Saturday 24 November 2012

Horses for Courses

I find myself increasingly wondering whether hipster story-games where the players get to control the narrative and are involved in the creative process are better for groups that are DM-heavy than "trad" games are.

The world of gamers, I think it's obvious, is divided into people who like to be players and people who like to DM. If you have one of the latter and a group of the former, traditional games work swimmingly, but if you have a group composed of people who prefer to DM, I think frustration can rather easily set in. When I am the player in a traditional game I become antsy and fidgety: I want the DM's role, because I want the really creative stuff and because my ego demands that I am the demigod (and demiurge) at the table.

Yet in my group, there are at least two other people who are (I suspect) rather similar to me. I wonder if, in the final analysis, games where the players are involved in controlling the narrative and helping create the world in some sense are more suited to groups like that, as they parcel out the traditional DMing responsibility and hence assuage the frustration of being just any old PC.

29 comments:

  1. I loooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooove being "just any old PC".

    Love it. Love it. Love it.

    And I love the challenge of trying to exert control over the story from that tiny, powerless position.

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    1. Fair enough. I love it in theory, but in practice I tend to become annoyed after a while.

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    2. zak, did you just say you like playing a tiny little man? lol

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    3. I'm with Zack. The only games I DM are because I want to play in them. If someone else was running Apocalypse World or Isle of the Unknown I would totally have sacked off being a DM and played instead.

      I am a power hungry lunatic, but I can do that just as easily as a PC and I don't have to think or worry about things between games like 'is everyone having fun?' or 'do things make sense?'

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  2. I think that you have a pretty solid, if not new, idea here.

    As a follow-on point, I am continually shocked to run into players who actively detest anything smacking of "script control". And these aren't even the lazy types, who just want the DM to tell them a story. These players actually feel like taking any control at the "meta" layer cheapens the whole experience. It boggles my mind.

    It's also worth taking your division of types one layer further. Designers are almost to a soul people who prefer to DM. Not only that, but many of them fall into the "frustrated novelist" niche. Once they get into the design space, they start talking online with other designers. It is very easy for them to create an echo chamber of like-minded people without realizing it. I went through it myself, where I got into all kinds of player-empowerment games on RPG.net. When I tried to take them back to the group, though, no one was even vaguely interested in playing that way.

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    1. Yes, I'm sure that's true - the frustrated novelist phenomenon has a huge impact on gaming. You could probably write a PhD thesis on it.

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  3. Nope, not me. I love being a player, specifically because it calls for a wholly different kind of creativity from being the referee.

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  4. "Hipster" games? Really? That's not derogatory...

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    1. Yeah. I'm into them and I certainly ain't no hipster. I'm probably no where near cool enough to qualify.

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    2. Have you ever in your life come across the expression "tongue in cheek", perhaps?

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    3. Sure, sure, I'm just saying...when people called them 'Hippie' games I was totally down with that. Made me smile. Hipster just seems off.

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    4. I was referring to the Anonymous commenter, not you. I use the term "hipster game" affectionately.

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    5. Someone still needs to learn that irony and sarcasm (along with humor) don't clearly come off as written through this new fangled Internet thing.

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    6. You need to take these things in context. The general context here being that 99.9% of what I say is to be taken with a generous helping of salt. The other 0.1% is bullshit.

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    7. Hipster is the new modern. Story telling, narrative, DMless, or rules lite games are the latest arc in RPG's, and a well deserved one. Whether as a regular DM or PC the style of play championed by such games as Fiasco only enrich any, and I mean any, gamers face to face game experience.

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  5. i dont mind the concept but ive always regarded players as world sharpers and collaborators - my favorite players would dream up their own enemies in their backgrounds for me which was awesome. Players even messed with each others back stories - like one in a superhero game adopted identity of another players extradimentional nemesis for a laugh. He inadvertently became the herald of the evil one - he got sprung by other heroes looking through his base for some team hardware they needed - it was all awesome - sandbox generally preferred to letting players ruin all your prep by hijacking scenario like some games i play-tested at cons where anything can happen. Less imaginative and pushy players suffer under these everyone can seize narrative. I had a card system which let players seize story in limited ways which was great - make villainess love you, get in one to one battle with villain, somehow survive certain death, find thing they needed etc

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  6. As someone who has grown to generally dislike finding myself in the player position I believe Noisms is correct. The new breed of indie games, with their expanded options for player control and input actually make me want to play them.

    Largely it comes down to experience. In all my many years of gaming I can count the number of GMs I've met who embrace active player contribution on one hand. More often than not, a player is something to be batted down and taught their place by the mighty GM god-king. Yeah, no thanks. I can bang my head against a wall trying to have fun on my own time. I don't need to schedule it as a group activity.

    That said, GMs that have the players' ideas matter in a traditional game rock my socks. I do it.

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    1. I do tend to encourage player input when I'm being a "traditional" GM - it's just that there is no formal rule-based mechanism for doing so, and it would be highly unusual to (for example, in D&D) roll the dice, tell the players they have a random encounter and then ask them what they encounter.

      Although that could be a lot of fun too actually.

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    2. it's quite easy to do this without any mnechanism at all.

      simply listening to the players and "getting" the mood the are in (something you do as a gm anyway) helps determining what an upcoming encounter might be about. this way the players create/shape encounters without realising it. i do this all the time.

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    3. Shlominus speaks the gospel!

      I ran my D&D-But-Not game yesterday for my ex-wife and some old friends and it felt more folkloric than the Ars Magica game I am currently running for my regular group (as a matter of fact I will be running it today).

      Why?

      Threw out a situation and some ideas and let the players' own interests in social and political situations combine with their interest in different cultures' mythology and legends combine to take the adventure in a different direction than I expected.

      Totally thought, after not playing RPGs very often for a long while, the PCs would get into combat pretty quick. Instead, they reasoned things out, when for a peaceful solution and then got 'side tracked' to investigate a mysterious land whose ruler might help their cause.

      Not my plan (GM), theirs (players). I simply followed their lead on this.

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  8. This doesn't fit my personal approach. As a referee, I like developing and having control over my own world, though I occasionally ask for player input outside the active session. As a player though, I don't feel any desire to control the narrative beyond my character's actions. I am there, mostly, to explore someone else's world. In terms of time spent gaming, I am just as likely to play as I am to run the game (especially in this age of easy to find ConstantCon games).

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    1. "personal approach" nails it.

      this is a personality issue, nothing else. some people feel the need to be in control, others... just don't :)

      my approach is exactly like yours. as a dm i enjoy being in control of my world, but as a player being in control of my character is enough.

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    2. If you are playing an interactive game, being in control usually comes at someone elses expense at the table. Great game nights are made of everyone participating.

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  9. There are three types of traditional gamers: People who prefer to be a judge. People who prefer to be a player. And people who enjoy both roles.

    I’m dubious that those types really have anything to do with narrative games. For me, the role of the judge in a traditional game is different to “narrative control”. The judge does make backstory, but the players in a traditional game can do that too. During a session, the judge is playing the NPCs in the same way the players play the PCs. The judge is also making rulings, but the narrative stand-point is only one tool (and, IMHO, shouldn’t be the only tool) used for that.

    (It’s hard not to nitpick the implication that playing in a traditional game isn’t creative.)

    The difference between traditional games and narrative games is the difference between being the character and being the author. People who prefer traditional games—even the judges—don’t want to be an author. People who prefer narrative games do enjoy the authorial role, though they may only really enjoy it in a collaborative context. People who enjoy both types of games enjoy both types of roles.

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    1. Come to think of it, I know a guy who really enjoys and really shines in collaborative storytelling games, but when playing traditional RPGs, he prefers to be a player rather than a judge.

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  10. Our game group is 100% GMs, and we have a propensity to play narrativist games. I think there is merit in the observation you make in your OP. The problem comes in when a play preference gets hypostatized into a moral good. I prefer to play and GM story games such as FATE and Ubiquity and I just tend to see that as a preference, rather than a reflection on my character or that of my players. I have been in campaigns driven more by the auteur style of GMing, but for the life of me I don't see why you can't combine the two methods more than they are. Give players more say over some details. Try mechanics that enable that rather than inhibit it.

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  11. Well there are some people who will never ever learn of the rules but the very basics. They always need help translating that into game terms but can be awesome to play with anyway since not giving a crap what the rules say can get them from getting stuck in a lot of un-fun ruts ("hit points? what hitpoints? I have a barrel full of burning oil!"). They tend to work well with black box DMing and not be able to do well for games in which the DM is less of a black box. These sort of people tend to never ever DM so if you have a session with a bunch of DMs then you'll do better with Storygames since you're cutting out of a section of the gaming population that doesn't do well with Storygames...

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  12. There's a cliche about creative groups, (which I think comes from people trying to set up virtual worlds?) that there are those who naturally, without pushing, will want to contribute substantially and creatively, those who will want to participate, and those who will want to spectate.

    D&D works very well if you have an even split of all of the above, as the spectators can support the action guys when asked, or very occasionally get put on the spot by the GM, the the creative guys can question and suggest things to the DM, the action guys can just go for it and make stuff happen, and the DM can let his imagination go wild.

    Then after a few weeks, you can swap round with one of the other creative players DMing, etc.

    Group of six, with 2 GMs, 2 "lets do this" guys, and 2 spectators/support? Sorted!

    If you've got too many creative guys, then you can never really give anyone a long enough turn at GMing to be satisfying, and you might as well share the opportunities out. In fact, you could probably play some of these shared authority games between you, and each GM for other people.

    I feel like there's a missing game out there that is to D&D as shared authority games are, but from a "loads of spectator players" angle. I know that there are improvisational story tellers and illusionist/participationist GMs out there, but the transmission of good practice is even worse than D&D's.

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