The Caller and the Mapper

[MerricB]

I learned to play from the Moldvay Basic rulebook. When I go upstairs after posting this message I'll see what it says about the role of the caller!

Page B4: "To avoid confusion, the players should select one player to speak for the entire group or party. That player is named the caller. When unusual situations occur, each player may want to say what his or her character is doing. The caller should make sure that he or she is accurately representing all the player characters' wishes. The caller is a mediator between the players and the DM, and should not judge what the player characters should do."

Page B19: "One player should be chosen to tell the DM about the plans and actions of the party. This player is the caller. The players may tell the DM what their characters are doing, but the game runs more smoothly when the caller relays the information. The caller should be sure to check with each member of the party before announcing any actions (such as "We'll turn right" or "he thief will check for traps"). The caller is usually a character with a high Charisma score, and should be near the front of the party, where the character would be able to see what the DM describes."

Page B63: "caller - the player who normally tells the DM what his or her party will do, based on what the other plaeyrs tell him or her."

Cheers!

 

[DMZ2112]

I find the caller generally redundant at the table, but I've resurrected the concept in my online voice-chat games, because I've found it helps tremendously with keeping things moving. When you lose all of the non-vocal cues you have at a table, you tend to get long tracts of silence on the line while each player internally decides whose turn it is to speak and then, having reached that decision, assumes that the person in question knows they are up and goes to the fridge to get a root beer. Having a caller tends to mitigate that phenomenon because the caller always knows it is their turn to speak and if they need input from another player they ask. It's been a big improvement.

I am a big old fencesitter regarding player mapping. It is one of the precious few parts of playing a character that I actually enjoy, and I love to see other players doing it, but it requires a lot of capability on the part of both the dungeon master and the player. The dungeon master has to articulate the characters' surroundings accurately and clearly, and the player has to listen and produce a representation without prompting or guidance that will still be useful once the moment has passed. When one or the other of those skills is lacking player mapping adds little to the campaign experience.

 

[Iosue]

C'mon gang. "Controlling" and "affecting" are two different things.

I'm aware of the difference and I still mean "controlling." I set up the world. I provide some hooks. What happens in the game as played is completely up to the players. I have no story for them to affect. What story that arises in the course of play is entirely dependent on their decisions and actions. I don't want nor need any say in the matter.

 

[Umbran]

What story that arises in the course of play is entirely dependent on their decisions and actions.

With respect - like it or not, that's not true.

I don't want nor need any say in the matter.

The story is based on the decisions and actions of all characters in play. That includes the monsters and NPCs - they have choices and actions - and you make them. So, you have say in the matter. You place the monsters, you create the NPCs (or accept/edit the ones present in published materials) - these choices also influence the resulting story. Even if you stop short of making arbitrary fiats of events in play, the GM cannot avoid having agency in the story.

 

[Majoru Oakheart]

My original group was 14 players and a DM(though on most days we only had 8 players show up). We used a caller and a mapper as well.

Though, more recently we've pretty much done away with the mapper because we don't often go through dungeons big enough to warrant it. Even if they did, it seems a pointless waste of time because it always causes more confusion than it should. Inevitably, the mapper mishears the DM once or twice about which direction the exit in the room goes and they end up with a map that looks absolutely NOTHING like the correct one. Then you have to watch the PCs stumble around aimlessly attempting to follow a map that is wrong without having any idea why the map is wrong. It was funny once or twice but it got old until I would just let the PCs say "We go back to that room with the fountain" and I say "Ok, your characters are able to find it".

As for party caller, I think the reason it worked well is because we as a group empowered the caller to make simple decisions without consulting everyone else constantly. When exploring a dungeon this comes up especially. Without a caller, every corridor takes ages to walk down. It normally sounds like this:

DM: "So, the hallway continues for 50 feet, there are 2 doors to the right and 2 to the left. However, at the end of the corridor, the passage continues to the right."
P1: "I say we check out each door individually!"
P2: "I say we check the left side doors then the right side doors."
P3: "Doors might have monsters behind them. If we go to the end of the hall and look down the right passage we can see if there are guards wandering or other options for places to go."
P4: "No, if we go past the doors, enemies will be behind us and we'll forget to come back here and check them!"

However, with a party caller(as long as we actually gave them the power to decide) the conversation goes:
Caller: "We check out the first door on the right first"
DM: "It's an empty room with nothing in it."
Caller: "We search it."
DM: "You don't find anything."
Caller: "Ok, we go across the hall to the first door on the left."

This doesn't mean that sometimes the other players wouldn't argue the decisions of the caller or didn't have a say on where they went. But it happened less often.

 

[Lanefan]

There are in fact three roles, not two: caller, mapper, and treasurer.

Caller: this had been abandoned by our crew before I even joined in, and that was a lo-ong time ago. We're just too independent, and none of us like the idea of another player speaking for our characters (which is how we've always interpreted the caller's role); never mind that half the time the caller wouldn't know what some of the party is doing - the ranger's off scouting alone, the thief is quietly prying at the desk drawer while the party is busy elsewhere, a third character is discreetly casting charm person on the party fighter, etc.

Mapper: absolutely essential. If the players don't keep a map it's assumed the characters don't either, leading to getting hopelessly lost in fairly short order. (as player, I try not to be the mapper as I do enough mapping as a DM)

Treasurer: also absolutely essential. The treasurer records what we've found, and (perhaps more important) what we know about what we've found; we don't and won't play a system where magic items identify themselves after a few minutes' use. (as player I almost always end up as treasurer, I don't mind doing it and it saves me from mapping) The treasurer also records who is carrying what out of what we've found in case anyone gets blown up, turned to stone, teleported to the high arctic, etc.

Lanefan

 

[Agamon]

Speaking for my own games, if I have the amount of players to require a caller, I'm doing it wrong. Four players is perfect, five can work, six is too many.

Also, when I GM, I'm one of the players, not someone too important to spoken to directly. lol

Oh, and I've been playing since '81, if that makes any difference.

 

[Iosue]

With respect - like it or not, that's not true.

The story is based on the decisions and actions of all characters in play. That includes the monsters and NPCs - they have choices and actions - and you make them. So, you have say in the matter. You place the monsters, you create the NPCs (or accept/edit the ones present in published materials) - these choices also influence the resulting story. Even if you stop short of making arbitrary fiats of events in play, the GM cannot avoid having agency in the story.

With mutual respect, I think you're splitting too fine a hair here, and perhaps taking two lines out of the context of my post and the larger context of the discussion in which it was made.

I'll further note that I'm not describing some platonic ideal of play here. I'm describing the specific style of play that my specific groups use when trying to play B/X D&D as an exploration game.

So, sure, I have involvement. But what I don't seek is control. I make certain choices before the game in order to create the field of play. The dungeons and hexes are stocked at random. Many encounters in play are random. NPC reactions are based on reaction rolls. Certainly I interpret these results into a coherent whole. But I don't have a story. Without the actions of the players, all I have are empty sets. Any story that exists is driven by the actions of the characters in play. Even in my NPC interactions, since I'm relying on random rolls I have very little control over how any one NPC will act, let alone the in-progress story as a whole.

To put it in DMMike's terms, it would seem that he as DM wishes to retain control of the story, while his players affect it. In my games, I want the players to have control of the story, while I merely affect it, simply because as DM I cannot not. You could define "control" so broadly that there is no distinction between how DMMike and I run our games, but I'm not sure how useful that would be.

 

[Iosue]

The issue I find with turning "gargoyle" is that while the characters live in the world 24/7 (or 32/8, depending on your game-world clock and calendar), the player lives in it a few hours at a time, every week or two, and views it only through interactions with the GM - that's a pretty narrow window. The PCs should have a ton of background information and intuition about how things work that the players generally lack.

It is the GM's job to widen that window, so that the PCs are making informed decisions. If and when the Players are walking down a road that the GM knows is kind of silly, and that runs contrary to what the PCs would know, I think the GM should probably offer that information, rather than wait for the PCs to specifically ask for it.

Case in point: I ran the second session of a new Shadowrun game last night. The first half of the run was stealing a widget. The second half was getting hold of the person who knows how the widget works. This latter, to a person of the real, modern world, amounts to kidnapping. A couple of my players balked at the ethics, even though in the game world, "corporate extractions" are a pretty common form of run.

So, it was important for me to remind the players of this - not that I get to make choices for them, not that they *must* take the hook I've provided (I had two different backup plans), but that in the rest of the world, this wasn't considered that big a deal. They can make the choice to not do extractions, if they want - but they should make that decision knowing the context in which it was relevant, rather than make it, and then find out later on that they're running against the grain without knowing it.

Similarly, for example, the party tech-heads should know a lot about common security systems. If the team starts making a plan that runs contrary to the knowledge the PCs would have, the GM should remind them, rather than allow them to make a crappy plan, and they gripe that the GM didn't give them enough information to make a good plan.

Again, I'm not talking about Universal GM Best Practices. I'm talking specifically about playing D&D as a game of exploration, and in this case making a contrast with Pemerton's style of "When my players are planning I pay attention, and frequently get involved (eg to egg them on one way or another, whether by encouragement or (gentle) mockery; perhaps to remind them of some salient backstory that they seem to have forgotten; etc)."

Of course I pay attention to what the players are saying, and of course I correct blatant player misconceptions the character could not be expected to have, e.g., layouts of rooms, etc. Nor am I saying that "turning gargoyle" will be appropriate for all kinds of campaigns/playstyles/games or people. And the free flow of information is vital. All I am saying is that when the players huddle to discuss their next course of action (in an exploration game, so this generally involves the next area to be explored), I take no part, aside from answering questions and making clarifications.

Umbran, I'm a little confused. Is there a reason you keep taking examples of me saying, "Well, in my specific game, this is what I do..." and extrapolating them into generalized discussions of what GMs do or should do? I mean, I get that the style I use to run B/X D&D may not be best suited for how you run Shadowrun, but what does that have to do with Callers and Mappers in D&D?

 

[pemerton]

I set up the world. I provide some hooks. What happens in the game as played is completely up to the players. I have no story for them to affect. What story that arises in the course of play is entirely dependent on their decisions and actions. I don't want nor need any say in the matter.

what I don't seek is control. I make certain choices before the game in order to create the field of play. The dungeons and hexes are stocked at random. Many encounters in play are random. NPC reactions are based on reaction rolls. Certainly I interpret these results into a coherent whole. But I don't have a story. Without the actions of the players, all I have are empty sets. Any story that exists is driven by the actions of the characters in play. Even in my NPC interactions, since I'm relying on random rolls I have very little control over how any one NPC will act, let alone the in-progress story as a whole.

A lot of this is similar to how I like to GM - I set up backstory, a lot of how NPCs react is based on random rolls (typically skill checks in my game, rather than reaction rolls, but for current purposes I don't think that's a huge difference).

I think the single biggest difference, for me, would be non-random stocking and non-random encounters. In a type of continuum with my non-gargoyle mode of engaging with player planning, I have a non-gargoyle mode of setting up these elements of backstory and framing situations: I deliberately set things up to pod and proke and get responses from the players. (Not any particular sort of response - hence why I say that, like you, I'm affecting but not controlling - but some sort of reasonably passionate response.)

I think this is probably the main marker of my game being a non-exploration game.

Enough about me! [MENTION=6688858]Libramarian[/MENTION] has frequently posted that, in order to maintain interest and avoid boring bits in an exploration-based old-school game, he puts "unrealistic" amounts of wacky stuff into his sandbox. (And so, eg, has fewer empty rooms than the traditional stocking tables would suggest.) Do you have any particular approach to this issue? (Maybe you don't think there is an issue.)