Is "GM Agency" A Thing?

[Crimson Longinus]

What if it never comes up again? Why determine it ahead of time? What if you determine what happens with the thieves guild and then the players don’t go back to that city for many months? Is the thieves’ guild still in control? Or has something else happened? Why not just wait until it’s relevant and then introduce it? Then, you’ll have more information on which to make your decisions or make the determinations.

Why commit before you need to?

Because then you know how it is and can take that into account if it would affect anything else. But yeas, ultimately you don't need to determine anything until it would touch or affect something the PCs would know. And if you can BS it on the spot so that everything seems like things had been going on the whole time then fine by me. I just personally find that it is easier to think these things in somewhat real time. But I'm sure in practice many games are combination of "real" living world and an illusion of it. Mine certainly are, I'm not really that committed. Though I'm sure a lot of GMs figure out things in advance much more diligently than me.

Says who?

Um... reality? Logic? I guess there could be a setting where each location was literally an isolated bubble and the PCs were the only people who were capable of travelling between these bubbles but that hardly is a common setup.

Oh well. I’ve been pretty clear. “Living breathing world” and similar phrases are obfuscatory by nature. Seems obvious to me. If you disagree, that’s fine… but maybe say something more than a shrug emoji?

Or don’t!

I mean it is not any more obfuscatory than any gaming jargon and established terms. Such things may not always be the best possible words to describe things, but once they get widely used we're stuck with them. I am not particularly enamoured with the designation, but neither do I find it any more ill defined or misleading than many other terms we use.

In any case, there are few things I find more tiresome than quibbling about semantics.

 

[Emberashh]

GDC Panel on Coherent Storytelling in Open Worlds

Fairly relevant to the ongoing discussion. In particular, this screengrab:

Note that he goes on to relate that in a few of these outcomes, the peasants disappearance culminates in the player potentially finding the peasants chewed up hat somewhere near where the wolf was.

While a very formulaic way of structuring narrative content (necessary for a video game), it illustrates that the overall point of an open-world, when done well, is to provide the player meaningful consequences for their choices, which encompass not just failure but success, and perhaps most importantly, different kinds of success and failure, and indeed, I would personally add that the neutral result is important to foster too. (Which I personally like to foster though NPC Adventurers)

The above though is just a simple example of re-examining how a very simple quest from The Witcher can be redone in a way that better suits the open-world gameplay.

This same sort of thinking can be applied much more broadly in scale, and genuinely has to, all the way up to the maximum scale your game supports.

That means choices like going to one town or another has to result in outcomes the player can meaningfully see and interact with, if they so choose.

But if the players do not choose to do so, then the game needs to hold up its end of the bargain and follow through on that choice, as otherwise, the choice doesn't matter.

As GMs, we have a lot more flexibility than video games do in making those choices matter, without even the need to preemptively write the eventual content, but if we are providing the means to make those choices, by putting it in the players hands where they'll go, then the GM is obligated to follow through on their choices.

It doesn't matter, in fact, whether or not you're trying to tell a story or not. The story will tell itself, ultimately, and the consequences of choices always have to be there even if all the players opt to do is run around and catch butterflies.

Ultimately I think this all goes back to what ive said about trying too hard to tell stories and being obsessed with doing so. By trying so hard to force it, in games that fundamentally want to be sandboxes, one tends to get in their own way, resulting in many-page discussions trying to resolve the self-inflicted problem without recognizing it for what it is.

 

[Lanefan]

I'm not sure when the notion of following "the news" came about, as a cultural practice. My guess would be the 19th century, tracking the emergence of mass literacy. My sense is that it would be quite anachronistic in a FRPG.

There were town criers giving what amounted to news reports long before the 19th century.

But issues of anachronism to one side, I think we can assume that the PCs, as they talk to people, are learning about who grew this year's biggest marrow, whether the local lord broke an arm falling from horseback, etc. Likewise they will know all sorts of other things by direct observation, like who has built a new shed onto their house, and how many kids the publican has, etc.

Indeed; and they'll also hear of more significant events here and elsewhere, which is my point.

But there seems no great benefit in making any of this a focus of play. What interest does it hold?

As @Hussar said, right now it may be raining in a Japanese town that I'd never heard of before his post. But I don't follow that. Why, in a game, would I want the GM to spend time telling me comparable trivia that has no existence or meaning outside the GM's imagination.

And once we get to non-trivial things, like necromancers rendering settlements into ghost towns, or thieves' guilds taking over cities, I stand by my remarks upthread, that this is the GM telling a story which is either irrelevant colour or the entry point to a railroad.

The interest is that it all speaks to there being a bigger world out there than what the PCs are interacting with right now.

Further, colour is never irrelevant; though it can of course be overdone just like anything else. Without fluff and colour the setting is a blank canvas. And, even if those news snippets are intended as possible adventure hooks, why do you immediately jump to the conclusion that it'll be or become a railroad?

 

[Micah Sweet]

There were town criers giving what amounted to news reports long before the 19th century.

Indeed; and they'll also hear of more significant events here and elsewhere, which is my point.

The interest is that it all speaks to there being a bigger world out there than what the PCs are interacting with right now.

Further, colour is never irrelevant; though it can of course be overdone just like anything else. Without fluff and colour the setting is a blank canvas. And, even if those news snippets are intended as possible adventure hooks, why do you immediately jump to the conclusion that it'll be or become a railroad?

Because @pemerton sees a railroad in any situation that isn't ultimately player-authored.

 

[Lanefan]

Yes! Sometimes, when people leave a city, they never go back and then nothing that happens in that city ever affects them again.

So if the game isn’t focused on the city, who cares what’s happening there? If for some reason it becomes relevant again, it can be determined then. There’s no need at all to maintain that kind of information when it’s not immediately relevant to play.

Except that if I every now and then throw a moment's thought at it in between times then when the PCs do go back there I don't have to stop proceedings while I work out how (or if) the place has changed. I can just narrate it, from what I already know.

But until these things somehow become relevant to play, who cares about it? It seems to be only the GM. That’s why this kind of stuff is called solitaire play.

The players can't possibly care about it if they never get the opportunity; and mentioning these things is what provides that opportunity.

If they don't know the monarch died (or don't even know who's on the throne or even if there's a throne at all) there's no possibility for them to care, or react, or in any other way bring that into their roleplay. Ditto if they never know about raiding bandits to the west, or the opening of the new Jupiter temple in town, and so forth.

And that’s fine if that’s something the GM enjoys… I get it; I spent years doing that kind of stuff myself. But as a player, if this stuff keeps coming up in play no matter what we do, it absolutely comes across as the GM trying to force their story. And it comes across that way because that’s what it is.

If having things go on in the setting outside the PCs' immediate purview - and occasionally narrating these things to the players - counts as "the GM forcing a story", there's a problem. And it's not on the GM's side of the screen.

 

[Lanefan]

Note that Arneson and others of the oldest RPG guard also ran campaigns where different groups were adventuring in the same campaign setting and interacting - some things that more modern GMing style would be NPC lead actions are, in that style sometimes the GM presenting the reaction of the setting to actions by Group A into the narrative of Groups B and C...

I do this now; and yes, sometimes what one group of PCs hears about (or in a few memorable cases, has to directly interact with) are the results of what another group has done.

 

[billd91]

So a chart or table is less biased? Or at the very least, can be perceived as such?

From my perspective, if the DM is picking the chart, rolling on the chart, and playing out whatever comes up on the chart, any bias suppression the chart offers (if any), is dwarfed by everything else the DM is doing. I think a lot of people put charts and random number generation on way too high a pedestal in this hobby.

 

[Lanefan]

Not really. Those consequences that you keep talking about are not actual consequences.

They are in the eyes of the inhabitants of the game world, and that ioncludes the PCs.

That’s not a consequence. A civil war after killing the emperor is not the only possibility. There are many. And allowing the players to be involved in determining those things means that they are actually thinking beyond their character and engaging with the broader world.

If they have their PCs stick around and get involved then yes, they can have a hand in determining (or altering) what happens next.

But having the players determine the outcomes and consequences in the metagame means they can all too easily steer those consequences toward their own benefit (and I wouldn't blame them for so doing), while also removing the possibility of unforeseen consequences. The civil war was in this case a largely-unforeseen consequence, and by the time they did get involved (peripherially at best) it was too late.

 

[pemerton]

RPGs are a conversation. GMs and players can just, you know, talk to one another.
"We want to replace the emperor with a democratic form of government, so we are going to kill him."
"Well, there are some other powerful figures that would absolutely love to fill that vaccuum. You could end up causing a civil war."
"Okay, let's figure out who those are and see if we can manipulate one into being on our side, and we will eliminate the others before we kill the Emperor."
"Okay. Give me a Political Schmooze roll."

So here we have the GM establishing the framing, and to a significant extent also the stakes ("civil war"). And then setting up the series of events that must unfold for the players to get what they want: "figuring out" who the other powerful figures are = learning the stuff that the GM has authored, and "manipulating them onto being on our side" = prompting the GM to tell us more stuff about the stuff that the GM authored.

This may make for fun RPGing, or it may not - that's taste.

But the structure of the play is not a matter of taste - it's a more-or-less objective property of the manner in which the fiction is authored. And it is obviously all being GM-driven.

 

[Emberashh]

So here we have the GM establishing the framing, and to a significant extent also the stakes ("civil war"). And then setting up the series of events that must unfold for the players to get what they want: "figuring out" who the other powerful figures are = learning the stuff that the GM has authored, and "manipulating them onto being on our side" = prompting the GM to tell us more stuff about the stuff that the GM authored.

This may make for fun RPGing, or it may not - that's taste.

But the structure of the play is not a matter of taste - it's a more-or-less objective property of the manner in which the fiction is authored. And it is obviously all being GM-driven.

Player agency =/= Player authorship.