Play prep and NPC's

[Rob Alexander]

Hi Gareth, all

Sorry for the confusion - I know I asked for the you to post about the style, but I was asking about games that had gone badly (e.g. the Celtic game), whereas your first post in this thread sounds like you're describing a method that works well for you (e.g. the bank job session). Obviously, your most recent reply has addressed this.

My interest? I'm looking to work out some solutions to the problems you described. I can relate to your "start a campaign, it fizzles out...", and that was partly why I didn't game for several years. In the past I've used a prep style quite similar to the one you described in this thread. My feeling is that, for me, that prep style (and overconcern for consistency of minor details) was a big part of my problem. I'm trying to move to a different style of play and prep, but it sounds like you've had problems with this new style in the past and I'm keen to learn from your experience.

"obedient" was a poor choice of word. What I was trying to get at is that the style of play (as a player rather than GM) that goes with a linear, reactive mission game is quite distinct from that that sits well with an open-ended "make your own trouble" game. If your players expected (or wanted) a linear, mission-based game, it may not have been easy for them to switch modes. They may not have wanted to. Though I guess you're well aware of all this.

Leaving aside the players you've introduced to rolegaming yourself, what kind of game (in terms of prep style etc) is popular with your highschool crowd and the games club? Are linear plots the norm? I know a lot of people seem to like them (although, as you've guessed, I don't understand the appeal --- notwithstanding that this was what I'd always put my players through a few years back).

I cannot abdicate my responsibility for the NPC's action to something that doesn't really exist.

Agreed. But presumably you do imagine that the characters are real so as to exploit your intuitive knowledge of how humans behave and interact? For example, while prepping do you do thought experiments along the lines of "If David were real, what might he do?". The benefit of thinking of NPCs as having goals, needs and desires is that it helps to stimulate your mind to come up with interesting stuff.

(E.g. --- Well, David might go looking for support among the criminal elements of the city for assistance in getting the old man off the throne. Of course, he's an arrogant, spoiled fop who is in no sense safe in the slums, so he's going to get into real trouble. And we've already established that Tim's PC has a younger sister who's very attractive --- how about she falls in love with David, just about when he's getting in too deep. And although David might be mostly ineffectual it doesn't mean he won't manage to expose the king to some real danger, and that could threaten the whole city, if not the country.)

Obviously, everything remains centered on the PCs - NPC's offscreen lives are only interesting insofar as they affect the PCs pretty directly. But you use your mental model of those offscreen lives to as an aid to generating interesting NPC behaviour (I'm guessing that you treat this behaviour as 'real', in the sense that it's enacted by you at the table). And, of course, this goes through a filter of "is this interesting/realistic/dramatically appropriate" before your bring it into play.

Am I disagreeing with you here? I don't think the above has anything to do with the problems you're reporting, which are more specifically to do with generating interesting stuff in real time, right?

I don't think anyone's saying "just make stuff up" here. But what method there is is subtle and hard to put into words. (And, personally, I'm a rank beginner compared to a lot of people here).


rob

[Callan S.]

Finally, 'players contributing to the game', which some take so much for granted, kills the usual pivotal sources of uncertainty for this play.

"contribute" was a bad choice of word on my part. I should have said something like "be proactive and choose their own direction". I.e. I didn't mean "Let's make there be cave in that hill", I meant "Let's see if there are any caves up in those hills near the town".

In light of the link Sydney gave to a thread, I think the perspective I gave is way out of place anyway. Sounded close at the time, but wow, way off!

But in regards to the technique your referencing, the difference between looking for caves in the hill and making caves in the hill is slim. Slim enough that it's not hard for the difference to go away - stuff in Donjon where players create secret passages by rolling 'search for secret passages' were designed off how slim the difference is.

[contracycle]

"obedient" was a poor choice of word. What I was trying to get at is that the style of play (as a player rather than GM) that goes with a linear, reactive mission game is quite distinct from that that sits well with an open-ended "make your own trouble" game. If your players expected (or wanted) a linear, mission-based game, it may not have been easy for them to switch modes. They may not have wanted to. Though I guess you're well aware of all this.

This I'm not so sure about, or at least, I'm not sure that anyone could tell from observation.  I mean, I have twice played long-standing games under GM's with whom I had had no prior contact at all, and I would be hard pressed to point out a significant difference in terms of the output.   Now that may be coincidence, but it seems to me that there is a lot more assumption that the game as actually played is significantly different than is warranted, IMO.

Leaving aside the players you've introduced to rolegaming yourself, what kind of game (in terms of prep style etc) is popular with your highschool crowd and the games club? Are linear plots the norm? I know a lot of people seem to like them (although, as you've guessed, I don't understand the appeal --- notwithstanding that this was what I'd always put my players through a few years back).

Well that is of course somewhat hard to say because I did not actually have access to the GM's materials in games where I have been a player.  One guy ran several of the Vampire metaplot scenarios in succession pretty well, and a couple of Cthulhu ones out of the book; another, who ran a vast and wandering Mage game, was so heavily into prep that his gaming materials were transported in a wheeled bag and we used to challenge him to produce various historical documents, which he could and would do.  One of the best linear adventures I have yet seen was produced for university RPG society for convention play, and although it it used a crutch I dislike (poisoning the characters at the start) it was well constructed and flowed naturally from strep to step. 

One of the most explicit differences I have encountered occurred in another Vamp game set in Poland, and the point of issue was whether my characters Herd stat was a subject of actual play; that is the GM wanted, and expected I would want, to play out every interaction with the Herd, while I thought of it as an abstraction which I had no intention of worrying about.  This produced a series of interactions that neither of us found much fun.  This is the one occasion I can really say was characterised by a different style, and was inclined to produce this sort of exchange:
me: how does such-and-such work?
him: how do you think it should work?
me: what I think doesn't matter

Having nothing else to do I started empire-building, which effectively made me the central figure of the game, which had its ups and downs.  Eventually this game too petered out; seeing as there were no real menaces to guard against, none of my preparations really mattered.  Possibly to liven things up, I still don't know, one of my schemes was hijacked and spoiled, which got up my nose a bit; it was not catastrophic but altered the tone somewhat.  I became much more cautious, less stuff happened, eventually virtually nothing happened.

Agreed. But presumably you do imagine that the characters are real so as to exploit your intuitive knowledge of how humans behave and interact? For example, while prepping do you do thought experiments along the lines of "If David were real, what might he do?". The benefit of thinking of NPCs as having goals, needs and desires is that it helps to stimulate your mind to come up with interesting stuff.

Well, for purposes of the portrayal, yes, but I'm really wary of "intuitive" knowledge.  Local ideologies and social value systems can produce effects outsiders would not expect, and behaviours that appear counter-intuitive and even unreasonable.  So I don't necessarily consider it safe to rely on my "instinctive judgment", as it were, without an eye to setting and situation.

Obviously, everything remains centered on the PCs - NPC's offscreen lives are only interesting insofar as they affect the PCs pretty directly. But you use your mental model of those offscreen lives to as an aid to generating interesting NPC behaviour (I'm guessing that you treat this behaviour as 'real', in the sense that it's enacted by you at the table). And, of course, this goes through a filter of "is this interesting/realistic/dramatically appropriate" before your bring it into play.

Well, yes and no in that I am inclined to start from whether the behaviour is interesting first, and construct a rationale for that afterwards.  For example, it would be easy enough for me to rewrite an existing NPC to give them a lover, if I thought that having a lover would add interest.  But my problem is, why should an NPC's romantic travails engage the PC's?  Well, presumably only if they care in some way, if there is some reason for this item to appear on screen.  So the problem once again is "why, and what for", not the coherence of the internal logic from which it is constructed.

One of the things that bothers me in the way I perceive this approach, is that I don't like the idea of an SIS full of moving NPC's in which the PC's are merely guests at a party, observing NPC's as they go about their "interesting" lives.  Fundamentally, I am not interested in the NPC's at all, they are only means to an end; it's the PC's and the players in whom I am interested.  Given a choice between playing an NPC and responding to a player attempting to Do Something in the gameworld, I would choose the latter.

Am I disagreeing with you here? I don't think the above has anything to do with the problems you're reporting, which are more specifically to do with generating interesting stuff in real time, right?

Yes.  I increasingly think that part of the problem is not having a stopping point, not having a clear end in sight.  The mage game mentioned above, by the GM with his bag of prep, staggered on for quite a while in a fairly purposeless way, eventually going through a full rotation of characters through death and retirement.  The question of "what are we doing and why" became more and more acute, and the game did not so much end as disperse.  Allegedly, this game did indeed have some kind of plot but was actually executed in quite a responsive, improvisational way interspersed with events according to some sort of schedule. 

I think, based on this and my own experience, that there is a practical limit to how long you can maintain such a game in your head without burning out, without your improvisation becoming perfunctory and minimalist.  I guesstimate thats seldom more than 6-10 sessions, and often less.  I have thought sometimes, when coming home from work to work on the coming weekends game, that a) for this much effort I could make real money writing a book, and b)  if I were writing a book, one day it would be over.  And that would mean that it could be paced, and not constantly a Red Queen game, forever running to keep up.  Hence I am increasingly interested in structure, staging and boundaries.

The single most useful RPG product I have ever used was the Hardwired supplement for CP2020 by Walter Jon Williams.  This is distinctly linear, but rather than compelling choices, it tends to make offers the players can't, or are in no position, to refuse.  I thought this worked very well and I was able to run this perfectly without any changes.  One of the effects was that this direction absolved me of a great deal of worry about incidental detail; because I knew full well, for example, that the PC's would never return to the location in which they started, I could be very free with detail without any fear of any of it coming back to haunt me.  Similarly, NPC's were brought on for a specific function and would likely never be seen again once that function was fulfilled; they were disposable rather than something requiring care and maintenance.  Also because I knew exactly where I was going, I could contribute to character creation to obviate some kinds of sticking points and encourage niches I knew would be well met.  All of this functioned, IME, much better than games in which a situation was created, even with NPC's, and left to "play out".

[FredGarber]

Yes.  I increasingly think that part of the problem is not having a stopping point, not having a clear end in sight.  The mage game mentioned above, by the GM with his bag of prep, staggered on for quite a while in a fairly purposeless way, eventually going through a full rotation of characters through death and retirement.  The question of "what are we doing and why" became more and more acute, and the game did not so much end as disperse.  Allegedly, this game did indeed have some kind of plot but was actually executed in quite a responsive, improvisational way interspersed with events according to some sort of schedule. 

I've played in a Mage game like that, and I liked it.  And the point of the game was that each session, every character had to ask themselves "What are we doing, and why?"  Our game was about Pride: Self-Worth vs. Hubris.  The "plot" of "There's a Techno-Nephandi who wants to undermine the magical fountainheads of the world in order to bring the Elder Gods back and destroy the world," was merely a backdrop for how our characters reacted to the day to day stresses of having Cosmic Power at your fingertips. Do you use it to do the laundry?  And it was interesting for Players who brought in new PCs to hear the "tales" of their old PCs, and how the survivors (mis)interpreted motives and opinions.

It seems you tend to create situations where the PCs can only really talk to themselves.  They might be able to call up their old war buddies at the airfield to rent a chopper to airlift a mammoth, but they couldn't really care less about inviting a war buddy home to dinner.  And that puts a limit on play in most groups, because when the PCs have finished talking about themselves and are done talking to each other, where do they look? Your NPCs are disposable.

I like your "guests at the party" analogy, and I would say, though, that rather than an SIS where the players OBSERVE the NPCs as [the NPCs] go about [the NPCs'] interesting lives, that there be a party in a very small apartment, where they players are often jostled by the NPCs as everyone goes about their interesting lives, and there's not enough beer to go around, and some of the NPCs want to get involved in the interesting lives of the PCs, and there's the one seriously hot girl and someone has the Xbox up on the Plasma TV.  That sort of SIS solves the "guests at the party" situation for me.

But I think you need to state, at the outset, that you are creating a game where there is an endpoint in sight.  It's a valid style of play.  To create an analogy, you want to make a Movie, not a TV Series.  If there's enough interest in the movie, you'll make a sequel. If there's really enough interest, you'll maybe make a franchise.  You're not interested in making a show that will remain on the air forever.

I think that if you establish this with your group at the outset: You're making a short term thing, and it will be renewed only if there's enough interest after each "movie," then if after the 8th session everyone goes their own way, there will be a "no harm, no foul" situation.  Maybe some players want to scrap their current PCs and come up with something completely different on the 9th session.  They can do that without feeling that they've ruined your plans.  You can accept this without feeling that you've overprepped for PCs who aren't going to be there next time.

So, game on, and do you mind if I borrow the image of a "vertical extraction of a mammoth" for my own use?

-Fred

BTW I totally get the "Herd" discussion: The ST there was trying to employ a technique of "Backgrounds Are There to Pull Plot Hooks,"  where you were working with "I Spent My Points On This Merit, Stop Trying to Turn It Into a Flaw." I've had numerous discussions on this "feature" in the WW systems, and on what sort of play it creates: where every victory of the PCs is just another chance for the STs to drag them down.

[Sydney Freedberg]

....this direction absolved me of a great deal of worry about incidental detail; because I knew full well, for example, that the PC's would never return to the location in which they started, I could be very free with detail without any fear of any of it coming back to haunt me.  Similarly, NPC's were brought on for a specific function and would likely never be seen again once that function was fulfilled; they were disposable rather than something requiring care and maintenance....

Gareth, a technique question: How much detail are you describing your locations and NPCs in that you are worring about it "coming back to haunt me"? If I describe a room, or even a person, I do it in very broad brushstrokes: The Duke is lying under the bedsheet, his scarred, muscular chest bare, the sheet strangely flat where his legs should be, with his artificial limbs lying discarded by the side of the bed (to take a quick example from an actual Burning Empires session I ran). From reading novels and my own abortive attempts at writing fiction, and from doing a huge amount of writing as a journalist, I find that if you put more than, oh, four details into a description, the reader/listener overloads and doesn't remember any of it anyway; whereas if you concentrate on two or three salient details and repeat one or two of them every time you reintroduce a location or character, it's much easier not only for you to remember but for your audience as well.

[contracycle]

I've played in a Mage game like that, and I liked it.  And the point of the game was that each session, every character had to ask themselves "What are we doing, and why?"  Our game was about Pride: Self-Worth vs. Hubris.  The "plot" of "There's a Techno-Nephandi who wants to undermine the magical fountainheads of the world in order to bring the Elder Gods back and destroy the world," was merely a backdrop for how our characters reacted to the day to day stresses of having Cosmic Power at your fingertips. Do you use it to do the laundry?  And it was interesting for Players who brought in new PCs to hear the "tales" of their old PCs, and how the survivors (mis)interpreted motives and opinions.

Well, it certainly wasn't all bad, and in fact I have really warm memories of this game in particular and Mage in general.  I recognise the issues you raise, and that was one of the reasons I enjoyed it; we had a lot of that too but I don't think it was as explicit a setup as yours appears to have been.  But, like my own games, it faded rather than finishing.  If it had finished, the positive memories would be unqualified, and the ultimate failure is all the more disappointing.

I like your "guests at the party" analogy, and I would say, though, that rather than an SIS where the players OBSERVE the NPCs as [the NPCs] go about [the NPCs'] interesting lives, that there be a party in a very small apartment, where they players are often jostled by the NPCs as everyone goes about their interesting lives, and there's not enough beer to go around, and some of the NPCs want to get involved in the interesting lives of the PCs, and there's the one seriously hot girl and someone has the Xbox up on the Plasma TV.  That sort of SIS solves the "guests at the party" situation for me.

Well thats the kind of thing I would be interested in hearing about, the way others employ NPC's.  One of the reasons for my antipathy to0 NPC's is that if a given player is talking to an NPC, the rest are relegated to audience, which is something I am hesitant to do a lot.  But there may be devices here that have not occurred to me.

But I think you need to state, at the outset, that you are creating a game where there is an endpoint in sight.  It's a valid style of play.  To create an analogy, you want to make a Movie, not a TV Series.  If there's enough interest in the movie, you'll make a sequel. If there's really enough interest, you'll maybe make a franchise.  You're not interested in making a show that will remain on the air forever.

Sure, but deciding to do that is only the starting point.  If I am going to have an endpoint, I have to have a reasonable expectation that we will get there.  So thats how I come to the conclusion that I should be looking at more structure, more planning, rather than more improv.

So, game on, and do you mind if I borrow the image of a "vertical extraction of a mammoth" for my own use?

Sure.

[contracycle]

Gareth, a technique question: How much detail are you describing your locations and NPCs in that you are worring about it "coming back to haunt me"? If I describe a room, or even a person, I do it in very broad brushstrokes: The Duke is lying under the bedsheet, his scarred, muscular chest bare, the sheet strangely flat where his legs should be, with his artificial limbs lying discarded by the side of the bed (to take a quick example from an actual Burning Empires session I ran). From reading novels and my own abortive attempts at writing fiction, and from doing a huge amount of writing as a journalist, I find that if you put more than, oh, four details into a description, the reader/listener overloads and doesn't remember any of it anyway; whereas if you concentrate on two or three salient details and repeat one or two of them every time you reintroduce a location or character, it's much easier not only for you to remember but for your audience as well.

Well, the prep as such and the description I give are two separate things, one being objectively true and the other being subjectively true.  I don't think most of my descriptions in play are likely to be much longer than the example you give, but working to a "four facts" rule of thumb might be very useful.

The concern I referred to is rather players calling up details I thought were inconsequential.  So maybe I gave name to a a security guard, and the players remember that name and I don't.  The virtue of the move to other locations meant that all this inconsequential could be simply dumped.  On this I think that many of my games have implicitly contained the goal of the players sort of internalising the setting via osmosis; I am not keen on expecting players to process a lot of data up front.  And this has meant trying to maintain a persistent setting with internal consistency.  But I increasingly think this approach was mistaken and so now I pay more emphasis to situation, and what the function the specific locality can serve.

As above your four facts suggestion is something that may well be useful and the kind of thing that I would like to hear more of.  Just thinking about it now, such a principle may serve not least to focus NPC's and locations, to select from all the things they could be known for, the subset of things they should be known for.

[Sydney Freedberg]

Four facts -- or even better, probably, three -- is a pretty handy rule. I'm glad if it helps you, just as I'm appreciative of your putting so much effort and patience into helping us understand your play style.

The concern I referred to is rather players calling up details I thought were inconsequential.  So maybe I gave name to a a security guard, and the players remember that name and I don't. 

Okay -- why is this so bad?

"So the security guard guy -- um -- Jason -- says..."
"No, no, you said he was Michael West."
"Oh. Oh yeah. So West says...

I see that it's a little hiccup in play, but not such a bad one that I'd want to avoid giving the guard a name, or avoid ever bringing him back into the story at all, just to avoid the risk of this kind of exchange. I have a few guesses as to why you find it so much more problematic, probably related to your approach that

Well, the prep as such and the description I give are two separate things, one being objectively true and the other being subjectively true.

but I want to get your own explanation of why this is such a problem before I start overanalyzing..

[contracycle]

I see that it's a little hiccup in play, but not such a bad one that I'd want to avoid giving the guard a name, or avoid ever bringing him back into the story at all, just to avoid the risk of this kind of exchange.

Well the way I think about this, it is like having a stage set fall down during a show.  It shouldn't have happened and you should have made sure it wouldn't happen.

I have always taken a theatrical approach to RPG as performance, and no performer should find themselves obliged to apologise to their audience.  If the show isn't ready you should not be performing before the public at all.  Admittedly some of those rules arise from theatre being a business rather than a hobby, but IMO its still possible to take a craftsman's pride in your work and try to keep to those rules.

This reminds of an account I once read of someone being impressed by a hand carved wooden box, not least because it did not use nails.  Part of what was important to the observer was that it was not marred by its own mechanism, it was aesthetically conceptualised with that in mind.  I don't want to just make a functional box, I want to make a beautiful one.

[Sydney Freedberg]

Aha. What you said is genuinely enlightening. It confirms one thing I thought but, more importantly, brings up something I hadn't really been considering.


1. What I'd suspected already

Based on your very cool "Raid on the Bank Nationale" actual play post and on this passage (emphasis mine) --

the prep as such and the description I give are two separate things, one being objectively true and the other being subjectively true....many of my games have implicitly contained the goal of the players sort of internalising the setting via osmosis; I am not keen on expecting players to process a lot of data up front.  And this has meant trying to maintain a persistent setting with internal consistency.

-- and on this passage as well (again, emphasis mine) --

it is like having a stage set fall down during a show.  It shouldn't have happened and you should have made sure it wouldn't happen. I have always taken a theatrical approach to RPG as performance...

and finally this one (emphasis mine)

I don't want to just make a functional box, I want to make a beautiful one.

-- it's clear that you believe strongly in the fictional world as an end-in-itself, not merely as a means to an end (e.g. telling "the story," providing cool background color to players' strategic or moral choices, whatever). The imagined reality should be so convincing and so internally consistent that you should feel it has "objective reality" external to any of the players' "subjective" experiences of it. Of course, the imaginary world doesn't have objective reality, by definition, it's just what people around the table agree to imagine -- but you could also say the Mona Lisa's smile is purely subjective and that objectively all you're seeing is some gobs of paint on an old canvas: creating the illusion of reality is high art.

In Forge-speak, I believe what your "creative agenda" is Simulationist, with a strong focus on Setting and Color, and secondarily Character, with System being low on the list or off it altogether (since you've not been talking at all in your Actual Play about wanting to make sure the rules of the game product results that appear "objectively real"). Specifically you're a strong believer in what folks have started calling "creative denial" -- that is, everyone around the table knows they're just making this stuff up, but they willingly suspend not only disbelief but the idea of their own input, seeking the (subjective) impression that the imagined world really exists separate from their imaginations.

What all this boils down to is simply this: You're pursuing a valid, noble, and for that matter highly demanding artistic goal. It's not the way I personally prefer to play, but I can respect and indeed admire it.



2. What I hadn't quite realized

But there's an aspect of your approach that I suspect is causing you unnecessary trouble -- that is, it's making achievement of your already demanding artistic goal more difficult than it has to be, rather in the same way that it would be much harder to paint the Mona Lisa without a model sitting for you. To go back to that second quote and complete it (again, emphasis mine)

.... I have always taken a theatrical approach to RPG as performance, and no performer should find themselves obliged to apologise to their audience.  If the show isn't ready you should not be performing before the public at all.

I get the strong impression that you consider yourself, as GM, to be the "performer" and the players to be your "audience," your "public." This is a traditional and time-honored approach, but it neglects one essential aspect of our hobby/art form/whatever you call it. In theater, you have a clear division between performer and audience. In roleplaying games, all the observers are also participants, so the performers are the audience.

Naturally, different participants can still have different roles -- traditionally, everyone focuses on one character, their own, except for the GM, who does the rest of the world -- and one person may spend more time as "performer" and less time as "audience" than another (or vice versa). But nevertheless (and this is where "the Impossible Thing Before Breakfast" comes in), as long as any participant has meaningful input, even if it's simply that a player is improvising dialogue for his or her character, that player is in the moment of that input a perfomer rather than merely part of the audience.

Now, there are lots of different ways to deal with this performer-audience duality in roleplaying games, but you appear to have chosen one that puts the overwhelming share of the burden -- perhaps an impossible burden -- on the gamemaster: You as the GM have to create something that appears seamless to the players, and if there's any moment where you falter, that's as awkward and embarassing as a stage set falling down. If the players have to prompt you or suggest something, you feel that's your failure as a performer, rather than viewing it as their contribution as fellow performers.

I'm not suggesting going all out to some kind of Prime Time Adventures or Capes model where everyone around the table is explicitly talking out-of-character all the time in terms of goals and issues and conflicts for the fiction. But I think you can relax a little and have more confidence in the soundness of your own creative contribution and in the contribution of your players. If the players ask about or think about something and you don't have an answer right away, your fictional world isn't so rickety that it falls down like a stage set: Try to think of it as the camera just being out of focus for a moment before your players help you adjust the lenses. If your players get excited enough about your world to remember details you don't and bring them up again, that's not a sign that you've failed, it's a measure of your success in getting them engaged as not only passive audience but as active fellow performers.

The obvious counterargument is that this kind of player participation "behind the scenes" of the fictional world is inherently damaging to their belief in its reality. Not necessarily so. Have more confidence in your players' ability to imagine out of both sides of their minds, as it were -- to separate the "performer" part of what they do from the "audience" part. This is where "creative denial" comes in again, as I understand the term: A player can contribute to creating the fictional world at one moment and then, in the next moment (or even in the same moment, with another part of the mind) appreciate it as if it were independently, objectively real. Sure, it sounds like a lot of mental gymnastics, but it's only one step beyond what we do all the time when we watch a movie and know intellectually that the special effects aren't real even as we're totally convinced of their reality on an emotional level: The giant space robot goes BOOM! and everyone flinches as if it had really exploded even when they're perfectly aware that they're sitting in a comfortable theater watching flickering images on a screen in perfect safety.

So, come to think of it, even when watching a movie, the audience isn't merely passively receiving, but actively collaborating with its own imagination, albeit in a small degree. After all, if you took a Kalahari Bushman or someone else with no experience of modern media -- even someone from the early 20th century who expected long establishng shots and wasn't used to the sudden jump-cuts of 21st century film and TV -- and showed them the same film, they wouldn't have the same experience of it because they lack the imaginative skills to do their job as an audience.

What does all this boil down to? Simply put, relax a bit and trust your players have the skills to be creative collaborators and appreciative audience at the same time.

[Ron Edwards]

Hi everyone,

What a great thread. Gareth, I've been looking forward to learning more about your play-experience for a while, and when it started up, I decided to shut up and read and not jump into it.

However, Sydney, I do have a little concern with your last post, because it's not clear to me that Gareth ever really asked for advice. Furthermore, if he did, then "just relax" is singularly bad advice in any context; my automatic reaction, at least, is to freeze and tense up. I suggest making it clear that such things as forgetting the guard's name is no big deal to you in your games, but that you can't fairly act as a judge on whether they are bad for Gareth in his games. And if they are, whether they (1) so bad (for him) that pushing himself to perform ever-more-excellently is the only option, or (2) actually not so bad as he thought, now that he's written it down.

Oh yeah - Gareth, I confess I'm not getting the most clear picture of just what it is you say and do as a GM. I gather that you don't dominate the verbal interactions, but I also gather that you do most of the scene-framing and descriptions of what player-characters see. Can you give me a representative example, or paraphrase, of what you might say to them in a particular instance?

Best, Ron

[Sydney Freedberg]

Sydney, I do have a little concern with your last post, because it's not clear to me that Gareth ever really asked for advice....

Not that that's ever stopped me before... yeah, point taken.

Gareth, I'm very curious as to your answer to Ron's question.

[contracycle]

I have been trying to think how to respond without actually writing a novel or similar.  So with that in mind, I will try to give a kind of paraphrased  account of the way a game played out.  This was heavily framed, to the extent that I created the character sheets and the situation, which is that the characters are FBI agents investigating a murder.

So the initial scene set, once the character sheets have been fleshed out into characters, was the stock interview with their superior giving them the outline of the problem and a clue to work on, with a little local colour such as the busy-ness of the office.  Once the players are settled I kick off with a statement about where they are, in this case in their bosses office, and I give a description,something like: "You walk into the office.  It is spare and elegant blah blah.  The chief is trim and balding blah blah; he glances up for some papers and says "Pull up a chair".  So this is all carried out in in-character dialog, with everyone acting their parts.  This goes on for only a few minutes and the characters are sent off to investigate.

They players then engage each other in a curious manner that drifts in and out of first person depending on habit, preference and experience.  Loosely speaking the tone is more inflected when in character, and more neutral when not.  I act as knowledge bank during this time, answering questions about the world and what characters (as opposed players) might know about such things. So in practice the way that works, is that if a player looks at me, the issue is about the world, and if they look at another player, they are in direct dialog.   I also listen to their plans and start to anticipate and compensate for them; sometimes I prompt or suggest things that might occur to residents of the gameworld, as it were.

Once the players have agreed amongst themselves some sort of Plan which they can now implement, or at least some sort of potentially fruitful act, the dialog will wrap up and they will start putting direct questions or propositions to me.  I try to look for or prompt a specific "go" decision for the plan because sometimes this is a bit vague when some of the plan is conditional. 

So in this case the players had a clue which was a very expensive engagement ring found on the body.  The ring carried a makers mark from a jeweler in the area, which is why they had the case.  So the plan they come up with, somewhat unnecessarily IMO (one of the players being an old and paranoid hand), was to pose as an engaged couple and inveigle their way into the jewelers trust, and then try to fish for  information out about the ring they were interested in.

So entering action, I set the scene again, describing their immediate arrival outside the building in which the jewelers was located (the jewelers a was a prepared location with one fully developed NPC, the master jeweler, and a verbal rather than graphic description of the layout etc).  Again this is little more than the building is made of such a material, how big it is, notable features etc.  The players briefly organise the last elements of their story and announce that they go in.  We play out their interaction with the receptionist, they get shown into the display room.  Again I give a brief location description, and details of the items on display.  The players set about pretending to be members of the wealthy set, and discuss with the jeweler the kind of thing that they are after, allegedly having seen something similar at a social event.  I guess this interaction, description and dialog, must have taken roughly half an hour, maybe more, pretty close to real time.  The players speak to each other OOC and IC easily more than to me; I only speak in response to queries or as an NPC or narrating the outcome of actions.

In this case the IC conversation was quite easy to turn towards my prepared clue, the photographic catalogue.  This contained the bespoke, rather than off-the-shelf, work of the jeweler and thus contained the names of the people who commissioned them.  So now the players had the name of the fiancee of the woman whose death they were investigating.

Having attained their goal, and accumulated some further information about precisely when the work was commissioned, the players go back into discussion mode.  They discuss amongst themselves how to approach the fiancee, given the sensitivity of the situation.  They do a trawl of engagement announcements to put a name to the body, which was handled in abstraction. The find out where she worked, and dig up some history on the company.  Conspiracy X has explicit powers for doing this sort of thing and so all they had to do was invoke their abilities. Similarly the search of the police databases that gives them an address.  This was probably another half hour.

So the players decide that their strategy will be to investigate the dead womens house first, and then go to interview the fiancee.  But I don't think we need to go further; this was roughly the first quarter of the game, which was a one-session event.  That is the basic dynamic of play, the alternation between planning phases and action phases.  In planning phases, I pretty much leave the players to themselves.  IME players are usually quite happy to spend time in inter-character discussion, and so how much play time overall is spent in planning can vary quite a lot.  If they are decisive and have a clear idea of what they are doing, it can be pretty short; if they are indecisive or not under pressure, they may waffle about for quite a while and I may have to chivvy them along.  In action phases I speak more, but still largely in response to player initiated queries or description of results.  How much I speak will largely be determined by the complexity of the information the players are asking for, or how much stuff is caused to happen or otherwise going on.  It's possible for an innocent question to trigger a digression on geopolitics or theology or similar but its fairly rare as an event.

So, does this help?

[Rob Alexander]

Gareth,

I have always taken a theatrical approach to RPG as performance, and no performer should find themselves obliged to apologise to their audience.  If the show isn't ready you should not be performing before the public at all.  Admittedly some of those rules arise from theatre being a business rather than a hobby, but IMO its still possible to take a craftsman's pride in your work and try to keep to those rules.

Since I asked for this thread in the first place, sorry that I've not been active recently. I've been very busy with work, but I'm still following with interest.

(I no longer have my initial concern, though, that I'll hit the problems you described in the other thread, at least for the same reasons that you have; I think our priorities and desires, game-wise, are very different).


rob

[Sydney Freedberg]

Gareth, I want to second Rob's thanks. I think your description of your interactions around the table confirm my initial guess that it's problem-solving, rather than roleplaying social interactions, that occupy most of your group's energy -- and if you're solving problems, you want a solidly believable world of puzzle pieces to manipulate, so that fits with your apparent "creative agenda" very well.