A limitless GM?

[Sir Gawain]

Some weeks ago I was trying to understand why my usual gaming group (i.e. my friends and I) wasn't able to enjoy RPGs anymore; after deciding to experiment a bit with a system of my own, I came to the conclusion that the key wasn't the game nor the setting nor anything else. The key is the GM.
Though this could look as rather trivial, it actually isn't.
When you strip your favourite game of everything except the bare bones, you get the following:
1 - a set of rules, or game mechanics
2 - a story
3 - the players, who are the link between 1 and 2
4 - the GM
The purpose of a RPG is the story (1), which is created for the players (3). And the rules? The rules are just the mean to let the players interact (I know it's an understatement) with the story, and so modify, spoil or accomplish it.
Trying to have my players concentrate on their characters (and so on the story) only, I didn't even give them their character sheets; I just told them what their characters knew, a general description of their knowledges and skill and that's all. Not wanting to give them nasty surprises, I asked beforehand what kind of character in a given setting they would have liked to play, and so the first session began.
I was the only one to know the rules (it was a system of my own), so I could sacrifice dice results and the rules themselves at will for the story's sake, trying to remain faithful to the original concept and at the same time letting the players change the events with their decisions.
It was very illuminating. I discovered that, taking the thing to its extremes, the rules were almost pointless.
Now the question is: are the rules just a cage? Does it make sense to simply ignore them (but not letting the players know it)? I'm not talking about a few dice rolls: I mean the whole rules.
I don't think fairness to the players is a point. A GM is fair when he gives his players the right chances to enjoy themselves and to accomplish their goals; if he manages to do all this without rules, is that a sensible thing?
Well, that was a long rant, but the matter has (for me, anyway) just started rolling. Please, let me know what you think about it!

Sir Gawain

[xenopulse]

It depends on (surprise!) what you want out of the game. Here's the part of your post that's telling:

The purpose of a RPG is the story (1), which is created for the players (3). And the rules? The rules are just the mean to let the players interact (I know it's an understatement) with the story, and so modify, spoil or accomplish it.

For you, the purpose of playing--what makes it fun for you and your players, I assume--is the creation of the story. You can achieve this goal with very few rules. In fact, I've been playing online via chat for over 8 years, both in GM-less and GM-driven games. As long as all players agree that what they want is to play their characters and have fun creating the story, it can work wonderfully. Of course, in that environment, players have absolute control over their characters to the point that it's them, not the GM, who decides when they get hurt or even die.

A system can get in the way of this story and character driven enjoyment, but certain systems can help you tell the story or bring some fresh aspects into it. Sure, it also depends on the GM, but the players as well. They need to be on the same path toward enjoyment of the game, or the group becomes incoherent and frustrated.

As to your questions, it can certainly make sense to ignore the rules, especially if they are in the way of your enjoyment of the game. When I GM, I frequently disregard rules and die rolls if it makes for a better story and more fun. But in my PnP group, players enjoy the game because of the Fortune and danger aspects of the game. They wouldn't be having fun if their characters were never in risk of death or failure.

Should you ignore the rules without your players knowing? Sure, if they have more fun not knowing and you have more fun creating a good story. It's not the perfect way to go, but most of us have a short supply of players from which to create a perfect group.

[Bankuei]

Hi SG,

How about instead of just placing it all upon the GM, we look at the entire group interaction between everyone?  

Having a preplanned story, or a single person with the invested right to determine "what happens" is just one way of playing, and therefore, the problem may or may not be the GM alone, but whether the group enjoys:

-Having limited input into the events in play
-Having a single person with signficantly more power than the others as far as input

Granted, if this is what the group enjoys, and is the main feature of what they enjoy about play, then, no particular formal rules are necessary other than, "This person here is the GM, they have the right to narrate all outcomes, and verify, modify, or deny your input."

I think if you choose to play in any other fashion than the one I just mentioned, then the rules become very, very important.  I would highly recommend you trying a game of the Pool, or Inspectres if you want to see what I mean.  In both games, the rules are not a "cage" but a tool to help push the sort of gameplay they're about.

Chris

[CplFerro]

Dear Sir Gawain,

I'd amend, that the purpose of RPGs is the generation of memories of emotion--not just stories but "war stories," to be fondly recalled, "Remember that time when...?".  Those are the best games, are they not?

Now, what are the rules for?  Ultimately everything is implicitly decided in the game on principle.  The rules merely help fill in gaps in imagination; like the notes of a symphony that suggest the inaudible musical idea.  They aid suspension of disbelief by giving the sense of the world as being rational, physical, rather than everything being decided by the whim of the GM.  But this is not an insurmountable problem, so we can easily imagine a GM not needing any rules besides those of language itself, or using them very loosely, like the metaphors they are.

Sincerely,



Cpl Ferro

[Jason E Leigh]

Sir Gawain:

Welcome to the Forge.

In fact, when it's just you as the GM with sole knowledge of the rules/system and whether or not you are even using the rules as designed - you're still playing by a set of rules, by a system.

It's just that you'd be replacing formal, designed mechanics with social dynamic mechanics (i.e. spoken and unspoken social rules that exist within and between the real people sitting round the table).

Try this as an expiriment - clue one of your players into your discovery - ask them to design their own game - and run it in the same mode you did.

Do you end up with the same results?  I'd be curious do know if you decide to try this experiment.

"Oh, it's you...
deadpanbob"

[John Kim]

Now the question is: are the rules just a cage? Does it make sense to simply ignore them (but not letting the players know it)? I'm not talking about a few dice rolls: I mean the whole rules.
I don't think fairness to the players is a point. A GM is fair when he gives his players the right chances to enjoy themselves and to accomplish their goals; if he manages to do all this without rules, is that a sensible thing?

My short answers:  No, the rules are not necessarily just a cage.  However, yes, it does make sense to simply ignore them in some cases.  Many people have had very rewarding and successful experience playing systemlessly.  It's not the one true way, but for some people, it works well.  

On the other hand, it could be that you would enjoy playing with the rules as written from more "New Wave" games like The Pool or such.  I would point to my old FAQ on diceless roleplaying from rec.games.frp.advocacy (cf. my http://www.darkshire.net/~jhkim/rpg/theory/rgfa/">rgfa information page).

[Rob Carriere]

Sir Gawain,
Apart from the excellent advice wrt rulesets to try, you could also try really playing without rules for a bit. In other words, do not have some ruleset in the back of your mind to use or ignore as you see fit, but really make all the decisions for yourself.

The thing to do is watch the reactions (your own and the character-players') to the decision-making process. The places where negative feelings crop up (irritation, uncertainty, etc), where play goes adrift (long decision times or avoidance of decisions) or where you have trouble communicating the precise content of the SIS are exactly the places where a rule system could help you.

When I did this exercise a couple of years back, I learned a lot about my preferences in gaming and game systems.

SR
--

[Callan S.]

It was very illuminating. I discovered that, taking the thing to its extremes, the rules were almost pointless.
Now the question is: are the rules just a cage?

I think your percieving synecdoche, that if the rules your using don't serve you, then no rules will serve you.

I think you just found the rules you were using were poor. If they didn't do what you wanted as a group (even though they were your creation), then they weren't the rules for your group.

The other things is that if you don't respect the limmitations that rules imply, then you wont benefit from them. Creativity is focused by limmitations, not stunted by them. You have to want focus if your actually going to use rules, and to use rules you need to follow them rather than how you imagined things would turn out...that's part of the limmitation. If you don't want focus, rules aren't pointless, they are just pointless for you.

Note: To be honest, as another poster noted, you are using a System, which has rules...they're just not written down and they are shared amongst the players (not just in one person).

However, I find one of the focus limmitations rules can have is when they are written down. Thus, they are not easily forgotten or stepped around.

And welcome to the forge, hope to see your next post soon.

[Sir Gawain]

Well...just to start, thanks to everybody for the interesting replies to my post.
To be honest, I know well enough that even the principle "no rules" is in fact another rule, and maybe I've not been very precise in my first writing. The actual idea of "no rules" came to me as a sort of temptation when I took in my hands the whole players-setting connection, which is usually accomplished through the rules.
I had noticed that my "best" player (not the most successful, rather the most convincing one) had never read a single rules handbook (in more than 13 years of actual playing!), when my more technical players couldn't avoid to see the story and the setting through the mechanics of the game, and in the end couln't actually enjoy it anymore.
In the very beginning, when I was a young but fairly experienced GM and my players had never played RPGs before, the "no rules" matter was just a consequence of their ignorance of the rules of the game we played; I was telling them what they needed and so colud direct (and control, it's true) more strictly the story and the game.
Later (and until a few months ago) I become a kind of prisoner of the rules: my players (except one) came to know them fairly well, and I couldn't break from them without being accused of playing unfairly. I had to know all the rules by heart, and this meant that I wasn't able any longer to create a story without measuring it in game mechanics.
I tried to play a kind of patchwork game, mixing the basic rules of different systems without revealing them to my players, in order to have them concentrate on the story issue rather than on the technical upbringing of their characters, and eventually decided to have a go with my own set of rules that I could bend and ignore at will (hence came the "no rules" issue).
But if my first goal was just a jolly good RPG session, a question followed: what was the point of playing after all? Well, no worry: I'm not going to get philosophical now: everybody has asked himself why does he play, and the answer sholud be different for each one. In the end I realized that I (and some of my players) were playing to be part of a epic tale or something like that; and knowing this, I understood that the main point was just the story. So I could ignore the rules for the story sake, even if I have still to understand the limit I can push the thing to. To be honest, I not so eager: I think I'll learn with experience.
Of course, this kind of playing can fit me but wouldn't fit everybody else, and I'm curious about your thoughts and experiences.

Sir Gawain

[M. J. Young]

I think it's been said in this thread already: you're using the wrong rules. You're trying to polish glass with a sledge hammer, or something like that. You've got the wrong tool for the job.

Try games that are designed to create stories--Sorcerer, Legends of Alyria, and others already mentioned. These have rules sets that are built to create stories rather than to resolve actions.

There is absolutely no reason why you cannot use the rules as writ, if they're designed to do what you want to do. You've attempted to design rules that do what you want, but your entire design process seems to have been built around creating a rules set that you can ignore because you're the only one who would know that you were ignoring it. That's not really so unusual--you've undoubtedly modeled your rules on others with which you're familiar, which means you're trying to get them to do what those other rules sets do, but in a different way. Probably the problem is that you don't want rules that do what those rules sets do. You're trying to do something completely different, so you need rules that determine something completely different.

For example, Multiverser uses something called a General Effects Roll pretty extensively. It uses a lot of traditional resolution mechanics, too; but when something occurs for which the referee really doesn't know what should happen, he rolls 3d10 for a scale that runs from something far beyond anything the player character might have hoped to something far beyond what he might have feared. It becomes guidance for the events of the story, not for the resolution of tasks within the story. I would bet that you're trying to resolve tasks with your mechanics when you really need a system that resolves events and directions, not tasks. You're also probably using something that says pass/fail instead of something that says simple/complicated. An example of this is in one game you roll the dice to see whether you kill the target; in another game, if you've decided to kill the target, that's a foregone conclusion--you roll the dice to see if you get away with it clean or attract attention to yourself in the process.

Take a look at some of these narrativist games. I think you're trying to create stories with mechanics that are designed to create challenges, and it doesn't work terribly well without a lot of work ignoring the mechanics.

I hope this helps.

--M. J. Young

[Sir Gawain]

Thanks for your help, M.J.Young: it is very interesting. I'm afraid here in Italy RPG have not a lot of fans anymore, so it's rather difficult to find new material and new ideas (like Sorcerer or Legends of Alyria), and this is why I tried on my own.
Talking about the difference in the systems you mentioned (pass/fail vs. simple/complicated) I was wondering: doesn't the automatic success of an action in the second set rob the game of a certain thrill? I see the good in choosing a simple/complicated system for my gaming problems, and I would like to know something more about it. Maybe you can help me again?
Thanks a lot!

Sir Gawain

[Nicolas Crost]

Hi SG,

I would advise you of the following:
1. Read around a bit in this forum. It is a great place for new ideas concerning roleplaying. I would especially advise reading up on Bangs and Relationship Maps in the Adept Press Forum (Sorcerer).
2. Download some of the really good free games out there. The Pool and FATE come to  mind. Read them and perhaps even play them.
3. Order some of the excellent Indie RPGs out there. all you need ist a credit card or a PayPal account (should be available in Italy, I know it is in Germany). Order Sorcerer (and Sorcerer & Sword etc.), My Life with Master, Dogs in the Vineyard. MLwM and DitV are available as PDF books for download, Sorcerer is only available as a hardcopy, but you should be able to get it within about two weeks time.

I can only tell you that I did all that and that it changed the way I see roleplaying.

Nicolas

[M. J. Young]

Talking about the difference in the systems you mentioned (pass/fail vs. simple/complicated) I was wondering: doesn't the automatic success of an action in the second set rob the game of a certain thrill? I see the good in choosing a simple/complicated system for my gaming problems, and I would like to know something more about it.

First, I'm glad I could help.

Does the automatic success of an action rob the game of a certain thrill? That depends entirely on what kind of thrill you want from the game. From a different point of view, the possibility of failure might rob the game of a certain kind of thrill--the story is ruined, because (for example) the thief failed to pick the lock.

We talk a lot around here about what we call "Creative Agenda". The best way I can explain what that means in a very few words is to say that this is about the kind of fun players want when they role play. Some players like to beat the odds, overcome the challenges, solve the puzzles, and otherwise have that thrill of being good at this. We term that kind of play "gamist", and indeed in that kind of play outcomes are important precisely because there is a thrill in succeeding where you might have failed. In contrast, narrativist play revolves around telling stories that deal with issues--we often call them moral issues, but that confuses some people, as these include such matters as love and betrayal, loyalty and treachery, and other ideas that are very personal. In such play, it doesn't usually matter whether the assassin succeeds in killing the victim. What matters is that he chose to kill the victim, and now that he has (successfully) done it, these are the consequences that arise from that. Since in such play there's no "kewl, you killed him" factor, that is, no social reward for having succeeded at what is automatic, there's no kick for "success"--but no one is looking for that particular kind of fun, they're looking for the kind of fun that looks at how the story develops from here, the way you would enjoy a great book or play. If you look at Shakespeare's MacBeth, we don't say, "Wow, MacBeth managed to kill the king, what a lucky shot" or "what a great plan", because we know that it was pretty much set that MacBeth was going to succeed in killing the king when he attempted it. What we're watching, really, is the way his choices impact the outcome of his life, as he trusts in charms whose meanings he does not grasp and sees everything he has built torn down by those who quite rightly do not trust him to be king. (Simulationist play is different yet again, but this isn't an essay on the three agenda.)

So the question really is, what makes the game fun, and how do you get that from the rules? If you're getting most of your fun from "winning", then you want rules that let you win if you play well and cause you to lose if you don't--so that you get a genuine kick from success when you might have failed. If your fun comes from the kinds of stories you build and the issues you explore, then you need a different kind of rules, an approach that does not allow failure to interfere with story but rather lets the mechanics create new complications or resolve old ones.

I hope that helps.

--M. J. Young

[Sir Gawain]

Following your advices I downloaded and read The Pool and Fate, and found them intriguing. Maybe The Pool is a bit too abstract (I'm not a pure gamist, but I enjoy some challenging fight here and there) for my goals, but just reading has provided to be extremely helpful.
I hope I can soon try something new with my players.

Thanks again!

Sir Gawain[/quote]