Hello All,

When I was in High School and College I noticed a funny trend concerning my writing skills. If I procrastinated and waited until the last possible minute to write a paper, I would sometimes score an A, more often an A- and the odd B+. However, if I decided to buckle down and do this one "properly" with lots of careful outlining, editing, revising, at BEST I would score a B+, usually a B or even an odd B-.

To this day, I never could figure out why that was. Why the hell was the top of my head crap superior to my carefully reasoned and constructed work that I actually put work and effort into?

After yesterday's session I'm begining to wonder if the same doesn't hold for my GMing skills.

So, for the previous session, I had a lot of "planned" things. These weren't planned in terms of what was going to happen but rather I had, what I thought, was a lot of emotionally charged conflicts. I had a relationship map, I had a backstory, I had bangs. I understood the emtional wants and desires of every NPC. I mapped those wants and desires across, around and through, those of the PCs and so on.

The game was flat. Things kind of happened, sort of, but nothing really ever went any where or really turned out cool.

Now, I had started down that path for this session. You see, there's a soap opera going on with the PCs. It looks like this:

Nicole is a member of the Explorer's Society. She is also a Montaigne noble who has run away from her faimly. Eva is Nicole's Eisen bodyguard. Genvieve is Nicole's sister and the complete opposite of Nicole. Nicole is adventurous, hot-headed and self-reliant. Genvieve is delicate, refined, EXTREMELY naive and all around "fluffy." She also has an NPC bodyguard named Jaqueline. Renaux is another Montaigne Noble who is extremely reckless and generally disapproved of by his family. He has been set-up in an arranged marriage to Nicole. The main problem is that he is really infatuated by Jaqueline.

All of this, has been set up by the players themselves. At the end of the last session all the PCs had set sail on a ship following Nicole's Treasure Map (introduced by Nicole's player at character creation). One of my players suggested to me that it might be fun just to have the wind die half way out and spend a whole session dealing with inter-PC conflicts. I thought that was a pretty good idea, so that's what I "planned" for.

My planning consisted of running through and creating stressors for those inter PC conflicts. For example, they've disguised Genvieve as a boy. I thought up situations in which crew members, "sailors being sailors", might threaten that disguise. Renaux's player also mentioned that although they've disguised Genvieve as a boy, he still treats her like a proper Montaigne Noble should treat his bride-to-be. And so on.

Then disaster struck.

Genvieve's player got really sick the night before the game. I freaked because Genvieve is like the keystone in all of this PC drama. With such a small (and tightly nit) group, I'd normally just cancel and reschedule. However, my parents were hosting this game, which meant they'd gone through a lot of trouble to prepare food and stuff, so I couldn't just back out. And frankly, I just wasn't in the mood to run something else, like InSpectres.

So, I suddenly found myself the night before the game doing something that felt like playing a solo game of The Pitch... "Alright, I see an island with syrneth ruins. I see natives. I see conquistadors! Oh and Pirates! Gotta have pirates!"

At the end of about a half hour I had a pile of "stuff" that felt sadly disconnected from everything the PCs were "about" but I felt it was the best I could do, given that one of the major players wasn't going to be there.

Whoa! The session ROCKED! Highlights:

Nicole dueled a stowaway for the "right" to stay on board.

Loyalties were called into question when the first mate was discovered to be a Porte mage.

Renaux sold out Nicole's historical find to the Castillian Explorers to prevent them from wiping out the natives.

Nicole and Eva sat dispassionately by as one of the natives processed their newborn baby through a Syrneth machine.

Nicole and Eva ended up destroying the MAJOR Syrneth artifacts discovered as well as killing off the last of an ancient race. One player reacted, "Oh my god, Indy just blew up the Arc!"

I let the session end on a cliffhanger note when Renaux was captured by the Castillian Explorers.

Anyway, just thought I'd share.

Jesse

That's interesting, because my experience is a similar one - if I actually go to the effort of planning out a game fully, it's never as good as the ones where I just "go with the flow", and respond to the players, basically making up stuff as I go.

Of course I still have plot elements running throughout and "what's going on behind the scenes" etc, but the minutae I make up as I go along and it all works really well.

What I have got quite good at (and what I recommend heartily to others) is sitting down AFTER a session, going over all the stuff you introduced/kludged during the session, and retro-fitting it all into the ongoing story. I have integrated "toss away" comments and situations so well that the players will swear blind that it was all planned many sessions previously, while really much of it was made up on the spot :-)

Brian

I've never been great at spur-of-the-moment GMing. The other GM in my group, however, can't do anything else. When he tries to plan, we get same-old, same-old run-othe-mill dungoen crawls which, frankly, suck. But when he forgets his adventure, or just decides to run a game when a few of us are over, we get complex pc-pc and pc-npc interactions, cool plot twists, and other neat stuff.

What do you do when you run an 'off the tip of your tongue' game? Do you use pre-created NPCs, or is your system simple enough that you can create them on the fly without too much hassle? The reason why I ask, is that my next adventure (for a Star Wars adaptation of Feng Shui RPG) is probably going to be less planned then usual: setting, background, backstory, NPCs, and setpieces, and let the game roll. But even my 'unplanned' adventure has taken up 2 and a half pages. :(

Hey Jesse,

Just curious how the run went. Not so much in terms of detail, but more technique. Can you compare it to the notion I introduced here and was asked to elaborate on in this thread? I'm curious how your 'unprepared run' compares to 'shared gamemastering.' Can you elaborate?

Fang Langford

I think, I may not be clear. In both cases, I didn't have an "adventure" planned. There was no series of preplanned events, there was no set objective. In BOTH cases I just had a pile of NPCs and Conflicts and ran with it.

It's just in the first case, I went out of my way to make sure stuff lined up with the PCs own passions. And for some reason the things I felt sure would connect, didn't.

In the second case no such effort was made. I had the same kind of layout as the first, but I didn't have time to think through the connections. There was nothing in my planning that spoke to the PCs directly, like there was in the first set of planning.

So, I'm not really talking about planned vs. improved. BOTH sessions exhibited the exact same planning in terms of raw structure. It's just in the first set I made a big effort to erase elements I thought were too disassociated from the PCs personal conflicts and deliberately inserted things I thought were HIGHLY connected to the PCs personal conflicts. In the second set it was just, "Alright, here's the complex stuff going on, on the island where your map points. Go!"

Jesse

Hi Jesse,

I know just what you're talking about. This is why I prefer relationship-maps as described in The Sorcerer's Soul rather than the tightly-connected, nailed-down-character-hooks version that people are always trying to convert them into.

For instance, in our current game of Fvlminata, the characters are all intimately connected in one fashion or another to the outcome of a certain chariot race. It makes for a wonderful, movie-style, multiple-social-class shifting set of alliances and betrayals, but ... well, it feels a lot like playing acts four-and-a-half and five, as opposed to a novel with many chapters and long-term shifts. Or perhaps (to bend the analogy more) like seeing the last five moves of a chess game.

I'm curious about your current perspective on the Sorcerer game you ran a while ago, regarding this issue. It also ties into the discussions we've had in the Sorc forum recently about demons - how the GM must play them with great verve and forcefulness, but not protagonize them. Can you see that having them there as "automatic NPCs" permits the Sorcerer GM to loosen up on the event-based prep?

Best,
Ron

Fang,

I cross posted with you but I hope that my second post answered your questions. The links you provided seem to deal more with controlling the flow of the events and character decisions which was not the issue here with one niggle. What I WAS trying to control was the "tightness" of the scenario to the PCs. I wasn't trying to force a direction or outcome, merely trying to guarantee that whatever events happened would 100% definitely speak to the conflicts already in play.

Ron,

1) Concerning Relationship Maps vs Character Hooks. I'd like to point out that a lot of players (myself, included, actually) often make the mistake of thinking that the Kicker somehow represents the peak and the beginning of the downhill momentum for the story. I had a friend, who is a professional writer, say to me once, "I don't like Kickers because they force the game to start in the third act."

2) Were you refering to the Space-Western game when you mentioned my recent Sorcerer game? In that game I litterally just took the three NPCs from the player's Kickers and dropped in a common McGuffin, so things were EXTREMELY tight. And yeah, it turned out pretty much just like you describe your FULMINATA game, which, is okay, because I was going for a TV Episode/Short Story feel. It worked out well there.

3) As for previous discussion this definitely relates to the "obvious" choice issue. When I was done with my Island planning it looked too simplistic to me. I had that reaction I was having to the Trollbabe examples, "Argh! Where's the choice? Where's the conflict?" But I said to myself, "Hey, this supposedly works for Trollbabe, I don't see why it won't work here," and let it ride.

As for the demon issue, I don't know. I'm still having trouble with the whole Not-Here thing and the problem with demons occassionally becoming sympathetic in my eyes. Although, I thought about the whole "shudder" issue and I answered, "What makes me shudder?" for myself and that cleared things up a lot in my mind.

Jesse

Speaking as someone who teaches students how to write essays --- and not by doing them at the last minute --- I think what we're groping for here is technique. I know this is something Fang is very interested in, but in general the issue is this: given that there is something happening unplanned that's not happening planned, (1) what exactly is it, and (2) how do I plan for it?

I'm very leery of the "tip of the tongue" model. It seems to me that when it works, it's great --- but when it doesn't, it stinks. The anecdote about school essays is apt here: every teacher has heard this, and seen it work, but you may recall that sometimes you did this and you got a rotten grade. People tend to forget this, because people like to remember the times they "beat" the teacher, not the times they got whacked. In RPGs, I think the additional problem is that too much focus on certain kinds of technique in GMing can lead to various forms of railroading, because GM technique all too often (not here on the Forge, as a rule) forgets an essential difference from essay-writing: the audience is writing too.

My guess is that when it works for you, it's because something you're doing provokes the players to contribute strongly. This is what makes for a fun game: everyone's in on it. So you need to think concretely about what it is about your unplanned style that prompts player contributions, and what about your planned style suppresses it.

In short, my advice would be more or less the same as what I tell my students, albeit in a very different medium.

1. Analyze your own style, at your best. Differentiate it carefully from your style at your worst, as well as your "average." Be precise --- what exactly are you doing differently?

2. Analyze others' styles. As an experiment, you might try consciously imitating someone else's style, as closely as you can. It helps a lot if it's a style you find appealing, but it's not absolutely necessary. You may want to warn your players that this is what you're doing.

3. In a similar vein, try new abstract models: Try doing something very Illusionist, or even railroading. Try simply dropping out, and running GM-less.

One of the nice things about #2 and #3 in RPGs is that you can just pick up another game system and give it a whirl, so long as you make every effort actually to GM differently and consciously.

Again, make sure your players understand what's going on with each experiment. First of all, they're likely to like the idea that you care enough about setting up for a great game that they'll be willing to try some experiments. They are also going to be fairly accurate about describing what you do that they like and do not like, particularly when they discuss this as a group. Be sure not to accept their judgments at face value, however; use their comments to formulate new experiments, and to guide your self-analysis.

Every time you consciously try something new, write up a tough, critical analysis of how it worked, what did and did not seem effective, what moments were brilliant or terrible, and why you think that might be.

Once you have a fair amount of this sort of material, you will not only have a lot more experience with a wider range (I'm not saying you're inexperienced, but everyone can use more experience), but you will also have a personal vocabulary of do's and don't's.

Now try to put it all together. Keep working at it, experimenting, analyzing, imitating, discussing, and so forth. Before you know it, you'll be getting A's every time, but will be anxiously striving for something beyond this. And you know what? Everyone's going to think you're a nut: they'll say, "Um, we love this game, and you're a great GM, so take a valium, OK?" If your response is to enjoy this but then go right back to work to make it even better, your game is going to rock.

jburneko wrote: At the end of the last session all the PCs had set sail on a ship following Nicole's Treasure Map (introduced by Nicole's player at character creation). One of my players suggested to me that it might be fun just to have the wind die half way out and spend a whole session dealing with inter-PC conflicts. I thought that was a pretty good idea, so that's what I "planned" for.

A couple of things spring to mind:

General player exectations: running around Syrneth ruins et al has a more heavily swashbuckling vibe to me than talking to each other on a marooned boat. When it comes down to it, your players may just prefer the former to the later, and your game might have benefited from their energy.

There's an anecdote which runs as follows: a mother goes to her kid's school open day. She looks at the art the different classes have done, and it's all, like, kid art. Then she gets to one particular class and it's wonderful, much better than all the rest. She compliments the teacher on how well she must have taught the kids and the teacher says: 'I just know when to take the pictures off them'.

Which, is the long way round of saying you might be over-prepping. It's the GM's version of writing eighty pages of character background and then getting bored half-way-through the first session. It's just a kind of play before play.

Edit to note that my first paragraph is just another way of saying what John already said. D'oh.

Hi Jesse,

John, Ian, and others are echoing stuff you and I have talked about for a long time. It used to be that you were burned out and frustrated with highly-planned, event-by-event, climax-in-advance plotting; when you let go a little and permitted the players to generate the emotional ties and so forth, things got better. Remember your Deadlands game? And the gothic Sorcerer one (which is the one I was referring to earlier)? Again and again, whenever you shook off the need to set up "the problem" in advance, people had more fun.

However, that lesson seems to be fading.

You seem determined to know the important connections and reactions of players beforehand, for some reason, perhaps to "ensure" something. However, that's not possible - not in the past, with your more-or-less railroaded games, and not in the present, with GNS jargon in your pocket.

Your friend's Kicker comment indicates quite a bit to me. People often don't recognize that a vague Kicker can be a good thing: remember, "Some guy tried to kill me with an axe on the bus today"? That was an example of a good Kicker, not a bad one (which for some reason is being referenced recently as my example of a bad one). If your players are feeling like a Kicker forces the third act, then frankly, you are trying to play before you play, as the GM, through their characters.

Narrativist role-playing - which I believe is what you're after to some extent, based on previous discussion - is not about "forcing story." It's about doing story. [I use the term "story" here specifically in reference to past dialogues with Jesse. I would appreciate it if people didn't latch onto this paragraph as some kind of quickie auto-definition.]

This has been your personal stumbling block as a GM for a long time, and it's showing up in a new way now. In the past, you forced scenes, outcomes, and specific secret-revelations. Now, you're forcing protagonism of a particular kind, the kind you want to see, and quite reasonably, your players are resisting. Saying, "Let's do story stuff," and then say, "No, do it this way. No, wait, we can't start until you set it up this way. This way! I'm telling you," etc, is not going to be functional.

I am beginning to think that what you really want - and this is only what I think, so consider it and correct me if I'm wrong - is to be a Narrativist player. You want to express Theme during play? You want to get pumped about neat issues and feel all the oomph of climactic action in the middle of them? You want to have Gladiator, Pulp Fiction, and Rosemary's Baby all rolled into one?

Then don't be a GM. That's what Narrativist players get to do.*

Best,
Ron

* OK, not too fair - the GM gets to do all this too, but at least in my favored mode of Narrativism, he or she is often ahead of the beat just a tad - not necessarily knowing what's coming next, but knowing that "now's the time" and so forth.

P.S. To everyone: the Burneko Dialogues date back quite a long time. A lot of this post is specific to Jesse and his group's favored style of a heavy GM presence. Don't read it as some kind of Narrativist Manifesto for anyone.

The Burneko Dialogs...heh.
Ron when you write the inevitable volume on GNS and gaming you'll have to compile those old emails into an appendix. "Confessions of a Closet Narrativist"...