What is the point of GM's notes?

[kenada]

“what is the point of GM's notes?”

The point of my prep is to give me things to say. They’re a tool to help me improvise. I can wing it for everything, but if I do, there’s a good chance things will turn out too silly or inconsistent or just kind of flat. I spend time outside of sessions fleshing things out a little bit to improve the experience during the session. The prep has an amplifying effect.

For example, my players told me last session they wanted to recruit retainers. I generated several (7), and I included a few statements (with details) on appearance and behavior and a few bullets of key info*. I had no idea how the PCs would go about recruiting, but this gave me tools to make the scenes interesting when they did meet some of the candidates.

After the session, I was talking to one of my players about it, and he commented: “It felt like we ran into characters, as opposed to hired help or NPC templates.” This is one of the NPCs from the retainer recruitment scene. I randomly picked three of the retainers from my list, framed the scene with the help of my notes, and established the stakes: how many (if any) of these people do the PCs hire?

Marie
AC 7 [12], HD 1d4 (3 hp), Att 1 × longbow (1d6), THAC0 17 [+2], MV 120′ (30′), SV D13 W14 P13 B16 S15 (A) [+1 vs. magic], LR 9, AL Chaotic
Paranoid (keeps tracks of all the exits). Light blue hair (short and cropped). Lanky (6′7″ tall).

• Wants treasure: to pay off her debt.
• Came to Orctown to escape creditors.
• Knows how to enter the secret dungeon in the <E3 ruins>.

It turns out the answer was two. They hired the fighter and the acrobat but not the illusionist (probably because the barbarian is weird about magic). At the end of the scene, after the bard gave Marie some money to buy better gear, she climbed out the window to leave. Nothing in my notes said that would happen, but it did because Marie is paranoid. My notes helped make the scene interesting.

The whole session went like that. I had notes on the town, a map, the list of candidates, and a timeline of goings on in the town (to provide color mostly). Nothing else was planned. The first thing the PCs did was have a planning meeting to decide how they’re going to stage an attack on some ghouls using lots of flaming oil. That was something they just started doing without any prompt.

---

* My notes were already trending towards this style, but they’ve been heavily influenced lately by the style Necrotic Gnome uses to key dungeons. For NPCs, I combine that with some ideas from the Alexandrian’s Universal NPC Roleplaying template to get a nice and dense block of tools to help me run my NPCs.

 

[Arilyn]

The "protagonist" style play is really hard to explain on paper, which I think is what is triggering a lot of posters dismissing it, or not fully grasping it, or assuming it won't work for them. While I think it's true that this style won't appeal to all players, it does have to be tried to be fully understood. A common complaint is that protagonist play will break immersion and can't create the sense of a living breathing world.

This was a concern I had as well, but the opposite occured. This style makes the world come sharply into focus. The GM not having notes or a created world somehow brings a heightened sense of reality. I'm really not sure why this occurs, as it seems counter-intuitive. Because of the collaborative approach, no one can coast and all participants must stay alert and fully engaged. This is also the downside. Creative juices have to keep flowing.

 

[pemerton]

I didn't say it has a known answer. I said it has a specific answer, which is true of unsolved mysteries of the world we live in. Your unknowns do not have specific answers. They can be answered by a myriad of things that come up during your game play and fit the bill.

That is the nature of writing fiction.

Serial fiction is replete with mysteries that are presented to the audience without an answer having been written. An example in super-hero comics is Wolverine - we as readers gradually learn that his claws are part of him (not his suit), that he is named Logan, that he is old, etc.

But when it is first introduced that Wolverine speaks Japanese, and someone (Kitty? I can't remember) expresses surprise, does Chris Claremont or anyone else know the answer? No! It is a mystery, though: in the fiction there is a specific explanation.

In Star Wars, Ben Kenobi obviously has a mysterious past. How did he end up on Tatooine? In possession of Luke's father's lightsabre? We the audience don't know. I'm pretty sure that at that point George Lucas hadn't written an answer yet.

In HPL's mythos fiction, various beings travelled at various times in the distant past to earth. When, exactly? For what reasons, exactly? The stories don't answer all these questions. These mysteries are not resolved within the scope of the stories that present them.

This is part of how fiction, especially but not only serial fiction, works: it points to elements of the imagined people, places and events that have not yet been authored or presented to the audience.

Now if one thinks of solving a mystery in a RPG as more like solving a crossword puzzle, or unravelling an Agatha Christie-style whodunnit, then the existence of a specific answer matters. But as the examples I have given in the preceding paragraphs show, these are not the only sorts of mystery that can exist.

They are not as I understand a living world.

<snip>

I'm asking if your world is a living one and you had those events planned and that they would have happened anyway, even if the PCs were not there and never went there. If the answer is no, the world is not a living one where such events happen. And I know from your posts that the answer is no. You don't play that style of game.

If a living world means a setting where the GM writes more fiction about it then is ever used in play, then I don't run a living world. To me that seems an odd definition.

I understand a living world to mean one in which there is understood - in terms of framing, consequence narration, flavour and colour, and other ways in which the fiction is presented and experienced in play - that there is more to the world than the immediate situation.

Moldvay Basic and Tunnels & Trolls do not advocate living world gaming in this sense (or at least in the case of T&T, presents it as an optional extra): in these RPGs the world, for play purposes, is the dungeon. Thus, for instance, one will not encounter NPCs whose reason for being in the dungeon, as that emerges in play, is connected to something that matters to them beyond the dungeon.

Modules like S2 White Plume Mountain and C2 The Ghost Tower of Inverness and C1 The Hidden Shrine of Tamoachan and X2 Castle Amber are all examples of this style. The events and setting are essentially self-contained and self-referential. Any allusions to anything beyond the dungeon has no bearing on how the dungeon is engaged with and beaten. (Eg in S2 the stolen weapons have owners in the City of Greyhawk; but nothing in the module depends upon, or is changed by, those facts of ownership. It's just set-dressing and backstory.)

A published scenario that contrasts with this, which I have run, is OA7 Test of the Samurai. In this scenario the motivations of the principal NPCs only make sense relative to a larger world that is implicated by, but not fully set out in, the module. The PCs' interaction with that world is understood to generate downstream consequences - eg if the PCs upset a certain NPC in place 1, day 1 then at place X, day Y the PCs might encounter agents of that NPC trying to seek revenge for the slight.

That is what I understand to be the meaning of a living world.

The purpose is so that you know what is happening in the galaxy. Such an attack would have serious implications across many worlds. Trade would suffer in some areas, and perhaps increase in others(arms). News would spread.

My first question is, how do you know all these things?

Why would the attack have serious implications? And why would news spread? Perhaps the attack is kept secret.

As for economics: Would the increased demand for munitions manufacture, coupled with the blockading of exports from the world under attack, boost or subdue other economic activity? Would the affect on trade by any more or less than the affect on trade of the depression on Tara (just to pick an arbitrary possible occurrence on an arbitrarily-chosen industrial world)? What about droughts on important agricultural worlds?

You have chosen one arbitrary event that might be happening in the galaxy - an attack that figured in actual play at my table - without asking about the myriad other events that might be just as significant but that you haven't asked about because they never became foregrounded in play. If our game hadn't featured the armada it would have featured something else that you and I haven't thought of yet. And then in this thread you'd be asking me about that event as part of the "living world".

Mercenaries would likely flock that way, which the PCs could encounter.

Would they? Australia was at war from 1939 to 1945, and much of that war was a naval war and involved the armadas of various nations. I don't think mercenaries flocked to Australia in that time.

The way, in Classic Traveller, it is determined who the PCs encounter is via a combination of GM decision-making and random rolls. While on the planet under attack, the PCs encountered (by dint of random rolls) some refugees fleeing one country on the world for another. The full backstory to that has never been established, but it seems pretty clear that the country from which they were refugees was allied to the Imperium against the country to which they were fleeing, and that their flight was connected to the reasons for the conflict - ie the politics of psionics.

I don't see that hypothetical encounters with mercenaries are markers of a "living world" in a way that actual encounters with refugees are not.

Just because the PCs are not there, doesn't mean that the pre-planned fiction you wrote won't have a significant impact on the narration of their story.

I'm sure it would. I didn't doubt that it would. I asked why would I do it?

I can narrate the PCs' story, including in a fashion which brings to light the effects that other events are having on their circumstances (eg their are refugees fleeing from one country to another), without preauthoring fiction that arbitrarily highlights one out of the myriad events taking place in the galaxy that might have such effects.

 

[billd91]

Going back to the OP. There is no "the point" of DM notes. The point varies depending on the kind of game you run.

If you run a detailed sandbox, the point is to set down all the details of the world to be discovered. The DM cannot remember them all, so it's all written down.

If you run a loose sandbox, the notes are a framework to build upon, noting important sites, cities and a few NPCs, but leaving the rest open to either be detailed when the party gets closer, improv'd, or both.

If you run an improv style game, the point is to put down what has been established through play.

And so on. There are lots of ways to play and lots of "the point" of notes.

Well, yeah, but a response like that doesn't help me fill out my Buzzword Bingo card.

 

[pemerton]

A common complaint is that protagonist play will break immersion and can't create the sense of a living breathing world.

This was a concern I had as well, but the opposite occured. This style makes the world come sharply into focus. The GM not having notes or a created world somehow brings a heightened sense of reality. I'm really not sure why this occurs, as it seems counter-intuitive. Because of the collaborative approach, no one can coast and all participants must stay alert and fully engaged. This is also the downside. Creative juices have to keep flowing.

Suppose a player in my Traveller game tells me that their PC is listening to the morning news on the radio, and wants me to fill them in.

There are two ways I can do this:

* I can read off my pre-authored lists of events.

* I can make some stuff up that fits with the established fiction. Eg I might say that there is a report explaining that the ongoing depression on Tara continues to keep prices for industrial goods down at present, whilst driving migration away from that world, leading to speculation that prices for goods might soon increase. If a subsequent random roll (for a ship encounter, or on the trade table whether for purchase or for resale) produces a result that seems to fit with that prior narration, I can establish the connection in my narration to the players.​

In neither case is the fiction more real. In both cases it is part of the shared fiction, and in both cases it is pure imagination. The world of Tara and the intergalactic trade routes that it lies on do not exist.

It seems, though, that one function of GM notes is to generate in some RPG participants a sense that the fiction is "real" rather than authored. I suspect this works by occluding the fact of authorship, which occurred in the past with the players not present.

 

[pemerton]

GM's notes can be pretty varied in their content - descriptions of imaginary places; mechanical labels and categories applied to imaginary people or imaginary phenomena; descriptions or lists of imaginary events, some of which are imagined to have already happened relative to the fiction of play and some of which are imagined as yet to happen relative that fiction.

So there may be more than one answer to this question.

Going back to the OP. There is no "the point" of DM notes. The point varies depending on the kind of game you run.

If you run a detailed sandbox, the point is to set down all the details of the world to be discovered. The DM cannot remember them all, so it's all written down.

If you run a loose sandbox, the notes are a framework to build upon, noting important sites, cities and a few NPCs, but leaving the rest open to either be detailed when the party gets closer, improv'd, or both.

If you run an improv style game, the point is to put down what has been established through play.

And so on. There are lots of ways to play and lots of "the point" of notes.

Well, yeah, but a response like that doesn't help me fill out my Buzzword Bingo card.

Gee, if only the OP had noticed that there might be more than one answer to this question!

Oh, wait . . .

 

[Maxperson]

Gee, if only the OP had noticed that there might be more than one answer to this question!

Oh, wait . . .

There is no "may" or "might." It's pretty factual that there are different answers. I've provided multiples.

 

[pemerton]

There is no "may" or "might." It's pretty factual that there are different answers. I've provided multiples.

In another recent thread I had occasion to express puzzlement about how you read others' words. Now I'm doing it again.

I Googled "use of might or may to moderate tone" and the first thing that came up for me was Modals – The Writing Center • University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

And on that page the fourth sentence reads "Modals can also serve a social function to show uncertainty or politeness." In writing an OP about a potentially contentious topic, which might lead to some posters who think there is only one function for notes (eg @Lanefan might be an example) having to confront the possibility of multiple purposes, including purposes they have not previously considered, I chose to use the modal may to show uncertainty or politeness. (I didn't need to reference a style guide in order to write like this. I refer to the style guide because in my experience you tend not to accept claims made about standard English usage without being pointed to some sort of textual authority.)

As even a cursory reading of my posts in this thread will reveal, I'm not in any actual doubt that (just to pick two examples) @Manbearcat uses his notes in a different fashion from how you use yours.

 

[Maxperson]

In another recent thread I had occasion to express puzzlement about how you read others' words. Now I'm doing it again.

I Googled "use of might or may to moderate tone" and the first thing that came up for me was Modals – The Writing Center • University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

And on that page the fourth sentence reads "Modals can also serve a social function to show uncertainty or politeness." In writing an OP about a potentially contentious topic, which might lead to some posters who think there is only one function for notes (eg @Lanefan might be an example) having to confront the possibility of multiple purposes, including purposes they have not previously considered, I chose to use the modal may to show uncertainty or politeness. (I didn't need to reference a style guide in order to write like this. I refer to the style guide because in my experience you tend not to accept claims made about standard English usage without being pointed to some sort of textual authority.)

As even a cursory reading of my posts in this thread will reveal, I'm not in any actual doubt that (just to pick two examples) @Manbearcat uses his notes in a different fashion from how you use yours.

Might = uncertain. Even your link there uses it in that context. If you aren't in actual doubt, then "might" was the wrong word to use in the context that you used it in. Using it the way that you did indicated that it was possible that there were multiple points to DM notes, but that there could be just one.

 

[pemerton]

Might = uncertain. Even your link there uses it in that context. If you aren't in actual doubt, then "might" was the wrong word to use in the context that you used it in. Using it the way that you did indicated that it was possible that there were multiple points to DM notes, but that there could be just one.

Are you a teacher of a literary discipline? A published author? A frequent public speaker?

I am all these things. I will very confidently put myself in the top 1% of the population for both spoken and written English. I know how to use modal verbs. I have written a doctoral thesis that engages with the pragmatic and semantic workings of modal verbs.

Consider a referee's report that says "The author may wish to reconsider whether the argument presented fully supports the conclusion that is drawn." If you read that, as the author, you know the referee thinks your argument is weak! Similarly if I write a comment like that on a student's paper. Just as the style guide that I linked to states, the modal verbs may and might can serve a social function to show uncertainty or politeness. I used the verbs to show politeness, as I explained not far upthread - to blunt the force of a proposition that some readers will find controversial. As I also said, I was not in actual doubt.

If you want to suggest that polite usage can lack maximum sincerity, that is probably true. If you then want to quote REH's Conan on the point, by all means do so. But don't try and correct my impeccable usage.