Here's an outline/proposal. Input appreciated.


I. intro to concept of alt gm-task distribution
A. snappy examples of functional alt-gm play (Universalis, Soap), (contrast with trad. task dist.)
B. examples of less-functional alt-gm play (Aria)
C. Introduce concept of game tasks, distinguish from role of gm
D. Continuum of games that centralize/decentralize tasks, emphasize that games mix c/d of tasks

II. Personal history

A. Gaming collaboration the norm for most things, and central to social circle interaction (yes I was raised in the wild by geeks)—social context, early to mid 90s
B. GM/player task split in my group—contrast with standard set of that era (eg White Wolf, contemporary D&D)
C. Late 90’s “standard” gm’d gaming: Ars Magica, Traveller Hack (“referee”).
D. My 1999 split from gm’d gaming—social contract and subjective descriptions of how it worked/didn’t work.
E. Commitment needed for use of pure negotiation, positive contributions of structure.

III. Game Tasks
A. Setting/background development
B. description
C. scene framing
D. in-character narration
E. conflict framing
F. conflict resolution (buck calling)
G. mechanic invocation (ball handling)
H. more… (final list probably will not be exhaustive)
EXAMPLES. EXAMPLES, EXAMPLES

IV. Who does what

A. traditional roles: player, gm, referee, kibbitzer

B. Joint tasks (eg conflict resolution—tasks for many participants)

C. Source vs Implementation
i.Sources for in-game material (the “what”)
1.person (creative, applicable knowledge,
suggestions, etc)
2.written materials (game texts, websites, other
research etc)
ii.Implementation (the “who”)

V. Continuum
A. Chart of Games – game tasks & who does what (all, gm, player, other)
B. Trends: What few games decentralize (ie conflict framing)

VI. Concluding words, my gaming life now, end on an up note with references to new up and coming games that break out of mold(s).


Tone: conversational. funny--goddess willing.
Target Audience: crossover indie-popular: of interest for anyone who goes “no gm, so what” due to examples of games and specifics of analysis (make chart and bullet point lists cogent and stealable); but primary audience is someone who doesn’t have any theory background, but is well-versed in trad. Role-playing. A paradigm breaker.
What I need: input on list of tasks and illustrative example of different distribution.
What I think might need a different approach:Section IV.


yrs,
Em

sorry about the formatting. php is a cruel master.

I'm not entirely sure that an exhaustive list of tasks is the way to go. Or, rather, I think you could go on and on and find out that a lot of them are overlapping and the same thing.

Some resources:
Empowerment and the Elements here at the Forge.
You've probably already read this, but: Doing Away with the GM, at lumpley games

For what it's worth, I consider the second approach (a short, conrete list of broad things) much better than the first approach, which is a little haphazard.

That said, I looked at your (A) and went "right, that's what's wrong with Polaris." Heh.

Also, right now the personal stuff seems to be smack dab in the middle of theory and more theory. I think it might be better to put it at the beginning (this might be best -- it makes a punchy byline) or after a rigorous theoretical description, as an example. As it is, it seems neither here nor there.

I am looking forward to reading your bibliography.

yrs--
--Ben

Ben Lehman wrote: For what it's worth, I consider the second approach (a short, conrete list of broad things) much better than the first approach, which is a little haphazard.

That said, I looked at your (A) and went "right, that's what's wrong with Polaris." Heh.

Also, right now the personal stuff seems to be smack dab in the middle of theory and more theory. I think it might be better to put it at the beginning (this might be best -- it makes a punchy byline) or after a rigorous theoretical description, as an example. As it is, it seems neither here nor there.

I am looking forward to reading your bibliography.

This seems nice. I especially like your goals, they are chosen wisely. Keep the personal stuff, it's crucial to the stated goal of paradigm-breaking.

However, I'm not seeing any stuff on the why of it. Why have a de-constructed GM? You might not want to go there, but there's plenty of interesting stuff to go over if you want to. Like, is there high level play goals that especially require or encourage this? I'd be especially interested in discussion of the active-passive dysfunctions of gaming that no-GM play can cure or balance. Any stuff on the associated problems are interesting, actually. And of course something about your ultimate convinctions: is GM-deconstruction the future, and is there any inherent value in the classical GM?

The above stuff would be useful if you're looking to grab the reader without strong feelings on the matter. By making it something of an ideological question you'd help orient your reader. To say it simply, offer the moon, heavens and a fun gaming experience as your bait, and the reader will pour over your every word to evaluate whether you're level or not. Much better than a slightly dry theoretical account, which this looks like, somewhat.

Just a passing note.

Can we please not use the word "deconstruct" to mean take apart, break down, or destruct? Poor Jacques Derrida just died; the least we can do is to avoid further maligning his work and encouraging yet more misunderstandings.

Sorry, just a pet peeve of mine that has, since Derrida's passing last Friday, gotten rather more aggravated.

I'd also recommend Vincent's threads on Improvizational System, to explore the idea that not all of this needs to be clearly worked out in advance, especially with strong Social Contracts in place. Instead, you just say, "You wanna handle this? Okay, take it away" and play just happens. Some people distribute tasks irregularly and instictively.

Also, for GMless play examples, there's always PTA, which seems pretty suited for that kind of thing (even though there is a GM as I recall, which I thought seemed a bit weird).

Eero Tuovinen wrote: However, I'm not seeing any stuff on the why of it. Why have a de-constructed GM? You might not want to go there, but there's plenty of interesting stuff to go over if you want to. Like, is there high level play goals that especially require or encourage this? I'd be especially interested in discussion of the active-passive dysfunctions of gaming that no-GM play can cure or balance. Any stuff on the associated problems are interesting, actually. And of course something about your ultimate convinctions: is GM-deconstruction the future, and is there any inherent value in the classical GM?

Thanks all.

Jonathan Walton wrote: I'd also recommend Vincent's threads on Improvizational System, to explore the idea that not all of this needs to be clearly worked out in advance, especially with strong Social Contracts in place....

Hey Jonathan,

In looking through the Forge for info on Ian Millington's Ergo (and related essays on collaborative role playing) I stumbled across this post where you mention you might have a copy of Ergo kicking around. If you do, could you send it my way? I've been trying to find the article "Principles of Collaborative Play" or whatever it was called, but all that seems to be on the web now is one interview of Ian by Andy Kitkowski.

Anyway, Jonathan, if you do have it I'd be most obliged. I tumbled to calling what I'm talking about collaborative play independently from Ian and I'd like to have my ducks in a row about how he used the word versus how I'd like to. But if it's not available to you, I'll just make a general call to the Forge.

yrs,
Em

Hey Em,

Yeah, I think I have a copy on my hard drive (you know, I should get Clinton to post it in the Forge articles one of these days, assuming I can track down Ian and get permission, tho that might be REALLY hard).

I'm in Beijing right now, away from my computer, but send me an email <jaywalt @ gmail.com> and I'll look for it as soon as I get home (probably Monday night or Tuesday morning). Ian's treatise is really the traditional model of GMless play, and he gives several different breakdowns of how traditional GM duties can be split up among players. Totally deserves to be quoted a bunch and given tons of credit for putting that out there (what, 6-8 years ago?).

Excellent! Thanks so much. I'm very curious to see what he said.

As for emailing Ian, Andy Kitkowski was in touch with him back in 2002 when he did this interview. So he might be a good person to ask about contact info.

Also, the form of my essay has changed somewhat from the outline. I think I've actually got 3 different essays that need to get written. This first one will generally talk about collaborative play and give examples from my experience and other games that have collaborative elements/mechanics in them. The second would discuss in detail the breakdown of how games split up responsibility for tasks. And the third would be a more personal essay about the improv gaming Meg, Vince & I have done--why we decided to co-gm, why we threw out all mechanics and how we decided to adopt different ones. Challenges etc. A hard look at what can be shared, what can't and why.

But for now, I'll just do one piece of the puzzle at a time.

yrs,
Em

Oh, criminy, here it is:

***********************************************
Collaborative Role Playing: A New Chapter


Somehow, the path I got on with role playing started with collaborative play. Before I even joined my first campaign, I heard about the elaborate back story that my friends had been working on together for years. This was, in fact, the second version of the world, changed after some major turning point in their collaborative efforts. Maps had been created, histories of nations charted, lineages of mages in their Ars Magica inspired world made into detailed genealogies leading back to the founders of the line. The overall impression was that this must have been what it was like to live with J.R.R. Tolkien, though somehow he managed this level of detail (and beyond—he crafted whole languages after all) on his own. Doing it as a group seemed the most natural thing. Why on earth should only one person be responsible for all this when in fact taking input from everyone enriched the world severalfold? There were other areas that were more traditional, less equally distributed, but from my perspective it might have been better if we’d been aware of how to make it more even. Pressures arising from tasks devolving to individuals could have been counterbalanced if we’d had more experience or there were better models for this kind of collaboration in the gaming world. As it is, I wouldn’t trade a moment of it for myself. And I seek it avidly in all my game experiences and in my game design.

Role playing is by its very nature a collaborative venture, but until recently few games took full advantage of this fact. Simultaneously a social activity and a creative exercise, role playing brings together the ideas and interests of a group of people. Each person who plays contributes to the adventure unfolding and has the potential to bring as much to the table as anyone else involved. Rules, as they are put into play by a group, create structure. They orchestrate the collaboration. Players use rules to say who among them gets to say what when. Rules applied may capitalize on the fact that there are multiple people contributing and encourage the input of many, or they may seek to minimize the potential chaos that many different perspectives could cause. Since the inception of the role playing game 30 years ago, most published games have taken the second path: trying to minimize conflict by giving players specialized and strictly demarcated roles. However, in the last five years, many games have been written whose rules--in part or in whole--help to coordinate the players’ creativity more equally among the players. These collaborative role playing games break down old assumptions about what it is to role play, and present another option for those who wish to explore new horizons in gaming.

In 1974 Gary Gygax and David Arneson struck the mold for role playing games with Dungeons and Dragons (D&D). In this game, as in countless others that have succeeded it, the rules divided participants into occupying one of two roles: being a “Player”1 or being a “Dungeon Master”--now more commonly known as a Game Master, or GM. These roles are nearly synonymous with role playing, and the kinds of collaboration acknowledged have been seen as occurring between Players and GMs. In Lisa Padol’s discussion of collaborative storytelling in role playing2 she describes it this way:

At its simplest, then, the players create [Player Characters,] PCs, and the GM creates the environment. The environment gives the [P]layers something to which the PCs must react, and this reaction, in turn, shows the GM how the environment must change. If the GM is wise, he will allow these changes even when they mean that his plans for the session must be completely re-worked. The GM cannot create the story without the [P]layers; if he can, he should be writing novels, not running games. All the gamers, the [P]layers and the GM, work together to create a story which will delight all.

1. All players take responsibility for the game, both the game-mechanics and the flow of the story. There isn't one player with special powers whose word goes.

Hm. Sorry for the repitions of certain lines. This thing has turned out to be a monster. I've got to start slimming it down now. And I expect to flesh out the citations and footnotes.

best,
Em

edited 1 time.

Hmm, somewhat rough, wouldn't you say? Will benefit from stylistic attention.

I found the text a little grinding at times, there's not much fire in it. More of earth and some water, really. That being the case I recommend laying the matter out in much more condensed manner. Present a phenomenon, define it, argue for and against, close off, rinse and repeat. Cut the wandering, it doesn't work well in an earth-type text. Turns it to mush instead of stonework.

The structure could stand some organization, like subchapters or sidebars. The example games seem to distract the general argument by popping up all over the place.

As far as subject material goes, the basic stuff is presented, but how about development? You take a social tack, claiming that responsibility sharing is about dividing the burden and preserving coherency in the game. Could anything further be said? I myself find the whole question of responsibility sharing to be a crucial cornerstone of what it means to roleplay, and can see all kinds of developments that stem from passivity engendered by GM/player-dichotomy. Shouldn't these consequences be explored some?

The main problem for me however is that there's not a clear train of thought to follow. Like, the main issue is introduced some seven paragraphs from the start, and even then is not stressed particularly. The text progresses logically, but because the reader does not know it's goal, there's no sense of perspective on what's important and what's background.

Overall, I'd like it more if it had more of a personal tone with concrete examples and stronger claims for and against the phenomenon. But that's just me, I like strong sparks with mucho fire, air and water. Some earth, too, that's important. Otherwise you run the danger of not making sense, like me.

Let's come back to this in detail soon.

Good suggestions, Eero. Thanks.
--Em

Hey Em,

In doing the "taking stock" thing, I thought I'd begin by giving you some thoughts on your article. I read it a while back, but recently went over it again and made some notes.

Overall, you've got a ton of good things to say, but, like Eero said, you're lacking a thread of delivery that allows them to come across clearly. You seem to be trying to do two things at once: 1) a history of the development of your own GMless style of play, 2) a history of GMless play period, across various games and such. I think you either need to keep these two different purposes seperate, or just choose one and really go for it. Maybe do one for this issue and then follow up with another next issue, or clearly divide your article in two. Or give a step by step history of your own development as a player, with milestone games mentioned along the way (even, I suppose, if you weren't aware of them at the time, just to show how well general design was keeping up with what you were doing).

Okay, so that's big picture. Here's more specific stuff.

Your "how I got into roleplaying" intro is a great choice. With a little bit of revision, I think it really does what you want. However, later on, when you get into Gygax, Arneson, and the traditional GM-player distinction, I get bored. You're not telling us anything that we don't already know here. I think you can assume that you audience knows about the traditional roles of GM and player. Give us a few sentences, a paragraph at most, and then move on to stuff that most people DON'T know. I don't get interested again until you start talking about the overlap between GM and player tasks.

Bringing in the 5 types of exploration makes sense, I suppose, but I don't really get what you're trying to say with it. I feel like I need you to go through how GMs and Players each support the 5 types, explaining the differences and similarities. For instance, I think it's interesting that Color has traditionally been mostly the responsibility of the GM, with the players just doing whatever they feel like, without really considering whether it's really appropriate to the genre they're supposed to be emulating or helping to support a certain kind of tone (as in my infamous experience were some guy pumped the evil Jedi master full of tranquilizers and killed the possibility of a climactic fight scene). I feel like talking about the GM-player divide in relation to these 5 categories would be much more interesting and helpful than the proceeding paragraphs that just renumerate common ways of thinking about it.

There were several places in the text where I wasn't clear about your terminology when it came to "games," "systems," and "mechanics." It was often unclear whether your "games" were single instances of play, campaigns, published game systems and settings, or something else entirely. Also, I couldn't tell whether your "system" included setting or just the mechanics. And, without examples, "mechanics" can be pretty vague too.

Okay, once you begin doing your reviews of games that support GMless or near-Gmless play, I really get lost. In the beginning, I thought you were going through the 5 types of exploration and talking about how different games handled them. You start with a paragraph on Setting and then write a paragraph on Character, but then the pattern stops. Personally, if you're going to do an overview of games like this, I'd do them in chronological order based on publication date, since most of these games thank their predecessors in the author's notes. This makes organization easier too, because you can do something like:

Ars Magica (Jonathan Tweet & Mark Rein•Hagen, 1989)

Ars Magica is an early example of a game that tried to move away from the traditional conception of GM and Player roles, doing X, Y, and Z.

...

Aria: The Canticle of the Monomyth/Aria Worlds (Christian Moore & Owen M. Seylar, 1994)

What a weird-ass fucking game. I can't believe it ever got published. But, beneath all the barely-playable stuff, there are actually some rather interesting ideas that could form the foundation of a GMless system.

...

Polaris (Ben Lehman, Planned: 2005)

Ben Lehman is such a genius. Have you seen how Polaris takes NPCs and divides them up among 3 other players in a 4-player group, making a neat arrangement were each player in a scene has a meta-game role as Ice Queen or New/Full Moon? It's so freaking cool that I want to use it in every game that I play for the next 3 months, until I get sick of it.

Hey Jonathon,

Thanks for the feedback. Again, those are excellent points. I've been working on a re-draft that I'll post soon.

best,
Emily

Hey all,

I'm working hard on this essay, really! Sorry it hasn't been to visible. The end of the semester has been catching up with me, so I'm still working on it. But I know what I want to say--just gotta say it.

Basically:

Intro~what is collab play, why you should care

Background~other sea changes in design, standard gm/player divide, influential games that established collab play (Ars Magica, Aria, Ergo)

GM tasks~definition, player/gm overlap and alternate distributions, introduction of 5 elements of role play as areas that can be collab/divided

Examples~go through setting, character, situation and system, contrasting standard split with other collab examples, including improv, written systems, etc.

conclusion~summarize and round up.


I like the idea of inset write ups of various collab games (Uni, PtA, Soap etc).

Thanks for your continuing patience. I really think this is an important piece to get out there, so I hope you can stick with me a little longer.

best,
Emily

Emily Care wrote: My participation at first was limited to learning about the world. But even this helped the others to elaborate what they were creating. I wanted to know what the elements of the major religions were, how they interacted with the social and political institutions. The background of the specific characters were in some mystery for me since my character did not know them, but my increasing knowledge about the world helped me get a deeper sense of the world, informing my characters actions. The background of my second character ended up getting involved in house politics, and a major segment of my last campaign with this group centered around the hunt for her and her ensuing trial for murder.

color (description and tone), setting (background and history), character, situation (interaction between character and setting) and system (rules and mechanics governing all). The tasks are activities which at base are quite similar, but which for each role (Player/GM) are focused on distinct areas of the game world. This type of collaboration is prescribed and bounded for both Players and GMs, with responsibility for the creative establishment of each element (color, setting etc.) partitioned off. Parts of each element may be reserved for Players, some for the GM, depending on how responsibility is distibuted by the rules used. The very difference between a Player and a GM boils down to where the partitioning lines are drawn among these five elements. And any other functional distribution is as possible to be created among them as the ones so familiar from the legacy of D&D.

Hi Liz!

Thanks very much for the comments. What I've got now is a lot less theory oriented and focused specifically on what traditionally a gm had done and how it can be shared out. The longer piece should be broken down into: 1) a history of collab play development (and, yeah, goddess bless Jonathan Tweet for that), 2) a personal essay where I talk about my gaming group's experiences with rejecting and then embracing mechanical system elements to support co-gm'd play and 3) a discussion of underlying theory of how various approoaches to shared authorship and gming (in which would be discussion of Lisa's collab storytelling essay, your paper on group narration and Quiogue's paper on collab fiction would figure prominantly.)

I'm thrilled that you are dipping your toe! And, as for the forge jargon--the point is to get more viewpoints. Can't wait to hear yours!

This week. A new draft.

yrs,
Emily

Collaborative Role Play: Reframing the Game
ecboss feb.2005

Role playing is, by its very nature, a collaborative venture. Simultaneously a social activity and a creative exercise, role playing deals with bringing together the ideas and interests of a group of people. A story is told, a world is created, and people are entertained. To this end, each person brings their own personal experience—of fiction, of history, of life. Each person who plays contributes to the adventure unfolding and has the potential to bring as much to the table as anyone else involved.

However, the vast majority of role playing games have been designed with a very different starting point in mind. They instead have rules that down-play the cooperative aspects of play, putting the lion’s share of responsibilities and creative tasks into the hands of one person: the Game Master, or GM. The GM describes the world that the players explore, keeps the action moving and provides relentless, yet impartial, adversarial opposition. Few other options have been offered. However, in the past five years, game designers and play groups have begun to change this fundamental way we look at role playing. The term coined for this change is Collaborative role play.

In Collaborative games, powers formerly held solely by the GM have been extended to all the players. This may be done in select parts of a game, or incorporated throughout. Players may be given more input about the background and setting, play multiple characters, be responsible for creating situations, invoking rules or resolving outcomes. With these features, Collaborative role playing games take advantage of the multiple viewpoints people will bring to a game. Instead of primarily utilizing one person’s ideas—those of the GM—they find ways to intentionally weave together the many creative strands that may be present. The historical GM/Player split is but one possibility along a continuum of collaboration, and new games that incorporate ways to make gaming more of a team effort capitalize on the inherent potential of gaming—the creativity of the entire play group.

Historical Accidents
The division between GM and Player is deeply embedded in the history of the role playing game. The two concepts arose simultaneously in 1973 with the publication of Dungeons and Dragons. The success of this game brought role-playing into popular consciousness and it became the template for successive games. For thirty years, the Dungeon Master who created an adventure for the other players has been born anew in countless guises, as the Game Master, Referee, Storyteller, Hollyhock God and others. Having players who are each responsible a single character and a GM who supports the rest of the game environment as well as the enforcement of rules has been the primary way to coordinate the many tasks necessary for gaming, with rare exceptions such as troupe style play found in Ars Magica. After twenty-five years, with the publication of Ian Millington’s game Ergo, concepts of collaborative gaming were formulated, and the term itself was coined. However, games with radically variant structures such as Ergo and Aria: Canticle of the Monomyth continued to be marginalized and few. The recent proliferation of games that vary from the norm shows that alternate arrangements are possible, actual play experiences show that people find them compelling. The endurance and pervasiveness of the traditional GM is an accident of history, most likely due to the fact that it is an easy division of a complex set of tasks.

How Deep the Divide?
The roles of the GM and the players can be broken down into many smaller tasks that can be distributed in any number of ways. These tasks are the avenues through which both Players and GMs give their creative contributions . What exactly are these tasks, and how precisely do the roles of Player and GM differ from one another? With the traditional Player/GM responsibility division, “Players” (non-GMs) focus on their proxies in the game world: the player characters or PCs. They may create a history for the character, describe its physical appearance, its personality and mannerisms, and most often create a numerical representation for it: it’s “stats” (eg quantified representations of attributes such as Perception, Dexterity, etc.). During the course of play, the Player of the PC will describe the character’s thoughts, words and actions, and how it responds to the world around it and events that occur in the game. The Player may roll dice or invoke stats on the part of the PC if there is an encounter that requires the use of specific rules or mechanics.

PCs may be seen as analogous to protagonists in a novel, the characters around which the action revolves. As Lisa Padol said, the GM is responsible for the environment in which the PCs experience that action . Though the whole group may have input on what role playing game is to be used, generally the GM choses the specific elements of the game world to describe and incorporate into play. The GM plays all additional characters, creates situations where PCs interact with other characters and events in the world, and is responsible for understanding, applying and interpreting the rules of the game. The GM may also be given other roles such as energy monitor or social arbiter, but only tasks directly affecting the in-game events will be considered here . This gives us the following break-down of standard tasks assigned to Players and the GM:

{this will be a table:}
The Standard Division of Player and GM Tasks:
Player:

• Describe and quantify history of Player Character (PC)
• Describe appearance, words, actions of one character (PC)
• Describe response of PC to in-game events.
• Use mechanics as they apply to Player Character.


GM:

• Describe and quantify in-game World.
• Describe the appearance, words and actions of many characters (NPCs)
• Create in-game situations and events.
• Invoke rules, apply mechanics, & resolve conflict: for world, all events & characters.



Looking at these activities overlap between Player tasks and GM tasks can be seen. Both Player and GM must provide description, create background and setting, play character(s), deal with specific situations and interact with the rules of the game. The differences are in the scope allotted to each role. Players specialize in doing these tasks as they relate to their own Player Characters. The GM does them with respect to almost everything else.

These tasks correspond well to the five elements of role playing, as described by Ron Edwards : Color (description and tone), Setting (background and history), Character, Situation (interaction between character and setting) and System (rules and mechanics governing all). These are common-sense categories which interpenetrate and overlap with one another: a given mechanic may affect Character, but be part of System. The tasks that comprise the roles of Player and GM fall within these areas. Taking a second look at Player/GM duties as they break down among the five elements of role-playing, a distribution can be discerned:

{this will be a table}
The Elements of Role Playing and Player/ GM Tasks:

Player


• Color (Descriptions of Character)
• Setting (Character history)
• Character Describe appearance, words and actions of one character (PC)
• Situation (Character actions)
• System(As affect Character)



GM


• Color Describe world, events, characters, objects, etc.
Set tone of game.
• Setting Choose and Describe World.
• Character Describe the appearance, words and actions of many characters (NPCs)
• Situation Create in-game situations and events.
• System Invoke rules, Apply mechanics,
Resolve disputes: as applies to world, all events & characters.


Phrase in parentheses denotes area of not much influence.


This is the traditional GM/Player divide. Players have some responsibilities in each element, but always with respect to their character. Character is the only area where Players may contribute meaningfully and extensively. GMs are given significant tasks and powers that span all the elements. But this is just one possibility, one set of distributions of these tasks. Many other functional divisions are possible. A growing number of games give players much more responsibility in the other elements. In some games the tasks of role playing are distributed so uniformly among all participants that the institution of the single GM is abolished. In these games, all players essentially become co-GMs, equals among peers.

The best way to understand how games create such innovative distributions of tasks is to look at examples of their rules in action. It is the rules of a game, as they are put into play, that allocate tasks. To this end, the rest of this paper describes the specific guidelines and mechanics that give all players equal opportunity to contribute meaningfully in all the elements of role playing. However, every play group may implement rules of a game the rules of a given game differently than how they appear in the published text. For the sake of discussion, it will be assumed that rules are applied as written, unless otherwise indicated. Also, of the five elements of role playing, color is the most difficult to separate from the others. Most tasks have some element of color, and few rules address color and no other element. For this reason, these examples of different ways to divide tasks within the elements of role playing will focus on the following four of the five: Setting, Character, Situation and System.


Collaboratively Creating Setting: 2, 3 or even 4 Heads are Better than One
Setting is perhaps the easiest of the elements of role playing to make collaborative. It certainly has the most immediate payoff: players who create their own setting are much more likely to become invested in it than those confronted with 200+ pages of background to read. The challenges are in creating a seamless whole out of what could be wildly disparate ideas, and in keeping track of all that may arise. Let’s look at how various game systems structure collaboration to help players overcome these obstacles:

Jenn, Charles and Phil are playing Primetime Adventures. Their campaign will be in the style of a television series, and together they are choosing the type of show they want to play. Phil suggests a gritty police drama like NYPD Blue. Jenn says she’d like to set it in New Orleans, LA in the early ‘90s--call it Murder City, USA--against a backdrop of Mardi Gras Carnival and dark Voodoo rituals. Charles objects that it would be easy to demonize Creole traditions and to avoid this, suggests that the main character be a police detective whose mother is a Mambo, a Voodoo priestess. The detective is torn between the rational world of the precinct, and her family’s religious heritage…

Meg, Vincent and Emily are playing an Ars Magica derived game using an improvised system. In the game, an emergency Tribunal, a gathering of wizards, has been called to address the recent fiery destruction of a wizard’s Covenant, or keep. During the Tribunal, the players will have a dozen or more characters each to play, many for the first time. In order to learn more about the wizards in the Tribunal and what kind of political machinations they may be up to, the players decide to run a session at every Covenant prior to the Tribunal, fleshing out each group of mages in turn…

Barry, Matt and Kim are playing Soap. Kim begins a scene where her character Valencia, the super-villain seductress of the piece, plans to reveal that she is carrying the love-child of Barry’s very-married, upstanding head-surgeon character, Dr. Bradley Underkopfler. Since Kim initiated the scene, she becomes the Author of it. She decides whether other players will have to pay her a Coin to enter the scene. She invites Barry to have Dr. Brad enter for free, but wants to Ban Matt’s character, Dr. Brad’s wife Patience, from the scene. Matt wants Patience to enter so he Bids 3 Coins to pay for her entry. Kim does not have enough Coins to match the bid, so Patience storms onto the set…

Sarah, Tony and Kip are playing Universalis. On her turn, Sarah pays one Coin and narrates how her character, Lexy, a spy for the United Federation of Inner Planets, flees Jupiter by spacecraft with information he stole from the Jovian capital building. Kip goes next and pays a Coin to introduce a new rule, or Gimmick. The Gimmick defines differences in the maneuverability of ships types in the 400 mile an hour winds of the Jovian cloud bands. On his turn, Tony pays one Coin to initiate a Complication, and two coins to introduce new world elements, called Components: he narrates that as Lexy’s skimmer dives through the thick ammonia clouds of Jupiter’s upper atmosphere, two Royal Guard fliers come screaming through the airstream, hot on his tail…

Holy %^$@*(&!!! Em, that's awesome! I just skimmed it, but I love the way you've organized it and used specific games to illustrate the points you make about different distribution schemes. You really took all our suggestions and then made this article your own. Sweet!

More detailed comments once I have a chance to do a more thorough read-through. I need to print it out and grab a pen...

Hey Em,

Here's first pass on editing. You might want to take a few days (or a week, even) off from the text before you really look at these and start making changes. You deserve it! And it'll help you come back fresh. AND some other people might have good advice by then.

I've copied your entire text and inserted comments in. Here's a key to my editing shorthand:

{and all that stuff} = Something that I'd cut out. Unnecessary.
hello <salutations> = The words in <> have been replaced. Word Choice.
[I don't know about...] = General comments and confusion.

My alternating between blue and red highlighting doesn't indicate anything. It's just easier to code with the drop-down color menu.

Also, note that my rewordings and such are just suggestions, at least at this point. If you make changes and I still have issues, we can fight about it later, before I use my editorial hammer to CRUSH YOU! ;)

Additional Editorial musings: I personally prefer roleplaying and roleplay to role playing, role play, role-playing, role-play, and the like. Also, I think it would read better if we could get game terms like coins, bid, etc. in italics instead of capitolized. Reading "Josh Bids 5 Coins to..." looks awkward.

------


Collaborative Role Play: Reframing the Game
ecboss feb.2005

Role playing is, by its very nature, a collaborative venture. Simultaneously a social activity and a creative exercise, role playing deals with bringing together the ideas and interests of a group of people. A story is told, a world is created, and people are entertained. To this end, each person brings their own personal experience—of fiction, of history, of life. Each person {who plays} contributes to the adventure unfolding and has the potential to bring as much to the table as anyone else {involved}.

However, the vast majority of role playing games have been designed with a very different starting point in mind. They {instead} have rules that down-play the cooperative aspects of play, putting the lion’s share of responsibilities and creative tasks into the hands of one person: the Game Master, or GM. The GM describes the world that the players explore, keeps the action moving and provides relentless, yet impartial [is the GM really EVER impartial? do you mean that they are traditionally expected to be?], adversarial opposition. Few other options have been offered. However, in the past five years, game designers and play groups have begun to change the <this fundamental> way we look at role playing. The term coined for this change is Collaborative role play [I think this last sentence could be better; maybe something like "They have begun exploring what has been called 'collaborative' roleplay."].

In Collaborative games, responsibilities <powers> formerly held solely by the GM have been extended to all the players. This may be done in select parts of a game, or incorporated throughout. Players may be given more input about the background and setting, play multiple characters, be responsible for creating situations, invoking rules or resolving outcomes. With these features, Collaborative role playing games take advantage of the multiple viewpoints people will bring to a game. Instead of primarily utilizing one person’s ideas—those of the GM—they find ways to intentionally weave together the many creative strands that may be present. The historical GM/Player split is but one possible division of responsibilities in <possibility along> a continuum of collaboration, and new games that incorporate ways to make gaming more of a team effort capitalize on the inherent potential of gaming—the creativity of the entire play group.

Historical Accidents
The division between GM and Player is deeply embedded in the history of the role playing game. The two concepts arose simultaneously in 1973 with the publication of Dungeons and Dragons. The success of this game brought role-playing into popular consciousness and it became the template for successive games. For thirty years, the Dungeon Master who created an adventure for the other players [you need to isolate the preceeding clause, with parens or dashes or something] has been born anew in countless guises, as the Game Master, Referee, Storyteller, Hollyhock God and others. Having players who are each responsible a single character [starting here...] and a GM who supports the rest of the game environment as well as the enforcement of rules has been the primary way to coordinate the many tasks necessary for gaming, [and ending here, you have too much info for one sentence; break it up] with rare exceptions such as troupe style play found in Ars Magica. After twenty-five years, with the publication of Ian Millington’s game [is Ergo really a game? more like guidelines for playing other games differently] Ergo, concepts of collaborative gaming were formulated, and the term itself was coined. However, games with radically variant structures such as Ergo and Aria: Canticle of the Monomyth continued to be marginalized and few. The recent proliferation of games that vary from the norm shows that alternate arrangements are possible. Furthermore, <,> actual play experiences show that people find them compelling. The endurance and pervasiveness of the traditional GM is an accident of history [whoa, nelly! that's a pretty big statement there! surely there are many non-accidental reasons for the pervasiveness of the GM/Player division] , most likely due to the fact that it is an easy division of a complex set of tasks.

How Deep the Divide?
The roles of the GM and the players can be broken down into many smaller tasks that can be distributed in any number of ways. These tasks are the avenues through which both Players and GMs provide <give> their creative contributions . What exactly are these tasks, and how precisely do the roles of Player and GM differ from one another? With the traditional Player/GM responsibility division, “Players” (non-GMs) focus on their proxies in the game world: the player characters or PCs. They may create a history for the character, describe its physical appearance, its personality and mannerisms, and most often create a numerical representation for it: it’s “stats” (eg quantified representations of attributes such as Perception, Dexterity, etc.). During the course of play, the Player of the PC will describe the character’s thoughts, words and actions, and how it responds to the world around it and events that occur in the game. The Player may roll dice or invoke stats on the part of the PC if there is an encounter that requires the use of specific rules or mechanics.

PCs may be seen as analogous to protagonists in a novel, the characters around which the action revolves. As Lisa Padol says <said>, the GM is responsible for the environment in which the PCs experience that action [is this the end of your Lisa paraphrase? it's unclear where it stops]. Though the whole group may have input on what role playing game is to be used [what do you mean here? what text should be used? what game should be played? your noun and verb don't seem to match up] , generally the GM choses the specific elements of the game world to describe and incorporate into play. The GM plays all additional characters, creates situations where PCs interact with other characters and events in the world, and is responsible for understanding, applying and interpreting the rules of the game. The GM may also be given other roles such as energy monitor or social arbiter [you drop these terms as if you expect us to know what they mean, but I'm not sure] , but only tasks directly affecting the in-game events will be considered here . This gives us the following break-down of standard tasks assigned to Players and the GM:

{this will be a table:}
The Standard Division of Player and GM Tasks:
Player:

• Describe and quantify [clarify] history of Player Character (PC)
• Describe appearance, words, actions of one character (PC)
• Describe response of PC to in-game events.
• Use mechanics as they apply to Player Character.


GM:

• Describe and quantify [clarify, as above] in-game World.
• Describe the appearance, words and actions of many characters (NPCs)
• Create in-game situations and events.
• Invoke rules, apply mechanics, & resolve conflict: for world, all events & characters.



Looking at these activities overlap between Player tasks and GM tasks can be seen. Both Player and GM must provide description, create background and setting, play character(s), deal with specific situations and interact with the rules of the game. The differences are in the scope allotted to each role. Players specialize in doing these tasks as they relate to their own Player Characters. The GM does them with respect to almost everything else.

These tasks correspond well to the five elements of role playing, as described by Ron Edwards : Color (description and tone), Setting (background and history), Character, Situation (interaction between character and setting) and System (rules and mechanics governing all). These are common-sense categories which interpenetrate and overlap with one another: a given mechanic may affect Character, but be part of System. All the <The> tasks that comprise the roles of Player and GM can be thought of as falling <fall> within these areas. Taking a second look at Player/GM duties as they break down among the five elements of role-playing, a distribution can be discerned:

{this will be a table}
The Elements of Role Playing and Player/ GM Tasks:

Player


• Color (Descriptions of Character) [there are, additionally, lots of ways in which character actions can reinforce or destroy attempts to create a specific color]
• Setting (Character history)
• Character Describe appearance, words and actions of one character (PC)
• Situation (Character actions)
• System(As affects <affect> Character)



GM


• Color Describe world, events, characters, objects, etc.
Set tone of game.
• Setting Choose and Describe World.
• Character Describe the appearance, words and actions of many characters (NPCs)
• Situation Create in-game situations and events.
• System Invoke rules, Apply mechanics,
Resolve disputes: as applies to world, all events & characters.


Phrase in parentheses denotes area of not much influence. [what does this note refer to?]


This is the traditional GM/Player divide. Players have some responsibilities in each element, but always with respect to their character. Character is the only area where Players may contribute meaningfully and extensively. GMs are given significant tasks and powers that span all the elements. But this is just one possibility, one set of distributions of these tasks. Many other functional divisions are possible. A growing number of games give players much more responsibility in the other elements. In some games the tasks of role playing are distributed so uniformly among all participants that the institution of the single GM is abolished. In these games, all players essentially become co-GMs, equals among peers.

The best way to understand how games create such innovative distributions of tasks is to look at examples of their rules in action. It is the rules of a game, as they are put into play, that allocate tasks. To this end, the rest of this article <paper> describes the specific guidelines and mechanics that give all players equal opportunity to contribute meaningfully in all the elements of role playing. However, every play group may implement {rules of a game} the rules of a given game differently than how they appear in the published text. For the sake of discussion, it will be assumed that rules are applied as written, unless otherwise indicated. Also, of the five elements of role playing, color is the most difficult to separate from the others. Most tasks have some element of color, and few rules address color and no other element. For this reason, these examples of different ways to divide tasks within the elements of role playing will focus on the following four of the five: Setting, Character, Situation and System.


Collaboratively Creating Setting: 2, 3 or even 4 Heads are Better than One
Setting is perhaps the easiest of the elements of role playing to make collaborative. It certainly has the most immediate payoff: players who create their own setting are much more likely [more likely? more easily maybe; but if I read 200 pages, I'm likely to become invested] to become invested in it than those confronted with 200+ pages of background to read. The challenges are in creating a seamless whole out of what could be wildly disparate ideas, and in keeping track of all that may arise. Let’s look at how various game systems structure collaboration to help players overcome these obstacles:

Jenn, Charles and Phil are playing Primetime Adventures. Their campaign will be in the style of a television series, and together they are choosing the type of show they want to play. Phil suggests a gritty police drama like NYPD Blue. Jenn says she’d like to set it in New Orleans, LA in the early ‘90s--call it Murder City, USA--against a backdrop of Mardi Gras Carnival and dark Voodoo rituals. Charles objects that it would be easy to demonize Creole traditions and to avoid this, suggests that the main character be a police detective whose mother is a Mambo, a Voodoo priestess. The detective is torn between the rational world of the precinct, and her family’s religious heritage…

Meg, Vincent and Emily are playing an Ars Magica derived game using an improvised system. In the game, an emergency Tribunal, a gathering of wizards, has been called to address the recent fiery destruction of a wizard’s Covenant, or keep. During the Tribunal, the players will have a dozen or more characters each to play, many for the first time. In order to learn more about the wizards in the Tribunal and what kind of political machinations they may be up to, the players decide to run a session at every Covenant prior to the Tribunal, fleshing out each group of mages in turn…

Barry, Matt and Kim are playing Soap. Kim begins a scene where her character Valencia, the super-villain seductress of the piece, plans to reveal that she is carrying the love-child of Barry’s very-married, upstanding head-surgeon character, Dr. Bradley Underkopfler. Since Kim initiated the scene, she becomes the Author of it. She decides whether other players will have to pay her a Coin to enter the scene. She invites Barry to have Dr. Brad enter for free, but wants to Ban Matt’s character, Dr. Brad’s wife Patience, from the scene. Matt wants Patience to enter so he Bids 3 Coins to pay for her entry. Kim does not have enough Coins to match the bid, so Patience storms onto the set…

Sarah, Tony and Kip are playing Universalis. On her turn, Sarah pays one Coin and narrates how her character, Lexy, a spy for the United Federation of Inner Planets, flees Jupiter by spacecraft with information he stole from the Jovian capital building. Kip goes next and pays a Coin to introduce a new rule, or Gimmick. The Gimmick defines differences in the maneuverability of ships types in the 400 mile an hour winds of the Jovian cloud bands. On his turn, Tony pays one Coin to initiate a Complication, and two coins to introduce new world elements, called Components: he narrates that as Lexy’s skimmer dives through the thick ammonia clouds of Jupiter’s upper atmosphere, two Royal Guard fliers come screaming through the airstream, hot on his tail…

Just to confuse everyone, I'll be using a different notation for my remarks, mostly because I have less of substance to say... I have the passage I'm referencing bolded with my comments <bolded and enclosed in angle brackets>

Emily Care wrote: Collaborative Role Play: Reframing the Game
ecboss feb.2005

<...snip...>

In Collaborative games, powers formerly held solely by the GM have been extended to all the players. This may be done in select parts of a game, or incorporated throughout. Players may be given more input about the background and setting, play multiple characters, be responsible for creating situations, invoking rules or resolving outcomes. <I'm not quite sure what either of these two things are, I have some good ideas, but I'm not positive. I suggest either further defining them here, or mentioning that you will be discussing them in more detail later, possibly with references to the sections they will be discussed in. Also, I'm not sure that your sections actually make it clear that this is what they are talking about> With these features, Collaborative role playing games take advantage of the multiple viewpoints people will bring to a game. Instead of primarily utilizing one person’s ideas—those of the GM—they find ways to intentionally weave together the many creative strands that may be present. The historical GM/Player split is but one possibility along a continuum of collaboration, and new games that incorporate ways to make gaming more of a team effort capitalize on the inherent potential of gaming—the creativity of the entire play group.

<...snip...>

Playing Multiple Characters: More Complex, Not More Confusing
Characters are the primary vehicle that players are accustomed to using to create in role playing games. As such, this is a natural venue to expand upon, allowing players to have greater impact on the game world, and broadening their experiences of it, by playing more than one character. This may be intimidating to players due to pragmatic issues such as what to do when your characters have to talk with one another, or fears that those with more characters may get more time and attention devoted to them. With a clear structure and a healthy social contract, <This is just a suggestion, but you basically have no undefined jargon in the entire piece except for this. While the concept of social contract could be considered obvious I recommend rephrasing this, but I'm not sure what would work here. You may choose to keep social contract because it is in all honesty the best word I can think of to describe this, but a lot of the meaning and implications are lost to someone not already familiar with the concept> these challenges may be easily resolved.

<...snip...>

This situation turned out to be an incredible opportunity. Taking time to play a session at each individual Covenant allowed us to flesh out the other mages of the region, of whom we had known a minimum before. <very odd phrasing here, I suggest "of whome we had known little before" or possibly "who had not gotten much screen time before">

<...snip...>

Conclusion
These examples are but a beginning to the different ways that the lines defining game tasks may be re-drawn. The new generation of games that have been published in the last five years testify to this fact. Games such as Sorcerer, My Life with Master and Dogs in the Vineyard each utilize collaborative techniques in key areas, especially System and Setting. These games help players create an atmosphere of collaboration while retaining most of the usual powers of a GM. Other games, such as Donjon, Engles’ Matrix, Shadows and Primetime Adventures give extensive powers to players, changing the experience of role-playing radically by opening multiple other elements to input by players. And a final group, including Universalis, Soap, and the in-play experiences of various free-form play groups, have done away with the idea that any player should have more or less access to contributing using any of the elements. This is the heart of Collaborative play. At every level it is possible to empower all the players. New games such as Capes, Scarlet Wake, and others are being published right now that have new ways to do all of these things. Far from there being but one way to play, there are a myriad of options open to all. The horizons of role playing games, which were once limited to the confines of certain shores, have expanded. Players may still seek the familiar waters of the GM’d game, but now the depths and reaches of the oceans of Collaboration are waiting to be explored.

Thanks, muchly, Jonathan & Thomas. And also to Ben for your comments on it this weekend (great to meet you!), & Meg & Vincent too, for their input last night.

I completely agree about the conclusion needing to be stronger. It was really just a first stab at an ending, tho I am darn proud of the horizons metaphor and hope to keep that or something better.

Thanks for the line by line breakdown, Jonathan. I've got a bunch of my own revisions planned too. I think I'll take your advice and take a break, and come back to it in a bit to streamline the language & rework certain parts. Ben & Vincent pointed out the discussion of character as part that could include more different issues, so I'm going to think on that. JW, good suggestions on what other games to discuss. I went with what I knew best, or thought of at the time and don't view it in any way as exhaustive. I'll think on your examples. I'll send you a text file version too, so you can see the tables.

And, Thomas, thanks for pointing out my jargon. It's important to me to have all the language pretty small and transparent, with either def's in the text or in the footnotes.

Thanks so much to everyone for your help. I'm so glad to be at this point with it, and 100% would not have been able to do so without all your encouragement.

yrs,
Em

I was thinking that Character, as a shared element, is actually much stranger than it seems, because it ventures into the realm of alt-player task distributions, taking things that are traditionally a player role and dividing them up.

So things like two players playing one character is as important or more important than one player playing many characters.

Do any games do this? Polaris does, I think, but it doesn't exist.

yrs--
--Ben

Ben Lehman wrote: So things like two players playing one character is as important or more important than one player playing many characters.

Do any games do this? Polaris does, I think, but it doesn't exist.

Your PC/NPC distinction sounds like somebody who's been playing with Vincent for too long :) NPCs can exist for many reasons that are not necessarily relative to PCs. For instance: Color (this is a big one, that I use all the time). Or to give the GM a pseudo-PC in the game with which to interact with the other characters. It just depends if the choices made by players (and their characters) are the focus of the game or not.

In the style of play that Vincent advocates, it certainly seems to be: NPCs are mostly valued as tools for expressing PCness. Heck other PCs are similarly viewed. So's Setting and Situation and the rest: all tools for putting the focus on player choice. But I wouldn't call that a hard and fast rool, especially in high Sim games and ones where the focus is not so much on player expressions of character. At least, I think it's a bit more complex than that.

Yup, Jon, you're right, no reason to be character-centric. The essential difference, though, looks to be the same in your color example and in my adversity type: the "NPC" type character exists to illuminate something beyond itself within the sis. Makes sense to me to look at the functions characters--and all other elements of the sis--may fulfill rather than just who controls it.

best,
Em

OK, some comments. I won't be looking at what others have commented, so probably duplicates. Also, this is pretty much thought-stream, no sense in thinking feedback over too much. Ignore to taste.

Emily Care wrote:
Historical Accidents

How Deep the Divide?

This is the traditional GM/Player divide. Players have some responsibilities in each element, but always with respect to their character. Character is the only area where Players may contribute meaningfully and extensively. GMs are given significant tasks and powers that span all the elements. But this is just one possibility, one set of distributions of these tasks. Many other functional divisions are possible. A growing number of games give players much more responsibility in the other elements. In some games the tasks of role playing are distributed so uniformly among all participants that the institution of the single GM is abolished. In these games, all players essentially become co-GMs, equals among peers.

Hello Eero,

Thank you so much. You make great points.

Eero Tuovinen wrote:
You make it sound here like Ergo singlehandedly formulated the idea of collaborative gaming. If this is so, I'd like to hear much more about it. If it's not, then perhaps you should have a somewhat slower and more detailed historical chapter.

To clarify: if an immersionist reads what you've written here, he might easily consider the whole analysis false, because he's reading your observations as posited material causes: as far as he's concerned, the GM/player tasks are divided based on the psychology of manipulating the SIS, and any task differentiation based on the five elements of roleplaying is rather non-consequential. It'd be better to explain to him the point of the excercise.

Emily Care wrote:
The history paragraph is an extremely short form of an entirely different essay I have in draft form now, after culling it out of this essay. What I kept hitting up against in writing this was the fact that I had way too much material. I had to struggle to write just one essay instead of 4-5. Just the learning curve, I guess.

What I need there is a paragraph that defines the scope of games & gaming culture that I am addressing, which is the US lineage descending from D&D. Would that address the issue an immersionist might have? I completely agree that the elements are arbitrary, though useful. Could you say more about this: the GM/player tasks are divided based on the psychology of manipulating the SIS?