No-Myth junky cries out for help

[TonyLB]

Cool.  That's what I thought you were saying.

My experience with this is that if the players sit on their hands and refuse to commit to a course of action until the GM has "showed his hand" then this whole style of play becomes an exercise in frustration for the GM.  Do you have recommendations for a way around that?

[jdagna]

My experience with this is that if the players sit on their hands and refuse to commit to a course of action until the GM has "showed his hand" then this whole style of play becomes an exercise in frustration for the GM.  Do you have recommendations for a way around that?

I'm not sure exactly what you mean by the GM "showing his hand", but I have had situations where groups seemed to get stuck.  I don't have any sure-fire methods for handling that.  Generally it's just a matter of figuring what's stalling the group and how I can meet what they want.  

For example, I discovered with one group that I was just giving them more choices than they wanted - they wanted to see the tracks.  It was kind of disappointing for me that they wanted it that way, but once I realized it, we all had more fun than we had before.  Another group (actually, the one in the examples I've been using) felt overwhelmed by the long-term odds and that caused a lot of indecision, so I gave them my assurance as GM that I wasn't into TPKs and would only hand them challenges they could either avoid or overcome.

Are those the kind of situations you're referring to?

[TonyLB]

Yeah, pretty much.  Maybe a slightly more dysfunctional version of the first one where your players wanted to see the tracks.  I've seen whole groups of players who insist that their characters must be disinterested loners who are totally self-sufficient and don't talk to anybody, and have no connections to any other character (player or otherwise).  To which I say "Okay, so what sort of thing would such a character be doing that makes them worth hearing about?" and they reply  "Oh, don't worry about me... when you start the story I'll find some way to get involved."

One person saying that... okay, fine, whatever.  Every player sticking to some variation on that theme?  That's a little frustrating.

[jdagna]

Yeah, pretty much.  Maybe a slightly more dysfunctional version of the first one where your players wanted to see the tracks.  I've seen whole groups of players who insist that their characters must be disinterested loners who are totally self-sufficient and don't talk to anybody, and have no connections to any other character (player or otherwise).  To which I say "Okay, so what sort of thing would such a character be doing that makes them worth hearing about?" and they reply  "Oh, don't worry about me... when you start the story I'll find some way to get involved."

One person saying that... okay, fine, whatever.  Every player sticking to some variation on that theme?  That's a little frustrating.

I play with a guy who has done a lot of GMing.  In one group like that he reached a point where he took out a deck of cards and starting playing solitaire.  About half an hour later, the players had all come up with good reasons for their PCs to get involved.

Admittedly, I don't think that's a universal solution to the problem... :)

[TonyLB]

It's pretty damn funny though... thanks.  That lightens my day.

Of course the horribly dysfunctional worst case isn't the one I'm trying to solve.  Those groups are few and far between.  But they clearly demonstrated (at least to me) the way in which I was relying on the players, and not doing as much to contribute to the game as I could if I presented my story ideas more forcefully.

Anyway, I got myself a few nice little short-term rollercoasters built for my game tonight.  Maybe, y'know, if people were to wander over that way and be in the mood for a rollercoaster already, and if they have tickets and, y'know, meet the height requirements... well maybe I might stick 'em in the rollercoaster and we'd all say "Whee!" for a while until they got off and could walk around wherever they wanted again.

I'll probably have lots more questions after that.

[Walt Freitag]

As I look back over the patterns of games I have run, one thing leaps out at me.  I don't prep story lines.  At all.  Now, I do prep.  I consider the characters my players have made.  I arrange a nice little bandolier of bangs (to use Ron's terminology).  I work up villains and sets and tensions and all that jazz.

But I don't tell them what they need to be doing.  I almost never run a game where there is a problem the characters need to address in the long haul.  Problems are either fixtures of the environment, largely inescapable and unaddressable, or they are temporary hurdles, forcing the player to make a single choice, and then exploding into one or (typically) more consequences that are themselves the next stage of small problems.

...

So here's the challenge:  Given my predilection for leeching off of the effort of my players, is there a different way for me to look at plotting, that would align my intellectual desire to provide more established story elements (for the players to bounce off of) with my emotional drive to give the players as much room as possible to develop their own stories?

When I play (GM) this way, I do most of the same things. The only difference I can see is in how I handle conflict. By "conflict" I mean not some particular problem or enemy, but conflict in the abstract, as an active autonomous force running through events. For ongoing adventuring, conflict is more or less conserved. That is, it usually arises out of other conflict (rather than from nothing), and it is rarely diminished even when an immediate problem is resolved.

But -- caution! -- the conservation of conflict doesn't mean that every attempt to resolve a conflict directly causes more conflict. That would be a recipe for defeatism and frustration. Rather, the resolution of a conflict exposes a (possibly hitherto unknown) underlying conflict (since conflict arises from other conflict in the first place) that can fuel new conflicts. This is not a law of cause and effect; it's a quality of the dramatic structure of an ongoing campaign.

When you look at conflict in a campaign, there's (often) a larger-scale conflict, some perpetual and practically unsolveable ambient problem (racial disharmony in the land, or a perpetual villain, or meddling feuding gods playing favorites Iliad-style, or whatever). Then there's the immediate conflict, the problems the PCs are facing on a session-to-session basis. The hard part, the key, and what you seem to be missing, is intermediate-scale conflict that gives weight and dramatic structure to events, and gives the PCs the opportunity to take on medium-term goals.

If you connect the largest-scale (perpetual, unresolveable) conflicts directly to the smallest-scale ones, then you get cool non-railroady adventures on the single-session timescale. (Non-railroady because (1) you create the problem without a particular forced solution in mind, and (2) there are many different small-scale problems scattered around, and if the players go searching for more you can always make up more, so that the players aren't forced to get involved in any particular one.) But this can also result in an episodic or aimless feel in the longer term. The Hercules TV series is a good example: every episode there's some local one-hour problem for Hercules to solve, because perpetual-villain Hera has meddled cruelly with mortal affairs in some way that needs to be undone.

To give this more dramatic shape and weight in an ongoing game, you need mid-scale conflicts. These are problems that cannot be resolved by unilateral direct action on the player-characters' part, at least not right away, and not in a mere session or two. But at the same time, they're not perpetual problems. They'll resolve somehow, eventually, whether or not the player-characters get involved in resolving them, but if the PCs do get involved, they can influence the outcome. A good example is a sickly old king and a disputed succession. It's easy to imagine how such a state of affairs could fuel any number of local brushfires, and it's (a little less) easy to see how the PCs involvement in resolving those brushfires could influence how the succession ultimately turns out.

Now, you can do this top-down (having made up the facts of the disupted succession, think up what kind of local problems might arise from it) or bottom-up (having made up a cool idea for a local problem, think up how it might tie into the disputed succession). And rather than being all ecumenical about how tastes and methods differ for different people, I'm going to go ahead and say that bottom-up works a hundred times better than top-down. Because with bottom-up, you can actually do it this way: having made up a cool idea for a local problem, think up how it might tie into some mid-level conflict such as a disputed succession. You don't have to invent the connection, or reveal the connection, until the players have shown an interest in, gotten involved in, or even resolved or tried and failed to resolve, the local conflict. Since the nature of mid-level conflicts is that you have several of them ongoing at once, this gives you a lot of flexibility for adapting to player actions, ideas, and preferences.

So, let's work an example. Consider this typical Hercules-episode-style problem situation: after years of tenuous racial coexistence in a region, the bad-reputation race (orcs, say) have been raiding villages. The dashing popular young local lord is raising an army to strike back. But -- big surprise... the orcs are actually innocent; the raids were carried out by mercenaries hired by the lord and disguised as orcs. How to connect this with the disputed succession is pretty clear. The lord's motivation for starting a war has something to do with the succession. Such as, he's one of the pretenders vying for the crown, and inflaming hatred and organizing an army will strengthen his grip on power.

That's the most common and easiest way to connect a conflict bottom-up: the larger-scale conflict turns out to be someone's motive for causing or participating in a local conflict. There are other ways that more directly involve the players' actions. One is that something the players do inflames an existing simmering conflict. For instance, the player-characters slay a dragon, and disputing armies show up to claim the dragon's hoard in reparations for old wrongs suffered by their respective peoples. Another possibility is that the player-characters do something that actually causes a new mid-level conflict to arise. A war is started, or an ancient curse is activated, or a hitherto minor antagonist becomes bent on revenge. These should be used with more care. They can become railroady if the players feel honor-bound to always solve the problems that "they caused." Also, if success at local-scale problem-solving always leads to larger problems, they might rightly feel put upon (though this is less a problem if it's failure that leads to the larger-scale problems).

Just as I presume you're doing with your local-scale problems, when you conceive a mid-level conflict, you do so without the specific expectation that the players must get involved in it, and you have no specific resolution or method of resolution in mind for the mid-level conflict. However, you do have to consider how actions within the player-characters' reach might affect the course of the mid-level conflict. The players will want to be able to figure out what they can do about it. If all they can do is put out the local brush-fires it spawns, then it's not a useful mid-level conflict (it becomes another perpetual unresolvable problem as far as they're concerned). The hallmark of a mid-level conflict is that putting out its brushfires (or failing to do so) also advances it toward resolution.

The idea here is that you're using your same non-railroady techniques as you use for your daily problems, but stretched over a longer time period in bits and pieces. Attention to and progress in mid-level problem-solving occurs in fragments amidst and between local-conflict action. Perhaps the disputed succession situation might eventually reach a climax where its final resolution becomes the local problem -- that is, the entire focus of effort -- for a session or two. But perhaps not; perhaps instead the PCs just find out one day that the prince they rescued from a deranged count's dungeon, in alliance with the guild leaders they saved from a poisoning plot and the orcs whose villages they saved from the planned pogrom, and despite their failure to save him from an ancient family curse of lycanthropy, has finally succeeded to the throne after the death of the old king.

Using the same bottom-up methods, if you want to, you can connect the mid-level conflicts with longer-scale high-level conflicts. There's no law that says such conflicts must be perpetual; they can evolve and change too, or even sometimes get resolved.

The important thing to remember is that as long as player buy-in to mid-level and higher-level conflicts is optional, and player-character approaches to dealing with them are not pre-planned or otherwise forced, then your GM decisions in causing those conflicts to develop, evolve, and move toward resolution are not railroading, even if those developments do not result in any strict cause-and-effect way directly from player-character actions.

- Walt

[Cemendur]

. . .  I've seen whole groups of players who insist that their characters must be disinterested loners who are totally self-sufficient and don't talk to anybody, and have no connections to any other character (player or otherwise).  To which I say "Okay, so what sort of thing would such a character be doing that makes them worth hearing about?" and they reply  "Oh, don't worry about me... when you start the story I'll find some way to get involved."

One person saying that... okay, fine, whatever.  Every player sticking to some variation on that theme?  That's a little frustrating.

Have you tried Spiritual Attributes (see Riddle of Steel) or Relationship Mapping (see Heroquest)? I have not tried these yet, I have just received the ROS and Heroquest sourcebooks, but I suspect they provide solutions to your trouble.

With SAs, you don't have a group of "disinterested loners". You can still have loners, or mercenaries, but they are passionate.  

Take the "anti-hero" in the movie, "The Magnificent Seven" (the "Western" Americanization of the film "the Seven Samurai").  His name is forgotten to me. He has the following Spiritual Attributes.

Drive: Lust for Gold
Conscience: Hero's Code (honoring women, kindness to children, compassion to peasants)

Each of the "Magnificent Seven" uphold the Hero's code, but each have a drive that defines that character.  Only one of them were willing to die for "gold". The other mercenaries put their life on the line for higher principles.

[contracycle]

It occurs to me that there is, for my money, an excellent pre-plotted adventure supplement already in print: Hardwired, for CP2020, by Walter Jon Williams.  I've waxed lyrical about this book before, but its worth mentioning again as an excellent (IMO) example of a fully structured, prepared adventure than none the less feels very free in execution.

Thinking about it, I think one of the keys to its success is sinking the element that links all the events together into the background such that, rather than leading the players by the nose through blatantly escalating tension, tension just plain escalates and realising why comes as something of a revelation, a discovery.