Why I don't GM by the nose

[Nagol]

The DM can always end the campaign, pure and simple; she has exactly 100% of that power. Further, she can then turn around and restart it with different players if she likes. I've seen this done.

That said, I'm not entirely sure that's what's under discussion here (though I could be wrong; I've skipped quite a bit within the longer posts here).

The question is not how much power the DM has as to whether the campaign exists or not, but instead - taking the campaign's ongoing existence as a given - how much power the DM has within said campaign. And that varies almost group by group, with no hard and fast answers available.

For my own part, I've ended two long campaigns. One ended in a story-driven manner: due to the PCs actions the world became unplayable (it became a non-magical world). The other ended when I said "Guys, it's over."* as I'd run out of ideas for it.

* - or very similar words to that effect.

Lan-"it ain't over till it's over"-efan

If I quit a campaign as a player, the campaign is over for me so I've ended it for me. (Actually as a player, the last 2 times I quit a campaign it ended the campaign for everyone, but that's another story).

If a DM decides to stop running a campaign, the campaign will end unless the players determine it will continue under new management. The DM stopping has a larger risk profile to the player group than a player stopping, but the player group can survive a DM and a player group can terminate at the loss of a player.

If a DM decides to restart a previously failed campaign with new players, it restarts for him. For the players, it is simply the start of their campaign. There is no power shift there just context for the parties involved.

 

[Raven Crowking]

I see now what you had in mind.

And we're mostly agreed, in principle at least.

In terms of the artificial divide, I am claiming that it is artificial in terms of the point I am trying to convey; it is probably not in all topices, or even all related topics.

You are correct that I do indeed mean "equally satisfying in principle"; I know that different people find different playstyles more satisfying than others. However, there is still a balance between my earlier (1) and (2) that is being sought; where that balance should fall depends upon your preference.

I'm pretty confident I follow your first paragraph. I remain uncertain about your move to the second paragraph. The removal of detail will only cause problems if the GM also isn't prepared to let the players respond as they see fit (taking for granted that they don't break the implict or explicit understandings at the table as to genre, tastefulness etc) to what is important.

Emphasis mine.

Define "important" in this context, and I believe it will aid you in moving from the first paragraph to the second.

Already, the move from "let the players respond as they see fit" to "let the players respond as they see fit to what is important" implies some degree of the GM leading the PCs. In the hands of a less experienced GM, the decision as to what is important is liable to centre in the GM's hands even more.

The GM deciding what is important is a necessary step to deciding what should happen, which is a necessary step to leading the players by the nose.

IOW, your style works for you -- and, I feel certain, a good many other GMs -- because you are experienced and good at what you do. It is not a style I would recommend to the novice.

YMMV, of course!


RC

 

[howandwhy99]

Again, you are assuming that I think the power relationship is a negative one. "Oppress people"? Why? You're right, Alex Trebek in no way oppresses the players. But, then again, they're playing a game where this is no player freedom whatsoever. All answers must be in a specific form and there is only one answer to a given question.

But, let's not forget, Alex Trebek still has all the power in that relationship. If the players choose not to follow the rules, he can disallow their answers. The judges (which Trebek is not one of) can disallow answers that are imprecise, and it's up to the judges to define "imprecise".

You cannot get around the idea that there is a power relationship at the table. It's always there. It has to be there really. Someone has to set the scenario, someone has to adjudicate the scenario and someone has to set up the next scenario. That someone is holding most of the cards.

And, again, that's NOT a bad thing.

This thing called power doesn't exist. I think you are creating it by choosing to view interpersonal relationships through an imperfect lens. Choose not to use that lens and the relationship is not about power, this abstract concept I can't point at in the real world.

Defining personal relationships in terms of power almost always begins by defining other as enemy, so my instincts are "unequal power relationships are undesirable" is your point of view. The conclusion is in the premise. But they aren't necessarily undesirable for you, okay. But when you say, "You cannot get around the idea that there is a power relationship at the table. It's always there. It has to be there really." I think you are locking yourself in a box that isn't there. Of course there is no power relationship at the table. It only exists if people choose to create it.

A puzzle game isn't about power differences between individuals, but the deciphering of the underlying pattern of the puzzle. It is an enabling exercise, not a controlling one.

Hang on a second here. The presence of the cult member is entirely improvised. It wasn't there until the player asked about it (given the original example). By placing the cult member there, you've, to use your language, changed the code, not based on any in game action, but on a meta-game level because the player gave you a cool idea.

How is that not improvisation?

But, taking it a step further, unless you have scripted out every NPC speach and refuse to vary from that, you must improvise NPC reactions all the time. That improvisation is based on a number of factors, but, it's still improvised on the spot.

I think you are trying to reduce the DM down to some sort of Internet Bot that simply reacts in a predictable way every time. Again, to each his own, but, I certainly wouldn't want to play in a game where the DM never improvises.

The player improvised the cult member, I did not. It is added to the code as the game is designed to engage him or her in continual deciphering of the world they are in. They all know about the "Irrelevant, so Yes" rule at start, so they know some of their conclusions drawn may be be accurate only because they were initially irrelevant. But upon the asking they immediately become relevant and are incorporated within the entire web of the game.

NPC knowledge maps can be explored through 1st person POV speech, but they are not improvised at the table. They are either generated during scenario creation, determined by players in backgrounds or at the table, or chosen by me at their initial configuration. As in the GoL, I as referee get to choose that initial configuration of the puzzle, like purchasing a module, but it must stick to or be converted to the underling code. I could write a module for any number of computer game engines, but it would still need to be converted to that engine to work.

I get this style of game is not yet attractive to you. It is appealing to people who play games to win, to decipher the code as in M:tG and demonstrate their own prowess. Memory matters in my game. Strongly attempting to imagine the related world, observe every detail, and retain for further reflection all of it leads to greater ability to perform within it. It isn't necessary to do so, but it is rewarded. My intention is not to turn the DM into a robot, but rather a referee. As a language game they are always having to decipher communication by the players to their best judgment. Clarification is key.

 

[Mark CMG]

(. . .) when you say, "You cannot get around the idea that there is a power relationship at the table. It's always there. It has to be there really." I think you are locking yourself in a box that isn't there. Of course there is no power relationship at the table. It only exists if people choose to create it.

"There's danger here, Cherie . . ." It is better to think of a DM, GM, Referee, etc. as a facilitator than on a "side." There are connotations to describing the facilitator/player relationship in terms of "power" that are unwise to ignore, at best, and detrimental, at worst.

 

[pemerton]

the move from "let the players respond as they see fit" to "let the players respond as they see fit to what is important" implies some degree of the GM leading the PCs. In the hands of a less experienced GM, the decision as to what is important is liable to centre in the GM's hands even more.

The GM deciding what is important is a necessary step to deciding what should happen, which is a necessary step to leading the players by the nose.

IOW, your style works for you -- and, I feel certain, a good many other GMs -- because you are experienced and good at what you do. It is not a style I would recommend to the novice.

That makes your reasoning clearer to me.

My response (not in the sense of rebuttal, but in the sense of what I think is another factor that can be brought to bear to head of the danger that you are pointing to) is to emphasise improvisation - the readiness of the GM to follow the lead of the players, and to construct situations that allow the players to find their own path through them (and, if it comes to it, out of them).

I'm not sure what best suits a novice GM. Part of the difficulty with 4e being the contemporary "gateway" RPG is that its mechanics - the need for battlemaps, for example, and the fact that a skill challenge can fail as a satisfying action-resolution exercise if the GM doesn't work hard to keep the mechanics tightly integrated with and responsive to the fiction - strongly favour preparation. In my own experience improvisation is nevertheless possible, but I think you're right to say that in improvisng in this way I'm drawing on a lot of GMing experience.

But 4e also doesn't favour the sort of approach that you appear to favour, of strong attention to world detail which then allows the players to choose their own path through the sandbox. My intuition, at least, is that a sandbox is facilitated by purist-for-system simulatonist mechanics, because those sorts of mechanics help both players and GM form the sort of understanding of the ingame causal dynamics of the gameworld that facilitates high-quality sandbox play. And 4e is notoriously not a purist-for-system game.

I know that LostSoul is doing some interesting things with his 4e sandbox, but I think it's a bit different from a typical sandbox. For example, in place of purist-for-system mechanics it relies heavily on both GM metagaming at prep and player metagaming during play, and this isn't necessarily easy for a novice GM either. And certainly there is nothing in the 4e rulebooks that would help a novice set up a game like this.

The upshot might be that 4e, then, is in some sense the wrong game to be the gateway. A better gateway on the sandboxy side would be something like Basic Roleplaying - good, clear, easy to prep and adjudicate purist-for-system mechaincs. A better gateway on the importance + improvisation (or "button-pushing") side might be something like HeroQuest.

4e, by trying to be tactically crunchy (which I like) but also being better suited (I think) to button-pushing roleplaying than sandbox roleplaying, is actually perhaps a fairly hard game for a novice to come to grips with. This discussion has given me a better sense of how 4e, in the hands of inexperienced RPGers, might be more likely than (for example) Basic D&D to end up as a bog-standard railroad that, at the level of actual player engagement, is a boardgame/dice-rolling exercise, because the space of mechanical decision-making is all that the players have left. That also gives me a handle on how it might come across as WoW-ish, because presumably the description I've just given is pretty well suited to WoW.

 

[Hussar]

Defining personal relationships in terms of power almost always begins by defining other as enemy, so my instincts are "unequal power relationships are undesirable" is your point of view. The conclusion is in the premise. But they aren't necessarily undesirable for you, okay. But when you say, "You cannot get around the idea that there is a power relationship at the table. It's always there. It has to be there really." I think you are locking yourself in a box that isn't there. Of course there is no power relationship at the table. It only exists if people choose to create it.

All personal interactions boil down to power. It's unavoidable. It's not positive or negative, it's just there. Your parents have power over you. Is that negative? Most of the time, no it isn't. Your teachers, your coach, and your boss all have some degree of authority over you. You are adding meaning here that is not intended. Power relationships have nothing to do with defining the other side as an enemy.

At a game table, the majority of the authority rests in the hands of the DM. Even if he is viewed as facilitator, that still vests the authority to facilitate in his hands. You cannot be a facilitator without a disparity of authority. I'm trying to avoid the use of the word power here because everyone seems to be getting hung up on the negative connotations there.

I see no negative connotations in saying that the DM has power at the table that the players do not. To me, it's just a very obvious observation.

The player improvised the cult member, I did not. It is added to the code as the game is designed to engage him or her in continual deciphering of the world they are in.

How? How did the player improvise that cult member. He asked the DM if there was a cult member in the group. There wasn't until he suggested it and the DM added it. "It is added" by the DM, not by the player. And, there is no obligation for the DM to add that element. At least no rules obligation.

That's entirely improvised by the DM. It did not exist in the game world until such time as the DM added it. The DM added it on the suggestion of the player. In this case, the DM still retains all the authority over the game. It could easily have gone the other way. The player makes the secret sign and no one reacts.

At what point does the player improvise anything? At what point can the player have any effect on the game world, or the "code" as you call it, beyond making a funny hand gesture?

If I quit a campaign as a player, the campaign is over for me so I've ended it for me. (Actually as a player, the last 2 times I quit a campaign it ended the campaign for everyone, but that's another story).

Semantics. Is the campaign still running after you quit? Yes? Then the campaign has not ended. That you are no longer playing does not end the campaign. Otherwise, someone like me has probably ended a bajillion campaigns as I've had players come and go from my table with an unfortunately regular frequency. ((The dreaded 5th player seat. There are 5 of us that have been together now for over a year with three of us gaming together for almost six. Every time we add a 6th player, they invariably quit after some time, sometimes because they don't like the game, but most often due to real life issues.))

Heck, my World's Largest Dungeon Campaign ran for almost two years. In that time, four of the players were there for almost the entire campaign. Overall, IIRC, we had twenty some people at the table. Does that mean my campaign ended twenty times?

While it is true that another DM might step up to run a campaign, it's pretty rare IME. It does happen, but not too often.

 

[howandwhy99]

All personal interactions boil down to power. It's unavoidable. It's not positive or negative, it's just there.
...
Power relationships have nothing to do with defining the other side as an enemy.
...
At a game table, the majority of the authority rests in the hands of the DM.
...
I see no negative connotations in saying that the DM has power at the table that the players do not. To me, it's just a very obvious observation.

It isn't obvious to anyone who has no conception of power. You are choosing to believe in it, but it has no empirical reality except in your brain.

Perhaps you missed the early years of this decade when DMs were castigated as evil tyrants imposing their will over the player victims in D&D, but the belief was well vocalized at the time. The belief hasn't gone away, but it is not socially popular either, so it is not voiced in quite the same manner. Instead we get story authority, authorship rights in games, rather than understanding through game rule deciphering. It's a point of view and not an absolute truth, though it is often abused against anyone who disagrees as such.

There is no power relationship at the table or authority. It's simply a lens you've chosen to see the relationship through.

How? How did the player improvise that cult member. He asked the DM if there was a cult member in the group. There wasn't until he suggested it and the DM added it. "It is added" by the DM, not by the player. And, there is no obligation for the DM to add that element. At least no rules obligation.

That's entirely improvised by the DM. It did not exist in the game world until such time as the DM added it. The DM added it on the suggestion of the player. In this case, the DM still retains all the authority over the game. It could easily have gone the other way. The player makes the secret sign and no one reacts.

At what point does the player improvise anything? At what point can the player have any effect on the game world, or the "code" as you call it, beyond making a funny hand gesture?

The player improvised the cult member when they thought about one being there. When they made the attempt to contact a member by secret hand signal to me I responded with an "Irrelevant, so yes" answer. I say yes by including the NPC signaled in the secret society. Now there is a cult member as I am obligated to do under the rules. The rest of what you say is more on power and authority. Who gets to add what to the story. This isn't storytelling, it's code deciphering: a game. Find the underlying pattern expressed either in the rules or in a code behind a screen. Role playing is about an analytic perspective shift. Change your view to attempting to understand rather than express in D&D and there is no concept of authority existent there.

 

[Lanefan]

If I quit a campaign as a player, the campaign is over for me so I've ended it for me. (Actually as a player, the last 2 times I quit a campaign it ended the campaign for everyone, but that's another story).

Your own experience notwithstanding, in most cases a campaign can and will survive the loss of a single player.

If a DM decides to stop running a campaign, the campaign will end unless the players determine it will continue under new management.

In a case where the setting and game are generic (e.g. a 3e game set in Forgotten Realms), perhaps so. But if the campaign is set in the original DM's own world and-or uses a rule system unique to that DM, not a chance.

If a DM decides to restart a previously failed campaign with new players, it restarts for him. For the players, it is simply the start of their campaign. There is no power shift there just context for the parties involved.

Context, however, is everything. If a campaign truly stops and then restarts with new players, those new players still have to deal with whatever history the original players and-or their PCs left behind; as well as develop their own new stories.

Lanefan

 

[Nagol]

<snip>


Semantics. Is the campaign still running after you quit? Yes? Then the campaign has not ended. That you are no longer playing does not end the campaign. Otherwise, someone like me has probably ended a bajillion campaigns as I've had players come and go from my table with an unfortunately regular frequency. ((The dreaded 5th player seat. There are 5 of us that have been together now for over a year with three of us gaming together for almost six. Every time we add a 6th player, they invariably quit after some time, sometimes because they don't like the game, but most often due to real life issues.))

Heck, my World's Largest Dungeon Campaign ran for almost two years. In that time, four of the players were there for almost the entire campaign. Overall, IIRC, we had twenty some people at the table. Does that mean my campaign ended twenty times?

While it is true that another DM might step up to run a campaign, it's pretty rare IME. It does happen, but not too often.

If I'm no longer involved because I withdrew, it is completely immaterial that the campaign exists for others because it is ended for me. The only reason it matters if the campaign continues is I know a group of people I may want to interact with are busy during a defined period of time.

Although it is uncommon for a player group to continue a campaign rather than start something new (or return to something older) when a campaign ends, it is within the power of the group to make that decision -- not any one member no matter his position in the failed game.

A DM does not have the power to end anything other than his involvement -- the same as any other player. The group decides how the group will continue to use its time. The group may decide to break up and go separate ways, start a new shared activity, return to a previous shared activity, or continue the current activity with a new DM.

 

[Nagol]

Your own experience notwithstanding, in most cases a campaign can and will survive the loss of a single player.

In a case where the setting and game are generic (e.g. a 3e game set in Forgotten Realms), perhaps so. But if the campaign is set in the original DM's own world and-or uses a rule system unique to that DM, not a chance.
Context, however, is everything. If a campaign truly stops and then restarts with new players, those new players still have to deal with whatever history the original players and-or their PCs left behind; as well as develop their own new stories.

Lanefan

I agree a campaign will usually survive the loss of a player. That's because a portion of the group is invested in continuing. If a single player is invested enough to stay with the DM then the DM can say his is continuing the campaign even if he replaces any amount of others.

I've seen homebrew worlds taken other by new DMs -- with and without the original DM's permission -- is it the same campaign? Certainly not from the perspective of the old DM, but obviously close enough for the continuing players. I've also seen groups get transported between settings (and sometimes game systems) when the DM reins were transferred. If the setting is different, but the PCs are the same is it the same campaign or not? I say it is the same campaign so long as the player group thinks it is.

The context of previous play only matters to those who experienced it. All (normal) worlds (should) come with history previous to the PCs and events and plotlines should appear in media res. A DM saying "I had fun with this before; let's have fun with it again" is really the same to the group as "Lets have fun with this" with the added comfort that a member of the group has enjoyed it previously. The previous investment made by the DM in the campaign trimmings may add to the play experience.