What is the point of GM's notes?

[Fenris-77]

A protagonist is, in common usage, the leading character or one the major characters in a fictional text. Setting aside for a moment issues of whether or not an RPG produces a story, that general definition seems to fit the PCs in pretty much any game. By the nature of the endeavor the game revolves around the characters and their choices.

 

[Campbell]

Here's how I have always viewed protagonism in the context of roleplaying games : a shared expectation that players will create characters who have compelling dramatic needs, play them first and foremost with their needs in mind, and that any adversity provided by the GM will be fundamentally honest and played with integrity. At heart is the conceit that the player rather than the GM provides the animating force. Also at heart is the conceit that the GM (and everyone else) is fundamentally a fan of the players' characters. When I talk about protagonism this is what I desire to speak about.

It's not a specific set of techniques, but rather a shared set of goals and expectations. You can have a game with a lot of protagonism in it that involves a lot of prep and world building as long as the focus when we are all that table is on playing these characters with integrity and seeing where their journey takes them. I personally tend to run games with very heavy prep using techniques I mostly have glommed from Sorcerer, OSR games and Apocalypse World.

If you have an issue with the language involved please provide better framing. I would be interested to here it so we can get on actually discussing the role of prep. I'll have more thoughts on some of the ways I approach game prep later tonight.

 

[Campbell]

So I think the framing of play to find out what happens is actually much better encapsulated in Monsterhearts' Keep The Story Feral and Justin Alexander's "Don't prep plots. Prep Situation". Basically don't come to play with preconceptions on how things should go or what the story should be.

 

[Maxperson]

Another distinction is that the first is literal and the second is metaphor. Are you able to give a non-metaphorical version of the second?

Why should he when you've yet to prove that the first is literal? None of us contesting this with you "Play to discover what is in the DM's notes." If you say it's literal, then it's literally wrong.

 

[Ovinomancer]

A protagonist is, in common usage, the leading character or one the major characters in a fictional text. Setting aside for a moment issues of whether or not an RPG produces a story, that general definition seems to fit the PCs in pretty much any game. By the nature of the endeavor the game revolves around the characters and their choices.

Yes, the protagonist is who the story is about. If I create a world that doesn't care about the PCs and then turn them loose in it to see what they uncover/do, is the story actually about those PCs? Play will focus on the PCs choices, sure, but the drama of the situation is rarely about the PCs. To use my session from last night, the PCs were raiding a dungeon under the home of a major NPC, all to discover what that NPC because they had been given a job to do just that. This will lead to further clues and directions on what the next steps in the mystery are. None of this is about the PCs -- none of it features anything that required any input from the PC or was designed with any given PC in mind. Yet, play is about the choices they make in navigating this situation. This isn't protagonism, because they aren't the main characters in this story, just the ones that feature in play (right now, if I kill one, they will be replaced), and what they're doing is reacting to the plans and plots of NPCs. This means this game is actually about those NPCs, and we're playing to see if the PCs foil their plans. The game isn't about the dramatic needs of the PCs.

To offer a different example, the first Infinity War movie in the Marvel oeuvre, Thanos is the protagonist, not the Avengers. Yet the Avengers are clearly major characters and demand the majority of the screen time.

 

[Imaro]

Ah, yes. The same people who keep ignoring and pretending like we don’t have firsthand experience running and playing in these sort of games too.

We aren't speaking to your experiences... we are speaking to our own and you in turn were not commenting on your own experiences you were speculating on why others think something.

 

[Fenris-77]

The world doesn't need to care. Whether it cares or not the basic recursive action of roleplaying, the conversation back and forth, is about the characters and it's their decisions and actions that shape the diegetic frame and evolving narrative. Sounds like protagonists to me.

 

[Maxperson]

I suspect that people don't like anything that dispels any of the smoke and mirrors of the game and reveals "how the meat is made." It sounds much more romantic to say "we're playing to see the magical Wizard of Oz" than it is to say "we're playing to see the charlatan behind the curtain pulling mechanical levers" though these are fundamentally the same thing as far as play goes.

No. We just hate mischaracterizations of our playstyle is all.

 

[Ovinomancer]

The world doesn't need to care. Whether it cares or not the basic recursive action of roleplaying, the conversation back and forth, is about the characters and it's their decisions and actions that shape the diegetic frame and evolving narrative. Sounds like protagonists to me.

Monopoly does this, are you arguing that Monopoly features protagonism?

 

[Bedrockgames]

So I think the framing of play to find out what happens is actually much better encapsulated in Monsterhearts' Keep The Story Feral and Justin Alexander's "Don't prep plots. Prep Situation". Basically don't come to play with preconceptions on how things should go or what the story should be.

This is also something you see in sandbox a lot. You might have a world prepped, you might have your NPCs, but one of the goals is to not think ahead of time how things will play out when the PCs come into contact with that stuff. There are different ways of doing this. A lot of people in my circles draw on the Alexandrian (including the Don't Prep Plots. Prep Situation). There is also the Situational GMing concept that Clash Bowley talked about on his blog: HERE. I discussed similar concepts on my blog as well. This is one of the reasons why I keep bringing up the living adventure concept (end emphasize things like NPC motivations---and using those motivations during play to decide what they do, rather than come up with events or actions the NPC will take in advance)