What is the point of GM's notes?

pemerton said:

Appendix I of Gygax's DMG has a lot of random charts, including one for condiments in a kitchen. But I think it omits haberdashery.

Click to expand...

So I took a look. First at the general furnishings and the closest thing I could find would be the wardrobe, but that may or may not have anything in it. There was even a butt on the list. Then I wandered over to magic user furnishings and found spatulas, tweezers and stuff animals(so you could find Elmo), but still no socks. Then it was on to religious furnishings where I saw cassocks, cloth, robes and vestments, but no footwear was to be found. Then I saw misc. utensils and personal items and thought, "Aha! It has to be here." Alas, while it had such things as earspoons, wigs and thongs(wonder what they did with those), there were still no socks in sight. Then at last I got to clothing and footwear and this is what I found. Boots, hose, leggings, sandals, slippers, and even stockings, but socks seemed to have been omitted.

It seems you were right!

Bedrockgames said:

I can't see how this isn't bad. It is almost always used as a pejorative in gaming circles.

Click to expand...

This. They've been used pejoratively in virtually every thread that I've seen them come up in. You can defend anything. Simply being defended doesn't keep it from being pejorative.

AnotherGuy said:

Yes, tone poisoning the waters of conversation was what I was answering.
Would have been nice if someone had made a comment about my proposals.

Click to expand...

Your proposals have the negative of being very close to old Forge terminology, and so are either already posed to start an argument (lots of people, for good reason in my opinion, dislike the Forge) or are confusing due to this.

As for tone poisoning, this isn't something that analysis should be concerned with. It's a dodge to avoid discussion, not an engagement of discussion. You can tell, because many in this thread use these terms to describe their own gaming. Even @pemerton has spent many posts talking about how his play in Traveler has a lot of playing to find out what's in the GM's notes. I'm running a railroad, with no protagonism. If these terms are actually meant to be intentionally slanted, it's an odd argument that the people advocating for them are using them to cast their own play in the assumed bad light.

Ovinomancer said:

Your proposals have the negative of being very close to old Forge terminology, and so are either already posed to start an argument (lots of people, for good reason in my opinion, dislike the Forge) or are confusing due to this.

As for tone poisoning, this isn't something that analysis should be concerned with. It's a dodge to avoid discussion, not an engagement of discussion. You can tell, because many in this thread use these terms to describe their own gaming. Even @pemerton has spent many posts talking about how his play in Traveler has a lot of playing to find out what's in the GM's notes. I'm running a railroad, with no protagonism. If these terms are actually meant to be intentionally slanted, it's an odd argument that the people advocating for them are using them to cast their own play in the assumed bad light.

Click to expand...

Whether you @pemerton intend them to be so or not, a great many people perceive them to be pejorative. You're going to continue to get a lot of arguments just like with the Forge terminology if you continue to use them.

Ovinomancer said:

As for tone poisoning, this isn't something that analysis should be concerned with. It's a dodge to avoid discussion, not an engagement of discussion.

Click to expand...

no it isn’t a dodge because we have also engaged the discussion (taking pains at times to point to the premises and assumptions we find faulty and taking pains to offer a detailed explanation of the process as we see it. It would be a dodge if all we did was critique the tone. And it would be a dodge if we didn’t offer up the above. But more than that, the tone is carrying assumptions into the discussion that are faulty. The tone of certainty here: where ‘because analysis’ is used to not only justify insulting tone but used as a means to assert the truth of your position and to claim ownership of logic and reason in the discussion. No one here is side stepping analysis. We are engaged in analysis too and rejecting many of your conclusions (via our analysis).

hawkeyefan said:

I wouldn't say that a GM's notes somehow preclude discovery on their part. I think that there are things they will discover through play based on their notes. I think that's something that can happen in play in even the most railroaded "GM's fiction as game" situation.

Having said that, my experience has been that such discoveries are more of the "Elminster's stockings are mauve" variety, where as in games where I rely less on my notes, it's more about something like "Elminster's an awful person" or "Elminster can't be relied upon", something along those lines.

Generally speaking, of course.

Click to expand...

I've had realizations dawn on me at pretty much any point you care to name from thinking about prep to writing prep to running a session--some of them have been the results of players asking questions, others have just been from seeing one or more connections. (Such as the one that came up in a different thread about an NPC suddenly needing to be wearing a leg brace, because I needed him to be a retired adventurer.)

pemerton said:

For the players to self-consciously change the setting there does need to be some shared conception of what the setting is. But I don't think that requires the sort of GM-side prep work that I (at least - maybe others would agree with me) would associate with a sandbox.

Click to expand...

Yeah. My point was that the setting needed to be established, not that the GM needed to establish it. I do the setting work in my campaigns, because I enjoy doing it (and because I didn't particularly enjoy the setting/s in game/s where some of the players at my tables contributed) but I wasn't attempting to universalize that. Other than playstyle-preferences, I don't think there's much daylight between us, here.

prabe said:

I've had realizations dawn on me at pretty much any point you care to name from thinking about prep to writing prep to running a session--some of them have been the results of players asking questions, others have just been from seeing one or more connections. (Such as the one that came up in a different thread about an NPC suddenly needing to be wearing a leg brace, because I needed him to be a retired adventurer.)

Click to expand...

Yeah, I think that this kind of thing can happen at any time. My preference is that I discover something during play along with my players. I mean, the game is a group activity so my gut would say for such discoveries to be made with the group, rather than aline while prepping. But that’s just a preference, and I do think these kinds of things can happen at any time.

I really love when that happens, when something in play just clicks...someone makes what seems like a casual remark, but it inspires a thought and suddenly a few elements of the fiction just click into place in such a way that it seems to be by design.

In my 5E campaign, I ran the PCs through Curse of Strahd. I tweaked some things to fit it into our campaign...there was more of a reason for the PCs to actively go to Barovia and there were rivals who also had goals there. One of the PCs, a kind of shared PC to help round out the party, was a female diviner wizard. It wasn’t until play got to Barovia that it occurred to me that she was actually of Vistani heritage. This explained her divination powers and then many other plot points kind of plugged into that. Just like that some vague ideas I had came sharply into focus, and the thrust of the fiction shifted accordingly.

I love those moments. I find them leas common when playing a game like D&D than I do with PbtA or Blades in the Dark. Such discoveries are more frequent and usually of more importance in those games precisely because less is being decided by the GM ahead of time.

prabe said:

Have you ever written fiction, aside from gaming?

Click to expand...

Not for a long time.

prabe said:

The GM is discovering or realizing (or I suppose composing) what's in the world in the same way a free-writing novelist does, approximately.

<snip>

-at least one writer I respect has compared it to being a paleontologist on a dig, and that makes sense to me, though it wasn't exactly my experience of it.

<snip>

I think this is where our respective ways of thinking about (and possibly experiencing) what happens at a TRPG table are different enough that bridging the gap is difficult.

Click to expand...

I don't write fiction, but I write professionally. It's the most important part of my job (I'm a humanities academic). I compose my work. I make decisions - just the other day I was two or three pages into one section of a paper when I realised that the structure I'd adopted wasn't working, and that a different structure was required.

A palaeontologist on a dig may be able to choose in what order to proceed, based on reasons; but is not deciding what it is that gets revealed.

Once a composer of fiction has conceived of an idea, there may be reasons that govern or constrain in what way it is set out, comparable to the reasons that govern the structure of an argument. In the latter case at least I know there is not typically one unique solution, though only one solution may occur to me as the writer.

There is certainly more than one idea that might be conceived of.

Maxperson said:

Whether you @pemerton intend them to be so or not, a great many people perceive them to be pejorative. You're going to continue to get a lot of arguments just like with the Forge terminology if you continue to use them.

Click to expand...

So make a counter point beyond “That term is pejorative”. Do you have any actual play example you can share which displays how a GM’s notes or a GM’s prepped material somehow enhances play? Or where it supports protagonism?

@pemerton has described some of his own play in this way. I would say a large part of my play fits this description. Other parts...particularly with games beside D&D...would not fit this description. I can provide examples.

I think it would really help if we moved beyond the dislike of the term and just started talking about how GM notes/prep/world can facilitate play and how it can restrict play.

prabe said:

pemerton said:

I've often posted that one important aspect of RPGing is that players declare actions for their PCs that oblige the GM to narrate more stuff. What do we see? is a paradigm example but there are many others.

Click to expand...

GMing that way, I mean, would feel more like reading a book. I mean, playing a TRPG isn't a lot like reading a book, and neither really is GMing one. I guess that your description feels more ... rote, than my experience of it is. Like writing from an outline (something I've never, ever been much good at).

Click to expand...

Well, in my Traveller game, once the players had established the requisite fictional positioning for their PCs I did read from a book:

Though with some ad-libbing as I posted not far upthread.

When I have notes written down and I refer to them either literally or by recollection, my narration of the setting or situation as prompted by the players' action declarations for their PCs is rather reading-from-a-book-like.

In my Prince Valiant session that I posted about upthread, when the squire PC tried to go past Sir Lionheart after the latter refused to joust, I had to decide how Sir Lionheart would respond. I did read from a book to ascertain Sir Lionheart's disposition (and I quoted the extract upthread). I then applied the action resolution rules.

I know there is some RPGing where a player who hoped to be knighted by a NPC would not obtain it via the sort of action resolution process I described but rather would be expected to ascertain what the NPC expects or wants to have done in order to grant such a benefit. We've seen discussions on this board, of a similar sort, around the hypothetical Chamberlain and about the literal mayor (was it?) of the village in Curse of Strahd. In that sort of RPGing there is the same reference to notes or to the recollection of notes or to a conception of the fiction to work out what the NPC wants - which is not too different as a cognitive process from me establishing my conception of what Sir Lionheart wants - and then there is a sequence of play in which the players engaged with and discover that conception.

The closest parallel to that that I've GMed recently was the players deciphering the controls in one of the rooms in Shadows; though I think I shortcutted it a little more than the module envisages as it is not all that interesting a puzzle.