Filing Edges: GM as Author

[Rob Carriere]

Vincent, are you aware of just how radically unconventional everything you just said was? In the context of the RPG community at large, I mean? (Well, at least among most of the gamers I've ever met, anyway, which is a limited subset, but still...)

Blink, blink. Pinch arm.

OK, I'll Whoa you back :-) I haven't heard anything but substantially that position for the last 15 years.  Guess you're under a rock in Outer Mongolia and I'm somewhere in a snowdrift in Antarctica? This is one of the wonderful things about this hobby: no matter how long you've played, now matter how many people you've talked too, still somebody will throw you for a loop.

Johnathan,
Sure most people are reluctant to get up, snort steam, fart fire and walk away in anger. This is a Good Thing (TM).

However, you can be more moderate in your protestations. Among all the people I have ever played with, player comments about the amount of fun they're having are things taken seriously. In fact, again, among the people I (have) played with, it is considered SOP for the GM to actively sollicit such input.

So, since you are obviously talking from a very different background than I am, a simple question to give me some elementary bearings: would the sort of play I have experienced fit your agenda, or are you looking for a more overt way of redistributing power, tasks, and roles?

SR
--

[Mike Holmes]

We're dancing back and forth here over the same ground. The question is what's meant by "power" and other terms that are being bandied about. What happens in the "traditional" game is not that the GM has all of the power, and not that the players share power because of their ability to abdicate. Power is passed back and forth. This is the "ball" that Chis Chinn (AKA Bankuei) refers to.

I mean, what about character action. As in the example given above, the players are, even in the most traditional games, given theoretical authoority over what their characters do. Yes, the GM can circumvent this. But this is becuause the players give the GM the ball at those points, or he takes it, or...whatever.

Basically it's not so simple as to be statable in one sentence. The best you can do is to point out that control of what's being created in the SIS can pass to any player at any point, and that the system being used is what controls this. This is simply the Lumpley Principle in action, and nothing new.

Now, as to whether one "should" or should not try to "get away" from having the GM have the ball most of the time...all I can say is that this is a preference thing. I didn't participate in creating Universalis to say that GM control is a bad thing - just to say that there are alternatives here. So the only imperative is to think about how to distribute control for your game to make it the best game that it can be. That'll vary tremendously from design to design.

All of which Mike Mearls is very aware of, BTW.  

Mike

[Jonathan Walton]

Mike, you're saying all this as if it's uncontroversial and written in stone.  Honestly, I don't think it's obvious that the "ball" metaphor is any more accurate or complete than my "valve" metaphor.  Additionally, I don't think this is just a YMMV thing that needs to be custom-fitted for each game concept.  Part of the reason I wanted to address Mike Mearls comments it that he thinks roleplaying hasn't really changed much, which makes me wonder whether it's possible for roleplaying to change much, and, if so, how we can make those changes happen.  I don't want to wait until I come up with a game concept that requires the GM to "give up the ball."  I want to come up with options NOW, and then build experimental games around those options to familiarize myself with the possibilities.

Finally, I've always thought that comments like "the only imperative is to think about how to distribute control for your game to make it the best game that it can be" are EXTREMELY unhelpful.  How are we to know what's "best" for a given design?  That's like saying there's only one person in the world that you could marry and be happy.  Bullshit.  There are thousands and thousands of different mechanics that could all be "the best" for a given game design.  It's not like there's just one answer or just a few answers.  This is especially true in the early stages of design, where people try out various bits of system to see what clicks.  And, in exploratory designs like what I'm planning to de here, the point isn't even to create a complete working game.  The point is to see what's possible and fiddle around with those possibilties.

Okay, rant mode off.

Well, mostly.

I think people are missing my purpose here.  Yes, we've all understand that GM power is given, temporary, illusionary, and subject to the whims of the players.  Yes.  Yes, yes, yes.  But why are we still stuck with the old model, over and over again?  I slip into it all the time.  

I ran My Life With Master at the Con this year, for 12yo boys, and it quickly became a GM-valve game.  Everybody started out on the same page, the early play of the game went great, with scene requests and player input and everything, but then one player decided to strike out on their own (probably out of ADHD boredom) and intentionally go against the group's shared goals.  So, not knowing of any available options, I reached for my familiar tool: the GM valve.  Now everyone's suggestions had to go by me before they were implemented.  I was able to loosen up a bit near the end, because the Endgame approached and so apocolyptic events could be unleashed, but it was much less fun that the early part of the game.

What I'm asking for, then, is a way to avoid even the temptation to use the GM-valve.  I don't want it to be even POSSIBLE for the GM to hog the ball and keep it away from the players.  I want that to be built into the system of the game and an important part of the social contract.  And I want this whole thing to be barred from drifting back into traditional models, eve when played with a group of players (like me) who have GM-ball-hogging and the GM-valve as our normal play habits.  But, we still need a way of dealing with 12yo boys with ADHD and would-be jedi-tranquilizers.  If the GM doesn't have the valve, then there needs to be some way of seperating the sheep from the goats.

[Callan S.]

*snip*
I guess this shows that GM power is an illusion.
*snip*

No, I think its real. What the illusion is that its bigger than it really is. An analogy might be that the traditional GM role means the other players allow him to wield a stick (shepards crook?). This means, one on one he's got the advantage.

The illusion is that a stick is all powerful. Err, no, its just a stick!

Now, a piece of fruit...(sorry, monty python moment)

[Rob Carriere]

Jonathan,
Thanks for the clarification. Now I think I know what planet I'm on :-)

Sounds to me like what you want is to rigorously distribute GM power as evenly as possible. Everybody is an equal part of the valve. So it's not your repsonsibility to call back the errant sheep, it's the group's responsibility not to allow the sheep to go errant in the first place.

My first reaction was, `commitee meeting for every decision, YUCK!'. Then I thought that maybe you could divvy up the GM powers, for example, you have a rules-arbitrator, a scene-and-prop setter, and NPC player, and a story guard (who keeps the group's goals in mind). These roles are divided among the players and rotate every once in a while. In a traditional-tempo game with long scenes you could rotate after every scene, for example. I'm not sure what to use in a more fast-paced game, but there's got to be something that's agreeable to all.

So, in the example you give, it would have been the responsibility of whoever was storyguard right then to curb the ADHD behavior. Half an hour later, it would have been somebody else's concern. This way you can't hog the ball, because the rules will take it away from you.

Is this more along the lines of what you were looking for, or am I still in that snowdrift?

SR
--

[Jonathan Walton]

Is this more along the lines of what you were looking for, or am I still in that snowdrift?

Well, this is the tactic advocated by Ergo, the first treatise on GM-less play that I ever read.  Ian Millington implied that the road towards GM-less play was paved with getting individual members of the group to take on what were formerly GM-responsibilities.

I originally planned to do something similar in my game Storypunk/Ever-After/Facedance (it's been through a lot of names), but have it be enforced in-game.  It was a game about being people who hacked into stories and took over the operation of them, so you'd have one character who was the "Muse" and would set the scenes, one character whose job it was to end scenes, etc.

So, yeah, in a sense, that's more like what I'm getting at.  I was just hoping that people could come up with other ways of making it happen.  I was looking for positive ways mostly: not restrictions that would keep the GM from hogging the ball, but game goals that would make it unlikely that anyone would ever WANT to hog the ball.  For example, what if you could gain benefits (?) whenever other players used elements you created during play?  Torchbearer does something similar to this with its Torch mechanics, and it might keep people from hogging narrative control.

I'm not necessarily just looking for GM-less play concepts.  I'm also interested in GMs that aren't ball-hogs and how that works in practice.

[timfire]

What I'm asking for, then, is a way to avoid even the temptation to use the GM-valve.  I don't want it to be even POSSIBLE for the GM to hog the ball and keep it away from the players.  I want that to be built into the system of the game and an important part of the social contract.  And I want this whole thing to be barred from drifting back into traditional models, eve when played with a group of players (like me) who have GM-ball-hogging and the GM-valve as our normal play habits.  But, we still need a way of dealing with 12yo boys with ADHD and would-be jedi-tranquilizers.  If the GM doesn't have the valve, then there needs to be some way of seperating the sheep from the goats.

I feel you're setting up an impossible standard here. How do you avoid the temptation? I don't think you can! The temptation for one player to dominate the game is always there. And it doesn't need to be the GM, it can just as quickly be a regular player. It's just easier for the GM.

I've seen things down down like this before:

Player A: I attack!
(Rolls a natural 20, the crowd cheers.)
Player B: Dude, you totally cut that guy in half!
GM: Umm... next person...

In my old playing group, after rolls were made people would start throwing out suggestions for what should happen. But the thing is, it was always the same couple of people who would make the suggestions. The GM would rarely question them about it. Those players effectively became the 'vavle' for what went into the SIS.

[lumpley]

Jonathan: it's hard.

Giving up exclusive authorship, as GM, means that you have to actually share your vision for the game.  You have to actually share it.  You can't share it only as long as your friends' visions are compatible with yours, you can't share it only until one of your friends has an ADHD moment.  Your vision can't trump theirs.

The moral is, don't share GMing with 12 year olds unless you're honestly willing to play a 12 year old's game.

Have I said a million times yet how genius Universalis is?  It does exactly what you say: if I use something you create, I get dice for it.  The game's rules give every player's contributions weight and value.  They actively, positively promote each of us to pick up the others' vision and fly with it.  It's wicked genius.

Otherwise, I feel for you.  There's not much beaten track.  Very few published games do what you're asking for, and for those of us who do it in play, it seems to come so naturally that it's hard to analyze and communicate.  Whatever techniques you come up with are bound to be innovative.

Rob, as far as "commitee meeting for every decision, YUCK!" goes, have you read my group's "Adventures in..." posts?  
Adventures in Improvised System
more adventures in improvised system: techniques
Further More Adventures in Improvised System
Adventures in Shared Character Vision
Adventures in RGFA Simulationism
More Adventures in Shared Character Vision
Adventures in Dramatic Drama
All you gotta do is find the right committee.

-Vincent

("It's wicked genius" may be a regionalism.  I apologize to people who're made to gag by it.)

[Rob Carriere]

Vincent,
No I hadn't. Thank you! That was a great read.

I think though, that the correct verb cannot be `find'. This sort of thing is built during a lot playing together beyond the initial agreement to try such a style.

I also suspect I might not be a good committee member myself. I don't think I could groove on the `halt-and-go-meta' moments. At least I always find myself irritated by the need to stop the flow of the game and consider resolution, be it by rules, consensus, or whatever. In fact, re-reading my own sentence, I gave myself away with `stop the flow'. That perception is not compatible with the type of play you describe, where figuring out how to resolve stuff is an integral part of play.

SR
--

[Rob Carriere]

Jonathan,
Thanks for the confirmation that I'm pointed in the right direction. Let me describe something I see in that direction:

Take an ordinary deck of cards and shuffle out one of the colors and all but one of the jokers. You now have a deck that has two of everything, except for the solitary joker. Deal a hand to each player (use up all the cards). Hands are not revealed.

When you introduce something into the SIS and I support you (for example, I play an NPC you just invented according to your guidelines, or I agree to have the event you just thought up to happen to my PC, or whatever) I get to blindly draw a card from your hand. If I now have a pair, I put the pair on the table, face up. I get a point for the pair.

At any point, whoever has the joker is the story and rules guardian. He must intervene when the agreed-upon boundaries of play are passed. He does so by revealing the joker. If I draw a card from you and it is the joker and I believe you should have intervened, I can call you on that by revealing the joker. If the rest of the group agrees, you lose a point.

Whoever has the joker when all the other cards have been paired loses 3 points.

At that point either quit or reshuffle and restart.

Now add a cool game use for the points, stir well and serve.

SR, who is hungry and outta here.
--

[Doctor Xero]

The conventional GM whose say-so makes the game happen is a fiction.  It's a convenient fiction for some styles of roleplaying - it takes all the effort out of negotiation, provided the GM doesn't stray too far from what's expected at the table - but it's just not real.

Take your examples.  It is within the power of any player present to end the game if the GM pulls that kind of shit and it's not okay.  If it's okay, it's okay by the players' indulgence; if it's not, the GM has no more power to make the game happen than anyone else.

I'm not talking about whatever rights & responsibilities the rules allocate to whatever player.  I'm talking about our right as human beings to ditch out of a game we don't enjoy.

Exactly!  The game master is a functionary for the Social Contract!

But why are we still stuck with the old model, over and over again?

I don't want it to be even POSSIBLE for the GM to hog the ball and keep it away from the players.

We still have game masters for a simple reason : because that is what players want, even if you don't think they should be allowed to have it (and even if you keep misreading the game master's service to his or her gaming group as "hogging" and domination).

The sort of adjudication (not appropriation) of certain types of player input you mention occurs precisely because the gamer who gave up playing to game master has been assigned by the will of the gaming group to that specific function.  The sort of game master about whom you write has the assigned function of game system interpretation (so that players don't have to waste time with reinventing the wheel of system every time something occurs within game), setting operation (including NPCs), and upholding the Social Contract.

Game masters have a valuable function, and there is nothing lazy nor subordinate nor uncreative about playing in a campaign which has a traditional game master.

Doctor X

[Doctor Xero]

But why are we still stuck with the old model, over and over again?

I ran My Life With Master at the Con this year, for 12yo boys, and it quickly became a GM-valve game.  Everybody started out on the same page, the early play of the game went great, with scene requests and player input and everything, but then one player decided to strike out on their own (probably out of ADHD boredom) and intentionally go against the group's shared goals.

Now you know why.  Remember, this was a Convention game, with children who had no pre-existing Social Contract nor emotional connections, really, and with no consequences should they go awry.  Had you selfishly abdicated your functions as game master, you would have been choosing to ruin the pleasure of every other player at that game.

I guess I was looking for situations more like this:

GM: So you round the corner and you spot... what?

P1: What?

GM: What makes the most sense to you?

P1: A magical castle!

GM: What does the magic castle look like?

P1: It's got hundreds of gleaming towers...

P2: ...and a huge garden maze made of rose bushes!

Still, this runs the risk of becoming Mad-Libs the RPG

Actually, this looks more like the signs of a lazy game master than an opening up of the shared imagined space.  If I'm going to be deciding what everything I encounter is for myself, I might as well be home writing a short story -- the function of other human beings has been deleted, and the gaming experience now feels more like a circle jerk than a lovefest.

One might be able to state that the game master has been dehumanized into a gaming resource or aid.

(Most game-master-less game systems have ways of incorporating this level of spontaneous world generation without dehumanizing anyone.)

In some ways, there is something inherently noble about the gamer who willingly takes on the task of game master, particularly since there are those who insistently reinterpret their services to the gaming group and to the Social Contract almost exclusively in terms of power madness, appropriation, and "hogging the ball".

I'm not necessarily just looking for GM-less play concepts.  I'm also interested in GMs that aren't ball-hogs and how that works in practice.

Jonathan, thus far in this thread, you have categorized game masters as tyrannical hunters ("the GM then plays Duck Hunt with those suggestions, shooting down the ones that don't fit his vision of what the game should be like"), thieves or plagiarists ("He's simply stealing their ideas . . . many GM's tweak player's suggestions when connecting them into the rest of the game, which could be seen as a way of claiming ownership over the suggestions"), selfish hogs ("I don't want it to be even POSSIBLE for the GM to hog the ball and keep it away from the players."), and people who pull off shit ("most of the time, the GM DOES pull that kind of shit").

With that kind of disrespect for game mastering, it seems to me that you won't be able to look at it in depth enough to recognize its vital functions and then redistribute those to the players (which has been done in game-master-less game systems already, so it must be possible).  Until you are willing to understand WHY players enjoy and may even need game masters, you will be unable to find ways to construct viable alternatives to game masters.

Doctor Xero

[Paganini]

Whoa.

Vincent, are you aware of just how radically unconventional everything you just said was? In the context of the RPG community at large, I mean? (Well, at least among most of the gamers I've ever met, anyway, which is a limited subset, but still...)

Ethan, yep, he is. This is not something new for Vincent. His very first post to the Forge was basically saying the exact same thing... the Lumpley Principle in a nutshell. ;)

Jonathan, have you played Universalis? Everyone who thinks about this issue should first do some serious Universalis.

[Doctor Xero]

First some advice directly to your question, then a point you seem to be neglecting and, through this neglect, thereby obscuring your concerns.

I'm not necessarily just looking for GM-less play concepts.  I'm also interested in GMs that aren't ball-hogs and how that works in practice.

Well, I know a number of methods for the commonplace healthy, respectful game mastering which never comes close to "hogging" nor appropriation nor tyranny, but those aren't necessarily built into the system beyond the seemingly-obligatory "How to Game Master this RPG" section, so I don't think those would scratch your itch apropos this topic.

Take a look at Pretenders, Otherkind, and octaNe for some built-into-the-system ways to encourage players to participate more directly in creating the Shared Imaginary Space and its Storyline/Premise/Contests.

Pretenders provides a detailed explanation of how to engage one's playing group in a round-table creation of the relevant parts of campaign reality.  This creation method is written into the rules and therefore could only be ignored by the gaming group as a sort of house rule alteration of the RPG itself.  As I've mentioned in other posts, I've done this with my own gaming group.  They wanted mysteries and therefore secrets known only to the game master, yet this round-table creation session encouraged them to specify for me the desired parameters of those mysteries.  Thus, from the start, I had player engagement with the campaign.  I had no more nor less veto power than any other gamer in the discussion with one small exception : I freely admitted when they wanted NPCs of a sort I can not properly play out for them.  In the past, sometimes this has functioned as a de facto veto, but often it has functioned to encourage a player to volunteer to play out that NPC for me.  (We don't like the discontinuity and oscillating characterizations of shared NPCs.)

Otherkind provides a dice resolution mechanic which gives almost complete resolution power to the player depending upon how well he or she rolls those dice.  What you would find relevant about this dice resolution mechanic is that the game master has virtually no veto power nor authority over the player's chosen resolutions.  octaNe is similar in that its dice resolution mechanics also give almost total control over activity resolution to the player, with almost zero game master input.

The one thing I dislike about both Otherkind's and octaNe's dice resolution mechanics is that they give near-absolute authority over a given part of resolution to either player or game master : there is no negotiated nor sharing of tasks between the two when it comes to activity resolution.

Donjon provides an example of a game in which the game master really has little to do except listen to players declare into existence almost anything they want so long as they make the requisite rolls, but its mechanics uncompromisingly incorporate a player-not-game-master creation trope of the sort you might be seeking.

What I'm asking for, then, is a way to avoid even the temptation to use the GM-valve.

The problem is that such a valve which will always exist through somebody in any functional game.

When a player is uncertain what to do, is too tired or overwhelmed or naive or bashful to be creative on demand, or is simply not the alpha charismatic of the group, he or she will often look to the game master for help.  Disempower the game master from doing so, and said aid will come from a fellow player -- or, as happens more often, the campaign is destroyed (as with your 12-year olds example) or the player becomes overrun and either ignored or dominated by the more aggressively creative, more certain, more charismatic players.

Without game master authority, authority always defaults to the most charismatic or the most aggressive.  Having either a cult of charisma or a tyranny of the most aggressive is almost impossible to avoid unless there is an empowered game master to counter either one.  (Or a particularly strong Social Contract, but that's not something a game system can address.)

In effect, anti-game-master "hogging" sentiments tend to promote the idea that every player has a right to input except the one conscripted to the position of game master.  The game master alone is denied the right to input under such anti-game-master reforms.

I don't want to see gaming become an isolated ghetto of the creative elite.  
I don't want to see gaming become nothing more than a vehicle for cults of charisma and/or domination by interpersonal aggression.
I don't want to see game masters dehumanized into wetware computer game interfaces.
Empowered game masters are currently our best means by which we might avoid such fates.

I think Pretender, Otherkind, and octaNe are all examples of game mechanics requiring greater player input without destroying the functional value of the game master position.

Doctor Xero

[Callan S.]

I think this has already been asked in certain ways, but I wanted to shorten it down and ask it again.

In a group of equals, when one of them percieves something has gone wrong, what can he/she do as an equal?