Player has authored a goal finding her sister that has been taken by a fiendish cult. Or did she join them? Whilst infiltrating the cults hideout, several things go awry, and would, if game rules were strictly followed lead to the sister perishing before he had a chance to talk to her. But GM uses subtle force to prevent this from happening. The sister survives, the character confronts her, dramatic reveals and some hard decisions follow.
This is not to say that the sister dying would have necessarily ruined things, it would have been a different sort of story. But if players are hyped about certain things coming to pass, I think it is fine for GM to use their tricks to help that to happen.
Sure. But sometimes player input might result the game stalling and nothing interesting happening. Or something happening that the players actually didn't want to happen. And I don't think it is wrong for GM to nudge things into more interesting or preferable directions on such occasions.
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Let's say this is the scenario. The player whose sister is missing is really invested to this storyline. It is the driving force of their character. This is important to the player. The characters infiltrate the cultist hideout. The PC's sister has joined the cult, but the characters don't know this, they just think that the cult has kidnapped her. Though they suspect things might not be quite as they seem. Also they have one new character. One player's character died in the previous session, and they're now playing a hot-headed fire sorcerer. Before this (and when the GM designed the scenario) the party had no AoE to speak off. They have a clever plan to get in unnoticed, but due a series of unlucky rolls and perhaps some bad decisions they get discovered just as they're about to enter the main chamber where the cultists are gathered for some sort of ritual. Unbeknownst to characters, one of the hooded cultist is the PCs sister. Some characters, including the one looking for his sister would want to negotiate, but the sorcerer, assuming that battle is about to ensue and seeing several cultist clumped together decides to take out as many of them as they can and unleashes a fireball. This fireball is powerful enough to kill any cultist who fails their save. Let's also assume that it is an established rule in this group that only PCs get death saves, and any non-PC who runs out of hit points is dead.
Assuming the GM has predetermined which cultist is the sister and she is in the fireball's area, is it force if they fudge her saving throw so that she survives?
It seems to me that there are multiple things going on here that could cause problems.
First, the GM is using pre-authored notes as an important component of action resolution - eg the presence of the sister in the AoE of the fireball - but does not want that prep to be binding.
Second, the GM is bringing high-stakes material into play - again, the presence of the sister in the scene - but is not revealing those stakes to the players - who therefore risk killing the sister without knowing it.
Third, the player is performing action declarations, like fireballing in the general vicinity of where they expect the sister to be, and wants a guaranteed outcome of a reunion with the sister.
No wonder it's a fiasco!
There are really straightforward GMing techniques that can avoid (1) and (2), and also encourage players to reduce the sort of hold that is found in (3). One is to prioritise
situation over backstory. Another is to use the AW framework of soft moves before hard ones. In this example, a soft move could be anything from a sign or clue that the sister has joined the cult, to actually catching a glimpse of her face beneath the cowl of her hood. Then the players would know what is at stake when the cult discovers them.
If the sorcerer nevertheless proceeds to fireball, the risk to the sister is on that participant, not the GM.
I'd prefer that situation to be set up a bit differently so that if we failed to find the maguffin, then there were other things to do. Either other ways to engage the path we were on with some kind of consequence for not finding the maguffin (perhaps we have to find some other clue or information and as a result we've lost time, and so a threat has increased or timetable has progressed, etc.) or else some other thing to do.
Alternatively, in the way you've described it, I'd rather the GM just let us find the maguffin rather than leave it to chance that we find it. If i's necessary in order for the game to not grind to a halt, why risk that happening? Just say we found it after searching for a while. Maybe have a roll determine how much time is needed to find it, and then you can advance related factors accordingly.
The whole notion of the Macguffin makes me wary. Why are the PCs hunting for this thing that is nothing but a plot device?
I know D&D modules are full of this stuff. It is a marker of very strong GM control of the fiction: what the situations will be; what the stakes will be; what the protagonist goals will be; and often, as in this immediate discussion, what the outcomes will be.
The way Edwards describes story before games seems consistent with how adventure paths and pre-written scenarios are meant to play out, in that it is defined as "meaning the basic course of events is pre-conceived and treated as something to be implemented" in which the GM is responsible for such things as "Sequence and climax," "Staying on track," "Staying on schedule." So the experience of a kind of reactive sandbox that
@FrogReaver and I are attempting to describe may fall under the description of "story before," but strike me anyway as quite different than the type of game Edwards describes here. He doesn't really talk about it much here except a bit at the end, but I would have thought that sandbox-style games (including the classic hexcrawls and megadungeons) would correspond more to "story after."
Perhaps. I don't think I've expressed an opinion, have I, on whether your or
@FrogReaver's RPGing is "story before" or "story after".
That said, I think a hexcrawl is more likely to produce "story after" than a sandbox where the PCs encounter "quest givers" like the faction who will provide the information if the PCs raid the outpost. To me that has quite a hint of "story before". Likewise in some of FrogReaver's hypotheticals about how various sorts of action declarations might lead to encounters with Orcs or similar enemies. That also has quite a hint of "story before".
I agree with you that sandbox games correspond more to "story after".
As I've said, I think it depends on the details of the sandbox. A sandbox in which players move their PCs among plots and factions with the expectation of play being that the PCs will get caught up in these seems to me to have a hint of "story before". It would be "story after" in
@Malmuria's example of the PCs sitting in a tavern while the GM narrates all the action of the NPCs around them.
This is
Edwards on "story after":
between sessions or at the start of a new one, the players learn how what happened last time generated plot events, which are now the context for whatever actions they might take this time. The point is that play itself doesn’t make a story “on the ground,” but provides raw material for selective interpretation and use by one person afterward, the results of which are then folded into the next round of play. . . .
in playing this way, appreciation of the setting may well be a front-and-center, experiential aspect. I haven’t been sympathetic to the idea but it may have quite functional applications given that priority.
I think at least some metaplot heavy FR-ish or Planescape RPGing must look like this.
If the factions etc are
situation but not quest-givers, then maybe we have neither "story before" nor "story after" but "story now". The reason I've been assuming we don't is because
@FrogReaver and
@Malmuria seem to be contrasting their RPGing with story now, rather than presenting it as an instance of it.
best practices for gms: build your situations around the goals of the characters, present opportunities for them to impact the situation; and for players: be proactive
Best practice: don't be constrained by your prep.
My view on this is very much what I posted in the earlier thread:
I think it can help in many discussions, both about D&D but even moreso when branching beyond D&D, to recognise that these difference are possible, and that there is no single way of approaching the authorship of the fiction that is identical to RPGing as such.
If I'm GMing Burning Wheel, then your suggested best practices make sense. If I'm GMing Moldvay Basic, then I don't think they're best practices at all.
