hawkeyefan
Legend
The primary reason why I am so down on a flexible approach comes down to expectations. The value of any social system is setting expectations and granting permissions. When I am playing in a game where GM techniques are bound to change moment to moment I have no way to meaningfully make impactful decisions. I cannot feel the ground underneath my feet. If a game does not optimally fit the experience I am looking for I can either sit this one out or take on the interests of the game and have a measure of fun. When I have tried running games like this in the past the cognitive weight of constantly reading the room and prioritizing one player's desires over another was soul crushing for me.
The pain point for me is this: we get a situation where we all sit around the table and try to play our own individual games instead of playing the same game. We do not address our very real conflicts of interest. Instead we depend on the GM to smooth them over. When things become untenable socially we look to the GM to resolve our social conflict and lack of trust in each other. We put all the responsibility on the GM for our own fun making running a game an onerous task. Because the GM takes on this extra social responsibility this can often shift the dynamics away from one where we are peers, fellow gamers, and creative collaborators.
Upthread @Lanefan bulked a bit when I suggested that any player could air a grievance about the fiction or group direction openly. This sort of thing as a common fixture of my play group. It is expected that we are all going to work together to resolve player level conflicts of interest. It is a necessary component to ensuring that all players remain engaged and motivated. Hacking the game is something that is always on the table as well as making adjustments to our characters and the fiction.
I'm all for open discussion about the game and its events, so I am with you on that. I think there's a time and place for it, and my group has established it's part of our wrap up/wind down time post game.
But your experience with flexibility is very much the opposite of mine. I thibk that flexibility and adaptation can be baked in assumptions of the game, and that players and GMs can indeed plan for them just as they can any other system. I do thibk this is best accomplished with a long-standing group of players, where they've had time to familiarize themselves with each others' judgment, but in my experience it is still achheivable with players and GMs new to each other and/or the game.
I find that such flexibility is not "soul crushing" but liberating...I don't feel constrained by the rules, but rather supported by them. Part of that comes from the ability to actually set the rules aside at times.
I agree with you about the inaptness of "flexible vs focused". Good for what I'm used to doing with it isn't a sign of flexibiility in a system.
I think a similar point applies to the idea of "player buy in". There is nothing distinctive about, say, Burning Wheel or 4e compared to AD&D 2nd ed such that the former two require "buy in" in a way that the latter doesn't.
What about player buy in when moving from one system to another? I would expect ot to be a big factor then...wouldn't you? Let's say someone is familiar with 5E and then they play Burning Wheel with you. Would you expect much of the game's success to rely on that player's ability to change his mindset so that his playstyle matches the new system?
So while I think that any game does require player buy in, I do think that such a shift in style can indeed be a factor.
Well, that is pretty different from how I run a game.
I don't run what you call "field adventures". And I frame the PCs into situations that speak to their needs and aspirations as characters.
That might be a reasonable description of your job. It's a terrible description of mine, though!
My job (as I conceive of it) is to apply pressure to the players, by presenting to them ingame situations that - in light of their PCs' concerns, aspirations, etc -drive those PCs to action. To quote Paul Czege,
Delicacy is a trait I'd attach to "scene extrapolation," the idea being to make scene initiation seem an outgrowth of prior events, objective, unintentional, non-threatening, but not to the way I've come to frame scenes in games I've run recently.
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I'm having trouble capturing in dispassionate words what it's like, so I'm going to have to dispense with dispassionate words. By god, when I'm framing scenes, and I'm in the zone, I'm turning a freakin' firehose of adversity and situation on the character. It is not an objective outgrowth of prior events. It's intentional as all get out.
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I frame the character into the middle of conflicts I think will push and pull in ways that are interesting to me and to the player. I keep NPC personalities somewhat unfixed in my mind, allowing me to retroactively justify their behaviors in support of this.
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the outcome of the scene is not preconceived.
I suspect my RPGing is pretty lowbrow by Czege's standards, but his statement of method is one that I often come back to. The gameworld is not something that I present "neutrally". I'm doing my best to turn that "firehose of adversity and situation" onto the PCs: to force the players to make choices that will push them in terms of their aspirations and motivations (both in character, and in their capacity as third-person-barrackers-for-their-PCs).
In my experience, that's how RPGing produces dramatic characters and dramatic story.
I agree with you here about neutrality. I dont thibk that's somethibg I really shoot for. Unless we look at it as a balance between rooting for the players and wanting to challenge them. I have to say that as a GM I'm very biased in some ways.
By "drawbacks" do we mean "bad things"? In that case, I can't say I've encountered any.
So, as I said, no drawbacks for my group.
Yes, drawbacks in the general sense....a weakness or flaw. If you made a list of pros and cons about a system, something from the con list.
Perhaps we need to get more specific because your assessment of "no drawbacks for my group" seems odd to me.
Let's say you're going to start a new fantasy game; which system would you choose? Why not the others? Let's limit the choices to those games you consider more player driven.