Well, the fiction has various parts.
There's the setting/backstory. There's the immediate scene/situation. There's the declared actions of the PCs. And there's the outcomes/consequences of those actions.
These don't all have to be established the same way. And different ways of doing any of them will produce different experiences.
My default, these days, is to start play with little or no prep. That's how I started my Classic Traveller game, all my BW games, my Cthulhu Dark and Wuthering Heights one-shots, and one of my Cortex+ Heroic Fantasy games.
Sometimes I use someone else's prep. In my Prince Valiant game I've mostly used episodes either from Greg Stafford's rule book or the complementary Episodes Book. In our MHRP game I used some scenes taken from the Civil War book as well as some stuff that I made up on the spot. In my Classic Traveller game I've used the Annic Nova starship - suitably adapted - from Double Adventure 1, and have also used the Shadows complex (though not its framing) from the other adventure in that Double Adventure volume. This has all been primarily about situation prep. The setting in our Traveller game is "The Imperium" as implicit in the 1977 rulebooks - with its interstellar navy and nobles - and interpolating a few ideas from early White Dwarf (I ignore the published Imperium material). The setting in our Prince Valiant game is "Arthurian Europe" and when we've needed maps to work out where we are we've used the map of Britain on the inside cover of Pendragon 5th ed, and a historical atlas that has maps of 8th century Europe.
Some games need prep. Eg Agon needs an island (in our first session I used one of those from the rulebook); DitV needs a town. These are all situation; the backstory in both systems (Odysseus-like heroes trying to return home from war while hunted by the gods; dealers of justice in a slightly weird west) is implicit in the whole game set-up and doesn't need additional prep. Classic D&D needs a dungeon map + key, which provides the basis for evaluating movement and then for framing situations when the players move their PCs into the appropriate corridor or open some or other door to a room.
As far as action resolution is concerned, there's too much to say in one post! But we can contrast unmediated adjudication of the fictional position of the PCs with (as one example) rolling a dice against a known target number. We can also look at different ways of setting target numbers: "objective"/realistic DCs (Classic Traveller, Burning Wheel, Prince Valiant, classic D&D for the most part); fixed target numbers (either always uniform, like AW; or changing but in a system-determined, largely fiction-independent pattern, like HeroQuest revised and 4e D&D); opposed checks (all checks in MHRP/Cortex+ Heroic are opposed, either by another acting character or the Doom Pool; all checks in Agon are opposed too). The GM will play a different role in these different approaches.
We can also look at what flows from action resolution. At one extreme is Burning Wheel: success means the PC succeed at the declared task, and the fiction changes/grows to reflect the player's intent; failure means the GM can introduce an appropriate thwarting consequence, with the focus being on thwarting intent (which may or may not mean narrating a failure at the task). And Let it Ride means that either outcome is binding until the fictional situation changes in a major way (the rulebooks provide examples of what counts for this purpose).
At the other extreme is the standard approach to D&D, where success on the check means the task succeeds, and failure means the task fails, but what this means as far as intent is concerned, and how binding this is downstream, is all in the hands of the GM. (Eg D&D modules are replete with advice to GMs on how to draw on, and manipulate, unrevealed backstory so as to ameliorate the impact of unanticipated player successes - like killing the BBEG early - or unwanted player failures - like missing a vital clue. That sort of thing is anathema in Burning Wheel.)
These different approaches give the GM a different role, and produce different experiences: those D&D modules produce tightly curated stories; the BW approach produces spontaneous and unpredictable "emergent" plot.
I have my own preferences across these various approaches, but they're more about what I don't like (which is fairly specific) than what I do like (which is quite broad). Eg I think that map + key resolution is a recipe for disputes over how fast people can travel and how long things take and so on, and hence I basically avoid it these days. (Outside of particular contexts where it works beautifully, like 4e D&D combat which has all the answers to movement rates, what happens when you push someone towards the cliff edge, etc all built in.) That's not to say that we don't use maps - I've already mentioned Prince Valiant, and in our BW game we use GH maps - but they are for colour and to provide content and context for narration; they are not a resolution tool. In Traveller I've built up a star map out of our play - at a certain point improvisation yields to the need for a record of what has been established! - but interstellar travel in Traveller is governed by its own little subsystem that doesn't depend on knowing precise interstellar distances.
So in BW or Prince Valiant, if the PCs are hiking through the woods either they get where they're going, and then the interesting stuff happens; or if the trip itself matters, then a difficulty is set and a check is made. If I as GM say it's been a hard trek - make a roll against obstacle 4 using Forte (in BW) or Brawn (in Prince Valiant) and reduce your Forte/Brawn by 1 for each failure - the players aren't going to quibble. If they're experienced hikers, they can project their experiences onto the fiction to form a clearer sense of the hardness of the trek. If their PC is really good at trekking (eg has some appropriate Trait or skill) then they can use that to augment their check. And so there are systematic reasons that certain disputes don't arise - systematic in the sense of resulting from the system rather than being connected to issues of trust, adversarial play, etc.
The flip side of this sort of approach is that players can't enhance their prospects of successful checking by eg pulling out a map and calculating a shorter route. It shifts the general "tone" of play from wargaming to theme/"feeling". There's a good description of this in Maelstrom Storytelling (I've cut and pasted this from Ron Edwards's quote of it here):
use "scene ideas" to convey the scene, instead of literalisms. ... focus on the intent behind the scene and not on how big or how far things might be. If the difficulty of the task at hand (such as jumping across a chasm in a cave) is explained in terms of difficulty, it doesn't matter how far across the actual chasm spans. In a movie, for instance, the camera zooms or pans to emphasize the danger or emotional reaction to the scene, and in so doing it manipulates the real distance of a chasm to suit the mood or "feel" of the moment. It is then no longer about how far across the character has to jump, but how hard the feat is for the character. ... If the players enjoy the challenge of figuring out how high and far someone can jump, they should be allowed the pleasure of doing so - as long as it doesn't interfere with the narrative flow and enjoyment of the game.
The scene should be presented therefore in terms relative to the character's abilities ... Players who want to climb onto your coffee table and jump across your living room to prove that their character could jump over the chasm have probably missed the whole point of the story.
The scene should be presented therefore in terms relative to the character's abilities ... Players who want to climb onto your coffee table and jump across your living room to prove that their character could jump over the chasm have probably missed the whole point of the story.
For completeness: in BW or Prince Valiant, a player wanting to pull out a map to calculate a shorter route is itself an action declaration that can be resolved (eg on Cartography in BW; on Lore in Prince Valiant) with the upshot being an augment to the main check (if the secondary check succeeds) or an increase in difficulty (if the secondary check fails - oops, you misread the map and led everyone into the Fireswamp!).
In the BW/Prince Valiant sort of play, no one has to "trust" the GM to make the right call about how badly rain affects hiking speeds, or how far someone can jump, or how likely it is that the PCs will get lost (something that classic D&D has rules for, as part of its map-and-key resolution system). Instead the onus is on the GM to come up with interesting ideas for scenes and for consequences.
I don't think there can be anything like a single answer to these questions.
Is the GM deciding, in response to the PCs killing the BBEG with the goal of ending the evil conspiracy, that an as-yet unrevealed second-in-command takes over a problem? In Burning Wheel, yes - that would almost certainly be terrible. In the typical D&D module? If the killing of the BBEG has happened when the game has got to page 10 of the module, and there's another 20 pages the group was expecting to play through, then the answer is probably no - and that answer is reinforced by the advocacy for this sort of approach found in D&D modules and GM advice.
In the context of the trek, does it matter what, and how, the GM decidess? That depends upon what is at stake in the resolution. Here's another Edwards quote:
It has rightly been asked whether Simulationism really exists, given that it consists mainly of Exploration. I suggest that Simulationism exists insofar as the effort and attention to Exploration may over-ride either Gamist or Narrativist priorities. . . .
Concrete examples #2: Simulationism over-riding Narrativism
In a system like that last dot point, getting the effect of rain on super-speed movement right is pretty important, because that decision by the GM is going to determine whether or not I can stop the bomb! I don't see that any amount of appealing to "trust in the GM" is going to help here - it's not about trust, it's about the GM getting it right, where a minimum condition for getting it right is that no one at the table thinks the GM got it wrong.Concrete examples #2: Simulationism over-riding Narrativism
- A weapon does precisely the same damage range regardless of the emotional relationship between wielder and target. (True for RuneQuest, not true for Hero Wars)
. . . - The time to traverse town with super-running is deemed insufficient to arrive at the scene, with reference to distance and actions at the scene, such that the villain's bomb does blow up the city. (The rules for DC Heroes specifically dictate that this be the appropriate way to GM such a scene).
I've never played DC Heroes, but if I was and this issue came up, I wouldn't object to someone pulling out an old copy of the Flash to try and find out how (if at all) rain affected his running. The time spent getting it right would be worthwhile, given the stakes.
On the other hand, in Marvel Heroic RP this would be easy: the check would be made against the Doom Pool, as an attempt to target a Scene Distinction (eg Ticking Bomb in the Centre of the City) and the Pouring Rain Scene Distinction would be folded into the Doom Pool, thus contributing to a chance of a slightly higher opposing target number than would otherwise be the case. There are plenty of GM responsibilities in MHRP play - managing the Doom Pool is one of them, and not trivial - but getting it right about the affect of rain on movement speeds isn't one of them.
Well, to be honest, here is one discussion of trust in RPGing that I think is on-target (Edwards again):
- The potential for personal risk and disclosure among the real people involved.
- High risk play is best represented by playing Sorcerer, Le Mon Mouri, InSpectres, Zero, or Violence Future. You're putting your ego on the line with this stuff, as genre conventions cannot help you; the other people in play are going to learn a lot about who you are.
- Low risk play is best represented by playing Castle Falkenstein, Wuthering Heights, The Dying Earth, or Prince Valiant. These games are, for lack of a better word, "lighter" or perhaps more whimsical - they do raise issues and may include extreme content, but play-decisions tend to be less self-revealing.
But as far as systems of play are concerned, I prefer that the game author just tell us how to play. The rules should make it clear who gets to decide what, preferably by coming right out and telling us; and then it will be clear who is meant to be talking when, and what principles should govern what they say,.
Whatever those rules and principles are, I have to trust that the various participants will abide by them.
I'll finish with another Edwards quote about trust, in the context of a request for advice from someone struggling with the GMing of scene-framing play and working out who is responsible for what:
I think [your problem] has nothing at all to do with distributed authority, but rather with the group members' shared trust that situational authority [ie the GM's scene framing decisions] is going to get exerted for maximal enjoyment among everyone. If, for example, we are playing a game in which I, alone, have full situational authority, and if everyone is confident that I will use that authority to get to stuff they want (for example, taking suggestions), then all is well. Or if we are playing a game in which we do "next person to the left frames each scene," and if that confidence is just as shared, around the table, that each of us will get to the stuff that others want (again, suggestions are accepted), then all is well.
It's not the distributed or not-distributed aspect of situational authority you're concerned with, it's your trust at the table, as a group, that your situations in the S[hard] I[maginary] S[pace] are worth anyone's time. Bluntly, you guys ought to work on that.
It's not the distributed or not-distributed aspect of situational authority you're concerned with, it's your trust at the table, as a group, that your situations in the S[hard] I[maginary] S[pace] are worth anyone's time. Bluntly, you guys ought to work on that.
And the way to work on that isn't for the rulebooks to say Players, trust your GM to come up with interesting stuff! It's for the GM to actually practice coming up with interesting stuff, drawing on every cue the players give!
