Hi, guys.  A little over a week ago, I sent out an e-mail to my group telling them I wouldn't continue running my very short-lived pseudo-weekly D&D campaign.  Basically, the pressure was driving me mad.  I literally stayed up nights worrying about the game.  I really, really want to provide the players with a fun time, and I don't tend to feel confident that whatever I have prepared is going to do that.  Now, a lot of the problem might have been due to stress in other parts of my life -- work, relationships, etc. -- seeping into my feelings regarding the game.  But, at the end of the day, I wasn't having fun, and I was dreading game day...so I quit.

I'm still in the group, mind you.  We haven't had time to meet since then, and probably won't for another couple of weeks.  At that point we'll talk and figure out what we're doing.  Probably someone else will GM a game, probably D&D or a close variant, maybe even the same campaign I was GMing.

In the meantime, I'm doing a lot of thinking and introspection to try to figure out what's going on with me, here.  I'm writing this post just in case any of you fine folks have any suggestions or insights of your own concerning this stuff.  This is a super-long post.  Consider yourself warned.  ;)

Actual Play time.

The Set-Up
A good while ago, I had a D&D game set in the default world of Greyhawk.  The PCs were all members of an elite team of adventurers working for a king -- sort of a royal SWAT team.  The campaign was centered around the war between this kingdom and the neighboring one, which was ruled by an evil demigod, Iuz.

That campaign fell by the wayside as someone else in the group wanted to GM something.  The guy who was then GM needed a break, so I stepped up and offered to GM.  As a group, we got together to talk about what we would do.  One of the newer players we picked up since I stopped running my previous campaign expressed interest in the War With Iuz campaign idea, and everyone else was on board, so away we went.  New characters for everybody, since people wanted a fresh start.

We had a full session to work on character creation.  I asked everyone to talk about their character concepts, and try to tie their characters together before play, so they'd have a reason to adventure together besides their mutual desire to kill Iuz.  I also asked for, essentially, flags: character traits, relationships, etc. the players would want to see the game focus on.  The response to this varied.  A few of the players did a great job and were enthusiastic about it; one player seemed to misunderstand me, thinking I meant "color" rather than "flags," even after I tried to explain things more clearly; and another provided virtually nothing.  (This last player's schedule only allows him to attend about every other session, so I get the feeling he's not as invested in things as the others are.  In other words, this didn't really surprise me.)  Oh, and they're all playing elves, which is kind of fun.

Anyway, I'm not interested in forcing the guys to do anything they don't want to, and people are rarin' to get going, so I leave it be.  I got some good material to work with, so I'm happy.  I give the players a quick run-down of the war situation, and ask what they want to do first.  Two of the players are playing monks, whose monastery was captured by Iuz's forces a few years ago.  The group decides that the first order of business is taking back the monastery.  Cool.

The Monastery
My goal here was to run a game like so many people have talked about on the Forge and similar forums.  I wanted to set up the initial situation, maybe drop a couple of bangs, and otherwise just see what happened.  I even did it once myself, as a one-on-one one-shot game.  That worked well, I thought, but this time I had five players, instead of one, and I think that made things into a whole different ball of wax.  And, I was still really new at this style of game.

It felt like it took me forever to come up with a good situation for the adventure.  I ran through at least two set-ups before finally settling on the one that I did, mere days before the game.  The idea was that the leader of the Iuzite force that took the monastery, Kault, stumbled upon the writings of the monastery's master, after taking over.  He read them and was enlightened, and instead of destroying the monastery or simply inhabiting it, he turned it into his own monastery.  I decided that Iuz lost interest in the monastery as a strategic stronghold once he took over the larger part of the surrounding area, and thus had no objections to Kault's desires.  Eventually, Kault's men -- now monks themselves -- were, for all intents and purposes, independent from Iuz, and neither cared much about the other.

Anyway.  I detailed Kault a bit, added a few supporting characters (including a very protective woman, whose love for him bordered on obsession), and away we went.

In-game, it was fun, but most of what I'd come up with went unused.  I enjoyed the surprise the players showed at realizing what had happened to the monastery.  The players decided that the inhabitation of the monastery by Iuz's men was an outrage, so they tried to sneak into the monastery, with the intent of killing everyone as they slept.  (Not nice people, these characters.)  A few botched stealth rolls later, they were taking the whole army of monks head-on.  It ended up being a hack-fest, which is fine with me; I only wish I'd known it would be, so I could've focused my prep on making the encounters more interesting!

The session came to a close with a showdown with Kault and his lady-friend.  I again stymied the players by having Kault kneel and mutter under his breath, as though drunk or traumatized.  He didn't lift a finger against the PCs.  His guardian, however, packed a mean punch and didn't hesitate to demonstrate just that.  It was a fun combat, and the players eventually won.  It turned out that Kault was muttering prayers to the elven gods of the monastery; he'd taken them as his own.  He was repentant and accepting of his fate, whatever it might be.  The monks in the party were pretty infuriated by this, interestingly, and decided to torture and kill him.  Okay.

I asked the players what they were interested in doing next.  I showed them a quick relationship-map I'd drawn up of the major bad guys in Iuz's army, who the big thorns in their sides were, and so on.  My idea here was to give them as much info as possible, so they could make informed decisions regarding what to do and where to go.  Unfortunately, this didn't work perfectly, since I hadn't fleshed a lot of it out yet.  I didn't even have all the info.  :)  Anyway, they decided next to try to reclaim the capital city of the area, driving Iuz's forces from the region once and for all.  Cool.

They would travel south through the forest they were in to reach Highfolk, a largely-elven city, where they would resupply and plan out a way to reconnoiter the capital.  Over the next couple of weeks, I prepared some forest encounters.  I had to fight the very strong urge to plot things out.  I also tried to set up a situation in the capital city, R-map and everything, and was met with mild success.  I wasn't super-happy with it all, and it still felt like not enough, but it was what I had time for.

Traveling South
The next session, the players first threw me for a loop by discussing whether they should travel through the forest after all, or whether they should go north and around the mountains, traveling to Highfolk by boat.  Uh oh.  One of the players showed concern that I hadn't prepped anything for that area, which I hadn't, but I, not wanting to constrain their freedom, encouraged them not to worry about it.  In the end they decided to stick to the forest anyway.

Their first encounter was with a group of orcs huddled together in a circle.  The corpses of elves hung from the trees around them.  The players soon learned that the orcs were feasting on the body of a fallen elf!  There was, of course, a big fight, which was cool.  Then I had to improv a bunch of stuff as the players interrogated one of the orcs.  I had intended the encounter to be more or less flavor, as well as foreshadowing a twist I had planned for the future (in which a sought-after potential ally turns out to be a friendly orc -- how will the players react to this?).  My players often push to learn everything they can, and I always forget this; there's no such thing as a random encounter for them.  :)  Oh well.  It went fine.  No worries.

The players then decide to seek out the village the dead elves were from, so they might return the elves' personal affects and tell their families of what happened.  I, of course, had prepared no such village, but I liked the sentiment and the idea, so what the hell?  To name the village, I grabbed my trusty Hero Builder's Guidebook and consulted its list of example elf names.  Great!  The players were fully aware, by the way, that I was making all this shit up as I went along.  They seemed okay with it.

After that, they asked if the village could spare any warriors to help them take the capital down.  I had the village elder explain to them that the village was essentially fighting for its very existence every day, and so they really couldn't spare anyone.  One player asks if there's anything they can do to help the village out, any problems they're having, so that the village can muster the resources to help the PCs out.

Oh, man.  I want to enthusiastically say "Yes!" to this, but, of course, I have no idea what I would do next.  I'm pretty open about this stuff at the table.  So, the player that did the asking says, "Isn't there a random adventure generator in the DMG?"  There is, but it's just an idea generator.  What the heck.  I open it up and roll, and the player (with a little help from the others) starts chiming in with ideas on how to integrate what I rolled into the next session.  To be honest, I was happier than a pig in shit with this development.  I love that they were helping out like that.  I wouldn't mind a lot more of that in these games, whichever side of the DM's screen I'm on.

Anyway, that was that.  Over the next couple of weeks I once again wracked my brain to figure out how I wanted to do things.  I had good ideas that the players provided, but I needed to really flesh it out.  Again, I came up with idea after idea, none of which I really felt happy with.  That's about when the "staying up nights" thing started happening.  A couple days later, I quit.

There's been a little e-mail conversation since then.  A couple of players saying they understood, and letting me know that they had a great time during the game.  Stuff like that.  Which is nice.  Anyway...

So what the heck is wrong with me?
I dunno, man.  Maybe I just don't like prepping D&D, and a different game (I'm looking forward to reading Burning Wheel, Sorcerer, and The Shadow of Yesterday) would work better for me as a GM.  Maybe I'm not cut out for GMing at all.  Maybe everything's fine, and I'll be happier when the rest of my life settles down a little.  But I think there's more going on.  Something I'm missing.

Thoughts I have had:

• During play, I tend to feel fine.  A bit nervous, but okay.  I don't even mind a small amount of improvising ("What clan does the orc belong to?" is fine; "Are there any missions we can take on for them?" isn't), as long as I don't have to keep it a secret, and maybe get some help from the players.  But between sessions, I absolutely freak out about preparing for the game.  Is it enough?  It never seems to be enough.
• The style of prep I was engaging in seems not to be what I was aiming for.  I'm not entirely sure what I was aiming for, though.  Basically, I feel like I was doing typical "railroading" prep -- I was just making sure the rails were going where the players wanted them to ahead of time.  Which is better, but it leaves me fully unequipped to deal with changes of plan.
• One explanation I can think of regarding the stress I was feeling is that I'm not sure I really know what's expected of me as GM.  What do the players want out of a game?  Without really knowing that, I'm left trying to prepare for every possible expectation, which I just can't do.  It's silly.  I need to talk to them about this.

Anyway, that's what I've got so far.  Sorry this post was so long -- I'm never sure when I'm giving too much information and when I'm not giving enough.  Please ask questions if anything needs clarification.  And thank you for reading!  I'd love to know what you guys think about all this.

-Will

Will,

The post wasn't all that long ;)

I can relate to your problem, as it reminds me of my past play experiences. Prep was always killing me (in D&D, even more so), and the pressure resulted in more sweat than it was worth. So, at some point, I simply ceased doing the prep - and from then on, I started having fun as a GM. Later, I've switched to Forge-ish games completely, as they usually offer better tools for the sit & play model than "traditional" systems, and spread the responsibility for fun more evenly among the whole group.

Judging from the AP, especially the Travelling South part, you're on the right track when it comes to making things work on the fly - once you started improvising, using random results for inspiration and sharing control with your players, the session went on well. My impression is that you were enjoying the session, and it seems like your players did enjoy it as well. The part where it got wrong, it seems, is the post-session prep, which left you paralyzed.

So, I suppose the easiest solution would be not to worry about the next session at all, and not think about it too much. Definitely, it's better not to force yourself to think up the details. If something just jumps to your head, it's fine, but otherwise, you could just as well come to the game with no more than very general ideas and let the session develop in a natural way, making things up on the spot as needed. In D&D it's not easy unless you have a very good grasp of the system, but other games you mention at the end, especially TSoY, should lend themselves well to such approach.

Also, you might find this thread interesting, I think.

I've been DM'ing for 21 years now, a fairly stable group of players, with only a couple (literally) of breaks.  I can feel your pain, though I'm not in your headspace.

Per AP guidelines - me 44, economist/civil servant/open-minded (I amuse myself by ensuring campaign background notes the primary economic system and sexual preferences of every major race etc.), attached but living couple of blocks from sweety, 'baby of group" 39 getting married shortly, other players a lawyer, two tech/IT guys, one marketing/business type, all university graduates etc.  We started in AD&D and have stuck with it through 3.5.  Most focused only on D&D playing, in mists of time Traveller, Call of Cthulhu, Rolemaster.  Met up through university game club with a couple joining since based on friend-of-friend connections.

Ironically, I'm the one pitching indie games, with more distributed power/authority etc. and finding not much interest (a victory to just get one player to read Burning Wheel, a real one, he wants his own copy).  Happy with what we know seems to be the verdict.  Effects of indie game movement so far: (A) Revising the dying/death rules in D&D based on Forge "death deprotagonizing" threads and homebrewing a version of variant WOTC rules; (B) Using a Universalis-derived coin system to outline the "tenets" of the next cycle of the D&D campaign.

I like running the game, like the players, we spend perhaps 20% of our game time joking and funning play styles and tropes etc. at our weekly sessions.

Coming to what you're experiencing, the biggest drain I find is the prep time at higher levels (group is 16th now) when permitting players latitude to choose their own path in world etc.  I'm committed to see campaign through to 20th level for the sake of those who want to "feel what it's like", but stopping there, to regret of some who want to try playing beyond that level.  The feel of characters at that level too far from the kind of fantasy drama that interests me and the game not balanced at that level in my view.  If I had children, there's simply no way I would have the time to run the game for them.

In meantime, I've hooked up with the local indie game scene to see what some of those games feel like.

Hi Will,

It seems to me that what you're struggling with is the tension between _wanting to provide an environment where the players' decisions are driving play_ and _wanting to have a cool adventure built up before play_. These interact uneasily and often lead to really tough pressure situations for GMs. Ron has described an experience like this with his Champions game many years ago that led him to seek new ways of roleplaying and game design, and I had an experience like this with D&D 3.0 about 3 years ago which was one of the things that led me to the Forge in the first place.

I've seen three ways to solve this problem, with different strengths and weaknesses.

1) The mainstream way: buy into a pre-existing line of products, maybe a whole developed setting, maybe just a series of modules and encounter books that you plug in when you need them. The advantage is that someone else is doing the prep, and you have to just juggle locations, etc., plug things in where appropriate. The disadvantage is: costs more money, you become increasingly bound to the continuity of someone else's ideas or metaplot, etc. This can inhibit creativity, especially if you have 'canon nuts' in your game. On the other hand, this seems to work pretty well for some folks too.

2) The old-school way: make it all up yourself. This is how I've always done it with traditional games. This takes a lot of work, and still has the problem you describe above in potential, but the work is much easier. In Champions or D&D 3.5, for instance, statting up a good monster or supervillain can take an hour or more even for an experienced and competent system master. In OD&D or Tunnels and Trolls or Risus or some d6 system games, etc., the mechanical part of the effort takes all of a minute, or ten. Psychologically, this makes a big difference for me. If I can say 'they might go here or here or here' and get a rough idea of what the here's are that, plus the knowledge that if they do something that's not on my list I can make it up in play on the fly or maybe with a five minute break from the action, makes the traditional kind of prep described in (1) and that you seem to be doing more manageable for some people. You're still caught in the dilemma (wanting to get things cool up front vs. wanting to give your players what they want in play), but the dilemma becomes resolvable in real time in a way it's often not (at least without massive supplement help) in modern mainstream games (D&D 3, Exalted, WoD, M&M, GURPS, HERO, etc.)

3) The new-school way as exemplified by some Forge designs: you run a system that focuses on the kind of story-making choices that you think are cool, using mechanics that tend to minimize other aspects of play. In the best incarnations this tends to have all the advantages of (2) (Sorcerer, DitV, MLwM, Hero's Banner, etc. all require relatively little to almost no GM work on making things up as you go) with the additional asset of mechanics that actually help drive play towards interesting thematic decisions. The disadvantage of these systems, if I may speak so broadly about a family whose members have many distinguishing features of their own, is the same as their advantage: they're tailored towards minicampaigns around a single theme. If you're expecting that you're going to play a long game with the same players where characters do a lot of different things over time, or if you're expecting that you're going to run a whole bunch of games in the same world for different groups over time, these games don't always help with that. The fun and successful play that a lot of people around here are getting with these games revolves around a series of focused short to medium length 'campaigns' that do different things at different times.

So in terms of advice, I guess I'd suggest one of the following. If you really are wedded to the open-ended fantasy campaign of yore, you should either resign yourself to buying into someone else's setting (1), find a system that allows the GM to improvise a lot without too much prep that gives you broad scope to imaginatively detail the world during and around play without the immense backwork that aggravates this tension (2 - my current fave along these lines is Revised Mazes & Minotaurs), or give up on the whole long-term play idea (for a while, if you're hesitant - you can always go back later!) and just experiment with a lot of new designs to see what you like (and if that's your choice, this website can point you to dozens of good ones).

YMMV.

Filip wrote:
I can relate to your problem, as it reminds me of my past play experiences. Prep was always killing me (in D&D, even more so), and the pressure resulted in more sweat than it was worth. So, at some point, I simply ceased doing the prep - and from then on, I started having fun as a GM. Later, I've switched to Forge-ish games completely, as they usually offer better tools for the sit & play model than "traditional" systems, and spread the responsibility for fun more evenly among the whole group.

Will,

In the light of what Sean says here:

Calithena wrote:
In Champions or D&D 3.5, for instance, statting up a good monster or supervillain can take an hour or more even for an experienced and competent system master. In OD&D or Tunnels and Trolls or Risus or some d6 system games, etc., the mechanical part of the effort takes all of a minute, or ten.

Hi everyone,

Thanks for all the replies!  I only hope I can organize my brain well enough to respond properly.  :)

Filip:

Filip wrote:
So, I suppose the easiest solution would be not to worry about the next session at all, and not think about it too much. Definitely, it's better not to force yourself to think up the details. If something just jumps to your head, it's fine, but otherwise, you could just as well come to the game with no more than very general ideas and let the session develop in a natural way, making things up on the spot as needed.

Calithena wrote:
1) The mainstream way: buy into a pre-existing line of products, maybe a whole developed setting, maybe just a series of modules and encounter books that you plug in when you need them. The advantage is that someone else is doing the prep, and you have to just juggle locations, etc., plug things in where appropriate. The disadvantage is: costs more money, you become increasingly bound to the continuity of someone else's ideas or metaplot, etc. This can inhibit creativity, especially if you have 'canon nuts' in your game. On the other hand, this seems to work pretty well for some folks too.

Calithena wrote: 3) The new-school way as exemplified by some Forge designs: you run a system that focuses on the kind of story-making choices that you think are cool, using mechanics that tend to minimize other aspects of play.

Calithena wrote: So in terms of advice, I guess I'd suggest one of the following. If you really are wedded to the open-ended fantasy campaign of yore, you should either resign yourself to buying into someone else's setting (1), find a system that allows the GM to improvise a lot without too much prep that gives you broad scope to imaginatively detail the world during and around play without the immense backwork that aggravates this tension (2 - my current fave along these lines is Revised Mazes & Minotaurs), or give up on the whole long-term play idea (for a while, if you're hesitant - you can always go back later!) and just experiment with a lot of new designs to see what you like (and if that's your choice, this website can point you to dozens of good ones).

Rob wrote: ...could you give us an idea of how much time you spent preparing for each session, and how long the sessions were?

If you could tell us what you seemed to spend the most time doing (e.g. thinking, scribbling notes, looking up stats, etc) then that would be great too.

Will wrote:

Thoughts I have had:

• During play, I tend to feel fine.  A bit nervous, but okay.  I don't even mind a small amount of improvising ("What clan does the orc belong to?" is fine; "Are there any missions we can take on for them?" isn't), as long as I don't have to keep it a secret, and maybe get some help from the players.  But between sessions, I absolutely freak out about preparing for the game.  Is it enough?  It never seems to be enough.
• The style of prep I was engaging in seems not to be what I was aiming for.  I'm not entirely sure what I was aiming for, though.  Basically, I feel like I was doing typical "railroading" prep -- I was just making sure the rails were going where the players wanted them to ahead of time.  Which is better, but it leaves me fully unequipped to deal with changes of plan.
• One explanation I can think of regarding the stress I was feeling is that I'm not sure I really know what's expected of me as GM.  What do the players want out of a game?  Without really knowing that, I'm left trying to prepare for every possible expectation, which I just can't do.  It's silly.  I need to talk to them about this.

My goal here was to run a game like so many people have talked about on the Forge and similar forums.  I wanted to set up the initial situation, maybe drop a couple of bangs, and otherwise just see what happened.  I even did it once myself, as a one-on-one one-shot game.  That worked well, I thought, but this time I had five players, instead of one, and I think that made things into a whole different ball of wax.  And, I was still really new at this style of game.

After that, they asked if the village could spare any warriors to help them take the capital down.  I had the village elder explain to them that the village was essentially fighting for its very existence every day, and so they really couldn't spare anyone.  One player asks if there's anything they can do to help the village out, any problems they're having, so that the village can muster the resources to help the PCs out.

Oh, man.  I want to enthusiastically say "Yes!" to this, but, of course, I have no idea what I would do next.  I'm pretty open about this stuff at the table.  So, the player that did the asking says, "Isn't there a random adventure generator in the DMG?"  There is, but it's just an idea generator.  What the heck.  I open it up and roll, and the player (with a little help from the others) starts chiming in with ideas on how to integrate what I rolled into the next session.  To be honest, I was happier than a pig in shit with this development.  I love that they were helping out like that.  I wouldn't mind a lot more of that in these games, whichever side of the DM's screen I'm on.

Anyway, that was that.  Over the next couple of weeks I once again wracked my brain to figure out how I wanted to do things.  I had good ideas that the players provided, but I needed to really flesh it out.  Again, I came up with idea after idea, none of which I really felt happy with.  That's about when the "staying up nights" thing started happening.  A couple days later, I quit.

Will, I'm going to totally ignore the whole prep question and answer the question you didn't ask, because the issue -- the "something I'm missing" -- is much larger than prep.

I. What didn't work

Will wrote: [Kault] was enlightened, and instead of destroying the monastery or simply inhabiting it, he turned it into his own monastery.  I decided that Iuz lost interest in the monastery as a strategic stronghold once he took over the larger part of the surrounding area, and thus had no objections to Kault's desires.  Eventually, Kault's men -- now monks themselves -- were, for all intents and purposes, independent from Iuz, and neither cared much about the other....The players decided that the inhabitation of the monastery by Iuz's men was an outrage, so they tried to sneak into the monastery, with the intent of killing everyone as they slept.  (Not nice people, these characters.)...I again stymied the players by having Kault kneel and mutter under his breath, as though drunk or traumatized.  He didn't lift a finger against the PCs.... Kault was muttering prayers to the elven gods of the monastery; he'd taken them as his own.  He was repentant and accepting of his fate, whatever it might be.  The monks in the party were pretty infuriated by this, interestingly, and decided to torture and kill him.  Okay....

The PCs were all members of an elite team of adventurers working for a king -- sort of a royal SWAT team.  The campaign was centered around the war between this kingdom and the neighboring one, which was ruled by an evil demigod, Iuz

a twist I had planned for the future (in which a sought-after potential ally turns out to be a friendly orc -- how will the players react to this?).

I had to improv a bunch of stuff as the players interrogated one of the orcs.  I had intended the encounter to be more or less flavor... [but] My players often push to learn everything they can, and I always forget this; there's no such thing as a random encounter for them....The players then decide to seek out the village the dead elves were from, so they might return the elves' personal affects and tell their families of what happened.  I, of course, had prepared no such village, but I liked the sentiment and the idea, so what the hell? ... The players were fully aware, by the way, that I was making all this shit up as I went along.  They seemed okay with it.
After that, they asked if the village could spare any warriors to help them take the capital down.  I had the village elder explain to them that the village was essentially fighting for its very existence every day, and so they really couldn't spare anyone.  One player asks if there's anything they can do to help the village out, any problems they're having, so that the village can muster the resources to help the PCs out.
Oh, man.  I want to enthusiastically say "Yes!" to this, but, of course, I have no idea what I would do next.  I'm pretty open about this stuff at the table.  So, the player that did the asking says, "Isn't there a random adventure generator in the DMG?"  There is, but it's just an idea generator.  What the heck.  I open it up and roll, and the player (with a little help from the others) starts chiming in with ideas on how to integrate what I rolled into the next session.  To be honest, I was happier than a pig in shit with this development.  I love that they were helping out like that.  I wouldn't mind a lot more of that in these games...

Will,

Will wrote:
I didn't keep track, but, not counting daydreaming on the train and what not, I'd say I spent about 10-15 hours a week prepping.

Sydney,

Sydney wrote:
1) Prep! Detail a specific adventure or situation, with any maps, mooks, and boss monsters you need statted up for that situation and that situation only. Assume your players are going to engage with that situation and not run off and do something random

Sydney wrote:
Note that you always stay just one step ahead of your players in prep work. This isn't railroading -- quite the opposite: If you were really railroading, you'd know where they'd be going several steps ahead; but this way, you let them decide whatever next step they want based on the actual play experience they've just had.

1) Prep! Detail a specific adventure or situation, with any maps, mooks, and boss monsters you need statted up for that situation and that situation only. Assume your players are going to engage with that situation and not run off and do something random, just don't assume what they'll do in the situation: They're definitely going to Orc Town, for example, so prep the major factions in Orc Town in case they want to ally with one to fight another, but don't bother with Goblinville or Elfburg.

2) Play! Present them the situation, respond to what they do, improvize like crazy.

3) Talk! Get everyone to talk about what they really liked in that session and what they want to do next. If they found a magic weapon in Orc Town, for example, they might want to take it to Elfburg to get it analyzed in case it has mysterious evil secrets -- in which case it should definitely have some, no matter what your original idea was!

Hi, guys.  Wow, look at all the replies!  ;) 

Adam wrote: Are the players having fun? You seem to have some GM jitters and they seem to be insecurity-driven. That is, I think if you knew the players were having fun most of the time, you'd be fine.

Adam wrote: You say you're fine during games. That means you're probably prepping enough. It also makes me wonder if you're frustrated because you aren't getting enough feedback from your players to feel like you can adequately prep. You're stumbling around in the dark without any help from them during prep and that's no fun. Then you get to the game and -- whew! -- the prep worked. But you don't know that till the game is in session. One day, you're afraid, the prep won't work and your game will crash and burn.

Adam wrote: From the techniques you're discussing and the way you're talking about them, I get the impression you're trying to drift your D&D game from its usual mode to something different. I'm hesitant to guess at what that "different" is (and I'm super hesitant to say you're shooting for a Narrativist game based only on what you've said) so help me out. Is the play experience what you hoped it would be? Are the players doing what you hoped they would?

Adam wrote: What is missing from the report, in my opinion, is what the players are doing -- what they're deciding -- and how that affects what you do. Low-prep games run very well with this kind of give and take.

Adam wrote: Those are techniques associated with the Sorcerer RPG and, lately, with Narrativist play in general. Yet, the actual play report is all about what you did as the DM -- the stuff you threw at them to kill, essentially. It's mission-based ("SWAT team") play, and I don't think your "bangs" are Bangs in the Sorcerer sense. That is, I don't see you putting the characters in a situation that makes the players make any kind of real decision. ("Fight the people trying to kill us!" is not a real decision, especially in D&D.) I'm not saying you have to implement real Bangs to have fun. They're a great technique for play, especially Narrativist play, but I just wanted to point out that you're not doing Bangs in the sense that we understand them.

Adam wrote: It looks to me as if the players are really jazzing off your world and the potential to be heroes in it. They want to help this village. They want to prove their mettle. Are you saying that, when the players said, "Okay, tell us about this village's problems so we can fix them," you are coming up blank? Is that the root of this problem?

Adam wrote: One technique I've seen people use (and I've used it myself because it's awesome) is, right when things are getting tricky, ask the player, "What is it?"

Sydney wrote: You're clearly trying to set up Bangs here around some big philosophical issues: Can an evil man redeem himself? Can we forgive those who have done evil to us in the past, or is it only just to seek revenge? What is "our side" anyway -- is it defined by sharing a common loyalty to our country, or a common religion, or something else?

It's also pretty clear that your players aren't interested in these questions, at least not in this context. They know who the good guys and the bad guys are, and bad guys claiming that they've changed and are good guys now just disgusts them.

Sydney wrote: And given the basic premises of D&D, you can't blame your players for wanting this kind of clear, bright line over which characters do not step.

Sydney wrote: What's more, it sounds like you hardwired this outlook into your premise for the campaign:

The PCs were all members of an elite team of adventurers working for a king -- sort of a royal SWAT team.  The campaign was centered around the war between this kingdom and the neighboring one, which was ruled by an evil demigod, Iuz

"Royal SWAT team in a land torn between a good and an evil kingdom" says "take out the bad guys by all means necessary" to me, not "wrestle with hard moral dilemmas."

Now, I'm aware that you played this campaign a while ago and are now restarting it, so your interests may have changed. You may well want gut-wrenching moral dilemmas about who's good and who's evil. But from all indications, your players don't, and it's not clear you gave them fair warning that you wanted to try something different this time.

Sydney wrote: There's a certain extreme form of "the GM is God" ideology that considers it the GM's right and responsibility to confront the players with surprises that question their assumptions, as real people sitting around the table, about what the game should be about, but I've never heard of it actually working in practice. Everyone needs to be on-board with what they want out of the game or you'll constantly be at cross-purposes.

Sydney wrote: So I'd strongly recommend that you ask your players point-blank, "Hey, that thing about Kault converting to the Religion of Good -- was that interesting at all, or a total waste of time? Do you want your bad guys to be bad guys and for the choices to be about the best ways to kill them, or do you want it to be unclear who's bad and who's good and for the choices to be about whether to kill with them or ally with them?"

Don't prejudge their answer. They might like the general idea of shades-of-gray but just have found something lacking with Kault as a character -- after all, it took George Lucas three Star Wars movies to turn Darth Vader from a villain to a sympathetic character, and it's a hard trick to present a character and say "you thought he was a villain, but he's not!" without any backstory or build-up.

Sydney wrote: This is great stuff -- and I mean not just "great things to happen in play" but "highly useful description in your Actual Play post." A lot of GM-seeking-advice posts in this forum are all about the problems and what people don't want with nothing about the good parts and what people do want; you've given us well-described examples of both, which is a huge help.

Sydney wrote: What's lucky is that you really enjoy doing this too. Yes, you'd like some more moral dilemmas, clearly, but you can enjoy this style of play too, which is all to the good (since your players don't seem to be into moral dilemmas) and which speaks to your credit (the more different things you can enjoy, the better).

What's even luckier is that they enjoy doing it with you, back and forth, improvizationally, with everyone around the table being part of the same creative process. If you had hardcore "GM is God" types, they'd sit there blankly expecting you to deliver all the details yourself, and then prep work really would be a problem.

What's luckiest of all is that you're totally open with them that you're winging it. If you were a hardcore believer in "GM is God," your pride wouldn't allow this, and you'd have a lot less fun. I suspect your anxieties about being a good GM and doing enough prep-work are the result of that lingering bit of training you have that whispers in your ear, "but you're the GM! You're supposed to know everything! You're supposed to have everything prepped! You shouldn't have to get ideas from mere players! Collaboration is bad! You must be a solitary genuis!" Tell that voice to go sit on a pitchfork.

Sydney wrote: My suggestion would be to toss a lot of neat ideas at your players and spend some time bantering back and forth with them about what you and they are both interested in.

Sydney wrote: From my own experience, the cycle should go something like this:

1) Prep! Detail a specific adventure or situation, with any maps, mooks, and boss monsters you need statted up for that situation and that situation only. Assume your players are going to engage with that situation and not run off and do something random, just don't assume what they'll do in the situation: They're definitely going to Orc Town, for example, so prep the major factions in Orc Town in case they want to ally with one to fight another, but don't bother with Goblinville or Elfburg.

Sydney wrote: 2) Play! Present them the situation, respond to what they do, improvize like crazy.

3) Talk! Get everyone to talk about what they really liked in that session and what they want to do next. If they found a magic weapon in Orc Town, for example, they might want to take it to Elfburg to get it analyzed in case it has mysterious evil secrets -- in which case it should definitely have some, no matter what your original idea was! -- or they want want to take it to Goblinville to kill goblins with -- in which case it might have dark secrets, but they shouldn't make it impossible to defeat the goblins, just more complicated -- or they might want want to take it to the King so he can use it before the bad guys take it back -- in which case there should definitely be somebody trying to take it back, and lots of dangers along the road.

And then go back to step (1).

Note that you always stay just one step ahead of your players in prep work. This isn't railroading -- quite the opposite: If you were really railroading, you'd know where they'd be going several steps ahead; but this way, you let them decide whatever next step they want based on the actual play experience they've just had.

Rob wrote: Well, I've never run more than one-offs in 3E, but this seems extremely high. How much playing time, on average, did you do per week spent on prep?

Rob wrote: Regarding Sean's comments, another game I often see pushed as a lower-prep, faster-play alternative to 3E is Savage Worlds. I've got the SW book, and it looks good, but I've not played it yet. It's structurally similar to 3E (including, for example, the strong encouragement to use minis for combat) but there are far fewer rules (the combat rules in the 3.5E PHB are, what, 60 pages of small type?).

Rob wrote: So, my question is... if you don't "provide the players with a fun time", what will be the consequence? What, specifically, are you worried will happen?

Rob wrote: This is something I'm actively pursuing. For example, in last night's TSOY game I told the players ahead of time that the session would be confined to the city they were in last time and its immediate environs. For any future sessions, I'm going to get this negotiated ahead of time - they can be in Ammeni, or the depths of the Khalean jungles, but there needs to be an agreed scope.

For a campaign that makes the traditional "continuous time" assumption (as I think Will's did), the scope might not be so wide, but the principle is the same. The main difficulty I see here is getting the time of the prep-necessitated break (scope change) to adequately match the real-world break (a satisfying time to end the session). I don't have any great suggestions for resolving this.

Will, happy to be helpful. Let me restate and reemphasize: It's only "railroading" if the GM assumes in advance what the players' decisions have to be. If all the players say at the end of a session, "Now we want to go to Orc Town and kill the chief!," and then you go home and prep up Orc Town with a special emphasis on the chief's combat abilities, you're not railroading, because you're responding to a decision that they already made.

Which brings us to

contracycle wrote: If I'm improvising, then my plan has failed.  That is not a desirable outcome, that is the outcome I am trying desperately to avoid.

Got called to the morning staff meeting before I finished all my brilliant, brilliant thoughts.

Will wrote: ...the bit about being disgusted about bad guys claiming to have changed -- that's really just one player in particular, Nik, who played one of the two monks who belonged to the monastery.  ...he told me after the game that he really liked that his character cut down Kault, as he thought it mirrored his own desire for his character's redemption.  He himself was playing a character who was once good, and slipped onto the path of evil, and he had plans for his character to atone.

I think I was on the wrong track with the whole monastery adventure.  I mean, there was the barest hint of situation, and then the players understandably rushed in with guns blazing....

Hi Sydney,

Sydney wrote:
Will, happy to be helpful. Let me restate and reemphasize: It's only "railroading" if the GM assumes in advance what the players' decisions have to be. If all the players say at the end of a session, "Now we want to go to Orc Town and kill the chief!," and then you go home and prep up Orc Town with a special emphasis on the chief's combat abilities, you're not railroading, because you're responding to a decision that they already made.

Sydney wrote: I disagree with Gareth (contracycle) 100% -- as I usually do: It's kind of creepy.

Sydney wrote: This is awesome. Not just that you and Nik are into the same coolness, but that Nik came out and said so explicitly after the game. That's good feedback. The only thing better would have been if Nik had said so in front of the whole group so everyone could chime in.

Sydney wrote: Question: What did Kault, as a character, want? Specifically, what did he want from the player-characters? (Thinking about NPCs this way is a core technique I got from Vincent Baker's superb Dogs in the Vineyard). If the answer is "to be left alone," that's like a basketball with half of the air out: Throw it all you want, it ain't gonna bounce.

Sydney wrote: What's a lot more fun is to set up a situation where the major NPCs all want something to change. If Kault really wanted the player-characters to endorse his conversion, that'd be more of a challenge than him sitting there praying and waiting to die. For that matter, it'd be more interesting if Kault rushed out of the monastery to meet them saying, "I am a wicked man - you are servants of justice - I beg you, slay me!" Sure, they might've said, "Works for me" and whacked him right there, but even a hardcore crusader type might've said, "Waaaaait a second -- is this some kind of trick?"

Will wrote: Okay, so here's my question:  if you and Gareth disagree 100%, how can I agree 100% with both of you?! 

Sydney wrote:

Will wrote: Okay, so here's my question:  if you and Gareth disagree 100%, how can I agree 100% with both of you?! 

Light is both a particle and a wave. The jewel is in the lotus. There is no spoon.

Andrew wrote:

Sydney wrote:

Will wrote: Okay, so here's my question:  if you and Gareth disagree 100%, how can I agree 100% with both of you?!

Light is both a particle and a wave. The jewel is in the lotus. There is no spoon.

Schrodinger's cat is both alive and dead.

Best of luck, TDM.  Hope it goes well -- come back afterwards and let us know!  :)

-Will

Will wrote:

Adam wrote: What is missing from the report, in my opinion, is what the players are doing -- what they're deciding -- and how that affects what you do. Low-prep games run very well with this kind of give and take.

Hmm.  Could you please elaborate a bit on this?  I'm not sure what you're asking. 

contracycle wrote:
If I'm improvising, then my plan has failed.  That is not a desirable outcome, that is the outcome I am trying desperately to avoid.

contracycle wrote:
I simply cannot in honesty suggest to the players that we should play a game if I can't GUARANTEE that I can deliver my side of the bargain.

Will,

Will wrote:
I know at least one of my players, Nik, isn't into that sort of thing, though I've struggled to understand why.  I remember a conversation in which he basically said that he feels that such things should come from the GM, so he can be surprised by the events as they unfold.  I don't understand why the two are related -- isn't it just as surprising if a fellow player comes up with the idea?

Will wrote:
It is kind of railroading, only I'm asking them where they want each very short section of track to lead before I lay them down, a little bit at a time.

"Control of a player-character's decisions, or opportunities for decisions, by another person (not the player of the character) in any way which breaks the Social Contract for that group, in the eyes of the character's player."

Will wrote:
1.  One of the things I liked most about GMing back when I started that first campaign was that I felt it was my opportunity to run D&D the way I felt it should be run.

Will wrote:
Thanks for asking that.  I'll have to think some about it all.

Rob wrote:
Gareth, why do you see improvisation as necessarily a bad thing? Have you had exclusively bad results when improvising like this in the past? I know that the sessions where I've improvised heavily have accounted for most of the best sessions I've ever had.

I kind of get the impression here that, like Will, you're setting the bar impossibly high for yourself. I'd really like to see an AP thread about your (in your eyes) unsuccessful attempts to use this style. I'd particularly like to know what the players thought of the game, and how they thought it compared to games you'd run with e.g. linear plots or controlled environments (e.g. dungeons).

Sydney wrote:
First of all, you're always going to have to improvise something: No GM knows their players so well, and has so much time to prep, that they have a preset reaction to every sword-stroke or line of dialogue the players offer. The question isn't whether or not to improvise; it's how much to improvise.

Second, and more fundamental: People improvise in RPGs all the time. They're called players. Why is this good for one type of participant and bad for another? The GM is just a special kind of player.

Now, how do players balance improvisation and prep work? Good prep for a player consists of having a solid character concept with whatever mechanical details worked out that the game's character generation system requires: You know who your character is, what he or she wants in general, and what things he or she can do. Then, when the GM presents you an unexpected situation -- or, for that matter, another player does something unexpected -- you have a solid foundation from which to improvise.

All I'd prepped was the map of the bridge area and the hordes; I literally had no idea what the players would find inside the city. Then, based on what the players had shown they were interested in, in both character generation and in that short bit of actual play, I came up with about half-a-dozen major NPCs, each associated with a different location in the city, and each with their own agenda (I tended not to prep stats until I knew the players were headed to that specific location). Every time the players chose a path to follow, knew what NPC's sphere of influence they'd be entering, and I knew what that NPC wanted and what the NPC's initial approach would be (ambush, negotiation, seduction, sorcery...), but I didn't know what the players' reaction would be (fight back, run away, reject, accept), and I didn't have to, because I knew the NPCs well enough to improvise their reactions just as if I were a regular player running my own PC.

Thus every campaign should begin with a clear discussion of what everyone wants from the game before you even create characters -- not just "here's my pitch, read it and make a character who's X level and has a plot tie to Y," but everyone sitting around the table brainstorming as equals.

sorry for botched quoting above

Will wrote:
Contracycle:  Geez, man.  I am totally with you.  100%.  So much it's creepy.  :)  I'm in particular agreement with the idea that one-shots and "miniseries" would be way easier than open-ended (or, as in my case, closed-ended, but very long-term) campaigns.  By the way -- could I ask you post a link to the AP you mentioned?  I'd love to read it.

contracycle,

Well, as I mentioned previously, it is very important to my scene setting and descriptions, but it can apply to things as trivial as coming up with someones name on the fly.  If I know that play is going to move to town X, then I can prepare descriptions of town X, think about who is in it and what might be going on.  If I had no expectation that play would move to town X, and the players take it there, then I am compelled to improvise; and because I have less time, and no ability to edit what comes out of my mouth, these descriptions will be less interesting and less engaging than they would have been if I had had sufficient time to prepare.  Worse, I risk a slip of the tongue or some omission of memory introducing inconsistencies or contradictions of previously established data.

Gareth is from Mars, I'm from Venus, or something. Will, I hope you don't think it derailing your thread if Gareth and I go back and forth like this a bit more. First:

contracycle wrote:

I can't see how this is not vigorous railroading - the outcome of entry into the city was a fixed point, determined and imposed by the GM.

In this technique, where the player-characters go next session is chosen by the players at the end of the last session. The only restriction the GM needs to place on them is to stick with that original decision. So the players provide the "fixed point," whether that's "We're going to go to place X" or "we want to rob a bank" or whatever. Then the GM preps the things they'll find there -- but with no preconception of how it's going to turn out.

When I GM this way, I know what the player-characters are going to do next, of course -- because the players just told me. That way I can then figure out what my characters are going to do in response. I never had any idea how the players were going to respond in their turn, let alone how my characters would respond to their response to my response. Usually within 30 minutes of starting play, I was having my NPCs do things I'd never expected them to do. But I could do it, because I knew those NPCs as people, just as if each of them was my PC and I was a regular player, so just like a regular player acting out his PC in the face of the GM's surprises, I could act out my NPCs in the face of the players' surprises.

Second:

If you started these orcish plots running, and the players have no buy-in, then they are reduced to being spectators of the metaplot...

Ah, I've not made myself clear. There is no "plot" in the sense of "a bunch of things I know are going to happen," and there are no "plots running" in the sense of "events happening independently of the player-characters." There are a bunch of NPCs with desires and abilities (motives and means, if you like), but they're all inert -- effectively in suspended animation -- until the player-characters interact with them. If the players find a particularly NPC boring, I usher that character out of the story as quickly as possible; if the players find a particular NPC interesting, I have that character interact with them more and more.

For example, in my "ruined city" campaign, Tony played the traumatized waif-assassin Yuri, and Jen played Khaidu, the noble savage and shapeshifter. (Yes, a man was playing the female character and a woman was playing the male). They set things up in character creation so that Khaidu felt protective of Yuri, but Yuri had a huge crush on Khaidu, as yet unreciprocated. I knew Tony liked teen angst drama, and that Jen had wanted more "doomed romance" out of our past games -- I knew because they'd told me -- so I set up two romantic rivals for Yuri. One was a werewolf princess of the shapeshifter people, Death-Her-Gift; the other was Yuri's long-lost sister, an uptight paladin and the true heir to the human throne, Kaina. I knew enough about each NPC's abilities and desires (for Khaidu's attention) to play them as if they were my own PC, and I threw them both at the player-characters a few times over the course of two sessions. It became quickly apparent that everyone found Death-Her-Gift uninteresting and Kaina really cool, so after that I never had Death-Her-Gift show up again, while Kaina became a member of the "party" and interacted with the PCs constantly.

And a very important point:

Through all of this, I'm only focusing on major characters -- or rather, NPCs who I think have the potential to be major characters, but it's up to the players to decide if they actually get to be major characters or not. I'm not worrying about what street connects to what avenue -- I only mapped out the city in the roughest detail -- or about a host of minor characters. So when Gareth says

the quantity of information they [players] need to track in order to do so is trivial by comparison to the amount the GM has to track.

it's actually not true in my case. In any given session I have three or four fully statted-out characters to keep track of, but each of them has much simpler motivations than the player-characters -- because they're foils, not protagonists in their own right -- and a bunch of generic mooks I can rename for any occasion, and maybe a rough sketch map. The system I was running was The Shadow of Yesterday, and I'm not sure you can get away with this little detail in D&D. But I am sure you can limit the amount of trivia you track and concentrate on characters, which is what make the game go.

Quick note to Will -

If you go #3, which it sounds like you are, don't think it's just going to be all 'make it up at the table'. It's less prep in some ways, but you still need to know e.g. who NPCs are, what's between them, what they want. For some games you need to know more than that too.

I recommend DitV as a good transitional game because it tells you more or less exactly what prep you need to do.

- C/S

hi, to me, it sounds like you have done quite well at DM-ing D&D for your friends. and  the forge-folks have done a great job of providing you with some great food for thought as well as resource matrerial. 

i realise that you may want to take a breather from DM-ing. that is fine. we all have to take care of ourselves. still.., it seems to me that you are quite a thoughtful & thourough GM & your friends will no doubt miss your GM-ing.

i know that i may have missed quite a bit of this tread because i have problems reading extened works on screen [dyslexia?.., who knows & as usual who isn't telling]. still, i want you to considder  a few points.

1] table-top RPGaming is, to me, primarilly an improvisational endevour which can be acted out in various styles of play. to me it seems that D&D's mechanic is essentially simulationist in its structure -but- game-ist players can do quite well playing in this system. narativist players  have more problems achieving their play-goals w/in the D&D system as it actually exists & as it is intended to be played.

2] what style of play do you & your troop of gamers preffer? is there a mechanic which facilitates the style(s) of play that everyone is seeking?  if so, move to that kind of mechanic, while keeping the color/setting of D&D..., if everyone like that setting. also the pre-play as wella as the in-play handling-time of D&D is significant. you may wish to opt for a system which provides you with a more aerodynamic flow.., both inside & outside of your rpg session's actual play time.

3] social contract, transperancy &  the GMs burden. all too often it is seen as the duty of the GM to entertain the players of the game. all too ofthen this is an unstated duty. i feel that this is an unfair burden. in improv acting everyone on stage [regardless of their role] is equally accountable for the success of the skit at hand. no one person holds the fate of the skit in their hands. it is a joint effort. so too it is with rpg play. we are all responcable for the level of success/fun in our rpg-session.

i suggest that you try giving everyone playing the opportunity to guide the sessions play by honestly discussing where things should go next [ = what conflicts & scenes to address]. you may even experiment & dispence with the contrivance of forced mystery, by say, abandoning the idea of character secrets [ = there can well be secrets between characters but none between players].  there is a distinction between players' & characters' & their relative realities here.

if we open up this knowledge to all the players gathered arround the rpg-table we all can intentionally play upon the dynamics of the internal conflicts of the characters in our story. doing so we can play up the irony, pathos &/or comedy at hand & that can be very fun.

i hope that these snippets have been of help to you. this reply is opinion. so take what is useful & disgard the rest.  ~cloud

Filip wrote:
contracycle,

I.e. we hardly ever give attention to names. Most often the group forgets the name soon after introduction, and we instinctively refer to NPCs or places by general labels. Consequently, I've found it more efficient to simply use labels instead of forcing myself to think up a name (or, occassionally I ask players if they had an idea for a name, or use some pre-generated list, if a distinctive name is needed indeed). During last years I had only one player who actually kept asking for names, and later on he wasn't using them anyway.

As it happens, making up names has become something of a learned skill, so its not that big a deal in practice.

Also, we simply edit things that come from our mouths, and retcon established data if there is such demand. Once it became an accepted procedure, things got much easier.

Well unfortunately I find both these things aesthetically displeasing. From my perspective if the players don't remember an NPC's name then that NPC doesn't really matter to them.  Thats fine for bystanders and whatnot but if they interact with them with any frequency, and the players are paying attention, it seems to me they should want a name as a hook on which to hang all the stuff they know about that person.

Retconning is also something I dislike, and which presents problems.  I have heard of people taping their own games so they can double-check the statements they made; or immediately doing a brain-dump onto paper.  I have found myself scribbling hasty notes to myself about some on-the-fly ruling which I am aware is not properly rationalised and is going to need further work.  And how can there be any challenge when the neither the past nor the future have a strong relationship with the present?

What I'm wondering is how people are coming up with so many details that (a) they can't remember them all and (b) they are all going to come up again. In my group, 90% of the dialogue around the table is about what a relatively small number of major characters (PCs and NPCs both) are doing and saying; yes, it's important to remember who's mad at whom, for example, but I'm never going to have cause to paraphrase the dialogue again, let alone quote it verbatim. (In fact, it can be fun to roleplay how my NPC's recollection of what was said is totally different from the players' recollection, in of course a self-serving and denial-laden way: "Oh, yes, you totally promised to support my bid for the throne..."). Likewise, there is a relatively small number of major locations where most of the action takes place, and I tend to describe them in atmospheric terms -- "the temple is dark, the walls lined with desecrated statues of the gods, with dark streaks of something foul-smelling on the floor" -- rather than in detailed terms of what goes where (and if I do, I sketch a map and keep it).

I suppose if I had a large number of minor characters that didn't make a particular impression on me, or lots of detailed locations I didn't have a chance to sketch out, this would be a lot harder. But I don't see the need for so many details.

In this context, let me recommend structured improvisation of setting elements using algorithms.

In that same thread, there's also some great advice from Larry Lade on how to unclutter your game of unneeded detail and get to the action:

Larry wrote: For years I've suffered through so much of this style of play. "Okay, you're in town. What do you want to do?" This simple phrase unfailingly leads to three hours of suck. (Oddly, it's almost always exactly that quantity of time before someone gets fed up and demands a railroad.) Go to the bar. Have pointless interactions with NPCs. Go SHOPPING. It's pretty funny how your example shows how this transcends the fantasy genre.

What's weird is that a lot of gamers have come to expect that this is the right way to run a roleplaying game, because anything else is railroading and disempowering the players. A lot of us got into this hobby in our younger days, when our time wasn't as precious and squeezing an hour or two of genuine enjoyment out of a fourteen-hour marathon session seemed reasonable. Fun being something that "had to" emerge from an unstructured situation.

And, hey, maybe this style of play can still work with a tightly focused Sim agenda. But if this happens under an attempt to focus on Narrative (as was the industry trend in the late-80s early-90s) you get dysfunction.

In particular, the tools that you must understand to get Narr to work are bangs and aggressive scene framing. Remember, Story Now. Cut out all the "You walk to the bar. The city is blah blah blah, and there's some blah blah alleys. On the way, you see a blind man asking for change, do you want to talk to him?" stuff. That's bullshit. They want to go to the bar, you're at the bar now. Get the players in on the scene framing. "Okay, you want to go to the bar? What kind of bar is it? Who's there?" And then you whip out the Bang, and now they're involved in something. They've gotta come up with some creative contribution.

If you can generate these sorts of provocative situations, then you're already addressing a Premise.

contracycle,

Well unfortunately I find both these things aesthetically displeasing.

Will,

After the discussions in this thread, do you have any plans to try GMing again? As you suggested yourself earlier on, it might be worth trying some games that directly support (or, indeed, require) a more improvisational play style. Even if you don't end up playing any of these regularly, they may be valuable as an occasional practice tools for you. I, for example, am expecting to go back to a more traditional rule system in the longer term, but I'm using TSOY for the moment to help my development in this style.

An alternative would be to try a mini-campaign with an agreed length and scope. For example, I'm currently toying with the idea of a short campaign, similar to yours in that it's based around a war. This would involve some stipulations about scope agreed ahead of time (for example "You will remain within the valley", "You will concern yourselves primarily with influencing the course of the war", and "You will, at any time, be fighting for one of the major factions (although you can change sides)"), and (perhaps more significantly) a general agreement that events will conclude within six to ten sessions.

I'd also very much like to hear how your players feel about the game you ran and about some of the suggestions raised in this thread. If you're willing to share this, could you break it down by player (who said what)? For example, you mentioned that Nik seems to have some attitudes that conflict with this style of play - I'd be very interested to hear his view on the matter.

rob

Gareth,

contracycle wrote:
Well unfortunately I find both these things aesthetically displeasing.

contracycle wrote:
Retconning is also something I dislike, and which presents problems.  I have heard of people taping their own games so they can double-check the statements they made; or immediately doing a brain-dump onto paper.

contracycle wrote:
And how can there be any challenge when the neither the past nor the future have a strong relationship with the present?

contracycle wrote:
As they have said, they are tired of making characters for games that never go anywhere.  And I cannot fault them for that, I am tired of  the same thing.

contracycle wrote:
But then things tailed off; left to their own devices the players do not seek out high adventure or dramatic experience, they make mundane arrangements and solve mundane problems.  In short order I was back to this-happens-that-happens while everyone was hanging around doing nothing.

contracycle wrote:
If the bar is that the game proceeds and everyone has fun, how can that be too high?  Thats the bare minimum, surely.

I'd really love to hear from Gareth (contracycle) in some detail on how he games and the problems he encounters with ensuring consistent worlds; if you want to take that to another thread, Gareth, please just post a link here so we all know where to follow you.

Rob wrote:
Gareth,

contracycle wrote:
Well unfortunately I find both these things aesthetically displeasing.

Ok, this presents a problem. I suspect that this kind of strong concern for continuity and memory of detail is a real stumbling block for the style of open-ended play we're discussing in this thread. Personally, I'm quite willing to play fast and lose with this kind of concern if it lets me run flexible, open-ended games.

Can anyone chime in with a success story of integrating these kind of concerns with open-ended play?

Rob wrote:
Regarding Sean's comments, another game I often see pushed as a lower-prep, faster-play alternative to 3E is Savage Worlds. I've got the SW book, and it looks good, but I've not played it yet. It's structurally similar to 3E (including, for example, the strong encouragement to use minis for combat) but there are far fewer rules (the combat rules in the 3.5E PHB are, what, 60 pages of small type?).

SW = Savage Worlds?

Sydney wrote:
SW = Savage Worlds?

Hi all,

Wow...okay, there's a lot to reply to.  I went out of town for a few days and haven't had time to deal with this, but I promise I'll get back to y'all soon, hopefully later today or tomorrow.  Thanks!  :)

-Will

Thenomain wrote:
I'm not sure if this suits as "open-ended play", but it was open-ended from our perspective.  It was certainly open-ended enough to keep the game loose, but not so much that anything felt made-up or chaotic.

Rob wrote:
Hmmm... so the players all work together to help keep the game details at least borderline consistent? That seems like a good approach, with multiple brains to keep track of it all. Has there ever been an attitude expressed that this should be the GM's responsibility?

Regarding "open-ended", can you think of a time where the PCs struck out in a very unexpected situation in the middle of a session? How did the GM handle it?

Hi Adam,

Adam wrote: You talk a lot about what you did during the game. I don't feel you're talking much about how the players reacted to things. I don't know if that means that the players were really passive most of the time and did exactly what was "expected" of them or if you just didn't explain what they did very well.

Hi Rob,

Rob wrote: Hmmm... as a GM, you can provide controlled, gradual, exposition of "what's going on". If another player proposes it, it's all revealed at once, up front. Spontaneous player-authored content may also challenge Nik's sense that the game world is 'out there', 'real', and self-consistent. I.e. if you encounter a cave that you placed there he can believe that it was "there all along", or that it at least makes sense in terms of the (abstract) world model that you have in your head. When another player proposes it right there at the table, it's obvious that none of this is the case.

Rob wrote: Is Nik the player who you think is "hardcore Sim"?

Rob wrote: Man, I can relate to this. I wouldn't use the term "should be run", but I am aware that I've got pretty narrow interests in terms of the kind of rolegames I'm interested in playing or GMing. I think that the style I'm working towards is one one that can be enjoyed by a wide range of players (significantly, many people who are attracted to rolegames in theory but who've been driven off by the playing styles they actually encountered), but until I get good at it I'm worried (I think rightly) that my games will be unsatisfying to everybody.

Hey, Sean,

Calithena wrote:
Quick note to Will -

If you go #3, which it sounds like you are, don't think it's just going to be all 'make it up at the table'. It's less prep in some ways, but you still need to know e.g. who NPCs are, what's between them, what they want. For some games you need to know more than that too.

I recommend DitV as a good transitional game because it tells you more or less exactly what prep you need to do.

Rob wrote: After the discussions in this thread, do you have any plans to try GMing again? As you suggested yourself earlier on, it might be worth trying some games that directly support (or, indeed, require) a more improvisational play style. Even if you don't end up playing any of these regularly, they may be valuable as an occasional practice tools for you. I, for example, am expecting to go back to a more traditional rule system in the longer term, but I'm using TSOY for the moment to help my development in this style.

An alternative would be to try a mini-campaign with an agreed length and scope.
...

Rob wrote: I'd also very much like to hear how your players feel about the game you ran and about some of the suggestions raised in this thread. If you're willing to share this, could you break it down by player (who said what)? For example, you mentioned that Nik seems to have some attitudes that conflict with this style of play - I'd be very interested to hear his view on the matter.

Kent,

Okay, so it sounds like your GM rolls with the punches. Question is, how much illusionism is involved here? E.g. if the GM has an adventure in mind, does he tend to warp the world so that, whatever you do, you end up pursuing that adventure?

If we want genuinely open-ended, player-driven play, there needs to be some sense in which the players are selecting some options and shutting down others. There needs to be a sense in which the play that happens wouldn't have occurred if the players had chosen otherwise. I'm struggling to put this concept into words, but it seems quite central to the discussion here.

I guess that without asking the GM in question, we can't know what he was doing.

Will, it's possible that this isn't relevant to your problem, but I guess that if you were willing to go heavily illusionist you could just lay down a rigid plot and then twist and turn until the PCs stuck with it.

rob

Rob wrote: Will, it's possible that this isn't relevant to your problem, but I guess that if you were willing to go heavily illusionist you could just lay down a rigid plot and then twist and turn until the PCs stuck with it.

Will wrote:

Rob wrote: Is Nik the player who you think is "hardcore Sim"?

Nope.  Although he may be more Sim than anything; it's hard to tell.  We need to try more games and styles before this sort of thing will become really apparent, I think.