What is the point of GM's notes?

[pemerton]

How did the players in my Classic Traveller game learn that, in the complex their PCs were exploring, there was a nearly 100 metre deep shaft with a great pendulum swinging in it? Because I told them. How did I know? Because I read it in the module.

How do the players in your game learn about the setting that you as GM have created?

No, because they decided to go into the complex in the first place, and then they decided to examine the complex enough, to make choices that eventually led them to that deep meter shaft. And there are two approaches here: one in which you have a model in your mind of the complex and the players are genuinely exploring a space (however fictional) with clear parameters that matter, versus you just decide there is a shaft. Most games and campaigns are going to lean toward one or the other of these (and there will certainly be blending-----as I pointed out, sometimes the GM never even thinks if there ought to be a shaft, and the players asking about it will cause him or her to conclude 'yes, there ought to be one here'. Again, what you are doing here is zooming in so much we only see the binary of players ask what they see, the GM tells them....but anyone who has played an RPG knows the process is so much more organic and involved than that, and what drives the GMs 'decision' is going to be predicated on things like choices the players have made, what details the GM has established about the world, what ways the system constrains the GM's choices, etc.

I was there. I can tell you how the players learned about the shaft: I told them! And I can tell you how I learned about it: I read the module. (Double Adventure 1, Shadows)

The fact that the players decided to have their PCs enter the complex doesn't change anything about the truth of the above paragraph. The fact that they declared actions for their PCs that obliged me to tell them about the pendulum in the deep shaft doesn't change anything about the above paragraph, other than to explain why I told them.

There is no "model in my mind of a space": There's a map and some words. What do the shadows look like in the shaft? I have no idea, because the words don't tell me and I don't know how to work that out even if enough detail were provided to do so, which I don't think it is. And if that detail were provided, that's just more authorship.

The players are not genuinely exploring a place. They were sitting in a living room. They are genuinely learning what it is that Marc Miller made up 40 or so years ago.

The difference between me having a map and module text that describes the shaft, compared to just making it up on the spot, is part of the whole point of this thread ie what is the point of the GM's notes? So I don't know why you think I'm not aware it makes a difference to play. But an obvious part of the difference is that I tell the players stuff that's in the notes. In this particular context, that's what they're for.

 

[pemerton]

The player through his actions and roleplay(which you seem to constantly ignore when responding about this), authors a significant portion of the moment.

This is the action declaration. I've not ignored it. I've mentioned it in every reply to you on this particular point.

As to your moved goalpost question, sometimes. Sometimes the player's intent is a factor.

This is isn't a competition. There's no "moving of goalposts". I asked you a question about what constrains your narration as GM.

It may be that the play of your game is largely indistinguishable from a typical PbtA game or Burning Wheel game. I've always assumed it's not, though, because you seem to be quite uninterested or even hostile to approaches to play explicitly informed by those systems.

EDIT: I can't envisage RPGing in which the players' action declaration does not inform in some fashion the GM's narration of consequences. Hence when I suggested GM constraints vs GM unilateralism that wasn't what I had in mind, as it is a trivial because unavoidable example of such a constraint.

 

[pemerton]

if you run Ravenloft, you are working with a setting that has parameters, an internal logic, a history etc

This is the point of my comparison to mathematics.

Even real-world history isn't as constraining as mathematics. It is subject to contingency that makes future events unpredictable, especially in the sorts of granular detail that are typically the subject-matter of RPGing.

When I run Classic Traveller there is a setting with an internal logic (the Imperium), various historical details, etc. Those don't uniquely determine any actual decision about what happens next.

And even if they did, given that it is the GM who is privy to that information (as best I understand your account of your RPGing), when the GM derives new information from that existing information s/he would still have to impart it to the players!

The characters are imaginary pieces moving in the imaginary model of ravenloft. That conceit is very important for running certain kinds of RPGs.

I would have thought this is trivially true of all RPGing.

What is the difference between RPGing, boardgaming and wargaming?

• Unlike boardgames, and like some wargames, in RPGing the shared fiction matters to resolution;
• Unlike wargames, and like some boardgames, in RPGing the non-referee participants each engage the game primarily via the medium of a particular character within the shared fiction.

The point is that the model is imaginary. There are no algorithms and no causal processes that yield answers. No matter how hard I study the problem, I can't work out the details of Sherlock Holmes's living room until Conan Doyle tells me. Telling me it's a typical middle-to-upper-middle-class living room in Victorian London won't yield an answer on its own.

 

[pemerton]

At the tables I DM, I construct the setting, because I find it easier for me to sustain the illusion in play that way. The players (best I can tell) engage: They ask questions, some of which I haven't previously considered, and I answer them. Their characters do stuff like cast legend lore on a thing that directly connects to a Great Old One, and I take a few minutes to write this:

Spoiler

gabbagabbahey
gabbagabbahey
gabbagabba we accept you one of us
gabbagabba you accept us into yourself
gabbagabbahey
gabbagabbahey

gabbagabbahey
gabbagabbahey
gabbagabba coming soon to a world near you
gabbagabba ending soon on a world with you
gabbagabbahey
gabbagabbahey

gabbagabbahey
gabbagabbahey
gabbagabba mountains won't stay green for long
gabbagabba talking all of your words at the same time
gabbagabbahey
gabbagabbahey

I don't understand how this process of the players asking questions from you, or otherwise prompting you to share this sort of information with them, does not count as you communicating to them your conception of the fiction.

 

[pemerton]

I do think you hit on things lots of living world GMs discuss and debate (and there is no one answer here). The idea of how to give players the information they need to make decisions

In the second sentence of this quote, who is the subject of the verb to give? I think it is the GM. The object obviously is the players.

QED, surely!

 

[Bedrockgames]

I was there. I can tell you how the players learned about the shaft: I told them! And I can tell you how I learned about it: I read the module. (Double Adventure 1, Shadows)

But this brings us right back to the modeling I was talking about. It didn't exist simply because you said so, or simply because you told the players it did. It was there as part of the model, prior to that. So while obviously you talking to the players is part of how players explore that model, there is a model that exists outside you and the players (the shaft's existence isn't dependent on the conversation between you and the players: it is dependent on the model). Sure that map existed on a page. But that map could just as easily exist in a GM's mind , and the same level of objective exploration could take place

 

[Bedrockgames]

In the second sentence of this quote, who is the subject of the verb to give? I think it is the GM. The object obviously is the players.

QED, surely!

Lol. No. That is a silly argument

 

[Bedrockgames]

I would have thought this is trivially true of all RPGing.

No, I don't think this the case. It isn't and it wasn't for me when I read the paragraph in question. Up to that point for me at least, things were either tied to locations on the map or they were tied to events the GM wanted to happen. Obviously it is an approach many GMs can take regardless. But I have said again and again it isn't unique to living worlds. As I mentioned before it can exist in any type of adventure (in which case I would call it a living adventure). Living world just takes that idea very, very seriously, expands it to the whole world, and really just makes it a key priority. But I have definitely been in games where NPCs are rooted more to a spot, are not acting like living pieces on the board (but maybe in service to some plot: a good example of this is simply having an NPC show up at a dramatically appropriate time, rather than when they would act: as Crawford said about them acting when they are ready to act).

 

[Bedrockgames]

Even real-world history isn't as constraining as mathematics. It is subject to contingency that makes future events unpredictable, especially in the sorts of granular detail that are typically the subject-matter of RPGing.

History isn't perfectly predictable like math, but events flow from one to another. You can see the logic and you can anticipate future possibilities. A game is similar. I would make an argument that history is more the model I look to when running a game (than say a story for example). And living worlds are like history at both the micro and macro level.

Yes events might be unpredictable, but they do have a rhyme and reason. But even a granular exchange isn't total chaos. We can follow a conversation between two people and understand how it gets from point A to B to C. And when we run a game we simply doing our best to achieve that kind of fidelity to what is plausible

 

[Bedrockgames]

The difference between me having a map and module text that describes the shaft, compared to just making it up on the spot, is part of the whole point of this thread ie what is the point of the GM's notes? So I don't know why you think I'm not aware it makes a difference to play. But an obvious part of the difference is that I tell the players stuff that's in the notes. In this particular context, that's what they're for.

Which I find odd because if you accept the notes as a kind of model, then surely you can't reject my argument that there is a mental modeling going on. The only reason I reject 'playing to discover the GM's notes' is because it is reductive and insulting, not because parts of it aren't true.