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GMs: Guiding Morals in GMing
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<blockquote data-quote="GrahamWills" data-source="post: 8989380" data-attributes="member: 75787"><p>I'm going to second this -- and also amplify it. The phrase "the plotline payoff" makes it sound a little like the GM has managed to force the players into a scene they had envisaged from the start, whereas in my experience (and I expect Lanefan's also), it's a resolution that was envisaged and developed by the GM, but substantially modified by player input over time.</p><p></p><p>I am a big fan of this style of campaign design; in fact just yesterday I finished off a 30ish session 13th Age campaign EYES OF THE STONE THIEF. For session zero I asked players to come up with characters who hated the Stone Thief enough to devote their lives to destroying it. Absolutely everyone, in the whole campaign, knew what the final plotline payoff was going to be -- and it made for great fun. The way they planned to destroy it and the decisions they made to make that so (they destroyed Horizon and started an empire wide war between icons) were all player driven. It was a great end.</p><p></p><p>I've run the DRACULA DOSSIER which was a fantastic campaign. It's all about hunting down and killing Dracula, so again, final plotline payoff was obvious from the start. But, as a GM, I noticed a couple of the players had an interest in magic, so I developed a sub-plot of Bathory as a magician-vampire opposed to Dracula, and defeating her was part of the payoff. I planned that general outcome about a year out, but exactly how it worked (romancing Dracula's human magician and converting them to their side; tracking down Bathory's mentors; subverting a large section of Romanian air forces) was player input.</p><p></p><p>I am now running THE GREAT PENDRAGON CAMPAIGN. There's a lot of known plot in the story, but the players have strong input. They healed the Fisher King after a year, preventing the wasteland and freeing Dolorous Garde years before Lancelot even showed up. I strongly suspect one player is going to try and woo Gwenhyvar instead of Lancelot doing so. We know how the story will end, but the details of that end are more important than the facts of it.</p><p></p><p>Strongly supporting Lanefan's comments -- my observation is that campaigns that have no even vague end goal simply have been less fun to play and run. If it is an explicit end goal, the GM and players have an improved shared understanding of the world and are better able to create together. If the GM has a hidden ending (like the Bathory plot in DD) the players get to realize how their input has been changing the world in subtle ways -- it's not that the GM suddenly inserts a pre-planned ending on you; it's that they show you the ending that you have been unknowingly co-creating! And that's pretty cool!</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="GrahamWills, post: 8989380, member: 75787"] I'm going to second this -- and also amplify it. The phrase "the plotline payoff" makes it sound a little like the GM has managed to force the players into a scene they had envisaged from the start, whereas in my experience (and I expect Lanefan's also), it's a resolution that was envisaged and developed by the GM, but substantially modified by player input over time. I am a big fan of this style of campaign design; in fact just yesterday I finished off a 30ish session 13th Age campaign EYES OF THE STONE THIEF. For session zero I asked players to come up with characters who hated the Stone Thief enough to devote their lives to destroying it. Absolutely everyone, in the whole campaign, knew what the final plotline payoff was going to be -- and it made for great fun. The way they planned to destroy it and the decisions they made to make that so (they destroyed Horizon and started an empire wide war between icons) were all player driven. It was a great end. I've run the DRACULA DOSSIER which was a fantastic campaign. It's all about hunting down and killing Dracula, so again, final plotline payoff was obvious from the start. But, as a GM, I noticed a couple of the players had an interest in magic, so I developed a sub-plot of Bathory as a magician-vampire opposed to Dracula, and defeating her was part of the payoff. I planned that general outcome about a year out, but exactly how it worked (romancing Dracula's human magician and converting them to their side; tracking down Bathory's mentors; subverting a large section of Romanian air forces) was player input. I am now running THE GREAT PENDRAGON CAMPAIGN. There's a lot of known plot in the story, but the players have strong input. They healed the Fisher King after a year, preventing the wasteland and freeing Dolorous Garde years before Lancelot even showed up. I strongly suspect one player is going to try and woo Gwenhyvar instead of Lancelot doing so. We know how the story will end, but the details of that end are more important than the facts of it. Strongly supporting Lanefan's comments -- my observation is that campaigns that have no even vague end goal simply have been less fun to play and run. If it is an explicit end goal, the GM and players have an improved shared understanding of the world and are better able to create together. If the GM has a hidden ending (like the Bathory plot in DD) the players get to realize how their input has been changing the world in subtle ways -- it's not that the GM suddenly inserts a pre-planned ending on you; it's that they show you the ending that you have been unknowingly co-creating! And that's pretty cool! [/QUOTE]
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