The Road to Narrativism...

[greyorm]

I've lately grown disenchanted with my 3E game.  Some thought on the issue leaves me with the impression this dissatisfaction arises from not knowing what the players want and thus not providing incentive to get them to their goals...in short, a lack of inspiring interaction.

Then a thought arose the other night, after a particularly slow and frustrating session, one I wasn't certain I wanted to GM in the first place because of personal issues leaking through from the week's events, yet I didn't feel like giving up my gaming night and relaxation time, either -- I still wanted to game.
The thought: What if instead of running the game every week, we switch every week?  That is, rotate through every player, letting each be the GM on a different week.

Not co-GMing, not sharing info on villians and plots and behind-the-scenes action between sessions, but mastering a single session and letting the next person run with it.

This is rather off-the-beaten track, since most co-GM games advise a high degree of communication and cooperation between the sharing GMs.  I'm not.  In fact, I'm advocating none at all.

I think that, given the freedom to be the director, not only will they become more comfortable with being directive as players, since they'll have a direct hand in the game world and its development, but they will also develop plots and situations important to their own interests.

I know the immediate reaction of many GMs would be "But it would lack cohesion!" or "It won't fit together realistically!" (because I've heard this argument before in regards to less serious forms of co-directorship).
This isn't true...this typifies the traditional style of thinking in adventure/campaign design in RPGs...that is, the GM invents a story/plot/situation and runs the players through it, revealing the crunchy bits to them as they progress in mystery-novel fashion.

For the characters, I'd originally envisioned some neutral, non-ownership method of creation.  That is, most games have it so that one specific character is "your guy" to do with what you will.  That won't work for this style of play, since the group would be minus a different character every session -- and to tell the truth, I've always hated GM PCs, along with the "silent PC" syndrome (SPCS) that occurs when a player is missing during a session.  So I see some amount of character trading going on, as the current GM and former GM swap players each session.

Not sure how that would work, and I'm not sure if I want to strip that much tradition out...I'd like to do the alternating GMs bit without removing player-specific characters, but I don't want GMPC or SPCS occurences, though I may not be able to avoid it.

I'm also not interested in "run a different campaign/game each week, for each different GM", since that defeats the purpose of the exercise.  Same characters, same campaign, different GMs.

That said, does anyone have any comments on the above?
Specifically, has anyone tried anything like this?  How did it work?

[James V. West]

Going way back in time to 1988 and my first real ADnD campaign, yes, I've done it this way, sort of.

We had 5 steady players and 2 who were mostly not there. Out of the 5 core folks, 3 of us liked to DM. The whole thing started with one adventure and a map of a small town on graph paper. Next adventure took place outside the town, miles away. New piece of paper, new part of the world.

Then I wanted to run a game, so I added my own new part of the map.

We kept switching out like that all summer, each playing off what the other had created, but keeping a healthy respectful distance from really screwing with what the others had done. Maybe you're thinking of something wherein screwing with other GMs' ideas is perfectly acceptible.

We didn't make a social contract, and we had no planned ideas. It was purely innocent and it worked quite well. In fact, I've never played an ongoing game since then that was as satisfying. I could run a game when I wanted to, I could sit back and play when I wanted to. It never got dull, never dried up, and only ended because life was changing too fast.

Hope this helps a little.

[Joe Murphy (Broin)]

(ooh, there's buttons to press, I love this new Forge... it has buttons)

My gaming group used this technique a few years ago, in slightly different circumstances

After wrapping up a spawling, 2 year Mage game, two players decided to run little one-off stories with the characters. It was awful.

The stories we played through weren't *important* to the Mage characters. They felt very arbitrary. It was like taking Mork and Mindy and throwing them into a wacky dungeon crawl just because you like Mork and Mindy. It was like bad http://www.fanfiction.net">fan fiction. So though it may sound obvious, the characters need to run around in suitable stories.

If you're swapping GMs every week, I'm not sure how you'd manage to maintain flavor between sessions...

And if you reread your own post, I'm not sure your solution solves your problem. =)

Rotating GMs may well mean you don't have to worry about a lack of inspiring interaction but will it cure that?

Joe.

[Paul Czege]

Hey Raven,

One instance a few years ago of "Why aren't we gaming?" produced an interesting negotiated AD&D 2e campaign concept. The idea was that there was a mercenary company that had evolved into something remarkably different subsequent to gaining control of a network of "gates" that spanned the planet, some in cities, some in remote locations. It was inspired a little by Glen Cook's The Black Company, and a little more by the short lived Marvel WarHeads comic. In short, the mercenaries had become a worldwide business, exploiting the network of gates to take difficult, special forces-type jobs. The company would carefully maintain neutrality in political conflicts.

Participants would each create two characters. The plan was to rotate GM, and for each session to be a single, self-contained mission, and for the player group to put together the best team for the mission by negotiating OOC which of their two characters each of them would use. We had a rule that you had couldn't neglect a character for more than two missions in a row.

The two big proponents of the idea were me and my friend Tom who ran the Theatrix game I've written about in Actual Play, and we actually played a mission he ran. I was supposed to run the second mission, and I spent a chunk of time prepping something where the PC's were charged with rescuing a little girl who'd been abducted by a priest and his flesh golem.

But I never completed it. Even for a one-shot, I couldn't overcome the AD&D prep hump, and the limitation of the players' established Gamist history with the system. I wanted villains who outmatched the PC's, and a Bond-esque confrontation with the priest where he revealed his fiendish plan. Ultimately, I was disenthused from completely prepping and running the thing by knowing the players would fight and be slaughtered.

I wanted Narrativism, before I knew what it was, and the system didn't support it. I wanted the characters to have difficulty maintaining the neutrality of the company, to form relationships, succumb to temptations, and react to situations out of pity and human emotion, that jeopardized their careers.

So I guess what I'm saying is, I don't think you can social contract Narrativism with AD&D for a player group with mixed GNS priorities. We came up with a contract for setting where it would be created collaboratively by the participants, as needed, as they took on the role of GM, and the potential for some nice Incredible Hulk style conflict for the characters, who'd go into situations they'd have to extract their emotions from at the end of the session, but the bias in the system killed it for me.

I could do the same thing easily now with The Pool and Narrativist-inclined players.

Paul

[greyorm]

Paul, I should point out I'm not trying to get Narrative...er, hrm, I suppose I am, but that's the long-term goal (hence the Road to Narrativism title).

Right now the idea is to get my players to act less like passive participants and more like Directors, which is possible to do in D&D without resulting in a system bias-conflict (since the stances are system-neutral, for the most part IMO).

I feel as though I am not engaging their interest in the game at this time, allowing them reign to work on the world and their own on-going adventures should give me a good idea of what they want, through watching how and where they push the world's elements around, what events crop up in their games and what kinds of NPC personalities they develop.

This is actually inspired by S&S -- "building the campaign as you go," which I can't get them to do otherwise.  They will be more interested in the setting if they've developed and advanced its elements themselves.  At least, that's the plan.

It should also let them get to know their characters better, or themselves, so they know what kind of characters they're playing and what they like.
I'm frighteningly aware that at least two of my players have no real concept of their character being more than a stiffly acted, obviously fictional character -- that is a series of reactions to events held together loosely by a background -- but everything they say and do leads me to believe they aren't happy with that, they want more, they want their character to be doing important, interesting things (as defined by the player), but they don't know what or how to get there.

Unfortunately, since they don't know what they want, and I can't just pluck it out of their heads, I have to find a way to get them to express it through clues I can read.
What's more unfortunate is that running fifteen sessions in a row that bore everyone to tears as I try different elements to see how they react isn't going to cut it...it ends up being emotionally draining, and by the end of some nights, makes you wonder why you're even gaming.

Hence I thought directorship would be a great lead-in...it would definitely let me watch what things they put into the scenario (many of which will likely be of interest to them personally...at least allowing me to see what interests them (the "Catching Up" session I ran also did this for me somewhat, since they authored the whole thing by themselves)).

Well, that's all a mouthful, so let me summarize what I'm looking to get out of this experiement:

1) More personal engagement with the world and its events.

2) Better understanding of their likes/dislikes in regards to story elements and character types.

Something else occurred to me while washing the dishes: my players are fixated on D&D.  We play it even though there's some obvious frustration with it, and refuse to play or try anything else.

I have to wonder if, as was discussed in the recent thread about playing the same character over and over, there's a subconscious desire being left unfulfilled, and we just keep turning back to D&D to fulfill the unspoken promise it's making about gaming yet has failed to provide as yet.
So we keep playing the same system over and over in the hopes of "getting it right."

(tangent: I also have to wonder if this is why house rules and system rewrites are so popular and wide-spread...the subconcious desire to modify a system to fulfill unmet needs)

Anyways, that's where I'm going: Directorship on the way to Narrativism; my personal feeling being that Directorship will help open up more Narrative play, rather that it is an iimportant element of such.

[greyorm]

Greetings Joe,

After wrapping up a spawling, 2 year Mage game, two players decided to run little one-off stories with the characters. It was awful.

Well, I already detect a difference, I'm not planning on having different GMs per story, but different GMs per session.

Some info on my game: we play on-line for two to three hours a week.  It's enough time for one scene, sometimes not even that.  I wish I my group had six hours to play on a given day, but we unfortunately don't; plus I think our collective wives would kill us (except for the married couple that plays).

So any particular "story" will be run by a variety of GMs, changing each week.  I might leave off in a crypt in the middle of a battle, and next week the GM picks up in that crypt in the middle of the battle.  Whatever elements they add to the crypt or the battle during that session will be their own...but it won't be a new story.

This will also force the players to pay more attention to the world when they aren't GMing, since (if they want to maintain consistency) they'll have to remember what's already gone on and events that have already occurred to tie everything together coherently.

No particular GM will know the final outcome...they shouldn't anyways!  There will be no, "Here's the module/map/adventure I wrote up, now you go through it step-by-step," since the actual thing won't be known or examined until after all has been said and done.

(reminiscent of the Murder Mystery game that was recently brought up...where no one knows who the murderer actually was until after the game is done, not even the murderer!)

If you're swapping GMs every week, I'm not sure how you'd manage to maintain flavor between sessions...

One of the things I'm going to avoid, and point out before we begin this, is that the GM's unspoken ideas from last week are not inviolate with this week's GM.
That week's GM may well change up everything the previous GM had "planned" to occur...this is a nasty habit anyways, pre-planning...or ideas about the NPCs unspoken motivations, history or so forth.
In short, the reality that is revealed will be a surprise to everyone involved, even the GM who originally created the character, place or events.

How will I maintain flavor?  Easy, we'll all maintain it...we'll work from a base set of assumptions, we'll make a social contract.  The world will no longer be "mine" alone to know and hold and move, nor anyone else's, but the group's as a whole.

That, at least, is how I envision it.

So though it may sound obvious, the characters need to run around in suitable stories.

I'm curious, how does one make suitable stories without the players providing input?  In fact, I'm not certain what you mean by "suitable stories"?  Who decides what those are?  How do you create them?  More important, how can you possibly pre-plan a "story"?

That's what I've done right now...I've made a "story" for them to follow, or rather, made up a bunch of elements for them to encounter...that's not a story...and it's the source of the problem.

[lumpley]

That week's GM may well change up everything the previous GM had "planned" to occur...this is a nasty habit anyways, pre-planning...or ideas about the NPCs unspoken motivations, history or so forth.
In short, the reality that is revealed will be a surprise to everyone involved, even the GM who originally created the character, place or events.

Hey!  That's how we play!

If it has happened in play, it's true.  Otherwise it's just conjecture.

(Well, mostly.  Sometimes we stake claims.  But we try to be flexible.)

Sometimes we race.  Right now, Emily Care and I both have opinions about her character's father, but until one of us has an opportunity to establish ours in play, who knows?

If your crew is anything like mine, you'll find it easy, fun, and very interesting.

-lumpley Vincent