What is the point of GM's notes?

[prabe]

I will generally share the DCs for saves. Some tasks I do, some I don't--some amount of "it depends" (usually comes to whether they can see the whole task before they try, I guess). I'll start announcing ACs after a round or two.

 

[Arilyn]

I think generally a fair number of people who do not have much experience with general use indie games like Burning Wheel or Apocalypse World tend to oversell how focused indie games are and dramatically undersell how many mostly unspoken expectations inform most mainstream play. I kind of blame a decent portion of this on indie community overselling the notion of the focused game and no real counter marketing now that it is substantially less true.

Speaking personally I know that when I run something like Scion, Exalted, or L5R I would be extremely careful about making the sort of hard moves, dramatic consequences or aggressive framing I utilize when running indie games. I think it's really important to give players more room to think things through as a group in more traditional/mainstream games. I am also a lot more careful about the sort of questions I ask players and how I ramp up tension.

When running Blades in the Dark or Apocalypse World I do things as a GM I would not dream of doing in D&D.

I agree 100%. The games you mentioned play very differently. There's a lot of debate over games like Fate, but Fate plays very much in the traditional space, and is as close to DnD than it is to BitD, for example. I bring up Fate because of the backlash it often receives as not a true rpg, and because I play a lot of Fate. Aspects, fate points, etc. are really just game mechanics. At its basic core, it follows the traditional rpg play loop. This is true for the majority of games, but not true for the games focussed on story now/protagonist play, or whatever the best term is for these games. The participants' roles and expectations are not the same as in traditional RPGs, and is an actual shift away from traditional play. I think this gets missed because people enter the conversation with traditional play in mind.

 

[Aldarc]

I agree 100%. The games you mentioned play very differently. There's a lot of debate over games like Fate, but Fate plays very much in the traditional space, and is as close to DnD than it is to BitD, for example. I bring up Fate because of the backlash it often receives as not a true rpg, and because I play a lot of Fate. Aspects, fate points, etc. are really just game mechanics. At its basic core, it follows the traditional rpg play loop. This is true for the majority of games, but not true for the games focussed on story now/protagonist play, or whatever the best term is for these games. The participants' roles and expectations are not the same as in traditional RPGs, and is an actual shift away from traditional play. I think this gets missed because people enter the conversation with traditional play in mind.

I suspect that one reason Fate gets a lot of backlash is because of how it sits in the overlap between more mainstream games and story games. Fate, for example, has a lot of GM advice, guidelines, and principles that are perfectly at home in story games. There is also a lot of player authorship, whether they are declaring a story detail, conceding a contest, or discovering aspects.

But in regards to "[entering] the conversation with traditional play in mind," I have had several people on this forum from more traditional, mainstream perspectives who assumed that cheating was rampant in Fate and flat out told me that they would "cheat to win" or "power-game to break/win the game" if they were playing Fate. This was also somewhat bizarre to me, because I actually have observed practically far less cheating (i.e., practically none) and this sort of behavior from my players when playing Fate than when I am playing D&D, where players (including the same Fate players) are fudging their rolls more regularly. But I also get the icky feeling that mainstream gamers sometimes secretly wanting to see untraditional indie games fail.

 

[Arilyn]

I've heard this too. Breaking Fate. But the strength of Fate is that it can't be broken. If your aspects don't have a downside, no fate points. If your weakness doesn't come up, no fate points. And using a fate point to alter the scene requires the GM and/or table to agree. You toss a fate point at the GM and say there's a machine gun just lying around, that fate point is going to be tossed right back with a nice try comment.

 

[pemerton]

Speaking personally I know that when I run something like Scion, Exalted, or L5R I would be extremely careful about making the sort of hard moves, dramatic consequences or aggressive framing I utilize when running indie games.

<snip>

When running Blades in the Dark or Apocalypse World I do things as a GM I would not dream of doing in D&D.

Are you able to give some examples? This is a topic I think I (at least) would benefit from discussing more.

 

[Emerikol]

Now, these are different games, and neither is right nor wrong. Different people may favor one approach over another. Some players may balk at having any ability to help shape the game's fiction in any way beyond character generation. Some GMs will struggle to come up with ideas if they're not determined ahead of time.

But ultimately, there are notes involved in both instances, and those notes inform play. It just seems to me that they do so in different ways.

I thought this was a pretty decent and fair overview of the two styles. You don't often get that.

My reaction as both a player and a DM is that I would vastly prefer the former.

I think one aspect of the latter is that the authoring the fictional setting's notes as the session rolls along is a major payoff for that style. It feels to me like a collaborative crafting of a story. I think in the latter you'd be far more likely to see a disconnect between what the player thinks is cool and what a character played by that player would want. Playing this way means you must devote a good bit of your energy to being a setting author.

For me, I'm more into the game aspects of roleplaying. So I want my skills as an adventurer to be the focus. I want my tactical and strategic planning skills to be challenged. I want to feel like I genuinely overcame a real challenge to be victorious. This synergizes with the character viewpoint I think.

I agree that what one person thinks is fun is different from another person. I'm just stating what I'm after when I roleplay a long term campaign.

 

[pemerton]

the GM has goals, intentions, and priorities, and their experience of play of this sort doesn't have to be limited to "play to discover the notes."

<snip>

if the players are playing to discern my conception of the world--which I think covers both "see what's in my notes" and "get me to make something up"--then maybe it can be said that I'm playing to discern the players' conceptions of their characters; I'm playing to find out what the PCs do. If I just wanted to world-build (or otherwise conceptualize settings) I wouldn't have to run a TRPG to do that.

Maybe another part of the fun for the GM--other than seeing what the PCs do--is the rush of spontaneous creativity

I generally agree with this, though I think I would say that I also want to learn how the players conceive of the world.

But I think we may well disagree when we cash this out in more concrete terms. To go back to a well-trodden example, suppose a player's conception of his/her character is as a finder of secrets, how does one experience that as a GM? And how does one set things up, and adjudicate action declarations, so as to permit this conception to emerge? I suspect we adopt different answers to these sorts of questions.

 

[pemerton]

@pemerton example about using Traveller World Stats is why I make sure I highlight the "Bag of Stuff" when I discuss my approach to running sandbox campaign. As referee we are not omniscience Gods just normal folks with normal abilities ranges of being able to remember stuff trying to have fun with a hobby. But when players go left instead of right we are confronted of having to come up with details great and small one the spot.

A way to overcome that is to develop a mental "Bag of Stuff". A bunch of generic locales, characters, and personalities that you can put out, tweak a bit and use on the spot. It is rare to have to come with everything needed so often sufficient to just record what you do say and then later flesh it out to whatever level of detail you think is needed or find fun.

<snip>

From Traveller it things like different type of Gas Giants, planet types, settlement types. How many ways can a Class E starport with a single building, some tanks and an unimproved landing area can be laid out?

The layout of a starport has never come up for me and my group in twenty sessions of Classic Traveller play. On a few occasions its been necessary to tell the players, whose PCs are in one part of the starport, that they can see something else happening there (eg a vessel landing or taking off). I've always just narrated that, using contemporary airports as my reference point.

My own view is that one legacy of D&D and its wargame-style dungeon-crawling is an overemphasis, in RPGing, on the details of maps and architecture. It's one thing I've found refreshing GMing Prince Valiant that we can almost always avoid them - we used a sketch map once to plot out the PCs three-pronged warband attack on some sleeping Huns. And Cortex+ Heroic/MHRP's use of Scene Distinctions instead is in my view a real strength of that system.

For me, in Traveller play the interests and inclinations of NPCs (whether individuals, or organisations) is generally the main thing of interest. As I posted upthread we do use a starmap, because that is necessary to frame and resolve starship travel given the system's rules. But we've never needed to consider a world map: we've never used map-and-key style resolution to work out whether the PCs can get from A to B or whether they can find what they're looking for.

 

[pemerton]

the vast bulk of @pemerton's posts (or an oft recurring underlying motif) has mainly been challenging related ideas pertaining to GM vs. player authorship in sandbox play in regards to creating a consistent or living world.

<snip>

It is not that GM-authored is bad, but, rather, that player-authored is equally valid. He is primarily "hostile" about anything that questions the validity of his own player-driven play, particularly coming from more traditional GM-fiat perspectives

My main interest is in reflecting, in plain terms, on who is authoring the shared fiction. So I always take it as a premise that the fiction has to come from somewhere.

There are two particular things related to that. One is unpacking the metaphor of "exploration". In the literal sense, one explores something by brining it into interaction with ones sensory and cognitive capacities (eg peeking around a corner; looking in a cupboard; cresting a hill). And the knowledge gained is the result of a causal process whereby the "external world" impinges upon the explorers brain/mind.

In RPGing the only process that resembles this, on the player side, is prompting the GM to say stuff. Relative to any given player, the GM is part of "the external world" and the things s/he says impinge upon the player's brain/mind and generate new knowledge/ideas. But the player is not in any causal relationship with an imaginary world. Not even by proxy - the GM is not a model, nor running a model. The GM is making authorship decisions.

The other thing is action declaration. My view is that action declaration and resolution is often under-examined, or is explained adopting premises that need not be true, or under investigation turn out to be quite odd (like the idea that because a player is responsible for some fictional element, that must mean the character controlled by that player is causally creating that element, at that moment, in the gameworld). My rote example for this: as moments of authorship by way of gameplay, I search for a secret door - hey, look, I found one! and I attack the Orc with my sword - hey, look, I killed it! are no different. Both are action declarations that result in the fiction taking on a new "shape" or new content. But it is very hard to get clear discussion about, this, because the first gets framed as "changing the setting" (it is now established that a secret door is part of it) where as the latter is not (even though it is now established that a dead Orc is part of it). And this tends to go back to notions of "exploration" of an "objective world" - as if authorship by way of action declaration is (ipso facto) correlative to causation in the actual world by performing actual, causally efficacious, actions.

When we try and unpack what is actually different about the secret door and the Orc actions, it turns out to be something to do with who gets to author what topic of fiction, and this is related to GM authority by way of prep/notes.

To relate this to @hawkeyefan's comment about the limitations imposed in his 5e D&D game by describing the rival NPC, I think everyone agrees that a game in which the GM had already pre-authored that the Orc will, or will not, die might count as a railroad. (I don't think it has to, but it clearly might and I think typically would). So how is the game in which the GM has already pre-authored that no secret door will be found different? I'm not saying there is no answer to that question, but I don't see how any good answer can be given that doesn't engage with the question of who gets to author what. You can't answer it just by pointing out that characters can't spontaneously create secret doors, because outside of passwall-type spells everyone agrees with that and there games don't feature that sort of thing.

 

[hawkeyefan]

I thought this was a pretty decent and fair overview of the two styles. You don't often get that.

My reaction as both a player and a DM is that I would vastly prefer the former.

I think one aspect of the latter is that the authoring the fictional setting's notes as the session rolls along is a major payoff for that style. It feels to me like a collaborative crafting of a story. I think in the latter you'd be far more likely to see a disconnect between what the player thinks is cool and what a character played by that player would want. Playing this way means you must devote a good bit of your energy to being a setting author.

For me, I'm more into the game aspects of roleplaying. So I want my skills as an adventurer to be the focus. I want my tactical and strategic planning skills to be challenged. I want to feel like I genuinely overcame a real challenge to be victorious. This synergizes with the character viewpoint I think.

I agree that what one person thinks is fun is different from another person. I'm just stating what I'm after when I roleplay a long term campaign.

Sure, it is a matter of preference, absolutely.

Challenges in Blades compared to D&D are a bit different, that is true, though there is still plenty of overlap. What's interesting for me is that I've found that my group seems to have a much stronger connection to their character and their roleplay is stronger in Blades versus D&D. Yes, there are elements that have them contributing in a more authorial way, beyond the view of their character. But instead of breaking immersion, those instances seem to actually enhance it in other ways.

I think the players feel more a part of creating the world, and as a result their characters feel more like an actual part of that world. There's a kind of sympathetic angle there.

I think this is also enhanced by the XP/reward system in Blades versus D&D. Blades ties XP rewards to more character based things, where as D&D typically offers XP for either gaining treasure or for killing monsters. So as players try to get XP, they're actively defining their characters.

Now, there's nothing to stop players in D&D from diving into their characters and really defining and portraying them....but there's very little in any iteration of D&D that actively supports that, or promotes it in play. I mean, ultimately, if we look at the reward system of any RPG, that's a really strong indicator of what the game is about.

That's just my experience with both games and the same group of players.