GMs: Guiding Morals in GMing

[hawkeyefan]

Yeah, that would bring us to the topic of @pemerton's thread about prep. I'd be hard pressed to see how you could create a 'module' for games like Dungeon World, there's simply not that much to write! I mean, someone could write a book of threats, fronts, etc. that might be handy, but nobody can ever say which will be useful to any specific group. Some degree of general setting can be more useful, like a town or a wilderness/campaign map can be perfectly usable with DW as long as it isn't TOO detailed. The Stonetop map and village are pretty good examples of course.

I mention Spire a lot in these discussions. It’s got a lot in common with PbtA and FitD type games. They have published a handful of “Campaign Frames” for the game. These are 16 page books that offer a scenario for play. Half the books are pre-generated characters, so you have about 8 pages of description setting up the scenario. Each is meant to offer a few sessions of play, but they don’t do anything other than introduce the participant NPCs and organizations, and provide some kind of inciting event. There’s no sequential element to the scenario. No chapter 2.

There really can’t be because of the way Spire works as a game. It eschews heavy prep and encourages improv during play. It actively involves improv in the rules of the game.

And that’s how it must be if you’re truly letting players do whatever they want once play starts. You can’t write chapter 2 until you know how chapter 1 ends. Doing so means that you are absolutely steering things. And that’s how most adventure modules or adventure paths haven been written for the past few decades. They have little to nothing to do with character, and instead rely on the plot entirely.

This was probably one of the biggest revelations for me, and one that was hard to reconcile. Once you write down something like “Once the PCs defeat Count Evil, then…” you’re deciding what play will be about before it’s happened.

Now, that doesn’t mean you can’t pivot at the table and improv as needed, and move away from the prepared story… it can be done. But the more a given game expects you to not have to do that… the more the game expects the GM to prepare ahead of time… the harder it will be to do that.

The system absolutely matters in this regard.

 

[pointofyou]

This was probably one of the biggest revelations for me, and one that was hard to reconcile. Once you write down something like “Once the PCs defeat Count Evil, then…” you’re deciding what play will be about before it’s happened.

If the PCs' defeating Count Evil is a necessary thing for other things to happen then yes. If you have Count Evil placed in context and have a sense of what will happen if the PCs kill him then not necessarily. Anticipating possible actions or results needn't be deciding what play will be about before it's happened.

 

[hawkeyefan]

If the PCs' defeating Count Evil is a necessary thing for other things to happen then yes. If you have Count Evil placed in context and have a sense of what will happen if the PCs kill him then not necessarily. Anticipating possible actions or results needn't be deciding what play will be about before it's happened.

It depends on the manner in which it’s done, I’d say.

Having some ideas about possible outcomes is one thing. It makes sense to consider probable courses of action and their possible consequences.

But when you sequence events as is done in a published adventure? That’s more what I’m talking about here. Most of them are a sequence of events… the outline is already set, just some minor details to fill in.

It’s something I used to do all the time, and recognizing it was tough. Hell, it’s something I still struggle with when I GM D&D… there’s the comfortability of habit there and the game promotes it in so many ways, it can be difficult not to do it.

I should add there’s nothing wrong with playing that way… I just prefer something less pre-determined so it’s something I try to avoid. I’d not go as far as to categorize it as something like a moral, but it’s a guiding principle for me.

 

[Jolly Ruby]

My guiding principles as a D&D DM (they are different for other systems):

- Always try something new: the two main reasons I say that are: 1. because there's always room to improve. If you're a DM for a long time you acquire some "habits", some ways to run the game that aren't deliberate. Trying new things help to find where you can improve your game and break these habits. And 2. it helps the game always feel fresh, both for the players and for the DM.

- Be deliberate, especially when you're being random: its a good thing to know why you run your game the way you run it. When designing a dungeon, encounters, homebrew rules, pieces of lore etc. do it with at least some kind of objective in mind. For me if helps improve specially the random parts of the game, like random encounters, when you curated what's on your random table with some kind of objective.

- Keep the game fun for yourself: when you're the DM it's easy to prioritise the players fun and think they having fun is enough for you. For me, it's not really enough. When I run a game I run a game that is both fun for me as a DM and that would be fun for me if I were a player. No game is fun for everyone, so aiming in what I would like as a player helps me find players that are more enthusiastic with things I'm enthusiastic, and gives my game a distinct personality.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

You can, you just can't document it. You can have an entirely character driven story in with a GM that utterly owns the setting, but the problem is you can't document it and communicate it to another GM. So it can never show up in a module the way it plays out in play, because you're dealing with just too many branching paths. You can if you have an intelligent GM have infinitely many branching paths.

We obviously fundamentally mean two different things by 'character driven'. That is, 'branching paths' is a description of a game where the the SETTING (location), that is the 'paths' and how they 'branch' is what is shaping play. I can go left, or right, and the story will then proceed, telling me about what I find in that direction. Sure, I can take those choices based on some aspect of my character's personality or 'dramatic needs', but that decision can only address control of what part of the setting we address, I would be overlaying my character stuff ON TOP OF that. Thus you see setting -> character, or probably setting -> situation -> character.

I'm assuming that 'infinite branching paths' is some way of trying to state how to get around that. In other words if the player has INFINITE CHOICE then they can address anything they want (IE some aspect of their character) as they can access any appropriate type of situation. I don't see how that describes a game that involves any meaningful prep at all. The only situation where there are limitless paths open is, well, maybe not a total blank slate as there can be limitless open paths and still some closed options, but one with very minimal setting/situation. This is exactly a way of describing the play of games like Dungeon World!

Now, the real impossible thing to do is to have totally character driven stories with more than one player and no coordination between the players. I learned that lesson the hard way. I ran several games where the players each started playing out their story and they didn't metagame and as a result there was never a party, just different characters living their separate lives. I even ran a game for my younger brother and his friends where after a few hours the two groups had allied with different rival organizations, one a group of slavers that kidnapped the love interest of a player in the other group. I never got a chance to play that out but it basically had become two different campaigns from either side of the fence of choices.

Well, I can't speak to your experience. I can tell you I've played in 2 different games in the last year run by @Manbearcat where exactly this sort of thing happened. Both of them generally had 4 players (I think we got up to 5 once in the BitD game). BitD kind of decrees that you are all a 'crew', although I imagine crews COULD split, the rules would need a bit of extrapolation. Still, it didn't happen in our game. Sometimes we had somewhat different agendas, but the crew had a shared history, resources, and some common goals. At one point we got close to possibly a split, but it never happened. Other BitD games don't typically suffer from that either. I've also never seen it happen in a Dungeon World game, nor in our Torch Bearer 2 game. Generally players don't have a lot of incentives to do that. However, I'm not sure why it would be a problem if it did happen.

But there is no way to record and transmit how to do that in an "adventure". I'm not even particularly happy with the typical attempts to record that through a sand box, because even if you don't have a linear story in mind you still need to have the current state of the NPC's motivations and at least a couple of their future "moves" so that you know what the fronts are trying to do and how that will intersect and interact with the motivations of the PCs.

I agree with you thoroughly, you cannot easily write adventures for most narrative games. Torchbearer 2 is a bit of an exception, there are adventures for that. However, its situation are generally very open-ended and not super large elaborate long-running kinds of things. I think the most elaborate TB2 adventure might have 12 obstacles, and require several pages to write up, not exactly TSR Module territory!

None of this depends on the system. Yes, if you really want to do character driven it helps to not be too lethal, but lethality is a product of system mastery and choice. And something like 2e really survivable after the first few levels if you aren't trying to push for lethality and challenge as the primary aesthetic. High level AD&D characters have massive amounts of hits points relative to the monsters they encounter, no crits to worry about, and as long as you don't hit them with save or die too often, they are really hard to kill. All you really do is feed the players challenges that are a couple levels below what you'd do in a more challenge-oriented game.

Maybe, TB2 can be pretty deadly, but I think even there it isn't overwhelmingly so. But in any case, I think the genesis of the situations in the sort of narrative play we usually speak of is not the same as what you have in mind, generally. It can be hard to draw distinct hard lines though. Still, lack of lethality is not, IMHO, a necessary feature of narrative play. I think a very lethal game of that type would require some sort of 'threading' mechanism aside from PC to kind of carry forward the narrative, but it seems possible to do.

 

[Lanefan]

Lots of great responses and I appreciate it, but still absolutely confused why so many DMs are afraid of improvising during combat to improve the narrative; and so much so, its considered immoral? Do you really not trust yourselves to make the right decision, ever?

I'd rather trust myself not to move the goalposts (or more accurately, I suppose, the goal line), which is exactly what is happening when a GM adjusts a combat mid-flight.

Also, depending on the type of mid-flight adjustment being made, there can be in-fiction knock-on effects that have to be accounted for. Hypothetical example (which I wouldn't do in reality): a low-ish level party is fighting their way into a small castle and meet six guards. My desire as DM is that this combat make enough noise to force the party into hiding so they'll sneak in, but the caster knocks out all the guards with one Sleep spell...and so I improvise by throwing in four more guards the round after. The party beat these up the old-fashioned way, make lots of noise, have to take cover, and so things go on.

But: having just invented four more guards out of thin air, I now have to remember to place barracks etc. for them somewhere in the castle, increase the seating apacity of the troops' dining hall, and generally account for there being more people here than I'd originally written in. And the odds are high to very high that in fact I won't remember to do any of this, thus introducing a minor but potentially niggling inconsistency in the fiction: where do these extra people eat and sleep?

 

[Lanefan]

This was probably one of the biggest revelations for me, and one that was hard to reconcile. Once you write down something like “Once the PCs defeat Count Evil, then…” you’re deciding what play will be about before it’s happened.

Maybe. You're guessing what play will be about, as a guide to what to prep, but nothing stops the players from doing something unexpected.

I think the problems arise only when a GM starts forcing the sequence of events and-or and not allowing the unexpected to happen.

Perhaps a better way to write it, when banging out a GM-side storyboard (which ideally would end up resembling a flowchart with all sorts of splits and branches), would be "If the PCs defeat Count Evil, then...", along with another branch starting with "If the PCs do not defeat Count Evil, then...", etc.

Now, that doesn’t mean you can’t pivot at the table and improv as needed, and move away from the prepared story… it can be done. But the more a given game expects you to not have to do that… the more the game expects the GM to prepare ahead of time… the harder it will be to do that.

I think a big factor here is the level of detail/granularity required and-or expected in the prep.

 

[Jahydin]

I'd rather trust myself not to move the goalposts (or more accurately, I suppose, the goal line), which is exactly what is happening when a GM adjusts a combat mid-flight.

It's a safe position to take for sure, but feel like you're missing out, honestly. I wholeheartedly enjoy my talent at subtly shoving those goalposts around whenever I want to maximize the fun at my table without breaking emersion.

 

[Jahydin]

"It is true that there is a correct way to play: whatever way gives your group the most joy. That's it." - Jeremy Crawford

 

[Bagpuss]

Everyone dies without understanding anything. Thats the way the world works, after all.

Sounds like a Call of Cthulhu Keeper after my own heart.