Advice for new "story now" GMs

[AbdulAlhazred]

I’ve been on the other side of that as a DM and it’s definitely true. Even with the best of intentions, for any number of reasons, what matters to a character can fall onto the backburner.

Yeah, in fact I have no fault with the 5e GM that I've mostly played with, we've been doing this stuff together for more than 40 years! I think there were just a few cases where she misjudged and there's not a ton of handrails there.

 

[Lanefan]

Harder, I guess, in the sense that you don't have notes telling you what exactly to say?

On the other hand, easier in so far as you don't need to spend so much time writing up notes!

Ahead of time, yes.

During or right after play, though? Different answer, at least if the collective memories at the table match my own.

Reading the excerpt you provided from Tuovinen's work, while it details (in point 1 of the numbered series) that the GM is responsible for keeping track of the backstory there's no mention (or I missed it - always possible) of who is responsible for tracking and-or recording the front-story, i.e. what happens and-or becomes established in the fiction during play.

Now obviously any participant can take on this task, my point is that it's worth mentioning as a task that probably needs doing; particularly if in-fiction occurrences now might somehow turn out to be relevant (and thus get circled back to) real-world years later. And note I'm not talking about anything pre-planed by the GM (or anyone else) here, I'm talking about how the run of play could randomly lead to something seemingly minor now becoming important later:

"<in-character> Of course! That strange guy we saw at the market last summer - that tall fish vendor with the wonky eye that we joked couldn't possibly be a spy because he stood out so much - he was my mother's* eyes-and-ears all along! <out-of-character> But while I-as-player clearly remember the character - how could I forget?! - I've completely forgotten which town we met him in. Was it Cyrax, or Karnos, or Holtby? We were chasing shadows all over the place back then." Ideally someone has record of this so the PCs know where to start looking for this chap.

* - where one of a character's long-term goals is to find out the truth of some very strange rumours about his mother, who he hasn't seen in a decade or more.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

Having read the OP, I both feel more comfortable with how I have run Dungeon World, and more confident than ever that my phrase for this approach, "Values and Issues," is good at capturing the gist of its designed purpose.

You must learn what the characters' (and, by proxy, the players') Values are, so you can put them to the test in Issues, conflicts that may or may not be combats.

 

[pemerton]

@Lanefan

Tuovinen's point about backstory authority, and my comments about the principles that govern that authority (for a "story now" GM), are about actual processes of play. Whereas the question of who if anyone keeps notes, vs relying on memory, is more of a table convention. It's not part of the process of determining the content of the shared fiction.

As for your actual example,

I'm talking about how the run of play could randomly lead to something seemingly minor now becoming important later:

"<in-character> Of course! That strange guy we saw at the market last summer - that tall fish vendor with the wonky eye that we joked couldn't possibly be a spy because he stood out so much - he was my mother's* eyes-and-ears all along! <out-of-character> But while I-as-player clearly remember the character - how could I forget?! - I've completely forgotten which town we met him in. Was it Cyrax, or Karnos, or Holtby? We were chasing shadows all over the place back then." Ideally someone has record of this so the PCs know where to start looking for this chap.

* - where one of a character's long-term goals is to find out the truth of some very strange rumours about his mother, who he hasn't seen in a decade or more.

On its face, this sounds more like an excerpt of play from a GM-plot-heavy game, rather than "story now" play.

But if for some reason the table can't remember some element of past fiction, and it matters, they will have to do what any author does - they will have to make it up. This happened to me last week, when I picked up a Traveller game after a hiatus of close to 3 years. I had notes that I could barely decipher, apparently indicating that two NPCs were present in the scene. The player and I did our best to recall what they were doing there, but had to simply fudge around and gloss over the gaps in our memories.

 

[Maxperson]

Lanefan, this position makes no sense. I’ve seen it so, so many times on here and every time I see it I just can’t understand what is happening in the gears of someone’s mind to produce this, rubber stamp it, then send it out in the world.

System Matters isn’t some indie, hippie dippie puffery that reflexively needs to be pushed back against “because culture war.” It’s an organizing principle for most everything that just so happens to apply exactly to TTRPGs. And what you’ve written above (and have written before) is an exact expression of System Matters!

Let’s review:

* System Doesn’t Matter!

* I don’t like this aspect of this game’s engine! So System Doesn’t Matter (huh?)!

* I’m going to sub out this aspect of this game’s system and bolt in/on my own widget/process! So System Doesn’t Matter (huh?)!

* Voila! Now the game engine works the way I want with my new widget/process in place! So System Doesn’t Matter (huh?)!


What in the world? How does that follow? Sub out TTRPGs and do the same exercise with virtually anything else and see if the latter sentence follows from the former.

System obviously matters and so says the person expressing the above!

System absolutely matters. D&D's major strength is that it was built to handle pretty much any playstyle you want to use, and do them decently well to very well depending on the style. It was made to be customized.

A well designed story now system, though, is going to have every mechanic and tool focused on that one playstyle, so it will do that style fantastically.

 

[pemerton]

Is there any RPG that is worse for "story now" RPGing than AD&D? Off the top of my head, I'm not sure I can think of one.

I know that RM is no worse, and probably better. Ron Edwards cut his teeth on Champions. GURPS, RQ and other "purist-for-system" simulationist RPGs would all seem to offer the same general possibilities here: loving detail in character build, the prospect of high stakes and drama within at least a limited domain (combat), and a general focus on "seriousness". RPGs like Pendragon, The One Ring, Ars Magica, Vampire and similar would probably fit in here too.

Perhaps a case could be made the CoC is worse, because GM-driven stakes and deprotagonisation are so inherent to CoC play.

Anyway, though "vanilla narrativism" is possible both with AD&D and RM - I report this from experience - these days I wouldn't recommend them. What are they bringing to the table that something like Torchbearer (in lieu of AD&D) or Burning Wheel (in lieu of RM) is not? Or, if you're really into the D&Disms, 4e D&D?

I don't deny having a nostalgic fondness for AD&D, with its colourful class distinctions, spell lists and magic items. But as a system it is so rickety, at nearly every point - framing, outside a fairly narrow dungeon or hex-crawl context; establishing stakes (save-or-die extends this issue even to combat); resolving action declarations (other than attacks, saving throws, and dealing with doors and similar portals) - that trying to do anything with it beyond what Arneson and Gygax designed it for seems pretty fraught to me.

 

[Nikosandros]

Over the years, I have streched AD&D (for which I have a great and largely irrational love) to do a lot of things, but narrativism is certainly not one of them...

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

System absolutely matters. D&D's major strength is that it was built to handle pretty much any playstyle you want to use, and do them decently well to very well depending on the style. It was made to be customized.

A well designed story now system, though, is going to have every mechanic and tool focused on that one playstyle, so it will do that style fantastically.

It isn't about 'mechanics' per se (though perhaps this is a semantic argument). Its about GAME STRUCTURE. D&D is a game in which a GM states, based on preexisting prepped material, or strict extrapolations thereof, what the character's are experiencing. Their options are strictly based on this situation and the setting it is embedded in, without regard to anything related to the character itself at all. Players have no authority over, or even signalling mechanism, to determine what this focus is. Moreover the core 'interact with the world' mechanics are drawn straight from a classic dungeon crawl paradigm in which the story comes after the tossing of dice, and the players source of input is purely tactical and logistical in nature. The reward system is totally focused on this sort of performance. Later editions, with their 'trad'/'neo-trad' kind of aspirations are thoroughly incoherent designs for this reason, though 2e at least makes a nod in the direction of reward being tied to RP.

It would be pretty hard to invent an RPG that is less endowed with traits that allow for Story Now play than D&D and still be a serious RPG. It would require drastic changes to the rules structure, at least equivalent to writing 4e.

The whole magic system, as just an example, is entirely against you. Its fixed description spells take no account of character at all. The attached resource allocation system is all wrong for the sort of play that a game like DW is aimed at. You're going to need to scrap that entirely, exactly as 4e did.

Yes, you can play 'low myth D&D' to a degree. However, the system is going to constantly trip you up. My advice is don't do it. Any imagined 'advantage' will evaporate immediately when you play simply due to the fact that its a lot more work to get around the issues than it is to simply adopt a system, like DW, that does what you want and tells you how to run such a game.

 

[innerdude]

D&D's major strength is that it was built to handle pretty much any playstyle you want to use

Umm . . . I'm not sure I'd accept this claim at face value. More along the lines of, "D&D can possibly handle playstyles other than gamist dungeoncrawling if enough of the subsystems are revamped, and the GM is willing to train himself/herself in highly specific techniques and principles, but the result is still, by and large, going to look and feel like 'classic' or 'traditional' D&D as you know it."

The fact that people use D&D for more things than gamist, wargame-like dungeoncrawling is more a testament to the culture of GM-ing that grew up alongside it than the game itself.

Though anecdotal, my own personal experience bears this out. As I've mentioned in other threads, "Classic" and "Traditional" D&D GM-ing were the only GM-ing cultures to which I was ever exposed between 1985 and 2012, had little real conception of the alternatives until 2017, and didn't fully understand or "grok" Story Now as a playstyle until 2021.

 

[Maxperson]

Umm . . . I'm not sure I'd accept this claim at face value. More along the lines of, "D&D can possibly handle playstyles other than gamist dungeoncrawling if enough of the subsystems are revamped, and the GM is willing to train himself/herself in highly specific techniques and principles, but the result is still, by and large, going to look and feel like 'classic' or 'traditional' D&D as you know it."

The fact that people use D&D for more things than gamist, wargame-like dungeoncrawling is more a testament to the culture of GM-ing that grew up alongside it than the game itself.

Though anecdotal, my own personal experience bears this out. As I've mentioned in other threads, "Classic" and "Traditional" D&D GM-ing were the only GM-ing cultures to which I was ever exposed between 1985 and 2012, had little real conception of the alternatives until 2017, and didn't fully understand or "grok" Story Now as a playstyle until 2021.

You don't need to revamp a single thing to avoid gamism/or gamist dungeoncrawling. And my anecdotal experience is far different from yours. Perhaps it's geographical. I'm in Los Angeles and many of my D&D groups have involved player/DM's who are writers, directors, actors, voice actors, MOCAP performers, stunt men and others in the Hollywood industry.