No power for me, thanks

[Mark Woodhouse]

This thread is an attempt to reorganize and elaborate on the proto-idea discussed in 'Creator or Fan?'http://www.indie-rpgs.com/forum/index.php?topic=16088.0

The basic question I am wrestling with is: can players who refuse GM-like tasks co-exist effectively with players who crave them? What techniques are particularly suited for this kind of mixed group?

My experience has been that groups develop System that allows players to exercise creative control in covert ways (hints, social engineering, out-of-band conversations with the GM, Drama Points and the like), in order that they not disrupt the SOD of the players who are not interested in creative control. This seems in my experience to be at best a stopgap solution, since the very covert nature of the player empowerment tends to drive toward assumption clash and overt conflict - essentially, a subset of player input is occuring out of sight of some players and not gaining assent from them, so it's sort of half-in, half-out of the SiS. The resistant players thus end up with a sort of unacknowledged veto over everything, since they can play the "meta-game" card anytime.

I don't want to turn this into "let's rag on the traditional roleplayers" thread - I am particular interested in hearing from players who prefer a large degree of immersion and highly channeled creative control as to how they collaborate with more overt players.

[Nogusielkt]

The basic question I am wrestling with is: can players who refuse GM-like tasks co-exist effectively with players who crave them? What techniques are particularly suited for this kind of mixed group?

I don't see a problem with it.  It may be easier to ask yourself "Why wouldn't players who refuse GM-like tasks and players who crave them co-exist effectively?"  The answer that comes to mind is that they are fundamentally different.  I'm someone who wouldn't want GM-like tasks as a player, and it's likely they someone who would has different tastes than my own.  If the game has any sort of direction, I wager it would leave one of us happy, but the other wanting.  As far as techniques that would be suited for a group split like this... well, I'd think that not assigning tasks to the guy who doesn't want them would be a nice start.  Dumping his tasks on someone else probably won't result in something positive either.  However, I do believe that such a group could co-exist and still have as much fun as any other group.  They just have to be prepared for it.  I play with an online group right now where two of the players have fun talking to each other and telling other people what to do in combat.  It might ruin my fun if they expected me to participate, but I toss in a "..." every once in a while to let them know I'm listening, but don't feel it's important.  Whether their fun is lowered or not is up in the air.  I suspect it is, but I also deem it selfish for you to expect other people to play how you want them to play.

[John Kim]

The basic question I am wrestling with is: can players who refuse GM-like tasks co-exist effectively with players who crave them? What techniques are particularly suited for this kind of mixed group?   

Hmm.  As far as I've seen, immersive players are still fairly open to there being a GM figure or GM-like organizer.  So there is at least the case of one or two players craving GM-like tasks working well with a GM.  On the other hand, from my larp experience, I found that there was in some cases resentment towards players who would go behind the scenes to get special perks out of the organizers. 

So I think that a solution is that the meta-game involvement has to be balanced by less say in non-meta-game matters.  The Buffy the Vampire Slayer RPG has an example of this -- where Hero characters have greater in-game power, while White Hat characters have less in-game power but more metagame power in the form of Drama Points.  I think the difference would have to be even more marked for the case where some PCs had no metagame power -- i.e. they would have to be very powerful in-game figures. 

[Bill Cook]

I'm more of an outie, myself. But a lot of my gamer friends are inies. So I guess that's the opposite crowd/direction that Mark is looking for. For my group, we end up finding an average in common. I'm more likely to say, "my guy makes a cordial response which brings great favor," and most other members would say, "'I'm greatly pleased by your hospitality and eagerly await the evening's festivities.' 'Ah, count, you do me great honor. Will you accompany me to the garden?'" and blah, blah, blah .. As the session progresses, though, I will speak a bit more in first person, with some measure of affectation, mixed in with my usual "he taps his gun in its holster and shakes his head." And they tend to paint their character a bit more rather than be him, in every instance.

We shift because we're stealing each others' spells. By acting him out a bit, my guy seems more real. By channeling unrealized intent upon a marker, they get to stamp an abstract without meeting requirements of expression or nuanced understanding.

To me, this is a style issue, separate of central vs. distributed GM duties. I think there's some conflation of "above the surface" control of characters and sharing duties of authorship.

[beingfrank]

I had trouble understanding you at first, until I worked out that SOD = suspension of disbelief.

Why do you feel rejection of GM-like tasks goes hand in hand with desire to protect suspension of disbelief?  Or that desire for creative control necessarily threatens that?

That's the bit I don't follow.

Anyway, of my own experiences now.  I play in a group that values a fair degree of immersion which also does a number of things that some might feel threaten suspension of disbelief.  Some people chose to maximise their immersion by refusing to know anything that their character wouldn't.  Is that the sort of suspension of disbelief that you're talking about?  We don't like that approach at all.  We like all players in the group to be present at the table and paying attention even if their characters are not in a scene.  People who aren't in a scene will wait until a scene is over before taking a toilet break and play will stop until they get back, even if they're not in the next scene either.  That's what we consider polite in the group.  I can think of some players who'd find it quite upsetting to be asked to sit and listen to plotting by another character that their character knows nothing about.  We consider failing to do so rude in our social contract.

We tend to play discrete scenes where in character dialogue is the default, interspersed with OOC questions and comments only where necessary.  There's agreement that we won't interrupt these too much, but we also have players suggesting things that might happen during breaks between these discrete scenes.  So there's avenue for creative imput in the intervals, but there's also clear times when it would not be appropriate and would lessen people's fun.  That's a simple technique works well for us.

Other than that I think it ultimately comes down to the two basic rules of roleplaying.  Number One: Know what you will and won't put up with and stick to it.  Number Two: Don't be a dickhead.  I have a feel for what level of immersion I comfortable playing with (rather than doing) and what level of overt meta control I'm happy with.  For example, I simply won't play with people who only want to know what their character knows and nothing more.  I've better things to do that waste both of our time.  And I keep in mind the comfort ranges of those I choose to play with and don't deliberately push into areas I know they dislike.  Same as matching up any other preference in roleplaying.

[MR. Analytical]

I note interestingly that the goalposts have slightly shifted.

Morrow's point, and Mark's point initially was that there's a difference between the people who want immersion and the people who like to see the artifice in the media they partake of.  Through the magic of the Forge this seems to have transformed into the different idea of people who enjoy authorial responsibility as players and people who sternly refuse it and argue that it disrupts their immersion.

The rephrasing of the issue is, to my eyes, unfortunate.

Firstly, because the issue of authorial responsibility is well trodden ground here as a source of intra-group conflict.
Secondly,it's not the same issue as a split between people who enjoy artifice and those who refuse to consider it (as BeingFrank correctly suggested).


The talk of postmodern divides in the other thread was, I think, along the right lines.  This is a purely aesthetic judgement about what level you tend to enjoy things on. It's a question of education and personality type.

As for the issue of do the two sets of preferences cancel each other out... well surely this is an entirely empirical question rather than an issue that can be resolved by analysis?

[Mark Woodhouse]

I apologize for my less than clear statement of the issue. Jonathan (Mr Analytical) is right to point out that I have moved the goalposts from the original thread - while the whole postmodern-divide angle is interesting, as the conversation on this topic has evolved here and in my RPGnet thread, what I'm much more interested in is the Actual-Play-relevant issue of "how do players exercise authorial control without letting themselves or others know they're doing it?"

To restate in Forge terms, bunches of people claim to engage in functional Ouija-Board play. How are they doing it? _Why_ are they doing it - is there some ideological or emotional affirmation they get from it? Maybe this is a bad question to be asking, but I become increasingly convinced that some of these players who aggressively reject the whole "Forge Way" of playing on purpose are doing it for some good reason. The 'creator/fan' divide struck me as a possible reason.

[Jack Aidley]

To restate in Forge terms, bunches of people claim to engage in functional Ouija-Board play. How are they doing it? _Why_ are they doing it - is there some ideological or emotional affirmation they get from it? Maybe this is a bad question to be asking, but I become increasingly convinced that some of these players who aggressively reject the whole "Forge Way" of playing on purpose are doing it for some good reason. The 'creator/fan' divide struck me as a possible reason.

I don't think the creator/fan thing is anywhere near Ouija-Board play. I think the style of play put forth by Morrow is straight forward Simulationism.

[Bill Cook]

I think Jonathon was saying that posters to Mark's thread shifted it. After rereading, I can see how the center has widened. Accepting Mark's restated focus, it might be worth sharing some actual play experience with players who are picky about their SOD.

In my main group's WoD campaign, the SG (Luke) met with each of us individually to get an idea of what kind of character we wanted to play. I was pretty open with the group about my concept (i.e. a blind blues musician). Everyone else kept theirs hidden. We didn't talk about what we'd be doing, who each other was or what they were on about. Luke just started us in different places. One character was on the road, walking. He was passed by another, driving to work. She arrived at the bar, where my character was rehearsing a set with his rhythm section. When the manager (another PC) walked by, the arriving bartender let him know about a phone message received late last night. At the bar, a stranger in town asked for some water.

So that was all we knew to begin with. Some of the players had worked out investing material along with their concept during their interview with the SG. (i.e. Jason wanted to track down a serial killer, Cory wanted to connect with local organized crime, Nick wanted to uncover the disappearance of his martial arts buddy.) Others of us hadn't set anything up, either because we didn't have anything or didn't understand that we were supposed to. As play progressed, the PC-to-NPC interactions began to draw a picture. In fact, it's only from my recollections of those patterns that I'm able to provide the above details, which are, in truth, speculation.

At least two players were extremely secretive about their character sheets, specifically, with regard to their abilities. Jason's character had some kind of quirk or weakness that got role-played, in that he would wake up feeling sick, or other times, he would black out. Why? I never figured it out. At one point, I glanced over at Jason's sheet and read his clan and said, "A [whatever]! It says here that those are enemies of the [other thingies]." He was quite upset and pulled his sheet out of plain sight.

The SG had planned for us to all be turned. Well, I think, like, only Cory and Jason knew about it. Nick was up for anything. Me and Libby really fought it, though. We were, like, what the hell? No, I don't want to be a vampire! But the SG kept erasing the doors off the walls and writing in more guys to hold us down. We were going to be turned, and that was that.

There were a number of NPC's related to Cory's character. So many, I can't remember them all. But it was like a David Lynch movie; I couldn't get a handle on any of them. One was Asian, for sure. I figured that out by the voice the SG used. How they related? Which were Kindred? What they wanted from Cory's character? Did it matter if they knew about each other's dealings with Cory's character? Why did a big shootout happen that closed down the bar for a week and landed Cory's character in jail? I have no idea.

There was this highly relevant three-story building in a run-down part of town that we stumbled onto, after we'd been turned. We got into a number of shenanigans there. The varied denizens treated us rather differently. Me, they excused with courtesy. (At the time, I had no idea why, but as I reflect on it, it was probably because my sire was a member.) Nick and Libby's PC's, they tried to imprison and kill. Actually, the SG disclosed between action segments that it was a den of diablerists. And, come to think of it, this is where a lot of SIS facts were garnered; an outside player would express bafflement as the SG and one other player reveled in some secret until, unable to contain it, one or the other would give some brief context.

During the last session, we had a pickup player, a friend of the group, named John. From his first few scenes, it become clear that he was a slayer. And when he showed up at my apartment, we all learned who his target was. What I had to find out in one of those SG confessions is that he'd been hired by my sister. Cory wanted to have a private conference about dispatching this guy. And I wanted to just talk about it right there in front of him. This really frustrated Cory. Maybe we should have passed notes. I guess that would have been more appropriate to the play style.

Just as in Jason's Traveller campaign, I found that the key to enjoying this kind of play is to intersect the GM's prepared material. Most .. whatever you call this style .. kind of players don't really care if you give up the goods on your guy. They just don't want you nosing into their domain and drawing back the curtains.

[greyorm]

players who aggressively reject the whole "Forge Way" of playing on purpose...

First, I want to note this isn't just "the Forge way", it's also "the Scandinavian LARPist way", and to go outside of RPGs for a second, "the poker shark/card shark" way, too (anyone who wants to learn how to play better cards and learns how card games work). EDIT: Hrm, so are we talking about rejecting "playing with a goal" or rejecting "playing with an understanding" -- two different things. The former can interfere with "just playing" because it makes play about more than play, while the latter does not.

If we are talking about understanding, I have to shift back to my original statement about fear of the unknown being the factor, the fear of the black curtain and belief that purposely doing or understanding anything results in no enjoyment. It's a cultural thing that has nothing to do with gaming. But is that, however, the kind of split we are discussing here, or is it something else? (Because, I have to admit, it seems all over the place so far...from "secret character goals" to "completely immersive play style" to "having control of the SiS" to "playing a CA purposefully")

[Mark Woodhouse]

Raven, let me see if I can focus it a bit for you. I think part of what is going on is that the player wants to experience their exploration very strongly, and they know exactly what content belongs in it, but they don't know or care about the structural, artificial elements of that content. This desired content can take a lot of forms - secret character goals, specific set-piece images and action sequences, dialogue, some "shtick" that the character should perform. But the player is completely unaware of - and doesn't WANT to be aware of - how the opportunities and narrative space for those elements might be created. They just want to DO it. They need the content they're after to "just happen".

Bill's AP is packed with this stuff - the GM clearly is privy to all kinds of side-channel info, and players are clearly using each other's characters as props for their individual stories, but it's all SECRET. Bill's game was clearly not too functional from his lights, but I suspect that at least some of the other players would have reported having a great time. What's going on there?

I would have thunk that this would just never happen - that this would always and everywhere result in frustrated, bored, restless players who can't get what they want. However, I keep hearing Actual Play accounts from people who say it is happening. I think that suggestions of some kind of false consciousness are not all that helpful - if that really is what is happening, then it suggests the question of "how do they maintain it?"

My hypothesis is that there exists some kind of battery of covert power-exercising techniques and sideband communications that serves to accomplish a synchronization of content. Not Force - or if it is Force, it's a kind of Force that players use too.

Am I just covering old ground that I've missed or misinterpreted somewhere?

[John Kim]

   I think part of what is going on is that the player wants to experience their exploration very strongly, and they know exactly what content belongs in it, but they don't know or care about the structural, artificial elements of that content. This desired content can take a lot of forms - secret character goals, specific set-piece images and action sequences, dialogue, some "shtick" that the character should perform. But the player is completely unaware of - and doesn't WANT to be aware of - how the opportunities and narrative space for those elements might be created. They just want to DO it. They need the content they're after to "just happen".   

Bill's AP is packed with this stuff - the GM clearly is privy to all kinds of side-channel info, and players are clearly using each other's characters as props for their individual stories, but it's all SECRET.  Bill's game was clearly not too functional from his lights, but I suspect that at least some of the other players would have reported having a great time.  What's going on there? 

I had brief but similar World-of-Darkness experience to Bill's, playing mostly live-action games.  My interpretation is that there is competition among the players.  Although they looked down on rules-lawyering, they were very concerned with outmaneuvering each other and getting legs up in political and other arenas.  I don't think these players are rejecting understanding of artifice.  Rather, as they gain understanding they will want to use it to their own advantage (unless perhaps that is seen as unfair or out of bounds). 

So I think there are several classes of players which are being confused here, which I might label "Casual Players", "Competitive Intrigue Players", and "Immersive Players".  It may be that there are players who overlap (i.e. fitting two or even all three categories), but I've seen plenty of players who are solely in one category for all three. 

Casual Players are players who rejects understanding of what is going on and want imaginative content to "just happen".  A casual player is interested in RPGs as a diversion but doesn't want to spend a lot of time on it.  You'll see a similar phenomenon in most hobbies -- people who will jump in to try it but don't want it to be a major investment.  You'll also see similar mixed reactions among dedicated hobbyists. 

Competitive Intrigue Players see information as the commodity for competition.  So they're going to keep information a secret, and expect play to be about maneuvering to get more information. 

Immersive Players are those who prefer to act through character.  This includes a wide range of styles, really.  Some prefer to keep keep out-of-character information a secret -- which potentially benefits getting into character.  Conversely, some prefer such information open to minimize assumption clash.  Notably, the Turku school -- a notorious immersive manifesto -- advocated complete lack of secrecy.  All notes and details should be open to all players. 

[Callan S.]

This seems in my experience to be at best a stopgap solution, since the very covert nature of the player empowerment tends to drive toward assumption clash and overt conflict - essentially, a subset of player input is occuring out of sight of some players and not gaining assent from them, so it's sort of half-in, half-out of the SiS.

I'd argue with the original idea of 'no power for me' that SOD players are supposed to want. If you have a big shiny control panel full of buttons and someone refuses to press any of them, you might assume they don't want any power. But if they don't want anyone else to press buttons, then they do want full control of the panel. If 'no power for me because I don't like it the buttons being pressed...repeat, I don't like the buttons being pressed!' isn't exerting creative control, I don't know what is.

While to give credibility to another player who is pushing a button, it's effectively the same as if they pushed it themselves (group agreement spreads the responsiblity of it). Sort of leaves the situation in a binary SOD or creative control situation, with no real grey area between to explore.

[ScottM]

The basic question I am wrestling with is: can players who refuse GM-like tasks co-exist effectively with players who crave them? What techniques are particularly suited for this kind of mixed group?

I think that the two groups can co-exist.  As John Kim pointed out above, Immersive players are typically OK with GM figures and GM Engineers.  When our group first started playing D&D 3E, Jim was the GM-- but he didn't have a very solid handle on the rules.  I wound up doing a lot of the rules checking and would suggest strategies for the bad-guys (based on their powers) mid-session.  This was acceptable, even to Trish (who's both immersive and rules averse), since it freed the GM to focus more on the stories and plots that excited us.

As far as techniques... there I'm a little shorter.  I suppose having the GM listen to casual players and treat their musings equal to other players' overt author or director stance might work for a while, though I could see that being disturbing to a truly immersive player when they realize what's going on.  In my current group, there's debate about what out of character/rulebook knowledge we should integrate, and there's tension between our immersives and other players.  Most of that tension is due to the unclear standard that we're aiming for-- if it was clear what information was "common" or what information was acceptable for characters to possess, there'd be less debate about it.

I suspect clarity (information like this is OK to use; this form of director stance is OK when you burn X resource) and spotlight are the key issues.  If the non-immersives make the game more focussed on themselves, then the GM has to compensate with plotlines (or bangs, etc.) for the immersives.

At least, that's my current muddled thought.
Scott