Experiencing the fiction in RPG play

[Rob Kuntz]

“The difficulty of literature is not to write, but to write what you mean; not to affect your reader, but to affect him precisely as you wish.” -- Robert Louis Stevenson

 

[Campbell]

@Umbran

What goes through the players head when they are making decisions about what to do? Are they primarily concerned with their fictional relationships to the other characters? Are they accepting jobs because they need the money or because the GM has put an adventure hook for them to bite? The presence of fictional justification doesn't remove social pressures that inform player decision making.

That's like totally a cool thing. There are plenty of good reasons to have play expectations that go beyond what is happening in the fiction. Being games most role playing games feature some degree of expectations that go beyond the fiction. None of us are playing freeform.

The impact of these expectations can have more or less impact on player decision making. This also varies drastically from group to group.

 

[pemerton]

Letting them come up with ideas on what they are going to do, rather than listing options; I can always give them hints later, except I would like to see if they can think of something I haven't thought of.

I wouldn't normally list options. But I narrate situations which clearly have salient "points of contact".

 

[dragoner]

I wouldn't normally list options. But I narrate situations which clearly have salient "points of contact".

I have been playing a lot of Classic Traveller lately, which is high narrative content compared to many other RPG's. There is probably no difference from points of contact and options, I'm just a STEM person so I word it more concisely. I would also bet that when deciding the points of contact, you know which ones the players are most likely to choose. With what I am doing, is trying to see if the players can make up different choices of action than what I lay out for them, sometimes they do, and sometimes they do what I would have given them the choice to do, they just decide to do it on their own without my offering it as an option. Others are tied to the options, which is fine, I don't penalize anyone, I find being surprised pleasant though.

 

[pemerton]

I would also bet that when deciding the points of contact, you know which ones the players are most likely to choose.

I'm not sure what you've got in mind here.

Eg as per this thread, when I rolled up a pirate ship encounter with a patrol cruiser, I presented it in a way that linked it in to the PCs anti-bioweapons-conspiracy mission. But I didn't know how the PCs would respond to it.

As it turned out, they took advantage of the absence of the cruiser from the enemy base to make their visit to that base. At that base, they lost a starship-to-starship battle that led to them being taken prisoner on a different enemy ship (a specalised lab ship, the St Christopher from the old scenario Amber to Red). They then took over that ship and used it to assault the enemy base.

The "points of contact" are salilent, but the player responses are driven by the players, not me!

 

[Hussar]

@S'mon - my Primeval Thule game ended with one of the PC's courting the queen as well.

Maybe they should duel.

To be fair, my PT game became a lot less sandbox than I wanted, mostly because I, the DM, thought it would be better to have a sort of Tour Des Realms campaign where they got a taste of a bunch of different parts of the setting, before settling back in Thule. It didn't work very well unfortunately. Not a bad campaign, but, not a great one either. Kinda blah.

If I did it again, I'd focus on one region almost exclusively and then run.

 

[dragoner]

The "points of contact" are salilent, but the player responses are driven by the players, not me!

Nice, sounds fun. So what do you consider the point of contact there?

 

[Campbell]

In general I am not really a fan of Tour de Realms play. It is difficult to make meaningful decisions if you are constantly getting a lay of the lands.

 

[Hussar]

In general I am not really a fan of Tour de Realms play. It is difficult to make meaningful decisions if you are constantly getting a lay of the lands.

Yeah, it was kinda my first attempt at it and it looks like it will be the last. Seemed like a good idea at the time, but, wow, no. Not good.

 

[Lanefan]

This is one of the reasons why many of us have taken to saying, at character generation - "Please make a character that is consistent with being part of a group of adventurers, doing adventurer-type stuff," or whatever the equivalent is for your table. This front loads the issues of player-agency. We are asking them to avoid a great many character types, yes. But once play begins, they have full agency, without tension.

I'm not sure you realize just how conflicted this is.

First you take a whole lot of character types and-or styles of play off the table, then you turn around and tell the players they'll have full agency once play starts.

These two things cannot both be true. As soon as you take those things off the table you've also taken away that much agency from the players, who are now restricted to playing within the borders you have set even if doing so would not make in-character sense at the time.

"Please make a character that is consistent with being part of a group of adventurers, doing adventurer-type stuff," is also often a red flag warning that the party's interactions/conflicts with the story/adventures/whatever are more important to the DM than the characters' interactions/conflicts with each other. Put another way, it warns that the DM wants to (and wants the players to) view the party as a single unit pursuing a single goal (at a time) with individual character goals being suppressed in order to avoid characters actually coming into conflict with each other - oh, the horror - even if those inter-character interactions and conflicts are more interesting to the players.

How dull.