niklinna
satisfied?
This is interesting. I hadn't thought of dealing with conflicting ideals as violating the character concept, but I can see now how somebody might look at it that way. You want it both ways, but you can't have it both ways!
Approaches to prep in RPGing - GMs, players, and what play is *about*
As a dm and a player i've often seen the player doesn't take the bait happen. The problem is the way the DM sees the game and the way the individual player sees the game is often different. It's not always players being uncooperative sometimes it's just two different people that see two different things in the same game.
The RPG does not matter, this is universal. It shows one of the huge flaws in the whole character thing. What if the player does not care?
So sure the player wrote down some character stuff as the GM told them too. Then the GM add that to the setting, and attempts to make some sort of story using the players stuff.
And the player does not care and they are not interested.
And your answer is to stop the game? Force the other players to sit there and do nothing? And have a special talk with the one player to fix things?
This makes for a horrible time.
Golden Bee
Explorer
RE The original topic:
In my experience, the best way to make sure a player is unavail is to prep an adventure around them.
I’ve been running ensemble, drop in drop out Pulp in Fate for months and months now. The expectation is amazing circumstances and action setpieces.
I run every other week, and come to the table with a few conflicts how vague ideas how the players may move between them. (In a recent adventure, I planned a dockworker strike, an all-out brawl at a dancehall, and an encounter with an enraged whale.) Since the game is set in 1935, setting is mostly research; without research, I wouldn’t have known about Jamaican labor unrest in the period, or the super fascinating Marcus Garvey, who the players met.
But my prep is mostly indifferent who shows up, because the players are a group of people who go on adventures, battle injustice and if all possible get paid doing it. It’s easy enough to plug people in, or players to do that themselves, during the opening minutes of play. (Someone who attends owes a favor to an NPC, the spy the group's tracking is old friends with someone…)
But there is a magical antipathy between going full player-centric and having that person show up.
In my experience, the best way to make sure a player is unavail is to prep an adventure around them.
I’ve been running ensemble, drop in drop out Pulp in Fate for months and months now. The expectation is amazing circumstances and action setpieces.
I run every other week, and come to the table with a few conflicts how vague ideas how the players may move between them. (In a recent adventure, I planned a dockworker strike, an all-out brawl at a dancehall, and an encounter with an enraged whale.) Since the game is set in 1935, setting is mostly research; without research, I wouldn’t have known about Jamaican labor unrest in the period, or the super fascinating Marcus Garvey, who the players met.
But my prep is mostly indifferent who shows up, because the players are a group of people who go on adventures, battle injustice and if all possible get paid doing it. It’s easy enough to plug people in, or players to do that themselves, during the opening minutes of play. (Someone who attends owes a favor to an NPC, the spy the group's tracking is old friends with someone…)
But there is a magical antipathy between going full player-centric and having that person show up.
Just to be clear, this is not the approach that the OP to this thread describes. The OP to this thread describes Character => Situation => Setting.
You are describing Character => Setting => Situation. I would mostly associate that approach with what is often called neo-trad play. If it's Setting => Character => Setting => Situation, then it might also be a form of more trad play that @Campbell is often an advocate of.
I don't agree that the RPG doesn't matter. If the RPG system has no way of bridging from Character to Situation without referencing Setting, then there will be problems with Charcter => Situation => Setting, as per my post 80 upthread.
It's not a flaw in a game that not everyone is interested in it. I love backgammon. I mostly play it with one of my kids, who also enjoys it. I love Burning Wheel. I mostly play it with one of my friends, who also enjoys it.
My kid doesn't play Burning Wheel. My friend doesn't play backgammon. That doesn't mean that either game is flawed.
As I said in the OP, I think "sandbox vs module" debates are resting on a premise that Setting=> Situation (and perhaps also that Setting => Character).
The OP is talking about not giving setting this sort of primacy. And obviously is not focused solely or even principally upon D&D play.
I don't think the sort of play you are describing here - highly curated/produced actual play, where the GM creates bespoke character arcs - is Character => Situation => Setting.
AnotherGuy
Hero
This is how I imagine those games to be, pretty intensive for the DM in the moment during play. As a DM who uses the traditional prep method, the other way sounds pretty daunting.
Manbearcat
Legend
I have very little doubt you would be able to pull it off and become at least proficient in the headspace and managing the various techniques to pull it off.
Like anything one hasn't done, it looks and sounds daunting...until it isn't!
In late 2019 I had to give up basketball (I was 42 then, I'm 45 now). That was very difficult. I also gave up cross-fitting (much less difficult to give that up, but I had been a weightlifter to one degree or another since I was 16). I had to replace these very important physical outlets with some other physical discipline. Both my rotator cuffs are wrecked as is my left labrum from BJJ and pitching (right rotator cuff). I have absolutely zero background as a gymnast and while I'm not afraid of heights...I don't love them...so....hey, why not take up climbing!
3.3 years (and a torn left biceps and flexor tendon and a broken hook of hamate on my right hand...costing me about 1 year total of lost time) later and climbing (bouldering without rope and lead climbing with rope) has gone from daunting to putting out just north of intermediate climbing facility (which I doubt I will ever ascend much beyond...but I'm at peace with my plateau).
If a totally broken down 45 year old body with no background in a discipline can figure out a way to go from totally daunted to mediocre in a few years, I'm more than confident you can get there with Story Now GMing, my friend!
AbdulAlhazred
Legend
I think one of, maybe THE, major difference between what you see in narrative games and what you see in games that focus on situation/setting/meta-plot is that in the former the NATURE of the character is the crux of the game. In games of the later sort this is never a fundamental issue. Instead the issues focus on the external life of the character, what they do, what physically happens to them, etc. So you see, for example, a 5e D&D character, which is pretty much a fixed thing. Even if you actually do something with BIFTs, you have a class, you have those character traits, and nothing really changes. You get basically one chance to further define your character at 3rd level, and that's pretty much it. The mechanics of what and how you affect the external world is what the game is all about. Its not that some sort of changes are forbidden, nor that they never happen, they simply aren't relevant to anything that the game deals with.
OTOH, while we haven't played Stonetop yet, it is VERY clear that who each character is, in a larger internal sense, how they think about the world, about Stonetop (the town), each other, and their own character abilities, is going to be pretty important. Even if you play in a pretty shallow way WRT your character's personality and such, you will at least have to face up to the implications of your character's actions WRT Stonetop! Every character is highly connected to the community and if you were to just play your character like a D&D adventurer taking treasure and power for themselves, etc. I am pretty sure that will create some pressures on you. Likewise any other way you portray your character, and things like your instinct is going to actually do stuff in game.
Further developing my theme from earlier posts, I think this represents 2 distinct ways a game can be 'character driven'. A sandbox D&D game is, for instance, character driven in that the PCs make all the decisions. Where do we go? What dungeon do we loot? Do we kill the dragon, or open the Forbidden Gate? And that may evolve into "I built a castle, I tamed the lands, I killed off the evil giants" etc. The GM may even be making up some of this stuff specifically to aim it at these PCs. OTOH, while that element exists to a degree in, say, Blades in the Dark, a lot of what the game is about is "what is the cost of this vice I have?" or "Do I kill my friends to get ahead?" etc. which are all fundamentally internal to the character. BitD can be played by people that largely ignore the internal, and D&D can be played by players who spend half their time dealing with their PC's internal demons or whatever. Its just more about how the game is focused, and that impacts the sorts of techniques, like PREP that we are going to want to use, and how we are going to want to use them.
AbdulAlhazred
Legend
But as I said when I responded to @bloodtide, there's no 'taking the bait' in a game like Dungeon World. You just do stuff, and stuff happens. You say "no I won't rush in and try to find out who killed my clan members." OK, that IS AN ACTION. DW cannot 'grind to a halt', because there's no particular direction it is going in. The mechanics are just literally "every time the players don't act, the GM turns up the heat." (I guess technically the GM doesn't always have to make the situation more charged/dangerous/etc. but they mostly will). Pretty soon the PCs will have to do something. In BT's example I said the GM might make a soft move, revealing something unwelcome. If the PCs STILL just stand there, then maybe next the town watch comes up and decides they're acting suspiciously by hanging around the scene trying not to be noticed and arrest them. They STILL don't do anything, they're framed for murder! They STILL don't do anything, they're convicted of murder and sentenced to death. They STILL don't do anything, a guard offers to let them escape! I mean, there's simply no end to the moves the GM can keep making, and no end to the amount of heat he can put on the party. Sooner or later they WILL act, I assure you.
