What is the point of GM's notes?

[Aldarc]

Huh?

The number of roles in humanity doesn't matter, only that you pick one to compare to the GM/player ratio. Some will compare higher, some lower, but I think the GM/player ratio will fit right in there nicely.

How about you go "huh?" yourself? This is such a silly argument.

 

[Emerikol]

It's not about words being "loaded". It's about not making assumptions, in one's analysis, that aren't true for other RPGers.

I think we've established in this thread that fidelity to the "reality" of the world is pretty important for most of us as posters. (When I played an AD&D one-shot generating a dungeon using Appendix A, I didn't care about fidelity to the reality of any world. And when I played a Dying Earth one-shot it was close to "anything goes" as that's the nature of the setting. Those are the only exceptions I can think of at the moment.)

I've put "reality" in inverted commas because of course it's a metaphor. Literally, as you say, reality entails existence. And these imagined worlds of RPGing don't exist and hence aren't real. What is real are moments of imagination, and the records ("notes") we make of those. As you explain, in advance of play you imagine things about the gameworld and write those down - this is the campaign construction phase that occurs outside the session, prior to the players learning about the world. You then use the record of your imaginings to decide the outcomes of some action declarations, like "I search for secret doors."

That's one possible resolution technique, that also shows us a distinctive use for GM's notes. It's not the only way of resolving such action declarations, and it's not the only way that enables maintenance of fidelity to the "reality" of the gameworld. That's also not the only use that GM's notes might have.

The problem is that I'm not making assumptions for you. I'm stating my own approach and my own preferences. I admit you use all sorts of words that have been extended in definition from their dictionary meaning to a game design context. That is fine we all do that in our lives but where you lose people is assuming we know all this meta language and then getting upset when we don't.

From day one of his thread, I've just stated things from my perspective. If I say such and such is shallow or non-immersive, that means I feel that way about such game constructs. It doesn't mean you do. I've stated over and over that subjective terms like immersion have to be taken as the writer's opinion. I cannot deny that watching paint dry is immersive to another person. I can't also claim that the greatest novel of all time is immersive for someone else either.

You seem determined to "prove" that my own perceptions are wrong. You can't do that no matter how long and how hard you argue your point. Have you not heard that "beauty is in the eye of the beholder"? Well immersion, shallowness, even fun are all things in the eye of the beholder.

 

[Bedrockgames]

My understanding of sandbox play in the classic sense, as being articulated in this thread, is that the GM is entitled and even expected to extrapolate from the notes about Sir Lionheart, the broader understanding of the setting (in this case, faux-historical mediaeval) and a feeling about "what makes sense". A reaction roll or CHA check or similar mechanic might be called for if the GM is not sure, but if the GM can make a decision without calling for a check that is permitted and even desirable.

I would say this is accurate. Again my only criticism is reducing it to being about the notes alone. I would also add I think the notes are not the most important thing: what is important is the GMs sense of the world (ideally you don't need to look at your notes to run the Temple Hill Gang and the Abbess who leads them---because you have their goals, motives, activities, whereabouts in your head---and you only occasionally need to refer to the notes). I have been in sandboxes for example where a GM barely looks at the notes

 

[pemerton]

This simply started with a rejection of the label "discovering what is in the GM's notes" and then became a kind of playstyle debate.

It started with you rejecting that as a description of another poster's play who - it turns out, unsurprisingly - may or may not play the same as you do.

things keep getting shifted to one of two extremes (real world physics or completely hand wavy, game physics). I think we've had this part of this conversation many times, where my side usually takes the position that the aim is to create a believable world, your side asserts that's impossible because of real world physics, we say the bar isn't that high, and then there is confusion

<snip>

If you need think of it as multiple tiers or as a spectrum: totally unrealistic cartoony worlds--pure genre emulating worlds--grounded believable worlds--worlds heavily grounded in science*--unattainable physics engine worlds. Another way to think of it is "what franchise are we in?".

No one in the history of mainstream RPGing has ever set out to create an unbelievable world. The "our side"/"your side" phrasing is nonsense, both in this case and in general (see my previous paragraph in this post).

There are complexities, though. Do you think X2 is a believable world? White Plume Mountain? Keep on the Borderlands? And of course Toon players do want a cartoony world, but I don't think anyone posting in this thread is a Toon player, and I seem to be the only poster who has played The Dying Earth and only for one session.

If players in WPM want to surf doors removed from hinges down the frictionless corridor to avoid the super-tetanus pits, and one of them pulls out a first year physics text to help with the velocity and momentum calculations, is that fair game?

In my Classic Traveller game we needed to decide how long it would take the PCs to drill and blast through 4 km of ice with a triple beam laser. The time mattered because it generates resource costs - especially fuel and salaries - and it also matters to what else might happen in the rest of the galaxy (the "living, breathing" world). As a group we Googled some stuff (published papers on using lasers to melt ice) and reached a consensus. Do you have any objection to that procedure? Is it is distinctive of "my side"? And what, if anything, does it tell us about the use of the GM's notes in play?

(More relevant might be who got to decide the alien complex is buried in 4 km of ice? Answer: me, the GM. Why? It's a component of framing, along with the fact that the planet was much colder than it had been 2 billion years ago when the aliens lived there, due to changes in the energy output of its star. How did I make the decision? I looked up the thickness of Antarctic ice and doubled it, because I wanted really thick ice.)

 

[Emerikol]

Trying to follow the thread and recent derailment into Epistemology.

I do believe there is a language that develops for communicating what the GM knows to the player in such a way that the character can now act in a way as if the character knew all along what a character should know in the situation.

I don't have a term for such words but they do facilitate communication. For example, we have hit points that conveys, perhaps in a pretty abstract and low realism way, the overall condition of the character. The character acts on that knowledge. Hit points are a shorthand way of communicating the info to the character via the player. The game typically provides some of these words to aid in communication.

When a player says his character carefully searches around the door for traps, the GM might answer "you find nothing of significance". Now it's a given there could have been a lot to describe. You could have went into the type of wood or the cracks in the stone, whatever. You typically don't unless the player via the character pushes harder for more information.

So a GM will describe sufficiently and the player will fill in the details for the character. Where this goes wrong is when the GM leaves something out that was significant or the player put something in that really wasn't there per the GM. So this means of communicating is a skill and an experienced GM will do a better job of heading off issues as he gets more experienced.

 

[pemerton]

my only criticism is reducing it to being about the notes alone. I would also add I think the notes are not the most important thing: what is important is the GMs sense of the world

<snip>

I have been in sandboxes for example where a GM barely looks at the notes

About 1 million pages upthread I offered to instead use the phrase GM's conception. But you didn't like that either. Yet here you use exactly the same phrase with sense substituted for conception in a context in which the two are absolutely synonymous.

 

[Emerikol]

I think some here are viewing the GM's notes as scraps of paper randomly scattered in a pile on a desk somewhere which seems to be a bit of a pejorative view. Our problem again is underlying assumptions that lead us to speak in a certain way about certain aspects of the campaign.

For me.
1. There is the pre-game creation of the setting which is a separate task and involves for me a good bit of work. It is a labor of love though so I do it. Some of this work is reused as I don't have to build a new world for every campaign. I can just create a new sandbox. The sandbox though is at least as much work as the rest of the world.

2. There is the upkeep of the world. This happens in between sessions. It is still not done during gameplay. The goals are similar to #1 but less effort is demanded. You just push the calendar along. You may make some additions notes about plans for NPCs due to events the PCs have caused to happen and which now change the calendar.

3. There is the immediate neutral refereeing of the setting for the players. This occurs during the game session when the other players are present. There is some improv here based on what has been defined in #1 and #2. Generally though I'm not inventing wholesale here. I am just building on the underlying foundation.

Now players can be involved in all three stages. If my players have been talking and saying they'd really love to play a campaign where they are pirates, and I react to that and build such a campaign then they are giving some input on #1. If one of them asks me in between sessions if it would be okay if he defined the marriage rituals for his cleric's religion and we nail that down, that is #2. BOTH of these situations involve players NOT characters. The GM also does have final say on the world but the GM is also wanting a fun game so that issue is not a big deal at least for my games.

In #3 though there is a very strong goal. Players ARE their characters. They do what their characters can do. The players don't separate their thinking from what their characters would be if those characters really existed. There is skilled play here and the players as their characters try to prepare, plan, and overcome challenges in the setting. There is also a high degree of agency. Go where you want, run if you need to, pick your poison.

Now there are two more categories that I do not use.
#4 GM's creating the world on the fly. I realize the line might be fuzzy but there is still a divide. I know GM's who try to create an entire dungeon entirely on the fly.

#5 Players add to the truths of the world in a way independent of the GM but respecting what has already been established and keeping genre conventions in mind.

We need words for all five of these and honestly we are using words to represent our take and others are seeing those words and not understanding or taking offense that the words are inappropriate.

 

[pemerton]

On the role of physics in RPG resolution - here is a passage from Maelstrom Storytelling (p 116):

Literal vs Conceptual
A good way to run the Hubris Engine is to use "scene ideas" to convey the scene, instead of literalisms. The scene idea is the scene concept, as imagined in the mind of the narrator [= GM], whereas that might be different from the literal elements of the description when the scene is presented. A ten foot fence might seem really toall to one person, and a little tall to another. But if the fence is described as really tall instead of 10 feet, evenone gets the idea. In other words, focus on the intent behind the scene and not on how big or how far things might be. If the difficulty of the task at hand (such as jumping across a chasm in a cave) is explained in terms of difficulty, it doesn't matter how far across the actual chasm spans. In a movie, for instance, the camera zooms or pans to emphasize the danger or emotional reaction to the scene, and in so doing it manipulates the real distance of a chasm to suit the mood or "feel" of the moment. It is then no longer about how far across the character has to jump, but how hard the feat is for the character. In this way, the presentation of each element of the scene focuses on the difficulty of the obstacle, not on laws of physics. It is the idea of how hard it is, not the actual measurement of the obstacle that is important. Everyone understands adjectives such as easy, hard, and impossible, but a wide range of argument can arise from saying that the chasm is 15 feet across. By supplying the difficult of the task, the player fills in the distance relative to the character's capabilities. . . . If the players enjoy the challenge of figuring out how high and far someone can jump, they should be allowed the pleasure of doing so - as long as it doesn't interfere with the narrative flow and enjoyment of the game.

The scene should be presented therefore in terms relative to the character's abilities ... Players who want to climb onto your coffee table and jump across your living room to prove that their character could jump over the chasm have probably missed the whole point of the story.​

Notice that this advice can generalise beyond jumping a chasm. It might apply to a trek. Or a climb. Or cleaning the Augean stables. Or even beating a giant in combat.

Notice also that it depends on adopting certain techniques in framing: as the game author says, the scene needs to be presented relative to the character's abilities. This is applicable obviously in the game this text is quoted from; to Cortex+ Heroic; to HeroWars/Quest; to 4e D&D skill challenges (less so to 4e D&D combat); to Prince Valiant (within some broad limits); to Burning Wheel (again within some limits).

It is not applicable to dungeon exploration of the sort that Gygax and Moldvay describe (but is broadly applicable, mediated via the hit point mechanic, to combat in those games). It is not applicable to RuneQuest. It is not applicable to Rolemaster, neither in the case of jumping (which is resolved by reference to the distance jumped) nor more broadly (all action resolution in RM is meant to be built out of details of the gameworld, not vice versa).

It's applicability to a system like Classic Traveller is interesting. Traveller presents itself as a system like RQ or RM, and so one might think the Maelstrom advice is not applicable. But it's not as simple as that. Relatively little action resolution in Traveller involves known and measurable quantities like jumping chasms, climbing walls or digging and shovelling. How hard is it to use or adapt a Traveller-style communicator to jam another communicator's signal? What processes are involved in doing so? Who knows?! So in practice a difficulty is set (I tend to default to 8+ for seems feasible for a trained person and 10+ for sounds a bit tricky even for a trained person) and skill mods are added, and the play ends up being much closer to Maelstrom than one might expect.

In a game played using the Maelstrom approach, should the GM's notes include the appropriate adjectives? There are different approaches. HeroQuest revised answers "no" and instead has a chart to be used check-by-check to set difficulties; this is intended to reliably guarantee dramatically satisfactory pacing. Cortex+ Heroic also answers "no" because the difficulties are set, or at least heavily influenced by, the fluctuating state of the Doom Pool. Prince Valiant and Burning Wheel on the other hand come closer to using "objective" difficulties which can make notes in advance more applicable - though too much prep of framing might start to conflict with other priorities for those games.

 

[pemerton]

I think some here are viewing the GM's notes as scraps of paper randomly scattered in a pile on a desk somewhere

Who do think has this view?

I know GM's who try to create an entire dungeon entirely on the fly.

Using what system?

I've done this in AD&D, using Appendix A. And I've done it in Cortex+ Heroic, using the full repertoire of devices that system brings to the task. They're very different things.

The Appendix A approach is "just for fun": nothing serious is likely to emerge from it, and some of the game mechanics become stretched if not broken because of the lack of a basis to adjudicate them (detection magic is the most obvious example).

The Cortex+ Heroic dungeon was a great experience. There was a fire lizard, and then PCs got split up and one was lost in a room with ghouls until he found a secret door back that led him back to the others. The PCs met a Crypt Thing with teleported them deep into the depths, but they deciphered some strange runes to find a way out. This took them through the land of the dark elves. There one of the PCs betrayed the rest, and the elves, to steal the latter's gold and escape to the surface, while the others had to grimly fight their way out.

Of course that's a "story hour" description, not an account of play. Those familiar with Cortex+ Heroic might be able to fill in some blanks; needless to say the procedures of play are nothing like those for AD&D played using Appendix A.

 

[TwoSix]

#4 GM's creating the world on the fly. I realize the line might be fuzzy but there is still a divide. I know GM's who try to create an entire dungeon entirely on the fly.

There's another way to do dungeons?

I'm joking, but I can count the number of times I've actually used a pre-drawn map for site exploration on one hand. I just usually picture what the place would look like and narrate it.