A Question Of Agency?

[pemerton]

To lean on your linked blog post about the War of the Swarming Beggars, you say the below:

<snip quote>

How was it discovered when you GMed this material?

Does Twin-Fisted Eagle reach out to the PCs? Do they hear of him by reputation and seek him out? So it sounds like you have two factions set up in conflict and the PCs are kind of in the middle, free to join one side or the other, or play them against each other, or whatever.

This is what I mean when I ask what play is meant to be about. It's the central premise of the campaign, seemingly.

So to kind of place this into my idea of a flowchart.....Twin-Fisted Eagle might be one box and Yellow Mantis/Southern Hill Sect would be another. How do they get from one to the other? What other boxes would be between these two?

Maybe they pursue another ally? Maybe they try to get the Thousand Deaths Flower from Iron Temple? How do they know of these allies or items? How are these introduced into play?

<snip>

How would the players learn that The Crocodile Sect might be a willing ally? How would they go about securing their aid? What might they have to do?

In contradiction of my use of "just" in my previous post, I'll say something about this too!

The most recent "faction"-oriented campaign I've GMed is my current Classic Traveller one.

At the start of the campaign there was a single faction - the bioweapon conspirators - whom the PCs were recruited by. (But at the start only one of them, the PC spy, worked out the nature of the conspiracy. The others just thought they were transporting some medical gear from one world to another.) In mechanical terms this was handled as a patron encounter, with me - as GM - introducing the details in a way that seemed to speak to established backstories and starting dispositions of the PCs.

On the destination world the PCs met someone - another, later-introduced PC - who had herself been a victim of and test-subject for the conspirators. Around this point they turned against the conspirators and dobbed them in to the local authorities. They also learned about a break-away group of conspirators operating from an abandoned army base on this world and travelled there in their ATV and shot them up. The background here was established no-myth style.

Around this point one of the players had his PC take the necessary steps to trigger another patron encounter. I built on this to have it be a civilian Imperial operative who retained the PCs to uncover details of what was happening on the conspirators' base world. This also helped solidify an emerging idea that the conspirators were a rogue group involving both civilian (Scout Service) and military (Naval and Marine personnel) elements of the Imperial government. (I wrote up a couple of pages outlining the workings/structures of these Imperial agencies at some early point during the campaign, drawing from and weaving together a mix of official and old White Dwarf material)

The players had their PCs take on this mission, and ended up destroying the conspirators' base and stealing their ship (the laboratory vessel St Christopher). During these episodes of play (3 or 4 sessions) I also took the opportunity to introduce further elements into the shared fiction, responding to evinced player interests and riffing off things the players said and had their PCs do - these involved aliens and psionics, which is where the campaign has mostly headed for the past 10 sessions. In the course of that another faction has been introduced - the Imperial Navy trying to suppress psionic activity.

The current state of the campaign - as I've said a bit about upthread - is bringing some of these things together: the PCs are exploring the psionically-inclined alien site on Zinion; they have an Imperial Naval Commander on their side, but she either doesn't know or is in denial about the PCs' psionic inclinations; the naval armada the PCs earlier escaped from is apparently on its way across the galactic rift; and also, last session, the players (and some of their PCs) learned that Leila Lo, the previous owner of the St Christopher who is still part of their "team" has not given up on bioweapons conspiracy.

To elaborate on that last point: the noble PC Vincenzo von Hallucida won the St Christopher from Leila in a game of chance played amid the rubble of the bioweapons conspirators' base, and the relevant reaction roll and ensuing resolution established that there were no hard feelings on her part; so she stayed with the PCs, and has proved a valuable member of their group given she is both a surgeon and a starship pilot. Last session it was established (by me as GM narrating both the framing of a scene and some downstream wrap-u) that she had implanted spores taken from Vicenzo's lungs during surgery (after he breathed in "dust" on an alien starshi) into the body of an enemy NPC who was under her medical care; as a result the NPC had turned into an Alien which ran amuck on the St Christopher while it was in jump space.

I tend to prefer this sort of "snowball" approach to trying to set it all up in advance. I've found - from experience, especially in running my first long RM campaign - that setting up in advance tends to produce wasted or redundant work, because you don't know at that stage what details will and won't be necessary. The "snowball" approach also makes it easier to make sure that whatever I'm doing as GM is also relevant to what the players are interested in.

 

[hawkeyefan]

Maybe I'm taking your flowchart metaphor too literally? Moving on to the next quote . . .

Yup! My bad.....it was something that I pictured that seemed clear to me, but obviously I didn't convey it clearly.

I was just thinking of boxes on the flow charts as the "points of interest" and then the lines between the boxes as "the techniques or processes used by the GM to help the players engage with these points of interest".

I just want to start with this.

As I've posted, at the start of the BW game where I'm a player Thurgon's sidekick Aramina had the Belief I'm not going to finish my career with no spellbooks and an empty purse! That's an example of your goal of accruing wealth and magic relics.

The geographical map we were working with was the GH map. The GM started the action on the Ulek/Pomarj border, on the south/west side of the Jewel River. Established on that map are various forts and the like - we agreed that these were the old border forts. Thurgon and Aramina were travelling along that frontier on a hazily-defined mission (hazy at the table; not necessarily hazy in the fiction, but the details didn't matter at that point) among those abandoned forts and ruined homesteads. Pretty classic/traditional stuff.

The problem of locations that may offer treasure of some sort was resolved via the Great Masters-wise check I've mentioned upthread, whereby Aramina remembered (in general terms) the nearby location of Evard's tower.

This is an example of your crafted according to actions declared by the players. At this point, and especially after the discussions of my Prince Valiant example where it was the players who introduced (by way of assumption, not assertion) the fact that the ghosts were Celts, I'm less clear than ever on what the boundaries of "sandbox" are and why this doesn't count.

Right, that's the kind of stuff I mean! There's a lot of vague language being used, so I'm driving for something more concrete.

 

[pemerton]

In Burning Wheel the ban on retries ("Let it Ride") is interesting because it cuts against the GM as well as the player.

As it does in 1e also, if the DM is true to the principles of the game as regards her NPCs if-when they try similar things.

That's not what I meant. Let it Ride limits the power of the GM to call for further checks from the players.

 

[hawkeyefan]

In terms of generalities i.e. that adventuring will be done, magic will be cast, and fun will be had: yes.

In terms of specifics, I've learned to temper any expectations with a huge grain of salt, as I've no way of knowing what my players or their PCs are going to do after the first adventure (which I usually kinda force somehow just to get them started).

Okay, this is what I mean. You start with a specific adventure. Do you mean a specific published module? Or one of your own design? Or can it vary by group?

As an example: over all my playing and DMing career I had somehow managed to avoid touching Keep on the Borderlands either as player or DM, and so for this campaign my take was "Dammit - I'm starting with KotB come what may!". The players were cool with this - three of them had also never touched it and the fourth played it about 25 years prior and had forgotten nearly all of it - and so that was the game's first adventure. After that it became much more open-ended; even more so as the party split in two and I started running twice a week at that point.

Okay, cool. That's a perfectly good starting point, thank you. Where did it go from there?

Like, when the party split.....why? They must have had a reason....how did they come to this decision? Meaning, what information did they need, and how was this information provided to them?

To some extent. What guides me more is making sure things like geograpical features make sense (or have an in-fiction rationale if they don't), that the history is halfway cohesive, and that I've left enough blanks both in history and geography to allow for later developments (or later ideas!) to fill them in.

And sure, there's an element of "wouldn't it be cool if...", but there's also an element of "if they ever want to go this way, how are they going to get over/under/through that mountain range...". As for important NPCs, I create some ahead of time in full knowledge that the players/PCs might never engage with them, or that said engagement might be one-and-done if-when it happens. Many of the NPCs that turned out to be important were created almost on the fly during play at the time, and expanded upon since.

But if you don't give them some kind of prompt.....a map found in a treasure hoard, a rumor heard in an inn, a reward poster on a community board......absent those kinds of prompts, how do your players know what to engage with? Are they that familiar with your setting that they can simply set their own agenda?

Everyone's talking about "players get to do whatever they want" so I'm trying to understand how those wants might develop.

 

[pemerton]

Really it comes down to the breakpoint of what players can keep in their head without risking confusion. I can't think of a campaign that would require no maps at all though. Im sure there are examples but those examples are going to be niche, IMO.

In my MHRP campaign we haven't used maps, but maybe that doesn't count? The action started in Washington, DC and has also taken place down the east coast of the US and over Florida (an aerial battle between War Machine and Titanium Man) and in Tokyo (most of the PCs tracking down the Silver Samurai/clan Yashida elements and bumping into Wolverine who was looking for the kidnapped Mariko).

In my Cortex+ Heroic Vikings campaign we haven't used maps. The PCs mostly go north but occasionally have gone south. We did a dungeon but maps weren't needed. I just used Scene Distinctions to establish relevant features. I've done terrain the same way.

My Classic Traveller game has a starmap, and we have plans for some of the ships (one that come with published plans; I haven't drawn any) and some of the bases the PCs explore (ditto). We've never had a world-surface map.

I'm not really trying to contradict you here - I know you're not being dogmatic in your post - but I do have an agenda: I think that RPGing has inherited a bit of a map fetish from its wargaming origins, and I think breaking away from that a little bit isn't necessarily a bad thing.

 

[prabe]

But if you don't give them some kind of prompt.....a map found in a treasure hoard, a rumor heard in an inn, a reward poster on a community board......absent those kinds of prompts, how do your players know what to engage with? Are they that familiar with your setting that they can simply set their own agenda?

Everyone's talking about "players get to do whatever they want" so I'm trying to understand how those wants might develop.

I don't claim to run complete sandboxes, but in the campaigns I run, the PCs have things in (at least some of) their backgrounds, and they find things as they adventure--sometimes they find those things by accident (from their POV) and sometimes they find those things by intent. By the time the PCs get to mid-high level, they can pick and choose among things from their background/s and from prior campaign events.

 

[Bedrockgames]

How do you find out what they're interested in doing? .

They make decisions in the game setting and that indicates where they want to go (or they ask me questions like "is there a school here that teaches sabres techniques). It ins't like a menu where they say "I want the high adventure with a dash of romance please". It is more handled through their characters and setting.

Are they familiar with the setting to the point that they can set their own agenda?

Sometimes they are, sometimes they are not. The longer they play, the more familiar they become. When they first start out, they have a more narrow field of vision.

Or do you share information with them in some way? If so, how do you share it? Through the characters? Through narration? Do you ask the players what their characters goals may be and then craft elements of the fiction accordingly?

This really depends. If they have goals, they can share those with me. It doesn't mean I am going to craft adventures around them. It is more about what their characters actively do in the setting. I try to make my settings comprehensive enough to handle all kinds of campaigns. That is why there are dungeons, there is wilderness, there are supernatural threats, but there are also sects, heroes, politics, etc. The players are pretty free to set an agenda and pursue it, they just have to do that through their characters. As an example one of the campaigns that we had, one of the players was focused on building alliances with different groups and forming a secret powerful sect made up of many key members of the martial world (but they all assumed disguises when serving the secret sects interest: this I believe I added to the War of Swarmign beggars material). However two other players in the group were less interested in that, so they decided to help him achieve his bigger goal, by seeking out manuals and artifacts that would increase the sect's prestige and power. So they basically went on a bunch of adventures that were more like heists and dungeon crawls (which is what those players felt like doing). I have no problem running a split party (as long as things don't get too disconnected). Once the other player had established this power base, they returned to help him manage things.

Everything is pretty much through the characters. The players can definitely talk to me, but most of our conversations tend to be about what is possible for their characters to achieve. That said I do listen to what my players want. I'll give an example.

In the Disposable Disciples campaign, the players came into conflict with the House of Paper Shadows, an organization that is intentionally mysteries in the setting (all they really knew about it was it had these supernatural shadow puppets that did its bidding, and it had a vast information network). One of the players told me at the end of a session that he was planning on attacking the house of paper shadows next week. Because this was a very important organization and I didn't have much material on it, and I knew it would take me at least two weeks to research what I needed and flesh it out, I said he can do that, but could he wait three weeks so I have time to prepare (because I had only a rough sense of what existed in their headquarters). This is something I don't mind doing at all. There is a location, the players want to go there, I genuinely don't have enough information and it seems too big to just ad lib (I could have ad libbed it if I had to but I just think it wouldn't have been underwhelming if I had). That way I was able to just think for a straight week about what it ought to be, then set to work on fleshing it out and mapping it out. It worked very well. I was quite happy with how it came out and the player seemed happy that I put the work in.

 

[prabe]

In my MHRP campaign we haven't used maps, but maybe that doesn't count? The action started in Washington, DC and has also taken place down the east coast of the US and over Florida (an aerial battle between War Machine and Titanium Man) and in Tokyo (most of the PCs tracking down the Silver Samurai/clan Yashida elements and bumping into Wolverine who was looking for the kidnapped Mariko).

In my Cortex+ Heroic Vikings campaign we haven't used maps. The PCs mostly go north but occasionally have gone south. We did a dungeon but maps weren't needed. I just used Scene Distinctions to establish relevant features. I've done terrain the same way.

My Classic Traveller game has a starmap, and we have plans for some of the ships (one that come with published plans; I haven't drawn any) and some of the bases the PCs explore (ditto). We've never had a world-surface map.

I'm not really trying to contradict you here - I know you're not being dogmatic in your post - but I do have an agenda: I think that RPGing has inherited a bit of a map fetish from its wargaming origins, and I think breaking away from that a little bit isn't necessarily a bad thing.

I don't disagree with you that TRPGs have historically overemphasized maps--I never do anything for cities that's more than the neighborhoods in relation to each other, and I've never done anything for larger areas other than overall continent-ish map/s. That said, I don't think having done some sort of maps is a bad thing: I find they help with consistency and with letting the players/characters have an idea of where things are.

I also think I agree with your implication that the Supers campaign is something of a special case: I've never played a Supers game that used anything other than the occasional tactical map (if the game in question had tactical movement, of course).

 

[Bedrockgames]

In my MHRP campaign we haven't used maps, but maybe that doesn't count? The action started in Washington, DC and has also taken place down the east coast of the US and over Florida (an aerial battle between War Machine and Titanium Man) and in Tokyo (most of the PCs tracking down the Silver Samurai/clan Yashida elements and bumping into Wolverine who was looking for the kidnapped Mariko).

I think anytime you are in our world, it is easier to run things without maps. I often set my mafia campaigns around Boston (where I live) for that very reason, it is just very easy to know an NPC has a house in Lynn or Malden (and we all have a sense of the geography there, to the point that we can even say what neighborhood or street and it will have meaning). If you do need to look stuff up, google maps works. But you don't really need a map when someone says I drive to the mall, and you know how long that takes.

 

[pemerton]

A map is important as some sense of where places and people are can be important - especially when the players are up against a clock as the physical distances between these places often limit what can be done quickly enough.

The use of maps (together with movement rates?) to resolve actions as described here is one particular technique. Ron Edwards has some nice discussions of it (eg in The Right to Dream essay I linked to upthread).

I think it puts a lot of pressure on the GM to be accurate and "fair" in relation both to the details of the map and the details of time spent. Classic dungeon handle this through (i) their fine-grained mapping down to the last 5' or 10', (ii) their relative sparseness of detail, and (iii) established conventions about how much time passes taking certain core actions (like searching a room or forcing open a door).

If the setting is a city, or a forest, each of (i) to (iii) comes under pressure: it becomes hard or impossible to have such fine-grained mapping, and there is more detail than can be recorded in notes, and the suite of actions becomes too broad to be easily handled via dungeoneering-like conventions about the time required.

I therefore tend to handle this sort of action (can we get from A to B in time) via opposed checks (or perhaps checks against a difficulty if it's not a race) and then use the map (if there is one) to help contribute to the colour of the consequence narration.

(A footnote: Classic Traveller starmaps together with its rule for interstellar travel do satisfy the (i) through (iii) constraints. It's one of the clever conceits of the system.)