This is the second part of my reaction to Mike Mearls association that roleplaying has not really changed much and his definition of roleplaying inherantly requiring a Gamemaster figure.

In traditional (i.e. most) roleplaying, the Gamemaster is the only real author of the story.

Let me explain what I mean by that:

When White Wolf asserts in its "Golden Rule" that the players can ignore or change any rules that they don't like, what they're really asserting is the supremacy of the GM/Storyteller over what's written in the book and, beyond that, everything else game-related. But this is hardly old news.

In traditional play, the GM serves as a kind of valve or filter placed at the metaphorical entrace to the shared imagined space. All the players, including the GM, voice their suggestions on the kinds of things that should enter the space, but 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.

In the worst cases, the game turns into an effort by the players to guess the kinds of suggestions that the GM will accept, which in turn trains them to offer the right kinds of suggestions, in order to get the cookie of having their suggestions incorperated into the shared imagined space. For instance:

P1: I grab a barstool and break off a leg to use as a club.

GM: Um, you're not strong enough to really do that.

P1: Well, then I grab a beer bottle and break off the bottom.

GM: You hit the bottle against the table and it explodes in your hand, giving you several cuts. Got any better ideas?

Now, sometimes the players will offer suggestions that the GM thinks are even better than what he himself came up with, and he'll incorperate them into play, but notice that NOTHING gets in without the GM's say so. He's not allowing the players to influence the shared imagined space, really. He's simply stealing their ideas and incorperating into a bricolage of his own design. The GM decides where, how, and in what manner the players' suggestions fit into the greater scheme of things. And, if you'll notice, 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.

P1: Wow! 43 damage! I chop him right in two!

GM: Well, close. You hack right into his side, and blood shoots out like a fountain.

Even when system elements would seem to dictate the results ("A roll of more than 40 damage will chop an ork in half"), tradition and things like White Wolf's "Golden Rule" means that the GM's whim still reigns supreme.

So here's my thesis about traditional play: There's no truly collaborative involvement in determing what occurs. The collaborative part is the group brainstorming possible happenings, when the players voice suggestions that the GM weighs against his own. But when it comes down to actually manipulated the imagined space, it's all the GM's doing. He manipulates the space and then shares it, through verbal description, with the players. The players can try to influence the GM's decisions, of course, but this is not the same as them having direct influence over what occurs. In the end, it is all GM fiat and the GM is the only true author of the collage that results (though he did not, in fact, originate most of the materials that make up the collage).

Questions:

-- How can we get away from this style of play, with its dependence on the GM, his choices, and his instincts. Good play would seem to require a good GM who is in-synch with the game he's running and is sensative to the interests and input of his players. Even games that claim to be doing something besides this model may be guilty of buying into it. Are they really doing anything besides telling the GMs to be more sensative and in-synch? Do they players REALLY have any direct input? Even if the rules say that they do, will people just drift it back to the GM-author model?

-- Is is worth it (or even possible) to ever really break with this model? Universalis does, but it accomplished this by ditching any pretense at the Golden Rule and bringing the system in to be a new valve, saying what goes in and what doesn't. Can roleplaying happen without a "valve" of some point? Isn't that the Lumpley Principle in action? Is what the Principle calls "system" really just my "valve"?

Um.

Actually the opposite is true. 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.

So not only is it possible and desirable to move beyond GM-is-sole-author, it's inevitable. It's like a soap bubble, poke it and it's gone.

Games like Sorcerer, the Pool, My Life with Master - they have a strong GM, but the GM isn't the author. The GM has a particular authorship role, complementary to the players', without which the players' power would be diminished. That's a different bug entire.

edit: Every valve - every valve - is group consensus.

-Vincent

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...)

Right, Vincent. Point taken.

However, I don't see how the player's ability to stop playing the game is really that empowering. I took it as understood that everyone wants to play the game. If the only way you can directly influence play is to walk away... that sucks. Or, likewise, if the only way you can directly influence play is to threaten the GM with walking out if he doesn't include your suggestions, that sucks too.

I think that, most of the time, the GM DOES pull that kind of shit and, yes, it IS okay with the players. It doesn't matter if the players can choose to walk out or not because they WON'T make that choice. The players indulge the GM because they want to play the game, which leads to the situation I described.

My question, in your terms, might be something like how can we get the players to stand up and demand direct input without walking away or threatening to walk away? (Because, personally, I don't find that very constructive). Often times, in my experience, this involves first convincing them that they actually WANT direct input. I've run many games with traditional roleplayers in which I wanted to not take the GM-author role, but was occasionally forced to because the players weren't willing to step up.

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, with the GM providing convenient "blanks," spaces in which it's okay for the players to have direct input. Better, perhaps, but not quite what I was hoping for.

Does that explain more what I was trying to get at here, Vincent?

Yes! It does!

And now that's exactly what you need to be asking, if you want to do more with your game designs than file the edges of what's already been done.

(What keeps the players from contributing and also from walking out? Their social contract. How do you communicate a new, better social contract to a group, in such a way that they'll adopt it? By codifying it in rules! Universalis shows this beautifully.)

-Vincent

Jonathan Walton wrote:
So here's my thesis about traditional play: There's no truly collaborative involvement in determing what occurs...

-- How can we get away from this style of play, with its dependence on the GM, his choices, and his instincts...

-- Is is worth it (or even possible) to ever really break with this model? Universalis does, but it accomplished this by ditching any pretense at the Golden Rule and bringing the system in to be a new valve, saying what goes in and what doesn't...

Jonathan Walton wrote:
Can roleplaying happen without a "valve" of some point? Isn't that the Lumpley Principle in action? Is what the Principle calls "system" really just my "valve"?

ethan_greer wrote:
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...)

Jonathan wrote:
P1: I grab a barstool and break off a leg to use as a club.

GM: Um, you're not strong enough to really do that.

P1: Well, then I grab a beer bottle and break off the bottom.

GM: You hit the bottle against the table and it explodes in your hand, giving you several cuts. Got any better ideas?

EDIT: I'm sorry, I think I completely misinterpreted what you were saying and should have referred my post to the 'gmless playing' section further up :-P However, given that I just got here and haven't yet figured out how to delete posts, I figured I might as well just leave it there since I already said it all. But what follows are remarks on completely shared control.


When I started doing conventional, GM-based roleplaying, I had been doing shared control roleplaying with my friends for years without knowing the term for it. We handled it in pretty much the following manner:

Each person had one major character and assorted NPCs they controlled. We created each other's plot, much like in a larp, and avoided having more than two of a given person's characters in a scene at once.

Conflicts were resolved by concensus. For example, if two characters were in direct combat, we would establish which was 'better', decide they won, and fill in the details, with each person deciding their own character's injuries. Or, if we decided we wanted the worse fighter to win for dramatic purposes, we would agree on a stunt that caused this to be possible.

Setting control sort of naturally went to whoever had the relevant area most developed, or somebody volunteer to do setting for a new place. The person doing setting wouldn't GM so much as provide minimal details, and everybody would fill in the rest (eg, "I find an empty room", not "Are there any empty rooms?"). Developing areas tended to happen through NPC control (if you have a secret assassin group from Kenya, you were setting for Kenya, etc).

Obviously, given that there was no system whatsoever, this dynamic was based on a lot of maturity/responsibility and trust, especially so that IC secrets could be kept. "Take my word for it, I may look like an innocent school girl, but shortly after you attack me, I kick your ass. I just can't tell you why yet." Nobody could do anything to anyone else's character without permission, and we were all sort of mutually motivated to decide based on what was the most realistic.



That said, I don't think the system is nearly as good as a valved one. The OOC social courtesy required necessarily restricted depth, because unlike GM games, one major conflict could break the trust and therefore the game. It has its advantages and specific uses, but I think the disadvantages are greater.

As such, I would say that any shared control game would have to have a high amount of system built in to manage the shared control. The Pool seems to do this pretty well. However, it would seem that one such game that had myth of reality would necessarily run into issues when conflicting intuitions of the reality had to deal with each other. Mystery and secrecy would also be a lot harder.

It's not clear to me how to do this with a bunch of people who aren't really sensitive to each other and know/trust each other really well, but still make the game primarily about anything other than the sharing of the reality and the telling of the story.




I suppose another extreme would be techniques for improvised coherent two-hour plays. Is that in accordance with the direction you're talking about?

Aside to List: it is not possible nor permissible to delete posts at The Forge. No one is ever to attempt to unsay what he has said, for better or worse. Among other things, it reminds all of us to think before posting.

-----

Jonathan, I immediately think of Legends of Alyria. We played it with a referee, but the position grows less and less meaningful with each session--it seems to exist primarily to bring about consensus concerning the rules, in the same way that in playing a board game you usually have one person read the rules and teach everyone else how to play.

But I'm also going to put forward Multiverser. The game allows and encourages a great variety of refereeing techniques, from strongly illusionist to completely background. Always the instruction comes through that the player should always be allowed to determine those things that matter to his character within the situation. It may be my desire to run a game in which the player character rescues the princess, but as referee I'm not allowed to coerce him. I can attempt to hook him, but if he doesn't take the bait, either someone else will have to rescue the princess or she will not be rescued, depending on what makes for the better future in the game world.

I'm frequently running games in which I haven't a clue what's going to happen next, but I'm waiting for the player to tell me. Right now I've got a guy who is living in a castle at the end of the nineteenth century, building a garden, buying up German Mauser rifles, and training an elite combat unit. I have no idea where he's going with this--but it doesn't matter, because it is where he wants to go, and I'm along for the ride.

Of course, once again it helps that Multiverser doesn't require all the players to be on the same page. The other players are happily doing what they want to do as well, and I'm following along and throwing in whatever looks like it will be interesting.

As far as mysteries go, they have their own problems; but I did a spy scenario just recently that had some of those qualities. The essence of the game required me to know what it was that was happening that wasn't known, and then to present a snippet of information that accidentally reached the player character and pointed her (an actual game) to the fact that there was something happening that needed to be discovered, and where it appeared to be happening. After that, she told me what she was doing to pursue the information, and I worked out through the rules what she learned. Even though she ultimately had to find that secret to save the world, it was never so that I determined how she would do that, and she did it in many ways that would never have occurred to me.

I'll grant that a lot of games are structured such that the referee runs what happens. Frankly, though, Multiverser looks very traditional on the surface, and is not usually run as you've described.

--M. J. Young

One element I noticed missing from the above posts is the concept of a goal, the ideal of what play should be like. There's lots of mention of control, which is like putting up walls/rules to block player input. Put in a goal that the players all agree to, and then the players will know where to head to, and won't waste time bouncing off the walls (being wild).

For example, two weekends ago, I ran Zac's Shadows game for two other players, where the PCs were Jedi Masters or Apprentices. As the GM I said that play should be like the three Star Wars IV, V & VI movies, and with martial arts moves from the Star Wars I & II movies, and that the PCs were to save the universe just like the movies. This was the first time these players had comes across this type of game, they are regular players of ICE Rolemaster, and former players of RuneQuest II & III and AD&D. I kept emphasizing the goal, and play very quickly proceeded in the right direction, and I rarely had to say no. Instead, the players kept putting their characters into bigger and bigger "trouble'.

I think the keyword here is syncronisation. One valve point, one GM is similar in application as having just one game system in use among everyone. We don't come together as gamers only to dream seperate dreams...we need to syncronise some shared knowledge. Even freeformers do it, I'm reminded of an actual play account where two people would game over the phone and use mutually owned magazines to show each other what they are wearing. Yeah, synchronisation is more than just having the same set of rules in everyones heads, its a whole bunch of things being the same in everyones heads.

Really, between abstraction and a pratical limit on the number of rules you can provide, the GM is a stop gap for what it doesn't cover. Never mind the 'provide a plot' thing traditional play insists on, you don't need a centralised stop valve to do that.

From what I know about universalis (don't own it), instead of providing a million rules for covering things like wacking orcs with swords, it provides a neat few rules for creating rules for wacking orcs with swords (should the user want to). The sycronisation doesn't come from everyone knowing how to wack an orc, but how to make a rule about it (if you want) with the systems rules.

Ooops, I have no wrap up point to make!

I think Andrew's on to something here (to pick one idea out of a horde of good suggestions). Perhaps what shared goals do, though, is put the valve in individual players' minds, instead of in the hands of the GM. After all, there always has to be some kind of filter that decides what is and isn't appropriate, out of the hundreds of possible reactions to established situations. If whatever comes out of the players' mouths is going to be implemented, you need a way of making sure that input will benefit the game, hence the need for "head valves."

For instance, I like to talk about this Star Wars game I played at a Con last year in which one hero decided to pump the evil jedi full of tranquilizers, destroying any chance at a final climactic battle. When people complained at him, he pointed at the GM and stated that it was his responsibility to make sure his plan didn't work at the climax still happened. This, to me, is a clear case where a head-valve would have saved the game, but where the player was expecting the GM-valve to do that job.

Jonathan Walton wrote: My question, in your terms, might be something like how can we get the players to stand up and demand direct input without walking away or threatening to walk away? (Because, personally, I don't find that very constructive).

Didn't mean to imply that I disagreed with Vincent. I'm 100% on board with what he's saying. I was just reacting to the kick in the head his post gave me. :) Carry on...

Jonathan Walton wrote: I think that, most of the time, the GM DOES pull that kind of shit and, yes, it IS okay with the players. It doesn't matter if the players can choose to walk out or not because they WON'T make that choice. The players indulge the GM because they want to play the game, which leads to the situation I described.

I've run many games with traditional roleplayers in which I wanted to not take the GM-author role, but was occasionally forced to because the players weren't willing to step up.

ethan_greer wrote: 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...)

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

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.

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

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
--

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

Jonathan Walton wrote: 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.

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.)

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
--

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.
--

lumpley wrote: 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.

Jonathan Walton wrote: But why are we still stuck with the old model, over and over again?

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

Jonathan Walton wrote: 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.

Jonathan Walton wrote: 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

Jonathan Walton wrote: 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.

ethan_greer wrote: 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...)

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

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

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?

Noon: he or she can say so.

-Vincent

Wow. The GM perspectives break down into very "ecclesiological" distinctions.

Views:



Pontifical: This view states that the GM has complete authority over all things within the game and his final word is the law, regardless of anyone else's feelings or opinions.


Episcopal: This view would be that the GM has a role as an overseer or presiding judge/arbiter/guide/shepherd. He provides all the information to the characters that is necessary to make the game run effectively. While his word is law within the game, he generally is seen as taking a somewhat "passive" role while encouraging Player interaction/development.


Presbyterian: This view would be the view that a few chosen and recognized individuals within the gaming group have the authority to tell the GM exactly where the game should be going. This usually ends up in a political battle between the GM and "special" Players in an attempt to make "their" positions/ideas primary. (My apologies to any Presbyterians out there. This is not meant as an attack against any denomination, just a reflection of political/GMing views.)


Baptistic: Here the GM has little authority outside of what the Players allow. They DO tell him what he's allowed to do and what's not within play. If he disagrees and tries to go his own route, the Players generally rebel and might even "throw him out" and get a more appropriate GM. ;)


Free: Even more radical, these groups do not function with a specified GM, or if they do, the role of GM is shared amongst the various Players at different times or even split up at one time amongst all the Players. Whoever is the GM at any given time does not have the last word over the complete game, but must work within the bounds of the game and Social Contract in order to promote play for the other Players and encourage them to be good GMs too when it's their turn.



Anyway, that's just what occurred to me while reading the post.

We have various approaches to our gaming "religion". Whose is "right"??? Hmmm.... Good question.

:)

Later.

Xero, you have a point about the attitude taken here to game mastering. That is, a lot of negative implications are being thrown that way. And it might help a lot to clear the air about it, because what's happening is that you're reacting to a MacGuffin. That is, it's not really "evil GM's" that Jonathan is talking about here, if I don't miss my mark.

Let me see if I can restate his point in a more neutral way:

One potential way to change RPGs going forward (one way amongst many), is to alter the GM player balance of power.

The reason that I think that the negative stuff is just rhetoric is because, in fact in the original post, he asks if, indeed going away from traditional GMing is at all something to be sought. That is, he admits that it may be potentially a blind alley. So I don't think that he has any real prejudice here, at least not insamuch as it affects the discussion (he may have his own preferences, but that's not salient to anyone's argument).

I think that going forward, we can, at least for the sake of argument assume that playing in a traditional way is just fine. But it misses the point. Even if playing the traditional way is just as good a way as any other, in it's own right, does changing that split represent at all a way to create "progress" in terms of expanding what RPGs are?


Another point, Jonathan knows Universalis well. Here's a review he wrote for it on RPG.net. http://www.rpg.net/reviews/archive/9/9425.phtml


Now, to Jonathan's points from the thread above. I'm going to go line by line only as a way to organize my thoughts - each of your statmemts has evoked a lot of thought.

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.

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.

Jonathan Walton wrote: 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.

Doctor Xero wrote: 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.)

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

lumpley wrote: Noon: he or she can say so.

Jonathan Walton wrote: -- How can we get away from this style of play, with its dependence on the GM, his choices, and his instincts. Good play would seem to require a good GM who is in-synch with the game he's running and is sensative to the interests and input of his players. Even games that claim to be doing something besides this model may be guilty of buying into it. Are they really doing anything besides telling the GMs to be more sensative and in-synch? Do they players REALLY have any direct input? Even if the rules say that they do, will people just drift it back to the GM-author model?

-- Is is worth it (or even possible) to ever really break with this model? Universalis does, but it accomplished this by ditching any pretense at the Golden Rule and bringing the system in to be a new valve, saying what goes in and what doesn't. Can roleplaying happen without a "valve" of some point? Isn't that the Lumpley Principle in action? Is what the Principle calls "system" really just my "valve"?

Hey Doc.

Nowhere in that equation do fun, courtesy, or doing-what's-right come into effect.

lumpley wrote: If you can't trust the group of people you're playing with to take your interests seriously, for no reason other than because you're a fellow player, why are you playing with them? They suck.

Jonathan Walton wrote:
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.

Doc X: It's a problem for game design for certain (as well as for the social contract). In fact, that's what a game's rules are: a structure, a framework, that the group takes up to guide their interactions. A tool whose sole purpose is the creation of a social dynamic.

As a game designer, I'm not going to take on entrenched dysfunction. But a group of strangers at a con? Absolutely.

Have you played Universalis? You gotta. In Universalis, if you embrace your fellow players' contributions to the game, you get more dice. Your input into the game is based on how effectively you engage with everyone else's input. This in concrete, objective terms: no judge or referee required. It's genius - that game blows me away.

-Vincent

Doctor Xero wrote:

lumpley wrote: If you can't trust the group of people you're playing with to take your interests seriously, for no reason other than because you're a fellow player, why are you playing with them? They suck.

I agree, but I have to accept the fact that hobby groups are more common than friendship groups. If nothing else, people who have no emotional/social bond are the predominant players one encounters at conventions.