So am I being pejorative of my own game when I describe episodes of it that have this character?
What is the point of GM's notes?
- Thread starter pemerton
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All the mathematicians in the world agree that 2+2 = 4. That's part of what reveals mathematics to be a scientific discipline.
All the philologists in the world could ponder the possibility of a mythology for England, but only one would come up with LotR: JRRT.
When we read LotR and its appendices, we are learning what JRRT invented. When we read critical treatments of it (I am familiar with Christopher Tolkien's commentaries in Unfinished Tales, plus Thomas Shippey's book; some posters here might be familiar also with The History of Middle Earth series) we see how JRRT made decisions, and changed his mind.
When I play D&D with a GM, and that GM reveals to me his/her conception of the fiction, it is not more maths-like than JRRT!
I don't know quite what you mean by these phrases. They seem related to the notions of Stance used on The Forge.
As a player my ideal is to inhabit my character. When the player in my Prince Valiant game tried to ride past Sir Lionheart, he was inhabiting his character.
The only sense I can make of your descriptions is that player stance means more of the fiction is established out of the process of action declaration than in character stance. Eg in the Prince Valiant case, the fiction of whether or not Sir Lionheart will knight the PC.
But I don't get the sense that that is what you are intending.
Particularly the facilitation. That is what the OP of this thread was about.
Last time I generated a complete story was like three years ago. Before that, it was like almost a decade, I think. As I've said elsewhere, these days when I play with language it's more likely to be poetry.
My reasoning for asking, though, was mostly because my experience of GMing is that it in large part uses the same ... "machinery" is the metaphor I usually reach for, as writing fiction does/did, at least in my brain. If writing fiction is not a recent or major experience for you, then it's plausibly less-helpful as a basis of comparison, at least for the purposes of our conversation.
That sounds more like when I generated a villanelle for our Christmas cards, and had to try several times before I had lines that were going to work, repeated as often as they would be (and were reasonably easy to rhyme, of course).
I believe the point of the metaphor was that the writer in question felt as though the story was there--complete, in their brain--and the work wasn't so much creating the story as uncovering it. I free-wrote all my fiction, and it probably wouldn't have been the metaphor I would have used, but it made some sense to me.
That sounds close to the experience of a writer who knows there's a story but can't figure out how to get to it. So, you try starting it at different points, you try coming back to it, you try different structures, and you hope one of them is your way into the story.
There is emerging in this thread, and I have seen it emerge in many previous threads, an implicit assumption that there are four basic ways to produce the fiction of RPGing:
The great insight which RPGs like Apocalypse World and Burning Wheel try to systematise is that this list is in fact not exhaustive. There are at least two other possibilities:
AW, DW and (to the best of my knowledge) many other PbtA games make extensive use of (5).
BW makes extensive use of (6) and uses (5) when it comes both to scene-framing and the narration of consequences of failed checks.
This elaborates my explanation of why I don't think that @AnotherGuy's suggested labels are very helpful. It also relates to what @Aldarc and (I think) @Fenris-77 have posted upthread about "living world" describing a goal or a result rather than a process. (5) and (6) are eminently viable contributors to the generation of a living world in which (for instance) NPCs are not just "sitting about" in room A as pre-conceived by the GM waiting for a PC to turn up. But at least as @Bedrockgames and @Maxperson present their play, (5) and (6) do not seem to be important techniques in it.
(1) GM authorship in advance;
(2) GM unilateral (or close to unilateral) authorship in the moment of play, which is like an ad-libbed version of (1);
(3) Player authorship in advance;
(4) Player authorship in the moment of play which requires stepping out of the character because it is very similar to (2) and hence to (1).
The great insight which RPGs like Apocalypse World and Burning Wheel try to systematise is that this list is in fact not exhaustive. There are at least two other possibilities:
(5) GM authorship in the moment of play based on constraints that emerge (significantly, probably not exclusively) from the player's play of his/her PC;
(6) Player authorship in the moment of play that does not require stepping out of character because it is part and parcel of action declaration for the player's PC.
AW, DW and (to the best of my knowledge) many other PbtA games make extensive use of (5).
BW makes extensive use of (6) and uses (5) when it comes both to scene-framing and the narration of consequences of failed checks.
This elaborates my explanation of why I don't think that @AnotherGuy's suggested labels are very helpful. It also relates to what @Aldarc and (I think) @Fenris-77 have posted upthread about "living world" describing a goal or a result rather than a process. (5) and (6) are eminently viable contributors to the generation of a living world in which (for instance) NPCs are not just "sitting about" in room A as pre-conceived by the GM waiting for a PC to turn up. But at least as @Bedrockgames and @Maxperson present their play, (5) and (6) do not seem to be important techniques in it.
I think using writing fiction as a comparison is kinda fraught, as appropriate as it may be. Writing camapaign materials uses some of the same skills, but really doesn't (or shouldn't) use others. The kind of evocative detail you want is similar to fiction, and you want structure, but the structure is the opposite of fiction. You want what you're writing to be as flexible as possible and to support as many possible outcomes (endings?) as you can. You want the moving pieces, but you don't want them strung on a necklace in order. It takes some discipline to avoid some of the writerly things you might do that are pretty counter to useful prep (outside something closer to railroad, or some kind of very linear action).
I agree. I don't treat GMing as though I'm writing stories--at least in part because I believe the story should emerge from play, not from just my brain. My experience of GMing is that my brain seems to operate similarly to how it did when I was writing fiction, in the sense of there being things emerging that I didn't know were there, but my experience of TRPGing is in general really more like my experience of being in a band. At this point the only things I do that I'd call "writerly" are A) if I'm working a description of a scene that I know will happen (such as at the start of a campaign or story arc, when I can frame hard) and B) if/when a PC goes looking for information and I get to write it up between sessions. Sometimes C), when I compose documents the PCs have found (I am probably proudest of the letters they found between a husband and his wife).
I think most of that paragraph just amplifies "I agree." Oops.
Bedrockgames
I post in the voice of Christopher Walken
It is possible I am misunderstanding here, but I don't think authorship is a good word for what is occurring (definitely do not see this as writing fiction or creating fiction----there is still a very interactive element and conversational element and that plays out over the model of the living world people have been talking about. But the above doesn't seem to account for the role of dice, the role of the synergy discussed earlier (point 5 might fit the bill here, but not sure---depends on what the constraints in question are). The issue this raises is it is pretty hard to distinguish based on asserting in our style only 1-4 are important between what we do, what an adventure path does, and what a GM as storyteller does (you can reject our description of what we do, but I don't think anyone can honestly assert those three things are the same thing). If I had to pin the essence of living world to one idea or statement (and I don't think you can do that, it would be along the lines of t'he most important part of living world is the GM determining what NPCs do, in response to what players do and the ensuing interaction that produces + dice'. It fundamentally boils down to deciding how things arise in the world through the characters, groups, and other forces in that world.
Bedrockgames
I post in the voice of Christopher Walken
I think this gets much closer to the mark. When I make notes for my campaign, if I am running a living world sandbox, what I am essentially doing is making the 'pieces' that populate that campaign world. And an important part of using those pieces well is treating them as alive, and what alive means is 1) not in stasis or rooted to one spot, 2) possessing a clear will and motivation, and ability to move and interact with the PCs and other elements of the setting, 3) no pre-determined plots, events, scenes, conflicts----imbedded in the pieces (any of that should arise naturally through their interactions with PCs and other elements). That is a very rigid definition. But if you need one, that is the language I would use.
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