So I wanted to see what other people's take is on this concept, especially people who are regular GM's for games. I have been running a game session with a group of friends from 4 to 6 people for the last two years with our game. Every so often at the end of a cycle I trade off my GM duties to one of my players (a specific person who also GM's) and become a player myself for awhile in his cycle of adventures.

I've tried everything from plotting out very detailed nuances of every element and plot point in a game and lead my players through a tightly knit and designed storyline point by point, bringing them back into the fabric of what I am weaving when they wander too far astray. I believe that I have done an excellent job of it overall since everyone seems to be greatly enjoying themselves. The only trouble I have with this structure is that I find myself placing too tight of constraints on them which lock them into specific areas of the world and making the key NPC far too powerful and evasive for them to deal with (as if it were a plot point battle in a final fantasy game and combat is just there for a story development device).

The swing here is the fluid story with only a vague overview of what I want to accomplish as far as start, collaborating the players, a few milestones and an overall end. These tend to go well enough as long as we are playing in a well established place. The world which we have been placing all of our games has a very set history and set of events, mostly determined by our game sessions of past. I find also that the first example of a very closely plotted story almost always works best in an unknown world, one which the players do not know by heart from other campaigns. I find that most players will only suspend their disbelief that their character has never before been to a place, especially if they have been there before with other characters. It sort of takes the magic away from a place if other characters have been there and done that. Closely plotted stories in a new places give the players less of an opportunity to wander off point as opposed to hosting in in their favorite town.

So what is your take?

Well, what's your priority here?  Do you want to tell your story, whether the players are interested or not?  Or do you want to tell a story the players are interested in, whether it turns out to be your story or not?

Well I generally like to run a game which everyone involved enjoys, often though you need to tell a story which is being set in a fresh, new environment which gives them more possibilities to explore in the course of playing the game, weather you are telling your story or the one which evolves through game play is really a moot point I think, because in the end it only matters if the overall group is enjoying what is being played.

Well, I disagree about it being a moot point.  Yes, in the end, if everyone has fun then you've done a good job.  But there are tools for providing a fun game either way, and you'll want very different tools if you want to ease people into appropriate roles in your own creation than you'll use if you want to open up the canvas of your imagined space to being affected by all the players.

So I suspect that the less you think about fundamental issues like this the less likely you are to end up with everyone having fun at the end.

I didn't mean that the methods to the goal were moot, I merely meant that if your game results in enjoyment, how you get there really doesn't matter.

But yes I agree, and that's just what I was trying to say, when you stated that different campaign models will require different tools to get the job done.

Hi,

Travis wrote:
I didn't mean that the methods to the goal were moot, I merely meant that if your game results in enjoyment, how you get there really doesn't matter.

The only trouble I have with this structure is that I find myself placing too tight of constraints on them which lock them into specific areas of the world and making the key NPC far too powerful and evasive for them to deal with (as if it were a plot point battle in a final fantasy game and combat is just there for a story development device).

I think we should accept Travis' assertion that his players enjoyed the game, not only he himself as the primary narrator of it. However, this sort of response does not come from all GMs. GMs who have dull stories that force players to play them are the worst out there, which I find at almost every gaming session I play at local cons in Sydney. However, intelligent, imaginative GMs can keep people interested - they are enjoying gameplay because they are enjoying the story the GM has created for them. I am going to presume that Travis is an imaginative guy and that his stories are those that keep people interested, if they are prepared to forgo player control because they enjoy hearing what Travis has to say.

As a general rule however, my own preference (and those of my players) is on granting player control to the story, with the end result being the story defined by player/character interests. However, Travis raised an important point in regards to this, and one that has come from extensive play with my own fantasy campaigns. I usually play with a core group of 3 players, with casual players coming and going, for greater or lesser periods, into the story. The fantasy world has organically grown around mutual actions of myself (the GM) and the players and has become this overarching vast tapestry of places, people and agendas. Newer players coming into it don't know what the hell is going on. And as such, they require more pre-scripted, or at least pre-defined, stories. The general outline (which is usually the setting itself) becomes a plot driven piece around small, selected elements.

The general consensus on the Forge is that outlines (assisted by bangs and whatnot, I am not too good on the terminology yet, so please forgive me if I am simplifying overly) are a more effective way to run things. But I find with less experienced players plots work best by far. There are virtues to having plot driven stories that should not be discounted - the reasons to summarise:
a) If the GM is a cool guy with a great story that players are willing to hear and
b) If the player is inexperienced and doesn't know what the hell to do.

These are definite merits of plot-driven pieces that should not be overlooked I think.

Thanks Justin, I and most people around me consider me to be a creative guy, but there are always pot holes in plotted out stories I admit. The biggest is keeping people on track without making it feel like you are herding cattle. I think the big issue is adaptability. I know the world we have developed through writing and through my player's past actions so well that I can adapt a plot point, character, or location to be the next area of the campaign's time line even if it wasn't originally plotted out to be it. Also if a player decides he wants to assault an NPC antagonist which is key to the story, I can either find means to replace him with a plot twist or provide a way fro him to escape. In the case of the antagonist being way too powerful for the players, that's where a number of elements comes into play such as the influence/reputation rating of a character and the narrative information. If it's a key person I tend to describe what the players know of this villain with flare and panache and try to impress the caliber of this character so they do not mess with them. I also have no reservation about using a "Dick weed" character (glossary definition) as an example when he doesn't want to heed the warning of impending doom in my description and engage this massively more powerful character.

I do think you are very right about the general rule that plotted, linear stories are best for beginners, as such we have this kind of adventure in our RPG core book. Outline stories tend to move much more fluidly and while preserving some major milestones, provide more lenience for divergence and player action. Even in a linear story I tend to allow the plays free reign in a lot of areas, and what they do most often influences the world around us for current and future games.

I think the most import thing is not to developer your preferred delivery method as a GM but rather to determine which method will work best for the story you want to tell and the composition of the play group you are playing it with. My game group comprises of my wife, my art director and friend of 24 years, his 14 year old brother who's played a lot of RPG's with him, a mutual friend who is fairly new to RPG's, his 14 year old brother who is also new and my art director's slightly less young brother of 19. My assessment in the various campaigns we've played in our system in the last two years is that linear plotted stories work best for small groups, it's hard to keep people interested and involved yet still keep the versatility to allow them to make their own way to some degree. The age differences also are interesting as the younger two brothers often go off track very easily. This seems to be random and based on level of fun. The more fun we're having in the game, the more jokes they make and More tangents they go off on, which is assuring in one sense that they are enjoy themselves, but annoying when we're trying to hit a major plot point.

Player personality also determines quite a bit, ll but one of the players (one of the younger brothers) seems entirely content to hear a build up and narrative description of situations and surroundings which help impress upon the group the gravity of situations and the nature of the place around them, but he's rather impatient about it sometime (ADD I think) and as a result I glazed over a small portion of one of my recent game secession without really impressing the importance and relevance of a scene, which in turn made the group progress beyond it without really savoring and absorbing it. Outlines are also nice simply because they are a little easier to follow for the GM than detailed story data.

My next campaign I plan to set in the distant past of the world which we have made and come to know so well. It will be a very much more open ended story with only a few milestones to geode people along when needed, and some NPCs as plot devices but the goals and choices of the characters will be entirely their own. I want to see the world which they can build especially since the resources and places they know from their other game are vastly limited and not as they knew them. The setting itself will be richly described but starting point and motivation will be entirely up to the group.

Well, it sounds like you know exactly what you want to do, and are having fun doing it.  Cool!  Have fun!

Justin wrote:
I think we should accept Travis' assertion that his players enjoyed the game, not only he himself as the primary narrator of it.

wow you just totally blew my mind man! :) that was like so deep and Haiku it borders on confusing.... or maybe it's just late at night and I've been GM'ing for the last 8 hours.

I think what the overall purpose of this thread is not so much to review my gaming style but to discuss the tools involved with these two models of GM'ing and what works for each of them. It's sort of like a discussion for the organizational methods of GM'ing.

I'm not even sure what this thread is about, then again they are amorphous and mutating things, that change with each new post, so I'll just work with the remarks this far.

Callan - I didn't read the thread this way, although I am glad that you pointed out what you did. Mutual back-slapping is not constructive for thought or analysis, I was just trying to say that we should accept that what Travis is saying about the responses of his players as he was the only person there. It is a courtesy. I do not run plot-driven games (except for newbies as I said) as I personally find them limiting for my own GMing stye. Then again I think plot based narratives get a bad rap when they are a staple of the RPG community, for whatever reason. A discussion of why they are a staple would be more interesting than the general anti-conformist response I see here. Sorry if that sounds overly harsh, but that's the way I interpret it. Please, correct me if I am misguided.

Travis - on the same note, to discuss the relative merits of the two forms of GMing style is all well and good, but to appease the skeptics, perhaps some discussion of the elements of dysfunction that may have appeared in your games would help analyse the situation more deeply. Perhaps a pro's and con's list would be a good result from such a discussion.

As a final point, many people are happy playing adventure/roleplaying computer games with linear plots and predefined characters because it is not story control that is important, rather the experience of playing the game makes it worthwhile - conflict scenes (in roleplaying dice rolling, combat etc. in comp. games fighting aspects), immersion in the setting (in roleplaying games through evocation of setting, in comp. games through nifty graphics etc.) etc etc. The indie gaming forum has grown around a particular mode of play that tries (and rightly so) to negotiate narrative and story power between GM and players to the point of sometimes having no GM at all. There was a good thread about it http://www.indie-rpgs.com/forum/index.php?topic=16037.0.

The more traditional methods of GMing (the auteur method so to speak) have their merits too, and these should not be discounted, rather discussed. The problems associated with plot driven narratives have been extensively detailed in various articles and in many threads and is well known. What are the merits?

If I am off-topic, may the Mighty Moderator or anyone else spank me down.

Well basically this thread is about the comparison between running a story driven linear game VS an open ended milestone or outline based game. I most often tend to run a structured game with pre set plot points, leading the group along through the adventure seeing how they interact and react to the world around them. I also make it a close point at the start of these linear campaigns to help each player develop a very detailed and in depth character which has back story and motivation. Taking these ideas away, I'm able to collaborate a starting point for the group and set up several interconnected story possibilities between the PC's. These type of stories I generally write out dozens of pages ahead of where we are playing, making minor changes and add ons as we progress, the whole time adding more material. We generally play through about a page and a half of material in a single game session lasting about 6-8 hours with breaks and tangents/social divergence etc. The Pro's are chiefly a lavished world which develops based on the actions and desires of the players, and an in depth plot which unfolds and often shocks and amazes the players with the revelation of twists which were carefully engineered around their actions and choices as the game progressed or pre-seeded with their back stories.

The Con's of this type of game we've covered left a right, yes it can be repetitious, it can feel like tedium since players are following the plot as it's fed and reacting rather than being proactive. I don;t generally have this problem with my play group since they all have very focused motivations and history which drives them to accomplish their own agendas within the greater events surrounding them.

The other method is the milestone/outline method which hits on a few distinct mile points and a few details along the course of the players defining the adventure with their agendas. I admit that I generally use this less because do to my playing style and methods as a GM I feel more comfortable having a detailed road map in front of me rather than winging it as it were. I feel like my cheese is left out in the wind so to speak if I don't have material to progress the events. A critical flaw I have is giving not quite enough or just a bit too much in this area which can make a session stagnate. From time to time I have a vague outline like "The group ends up in the city of Churchibell just as a siege of the city begins. The port is closed to all travel and the group is interned in the city for the duration of the struggle." and I really have no other points of event. I can then be in such a rush to get the group to the next plotted progression of the agenda I have, that I ignore the natural progression of the story they the players are developing here in the city which I seem so eager to get them out of. I think that is the major trouble which GM's who are used to "old school" role playing who try the outline method, they tend to either distrust their players with the progression of the game, or at least seem to rush to the next well established theme.

Thanks also for that link, Justin, it does clarify for me some elements which I hadn't been able to nail down in words. It does ring through to me though that the type of individuals and the dynamic of how they are together can often be the key in determining what GM method you should use on the given story at hand.

Also I think the purpose overall of this topic is also to discuss the relevance of the world setting and player familiarity with it as an aspect to determine which GM method to choose. As I had stated in the first posting I find that well established worlds tend to work better for Player driven play, while new worlds revealed for the first time are often better for linear stories and GM controlled plot progression.

again I think it's give and take between GM's and players as far as who has control of the plot devices and progression, and no one method should be used exclusively in any game session.

Hi. i'm Jake. I play with Trav and am the GM he sometimes switches off with.

For anyone who is wondering,. I think Trav is a fun GM and a fun guy to play with. So theres that. We also have very different approaches to running our games. Trav has described his, but let me give you the "peer" impression. To me it seems like Trav plans alot. NPC's, maps, items and equipment, plotpoints, storylines, backgrounds.; every aspect of his game is plotted out ahead of time. He recently told me that he had some absurd number of pages of plot and plans written up for the game we just started (absurd for reasons I'll make apparent in a moment). Thats the kind of game he runs, a well plotted, detailed game with a set storyline. Is there room for improvision? Sure, Travs a flexibile guy, and we (me and the other players) are constantly going off in new directions which i'm sure he hasnt planned for. As he said, he adapts, he moves the events he's planned around. Thats the kind of game he runs, and we all have fun. Sure there can be problems (Trav has pointed out many of them already). stagnation can be a big one. Sometimes we get so deep into e\vents we're not sure where to go or what to do. Or sometimes we need some fresh air an a break from the storyline. It happens. I think it probably happens a lot in any long game.

I'm, like, the exact opposite. The last game I ran (for our high fantasy CrossRoads of Eternity game), which lasted for about 3 months and just ended last month was based on a single image I had i my head. I combined that image with a pair of ideas I had been playing around with and came up with a plot summation that was two sentences for a game i knew would last at least 10 sessions. And that was it. I had a few key scenes in my mind, but that was it, and I was ready to go.

I know that dosent sound like much, but in my mind thats really structured. i knew the story I wanted to tell. I wasnt 100% sure how I was going to get from point A to point B to whatever, but I had ideas. So every time we sat down to play I forced myself to write a few lines about what would happen. A short paragraph at most. Heres what I had for the first game:

Players get to unexplored continent, start exploring. They return in the evening to find the base camp has vanished, all their colleagues gone. Ship gone. No trace. Stranded with no supplies and very little food.

And thats it. Of course I added in TONS of stuff on the fly. An ogre ship boy, some weird flora & fauna, a cast of unique and interesting NPC, plenty of jokes and humor, a skirmish with a big weird Yak thing, a big mysterious rock, a vampire monastery, a goat barbecue, a 5 month voyage full of fights, sex and practical jokes, and of course the big plot twist at the end of the night.

And the players had plenty to add. everyone introduced their characters and forged relationships. One of the character insisted on buying a boat, another started journaling all the unique plants and animals he discovered (forcing me to come up with them on the spot. This was Trav by the way).

I think we played for like 8 hours that night.

The next session I wrote a one line description: Things get worse.

The game after that: Cave. Someone dies.

Later on in the game I did plan 2 specific sessions out in advance, but neither took the path I predicted.they turned out fine anyway.

At the end of the game the nice thing for me was getting to tell the story I wanted to tell, or at least the 2 or three scenes I had in my mind. The rest was spur of the moment imprecision. Was that good or bad?  Well, it meant that I was constantly coming up with new and crazy ideas, but it also meant I occasionally got stuck and couldnt think of anything cool to do. Which sucked. the big thing in my mind was that I was able to respond to whatever it was the players wanted to try without worrying about it messing up plans I had. What I found was that I would open a game with just a simple idea in my head, but once the game started going the players action and my own descriptions and actions would give me all kinds of ideas about where to go. i would find whole plot structures and new possibilities stretching out in front of me. That was really fun. Little scenes would blossom into the heart of a session. throw away characters would become major forces in the narrative. At one point a player did something completely unexpected that ended up changing the entire direction of the game. It worked well and i really enjoyed it. i think the players did as well.

I think what I like to do is get a story or sequence of event or whatever in my head and run with it and see what happens. Story, plot is important to me, but I like to be flexible as well. i dont like to plan ahead because i like to be surprised. By both the players and myself. At the same time i like to tell a story, even if its one that I'm largely making up off the top of my head. Justin just said something about people playing computer games and what not and being fairly happy with that kind of semi interactive story. If you can tell a cool story, maybe your players will want to hear it. If your players can get into it and get on in it, actually contribute and help shape the story, make it their own, all the better.

So what was the question?

-Jake

Hi there,

Travis, Jake's last question is a good one. A thread which is only based on getting others' takes is not going to yield much of a discussion, and despite the initial poster's best intentions, tends to have a negative effect.

Can you provide some focus for us? Perhaps a specific sort of comparison that you'd find helpful. Perhaps a reaction or interaction among people during play that you can speak on, whether to say it indicates something specific or to say that you're not sure what it indicates.

It would be especially helpful to have some more information about the group and specific play-experiences.

Best,
Ron