What is the point of GM's notes?

[Fenris-77]

I'm going to wait here for @darkbard who is about 20 pages back but approaching quickly.

 

[Cadence]

@pemerton @Ovinomancer @Manbearcat - Thank you all for your answers and play examples! They helped clarify a great deal about what I was reading in your posts - especially when you described the range of different takes the games you've played and enjoyed had on these issues. Now I just need to find the time (which I obviously didn't have this weekend to reply!) to let the things gel in my head.

Being impatient and trying to avoid work though...

The thing I'm wondering about most immediately is how much of enjoyment of the DM and players is what they imagine they're doing, as opposed to what they're actually doing. For example, if a player was enjoying what he thought was going through a dungeon with pre-specified difficulties, how much of that should be lost if it turns out the DCs were being made up on the fly? If a player was having fun thinking that all of the responses hadn't been pre-imagined by the DM and showed up organically in play, how much of that should be lost if they learn the DM had a pre-imagined plot that sometimes dropped in?

And so, getting off track of the thread, this has me realizing I don't think I've ever been in a session-zero equivalent where the DM has explicitly said where they "fudge" (beyond just not doing it with the dice in some cases) and at what level they put character story in. Do the adamant no-dice-fudgers still adjust whether reinforcements all show up or have the villain switch attacks just to save a PC? Do they adjust what magic items were going to be found if a character dies and is replaced by a different class? etc. And I wonder how many players would want the "no-fudge" option when picking a game style, but then want the fudging out at some level (is taking character backgrounds into account when world designing considered fudging to some).

 

[Bedrockgames]

Post-mortem analysis of successful play can be very enlightening.

i am not talking about post mortem (post mortem are always a good idea). I am talking about observing in the moment what isn't working. You can do that for when the session is going well too (though I find it very hard to analyze a game that is working and keeping it working----you are sort of in the zone). But if it is already falling apart, it is a great opportunity to pay attention to what seems to be making it all not work.

 

[Fenris-77]

There's a huge difference between a DM just making crap up and adjudicating actions and consequences with a keen eye to the unfolding narrative, both in terms of logic and content. The first sucks, while the second is dandy.

 

[Fenris-77]

i am not talking about post mortem. I am talking about observing in the moment what isn't working. You can do that for when the session is going well too (though I find it very hard to analyze a game that is working and keeping it working----you are sort of in the zone). But if it is already falling apart, it is a great opportunity to pay attention to what seems to be making it all not work.

No, I was talking about post-mortem. I'd agree that in the moment it's tough to observe much of anything. The bad stuff might be more obvious, but that is also much easier to sort out post-mortem. I was just suggesting a moment where what works in a campaign can be a useful learning tool for GMs.

 

[Bedrockgames]

No, I was talking about post-mortem. I'd agree that in the moment it's tough to observe much of anything. The bad stuff might be more obvious, but that is also much easier to sort out post-mortem. I was just suggesting a moment where what works in a campaign can be a useful learning tool for GMs.

I agree on that

 

[Manbearcat]

I'll bypass Manbearcat's humour, because that's the sort of person I am, and cut to the issue of adjudication.

I'm sure the GM who made the call about duration of oxygen supply in my sci-fi convention game hadn't set out to make the game feel less real. When I had unrealistically slow planes on Byron, that wasn't deliberate either. I just didn't know much about the speed of military prop planes! (Or even civilian ones - I've just Googled and learned that a Focker Friendship goes faster than what I called in our game.) Surprisingly, but also helpfully insofar as it avoided any issues, apparently none of my players did either, not even the military history guy.

This drives home my point that we're not talking about "thought experiments" here. We're talking about the GM making stuff up, by reference to his/her conception of the thing which may include some stuff that's written down (ie notes). It's needless obscurantism to overlay this with metaphor such as "exploring a world" or "really existing in thought". It's stuff that someone is authoring based on whatever considerations inform those authorship decisions.

EDIT: An author extrapolating from his/her description of something to something else "that feels right" isn't a thought experiment. It's just more writing. It's not constrained by "reality" in any way beyond being constrained by the other ideas and beliefs and expectations and aspirations of the author.

There's no need to complicate this, or use metaphor. It is what it is. Gygax is upfront about that. So is Moldvay. It's an approach that obviously puts the GM's conception of what is happening in the fiction in the forefront of framing and adjudication.

Agree with all this.

For my part I just totally lost the plot because I thought I was contending with “thoughts are real so imagined space has subsistence” (not true) but it turned out to be “everyone’s threshold for ‘real’ is different because it’s on a continuum” (true).

 

[Manbearcat]

How so?

MBC is positing we have what seems an absurdly low rate of GMs among the player pool and compares it to the number of [various types of athlete/artisan] among the humanity pool.

I'm just trying to point out that the ratio in either case probably isn't all that different.

How many roles are there typically in a RPG? Now how many "roles," "specializations," or "jobs" are there in human civilization? How has the population boom of humanity affected that across time? I don't think that this is an appropriate comparison of like to like.

Aldarc is correct here.

You entirely changed the framework of the theoretical longitudinal study I was proposing...and you weren't changing it for the better.

The study proposes two populations:

* Homo sapiens circa about 100 k years ago till today (by this point we were effectively passing down martial arts/craft/artisanship through generations).

* TTRPGing players circa mid 70s till today.

Then,

1) Examine what % of functional (not tails of the distribution...just part of the normal distribution) martial artists (anything physical including sport), craftfolks, AND (not OR...AND) artisans emerged perpetually from the populace and how (it emerged exactly as I proposed it emerged above). This is because (a) they're kindred in their nature and (b) kindred in the means by which they were passed down.

2) Do the same thing with GMs (and don't break it down into GMs by game or by playstyle...ALL OF THEM).


Its straight-forward. (1) has an enormous % of functional martial artists, craftfolks, and artisans across Homo sapien history. (2) has an extremely low % of functional GMs across TTRPGing history. The way (1) achieved their prolific production is entirely different than the way (2) failed to achieve prolific production.

Perhaps (2) could use more of the approach of (1) to increase their production of functional GMs as a % of population.

---

Now if you change the longitudinal study, you'll be looking at and answering something different. Specific subgroups such as Cobblers vs Story Now GMs for 4e is something else entirely. If you change it from the normal distribution to studying one of the tails (are we more apt to get freakishly good Cobblers or freakishly good Story Now GMs for 4e) is, again, something else entirely.

But...why would you do that?

 

[Bedrockgames]

Aldarc is correct here.

You entirely changed the framework of the theoretical longitudinal study I was proposing...and you weren't changing it for the better.

The study proposes two populations:

* Homo sapiens circa about 100 k years ago till today (by this point we were effectively passing down martial arts/craft/artisanship through generations).

* TTRPGing players circa mid 70s till today.

Then,

1) Examine what % of functional (not tails of the distribution...just part of the normal distribution) martial artists (anything physical including sport), craftfolks, AND (not OR...AND) artisans emerged perpetually from the populace and how (it emerged exactly as I proposed it emerged above). This is because (a) they're kindred in their nature and (b) kindred in the means by which they were passed down.

2) Do the same thing with GMs (and don't break it down into GMs by game or by playstyle...ALL OF THEM).


Its straight-forward. (1) has an enormous % of functional martial artists, craftfolks, and artisans across Homo sapien history. (2) has an extremely low % of functional GMs across TTRPGing history. The way (1) achieved their prolific production is entirely different than the way (2) failed to achieve prolific production.

Perhaps (2) could use more of the approach of (1) to increase their production of functional GMs as a % of population.

---

Now if you change the longitudinal study, you'll be looking at and answering something different. Specific subgroups such as Cobblers vs Story Now GMs for 4e is something else entirely. If you change it from the normal distribution to studying one of the tails (are we more apt to get freakishly good Cobblers or freakishly good Story Now GMs for 4e) is, again, something else entirely.

But...why would you do that?

except 1 wasn’t a) a straight line of transmission (there is a lot to be skeptical about when it comes to claims of unbroken lineages and oral traditions in martial arts, with many arguably being more recent reinventions. 2) There were and remain a very high percentage of not functionally good martial artists. This was something we realized with the UFC: there was and is tons of martial arts practices that don’t work because the relied heavily on theory not enough on fire. I think it is similar with RPGs: fire-the table is most important.

 

[Manbearcat]

@pemerton @Ovinomancer @Manbearcat - Thank you all for your answers and play examples! They helped clarify a great deal about what I was reading in your posts - especially when you described the range of different takes the games you've played and enjoyed had on these issues. Now I just need to find the time (which I obviously didn't have this weekend to reply!) to let the things gel in my head.

Being impatient and trying to avoid work though...

The thing I'm wondering about most immediately is how much of enjoyment of the DM and players is what they imagine they're doing, as opposed to what they're actually doing. For example, if a player was enjoying what he thought was going through a dungeon with pre-specified difficulties, how much of that should be lost if it turns out the DCs were being made up on the fly? If a player was having fun thinking that all of the responses hadn't been pre-imagined by the DM and showed up organically in play, how much of that should be lost if they learn the DM had a pre-imagined plot that sometimes dropped in?

And so, getting off track of the thread, this has me realizing I don't think I've ever been in a session-zero equivalent where the DM has explicitly said where they "fudge" (beyond just not doing it with the dice in some cases) and at what level they put character story in. Do the adamant no-dice-fudgers still adjust whether reinforcements all show up or have the villain switch attacks just to save a PC? Do they adjust what magic items were going to be found if a character dies and is replaced by a different class? etc. And I wonder how many players would want the "no-fudge" option when picking a game style, but then want the fudging out at some level (is taking character backgrounds into account when world designing considered fudging to some).

Hey Cadence. Glad that was helpful.

What you're talking about above is "Skilled Play" as a play priority and "Follow the Rules" as a play priority. You can have a game that isn't Skilled Play that has Follow the Rules as a priority but is more muted on the "Skilled Play" priority (even if it has it). My Life With Master and Dogs in the Vineyard can both be played skillfully but Skilled Play (as a priority) is more muted than in another "Follow the Rules" game like Moldvay Basic D&D or D&D 4e or Blades in the Dark (where Skilled Play is extremely important in those games).

Any game where Skilled Play is a big priority or THE APEX priority of play (Moldvay Basic D&D), you MUST Follow the Rules. If a GM goes into one of those games and fudges dice and/or results and/or deploys Force (this is a technique used by GMs which wrests the trajectory of play from players to the GM by rendering their meaningful decision points irrelevant), things go "pear-shaped" because that is a strict (and overwhelmingly deceptive) violation of the ethos of play.

So you've got 2 problems; cheating and deception. People don't like that.

Not all TTRPGs are like this and not all forms of D&D. In fact, I would say that the most common form of D&D (and the one that 5e pushes toward) is a "Storyteller" form of D&D where the GM is (a) EXPECTED to control the trajectory of play to (b) ensure an "exciting, memorable story" and this is overwhelmingly through (c) heavily curating/tailoring play (while playing) by way of (d) heavy-handed framing + the deployment of Force (which includes fudging, ignoring, or changing outcomes).

In that sort of game, its built-in that "GM as Storyteller" is a mandate and "Tell an Exciting, Memorable Story" is the apex priority of play. If following the rules doesn't serve that end and players playing skillfully doesn't serve that end....well, Follow the Rules and Skilled Play become subordinated. So players should understand that going in. It isn't cheating or deception for the GM to do those things. Its "doing their job."

The problem D&D has historically had (since Dragonlance and AD&D 2e really introduced this as a mainstream priority of play) is that designers/culture haven't been forthright and transparent about the interactions of these things. How the implications of Force and "The Golden Rule" completely subvert Skilled Play. So that has led to a lot of incoherent play or incoherent expectations at the table and a lot of downstream hard feelings as a byproduct.