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I think it's the weird leakage of suspension of disbelief. Like, in an actual RPG session you don't call out that that you went to a town the GM didn't expect you to go to and now they're making stuff up, but equally you don't have your PC go to the library and ask the GM to read you what's on every book spine. But it seems that bit of social contract and suspension of disbelief then leaks out to external discussion as well, to the point where a lot of what RPGing is advertised or described as is actually just how you're supposed to treat it in order to engage with it enjoyably, not what it actually is. It's not exactly uncommon. Plenty of films and books are advertised with the claim that you can "meet" the characters or even do things "with" them. Very rarely will any advert for a film or books describe what you will do as "watching" or "reading".
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Nov 15, 2021 22:41
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That's why I pull back the veil and describe my GM style as "bad, just absolute dog doo".
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Nov 15, 2021 22:45
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"This is my first time running this, I don't know what I'm loving doing, it's probably going to suck overall."
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Nov 15, 2021 22:46
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My style is sort of a cosmic gumbo.
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Nov 15, 2021 22:47
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Absurd Alhazred posted:"This is my first time running this, I don't know what I'm loving doing, it's probably going to suck overall." Remarkably, people tend not to be interested in signing up for that. I thought that fool of sound was being a bit harsh by making that description a warning sign, because the GM has to play along with the metasocial game as much as anyone does.
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Nov 15, 2021 22:53
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It certainly sounds like the sort of answer you give if you want to be all things to all people and are defining your style largely in terms of avoiding stuff other people have said they dislike, even if that leads to a totally contradictory mashup. (It also feels like the sort of DMing style I vaguely remember a lot of 2E-era D&D stuff encouraging you to aspire towards.)
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Nov 15, 2021 22:55
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It happens on the player side, too. Players will tell you what they think the DM wants to hear because they want to play and they don't have a good grip on the things that make them happy and unhappy.
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Nov 15, 2021 23:08
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Nehru the Damaja posted:It happens on the player side, too. Players will tell you what they think the DM wants to hear because they want to play and they don't have a good grip on the things that make them happy and unhappy. Hey, don't call me out too hard. I'd like to think I know what would make me happy in games but it's very rare to get to encounter it, so I have no way to be sure short of saying it and being proven right/wrong. Trial and error is generally not the best way with how difficult it is to get new games going. 
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Nov 15, 2021 23:14
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Nehru the Damaja posted:It happens on the player side, too. Players will tell you what they think the DM wants to hear because they want to play and they don't have a good grip on the things that make them happy and unhappy. Yes, there's a lot of this. Moreover, a lot of the things that would make them happy, they don't want to know are being engineered for that reason. I remember a similar one where a GM warned that a game would have real danger of PC death, and when a PC actually died the player was outraged. Naturally the player assumed that the players were supposed to suspend belief that their PCs were in danger of death, but not that they actually were (which again is a standard social trope as without it the PCs would hear about the dragon's lair and decide not to go because it was too dangerous)
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Nov 15, 2021 23:22
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I do wonder if this is partially a matter of the DnD = all RPGs slippage? Just to lay the ground a little, when people ask me why I like TTRPGs even though video games exist, it isn't because they have an extremely open possibility space for character expression, the "be whoever you want to be" thing that I see in very tertiary media around RPGs, but that a TTRPG will generally be incredibly responsive, i.e. TTRPGs will coherently respond to an extremely wide range of inputs that put any existing video game to shame. Another way to say this might be that I care about the openness of the possibility space at the micro level but not so much at the macro level. Like to put in a concrete example, BITD gets compared a lot to Thief and Dishonored with good reason. BITD is not a very open game space: you are a criminal, in a dingy city with little focus on anything outside one specific city, the game is a series of heists, and each heist has a pretty rigid structure. You can't even play an orc. But when you want to get past a door, your option space is massive. Thief and Dishonored compared to most video games have a lot of verbs that will work for getting around a door, and they feel like wearing a straitjacket compared to BITD. And BITD is, again, pretty rigid for a TTRPG! Anyway back to that weird repeated DnD pitch - if you are not comparing DnD to other TTRPGs but are mostly comparing them to video games, then nearly any DnD DM would qualify as extremely open ended, reactive, and flexible. "The plot moves regardless of what you do" is a fun claim because the reason video games don't tend to do that is because it tends to be kind of pointless when things are scripted (now, a lot of timeloop games do have a world that moves without your intervention but part of the point is so that you can slide into "ah yes Tim always buys apples at the 10 minute mark so I can catch him there" kind of gameplay, rather than a single thing where if you miss your chance its gone). So when a GM is making that claim, they have some chance of backing it up because the way the plot moves on without players can be tuned so that its not just a frustrating or silly aside. ANYWAY that is a lot of words to say that that cliche self-description feels like it results from comparing oneself to a video game rather than to other GMs or tables. And its given me the interesting thought experiment of "how would I pitch myself as a GM." e: other than "kinda bad"
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Nov 15, 2021 23:24
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Nehru the Damaja posted:It happens on the player side, too. Players will tell you what they think the DM wants to hear because they want to play and they don't have a good grip on the things that make them happy and unhappy. I mean at this point as we go into session 1, I'm probably gonna be pretty upfront, "look dude, you veto'd every fun concept I had and then needed someone to play a meatshield in a system that isn't mechanically rewarding for a tank, so I stepped up to the plate since the players that were gonna have fun made fun classes. Also because you decided to go with rolled stats, theatre of the mind and house rules that make martial characters even shittier than the base game which already goes out of its way to do that I'm not really useful for out of combat stuff. I'm mostly gonna be on my phone until it's my turn to basic attack or rage per day or whatever the gently caress this bad game lets me do."
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Nov 15, 2021 23:28
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I suspect it maps maybe to this: Session 0: GM has not in fact done any prep work and is worried. They have a map or a published setting resource but they haven't prepped an adventure. Also, in their head, they are dreaming of a great player group who will seize the world by its horns and do fun poo poo. They've got this though, they have resources at hand, and can come up with stuff on the fly. Excelsior! Session 1: The players have also not done much or any homework, except for Leigh who has a 2-page backstory for their tiefling. The generic setting they land in has no instant plot hooks, or maybe there's twelve; they're supposed to take the initiative, but it's 7pm on a friday and while they imagined leaping into this dynamic world with some Cool poo poo, actually they're still a little nervous with this group, nobody feels like taking control because they might come off as rudely dominating things? So they kind of talk to the bartender and manage to buy some cheese and the tiefling makes an inappropriate joke about udders. It's weird, why aren't they rushing out and Adventuring? Session 2: The GM, after panicking for 2 days after the last session, has sketched out an Actual Adventure and as the players sit down, they are railroaded straight into it. And a drat good thing, too, because if this session went like Session 1, there wasn't going to be a Session 3. The sandbox world is still there, but everyone is sufficiently relieved to actually be doing something that they prefer forgetting about that idea, vs. disrupting Actual Fun Gaming to try wandering down random pathways instead of doing what the Dark Stranger hired them to do. Session 8: Hey this game is on rails, whatever happened to that glorious open-ended exploration and discovery thing we were gonna do? to summarize: actually, totally open-world gaming is hard, especially with a new group, and especially with a system like D&D that requires at least some prep of an encounter ahead of time, and especially if the players aren't willing to generate plot hooks by fleshing out their characters, ideally together in a joint session. Also, there's another word for open-ended sandbox gaming, and that's "aimless." I'm sure it can be done, but I sure haven't done it. Leperflesh fucked around with this message at 23:58 on Nov 15, 2021 |
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Nov 15, 2021 23:55
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I find generally that openness on the macro level, as Tulip described it above, is something best added to RPGs gradually -- especially with a new game or a new group. Start with something very structured to introduce some plot elements, introduce the game structure, and give people something to bounce off. Then later on once there are established characters and setting details and the like, you can open the horizon and start adapting to the PCs' long-term goals.
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Nov 16, 2021 00:04
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Yeah, it's funny you mention open sandbox and aimlessness, because I've actually had a player who cut his teeth on d&d who always wanted a true sandbox where the GM and story actually are based on what the players pursue and now having played some pbta, and resistance games has realized he wants a bit more structure than the GM making whatever the PCs pursue important and not railroading, because the game meanders and it often feel like there's not much of a common thread otherwise.
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Nov 16, 2021 00:07
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Oh yeah, sessions 1-??? are definitely going to be on... Minimally, guiderails for me. But I'll be up-front about it. "Hey, I'm not sure what I'm doing, mind helping me out this time?" My group much prefers less free-form, so it works.
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Nov 16, 2021 00:13
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Tulip posted:Just to lay the ground a little, when people ask me why I like TTRPGs even though video games exist, it isn't because they have an extremely open possibility space for character expression, the "be whoever you want to be" thing that I see in very tertiary media around RPGs, but that a TTRPG will generally be incredibly responsive, i.e. TTRPGs will coherently respond to an extremely wide range of inputs that put any existing video game to shame. Another way to say this might be that I care about the openness of the possibility space at the micro level but not so much at the macro level.
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Nov 16, 2021 00:58
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One of my friends was a player in a game I was GMing. He has never GMed before. The party had finished up their initial mission and had a few branching options for what came next. They picked one and we ran a nice little dungeon adventure that flowed into their next story hook. After my friend was super complimentary about how I had either prepped for all the different options or been able to improv so well. I told him I appreciated the positive feedback, but I had really just prepped the one dungeon and no matter what story option they chose they were going to be doing some version of that adventure, reskinned as necessary. He seemed pretty deflated and maybe a bit cheated that the story wasn't 100% reactive to what they chose, but I was like, dude, I'm not Skyrim. You're not going to pick a random mountain cave and have me have pre-planned the specific unique adventure therein.
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Nov 16, 2021 01:12
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Warthur posted:I hear that: it's why a lot of the painstaking character-crafting heavy RPGs (like 3.X D&D with all the sourcebooks in play) do little or nothing for me. A wide range of finely-detailed, mechanically-supported choices at character generation or in the levelling process don't interest me, I'm more interested in what those characters do during actual play than who they were before the game started. (The old truism of "don't make your backstory more interesting than the planned action of the campaign" springs to mind here.)
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Nov 16, 2021 01:19
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Giodo! posted:One of my friends was a player in a game I was GMing. He has never GMed before. The party had finished up their initial mission and had a few branching options for what came next. They picked one and we ran a nice little dungeon adventure that flowed into their next story hook. After my friend was super complimentary about how I had either prepped for all the different options or been able to improv so well. I told him I appreciated the positive feedback, but I had really just prepped the one dungeon and no matter what story option they chose they were going to be doing some version of that adventure, reskinned as necessary. It's funny how that works. I've had a near identical conversation with someone when we were playing 4e D&D. Like in order to have cool combat I needed to have encounters already designed to some degree. I have done some stuff where I had 6 set pieces I'd put together, even though realistically we'd only gonna get to 1 or 2, but usually that's only when I can easily recycle them -or already did.
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Nov 16, 2021 01:47
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Splicer posted:I've run into this with players a bunch where they feel they have to have their character's personality and backstory completely locked down before the game even starts, but even with stuff like D&D often the characters I've ended up having the most fun and fully fleshed out personalities for started the first session as "Class: Ranger, Species: something nobody else has picked with a +dex mod". My favourite and longest running 4e character started with me taking over a prebuilt rogue trapfinder/lockpick NPC in session 2. For some people, having the rules offer game mechanical weight to every aspect of their character is what makes those facets of the character real. For others, it creates the impression that because the rules are so extensive, anything not specifically covered is either forbidden or irrelevant. If you need to spend 13 character points to play the guitar, suddenly your character can't be a guitar player unless you pay those points, even if you just wanted it as a flavour thing.
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Nov 16, 2021 01:48
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Leperflesh posted:Also, there's another word for open-ended sandbox gaming, and that's "aimless." I'm sure it can be done, but I sure haven't done it. So two campaigns that I've run recently that were well received end up on an odd spot here1, because these were explicitly aimless campaigns, but both of them were campaigns where I told players up front "I want this campaign to be about lowkey, small conflicts, and the question to be why the characters are doing things. I'm not going to give you guys big threats to solve, I want this contemplative and a little sad." I may just not have a vocabulary I feel settled on, because using "aimless" as a deliberate noun, an aim even, is very different from aimlessness resulting from a table not establishing any coherent direction. 1Promethean 2e and Wanderhome, FWIW. Giodo! posted:One of my friends was a player in a game I was GMing. He has never GMed before. The party had finished up their initial mission and had a few branching options for what came next. They picked one and we ran a nice little dungeon adventure that flowed into their next story hook. After my friend was super complimentary about how I had either prepped for all the different options or been able to improv so well. I told him I appreciated the positive feedback, but I had really just prepped the one dungeon and no matter what story option they chose they were going to be doing some version of that adventure, reskinned as necessary. Ha! Pretty cool that the illusion worked tbh. A lot of what we do in any sort of fiction is 'make illusions,' and the illusion that a cave full of kobolds and a camp full of bandits are totally different is to me just good GM execution. I guess it's kind of funny - he saw that what he thought was so impressive wasn't there, but I'm seeing an impressive execution of a different skill that he didn't even think of.
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Nov 16, 2021 01:56
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Coolness Averted posted:NISEI is the name of the non-profit fan org publishing and doing organized play to keep Android/Netrunner alive, they're saying the Star Trek game had fans do the same thing first. Well Star Trek already had a built in base of terminally online shut-ins so the labor force was readily available.
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Nov 16, 2021 02:45
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Giodo! posted:He seemed pretty deflated and maybe a bit cheated that the story wasn't 100% reactive to what they chose, but I was like, dude, I'm not Skyrim. You're not going to pick a random mountain cave and have me have pre-planned the specific unique adventure therein. Do you also tell children that Santa isn't real? 
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Nov 16, 2021 02:48
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Tulip posted:Anyway back to that weird repeated DnD pitch - if you are not comparing DnD to other TTRPGs but are mostly comparing them to video games, then nearly any DnD DM would qualify as extremely open ended, reactive, and flexible. "The plot moves regardless of what you do" is a fun claim because the reason video games don't tend to do that is because it tends to be kind of pointless when things are scripted (now, a lot of timeloop games do have a world that moves without your intervention but part of the point is so that you can slide into "ah yes Tim always buys apples at the 10 minute mark so I can catch him there" kind of gameplay, rather than a single thing where if you miss your chance its gone). So when a GM is making that claim, they have some chance of backing it up because the way the plot moves on without players can be tuned so that its not just a frustrating or silly aside. That can be very variable though - there are video games where that happens, and in those it can end up being more effective because it's much more accepted to replay or restore in video games (in other words all video games are timeloop games to some extent). If you aren't in the right place at the right time then you can try again and be there, whereas in an RPG it's just gone. But the real trick is that it being able to prove in the table experience that the plot moved on and was tuned is very difficult unless it's very heavily player-driven.
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Nov 16, 2021 03:30
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People don't like to feel like their characters' actions don't have any impact and creative solutions are shot down in favor of the ones the GM expected, but avoiding that doesn't mean expecting the players to proactively create the narrative while the GM more or less just adjudicates it on the fly. My experience is that most games are most satisfying when the GM has the major beats of a narrative in mind and adjusts it in reaction to player actions and collaborations. Of course, this should all be up front. At session 0, the GM should say "you are [A], your initial goal as a party is [B], and the main story will progress towards [C]" and players should be creating their characters with this in mind, and the GM should work with them to tie their characters into the main story.
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Nov 16, 2021 04:19
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I mean, some games do expect the players to do this, like Blades, and the GM guidelines there can be taken as advice for how to do this in other games.
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Nov 16, 2021 04:30
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The devil there is in the word feel. The players can’t know for certain whether or not their characters’ actions made a difference unless they replay the game taking different actions, which isn’t likely (ironically it is only really possible when running modules!). In other words, it’s possible for characters’ actions to make a difference but players not to feel they did, and vice versa. This isn’t addressed by most GM sections, since it turns out that not railroading the players doesn’t necessarily mean they don’t feel railroaded.
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Nov 16, 2021 06:33
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Are there any good 2 player RPGs? Could be 1 gm, 1 player; Two players; or switching the role of gm between players. Someone I've played with has interest in that and so do I, but I'm not sure what games are out there. I can only think of Breaking the Ice, which is a game about your PCs dating each other which might be a bit strange for our first choice.
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Nov 16, 2021 12:06
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Heliotrope posted:Are there any good 2 player RPGs? Could be 1 gm, 1 player; Two players; or switching the role of gm between players. Someone I've played with has interest in that and so do I, but I'm not sure what games are out there. I can only think of Breaking the Ice, which is a game about your PCs dating each other which might be a bit strange for our first choice. There's a podcast called Party Of One that explores a bunch of systems being done as a duo, it might be worth exploring. Ironsworn gets a lot of mention for solo-play but it also works fine as a one-on-one. Scarlet Heroes is an OSR game that started as a way to handle old adventures as a solo character which got developed further into Godbound which also works fine as a solo game.
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Nov 16, 2021 12:14
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Heliotrope posted:Are there any good 2 player RPGs? Could be 1 gm, 1 player; Two players; or switching the role of gm between players. Someone I've played with has interest in that and so do I, but I'm not sure what games are out there. I can only think of Breaking the Ice, which is a game about your PCs dating each other which might be a bit strange for our first choice. It's not explicitly designed for it, but World of Darkness games are excellent for this model of play. The Vampire the Requiem Chronicler's Guide has a section on 1 storyteller/1 player games.
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Nov 16, 2021 12:19
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Cthulhu Confidential is a two-player twist on Trail of Cthulhu, but I dunno if it's good.
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Nov 16, 2021 14:37
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Quick question to the chat: I recently gm'ed the second long-form session (basically the 2nd weekend me and my friends meet where we play from friday to sunday) and my group basically came down hard on my "the world moves on" -style of GMing, where I offer them side commissions if they take missions on a planet, which fall down by the wayside sometimes because they feel like another hook I'm presenting them with seems "more important" or "main-plotty" and they feel bad for not being able to take the opportunity. Any tips for how to react or work with this? We're playing Mongoose Traveller in the Pirates of Drinax Campaign and at first the players seemed really into the general style of exploring options and space out there and creating allies & enemies.
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Nov 16, 2021 14:39
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Siivola posted:Cthulhu Confidential is a two-player twist on Trail of Cthulhu, but I dunno if it's good. I'm not as familiar with Cthulhu Confidential, but Night's Black Agents: Solo Ops uses the same Gumshoe One-2-One system and it's great.
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Nov 16, 2021 14:43
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Mr.Misfit posted:Quick question to the chat: I recently gm'ed the second long-form session (basically the 2nd weekend me and my friends meet where we play from friday to sunday) and my group basically came down hard on my "the world moves on" -style of GMing, where I offer them side commissions if they take missions on a planet, which fall down by the wayside sometimes because they feel like another hook I'm presenting them with seems "more important" or "main-plotty" and they feel bad for not being able to take the opportunity. I mean, the quick and dirty solution would be treat the side commissions like quests out of a video game that just sort of stick around until the players get to them, verisimilitude be damned. Maybe keep up a strait up quest log that records opportunities and gives advance warning if something is fleeting?
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Nov 16, 2021 14:51
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Mr.Misfit posted:Quick question to the chat: I recently gm'ed the second long-form session (basically the 2nd weekend me and my friends meet where we play from friday to sunday) and my group basically came down hard on my "the world moves on" -style of GMing, where I offer them side commissions if they take missions on a planet, which fall down by the wayside sometimes because they feel like another hook I'm presenting them with seems "more important" or "main-plotty" and they feel bad for not being able to take the opportunity.
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Nov 16, 2021 15:07
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Probably just draw less attention to the stuff they're passing up. Time is pretty linear so when they choose one thing they don't choose another, but drawing a lot of attention to it kind of feels like rubbing it in their faces I guess. The way campaign play tends to snowball also lends itself to this being a bit less stressful. Like in Blades you tend to open up a session with e.g. you can rob this rich guy or assassinate the leader of a rival gang. You choose one and not the other, and while you might lose the chance to do one thing, you likely opened doors to new heists, and if the emphasis is more on the opening doors than the closing ones it feels pretty light to leave them behind.
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Nov 16, 2021 15:30
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Mr.Misfit posted:Quick question to the chat: I recently gm'ed the second long-form session (basically the 2nd weekend me and my friends meet where we play from friday to sunday) and my group basically came down hard on my "the world moves on" -style of GMing, where I offer them side commissions if they take missions on a planet, which fall down by the wayside sometimes because they feel like another hook I'm presenting them with seems "more important" or "main-plotty" and they feel bad for not being able to take the opportunity. The approach I take in my current game is that the thing which causes time to move on isn't travelling and doing missions -- it's resting, repairing, and recovering. If you're willing to keep on pushing the risk of going into a situation at less than 100%, you can keep on chasing sidequests without letting the main plot fall by the wayside. The other thing I'd suggest is ensuring that the sidequests you're offering them all have explicit rewards made clear that tie into what they perceive as the main plot. These don't have to specifically be loot (although of course they can be) but things like "These people would make useful allies against the pirates if only their food shortage problems were solved" or "Wait, fix a flood on Cephelon 9? Isn't that where the pirates' first mate was born? You bet you could get some useful leverage on him there" will work as well. Basically ensure that "which of these hooks is the main plot" isn't such an easy question to answer any more.
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Nov 16, 2021 15:31
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Whybird posted:Basically ensure that "which of these hooks is the main plot" isn't such an easy question to answer any more. Great suggestion, thanks for this write up!
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Nov 16, 2021 15:35
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Splicer posted:I've run into this with players a bunch where they feel they have to have their character's personality and backstory completely locked down before the game even starts, but even with stuff like D&D often the characters I've ended up having the most fun and fully fleshed out personalities for started the first session as "Class: Ranger, Species: something nobody else has picked with a +dex mod". My favourite and longest running 4e character started with me taking over a prebuilt rogue trapfinder/lockpick NPC in session 2. My backstory is a wizard turned me onto a bugbear and gave me two craghammers
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Nov 16, 2021 16:33
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And the bugbear said "Hey handsome, how 'bout you drop those Craghammers and let's see where this goes"
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Nov 16, 2021 16:59
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