happens to link to group roleplay. My thoughts are that is:

• Not actually required to any significant degree for group play.
• Cool if the GM has fun doing it, and everyone enjoys playing with his creation.
• Really not cool if the GM comes to see it as labor and view the other players as unappreciative ingrates.

Are you more interested in discussing the actual worldbuilding "game," or in the relationship that process has to the group game?

I think a game that makes the usually solo worldbuilding stuff collaborative is a neat idea. I believe Lee Short has developed a system for such a thing, based on the Shadows in the Fog system.

[Chris Geisel]

This is a bit of a tangent, but when reading about your bread-baking GM, I was reminded of an acquaintance of mine who paints landscapes. But not just landscapes.

He is obsessed with weather, weather patterns, erosion, climate, geological activity and so on. He creates fictional solar systems with fictional planets at different distances from the sun than Earth, spends hundreds of hours mapping the development of the surface of the planet, the weather systems over thousands of years during specific snapshots of the overall history that he's interested in, picks places on the map that interest him in particular, and then paints landscapes of that imagined spot on a specific fictional day and time in the planet's development.

Then he shows each painting along with the reams and reams of preparation that go into it. He has a small but utterly devoted following, who believe in his planets as much as he does, and enjoy visiting through his landscapes.

It strikes me that this is the sort of thing that your DM is doing. He has a guaranteed audience in your group--since you all appreciate the "wood grain" he's working on. My guess is it doesn't have much effect on your play, except to reinforce the idea that this guy you're hanging with has a beautiful obsession that you all enjoy being a part of.

[Vaxalon]

The immersion of the creator, rather than the immersion of the explorer.