Beginning to Doubt That RPG Play Can Be Substantively "Character-Driven"

[pemerton]

Maybe I already posted this - some of these threads are blurring together in my mind - but in any event it bears reiterating: GM force is not the same thing as GM narration or the GM establishing consequences. In every traditional RPG - every one that has a distinct "GM" role - the GM adds to the fiction, and often (even typically) more than any single other participant at the table.

The notion of force is trying to get at a particular way of doing that - as @Manbearcat has described it, by ignoring or modifying player input. Or as I would typically describe it, by overriding or manipulating the (notional) action resolution mechanics. Although not synonymous descriptions, mine and Manbearcat's will mostly if not always overlap in the actual phenomena that they capture.

Something that has not come up much directly in this thread, but is a very big deal for me (in part because it explains basically every unsatisfactory RPGIng experience I've ever had), is when the GM determines the outcomes of action resolution not by reference to the scene as framed, but by reference to off-screen elements that are not known to the players. It's mostly to cover this phenomenon that I include "manipulating" in my description - because it's not necessarily an overriding of action resolution in the strictest sense.

 

[prabe]

Something that has not come up much directly in this thread, but is a very big deal for me (in part because it explains basically every unsatisfactory RPGIng experience I've ever had), is when the GM determines the outcomes of action resolution not by reference to the scene as framed, but by reference to off-screen elements that are not known to the players. It's mostly to cover this phenomenon that I include "manipulating" in my description - because it's not necessarily an overriding of action resolution in the strictest sense.

Um. Wouldn't the to-hit tables in 1E AD&D have technically been an off-screen element not known to the players? Or are you meaning something other than mechanics here (I suspect you are)?

 

[Numidius]

"Because reasons!"

 

[pemerton]

No amount of "the game works best if you follow this play agenda" direction can correct for a table expectation of "tell us a story."

That seems plausible. But then why would such a group waste their time with (say) BitD or Apocalypse World or even Fate? Basic Roleplaying in some appropriate variant would seem the right system for them!

 

[pemerton]

Um. Wouldn't the to-hit tables in 1E AD&D have technically been an off-screen element not known to the players? Or are you meaning something other than mechanics here (I suspect you are)?

By element I intended "element of the fiction". By off-screen I mean not established in the shared fiction of the situation currently unfolding at the table.

Secret mechanical processes were regarded as desirable by Gygax for whatever reasons, but I think the history of RPGing has shown that that is not really practical. Even in 1st ed AD&D, notionally secret processes about finding secret doors end up being presented to players via the racial write-ups for elves and half-elves. Moldvay Basic completely abandons this particular conceit.

I don't know enough about the wargaming of the period to know whether and to what extent it influenced this particular aspect of Gygax's presentation. Oddly enough it wasn't part of OD&D (where any player can read Men & Magic and/or Chainmail and see the to-hit matrices).

 

[pemerton]

I think a big part of this is about the outcome itself. The Pass/Fail state should not be subverted by GM Force. The roll determines success or failure.

This is where framing and "secret backstory" (ie elements of the fiction as understood by the GM that are not shared by the players) become crucial.

If a player declares I seem to recall Evard's tower is somewhere around here, isn't it? and then suggests a knowldege check to resolve the matter, what are the ranges of permitted GM response? (And let's assume that the player's suggestion is consistent with general tone, genre and established fiction, so there isn't a need for the GM or other participants to police it from a coherence/appropriateness perspective.)

Is there a difference between the GM saying (for instance), and without a roll, You don't know and No, we're not doing Evard's tower at this point? I think there is.

The second is upfront assertion of GM control over backstory and situation. Of course, if the system being played allows for knowledge checks to be used by a player to control, or at least influence, backstory and situation then the second, while upfront, is still clear force contrary to the rules of the game. (And I take the actual example from the Burning Wheel game where I'm a player, and I declared the action for my PC's offsider, and then made a Great Masters-wise check, and succeeded - with the result that we made our way to Evard's tower! It would have been flat-out wrong for the GM to exercise force in lieu of allowing the check.)

The first to me smacks of an illusionistic version of the second. (The more extreme illusionism would be to allow the check but give the same answer regardless of the result.) The GM is controlling the shared fiction but presenting that control in "in-fiction" terms. Do this enough for various sorts of action declaration and the result becomes something like a railroad. On the other hand, I think it's in this thread that @Manbearcat flagged the fact that some players/participants are perturbed by clear procedures and upfront answers. They may not want the (immersion-breaking?) response We're not doing Evard's tower. For those groups GM force I think is inevitably going to figure prominently in resolution.

There have been posts saying that force might be used when the rules themselves don't give the experience desired, or when it's not appreciated that they do. But if the experience desired includes never knowing the actual reason why the GM makes decisions (like we're not doing Evard's tower tonight) then there may be no way out of force for that group. For my part, the only satisfactory RPG experiences I think I've had using such an approach are CoC one-shots.

 

[pemerton]

Most of those cases would have likely been to apply Force to end one player's overindulgence in roleplaying mundane encounters in order to allow things to move along for everyone else.

<snip>

I simply narrated "You realize that you've wandered into a demiplane that is a duplicate of the tomb, likely a testing ground for the traps and hazards Acererak has used" and called it a day.

I don't know if this counts as nullifying their decision, but I certainly altered the outcome to be different than it would have if we played it out as the book suggested.

Both these cases are strong assertions of GM authority over scene-framing. I don't necessarily see that they're force because in neither case does there seem to be any action resolution going on.

That second claim might be contentious - but if we say that action resolution means some meaningful change in either the mechanical situation, or the fictional situation, or both, then I think it's plausible. Your mundane encounters (I'm assuming this is talking-to-shopkeepers stuff) seem (if I may be so bold) mere time-wasting colour. The second one maybe is meant to involve resource consumption? But it's also a safe place where they can rest and get back their spells and hp? And at least as you present it no actions had really been declared. (In my Illusionism thread I mentioned Roger Musson's union meeting of ogres, to stop the players going down a corridor that the GM hasn't written up yet. The line between that, and what you did, might be fine but I think it's worth noting. You didn't leave the players' action declarations on foot and narrate further content and consequences. You just reframed the whole situation.)

This goes back to something I think I posted upthread (again, I've got thread-merging-confusion) - if all GM decisions about the fiction are equated with force than the latter concept becomes analytically unhelpful.

There is a widespread view that the GM framing scenes is railroading unless they're scenes with a "quest-giver" in a tavern so that the players have the (at least notional choice) of taking the quest or keeping on chatting with the barmaid. But I think you only have to state the view plainly to see it's pretty implausible. Of course strong scene-framing might be contrary to some agreed point of a game - say dungeon-crawling or hex-crawling - but that doesn't make it force. Not all bad GMing, or poorly-judged narration, is force.

 

[pemerton]

There is always a tension between the player's and GM's various inputs into the fiction and the GM always has a desired result, and his choices as GM generally index that desired result.

This claim is pretty controversial. And I think it's false.

The last session I played, a week and a half ago, was my Cortex+ LotR Hack. I still haven't written it up, but one thing that happened was that Gandalf defeated a Nazgul. I didn't have a desired result as to whether or not that would happen.

Our session before that was Classic Traveller. One PC got knocked unconscious twice by Aliens (deliberate capitalisation there). I didn't desire that that happen, nor that it not. It was just how things played out from the framing.

Of course I have desires around the framing - I introduced Nazgul, and Aliens. So I want these to be part of the shared fiction, and want to see the PCs engage with them in some way. But what happens as a result is up for grabs.

An intriguing aspect of the Traveller session was that the PCs kept splitting up and going to different floors of the abandoned vessel they were exploring. I didn't set out to achieve that. I didn't desire it (nor not desire it) at the outset, and didn't manipulate things to produce it - it emerged from the players' own play of the characters, having regard to their various capabilities (eg the weakling computer technician stayed on the bridge working on the ship's computer, while the buff soldier-types stayed guarding the spot that the aliens were emerging from). I don't know if Marc Miller is just that good as a RPG designer, or if this emergence was a coincidental outcome of our mix of PC builds and framed situation. But it was pretty cool that it happened!

 

[Fenris-77]

This claim is pretty controversial. And I think it's false.

I think you're misreading my use of tension. The players and the GM are the push and pull that drives the narrative - that's the tension. Your examples are (I might be jealous) pretty ideal examples of how that tension drives great stories. The desired result in question, in your case, is completely aligned with the players', which is fine - tell a cool story and allow the characters' actions to be the plot engine. In other games at other tables it might not be perfectly aligned. Not necessarily because the general result is at issue, but because of system force or any number of other things. Even in dice-light or diceless games that directly index character over mechanics, the GM is still making choices about interesting ways to challenge or include characters, choices about what is interesting or cool from a frame perspective, choices about how to respond to player choices - choices are involved. Any time there are choices the person making those choices has some sort of heuristic to guide their decision making, that was my point.

What I wasn't saying is that the GM has to have his own agenda about the teleos of the action.

 

[TwoSix]

That seems plausible. But then why would such a group waste their time with (say) BitD or Apocalypse World or even Fate? Basic Roleplaying in some appropriate variant would seem the right system for them!

They probably shouldn't be playing those systems, you're right! I just think it's handy to keep in mind that the utility of GM force is inversely correlated with the amount of player initiative in driving plot. And the amount of "player initiative" in driving plot is only loosely correlated to system; it's primarily a function of player psychology and previously derived expectations of the role of the GM.

Depending on the group of players, even a table amenable to player driven systems like BitD or AW may need threads of GM force in the form of harder framings that demand a certain amount of reactivity. Some players (or even a larger group of players who might be having an off-day) simply might not be engaged enough to help frame compelling fiction; using GM force to give them some GM driven fiction is no vice in these cases to get them to a point where they're better able to engage.