GM: Table Leader

[Professor Murder]

Some good input. Thank you.
Some further/deepening thoughts on it given reflection.
By leader, what I mean is "set the agenda."
Have you GMed a game where one of the players proposed the game to be played? Where a player directed character creation for the table overall? One where a player takes the reins and sees to it the game actually happens?

Part of my musings is, too often the GM has to do all this heavy lifting to make the game actually occur. Yes they can and should delegate. But, from a "change the culture" perspective, I would love to see players step up more without being asked. Many GMs can feel that they are letting their tables down if they don't shoulder way too much. Now, I am old, and I have watched for many newer players, this is changing. This makes me feel good. But we can do more. We can do more to make the role of the GM less taxing. GMs shouldn't feel drafted.

 

[SpringRoll]

Part of my musings is, too often the GM has to do all this heavy lifting to make the game actually occur. Yes they can and should delegate. But, from a "change the culture" perspective, I would love to see players step up more without being asked. Many GMs can feel that they are letting their tables down if they don't shoulder way too much.

Go the japanese way (as I did).
The GM is the facilitator. The game is structured, and players make relevant choices popping out from rules. Scenes are introduced by the GM, but players tell what happen (the system is easy and usually inverse the western one: you must narrate the outcome of the die included what the issue was, instead of waiting for a challenge to be thrown at you - the scene is already "the hero fought his archenemy", player picked it). All players and GM can contribute by suggesting more fitting stuff.
GM create the whole plot points, but is up to players to touch them or not. There's a girl to save, players decide to indepth in a purpose scene or leave her as a background feature and indepth somethig else.

It's a formalized version of "you'll go the green door or the red door?", extended to the whole narrative. I suppose is what you were thinking by extreme.

 

[Professor Murder]

Go the japanese way (as I did).
The GM is the facilitator. The game is structured, and players make relevant choices popping out from rules. Scenes are introduced by the GM, but players tell what happen (the system is easy and usually inverse the western one: you must narrate the outcome of the die included what the issue was, instead of waiting for a challenge to be thrown at you - the scene is already "the hero fought his archenemy", player picked it). All players and GM can contribute by suggesting more fitting stuff.
GM create the whole plot points, but is up to players to touch them or not. There's a girl to save, players decide to indepth in a purpose scene or leave her as a background feature and indepth somethig else.

It's a formalized version of "you'll go the green door or the red door?", extended to the whole narrative. I suppose is what you were thinking by extreme.

I think these are fine ideas, but these are concepts about how gaming narrative can be constructed, and that's not really what I'm getting at, at least for this discussion.

When I say leader, I mean who is making the game happen. If you are a player, what are you doing besides showing up ready to play your character to make sure the game happens? Do you coordinate with the table to see who is attending? Do you arrange dinner? Do you act as a "buddy" to a new player, answering their rules questions so the GM has to do so less often? Do you help rangle minis? Do you keep track of initiative? Do you take notes during play and offer a recap of the last session? Do you call out good RP of other players so they can be recognised for Inspiration?

 

[aramis erak]

Have you GMed a game where one of the players proposed the game to be played? Where a player directed character creation for the table overall? One where a player takes the reins and sees to it the game actually happens?

While all of those are true if one considers the GM a player, several of the "GMless" games, and some of the rotational GMing games are intended to answer those with Yes. And some make the GM role very... hands-off the plot.
That said, several times I've run games requested by players. In a few cases, games I'd not otherwise have chosen to... including Transformers. Several runs of D&D - I seldom want to run D&D; it's more often that players ask for it and I give in.

 

[Professor Murder]

While all of those are true if one considers the GM a player, several of the "GMless" games, and some of the rotational GMing games are intended to answer those with Yes. And some make the GM role very... hands-off the plot.
That said, several times I've run games requested by players. In a few cases, games I'd not otherwise have chosen to... including Transformers. Several runs of D&D - I seldom want to run D&D; it's more often that players ask for it and I give in.

I've taken to giving my players a "menu" of games when a campaign is ending. I rank them from "I've got a bunch to work with here" to "I don't have much but would be willing to run."

 

[Celebrim]

If you can run a good role-playing game you can probably handle just about any small group leadership task provided you have domain knowledge - bible study, business meeting, revolutionary cell, support group, hobby club, sport coach, etc. I kid, but only a little.

There are limits to how much the GM can delegate and still maintain a particular style of play. The trouble is that the GMs actual primary job is something you don't mention. The GM's primary job at the table is "secret keeper". The purpose of the GM is to emulate a particular aspect of reality and that is that the participants don't know everything. You can see this going all the way back to the GM's origin in professional military role-playing games where the purpose was to control the flow of information between the two sides in the conflict. The goal was for the two players (or teams of players) to make command decisions based only on the information a real-world commander would have at the time. The "referee" or "secret keeper" showed each player on the other side of the screen only those moves that they could see. (These days we'd have a computer act in this role.) This style of free form open wargame with limited information was introduced to the amateur community through the Bronstein, one of the direct ancestors of the modern RPG. The secondary role of the GM is actually referee, in as much as in theory a game could be played with perfectly complete and unambiguous rules and as such a referee wouldn't strictly be necessary, but the "secret keeper" that controls the flow of information would always be necessary. That's where the GM really comes from and it's the reason why the GM has limited ability to delegate.

If the GM delegates, you aren't playing the same game. You revert back toward the experience of being able to see "both sides of the screen" which moves the experience of play for a player from being a participant and toward being an observer. The experience of being involved in the story creation as a narrator inherently takes you out of being involved in the story creation as a character.

The only real reason a GM needs to know the rules and game better than any player is because they are the secret keeper. As secret keeper sometimes they are cranking the game engine in situations where only they know what rules are being engaged or why. It's easy enough as the GM to ask for player input into rules situations where the player has full knowledge of what is going on, but sometimes you aren't in that situation. Likewise, sometimes players make propositions without full knowledge of the circumstances (in fact, usually they do so) and now you need to apply knowledge of the rules secretly so as to not reveal information in an untimely manner.

 

[aramis erak]

@Celebrim , that's a very narrow-minded approach to the issue; secret keeping is not only unneeded for play, in many playsyles, it's utterly irrelevant to "running the world." It presupposes secrets are integral to play -- they aren't, outside a very narrow group of genres (investigative horror and murder mysteries) -- and that secret-finding is important to to the players.
It carries also implications of plot railroad.

Some of the most enjoyable play I've had was utterly sans secrets to learn, and players and I playing to find out. The game in question being Blood & Honor, John Wick's second samurai game. The GM has no secrets in B&H, because noting exists prior to introduction, and players can twist things; rolls aren't mmade to find out things, but to define things. If you've an unrevealed secret, in any scene where the secret might be resolved, a can define it. The GM's role in the game is to introduce new troubles, not to be a keeper of secrets.

 

[GMMichael]

I honestly think that having to do so much in addition to devising and running the game is a factor in the GM shortage.

Maybe it would help to see GMing compared to something else. Think of a role-playing game as a fundraiser. The GM is the organizer - the party that wants the particular thing to happen, has the plan, the vision, the passion. The PCs are the donors. They just want to show up, look pretty, have fun, and do something really simple (write checks in the example).

So maybe there's a "GM shortage" because there's a planning or passion shortage?

Does having passion for a game mean that you're not willing to leave major decisions up to another player, forcing you into the GM position?

 

[Celebrim]

@Celebrim , that's a very narrow-minded approach to the issue;

Really?

It presupposes secrets are integral to play -- they aren't, outside a very narrow group of genres (investigative horror and murder mysteries) -- and that secret-finding is important to the players.

That seems to me to be a rather parochial view of the role of secrets in gaming, one that you'd think you'd immediately question given the origin I outlined in wargaming - which is neither investigative horror nor a murder mystery.

If I'm playing a traditional dungeon crawl, the PC's encounter a door. The door hides what is on the other side. They encounter a chest. The chest hides its contents. Magical effects and traps may lurk hidden in the scene. You play to find out. Are you claiming the secrets here don't matter to the player?

If I'm playing a Super Hero RPG, then the Evil Mastermind has some plot afoot which I have to thwart. His lair. His resources. The dastardly deeds he is planning, the means of stopping him, his strengths and weaknesses as an opponent will all be initially unknown to me. Are you claiming that the secrets here don't matter to the player? Are you claiming that the story is the same whether or not Lex Luthor can't outwit you because you have perfect information?

If I'm playing a Spy RPG, then does it matter if I know ahead of time who the double agents are? Does it matter if know the dastardly plan of Goldfinger before I begin to play? And so on and so forth?

For myself I'm struggling to find a genre that doesn't depend on secrets. We have this notion of "spoilers" where the hidden information about the situation is revealed, and the concept is not only universally applicable to all stories but also to video games (Nethack, for example) and table top RPGs.

It carries also implications of plot railroad.

And again, this seems to me to be a rather parochial view of the role of limited information. You yourself in your real life do not have perfect information. Do you feel that the fact that much of life is secret from you and undiscovered means that you are in real life on a plot railroad?

Suppose you had perfect information. Then you could look at the state of things and see that there was one optimal path through the situation. Rather than taking the story through twists and turns, you could plot the straight or straightest line to whatever it was you desired. Would having perfect knowledge of the situation - the map of the dungeon, the evil Master Mind's lair and plot - make you experience of play more or less of a railroad? Perfect information by all parties arguably makes the actions of the participants more predictable and not less predictable. I can't predict what the players will do precisely because they don't know everything that I know, and so I can't know how they will react to or deal with the imperfect knowledge that they have.

Some of the most enjoyable play I've had was utterly sans secrets to learn, and players and I playing to find out.

That may well be true but this is a much more limited claim than you are making. You claim that the role of secrets is narrow. Now you are just claiming that you can enjoy a game without secrets, something I have no need to deny.

The game in question being Blood & Honor, John Wick's second samurai game. The GM has no secrets in B&H, because noting exists prior to introduction, and players can twist things; rolls aren't made to find out things, but to define things. If you've an unrevealed secret, in any scene where the secret might be resolved, a can define it. The GM's role in the game is to introduce new troubles, not to be a keeper of secrets.

What's your point? It is you that have defined a narrow style of play with narrow aesthetics of play. Aside from the fact that you lost me with "John Wick", the truth of the matter is that collaborative narrative games like that where you work out what the story is going to be like a team of screen writers producing the next Disney franchise movie appeal to a fairly narrow audience. I grant people can enjoy them, and more power to them. I don't deny that there is more than one way to play. I just don't think that "Oh yeah, well GMs don't have to be secret keepers" is much of a retort to what I wrote. I mean I even explicitly discussed what happens when the GM isn't a secret keeper, which just goes to show how "narrow minded" I am I guess.

 

[aramis erak]

Knwoing what exists on the other side of said door isn't a needful thing. See also Houses of the Blooded and Blood and Honor. Or even Apocalypse World. It need not be defined until someone listens at the door. And it need not be determined by the GM.

And AWE/PBTA is one of the larger market segments - the GM doesn't provide secrets; the GM provides consequences of failure, and consequences of stalled play. In fact, AW specifically calls out that the GM isn't a source of plot.

John Wick is the warped mind behind Houses of the Blooded, Blood and Honor, both editions of 7th Sea, Legend of the Five Rings 1e, L5R CCG, Orkworld, Cat, and a number of other kind of out there designs... but he has been an important figure since the mid 1990's in the gaming industry because his big games (7th sea and L5R) both hit at key timeframes and found lasting fanbases. He also was a columnist for Pyramid Magazine (SJG).

I've run several minicampaigns that had no secrets -- for there was no prior decision -- the action was declare what you're listening for; on a failure, something other is revealed, but decided at the time, while on a success, the player's stated expectation is true. The role of GM in such play isn't about secrets, but about consequences of failure and calling out violations of genre.