I was following the thread on [D20 Eberron] Lost that Spark, a Lost Gm seeks advice. And realized that I feel very strongly that people keep asking the wrong questions and focusing on the wrong things. While many people have put forth that the experience system as written for D&D does not assist coherent play, you can use D&D for fantastic Sim play…if all parties buy into the process.

I’m not talking about obfuscated illusionism, but the real deal “Live the Dream” engaged play…without changing the rules!

The problem is that the amount of personal investment and prep time for a GM in such a game is absolutely staggering…and then the GM has to be able to let go of vast swaths of created material that were simply there to build verisimilitude.

Example: I ran Keep on the Borderlands not as a entry level dungeon crawl but as a multicultural political hotbed. The first and last piece of railroading I did was to tell the group they had been called in to clean up the nasty local humanoid problem. In typical D&D adventurer style they went out and kicked in the door…at which point in non-typical D&D style they got their butts handed to them by tactically savvy tribal warriors (yeah THOSE humanoids) who then proceeded to forge an extremely shaky alliance and started a guerilla war that ended with them laying siege to the Keep. A summer of reactionary Sim play in which the Players would do something and I’d respond ended with the final battle for the Keep a betrayal from within (remember that damn evil cleric?) and a final battle at the gates of the inner bailey that would have made a good movie (LotR anyone?). The players finished by becoming the local lords of the keep (yeah, all guys) and being knighted by the Lords of Greyhawk. Started at first level finished at 6th and not a single railroad in sight.

The cost, however was that I prepped an average of 8-12 hours a week and used perhaps a third of what I prepped. The rest was simply the background material and the dealing and double dealing that kept the humanoid alliance a bubbling, kept my timeline making sense and kept the game going as the body count mounted.

And therein is the rub. Unfortunately to have that kind of a game you have to prep far enough and wide enough that when the Players take their characters off the beaten path they find themselves on other paths to other places and other adventures…and the GM has to keep at a dead run ahead of them. Also the details need to be created with an eye to increasing the verisimilitude. Barmaids have names, and so does the potboy. NPCs are more than numbers, they are Characters! Backgrounds, goals, feelings and quirks same as Player Characters but not central to the story you are creating. Magic sword? Why is it there? Whose was it? Might they want it back? Potion, scroll, who made them? Where is the rest of their stuff if their not using it? Gems, jewelry where did they come from? Who wants them back? Orcs? Whay are they there? Wolves? Where is the rest of the pack? And every one of those answers creates more people you have to make and more places you have to build. But little of it gets used directly. Indirectly it allows you to add to your Player’s immersion when they do Legends and Lore an item and realize the there is probably an elf who’d like it back or maybe someone shows up looking for their family heirloom.

Without these things I find my worlds have the effect of a Hollywood movie set. Open the wrong door and you’ll see two guys sitting on folding chairs eating donuts from the buffet. Or you get railroading and illusionism.

The Player investment is significantly smaller but not insignificant. Backgrounds MEAN something…or should.

The questions I have are:

Number one – Is there a way to get that level of verisimilitude without that level of prep?
Number two – What happened to make people not realize that this is what needed to be done to make the kinds of games that G. Gygax and D. Arneson were playing when they started?

Being as I am working on a more Forge like game of my own I would like to see if there are any answers I can use in my own design to either explain what is required so that the game does not end up flat OR how to build a game that doesn’t require that level of prep but gives back that level of Sim play.

C. S. Bone

If you have the temperament for it and the right system, genuine Live the Dream, "virtual nonfiction" Sim can be done with a lot of GM improvisation. It's simply a matter of whether the value controlling the improvisation is "I'll put this there because it makes the richest, truest tapestry" or "I'll put this there because it makes a nice test of the party's abilities" or "I'll put this there because it plays to X's ethical concerns (or "passions" or whateve)." Improv for the first reason is Sim. See old rgfa threads on the "IC with the world" concept for accounts by GMs who play this way.

My old Amber GM, Mike Jacobs, was a master of this kind of Sim GMing.

IMHO, the system is the rub. It needs to support creating NPCs and places on the fly. Also, don't sell short the value of handy lists - names especially. Something like the proto-NPC concept from Dogs in the Vineyard could be very helpful too.

Anyway, I think valuing this kind of prep is why some GMs buy and use the kinds of fat, expensive setting books that the Forge community tends to abhor. Because they think it will provide, rightly or wrongly, the level of prep you're talking about. Some people aren't comfortable with doing improv-heavy sim; some don't believe it's possible. (There were plenty of skeptics on rgfa, but I have seen the thing with my own eyes.)

Best,

Jim

Hiya,

I think Jim is right on the money. In this, my post, I want to emphasize to you, Chris, that any advice or ideas given to person X in Actual Play, is not supposed to be transferred into any other person's play, lock stock and barrel.

That goes double when we're talking about D&D, of any edition or version. For all sorts of reasons, people are incredibly protective of the game, including the game text, and hyper-sensitive to anything which (a) paraphrases or interprets textual goals and (b) doesn't match what the listener or reader has done with the game. On-line fights about this seem to escalate to Jerry Springer level very, very fast. It's like watching a bunch of people in the same subcommittee of the same political party, gathered to discuss some issue, suddenly have a disagreement over the table arrangements and start stabbing one another to death with the salad forks.

For the record, in the thread you're spawning this one from, I think all the discussion of what "D&D rewards" and "Kill Things and Take Their Stuff" was tailor-made for provoking such an event. I watched that thread carefully with full intent to spray it down with cold jet-stream moderation if necessary, which fortunately wasn't the case.

Why don't you help avoid this grim fate simply by talking about, and celebrating, what you have done with the game? Never mind what "that guy said!" and trying to refute it. What actually happened in that Keep on the Borderlands game? (which, incidentally, by your account so far, featured absolutely no railroading, especially not the starting-conditions you describe) Talk about the events of play, the people of play - hell, man, I'm even interested in the characters, as in race, class, level, and weapons.

Did you end up using the bad guy, the evil cleric who (if I recall correctly) is hiding out in the ruined fortress?

Best,
Ron

Supplanter wrote:
If you have the temperament for it and the right system, genuine Live the Dream, "virtual nonfiction" Sim can be done with a lot of GM improvisation. It's simply a matter of whether the value controlling the improvisation is "I'll put this there because it makes the richest, truest tapestry" or "I'll put this there because it makes a nice test of the party's abilities" or "I'll put this there because it plays to X's ethical concerns (or "passions" or whateve)." Improv for the first reason is Sim. See old rgfa threads on the "IC with the world" concept for accounts by GMs who play this way.

John wrote:

Supplanter wrote:
If you have the temperament for it and the right system, genuine Live the Dream, "virtual nonfiction" Sim can be done with a lot of GM improvisation. It's simply a matter of whether the value controlling the improvisation is "I'll put this there because it makes the richest, truest tapestry" or "I'll put this there because it makes a nice test of the party's abilities" or "I'll put this there because it plays to X's ethical concerns (or "passions" or whateve)." Improv for the first reason is Sim. See old rgfa threads on the "IC with the world" concept for accounts by GMs who play this way.

Actually, Ben Lehman coined the term Virtuality for this facet of play, and its been unclear whether it is Simulationist or not.  This was the original rgfa definition of Simulationism (renamed "Virtualism" since the term Simulationism was used differently), and an answer which several people gave was that Virtuality is a Technique which doesn't specify Creative Agenda.  I talk more about Virtuality (aka rgfa Simulationism) in an essay, "Simulationism Explained"  I also have an article in Jonathan Walton's upcoming journal PUSH on world-based preparation and gaming.

Hiya,

You may want to look into some stuff about "No-Myth" play.

Provisional wrote: No Myth
Intuitive Continuity which includes all Setting features (i.e. more than just Situation). An extreme version of the general principle that the Shared Imagined Space is established by people communicating with one another. Term coined by Fang Langford.

Nathan wrote: The point during play that really "clicked" for me in terms of bricolage was this: Victoria has just saved Daniel's ass from being hauled off by Mafia polookas for an as-yet-unknown reason. Joe is being forced by his Master to track down someone named "Lambetti" in Victoria's timeframe. I cut from a scene with Victoria to Joe walking down the street, still unclear on what his Master wants him to do and trying to be proactive in some manner. I asked myself "What would be cool, right now?" I decided that a car pulled up next to Joe and a Mafia-looking palooka yells "Hey Dan, where the hell you going? We need to get to the meeting!" Over the course of the scene, we determined that (young) Joe looked just like Dan, that Dan was apparentely quite the joker ("Come on Dan, drop the act, this is serious) and that the guys in the car were going to meet Lambetti.

Click, click, click. A connexion was forged. I knew it, and I'm pretty sure the other guys knew it - of course Joe looks like Dan. Of course Dan was going to get Joe in trouble with Lambetti, whoever he was, and Lambetti would send thugs after the real Joe.

Supplanter wrote:
What I'm calling "virtual nonfiction" is not Virtuality per se. "Virtual nonfiction" as I contemplate it is Virtuality with a pure Big-Mod Sim agenda. In classically polarized GM-PC groups it matches a virtual historian with a bunch of virtual biographers. It's definitely "discovery play." Analogize it to travel literature and other memoirs of especially active lives. Its highest value is the imagined "realness" of the SIS. PCs may face tactical challenges and ethical dilemmas, but in furtherance of, well, the Dream - those things should be part of the game because they are part of life.

CSBone wrote: Number one – Is there a way to get that level of verisimilitude without that level of prep?
Number two – What happened to make people not realize that this is what needed to be done to make the kinds of games that G. Gygax and D. Arneson were playing when they started?

John wrote:
Sure, I agree that there is an overlap of Virtuality + GNS Simulationism.  However, I think your term and analogy don't seem to express that skewer very well.  In my experience memoirs are frequently chock-full of meaningful human issues.  For example, I was just reading The Cavalry Maiden, by Nadezhda Durova about her life in the Russian military in the Napoleonic wars, and it is extremely powerful. 

The problem here is that much of what you say is also true of Virtuality.  In the style of Virtuality, we also put things into the game because they are a part of life.  Lives aren't meaningless -- and being true to life generally makes the game more meaningful, not less. 

On the other hand, I can't think of an expressive short-hand term.  Perhaps we should just say "Virtuality + GNS Sim". 

I prefer improvisation, with as much player input as possible (still working on that part).
That way you, as the GM, have something to do while the players run around and kill or do not kill things. You can see what is the best development for any particular scenario, and run with it.

It can be done with 3rd ed of D&D. I can do an NPC of up to third level in my head with no problems. Gets a bit tough at higher levels, but can be done.
Also, not nearly all of the NPCs will be fought. Assume that they have about maximum ranks at whatever they are good at and +1 or +2 from ability and that's it. Other skills as appropriate.

Joshua wrote:

CSBone wrote: Number one – Is there a way to get that level of verisimilitude without that level of prep?
Number two – What happened to make people not realize that this is what needed to be done to make the kinds of games that G. Gygax and D. Arneson were playing when they started?

As to your number two, taken superficially (and a bit naively), the problem seems pretty straightforward: the players are going to explore a dungeon and encounter stuff.  Surely, this stuff is "there" in the fiction and they are encountering it.  Therefore it would be prudent to prepare the stuff before hand.  Only thing is, the basic premise is not at all true.  The stuff doesn't exist until it comes up in play, and it is not encountered, it is created in that moment of play and not before.

Nathan, I meant to mention wargaming roots, because that's right on.

As to the source material, that goes back to what I'm saying about Buffy -- we see the finished product which is often the result of a lot of in-the-moment improvisation and polished up with some retroactive editing (something we don't have access to).  That the finished product seems to present a "well-planned" world/setting/whatever is more a testament to improvisation and editing than it is planning.

Nathan wrote:
With those two as big, big influences on the genre, I think it's not much a leap to see how the assumption that the fictional world needs to be as complete as possible before the characters enter into it was made.

Supplanter wrote:
I'm not talked out of "virtual nonfiction" as a term because I don't think anything you've said really undermines it. But my pertinent claim (to CS's situation), is that the CA Sim GM who wants to minimize prep time can learn approaches from the rgfa "IC with the world" threads that can be useful to them. Do you disagree? If so, that could be important.

Hiya,

Christopher, what do you think, so far? Anything you want to develop? Is the primary focus of thread serving its purpose?

Guys, let's allow Christopher to direct us from this point.

Best,
Ron

Hey guys, thank you so much for jumping in…

I’m going to start with Ron’s question about what happened in general and then try to answer the rest of the questions after that. This is going to be LOOOONNNGGG.

Ron,

I’m not quite sure how much detail you’d like me to go into but I’ll start and we can see what might be useful to this discussion.

First things first, IMHO Keep is the best module ever written. The game in question was not the first time I had run Keep on the Borderlands. I had gotten it when I picked up my original Red Box. I don’t rightly remember if it came with it or not, I think it might have. In any event I’d run Keep at least a few times as written before I ran this one.

The Players were:

MB – My brother. A 6’2” gentle giant, he ALWAYS ran dwarves. His character sheet is still in my notes. I watched him roll a full handful of 18s for stats and he named him Thorin from The Hobbit. Because I’d already had some experience with not having enough hit points so he started with max 8+3. As he leveled I never saw him roll lower than 7 for hit points so he was a tank. According to my notes he had a +1 Cursed Sword which I know is from the AD&D Dungeon Master’s Guide, Plate Armor and a +1 shield at 5th level. I believe he may have started with that sword. As a Player he loved the thing. His character hated it because it was Elven made and he was always talking about how he was saving up enough gold to get a remove curse cast on him. Never happened.

JP – A good friend. He and I used to argued Mormon vs Jewish religion. He started play with a Cleric who got whacked by the kolbolds on our first foray into the Caves and then he started playing an Elf. The Elf had an 18 Dex and a longbow and wore “Elven” Chain +1 from the start and I remember him picking up a pair of Elven Boots at some point. JP and my brother used to go round and round in the “dumb dwarf” “stupid plant” vein and since both my brother and JP loved creative cussing (remember, Mormon…no profanity) it was a riot.

RT—A friend of JP’s. RT was the Other GM and his games ROCKED. Looking back it was pure obfuscated illusionism…but he was good at it. His first character was a Theif, who got whacked when JP’s Cleric did and so he started playing one of the Curate’s acolytes as our party Cleric and the Curate too.

There was also RP, JP’s brother and KT a friend of his who played some of the game and they played mercenary Fighters of whatever level everybody else was when they played.

We never did have a Magic User.

We played once a week for the first half of the summer on weekends and 2 of those including the last one were monster, 12 hours till even caffeine couldn’t keep us awake, pizza in the morning, go to Mormon Church and play till 5 or 6 pm sessions.

The first session was just me MB, JP and RT and we spent a great deal of time meeting all of the people in the Keep and then they went out looking for trouble and ran into the Spider Lair and the Mad Hermit. Upon their return they got to talking with the Priest with the silent acolytes and he pointed them in the direction of the Caves of Chaos.

The next session they took the Priest’s directions and headed to the Caves…and the fun really got started. They hit the Kolbold’s first and were feeling pretty stompy until the Theif and the Cleric fell into the pit trap and got killed by spears. My brother’s dwarf  Thorin had gotten hammered in the first encounter and so he was in the back and he tried to save them, failed and then ran. When he got back to the Keep RP and KT had just showed up so 5 strong  (the Curate had healed Thorin) they went back and kicked the kolbolds in the teeth.  Feeling good they rested in the Kolbold Lair and we called it a night.

The third session, the next morning I decided that the Orcs and goblins had heard the ruckus and ambushed them on the way out. From there it was a running fight back to the Keep in which the Players got hammered but they made it out without loosing anyone. When they woke up the next morning the Keep was under siege.

The fourth session was the beginning of the siege. Originally it was only the 30 Orcs, 20 Goblins, 2 Ogres, 24 Hobgoblins, and 14 Gnolls. And they had taken up position just out of ballista range on the path to the Keep. I know the Players spent the entire session working up their direct frontal assault on the attackers and nothing but planning got done.

The fifth session was that battle. We broke up the Keep defenders into groups and everybody played some and I rolled for the humanoids That first battle between the defenders and the humanoids was a disaster. Without any mucking around I handed them their ass. Because of the narrow path they could have had the advantage but they charged into the open and got creamed. Those that survived (RP and KT’s Fighters didn’t) holed up in the Keep. The humanoids lost about half of their people. The Players and the Keep lost most of the defenders.

From there I think we had a session of trying to get the rest of the Keep ready to defend themselves for the coming horde because I’d ignore the “the humanoids can’t get reinforcements” thing and had them send runners for more help. This was followed by
two weeks of serious siege battles where the levels went to just under 6th from killing humanoids and just about all of the Normal Man NPCs ended up with 2-3 Fighter levels.

The tide was turning because we could have held that Keep as long as we didn’t run out of ammunition…until I had the evil Priest and his silent acolytes open the gates. From there the fight raged from the outer Bailey to the Inner Gatehouse, the humanoids took the balistas and catapults from the outer walls and battered down the Inner Gatehouse and the final retreat dragged everyone back to the Keep Fortress where we finally turned the attack due to good rolling and great tactics.

The last monster session finished at 8 am and we all went to church hyped on adrenaline and then crashed. When we woke up Thorin became the new Captain of the Guard. JP’s Elf became the Castilian (the old one having died in the final assault) and the Curate stepped down in favor of RP’s Cleric.

RP had by that time picked up a copy of G1-G3 and we decided to play that and never got back to the Keep to finish the Caves of Chaos.

C. S. Bone

Jim,

If you have the temperament for it and the right system, genuine Live the Dream, "virtual nonfiction" Sim can be done with a lot of GM improvisation. It's simply a matter of whether the value controlling the improvisation is "I'll put this there because it makes the richest, truest tapestry" or "I'll put this there because it makes a nice test of the party's abilities" or "I'll put this there because it plays to X's ethical concerns (or "passions" or whateve)." Improv for the first reason is Sim.

It's like thinking that when Joss Whedon was writing the first season of Buffy: the Vampire Slayer, he was always thinking of the First Evil, the Big Bad of the last season.  Chances are, Mr Whedon might have had a very sketchy outline of Buffy confronting the Master at the end of the First Season, and only that because he'd need the outline to pitch the show to get funding.  There are counter examples, of course, but they're the exception, not the rule.  And I usually point out that while J Michael Strazinsky of Babylon Five fame plotted out the entire five year arc of the series, he didn't get to finish it the way he wanted anyway.

Hi Chris,

H'm. That was a lot more battle-strategy heavy than your first post led me to believe. I'm not really seeing the "multicultural political hotbed" you mentioned, at least, not as I interpreted the phrase ... instead, a rather good example of playing a non-railed combat campaign without making the foes stupid. Very much in the classic D&D ideal in which the wargame/campaign (in the technical sense of the word) provides the context for the individual or squad-level tactics, negotiations, and skirmishes, and the individual and squad level results then feed back up to the next event at the wargame/campaign level.

All of which is, if you're interested in taking it as such, praise.

Now let's go back to your questions, which I think need to be revised a little.

Number one – Is there a way to get that level of verisimilitude without that level of prep?
Number two – What happened to make people not realize that this is what needed to be done to make the kinds of games that G. Gygax and D. Arneson were playing when they started?

Whoops, missed that last bit in your latest post, Chris.

1. I think you're starting to post a little emotionally, because you're contradicting yourself ... in your first post, you accused yourself of railroading to start the game, and I said, you did not. So don't start defending yourself as if I said you were railroading.

2. Can't help you out on the techniques, at this point. The field of possibilities is too large. Without the insight I mentioned in the last post, none of them will make sense, and without a little more focus on what you'd like play to be like, I'd have to lay out all of them in a huge monstrous matrix. So let's get through talking about the points I made in the above post, and then more into what you'd actually like to see in play, among the people. Right now all I can get is how you felt about it - I'd like to know more about what you actually visualize everyone doing.

Best,
Ron

CSBone wrote:
Nathan,
My biggest problem with what you are calling “No-Myth” is that in order for the stuff to mean something later you still have to back prep encountered places and things if Characters might return to them. While I find I love the discovery process as much or even more than the Players, I don’t find it reduces prep time if I want the kind of concrete “Yeah, I feel like I’ve been there,” Sim I really want. Am I missing something?

Ron,

You are probably right about the political hotbed thing. Through the glasses of time it seemed more so that it probably was. During the siege there was a LOT of Player Character to NPC interaction but I think you are probably right that the wargaming aspect was more paramount. The politics of the humanoids was of interest only to me as the GM and looking back not really relevant beyond the fact that rather than fighting each other they came as a huge group with tactics to kick ass on the Players and the Keep.

And I’ll take the praise. (Not emotional, tired…sleep is good.)

So:

Question One:

Is there a way to get that level of verisimilitude without that level of prep?

What happened to make people not realize that this is what needed to be done to make the kinds of games that G. Gygax and D. Arneson were playing when they started?

A) Let's lose the "vision of the prophets" rhetoric, shall we? As I see it, for instance, the two Names you mentioned never shared one iota of common goals or procedural preferences in play. Do you especially feel like entering into a 5-page debate about that? Neither do I. I suggest instead just flushing the whole need to characterize or represent "the way Gary and Dave played" as an ideal or standard.

B) What "this" are you talking about? Major, intensive, exhausting prep? Or some alternative to it, i.e., however you answer #1?

C) What people are you talking about? Be accurate with your answer to this one. It's crucial.

CSBone wrote: Let the Players help prep sections outside the scope of the regular play I.E. flavor.

Nathan,

Got an easy one from the game. First Battle of the Keep. From the fourth to the fifth session I generated all of the humanoids and their tactics in great detail as well as all of the NPCs from the Keep. 90 some odd humanoids some with magical weapons and items that needed backgrounds because they might fall into PC hands plus tactics. And then all of the NPCs from the Keep. Each with a name, list of physical and emotional quirks so you could identify them and with them. Stuff, armor, weapons. Not to mention sketches of some of the more unusual stuff. To be fair about half of each ended up as throwaways, but I didn’t know which half so I prepped them ALL. No stormtroopers, no endless mass of screaming monsters. Each had identity. And I used those identities. I truly believe that the Players hated the humanoids more because they could identify the meanest and nastiest and felt a real sense of loss from losing, not just another level 1 Fighter but, Rogge the short fat one who laughed as he pushed down the scaling ladders.

Lot of prep.

C. S. Bone

Just as a tip, the 'Post' button is on the left, and the 'Preview' button is on the right, and getting them mixed up like I did is not a good idea.

CSBone wrote: Let the Players help prep sections outside the scope of the regular play I.E. flavor.

CSBone wrote: Question One: What kind of a model and techniques do I need to learn and address to bring a real world level of verisimilitude to a game without major, extensive, exhaustive prep.
Question One A: As a designer I how much work do I need to do and background do I need to provide to make sure that GM and Player prep is as low as possible without compromising verisimilitude.

Question Two: How do I get as GMs and Players creating the Sim environment, via the new model (however it ends up), to buy into and understand the level of prep required for a game, (which it seems should be less) so that they have a screaming good time doing things and being people they can’t be in real life because when you are pushing that much risk losing doesn’t just suck, it makes you dead.

CSBone wrote: Got an easy one from the game. First Battle of the Keep. From the fourth to the fifth session I generated all of the humanoids and their tactics in great detail as well as all of the NPCs from the Keep. 90 some odd humanoids some with magical weapons and items that needed backgrounds because they might fall into PC hands plus tactics. And then all of the NPCs from the Keep.

John wrote: 3) Reduce the size of the scope.  Seriously, this might seem a bit obvious, but imagine an outpost a quarter of the size (i.e. fewer NPCs) attacked by fewer monsters -- and perhaps a smaller number of slightly more powerful monsters.  A big shift in my gaming over the years has been reducing the size of the scope.  So where before the PCs might have been based in a big city, now they are based in a small village.

Hi Chris,

Does this thread resonate with you?
Gamism In Action or Why I Hate Arts and Crafts

Also, how does 'all of us at the table must be windows for one another' feel for you? Do you have any concerns over feedback issues, eg a player says "Don't worry, from the looks of it there are just kobolds at this level", but instead of this being taken as an estimation of game reality, it becomes the game reality. The ability to judge if he was right, has been lost?

Guys,

Y’all are asking some deep questions and I don’t want to just punch off a set of short answers so this might get long and ramble a bit. If I get off track somebody drag me back.
[hr]
Joshua,

CSBone wrote: Let the Players help prep sections outside the scope of the regular play I.E. flavor.

Think you can ditch this part?  Specifically, the part where players only contribute 'flavor' (we call it Color round these parts) and nothing substantial?  Cause if you can, you're golden.  To my mind, this is the biggest step to take from GM illusionism into full on collaborative play.  Everybody should be throwing in good stuff, and that good stuff should have an effect on roleplay.  Once you can start doing that, lots of other things fall into place.

One of the ways I think of it goes like this: one GM, working alone, spends eight hours writing up stuff, and then four hours reviewing and editing it, for a total of twelve hours prep for a six hour game.  Now, if all four players at the table collaborate on writing stuff up, you could say that those twelve man hours get cut down to three a piece, but that's missing the fact that working collaboratively, all content is constantly being reviewed as it's being articulated.

My personal preference on the question is sort of a two step approach.  The first step is providing a strong, evocative direction that is written with the sole purpose to get the players on board for creating a gaming experience in that direction.  If the focus of that direction is a world or setting, this will superficially look like a description of that world, but it's not -- it's an exemplar showing the players what roleplay should look and feel like, not what roleplay should be.

Is your question "How do you get players to engage when they could lose their investment through character death?"  My solution is simple: remove character death.  Presto.  The slightly longer version is "divorce player authority from character status" -- so that everybody, no matter who they happen to be playing and what is happening to that character, retains the ability to contribute to the unfolding game.

1) For all of what comes below, make sure prepping is interesting and fun for you.  Hopefully, you can enjoy it the same way that some people enjoy knitting, or reading a book, or whatever.

2) As other people have said, involve the players.  There are good reasons to limit player knowledge of the opponents, but in the above example you could easily have had the players help with keeping track of the NPCs in the keep.

3) Reduce the size of the scope.  Seriously, this might seem a bit obvious, but imagine an outpost a quarter of the size (i.e. fewer NPCs) attacked by fewer monsters -- and perhaps a smaller number of slightly more powerful monsters.  A big shift in my gaming over the years has been reducing the size of the scope.  So where before the PCs might have been based in a big city, now they are based in a small village.

4) Use pregenerated materials.  I tend to set games in the real world, because this lets me use real maps, real cultures, and so forth.  For my Vinland game, I used USGS maps.  However, there are also options for fantasy.  These days for D&D you can buy PDFs for a ridiculous number of things: customized sets of treasures, items, opponents, and so forth.

5) Simplify the numbers.  A simpler system in general is ideal, but even with a system like D20 there are options.  There are software programs for handling sheets for NPCs, including templates.

Does this thread resonate with you?
Gamism In Action or Why I Hate Arts and Crafts

Also, how does 'all of us at the table must be windows for one another' feel for you? Do you have any concerns over feedback issues, eg a player says "Don't worry, from the looks of it there are just kobolds at this level", but instead of this being taken as an estimation of game reality, it becomes the game reality. The ability to judge if he was right, has been lost?

Right now all I can get is how you felt about it - I'd like to know more about what you actually visualize everyone doing.

CSBone wrote: However, what I like is t how much fun it was to end up someplace unexpected and have individuals do the unexpected and I’m not sure how having the group designing things would assist this. ...I am having a hard time understanding how a collaborative build could have done the same thing. Can you explain?

I’d absolutely agree that this would make building Color easier but, again if your adventure is about how the local political system is a morass, how does knowing how the various NPC are going to react, add to play?

I really don’t see how Capes could have pulled off that kind of a game. It was not the immersion, but the detail that I dug. You could make an argument for it being a very Gamist scenario, but that would miss the in Character prep we did. Sure we were looking for an advantage, but I loved the interactions even more than the winning through in the end.

By the way I think Color, in Sim, IS substantial.

My personal preference on the question is sort of a two step approach.  The first step is providing a strong, evocative direction that is written with the sole purpose to get the players on board for creating a gaming experience in that direction.  If the focus of that direction is a world or setting, this will superficially look like a description of that world, but it's not -- it's an exemplar showing the players what roleplay should look and feel like, not what roleplay should be.

Can you give me an example in play?

Joshua,

You've raised a lot of examples of the players being surprised by the GM.  If you open up things like I and others have suggested, this allows the players to surprise the GM, or the players to surprise each other.

So here you say that you liked the details and you liked the interactions.  How are either dependent on the GM doing the prep and revealing that prep work to the players during roleplay? 

You can just as easily furnish details and interesting interactions by having the players create/reveal such things as play progresses.  And the bonus is that everybody is continually surprised throughout the game.

In Simmy games, Color is essential but that doesn't mean it's substantial.  By substantial I mean that it would impact the System (the means by which the players agree on the development of the Fiction).  Essential is what you're after -- all those juicy details -- but that doesn't mean that they determine the development of the Fiction.

My personal preference on the question is sort of a two step approach.  The first step is providing a strong, evocative direction that is written with the sole purpose to get the players on board for creating a gaming experience in that direction.  If the focus of that direction is a world or setting, this will superficially look like a description of that world, but it's not -- it's an exemplar showing the players what roleplay should look and feel like, not what roleplay should be.

I might not have been clear; that's a design strategy.  A play example of a design strategy is like apples and oranges.  Unless you mean a play example that is drawn off of a design that used said strategy?

Here are some answers to particular questions...  There is some discussion of the big question of players directly narrating background (i.e. use of Director stance), but I'll leave that for another post. 

CSBone wrote:

3) Reduce the size of the scope.  Seriously, this might seem a bit obvious, but imagine an outpost a quarter of the size (i.e. fewer NPCs) attacked by fewer monsters -- and perhaps a smaller number of slightly more powerful monsters.  A big shift in my gaming over the years has been reducing the size of the scope.  So where before the PCs might have been based in a big city, now they are based in a small village.

I think this is one of the best suggestions so far, and I wish I'd thought of it myself. My question for you is how do you do something like house breaking in Lanhkmar (Fahfrd and the Grey Mouser series by Fritz Leiber) or capture and escape from the Death Star (Star Wars Ep IV) without railroading. We are talking some big places. Actually, the big place thing is one of my biggest problems. Same question for Joshua.

CSBone wrote:

2) As other people have said, involve the players.  There are good reasons to limit player knowledge of the opponents, but in the above example you could easily have had the players help with keeping track of the NPCs in the keep.

Actually, I did have the Players playing the NPCs during the big fights. Are you suggesting that I should have had the Players doing the prep on those NPCs as well?

CSBone wrote:

4) Use pregenerated materials.  I tend to set games in the real world, because this lets me use real maps, real cultures, and so forth.  For my Vinland game, I used USGS maps.  However, there are also options for fantasy.  These days for D&D you can buy PDFs for a ridiculous number of things: customized sets of treasures, items, opponents, and so forth.

I do and I intend to make my own for my own game. The question I always have is how much is a good thing vs. padding a system. To be sure .pdfs turn the whole distribution thing on it's head so the answer might be more is better.

CSBone wrote:

5) Simplify the numbers.  A simpler system in general is ideal, but even with a system like D20 there are options.  There are software programs for handling sheets for NPCs, including templates.

A good thought, but how do you simplify the characters or the places or the things? And how simple is too simple. I don't like cardboard cut out caricatures. How would you typify the line between simple and flat. Is there a rule of thumb?

CSBone wrote: In a GM created environment you can explore Man against “X” from the POV of the “Man”. I don’t think it is quite so easy to do in a collaborative story telling environment. And not Sim as I understand it. Having limited ability to affect the collaborative environment through your Character and yet still doing so, I feel, is the fun in roleplaying gaming as I understand it.

Perhaps we need to use a different word that Color because I am getting the impression that implicit in the definition of the a word is the idea that it does not have a concrete effect ons the shared information space.

Hi Chris,

Oh, I should have said I like arts and craft as well - in a similar issue to you, I don't like spending the time on it only for it to get used up in an almost ephemeral way.

Chris wrote:

Callan wrote: Also, how does 'all of us at the table must be windows for one another' feel for you? Do you have any concerns over feedback issues, eg a player says "Don't worry, from the looks of it there are just kobolds at this level", but instead of this being taken as an estimation of game reality, it becomes the game reality. The ability to judge if he was right, has been lost?

Big time! This is in fact one of my biggest problems with the idea of co prep with your Players. I can see how it might engage them, but I can also see how it might ruin the game too.

John, Joshua,
I'm not ignoring your posts, but you deserve answers with some thought.

Callan,

Imagine that your roleplay is about stockbrokers trying to choose the right stocks to invest in from the information they have.

You as GM create all those news reports and info. However, you just don't have the time for generating all that info.

But, if the players invents (some of) the information - well, unless it's just treated as background colour, the player himself is inventing (part of) the solution (as all pertinent facts tend to effect all solutions, like a butterfly effect). After he's done this, even if he chooses the right stock to invest in, how much has he actually learned about this imaginary stock market? How much has he learned, compared to how much he's merely satisfied his own preconceptions of how this stockmarket works?

Hey Callan,

I have only skimmed this thread at the most superficial level, but your above post is spot on in my book as well.

It would seem I’m working backwards….

John,
Thank you for your suggestions. They are beginning to  make sense. I’m going to put together a long rambling post with examples to make sure I get it.

Joshua,
Your ability to parse incoherence into useful dialog is astounding…this is not an ability I possess.

So lets try this again.

You seem to be equating "Players explore a predetermined setting via character avatars" as Sim.

"All" Sim is is a directed effort to create an experience that consistently emulates a genre (including but not restricted to realism) as understood by the players.  While your knot of techniques is certainly one way to go about getting that, they are  not Sim.  Your techniques are a ladder; Sim is the ledge you're climbing for.

What you've got is a knot of techniques -- tight character identification, exploratory emphasis on setting, player power constrained by character stats, GM prepwork, player ignorance of that prepwork, and absolute authority of the GM so armed with said prepwork.  None of these techniques are necessary components of Sim.

I should apologize; I didn't understand what you were asking for. 

You weren't asking for alternatives to extensive GM Prep

; you seem to see this as a necessary feature of your preferred means of play.

What you were asking for were means to mitigate, reduce, compact, or otherwise streamline that process.

Hello,

This thread has included some great posts. I suggest, though, that it's taken us three pages to arrive at shared understanding of the questions, and so the topic would be best served by splitting off new threads, leaving this one as the foundation. As a minor supportive point for this suggestion, the title turns out to have been a little misleading.

I can see two such threads at this point: one about your (Chris') straightforward questions about reducing prep without entering into anyone-contributes-to-setting-or-situation play; and one about getting into such play, if desired.

So, let's close this thread, but not stop the discussion. Chris, if you could, please feel free to start the new threads with a lot of attention and focus. And if you can stand it, a wee bit of actual play, if only to orient everyone (see how useful it was this time, for instance!).

Best,
Ron