What is the point of GM's notes?

[Doug McCrae]

A call for submissions. Can anyone find me a definition of gamist that has anything to do with TTRPGs that isn't connect to the GNS term? I didn't find any, but perhaps my google-fu is weak.

I can't provide any I'm afraid. I can only say I've seen people using it in the second sense on rpg message boards in the last few years.

 

[tetrasodium]

I'm curious about whether players can engage in observation like this in Blades? What would happen? I'm very fuzzy on these non-traditional games, but here's what I imagine based on following some of these conversations. The player can't just fish for information with no outcome in mind. So instead of saying, "I observe the guards to see if I notice anything useful," they could say, "I secretly observe the guards and discover a gap in their patrol route which I then exploit." Something like that?

When I've been a player in a traditional game, a significant amount of the fun has been in gathering information. Which seems to be an effort to transferring as much of the GM's conception to the players as possible before declaring a high-stakes action.

I can't answer for BitD, but I can for fate, it makes wish look limited.
That could place an aspect on the square they patrol like "under bob's watch" which could be used for a few mathy things that would take system knowledge or "declare a story detail" , this could be anything from one of the guards was at that shady auction a few weeks back to the guards are given an aspect like "[armed with only nonlethal melee weapons]". At the same time though, the gm can tag the aspect bob created on himself by oing that watch to have someone sneak up behind him or even say stuff like "because your so focused on those guards you miss this other important thing going on down the street" Shared narrative games are a very different beast, but there is a lot of great stuff you can learn from them as a GM, here is a pretty good thread about fate's shared narrative I found on google

 

[Lanefan]

I've honestly only heard "living world" as an approach as opposed to a goal when discussing in this thread, and a couple of others like it. I don't think it's so ubiquitous that its meaning is apparent.

It's a goal, for sure; and one that goes all the way back to the 1e DMG (if not further) where the idea of "bringing a world to life" was presented. The means and methods of approaching/achieving said goal don't really themselves have a name, so "living world" by default kinda has to cover those too.

 

[Lanefan]

Dude, try not to be a jerk. It's a GNS term, which I mentioned, and has no currency as a term outside that. Perhaps you should go back and read my entire post instead of just identifying the word Forge and losing your mind. Just a thought...

Capital-g Gamist is the Forge term. Small-g gamist is the term people used in pre-Forge days to refer to anything done purely for game-mechanical reasons, which is how I for one still use the term today.

 

[hawkeyefan]

It's a goal, for sure; and one that goes all the way back to the 1e DMG (if not further) where the idea of "bringing a world to life" was presented. The means and methods of approaching/achieving said goal don't really themselves have a name, so "living world" by default kinda has to cover those too.

Sure, the idea of a LW as a goal is something I think has been around for a long time, and some exampels have just been provided. But as a description of the method to achieving that, I don't know. I am sure some folks use it that way, but it seems poorly suited.

 

[Fenris-77]

Capital-g Gamist is the Forge term. Small-g gamist is the term people used in pre-Forge days to refer to anything done purely for game-mechanical reasons, which is how I for one still use the term today.

So are you saying that there are two very different definitions, or are you saying that the GNS definition is a more specific version of the general use one?

 

[pemerton]

No. They can learn anything the DM makes up. Existence outside the PC bubble is the key element.

Is learning anything the DM makes up the same thing as learning the content of the GM's notes? If there's a difference I can't see it.

The PC bubble is the sphere that sort of surrounds the PCs. The part where things happen wherever they go and they are central to pretty much everything.

<snip>

The possibility for them to miss the event is one of the key elements to the event existing outside of the PC bubble.

An event in the gameworld that the players don't know about and that is not relevant to the "PC bubble" - which I take to mean the framing of situations and resolution of them during the course of play, as the players declare actions for their PCs - seems the very definition of setting solitaire!

 

[pemerton]

• The purpose is the 'immersion' of the GM in their setting, not of the players in the game

I think this relates, very much, to the notion that when the "living world" GM is improvising, s/he is extrapolating from prepared material.

 

[pemerton]

The fiction is the shared experience of the characters and GM. Is this right?

No. I use the word fiction to refer to the imaginative content that is shared by the participants in the game. In other words, the stuff that they make up together.

I believe @hawkeyefan is using it in the same way.

Do you suppose that if ten people took turns extending a story that it would be as coherent as something authored carefully over time? As I'm building my world, prior to campaign start, I can decide something doesn't fit and change it after I've done more work.

I'm not sure how storytelling fits in, Who in this thread thinks that the goal of RPGing is for anyone to tell a story?

Part of the beauty of RPGing is that the fiction isn't very extensively edited at all!

 

[Fenris-77]

So can someone remind we why we're now talking about GM immersion? Never mind whether that's possible or not in the way that player immersion is, why are we even considering it as idea? As a goal of living world play? I find that idea faintly ridiculous, but maybe I'm missing something....