Forked Thread: Why the World Exists [GM-less Gaming]

[jim pinto]

It depends upon the consequences of the choice (and even in literally spatial terms, choice of direction is seldom but binary; even if so initially, decisions can keep branching). Traditional D&D is not about relying on rumors! That's the point: a real choice involves significant consequences and a reason to choose non-randomly.

If you add rumors, then that's not choosing to go left or right. That's choosing to go to the witch's hunt or a goblin's lair. I have to now assume that's what you meant from the beginning.

 

[jim pinto]

That looks at first like a universal statement, thus including your own RPGs. I suspect that's not what you intended.

The whole paragraph comes off as sophomoric bashing of people on the basis of stereotypes and personal preferences. What on Earth has that to do with GM-less gaming?

Are those really what you consider examples of moral dilemmas -- or even of choices that don't arise in RPGs? What has this to do with GM-less gaming?

That is my point. That's why canny D&Ders take steps to acquire information. How are they to acquire what does not exist? If it is to be made up ad hoc and post hoc, then that is a problem. It is a problem with GMs who "fudge", and at least at first glance a situation a GM-less game is not well suited to address to the satisfaction of those who prefer more traditional challenges. It can be done to a degree if it becomes a multi-GM game, players taking turns in the position. (Secret, secret; I've got a secret -- I'm the GM now, so I'll give you clues!)

Good post. First. I'm not trying to bash anyone. I have a philosophical opinion that 99% of RPG playing isn't about anything morally substantive. Example: We kill the orcs, because they are orcs. That comes up in discussions of mine as a result. I wasn't trying to tangent. Nor am I trying to tangent now.

You made a point that choosing left or right needs to be important. That if the GM doesn't script it ahead of time and just MAKES IT UP, then your decision isn't important. Then your counter to that is rumors that might point you left or right. Which, I feel has little bearing on the previous concern. If you don't know the rumors, then you're flipping a coin. If you do know the rumors, then the GM isn't just making it up as you go.

If you're playing without a GM, neither of these problems will arise. Either, the collective "story" already indicates where everything is, or one player at the time of the choosing has the arbitrary ability to determine the relevance of the decision before it's made.

However, your entire posts makes BINARY decision making the most important part of an RPG as though nothing else were going on during a session. Some players enjoy the narrative aspects of play. Others characterization. Others storytelling. Others environment and details (ala SCA). Choosing to attack the goblins from the right flank because you found out their training is weak in this capacity is significant for 2-6 encounters. Hardly the gestalt of the play experience.

Using DOGS IN THE VINEYARD as an example. If you're not familiar, you effectively play AGENTS of the church who can do whatever they want. Imagine PALADINS without alignment restrictions, but instead a mission statement. In the game, you can decide to do anything you want. Even burn the entire village to the ground (occupied by people of your own faith) to rid the faithful of sin.

You can choose do this regardless of information, but without information the choice is meaningless. With information, the choice is a desperate attempt to solve the present problem in front of you. In either case, the true merit of the game comes from

1. The acts of the characters and what they represent to their moral views
2. The consequences of the characters and how they affect the "emotional" response to the game play. (Certainly you can play without feeling "bad" about what you've done, but as a collective story-telling experience, it does have meaning).

Now. Dogs is a poor example, because to date I can't figure out how to run it GMless. But not for the same reasons people oppose running D&D GMless. Once you add the moral liability of decisions and someone having to interpret the consequences of non-binary decisions, then running a GM-less game gets even harder.

Choosing to fight the orcs or the lizardmen is no more important then choosing to turn to page 7 or 12 when you open your first choose your own adventure book.

All of this aside, arguing the merits of WHY you should run a GM-less game seems counterproductive. Either you want to try it out or you don't. You're a smart guy and there's almost 100 posts on here now. You know whether you can afford to risk the fun of a month's worth of D&D play to experiment with this model or if you really just like things they way they are.

I'm not going to judge you for choosing to play D&D the same way you've always played it. I will contend though that if the most important decisions that are going on in a D&D game are LEFT or RIGHT that you're probably missing out on a lot more fun than you could be having.

Left or Right doesn't feel like I impact the world. Avoiding a specific tavern in the city because the owner feeds more than his fair share of money to the oppressive church of Wee-Jas feels like an interesting and layered choice players can make in a world layered with details they all helped to build.

 

[Ariosto]

You made a point that choosing left or right needs to be important. ... Then your counter to that is rumors that might point you left or right.

False. That's attributing your own and someone else's words to me.

However, your entire posts makes BINARY decision making the most important part of an RPG as though nothing else were going on during a session.

There you go putting your words in my mouth again.

Dogs is a poor example, because to date I can't figure out how to run it GMless.

Poor example -- fine game!

I'm not going to judge you for choosing to play D&D the same way you've always played it.

It is no more than common sense not to judge what one does not know.

I'm not sure I see what the "linguistic imperialism" snipe adds to the discussion.

I am sorry. Please pardon me. I did not mean it as a snipe, but as descriptive of the process. You don't need others' compliance to use the term as you please, so why try to force it?

Are Blazing Rose, Grey Ranks, and Polaris on-topic for the General RPG forums, or not?

It would not bother me if people were to discuss those games here, but ENworld is not my domain.

 

[howandwhy99]

Cause and Effect. One of the most important roles of a GM is determining the ramifications of the PCs actions. If they burn down the village of ABC, how are the people in village DEF doing to respond? Again. Why is the logic of the GM so much better than the logic of the PCs? Couldn't the players themselves determine for themselves that they need to hide out for a while and/or skip town for stealing Mrs. Blankenship's pies?

This is where I think games that try to be GM-free will always fail. A person cannot play a role successfully and yet determine the success or failure of their roleplaying for themselves. They can have an inkling based upon how factually a simulated world reacts, but roleplaying requires legitimate social feedback to prove the veracity of behavior in the role. After all, social roles are defined exterior to ourselves. They are a matter of conformity and social identification. So whenever I hear of RPGs where the Players have powers over the world their characters do not I know they are not strictly roleplaying games as all elements of roles that are left out of the performance by the actors are by definition not roleplayed.

Is what you are proposing possible for Story Games (a.k.a. theatre games) where people get together to put on an improvisational play? Sure. But actual roleplaying requires one to perform the role and, in the end, as almost all RPGs do, reward the roleplayer for performing the role well. Role success cannot be had if the measures of success or failure are determined after the fact. I don't honestly think any kind of success fits that definition. The goal in goal attainment always comes before attainment. Setting the measure of success afterward is no success at all.

I grant you what we do is difficult as playing fictional roles means knowing how to roleplay properly in an unknown situation. The roles in hobby RPGs are just made up. However, real world roles are also "just made up" - a human made constellation of social mores and cultural expectations upon a society's members. And while the social roles are chosen by a society as a whole, they are still chosen and not some platonic universal of human behavior. So our hobby RPGs' fictional roles do qualify as roles in so much as they are similar to real world roles, i.e. ones real people can perform. While a good deal of what passes for roleplaying isn't acted out in hobby RPGs at all, specifically the impossible to perform fantasy elements, all of what is roleplayed does conform to to the qualifications of a real world role. So I would suggest thinking of playing hobby RPGs as learning the mores of a foreign culture. It can certainly be done, but defining role success in that culture could never be done if the roles are continually defined after the fact.

 

[jim pinto]

This is where I think games that try to be GM-free will always fail. A person cannot play a role successfully and yet determine the success or failure of their roleplaying for themselves. They can have an inkling based upon how factually a simulated world reacts, but roleplaying requires legitimate social feedback to prove the veracity of behavior in the role. After all, social roles are defined exterior to ourselves. They are a matter of conformity and social identification. So whenever I hear of RPGs where the Players have powers over the world their characters do not I know they are not strictly roleplaying games as all elements of roles that are left out of the performance by the actors are by definition not roleplayed.

Is what you are proposing possible for Story Games (a.k.a. theatre games) where people get together to put on an improvisational play? Sure. But actual roleplaying requires one to perform the role and, in the end, as almost all RPGs do, reward the roleplayer for performing the role well. Role success cannot be had if the measures of success or failure are determined after the fact. I don't honestly think any kind of success fits that definition. The goal in goal attainment always comes before attainment. Setting the measure of success afterward is no success at all.

I grant you what we do is difficult as playing fictional roles means knowing how to roleplay properly in an unknown situation. The roles in hobby RPGs are just made up. However, real world roles are also "just made up" - a human made constellation of social mores and cultural expectations upon a society's members. And while the social roles are chosen by a society as a whole, they are still chosen and not some platonic universal of human behavior. So our hobby RPGs' fictional roles do qualify as roles in so much as they are similar to real world roles, i.e. ones real people can perform. While a good deal of what passes for roleplaying isn't acted out in hobby RPGs at all, specifically the impossible to perform fantasy elements, all of what is roleplayed does conform to to the qualifications of a real world role. So I would suggest thinking of playing hobby RPGs as learning the mores of a foreign culture. It can certainly be done, but defining role success in that culture could never be done if the roles are continually defined after the fact.

Good post.

I wrote an essay once on how the morality of the world is mostly reflected in the actions of the PCs. If you magnify the PCs actions you get a barometer for how people in the world treat one another. PCs that are jerks are going to find that everyone else is. PCs that help out others will find that the world is a genuinely just place.

This is paraphrasing. My essay was more involved, but reflected this core idea.

A PC once interrogated a captured prisoner. Upon not getting the answers he liked, he stabbed the NPC and watched him bleed to death. I don't judge and monitor PC morality, so I let him do this. Several sessions later, he himself was captured by the Thieves Guild for some unrelated issue. His character was never seen again.

My attitude as GM was that if the PCs (stars of the story) can treat strangers this horribly, how would lawless thieves treat others?

I imagine that a GMless game could ascribe the same moral benchmark to a game. If the player has to judge his own character's actions, certainly it fails. But couldn't the other players do the same thing I did in my game? Why does a GMless game require anyone to challenge themselves?

 

[Ariosto]

The trouble with the notion that moral dilemmas create dramatic action is that in fact they produce indecisive inaction, which is intrinsically uninteresting. People tend quickly to develop sorting and prioritizing rules to get past boring stasis to the engaging particulars of doing something. Conflict between people with different hierarchies of values is something else altogether.

 

[howandwhy99]

Good post.

I wrote an essay once on how the morality of the world is mostly reflected in the actions of the PCs. If you magnify the PCs actions you get a barometer for how people in the world treat one another. PCs that are jerks are going to find that everyone else is. PCs that help out others will find that the world is a genuinely just place.

This is paraphrasing. My essay was more involved, but reflected this core idea.

A PC once interrogated a captured prisoner. Upon not getting the answers he liked, he stabbed the NPC and watched him bleed to death. I don't judge and monitor PC morality, so I let him do this. Several sessions later, he himself was captured by the Thieves Guild for some unrelated issue. His character was never seen again.

My attitude as GM was that if the PCs (stars of the story) can treat strangers this horribly, how would lawless thieves treat others?

That's what alignment and attitude were for. The first denoted a status of worldly alliance while the other was a more specific relationship to individuals. The forces of good were allies to other forces of good and enemies to the forces of evil. Stuff like that. Attitudes were mostly broken down by race, elves and dwarves both being "Indifferent" to each other (IIRC), but each NPC's relationship could change towards the PCs. They could change according to each other too, NPC to NPC, but that was always a determination resulting from PC/Player actions. Moreover, tactics and strategies used by NPCs did not remain at their default (typically set by race). NPCs could learn as well and include new strategies (and all other kinds of information) as they encountered their use. So I have to agree with what you're saying. At least in old D&D campaigns. The morality of those around the PCs changed, for better or worse, depending upon the players'/characters' actions.

This makes a kind of sense in the real world too, at least in one iteration of the Golden Rule: others will treat you as you treat others. And from that belief we get both the proscriptive "treat others as you wish to be treated" and the behavioral reinforcement "treat others as you are treated", both turn the other cheek and an eye for an eye.

I imagine that a GMless game could ascribe the same moral benchmark to a game. If the player has to judge his own character's actions, certainly it fails. But couldn't the other players do the same thing I did in my game? Why does a GMless game require anyone to challenge themselves?

To thoroughly clarify the answer to your questions I would need to deeply get into what the nature of roleplaying is. I'll try and keep things simple, but the scope of the answer really requires more of an essay.

Another person or place positions the roleplayer in their role. Not only does this require an outside agency for the roleplaying to be a challenge, but it requires an objective agent for this to be a legitimate game (as we went over above). Without a GM (or a referee with a ruleset) the other players are the ones who are determining another's roleplaying. This would mean they are acting as both audience to and authors of the roleplayer's role. If their judgment of the roleplayer's performance is not objective, then the judgment is not objective. It is a result of whatever bias that person is under from the person they are judging.

For instance, from the point of view of a "GM-less RPG" the roleplayer has influence over those judging his performance. This influence is not solely his performance of the role, but the influence of his being able to in turn judge his judges at the same time. Such an exercise cannot be objective. It does not make a difference whether or not the one making the judgment is acting as a fellow protagonist with the roleplayer in the same situation or will later be judged by that same person in a different situation. Neither person's judgment can be held as valid as neither is any longer in an objective position to the other.

As we went over before, a person cannot win a game where they, the player, sets the benchmark for success after the fact. A GM-less game means each player manipulates each other to set those benchmarks after the fact in order to have their own benchmarks also set afterward. Is this a game? Sure, but not one where the objective is roleplaying. It is a judge manipulation game.

All games are technically roleplaying games, but to be considered an RPG a game's objective must be to roleplay.

 

[Gentlegamer]

To quote Dr. Frankenfurtur, you've eliminated the cause, but not the symptom.

Oh honey!

 

[Gentlegamer]

It does mean you have to shift gears more often (and you always already do to some extent, whether it's when rolling dice or getting up to go to the bathroom) between metagame headspace and character-perspective headspace.

It is the strain to engage in this "double-think" that makes this endeavor ultimately flawed, in my opinion.

"GM-less" role-playing can certainly be collaborative storytelling, but not really a game, in my opinion.

 

[jim pinto]

As we went over before, a person cannot win a game where they, the player, sets the benchmark for success after the fact. A GM-less game means each player manipulates each other to set those benchmarks after the fact in order to have their own benchmarks also set afterward. Is this a game? Sure, but not one where the objective is roleplaying. It is a judge manipulation game.

All games are technically roleplaying games, but to be considered an RPG a game's objective must be to roleplay.

Interesting analysis.

If I had to classify myself, I'm a storytelling-roleplayer. I think what is happening is just as important as how I react to it. Deadwood strikes me as the best kind of TV show because it's about both things at the same time. Sometimes slow, the episodes are almost artful, taking on more than just the sum of their parts.

But I digress.

I have played very little as a PC in games, but when I have, I've often-times made decisions as a player that would have a stronger impact on the story rather than a pragmatic impact on my character's life. I've even had a character commit suicide in a game before because I knew the impact it would have overall (there's too much background to explain here, but trust me when I say it was a meaningful decision).

Obviously, the values of the player (am I here to kill orcs or to explore the realms of the king?) impact the kind of gaming that person wants to or CAN engage in. I played a miniature-heavy session of D&D at a con with some wargamers once, and none of them could rap their heads around the actions of my dwarf who was eager to get some vengeance on the ogres inside the keep… all the while, they wanted to strategize every single act of minutia they could, dragging out the planning of the siege for one hour of real time.

Neither of us was in that game for the same reason.

Remove the GM from the equation and that game is very different. Add a chess clock and you change the process again. Put objective cards in the PCs hands and the game changes again. Hand out massive XP bonuses for roleplaying their weaknesses and you're back to where you started.

You analysis states that a game like IaWA (which I love) is about judge manipulation (certainly this true of something like Mountain Witch), when this is a smaller portion of a tool for storytelling.

And in my opinion, that's all any game really is… a tool. But D&D is hardly a tool for roleplaying. Certainly 1st and 4th edition aren't. And 2nd and 3rd barely even cover things like diplomacy except in passing on a skill chart somewhere.

The expectation that D&D is about roleplaying is endemic to the process. We all know what we're doing because we've done it before OR we explored the process enough that we are not comfortable with our game group and our play styles… but find me a page in any D&D book that actually teaches you how to roleplay and GM and storytell and do anything other than "overcome challenges" and I'll eat my dice (safely my dice were lost recently, so no fear there).



To be honest, short of us sitting down and exploring the process out of our comfort zone (as we do such much in playtesting) or writing an entirely new book on "HOW TO" there's no real way to get some of these ideas out on the open road.

Earlier, I stated that we should all hang out at gencon and explore some of these concepts. And I was serious. I'd love to spend 3-5 hours bantering and playing through some new ways of doing all of this. I do it with my group (when I can) and I know people that have been looking for that NEW THING enjoy the chance to try something without worrying about being "flat-footed" or suffering an AOO.

ASIDE: As to your alignment argument, I'm not a fan of the stiff alignment system. There are times when people will make decisions out of necessity, pragmatism, and/or opportunity… not out of adherence to a rigid and archaic system. If anything, all of the absolutes tend toward neutral anyway, only adhering to their ideology when it's convenient. A truly LG person could not exist during a famine for instance. And if he did, he's probably not human.