Approaches to prep in RPGing - GMs, players, and what play is *about*

[niklinna]

Oh for sure. If players are so used to controlling everything about their character’s emotional state and sense pf self and the like… if the player’s concept of character is inviolate without their approval… it can be jarring to play a game where that’s not the case.

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!

 

[nevin]

Why do you always assume players are so uncooperative? What kind of players do you have because this is not typical.

The player has set their personal stakes, passions, goals, etc. Why would they then ignore the hooks?

You have a completely wrong idea of this game style if you believe players can just announce what they want in the game and get it. No one would play this way!

Pemerton has posted a ton of play reports. Have you read any of them? Even if this kind of play is not for you, it'll at least give a clearer picture of what's going on, in terms of game style.

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.

 

[bloodtide]

I'd suggest that both player and GM work on tightening things up!

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]

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.

 

[pemerton]

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.

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.

The RPG does not matter, this is universal.

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 shows one of the huge flaws in the whole character thing. What if the player does not care?

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.

 

[pemerton]

So what I get from all that is Setting is the foundation and the players change it as they play making it thier version of the setting.

It's also the difference between running a sandbox game in a DND Setting and running a module. I think most of the arguments where people cant seem to agree on what balances out the game are people who run sandboxes vs mostly modules when it comes to DND

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.

Yeah, to some degree, isn't the process of play orthogonal to this discussion? Look at something like highly produced actual play.

<snip>

All of those generally include some pretty heavily character driven stories, to the point that there's a whole meme around actual plays creating the expectations all GMs should be creating bespoke character arcs.

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]

The GMs in these games don't consider themself poor-off.

They GM's don't indulge player's power fantasies. There is no "serve the game up for the players." Quite the opposite in fact. GMing these games is about putting rules/structure-constrained pressure on what the players (through their PCs) care about. You aren't a passenger on some kind of "player-side railroad."

GMing these games is mental bandwidth-intensive. Its cognitive load-intensive. Its creativity reservoir-challenging.

At every moment of play, you're integrating several different axes of thought:

* What do the rules demand of me here and how am I constrained by them?

* How does the fiction to this point inform and constrain the obstacle/situation I'm framing or the consequence I'm meting out as a result of some kind of failure or complication of action resolution?

* What is the intersection of drives and relationships and entanglements that make this PC's life interesting and how can I use that right now (if I can)?

* How can I build out as interesting a decision-space (thematically, tactically, strategically) for the player(s) right now (either via framing or via consequences/complications)?

* What might be going on offscreen that can be in play here (or might be in play within the potential constellation of consequences should things go haywire)?

---

I've said it before and I'll say it again. These games are Not Writer's Rooms. These games are not Player-Side Railroads.

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]

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.

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]

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!

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]

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.

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.

 

[soviet]

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.

The example that always stuck with me was the code of honour, I think from Ron Edwards.

The gist of it is that in some games if your PC has a code of honour, the expectation is largely that you will embody that at all times during play. It's a static fact of your character. 'I'm a samurai, we don't do that here'.

But in a narrativist game the expectation might be that your code of honour is a time bomb waiting to explode. Do you betray it now? How about now? How about now? It may be that the character does stand firm on it, in which case we will explore the cost in terms of battles not won, friends not helped, etc. Or it may be that the character breaks the code, and the consequences are to their position, their family name, etc. Either way there is a choice to make and a price to pay, and things cannot stay as they were originally. The character is in flux.

 

[niklinna]

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.

And yet in Stonetop all this is coming from Setting first. Or rather, a template of Setting...and templates of Character. We are asked to define our characters' positions in town, and a few key relationships with other PCs and with NPCs. So there is some muddiness here about what comes first. Again it's a matter of degrees, but I know I didn't start character creation by thinking about personal goals or ideals: I looked over the available playbooks and picked one first, and then it presented prompts for what my character is supposed to be concerned with, and that's all in relation to the setting. And all we have on the playbook is a single Instinct, which might come into conflict with...something. But there's no formalized other character attribute for it to come into conflict with.

In other words, I am finding it hard to be relentlessly positive about Stonetop, from the perspective of Character => Situation => Setting. But at least it means I'll be able to understand it! (And I am looking forward to it; I just wanted to point out this seeming discrepancy.)

Edit: Fixed a typo.

 

[niklinna]

The example that always stuck with me was the code of honour, I think from Ron Edwards.

The gist of it is that in some games if your PC has a code of honour, the expectation is largely that you will embody that at all times during play. It's a static fact of your character. 'I'm a samurai, we don't do that here'.

But in a narrativist game the expectation might be that your code of honour is a time bomb waiting to explode. Do you betray it now? How about now? How about now? It may be that the character does stand firm on it, in which case we will explore the cost in terms of battles not won, friends not helped, etc. Or it may be that the character breaks the code, and the consequences are to their position, their family name, etc. Either way there is a choice to make and a price to pay, and things cannot stay as they were originally. The character is in flux.

Yes, this—your code of honor is not something for the GM to provide opportunities to exhibit, it's for the GM to challenge, at every turn!

 

[pointofyou]

The example that always stuck with me was the code of honour, I think from Ron Edwards.

The gist of it is that in some games if your PC has a code of honour, the expectation is largely that you will embody that at all times during play. It's a static fact of your character. 'I'm a samurai, we don't do that here'.

But in a narrativist game the expectation might be that your code of honour is a time bomb waiting to explode. Do you betray it now? How about now? How about now? It may be that the character does stand firm on it, in which case we will explore the cost in terms of battles not won, friends not helped, etc. Or it may be that the character breaks the code, and the consequences are to their position, their family name, etc. Either way there is a choice to make and a price to pay, and things cannot stay as they were originally. The character is in flux.

This seems like a good description of the idea. It seems to capture the problem I've seen and had with this type of play which is that if you as a player want to play an honorable character you might not want that to be under threat from the game. That's really more a matter of taste than good/bad.

 

[Grendel_Khan]

This seems like a good description of the idea. It seems to capture the problem I've seen and had with this type of play which is that if you as a player want to play an honorable character you might not want that to be under threat from the game. That's really more a matter of taste than good/bad.

I think this gets at a core difference between trad and non-trad games (storygames, story now, narrative, etc.), which is that in trad games PCs are typically trying to minimize negative consequences basically all the time. Story games often not only encourage inviting and leaning into those consequences, but have mechanical incentives to do so. For example, in Blades in the Dark you get XP for struggling with your Vice or any Traumas you've accrued through play (Reckless, etc.). You're incentivized to get yourself in trouble—to say "I'm getting drunk during the party, before we hit the safe." That's very different from something like Savage Worlds or Shadowrun, where you get a negative trait of some kind (in exchange for points at character creation), and that become a GM-triggered hazard hanging over your head, that you're incentivized to minimize or avoid.

Neither is better or worse, necessarily, but it's more than just a matter of taste. The mechanical approaches and incentives (or disincentives) are different, and they directly drive different kinds of play.

 

[pointofyou]

I think this gets at a core difference between trad and non-trad games (storygames, story now, narrative, etc.), which is that in trad games PCs are typically trying to minimize negative consequences basically all the time. Story games often not only encourage inviting and leaning into those consequences, but have mechanical incentives to do so. For example, in Blades in the Dark you get XP for struggling with your Vice or any Traumas you've accrued through play (Reckless, etc.). You're incentivized to get yourself in trouble—to say "I'm getting drunk during the party, before we hit the safe." That's very different from something like Savage Worlds or Shadowrun, where you get a negative trait of some kind (in exchange for points at character creation), and that become a GM-triggered hazard hanging over your head, that you're incentivized to minimize or avoid.

Neither is better or worse, necessarily, but it's more than just a matter of taste. The mechanical approaches and incentives (or disincentives) are different, and they directly drive different kinds of play.

Indeed. It's the difference between considering a character trait as a mostly-consequence-free descriptor or as a disadvantage to be worked around or as a story-engine to be leaned into. Someone who prefers one of those but is playing a game that is written for another is likely to have or be a problem.

 

[soviet]

Indeed. It's the difference between considering a character trait as a mostly-consequence-free descriptor or as a disadvantage to be worked around or as a story-engine to be leaned into. Someone who prefers one of those but is playing a game that is written for another is likely to have or be a problem.

I think it's worth adding that in a lot of these games (my own Other Worlds included) there's a stated expectation that player and GM will have a chat about which traits are there to be challenged and which traits are there more to be exhibited, to use niklinna's terms. Not every trait is necessarily a ticking time bomb as long as some of them are.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

And yet in Stonetop all this is coming from Setting first. Or rather, a template of Setting...and templates of Character. We are asked to define our characters' positions in town, and a few key relationships with other PCs and with NPCs. So there is some muddiness here about what comes first. Again it's a matter of degrees, but I know I didn't start character creation by thinking about personal goals or ideals: I looked over the available playbooks and picked one first, and then it presented prompts for what my character is supposed to be concerned with, and that's all in relation to the setting. And all we have on the playbook in a single Instinct, which might come into conflict with...something. But there's no formalized other character attribute for it to come into conflict with.

In other words, I am finding it hard to be relentlessly positive about Stonetop, from the perspective of Character => Situation => Setting. But at least it means I'll be able to understand it! (And I am looking forward to it; I just wanted to point out this seeming discrepancy.)

Sure, though I kinda think of the town of Stonetop as a sort of a character, or extension of the characters in a sense. Like, there's not a concept of exploring the town. It is setting but it is also situation and even character. A lot of it is also made up by the players. Each of our PCs is a fairly important inhabitant and we defined the other major town figures, at least some of them, ourselves.

 

[pemerton]

And yet in Stonetop all this is coming from Setting first. Or rather, a template of Setting...and templates of Character. We are asked to define our characters' positions in town, and a few key relationships with other PCs and with NPCs. So there is some muddiness here about what comes first.

Ron Edwards wrote a good essay about how this works, but I don't think it's online anymore. This might work: Wayback Machine

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

I think it's worth adding that in a lot of these games (my own Other Worlds included) there's a stated expectation that player and GM will have a chat about which traits are there to be challenged and which traits are there more to be exhibited, to use niklinna's terms. Not every trait is necessarily a ticking time bomb as long as some of them are.

Yeah, it could be simple mechanics too, they're simply different types of attribute or the ones you simply exhibit aren't represented by mechanics at all.