There have been numerous postings lately from folks who have become frustrated in trying to introduce "Forge ideas" into their regular play group, whether it be new games, GNS terminology, or gaming techniques, and running head on into an unconcious resistance characterized by "that's not the way we are used to doing it."

I've recently had a number of experiences from a slightly edge on point of view. I've been lucky enough since returning actively to the RPG hobby a bare 9 months ago to have fallen in with the Seattle crowd of hard core "Neophiliacs". Not only have I found a group of people who are willing and eager to play the kinds of games I used to buy, read, and file on my shelf under "who could I convince to play this?", but I've also gained insight into the roleplaying act itself that has allowed me to look at my past experiences and actively identify what things it was that I enjoyed, and what things caused me to be frustrated.

Now, in the past month, I've had a number of experiences where I was "reexposed" to the RPG mainstream, and have come to realize that I have unconsciously assimilated the norms and techniques of "Forge style" roleplay such an extant that stumbling across incidents of "standard operating procedure" has been jarring to both myself, and I think perhaps others around me.

I've have three specific incidents of actual play I'd like to report on. The first two took place in the context of the annual gaming convention in the Seattle area (Dragonflight), and the third took place as part of the weekly "one shot" night that Seattle Gamers Assemble promotes.


Case #1
Type of Play: Con one shot
System: Deep7's Red Dwarf XPG
My Role: player
Incident: after a rules briefing and character creation, the GM began to go round and do scenes with individual players, slowly bringing them into play. She was introducing each of the characters primarily in isolation, and doing some one on one roleplaying with each of them. At one point, one of the other characters was engaged in an activity (trying to break into some old storage lockers) and I saw an opportunity to frame my character into the scene in a way that involved both characters schticks, and was also humorous. I spoke up, and got slapped down hard and told to "wait my turn".

This really jarred me, because I've become so used to the idea of players and GMs working together to "set the scene" that it didn't even occur to me it would be taken negatively. I instantly realized that the GM had perceived me as a "scene hogger" and acted to cut me off.

An aside on the game system itself: Deep7's system is a pretty light skill + attribute and roll under thing. However in play, the system was all but ignored, in favor of alot of player to player schtick. This reminded me greatly of old Paranoia play, where success or failure eventually became more of an adhoc consensus based "what was funny" rather than any consistent application of the system. Now I'm curious to see how something like Red Dwarf would play with more of an "Elfs" style system, where humorous failure is rewarded by the system, rather than incidental to it.


Case #2
Type of Play: Con one shot
System: Dust Devils - Ronin variant
My Role: GM
Incident: As part of the SGA sponsored track of events at Dragonflight, I ran my Ronin adventure Stone Hearts, Stone Memories. I had four player slots, and it turned out I got a full set of players. What was even more interesting was that the four gentleman playing were a group of four GMs who run a "team GM'd" multi-session Feng Shui every year. One of them had purchased and read Dust Devils, but had never played. The others were unfamiliar with the game. I spent some time going over the idea of scene resolution, and also emphasized the shared narration mechanic.

A bit later in session, when three of the characters were camping in the woods near a roadside shrine, waiting to see if the "badness" would come and find them, and another players was escorting a woman through those very same woods searching for her missing grandfather, I noticed that the players were spending an awful lot of time feeding me "tactical details" about what they were doing. "We build a big fire, but then sit in the shadows away from it." "I never look directly at the fire." I suddenly realized that despite all the talk of scene resolution and player narrates outcome, they were busily establishing their bonafides for when the big GM screw came down. I thought about stopping the game for a little pep talk, but when the searchers stumbled across the campers, and got into a player vs. player argument over "my tacticals are better than yours", I realized that these guys actually enjoyed this kind of stuff, so I just kept mum, and let them entertain themselves. Very surreal to have a pure narrative game like DD be dominated by gamist tactical patter, but hey, the customer is always right :)

Aside: these guys, unbeknownst to them, were responsible for one of my more significantly frustrating RPG experiences a couple years ago when I tried playing in their big Feng Shui tournament at DragonFlight. In retrospect, I can now identify my dissatisfactions as Gamist (my character had a healing ability whose use was repeatedly disallowed for various reasons boiling down to "the GM doesn't want you to") and Exploration of Character (the players were placed in a situation where they were pretty much forced to kill a bunch of cops who were just doing their jobs rather than being allowed to avoid them).


Case #3
Type of Play: informal one-shot
System: Hero System (Dark Champions)
My Role: Player
Incident: Two new people (husband and wife) who have recently moved to the Seattle area showed up at our SGA monday night, and the wife had prepared a "low powered vigilantes" murder mystery game to run. The players were the husband, three SGA Monday Nights regulars (including myself), and two people who were visiting SGA Monday Nights for the second time (one of whom is just now getting back into role playing).

There were two specific occurrences that were jarring to my current habits. First, it became pretty obvious that for the GM and her husband, their accustomed style of play involved everybody being very secretive about their character, and massive note passing. SGA play has historically encouraged lots of kibitzing in other peoples scenes and an informal understanding that player knowledge != character knowledge. This led to a very strange dynamic as most of the players sat around with their character sheets face up, and happily talked about what their character was doing, and commented on other players scenes, while the husband sat with his character sheet face down, and was constantly leading the GM off for "private chats". I was even reprimanded by the husband at one point when a player seated near me asked a question about the rules and I picked up that players character sheet to offer advice.

The other jarring incident in the game was suddenly falling into a game of GM "twenty questions." My character was a Batman type, and near the end I was trying to break into the house of a very wealthy guy, which house had only been described in very abstract terms. So first I narrated disabling the security systems and sneaking over the wall, and was told there was no wall. So then I narrated myself gliding up to second story porch on the on the house and picking the lock on the door to the porch. Nope, the house doesn't have a porch...

I do have to give this GM props in one respect. Early in the game, I narrated my character (a playboy billionaire) as driving a large black Hummer, and alluded to the fact that it was tricked out with all manner of crime fighting gadgetry. While the initial "Let's take my Hummer!" got a weird look from the GM, later she got great mileage out of riffing off it when the computer hacker in the group started fiddling around with my security systems while my character was off elsewhere.

What's my point in all this? Well, I think its a small case of "you can't go home again." If you've inculcated a more deliberate and thoughtful approach to your roleplaying, and you find you are someone who enjoys that sort of thing, I think you are going to wind up "frightening the horses" occasionally, even when you are trying to fit in.

On the plus side, being able to quickly understand what is bugging you about the current play situation goes a long way to helping you figure out how to "work within the system" to try and fix it. Or if it is not fixable, tolerate it for awhile, and then move on.

rafial wrote: What's my point in all this? Well, I think its a small case of "you can't go home again." If you've inculcated a more deliberate and thoughtful approach to your roleplaying, and you find you are someone who enjoys that sort of thing, I think you are going to wind up "frightening the horses" occasionally, even when you are trying to fit in.

On the plus side, being able to quickly understand what is bugging you about the current play situation goes a long way to helping you figure out how to "work within the system" to try and fix it. Or if it is not fixable, tolerate it for awhile, and then move on.

John, thanks for the follow up. I wasn't sure exactly what I was looking for when I dumped this big ball of something that had been festering in brain out on to the pixeled page, but I think your post has helped clarify it for me. And I think I'm actually talking about two different kinds of situations:

1) The original "frighten the horses" idea, where the use of an unusual type of play produces a "startle" reaction in another player. And how to avoid having that "startle" reaction turn negative

2) A situation where theory gave you an insight into the current dynamic in play that allowed you to steer around a situation that once would have been quite frustrating for you, or at least allowed you avoid having that frustration dominate the game.

To expand on my original incident #3, in the case of the GM "twenty questions" gambit, my realization of what was going on allowed me to switch to a "you tell *me* how I can get in the house" mode before I got too frustrated about the situation.

John Kim wrote: I don't think I scared the horses per se, in that I got positive feedback from most of my games.

I tried to use the confusion of other events to shake people down for money with which to buy drugs. However, I was so deeply in debt that there was no way to really repay. I ended up killing myself after the woman I loved died trying to protect me. In theory this was very well set up, and it was certainly a good game -- but there were a number of details which ticked me somewhat.

My character was a big game hunter set on bagging Earthshakers in the pass (i.e. dinosaurs). The event that struck me was when I tried to hunt one of these. I started to outline a plan for catching a triceratops -- which would involve a trap to immobilize it for the group to attack it. The GM then said that my character would try to hunt them on his own.

I don't think I scared any horses, but as GM I think I did a decent job encouraging improvisation and Drama Point usage in Buffy, and in open-ended plot development in Extra Credit. I had been aiming to make my con games accessible, but I don't think I pulled any punches in sticking to my thoughtful approach to gaming.

rafial wrote: Excellent. Did you consciously make use of any "Forge-style" techniques such as scene framing, bangs, no-myth, etc in your con GMing? And if so, did any of the players seem to notice that something different was going on?

I guess what I'm looking for are examples of how a more aware style of play, as either a player or GM, can contribute to more successful outcomes, even when playing in a group that is mostly used to "mainstream" playing styles.

rafial wrote: (Re: The Tekumel LARP)
Can you recall any specifics on what ticked you off?

rafial wrote: (Re: HeroQuest dinosaur hunt)
Wow, that's a great example of the second sort of situation I was talking about. Here we have a GM who is "taking the character away" from a player, when player starts heading in a direction that doesn't fit with the GMs preconceptions. You mentioned this broke into discussion at some point. Was your understanding of the GMs motives in this situation (as unfortunate as they may be) helpful to resolving the situation in a way that helped both of you? Or was the situation resolved?