This makes no sense to me. In classic D&D a 9th level fighter gets 100+ mercenary followers. These followers may play important roles in battle, but there is no assumption that the player will roleplay through the recruitment of any of them.
Frankly, I never saw those followers play any role in battle. Mass combat has never been a D&D strength. The one exception was the early Ranger, and I often saw it suggested that those followers be role played into the game, not just tossed at the Ranger’s feet – they would be a part of the campaign, so they should not be flat cardboard cut-outs.
Hussar's hireling are hugely important to victory against the grell.
Part of the problem is that the battle against the grell really isn’t all that important in the grand scheme of things.
But the details of their personalities, their backstories, the hiring process itself - those things are of no interest. They're almost certainly just colour - something the GM can use to enliven a bit of otherwise boring narration. The dwarf PC in my game had some NPC followers for a while, and while several got killed by hogboblins and their pet behemoth one of them - Gutboy Barrelhouse - became his herald.
So several were pretty much unimportant Redshirts, killed for illustration and colour and one was a guest star who had an actual impact on the action. Hussar wanted the spearmen to have an impact on the battle, not just die like redshirts.
And again, if the GM wants to put the hirelings' loyalty into play there are many more interseting ways to do that than via job interviews. Maybe as the group approaches the grell's lair the PCs get a Sense Motive check to notice that one of their mercenaries is shaking with fear
“But I would have asked about combat experience in the hiring process – I should have had a chance to realize one of these guys was lying about his experience, and hired someone else. It’s not fair. The GM’s out to get me because he can’t stand my brilliant plan of hiring mercenaries allowing us to defeat his Mary Sue Grell!”
, thus creating an opportunity for a St Crispin's Day-style speech, or some corporal discipline, or whatever else the PCs want to do to shore up morale. There's certainly no need to take up 90 minutes of play before anything interesting happens!
This assumes the recruits’ personalities, backstories, hiring stories and interaction is “nothing interesting”. If the GM doesn’t make them – or the combat against the Grell – interesting, then the problem lies there, not with the nature of the scene. The onus is on the GM to make it “not minutia”. If it is minutia, then it’s like buying gear in most games – shell out the gold, write down the gear and move on.
There are probably dozens of ways to handle this particular isue without requiring playing out the minutiae. BW Instincts are one way. Random "luck" die rolls are another that I often use at my table. In this particular scenario, a variant on a luck roll would be a Riding check - roll well and you're loosely on its back, roll poorly and your friends tied you down to stop you being a liability!
But it’s not really luck, Pemerton, because you’re going to assume and appply the worst possible results in your continuing efforts to screw over the PC’s. Haven’t you been following along? That’s what GM’s do! That’s when the player screams blue murder that he should have been given the choice of what precautions to take so he could ensure you could not screw him over like this. And that’s one way we end up playing out the minutia – because the player can’t bear to give up any control that might lead to a possibility of failure. The other option is for the GM to accept that the player’s plans always succeed 100% with no complications or ramifications.
Because it matters whether City B is Baghdad or Salisbury? Because I want to know whether I'm more likely to meet genies or pixies? Because I care about the diffrence between broadsowrds and scimitars, and between longbowmen on foot and mounted archers?
Where are you “more likely to meet genies or pixies”? In the desert or forest that you explicitly don’t want to interact in any way because it’s booooooooring setting wank? Since it’s all just colour anyway, there is no reason my desert nomads can’t be armed with broadswords and longbows. Why do you care, again? Oh, because there are mechanical differences between infantry armed with longbows and cavalry archers. How do you know they’re not Hippogriff mounted crossbowmen, whether in the forest or the desert?
The colour of the backdrop is pretty fundamental to any RPGing, and perhaps especially so for fantasy RPGing. I'm really surprised that you even feel the need to ask this question.
And that colour interacts on the gameplay. I’m much more inclined to learn Create Water in a desert setting, and far less likely to invest a lot in Swimming ranks, because I know that the challenges in a desert will find the former more useful than the latter. But if the entire campaign never leaves the Sultan’s palace, or all travel is by flying carpet so we never see the sand, it makes no difference that we are surrounded by a desert.
Why? My PC being a man or a woman is, at least in my experience, almost never gong to affect play, at least mechanically. Does that make it irrelevant? Whether my PC is black or white, or (say) an elf of Rivendell or an elf of Lindon is almost never gonig to afffect play, at least mechanically. Does that make it irrelevant?
If, at no time in the game, there is any impact of your gender, skin colour or origins, then yes, it has been made irrelevant.
What was lost in the game I described was a whole network of fictional relationships to that setting by and among the PCs, established by the players through play. If you want to call that "setting" be my guest, but you're still goint go have to recognise that that network of player-authored relationships is nothing like Hussar's desert as a setting, in which the players have no investment or stake at all.
Both. What he did I've now described three times (once originally, once in reply to Celebrim, once in reply to you). Why he did it I've also described, and that is very important. It tells me that, in his game, there is no point building up player-authored plot and story elements, because when they get to a certain point of actually mattering to and driving the game the GM will pull the plug on them. Hence there is no point in me playing his game.
I don't know where the NPC thing came from - I emphasised in my description intra-party RP.
OK, I’m confused (and I misread “intra-party” because of this). How does moving the party, through space or through time, invalidate intra-party RP? Aren’t all the PC’s still there? Either the setting was important to this RP (in which case changing the setting has an impact) or it was not (in which case that RP is not invalidated by the fast forward).
I've explained above my view of the GM's role, plus linked to
a blog by Eero Tuovinen that explains it better than I can:
One of the players is a
gamemaster whose job
[ASIDE: I’m not reading blogs, so I’m responding to your points]
Emphasis added. Job? Does he get paid for this? He is also engaged in a leisure time activity, and there is no reason for him to do so if it isn’t fun for him.
it is to keep track of the backstory, frame scenes according to dramatic needs (that is, go where the action is) and provoke thematic moments (defined in narrativistic theory as moments of in-character action that carry weight as commentary on the game’s premise) by introducing complications. . .
“Introducing complications” seems to include “to get to the city, you need to cross the desert – man versus nature” and “do you want to take the first six spearcarriers who come along, or do you want to interview them in more detail?” are both valid complications in the game, at least as I see them.
[The GM] needs to be able to reference the backstory, determine complications to introduce into the game, and figure out consequences. Much of the rules systems in these games address these challenges, and in addition the GM might have methodical tools outside the rules, such as pre-prepared relationship maps (helps with backstory), bangs (helps with provoking thematic choice) and pure experience (helps with determining consequences). . .
A lot of reference to backstory (setting) influencing the game, rather than just providing colour, I think.
The most important common trait these games share is the GM authority over backstory and dramatic coordination . . . which powers the GM uses to put the player characters into pertinent choice situations.
So yes, the GM has some - in fact, extensive - authority over the fiction. The GM also has an obligation to follow the players' leads in framing scenes according to dramatic needs, to have regard to player cues in introducing complications. If the GM wants to run a desert exploration, then, the GM should frame it by reference to dramatic needs.
I don’t see where the GM has been advised to always tell the players up front exactly how each scene ties in. Often, the protagonists do not know precisely where the action is going, and I find that works just fine in the game as well.
However, none of the above outline works if the players don’t trust the GM to use that power wisely to deliver an enjoyable play experience, rather than with malice to screw them over and rob them of their fun. The GM cannot do his “job” if that is how he is viewed by his “employers”.
And if the GM's judgeent of the dramatic needs, and reading of the players' cues, misfires, then that is bad GMing, a mistake. Do it often and reliably enough and perhaps you're a bad GM.
In
this thread at The Forge in 2006, a poster expressed worries about the relationship between GM authority over the fiction, players' desires to avoid or reframe scenes, and railroading. After a bit of to and fro, Ron Edwards reached this conclusion:
I think it has nothing at all to do with distributed authority, but rather with
the group members' shared trust that situational authority is going to get exerted for maximal enjoyment among everyone. If, for example, we are playing a game in which I, alone, have full situational authority, and if everyone is confident that I will use that authority to get to stuff they want (for example, taking suggestions), then all is well. Or if we are playing a game in which we do "next person to the left frames each scene," and if that confidence is just as shared, around the table, that each of us will get to the stuff that others want (again, suggestions are accepted), then all is well.
It's not the distributed or not-distributed aspect of situational authority you're concerned with,
it's your trust at the table, as a group, that your situations in the S[hared] I[maginary] S[pace] are worth anyone's time. Bluntly, you guys ought to work on that.
And there you have it spelled out – no trust, game fails. Hussar wants us to trust that he would only use his scene-skipping power wisely and in the best interests of the game. From the examples given, I don’t know that I have that trust. Meanwhile, Hussar does not trust the GM – he expects the GM will do everything in his power to screw him, and the other players, over, railroad them into his pre-fab scenes and reactions and overall abuse any trust placed in him. So the game cannot work.
Hussar's complaint, as I read it and reframed in Edwards' terms, is that his GMs were not framing scenes that were worth anyone's time. And when efforts (like out-of-character suggestions, in character veneers of verismilitude, etc) were made to let the GM know where the good stuff was, the GM disregarded them. Hence, lacking trust in that respect, Hussar (perfectly reasonably in my view) left the game.
I think the deeper problem is that Hussar was unwilling or unable to extend that necessary trust at the outset, approached the game with a “GM versus Player”/ “GM will always try to screw us over” viewpoint, and as a result got “shirty”, likely causing the GM (and maybe other players) to get defensive.
The reality could fall at either end of those extremes or anywhere in between – we weren’t there so we can’t know with any certainty (and if we were there, we’d be biased by our own perceptions and experiences anyway). It seems clear Hussar considers himself to have been 100% in the right. I doubt his GM shares that viewpoint. It would be interesting to know his, and the other players’, views, but we don’t. All we have is Hussar’s views.
