pemerton said:
In what concrete way would my game be better, here and now, if I decided the "true" backstory of the decapitated brother, and used that secret backstory to adjudicate action declarations and hence determine outcomes.
Because then you could have built clues around it (whether legitimate or not), had results of second-party interactions influence the party (e.g. someone who had been wronged by the brother later interacts with the PCs), and - to use your term - used it as a lens through which to frame scenes. Hard to do any of that if you don't know ahead of time what you've got to work with.
But all these things
did happen. There were clues as to the brother's moral status (possession by a balrog; his treatment of his apprentice - the assassin PC; the discovery of the black arrows). There were "second-party" interactions, between the brother PC (who wanted to redeem the NPC brother) and the assassin PC (who wanted to kill him, and has now succeeded in that).
The game has been working with all this stuff
the whole time. In
the very first session, the PCs found a spellbook apparently written by the brother and in the possession of a mad murderer.
The confrontation between brother and brother; the need for the NPC to then recupreate in the mage's tower; and his decapitation by the assassin PC-turned-NPC - these have been the events to which the whole campaign, to date, has been leading up! It's hard to envisage any way it which this stuff could have been more at the centre of the game, given that it also has other PCs and so other elements in play (eg the naga and its PC servant).
There shouldn't be any mysteries for the GM - only knowledge. Mysteries are for the players.
in an RPG, if there's to be a mystery with clues etc. those clues have to come from somewhere; and that somewhere is by default the DM (though a player can author a mystery of her own, I've seen it done).
<snip>
Mystery is fun. Mystery is therefore good.
<snip>
Isn't that part of the mystery, though: the not knowing everything? (or, in some cases, not knowing anything)
But why, then, is the mystery even better if the GM already knows the answer?
A game can have clues - in the sense of events that point to something that lies beyond or behind them - without having a pre-authored mystery that the players are trying to unravel.
I was assuming that there had been <prior interaction between PCs and brother>, and if so the inconsistency would have come from whatever the brother did/said at the time not being filtered through his evilness.
But how do you know it wasn't filtered through his evilness?
Or to put it another way: suppose there had been prior interaction - and it took whatever form it did - why would that be inconsistent with evilness? Does "evilness" always manifest itself in some particular and distinctive way?
This is why I'm puzzled by these concerns about inconsistency - they seem to derive from some very particular conception about how certain sorts of characters
must behave, or how certain sorts of events
must unfold, if certain other things about those characters or those events are to be true. But this doesn't seem to be the case in the real world, and so why would it have to be so in the imaginary one?
pemerton said:
If stuff happened that matters to the game, in the sense of engaging or involving stuff that is core to the PCs (and hence their players), then the situation might continue to be important. It would inform framing; inform the narration of consequences for failure. But none of that requires the GM to give the town its own "character arc"!
Yet without doing so how can you inform yourself what's going on in the town and by extension what filters any interactions with the townsfolk may have?
You just make stuff up. Or you read it from the dice.
Think back to rolling reaction dice in a B/X game. The PC elf stumbles across an ogre. The GM rolls the reaction dice. They come up 5 - and the GM has the ogre say "MMM - I think I might have some elf for dinner!" And now the player of the elf can either resign him-/herself to a fight, or try to persuade the ogre to (say) take money in lieu.
Suppose instead the dice come up 10 - then the GM has the ogre say "Ooh, look at the cute elf. You remind me of the elf I saw that time when I was just a baby ogre!" In other words, the ogre's backstory and motivations are written in to fit the rolls. The same can be done for peasants in a town.
That's why I keep emphasising the significance of action resolution. We have, in our game, techniques for the players declaring actions for their PCs and then determining whether or not the PCs get what they want. We don't need an extra filter of secret backstory to resolve these dice rolls. Rather, we can construct the backstory off the back of the results. (And as part of framing. And as part of PC building. Etc, etc. But there is
no need for GM's secret backstory.)
But a bit of logical continuity (and maybe some dice rolling) isn't much of a stretch.
If the ogre ever comes back into play again, chances are everyone at the table will remember it. If not, roll the dice again!
Or make notes. Written backstory isn't less effective because it's written down as a product of play rather than as a prelude to it.
Which tells me one of several things:
1. You've been amazingly lucky, or
2. You and-or your players are either meticulous note-takers or have memories that would put an elephant to shame, or
3. Your campaigns are very short (it's easier to remember something for 6 months real-time than it is for 5 years), or
4. You and your players are simply willing to live with a certain amount of internal inconsistency (border to be determined) just to keep things going.
Again, my experience makes me think that you're exaggerating the issue. It's just not that hard. So I think you're exaggerating 1 and 2.
My campaigns tend to run for many years, so 3 is not relevant.
You've left off 5 (no one remembers and so no one cares). And 5 can be quite important, because if something happens which turns out to go nowhere or be of no concern to anyone, then it doesn't really matter if it drops out of the group's collective memory and never gets brought up again. (It's hard to give example of 5, because by definition they've been forgotten. But I suspect early in my main 4e game, when the PCs were opposed to a Bane-ite sect, some stuff was at least implied about that sect that I think ended up dropping out of the picture, because the player who would have been mainly interested in that stuff - due to playing a cleric of Kord - moved to London.)
And I think you're also too harsh on 4. There's the famous story that even Raymond Chandler didn't know what the story was with one of the murders in the film of The Big Sleep (I think it's the car that is pulled out of the bay). In the real world there are often loose ends or bits that don't quite seem to fit together. So it's hardly unrealistic that, in the gameworld, there'll be events whose cause is uncertain, or NPCs who motivation never quite comes to light.
But the overall anchor of consistency and continuity is the players' play of their PCs. That provides the focus of play, and the common thread around which events turn.
Speaking of character arcs, I am not really a fan of the idea of preplanned arcs for PCs or NPCs. Drives, Passions, History, Relationships, Plans, and Goals are all awesome. They provide a trajectory and situation to be explored through play. Character arcs seem like character as script to me, and throw up alarm bells. I tend to be much more in favor of characters as essentially presenting questions to be explored.
From the PC side Drives, Plans and Goals add up to a planned arc looking for a place to happen.
But they're not a planned arc, at least as Campbell is conceiving of them. They're springs to action. But they will be tested, perhaps realised, perhaps changed or abandoned.
If you learn that your brother was a maker of cursed arrows, maybe you have to give up your goal of redeeming him! (Or maybe not. But when confronted with that sort of challenge to your goals, the notion of a planned arc has to be abandoned.)
This is the sort of thing Campbell means by "exploring through play".
Disappointment or a major after-the-fact facepalm is sometimes a fact of life, both in reality and - one would think - in the game world.
Yes. But when, at the table, is the GM licensed to introduce such results. In my preferred approach, as the narration of
failure. Because that's what you're describing: the players (and their PCs) have not got what they wanted.
An RPG takes a group of players, puts them into characters, drops them into a game world or setting, and turns them loose. After this, both game-world time* and real-world time can only move in one direction: forward. So, something that's in the past for the characters is also in the past* for the players.
But this is just wrong.
Players make up bits of their PC backstory all the time. Heck, some players make up
names for their PCs sometime after the first session.
GMs have been making up the settting in response to play ever since the first time Gygax or Arneson or whomever said - "I wonder what's in the neighbourhood of this dungeon - I'd better write up a village". The City of Greyhawk clearly was conceived of by Gyggax efore its history was. Etc.
And filling in backstory after the event is an utterly routine feature of serial fiction.
The Baron's an NPC. The DM runs the NPCs. Thus, if the Baron did something then by extension I as DM did it.
This just seems confused.
If the Baron does something, that doesn't mean the GM did that thing. Sauron killed Elendil. Tolkien wrote a story about Sauron killing Elendil.
In terms of the relatonship between backstory, GM narration thereof, and the way that play of the game works, the GM can just as easily narrate that the Baron did such-and-such
as part of narrating the consequence of a player's failed check, as decide on it secretly in advance and then use that decision as the basis for deteriming that the player's action declaration for his/her PC fails.
The GM is doing quite different things in each case, but what the baron did remains the same in either case. This is why it is helpful to analysis to distinguish the doings of (real) GMs from the doings of (imaginary) NPCs. If we don't, it's very hard to talk coherently about what is driving the game: we end up with assertions like "The baron cause such-and-such to happen in the game", when the baron in fact (being imaginary) exercised no causal power on anyone ever.
This point is pretty well recognised when it comes to alignment and characterisation - ie most RPGers recognise that "I was playing in character" isn't a good reason to explain anti-social play, because the character isn't real, and it is the
player who has to take responsibility for the choices s/he made.
Exactly the same point applies in other contexts too. The fiction doesn't write itself. It gets written by someone, via some process. And we can't identify or talk about that process if all we talk about are the imagined causal powers of imaginary people.
A book author, playwright or screen-writer has the huge advantage of knowing where the end will be before they start, and of knowing or alone determining the path taken to get there. This gives them the ability to write whatever bits strike their fancy and then tie those bits together later. The reader/viewer obviously doesn't know any of this, they just get to enjoy the finished product.
<snip>
What this forces, however, is a different approach to authorship (usually) by the DM; in that this world or setting the PCs are bashing around in has to be robust enough to withstand what they do to it, it has to be internally consistent and maintain that throughout, and it has to be alive in that it's constantly changing no matter what the PCs do to it.
<snip>
So, while in an authored work it's (usually) easy to see the cause-and-effect in the end even if they weren't authored in that order, in an RPG the cause has to be in place first to both allow for the effect to happen later and - in some situations - allow the cause to itself be noticed and interacted with. And that's the DM's job.
None of this is "forced".
The setting doesn't have to be "constantly changing" - until the PCs visit place X, I as a GM don't even have to turn my mind to it. And when they do, I can make up or drop in whatever seems reasonable - and if they never come back to place X again, that's the end of it. And for X to be "robust enough" to withstand what the PCs do to it, all I need is a few key descriptions and some action resolution mechanics.
Pages of backstory simply aren't necessary to any of this.
