So Principia is a game my friend Tony is writing. It's about the adventures of engineers, artists, duellists, heretical priests and so on during the Renaissance. Specifically, Florence, in a nebulous period where we can have any Di Medici we want, including none at all.

I've been running it recently, for various groups. One of the things that I've found hard about writing a game is writing the "how to GM this game" text, so I'm going to make some little bullet-pointy notes. Additionally, they'll give you, the reader, a sense of whether or not you want to run the game when it (shortly) goes into open playtest.

How to GM principia:

* Have a stack of 3x5 cards.

* The first thing you have to do as a GM, is come up with a shared affiliation for all the players. This is very simple: it's a group that they're all involved in. This is without a doubt the hardest part of GMing the game, bar none, because you have to create from nothing. Fortunately, you can't really screw it up.

When in doubt, it's a prominent family, probably merchants with some clergy mixed in. Family is always a good center of conflict.

* While people are making their characters, write down the character names and drives on one of the cards. This will help you remember the characters' names, which would otherwise be embarrassing.

* Write down the name of any person mentioned during character creation, and give them one or two little advantages. Give them obvious ones, unless it's way *too* obvious, in which case make it non-obvious.

For instance, when Alexis is playing the no-good layabout son of a merchant family, I write down his smart but unmarried older sister who actually runs things. This is obvious. When Lukas is playing a con-man, and has a drive "I can't lie to Lotta," the obvious thing is that Lotta is the hot girl he has a thing for. But that's *too* obvious. So I write down that she's a late middle aged widow who runs his boarding house and takes no sass from anyone.

* There will be a question you have to come up with. This seems hard but it's easy. The question has to do with the affiliation you picked out earlier. The touchstone is the affiliation itself. Wasn't that easy?

* Sometimes, during both character creation and play, you will discover the game is not about what you thought it was going to be about. This is okay. Roll with it.

For instance, when Tony gets a glint in his eye and starts saying "I don't know if I should write this down, it will really throw the game off the rails" you should say "TONY! Write it down!" And then he writes down "By night, I hunt rogue automata beneath the streets of the city," which has basically finished your planning for you.

* You will have, all together, about 4-10 NPCs in front of you before the start of the game. You don't need to know what all of them are up to, or which ones have secret plots and plans, or anything. Maybe, if you feel like the "plotting GM" type, come up with one *one* of them is up to.

*  That's not to say that this is not a game with secret plots and plans, because it is. You will discover, in play, the plots and secret plans of all the NPCs you started with, plus the dozen more you introduce during play. Don't be afraid of this, embrace it. But don't have things be too complex, or have your NPCs be too good at lying. Remember that, while everything might not be revealed in four hours, the game is only four hours long, so any given thing it should be *possible* to reveal in four hours.

* Do not try to set the game's tone. That's the job of the players. For instance, you may think you're playing a dark Blade-runner style paranoia game about automata and sentience. But the players think that they are playing a buddy movie comedy with automata parts. This is fine.

* Do not give into the temptation to change around NPC plots and plans once you've figured them out. It will just make things confusing. For instance, you had this whole plan where Alexis's character was going to be replaced by an automatic replica who was a better son for the family than he was. You may think "this is too dark for this game." But it's not. The players control the tone. When that scene finally happens, it will be played for laughs.

* Do run out of ideas. Absolutely nothing makes a game of Principia hum better than "okay, so you've done that. What are you doing for the rest of the day?" Stop the player when they get to an interesting part, or when an NPC would interfere with what they're doing, and play it out. You don't have to provide a bang for every down moment. The players have more than enough to keep their characters occupied.

Giving characters free time gives the players a chance to use all their awesome Position abilities. Which is good.

* Don't feel like you have to be aggressive about always siding on the "bad" side of every question. Just side on what you think is more interesting at the moment.

* You don't have authority over whether or not a player can use an ability, or get resolve. When players look at you like "can I do this?" the only proper response is to shrug your shoulders and ask them if they think that they can use it.

* Do not set stakes in conflict. Don't even phony set stakes in conflict, where you talk about your character's "intentions" or "what they want." That's not how it works.

There is exactly one trigger for a conflict in Principia, which is that a player wants their character to get an advantage over another character, and thus picks up the dice. That's it. Nothing else is decide until the end.

* When in doubt, bring in Machiavelli. Machiavelli is fun to play.

* Always end the game with a big conflict (I think the division is "argument" vs "conflict?" I can't remember). It's just more fun that way.

Thanks, Ben. Watching you GM the game has been very instructive (and fun), and this will help me a lot with my GM text.

The stuff you say about tone is very cool. I had no idea that was happening. I thought you were setting the tone on purpose all along! You're very good at getting the players to lead the action--better, I think, than me and my regular group often are. We tend to continually push-push-push. Your GM-ing judo has turned my thinking around a bit on this.

I've been reading through Principia (my apologies, Tony, for being so slow!), and this thread is making a lot of sense. I'm definitely going to try to play this in the next month or so.

Now, I want to hear about this "GM judo" that's hinted at but not fully revealed in this thread!

Share your wisdom!

Hi Paul,

Yes, I'm sorry if your draft is unclear. Principia is slowly lurching towards comprehensibility. Ben's GM-ing insights got a long way.

As for GM Judo, I'm not sure I can fully describe it, but I can give an example.

Alexis is playing a swashbuckler (really a 17-year-old gang punk). Under the rules, when she gets into a fair fight, she can pay resolve to automatically defeat her opponent. The GM gets to decide if the opponent lives or dies. After Alexis' character humiliates another punk in a fight, Ben narrates how the punk leaves utterly dejected. We think the punk's going to live.

A few scenes later, all hell breaks loose as it turns out the kid went and killed himself - and he's from a large powerful merchant family to boot! Instead of "push to conflict", it's "use the PCs momentum to create consequences."

Interesting. I would have guessed that you ran Principia in at least a somewhat similar way, Tony, because of the way the game is structured (with the NPC card and resolve system, the strong PC abilities, the three PC drives to make sure that they act on their own without your help). It really makes this sort of GMing (which, in my head, is "old-school GMing" because it's the way I used to run D&D) much, much easier. Particularly great, and unique, is the NPC resolve system, which I'll describe because it's neat.

As a GM, you have all these cards in front of you with NPCs on them. NPCs, and PCs, get "resolve" which is basically just extra oomph. Here's how an NPC gets resolve: whenever they appear in or influence a scene. So any time they show up, that's one resolve. But they can also get a resolve for influencing a scene (either indirectly, though agents, or just being a topic of conversation for that scene.)

So you're playing your game and you go "hey, wait, Lorenzo di Medici has six resolve on him and he's not yet actually showed up in a scene. I better make sure he shows up soon!" It's a very nice tension building device (you can delay the villain's arrival and still have her be suitably bad-ass) and also a great queue for the GM as to which NPCs are important. For instance, in the other game, I had a merchant guy who was going to be important. But, near the end of the game, he had no resolve. He literally had not mattered to the game at all. So I just tossed the card: I'll use him for a later game or something.

Since the game had so many tools for that sort of GMing, I imagined it was intentional. Now I want to have you run a game to see how else it works.

Yes, you're exactly right on how to GM Principia. What I was referring to was how your style of GM-ing differs from what I do, and what I'm used to. You delay the gratification. You use surprise. It's very old-school, and something we don't do as much as.

As for the NPC cards, I have to hand glory to John Harper for that. I simply codified how he GM'ed when he ran Principia.

I have another question for you guys:

Ben wrote:
* Do run out of ideas. Absolutely nothing makes a game of Principia hum better than "okay, so you've done that. What are you doing for the rest of the day?" Stop the player when they get to an interesting part, or when an NPC would interfere with what they're doing, and play it out. You don't have to provide a bang for every down moment. The players have more than enough to keep their characters occupied.

Oh, man...

Wait a minute! A whole thread about running this game, and not a word about Questions?

What gives? Surely the Questions impact what happens and how you play in a big way. Spill the beans! :)

How do the Questions affect play, for the GM and the players, and how do they influence decision making, scene framing, etc?

Wow. Ben, your bullet points look almost exactly like how I ran Principia. So whatever Tony did to communicate the methods to you must definitely make its way into the book. It clearly works.

Could it be we're onto somthing here? Now if I can just find a way to include Ben and John in the box...

Paul, I owe you some replies!

"Running out of ideas" is part of running or playing Principia. Maybe there's a better name for this phenomenon. Principia is one of those games where the GM doesn't have the authority to srictly control the game and where it goes. So it's not so much running out of ideas, as being *ready* for that to happen.

In our last game, Ben was building up a big mystery about a bridge that mysteriously collapsed, implicating the engineer's guild. It turned out that automata (robots, sort of) were being used to build the bridge. My character has a mania about smashing the automata "thread", and we've got an oustanding question over whether automata have souls, so it's a big deal. My character (Brunelleschi) is an engineer. This gives him certain powers in the world.

My character (Brunelleschi) walks onto the bridge and uses his ability "When I assert the innate rationality of all things while sifting available facts, I can discover the cause of an event or the action of an NPC, and the GM gets to state what that cause is." The game immediately jumps over Ben's planned investigation to the causes and what happens when those causes are reveled.

This game eats ideas fast.

As for the questions, they do a bunch of things:
- Frame what's important in the campaign on a high level
- Let the players flag the issues they'd like to explore
- Let the GM flag the trouble (s)he's going to bring
- Provide a specific means for narrating the fallout from a session
- Set up situation to explore in the next session

It makes a lot of sense when you see it in play. Hopefuly the text is clear enough that you can follow the procedures and see it happen!

Oh: does the GM write questions in play?

Paul wrote:
Oh: does the GM write questions in play?

Do you guys end up narrating a lot at the end? Does it turn into a bit of a collaborative storytelling sessions?

Any advice for handling that part well?

Usually our wrap up is pretty quick, though it depends on how much time we have left. It's easy to forget to leave some time for narrating questions. If you're getting collaborative storytelling, I'd really like to hear about it. Ours tend to more of an epilogue to the story.

And one more:

How do you decide when something should be a conflict, as opposed to just a controversy?

Is it a pretty straightforward "here is the climactic scene of the story" kind of thing?

How many conflicts (as opposed to controversies) does each session/story see? Just one, or more?

Paul wrote:
And one more:

How do you decide when something should be a conflict, as opposed to just a controversy?

Is it a pretty straightforward "here is the climactic scene of the story" kind of thing?

How many conflicts (as opposed to controversies) does each session/story see? Just one, or more?

Tony,

Your explanation of how the latest draft will work is how I thought Principia was supposed to work when I read the rules--it made sense, intuitively.

But then I realized that you had to decide upfront, in order to clear all the Drives.

So, I'm totally onboard with the latest concept. It works intuitively and is more elegant.