What is the point of GM's notes?

[pemerton]

In my Traveller game I use preparation in the form of starmaps. After the first couple of sessions I drew these up, because keeping track of the established worlds in my head seemed too hard:

The two region are separated by a rift: it is jump-4 from Zinion to the Akaisha Outstation.

Each of these worlds has a write-up. This is mostly randomly-generated properties (as per the Traveller world creation rules), with an overlay description provided by me. Three exceptions are Ardour-3, which was the starting world: after the random rolls, deciding the details of the world was a collaborative effort; and Tara and the Outstation, which were taken from Space Master modules.

Traveller does not suppose that the GM will keep track of events on dozens of worlds with total populations in the billions of people. It uses random generation tools to handle that.

I would say that the main difference between how I approach the world, and the "default" approach to Classic Traveller, is that when those tools generate events, I frame them in ways that connect them in some fashion to the concerns of the players. This reduces the "exploring the GM's world" feel and increases the "protagonistic" feel.

 

[TwoSix]

That isn't what I said, though. He's describing his method as producing living, breathing worlds, but his method is unable to produce them. He may know how to do it, and he may want or not want to do it, but what he is describing isn't it.

I'm going by what he is describing, not what I assume about what he knows. What he's describing isn't it. If he's aware of what makes a world a living, breathing one, then why is he describing something that isn't one and claiming that it is?

I don't have any conception of what RPGS "should be like." I accept that there are many ways to play them and not all of them are my cup of tea. I do know preparation is a requisite for achieving a living, breathing world, though. So claims that they are achieved in a non-prep game aren't accurate. Please note that I'm not saying that what is achieved in non-prep play isn't satisfying to those playing the game.

I'm not going to buy into a prepped world being the only thing that makes a "living, breathing world". You're insulting some of my playstyles and I'm not going to be lawyered into accepting your terminology.

 

[Manbearcat]

Personally I believe that trying to maintain the mystique of what we're doing does a lot of harm to new GMs. It also discourages people to try to become GMs because the entire exercise just looks too daunting. This sort of aspirational language is why I never felt confident as a young GM until I ran Apocalypse World. It's why sandbox play was ineffable to me until I read Stars Without Number and started utilizing the process and tools Kevin Crawford provided.

Really great post but especially this last bit.

My contribution to these threads are to try to deconstruct and demystify what is happening under the hood in all forms of play in order to encourage people to not only play all sorts of games, but TO GM THEM.

TTRPG culture would be so much better off if (a) everyone had more diversity of experience and (b) the player base has significantly more confidence because they’ve all been GMs.

When I GM for people who have a history of GMing, the creative energy of play and excitement is NOTICABLY more palpable. In part that is because of endogenous features inherent to people who typically GM. But a part of that is exogenous; environment sharpening them in key ways (that, frankly, makes them more desirable players for me).

Anything that makes GMing less daunting and more transparent = yes, please.

Anything that does the opposite = no thanks.

 

[Bedrockgames]

Yes, because everyone else plays him robotically and passively.

My point is the living aspect you are pointing up is the duke is on pilgrimage every spring so they speak with the chamberlain instead. My pony is whole that is a part of maintaining a living world it isn’t really what it’s about. It’s about what the duke and chamberlain do once the PCs become involved. For instance if the chamberlain decides to work against the PCs, or with them, where goes and what resources he Martial’s towards that end after the PCs leave. It is about the GM treating the npc more like a pc

 

[pemerton]

I've run campaigns that feature the authored-by-and-only-known-to-the-GM bacsktory and setting trajectory stuff that @Maxperson describes:

If you don't prep, you can't have things going on in the world that the player may not even know about, if you haven't thought them out and enacted them prior to play. You have to have prepared who the NPCs are in advance, what their goals are and what they are doing about it, then plot out how they go about their goals and what the approximate timeline is. Just saying, "Hey, you hear a rumor of X going on somewhere else in the world." or "You see on the news that a helicopter crashed in Indonesia." doesn't make the world a living, breathing one.

As I posted upthread,

Over time I realised that the good bits [of the game] were the ones that were player-facing and player-driven. And that the backstory that I had developed, which would have "the world" unfolding behind-the-scenes in accordance with pre-scripted defaults, was essentially pointless. So I stopped preparing that stuff.

From the players' in-character-point-of-view, when they hear about the prospects of an Imperial armada arriving, I don't think it matters whether I wrote that out three months ago, or whether I made it up on the spot as part of the framing when one of the characters - an Imperial Navy Commander - returns to her base on Novus.

The difference is that I am not trying to present to the players my "mental model" of a world. Rather, I am trying to frame situations that will engage them relative to their aspirations for their PCs.

I think it was earlier in this thread that some posters suggested that it would be important to know the details of such an armada in order to make other decisions about the gameworld (though I'm not sure which ones). My view is that the armada is no more nor less significant than any of the other things happening, such as depressions in major industrial worlds, or droughts on important agricultural worlds. In a system like Traveller, this is all bound up in the rolls made for random content generation.

Other systems that I GM - eg Prince Valiant - are even less procedural than Classic Traveller. The living world in Prince Valiant consists in the PCs getting married, having families, intervening in politics, establishing their regencies, travelling to Constantinople and being praised by the Emperor, etc. We don't need to know any details of military operations beyond either (i) the maps we are using from historical atlases, and (ii) the operations the PCs themselves undertake.

 

[Maxperson]

I'm not going to buy into a prepped world being the only thing that makes a "living, breathing world". You're insulting some of my playstyles and I'm not going to be lawyered into accepting your terminology.

Then this is much like other discussions here and in the real world. You have two sides who each have a definition. I'm also not going to be lawyered into accepting your terminology. We are at an impasse.

 

[Aldarc]

Kevin Crawford manages to describe the process of running sandbox game with precision and without resorting to aspirational language that fails to account for the cognitive limits we all have. He also does not place sandbox gaming on pedestal or make claims about the depth of other ways of playing. Is his treatment of sandbox play in Stars Without Number or Godbound reductive?

I personally love sandbox gaming. Sine Nomine has a direct line to my wallet. I just think our analysis needs to be practical, acknowledge the process of play (and not just how it feels), and respect the limits of our cognitive powers. That last bit is a really big deal to me. I know how hard this naughty word is. We just had our Session Zero for the Infinity game I'm going to be a player in last night. Understanding the scope, relationships, and life experience of one person who is not us is damn near unfathomable to me. Implying that you can actually keep an entire world in your head is staggering. There's a lot of value in the attempt, but acting like the entire endeavor is not a massive exercise in human will is deeply misleading in my opinion.

Personally I believe that trying to maintain the mystique of what we're doing does a lot of harm to new GMs. It also discourages people to try to become GMs because the entire exercise just looks too daunting. This sort of aspirational language is why I never felt confident as a young GM until I ran Apocalypse World. It's why sandbox play was ineffable to me until I read Stars Without Number and started utilizing the process and tools Kevin Crawford provided.

In Stars Without Number, Crawford attempts to explain roleplaying games to new players by equating the PCs to avatars in a computer game and the GM as the computer. This has me thinking whether we should reframe "playing to discover what's in the GM's notes" as "using the GM interface to play/discover the game." The GM exists as the players' interface into the game and its curated world: they are the computer that runs the game world program as well as the input/output of player commands for their PC's actions. This may be better than "GM's notes," though it may not provide a better sense of the underlying play procedures in more mainstream sandbox games.

 

[pemerton]

t’s about what the duke and chamberlain do once the PCs become involved. For instance if the chamberlain decides to work against the PCs, or with them, where goes and what resources he Martial’s towards that end after the PCs leave. It is about the GM treating the npc more like a pc

This is a huge part of Apocalypse World. It is what "fronts" are for. Yet I don't think you and @Maxperson count that as a "living, breathing" game.

In my own case, GMing Traveller, I don't need to decide what resources have been martialled in advance. If the next random starship encounter is with a warship, then I can decide that it's a vessel that is hostile to the PCs because sent by the Chamberlain. That's part of the point of a system for random content generation.

 

[TwoSix]

Then this is much like other discussions here and in the real world. You have two sides who each have a definition. I'm also not going to be lawyered into accepting your terminology. We are at an impasse.

There's been an impasse here for years, the thread descending into these types of discussions is just the latest manifestation.

 

[TwoSix]

In Stars Without Number, Crawford attempts to explain roleplaying games to new players by equating the PCs to avatars in a computer game and the GM as the computer. This has me thinking whether we should reframe "playing to discover what's in the GM's notes" as "using the GM interface to play/discover the game." The GM exists as the players' interface into the game and its curated world: they are the computer that runs the game world program as well as the input/output of player commands for their PC's actions. This may be better than "GM's notes," though it may not provide a better sense of the underlying play procedures in more mainstream sandbox games.

I think I referred to the fictional setting as a "mental holodeck" a few pages back, what you're describing is pretty close to my meaning.

The general sense for this type of play is that the GM's NPCs can act more like PCs and have input in the play space that's orthogonal to the current play agenda. Let's say the PCs wrong a certain powerful NPC, and then the NPC takes actions "behind the scenes" to hire some bandits and ambush the PCs while they're in the middle of another quest 6 game-time months and 5 real world sessions later. That would be applauded as good "living world/sandbox" play, because the PCs actions had repercussions they couldn't anticipate and displaying those consequences helps generate verisimilitude.