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This is the second part of my reaction to Mike Mearls association that roleplaying has not really changed much and his definition of roleplaying inherantly requiring a Gamemaster figure.

In traditional (i.e. most) roleplaying, the Gamemaster is the only real author of the story.

Let me explain what I mean by that:

When White Wolf asserts in its "Golden Rule" that the players can ignore or change any rules that they don't like, what they're really asserting is the supremacy of the GM/Storyteller over what's written in the book and, beyond that, everything else game-related.  But this is hardly old news.

In traditional play, the GM serves as a kind of valve or filter placed at the metaphorical entrace to the shared imagined space.  All the players, including the GM, voice their suggestions on the kinds of things that should enter the space, but the GM then plays Duck Hunt with those suggestions, shooting down the ones that don't fit his vision of what the game should be like.

In the worst cases, the game turns into an effort by the players to guess the kinds of suggestions that the GM will accept, which in turn trains them to offer the right kinds of suggestions, in order to get the cookie of having their suggestions incorperated into the shared imagined space.  For instance:

P1: I grab a barstool and break off a leg to use as a club.

GM: Um, you're not strong enough to really do that.

P1: Well, then I grab a beer bottle and break off the bottom.

GM: You hit the bottle against the table and it explodes in your hand, giving you several cuts.  Got any better ideas?

Now, sometimes the players will offer suggestions that the GM thinks are even better than what he himself came up with, and he'll incorperate them into play, but notice that NOTHING gets in without the GM's say so.  He's not allowing the players to influence the shared imagined space, really.  He's simply stealing their ideas and incorperating into a bricolage of his own design.  The GM decides where, how, and in what manner the players' suggestions fit into the greater scheme of things.  And, if you'll notice, many GM's tweak player's suggestions when connecting them into the rest of the game, which could be seen as a way of claiming ownership over the suggestions.

P1: Wow!  43 damage!  I chop him right in two!

GM:  Well, close.  You hack right into his side, and blood shoots out like a fountain.

Even when system elements would seem to dictate the results ("A roll of more than 40 damage will chop an ork in half"), tradition and things like White Wolf's "Golden Rule" means that the GM's whim still reigns supreme.

So here's my thesis about traditional play: There's no truly collaborative involvement in determing what occurs.  The collaborative part is the group brainstorming possible happenings, when the players voice suggestions that the GM weighs against his own.  But when it comes down to actually manipulated the imagined space, it's all the GM's doing.  He manipulates the space and then shares it, through verbal description, with the players.  The players can try to influence the GM's decisions, of course, but this is not the same as them having direct influence over what occurs.  In the end, it is all GM fiat and the GM is the only true author of the collage that results (though he did not, in fact, originate most of the materials that make up the collage).

Questions:

-- How can we get away from this style of play, with its dependence on the GM, his choices, and his instincts.  Good play would seem to require a good GM who is in-synch with the game he's running and is sensative to the interests and input of his players.  Even games that claim to be doing something besides this model may be guilty of buying into it.  Are they really doing anything besides telling the GMs to be more sensative and in-synch?  Do they players REALLY have any direct input?  Even if the rules say that they do, will people just drift it back to the GM-author model?

-- Is is worth it (or even possible) to ever really break with this model?  Universalis does, but it accomplished this by ditching any pretense at the Golden Rule and bringing the system in to be a new valve, saying what goes in and what doesn't.  Can roleplaying happen without a "valve" of some point?  Isn't that the Lumpley Principle in action?  Is what the Principle calls "system" really just my "valve"?

Um.

Actually the opposite is true.  The conventional GM whose say-so makes the game happen is a fiction.  It's a convenient fiction for some styles of roleplaying - it takes all the effort out of negotiation, provided the GM doesn't stray too far from what's expected at the table - but it's just not real.

Take your examples.  It is within the power of any player present to end the game if the GM pulls that kind of shit and it's not okay.  If it's okay, it's okay by the players' indulgence; if it's not, the GM has no more power to make the game happen than anyone else.

I'm not talking about whatever rights & responsibilities the rules allocate to whatever player.  I'm talking about our right as human beings to ditch out of a game we don't enjoy.  

So not only is it possible and desirable to move beyond GM-is-sole-author, it's inevitable.  It's like a soap bubble, poke it and it's gone.

Games like Sorcerer, the Pool, My Life with Master - they have a strong GM, but the GM isn't the author.  The GM has a particular authorship role, complementary to the players', without which the players' power would be diminished.  That's a different bug entire.

edit: Every valve - every valve - is group consensus.

-Vincent

Whoa.

Vincent, are you aware of just how radically unconventional everything you just said was? In the context of the RPG community at large, I mean? (Well, at least among most of the gamers I've ever met, anyway, which is a limited subset, but still...)

Right, Vincent.  Point taken.

However, I don't see how the player's ability to stop playing the game is really that empowering.  I took it as understood that everyone wants to play the game.  If the only way you can directly influence play is to walk away... that sucks.  Or, likewise, if the only way you can directly influence play is to threaten the GM with walking out if he doesn't include your suggestions, that sucks too.

I think that, most of the time, the GM DOES pull that kind of shit and, yes, it IS okay with the players.  It doesn't matter if the players can choose to walk out or not because they WON'T make that choice.  The players indulge the GM because they want to play the game, which leads to the situation I described.

My question, in your terms, might be something like how can we get the players to stand up and demand direct input without walking away or threatening to walk away? (Because, personally, I don't find that very constructive).  Often times, in my experience, this involves first convincing them that they actually WANT direct input.  I've run many games with traditional roleplayers in which I wanted to not take the GM-author role, but was occasionally forced to because the players weren't willing to step up.

I guess I was looking for situations more like this:

GM: So you round the corner and you spot... what?

P1: What?

GM: What makes the most sense to you?

P1: A magical castle!

GM: What does the magic castle look like?

P1: It's got hundreds of gleaming towers...

P2: ...and a huge garden maze made of rose bushes!

Still, this runs the risk of becoming Mad-Libs the RPG, with the GM providing convenient "blanks," spaces in which it's okay for the players to have direct input.  Better, perhaps, but not quite what I was hoping for.

Does that explain more what I was trying to get at here, Vincent?

Yes!  It does!

And now that's exactly what you need to be asking, if you want to do more with your game designs than file the edges of what's already been done.

(What keeps the players from contributing and also from walking out?  Their social contract.  How do you communicate a new, better social contract to a group, in such a way that they'll adopt it?  By codifying it in rules!  Universalis shows this beautifully.)

-Vincent

Quote from: Jonathan Walton
So here's my thesis about traditional play: There's no truly collaborative involvement in determing what occurs...

-- How can we get away from this style of play, with its dependence on the GM, his choices, and his instincts...

-- Is is worth it (or even possible) to ever really break with this model?  Universalis does, but it accomplished this by ditching any pretense at the Golden Rule and bringing the system in to be a new valve, saying what goes in and what doesn't...

It seems like simply aportioning valves to all the players forces the collaboration to happen.  I mean, to the extent that the end product is a story, all the players had a real hand in determining some of what went into it.  How you do this is wide open: one big valve that rotates among the players from unit of play to unit of play, or valves that only operate on certain domains of game input -- coupled with one player who settles ties among the valveholders, or adhocratic committee-based consensus could be the mechanism to distributing the valviness.  And so what about the "Golden Rule?"  Of course anyone can ignore any rules at will.

Quote from: Jonathan Walton
Can roleplaying happen without a "valve" of some point?  Isn't that the Lumpley Principle in action?  Is what the Principle calls "system" really just my "valve"?

It sounds like it: "System (including but not limited to 'the rules') is defined as the means by which the group agrees to imagined events during play."  Is that what you mean your valve to encompass?

Chris

Quote from: ethan_greer
Vincent, are you aware of just how radically unconventional everything you just said was? In the context of the RPG community at large, I mean? (Well, at least among most of the gamers I've ever met, anyway, which is a limited subset, but still...)

Nevertheless, I think Vincent is totally, completely, 100% correct. He's right that everyone saying, "okay, we want the GM's say so" makes the negotiation easy, but it's a totally dangerous (and common!) error to mistake this temporarily granted authority for actual power. It's an error that's pervasive throughout the hobby, but it's still an error. The instant anyone says no about anything and digs in their heels, that's the instant everyone realizes that they have no power to coerce whatsoever. That's why you can have groups that appear to function for a while, and then blow up suddenly -- someone or some subgroup hit a hard line, and the others discover that the game just isn't going to go where they want it to.

Quote from: Jonathan
P1: I grab a barstool and break off a leg to use as a club.

GM: Um, you're not strong enough to really do that.

P1: Well, then I grab a beer bottle and break off the bottom.

GM: You hit the bottle against the table and it explodes in your hand, giving you several cuts. Got any better ideas?

At this point, what I would do is say "Dude." and give the GM a look. Note that I'm not making this a life-or-death issue and threatening to walk -- I'm just letting him or her know that I find this annoying and a little frustrating. And then the GM, being a cool person, will back off and give me some space. Iterate dozens of times over the course of a game, and boundaries get negotiated.

EDIT:  I'm sorry, I think I completely misinterpreted what you were saying and should have referred my post to the 'gmless playing' section further up :-P  However, given that I just got here and haven't yet figured out how to delete posts, I figured I might as well just leave it there since I already said it all.  But what follows are remarks on completely shared control.


When I started doing conventional, GM-based roleplaying, I had been doing shared control roleplaying with my friends for years without knowing the term for it.  We handled it in pretty much the following manner:

Each person had one major character and assorted NPCs they controlled.  We created each other's plot, much like in a larp, and avoided having more than two of a given person's characters in a scene at once.

Conflicts were resolved by concensus.  For example, if two characters were in direct combat, we would establish which was 'better', decide they won, and fill in the details, with each person deciding their own character's injuries.  Or, if we decided we wanted the worse fighter to win for dramatic purposes, we would agree on a stunt that caused this to be possible.  

Setting control sort of naturally went to whoever had the relevant area most developed, or somebody volunteer to do setting for a new place.  The person doing setting wouldn't GM so much as provide minimal details, and everybody would fill in the rest (eg, "I find an empty room", not "Are there any empty rooms?").  Developing areas tended to happen through NPC control  (if you have a secret assassin group from Kenya, you were setting for Kenya, etc).

Obviously, given that there was no system whatsoever, this dynamic was based on a lot of maturity/responsibility and trust, especially so that IC secrets could be kept.  "Take my word for it, I may look like an innocent school girl, but shortly after you attack me, I kick your ass.  I just can't tell you why yet."  Nobody could do anything to anyone else's character without permission, and we were all sort of mutually motivated to decide based on what was the most realistic.



That said, I don't think the system is nearly as good as a valved one.  The OOC social courtesy required necessarily restricted depth, because unlike GM games, one major conflict could break the trust and therefore the game.  It has its advantages and specific uses, but I think the disadvantages are greater.

As such, I would say that any shared control game would have to have a high amount of system built in to manage the shared control.  The Pool seems to do this pretty well.  However, it would seem that one such game that had myth of reality would necessarily run into issues when conflicting intuitions of the reality had to deal with each other.  Mystery and secrecy would also be a lot harder.  

It's not clear to me how to do this with a bunch of people who aren't really sensitive to each other and know/trust each other really well, but still make the game primarily about anything other than the sharing of the reality and the telling of the story.




I suppose another extreme would be techniques for improvised coherent two-hour plays.  Is that in accordance with the direction you're talking about?

Aside to List: it is not possible nor permissible to delete posts at The Forge. No one is ever to attempt to unsay what he has said, for better or worse. Among other things, it reminds all of us to think before posting.

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Jonathan, I immediately think of Legends of Alyria. We played it with a referee, but the position grows less and less meaningful with each session--it seems to exist primarily to bring about consensus concerning the rules, in the same way that in playing a board game you usually have one person read the rules and teach everyone else how to play.

But I'm also going to put forward Multiverser. The game allows and encourages a great variety of refereeing techniques, from strongly illusionist to completely background. Always the instruction comes through that the player should always be allowed to determine those things that matter to his character within the situation. It may be my desire to run a game in which the player character rescues the princess, but as referee I'm not allowed to coerce him. I can attempt to hook him, but if he doesn't take the bait, either someone else will have to rescue the princess or she will not be rescued, depending on what makes for the better future in the game world.

I'm frequently running games in which I haven't a clue what's going to happen next, but I'm waiting for the player to tell me. Right now I've got a guy who is living in a castle at the end of the nineteenth century, building a garden, buying up German Mauser rifles, and training an elite combat unit. I have no idea where he's going with this--but it doesn't matter, because it is where he wants to go, and I'm along for the ride.

Of course, once again it helps that Multiverser doesn't require all the players to be on the same page. The other players are happily doing what they want to do as well, and I'm following along and throwing in whatever looks like it will be interesting.

As far as mysteries go, they have their own problems; but I did a spy scenario just recently that had some of those qualities. The essence of the game required me to know what it was that was happening that wasn't known, and then to present a snippet of information that accidentally reached the player character and pointed her (an actual game) to the fact that there was something happening that needed to be discovered, and where it appeared to be happening. After that, she told me what she was doing to pursue the information, and I worked out through the rules what she learned. Even though she ultimately had to find that secret to save the world, it was never so that I determined how she would do that, and she did it in many ways that would never have occurred to me.

I'll grant that a lot of games are structured such that the referee runs what happens. Frankly, though, Multiverser looks very traditional on the surface, and is not usually run as you've described.

--M. J. Young

One element I noticed missing from the above posts is the concept of a goal, the ideal of what play should be like. There's lots of mention of control, which is like putting up walls/rules to block player input. Put in a goal that the players all agree to, and then the players will know where to head to, and won't waste time bouncing off the walls (being wild).

For example, two weekends ago, I ran Zac's Shadows game for two other players, where the PCs were Jedi Masters or Apprentices. As the GM I said that play should be like the three Star Wars IV, V & VI movies, and with martial arts moves from the Star Wars I & II movies, and that the PCs were to save the universe just like the movies. This was the first time these players had comes across this type of game, they are regular players of ICE Rolemaster, and former players of RuneQuest II & III and AD&D. I kept emphasizing the goal, and play very quickly proceeded in the right direction, and I rarely had to say no. Instead, the players kept putting their characters into bigger and bigger "trouble'.

I think the keyword here is syncronisation. One valve point, one GM is similar in application as having just one game system in use among everyone. We don't come together as gamers only to dream seperate dreams...we need to syncronise some shared knowledge. Even freeformers do it, I'm reminded of an actual play account where two people would game over the phone and use mutually owned magazines to show each other what they are wearing. Yeah, synchronisation is more than just having the same set of rules in everyones heads, its a whole bunch of things being the same in everyones heads.

Really, between abstraction and a pratical limit on the number of rules you can provide, the GM is a stop gap for what it doesn't cover. Never mind the 'provide a plot' thing traditional play insists on, you don't need a centralised stop valve to do that.

From what I know about universalis (don't own it), instead of providing a million rules for covering things like wacking orcs with swords, it provides a neat few rules for creating rules for wacking orcs with swords (should the user want to). The sycronisation doesn't come from everyone knowing how to wack an orc, but how to make a rule about it (if you want) with the systems rules.

Ooops, I have no wrap up point to make!

I think Andrew's on to something here (to pick one idea out of a horde of good suggestions).  Perhaps what shared goals do, though, is put the valve in individual players' minds, instead of in the hands of the GM.  After all, there always has to be some kind of filter that decides what is and isn't appropriate, out of the hundreds of possible reactions to established situations.  If whatever comes out of the players' mouths is going to be implemented, you need a way of making sure that input will benefit the game, hence the need for "head valves."

For instance, I like to talk about this Star Wars game I played at a Con last year in which one hero decided to pump the evil jedi full of tranquilizers, destroying any chance at a final climactic battle.  When people complained at him, he pointed at the GM and stated that it was his responsibility to make sure his plan didn't work at the climax still happened.  This, to me, is a clear case where a head-valve would have saved the game, but where the player was expecting the GM-valve to do that job.

Quote from: Jonathan WaltonMy question, in your terms, might be something like how can we get the players to stand up and demand direct input without walking away or threatening to walk away? (Because, personally, I don't find that very constructive).

A few years back my group started playing this game. There was no discussion about what we were about to play. The GM was one of our regulars, we only played D&D at that time and the setting was also the usual one. So everyone made up his characters and we started playing.

Now ... this particular GM had played several campaigns with the group before. They all had been world-saving-quests, but we didn't think about it when we started playing. But then, by the end of the first or second session, there was this decision making moment. The PCs had to choose if they were going to pursue the quest. But the choice was an illusion (or so we thought) because the hooks (rails?) were all in place and we could see clearly where the GM wanted us to go and what he wanted us to do.

And then we didn't.

One of the characters said he'd rather not go in that journey because he wanted to go the other way looking for his lost sister (something in his background). Another PC said "Hey, I might as well help you doing that." And finally the third one entered in what-the-hell mode and joined the other two.

The GM then ended the session (it was late anyway) and during that week we discussed what happened. It turned out that we weren't in the mood to play another epic quest to save the world, though until that point we didn't know it. The GM saw that, prepared for next session and off we went. It was a terrific game.

I guess this shows that GM power is an illusion.

But now that I wrote it, I see that I don't know how to make this happen since  in that case it just happened. But the important thing was that, after it did happen, we started paying more attention to what people wanted from the game, and I guess openly discussing this is the key.

Andreas

Didn't mean to imply that I disagreed with Vincent. I'm 100% on board with what he's saying. I was just reacting to the kick in the head his post gave me. :)  Carry on...

Quote from: Jonathan WaltonI think that, most of the time, the GM DOES pull that kind of shit and, yes, it IS okay with the players.  It doesn't matter if the players can choose to walk out or not because they WON'T make that choice.  The players indulge the GM because they want to play the game, which leads to the situation I described.

This reminds me of the Wildcards superhero character 'Kid Nova', who had the power to blow up the sun (it was his only power). "Freeze punk, or I'll Blow Up the Sun". Yeah, right!

I have seen players walk out of games and I have done it myself, but only a few times and I've never done it with the intention of destroying the game. However if I'm genuinely not enjoying myself and would rather do something else, and my non-enjoyment of the game overcomes my tendency to stick with the game anyway and not appear rude, I'm prepared to do it. However I don't see it as an ability I'm prepared to use to influence the direction of the game. if I'm going to withdraw I don't see that I have any right to interfere with the enjoyment of those wanting to stay in it.

QuoteI've run many games with traditional roleplayers in which I wanted to not take the GM-author role, but was occasionally forced to because the players weren't willing to step up.

I've come across this before. A recent Hero wars campaign of mine (ok, last year) could have benefited from more GM authorship and direction on my part. I was actualy told this by several players. I gave them a loose reign and a variety of plot lines and NPCs to get involved with, but it turns out they'd have prefered a more tightly focused plot line.

I think there's a fine line to be trod here. On the one hand you need to focus on events, places and characters that are important to the game you're running. On the other hand, you want to give the players free reign in how they respond to those events and characters, and influence over the course of events.

I don't think there's any easy formula that will square this circle. It requires a consensus on what the goals of game play are, what the premise of the game is and this can only be effectively handled through communication between players and the GM about their expectations. I think you're right because traditionaly RPGs don't offer formal mechanisms to facilitate this communication, even if your examples are somewhat contrived extreme cases.


Simon Hibbs