Player-driven campaigns and developing strong stories

[pemerton]

II know many players that prefer the action come to them then to go looking for it. I think the key element here is offering them options.

I think the best way to bring the action is to bring the action.

Players can author "kickers" for their PCs: "a player-authored Bang included in character creation, giving the GM responsibility to make it central to play"; a "bang" is an event introduced " into the game which make a thematically-significant or at least evocative choice necessary for a player." (See here).

That same linked page gives the following examples of bangs:

It can be as simple as a hellacious demon crashing through the skylight and attacking the characters or as subtle as the voice of the long-dead murder victim answering when they call the number they found in the new murder victim's pockets.​

A good RPG system - at least it seems to me - will be designed so that, in principle, any moment of action resolution can yield a bang. For instance, upthread I mentioned a session of Burning Wheel play involving Aedhros and Alicia. Earlier bangs had resulted in the two of them planning to break into a harbour official's strongroom. How to get in? Alicia, a weather watcher, tries to predict the weather: but instead of the moonlit night she is hoping for, it starts raining. Then Alicia decides to cast Chameleon to help sneak in - a check is called for, it fails, the result (as generated via the rules for failed castings) is that instead of turning invisible as she hoped, the rain about her turns into copper coins, reflecting her deep desire for wealth; and Alicia faints from the tax of casting the spell, and so is lying in the rain with a pile of copper coins on top of her. Which provokes action from Aedhros, etc. (A full actual play report is here.)

This is how we get story without the need for anyone to be aiming at creating a story via their "unified vision".

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

Usually. But even when they do, that doesn't always mean its done a benign way. Its not like its hard for more assertive personalities to end up taking the wheel of the campaign direction, and I'm not a fan of letting that happen.

Well, I think this is a place where principled play of a game with good rules regarding process helps a bunch. Obviously its also helpful if the players are self-aware enough to not be dicks about this sort of thing. Like, I'm pretty assertive in my own way, and I'm sure in a lot of groups I could get whatever I want. I just don't actually want to 'get what I want', I want to see what happens. GMs can help to instill this sort of ethos into play. Still, I don't disagree that a group could suffer from this sort of problem. Note that it is not at all limited to narrative play though. I mean, anyone who's run enough trad games (and I certainly have) has had the dominating player who runs everything! Heck, one of my best friends had a tendency in this direction. He knew it, I knew it, and we always made it work. I've had a few campaigns fizzle in my time, but even those were functional groups. I'll admit to not inviting a couple of toxic players to my game too of course, those do exist now and then. Oddly enough though they usually are OK in specific groups. Like there was a whole group of people back in my home town that I would not play with, but they were totally great with each other and AFAIK ran a D&D campaign together for like 10 years.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

I had a thought that somehow never occured to me, as it goes against the orthodox puritanian model of a true sandbox, but what if the PCs don't start out as new nobodies with no reputation and no involvement in anything?
There could easily be people out looking for them and planning to hand out some pain or other major nuisance when they find them?
Frequently this shows up as someone more powerful and lots of goons forcing the PCs to go on an adventure doing a specific thing, if they want to or not. Which of course is really not player-driven. But even when you go with the old (and perhaps tired) of "You own this dangerous guy a lot of money", it does not need to be that the players do a specific task to get the debt cleared, but just deliver the money by whichever means they can think of.
If the PCs primary goal is to stay alive and keep their possessions, heading away from all the action is a sensible approach. But when trouble is already coming for you and will keep looking for you, then that changes the whole situation comppetely. Various places now become much more dangerous for the PCs specifically even if they are not particularly so for other people, and the PCs already have good reasons to look for opportunities to team up with the enemies of their enemies.

I don't think its necessarily a bad idea. As I've said before, I think player-driven games are not limited to a specific type of setup. It has more to do with how the game gets steered and to what degree it engages specifically with the characters and brings out specific conflicts and whatnot. So, for instance, a BitD campaign could absolutely start with "We're deep in hock to The Hive." The players actually are supposed to pick a sort of initial situation where they pick enemies and allies, etc. at the start of play. In that game you are a crew, already, but a very small 'tier 0' crew, which means your 'scale' is like 1-10 people, including several PCs. I think you get a single cohort (a gang generally) that works for your crew. You definitely get an enemy! I think the GM or the setting itself, could also posit a starting situation like this, but in that case it probably is more of a background circumstance that the GM uses now and then. Like such a thing could be a DW Front. Now and then the 'boss' sends a couple leg breakers after the PCs to 'collect'. It would certainly be a reasonably workable idea.

However, a situation like this shouldn't 'suck the air out' of the entire game, at least not unless the players really go for it. Like if the players totally focus on the need to get that payment, and have their characters focus on the possible consequences of paying and not paying, etc. and just really make that THE THING, then hey, go with it! I mean, the loan sharks kidnap Gramma, they frame one of the PCs, they turn your friend against you, whatever. If OTOH the players are like "yeah, well, we'll deal with them in good stead" and go off and start up some unrelated adventure or something, then let it lie. Maybe later at some point when you owe them a hard move one of these thugs shows up at an inopportune moment, but they're probably not going to be a big focus of the game.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

Oh, I agree. One of the things that came out of the Forge era is a realization that the processes of play weren't well encoded, described and transmitted to the players. A lot of the games that came out of the discussion do a very good job of not only telling you the rules, but also telling you how they want the game to be played.

This is both good and bad.

However, it doesn't overturn the idea that how you think about the game is more important than the rules. It just means that the game also tells you how its designer expects the participants to think about the game.

I think its both good and good

While I won't dispute that the designer of Dungeon World is telling you how they think DW works, and what it does, and probably expect you want to play that way (or else you would probably play something else) I also think that what they are mostly doing is just telling you what the rules are, which includes what the GM says, when they say it, what the players do and say, who makes what decisions, and when, etc. If you MERELY take the game as a construct, without attaching any sort of ideas to it ahead of time, and simply play it, recipe-like, you will get narrative play. I mean, OK, you might get lousy uninteresting shallow narrative play (I've seen that) but it will be some sort of narrative play, at worst. So, what we should focus on when talking about games is, remarkably enough, the game itself! All this smoke and mirrors about players 80% want this, or always do that, or might do X, Y, or Z, whatever. Its all a distraction. You want to play an RPG that focuses on what the players decide their characters will do, and is about that, then go get a copy of the Dungeon World PDF and go to town! Its that simple, really. If that genre isn't what you want, there are plenty of other similar games built on the same or somewhat similar basis that do roughly the same thing. Heck, Ironsworn is a pretty good one you can run solo, or GM-less. Hard to beat that for a game to just try out!

 

[bloodtide]

If the PCs primary goal is to stay alive and keep their possessions, heading away from all the action is a sensible approach. But when trouble is already coming for you and will keep looking for you, then that changes the whole situation comppetely. Various places now become much more dangerous for the PCs specifically even if they are not particularly so for other people, and the PCs already have good reasons to look for opportunities to team up with the enemies of their enemies.

Not the best of ideas.

First off, many players won't care enough if something happens to their character. And that goes double if "the bad guys are just after their character as the DM says so".

Second, a lot of players won't react well to the Railroad of "no matter what the bad guys will spawn out of thin air" plot.

But third, and most of all, many DMs won't be able to commit to the "have the bad guys attack and defeat, capture or kill the PCs."

'Fallacy', ROFL! Who role plays the characters? Who constructs their personalities and decides how they react to various situations, and probably (in my play at least) determines what sorts of situations those are? The PLAYERS. Characters aren't 'driving' anything, they're played by the players! This entire notion is strange and incomprehensible to me!

Player Driven is where the game is made for the real life players. They are playing their character as a self insert: as themselfs. If the player likes combat and loot, then the character likes combat and loot. The player cares nothing about the fiction at all. For example if they have an elf character and some elves ask for help, the player utterly does no care and just asks "can we have more combat now?"

Character Driven is where the player takes on the role of the character they have created. The basic definition of Role Playing. No matter what the player thinks or likes or dislikes, they will role play the character in a unique way.

Again, look at the rules for Dungeon World, which offer a very comprehensive set of elements, organized in a sort of 'onion-like' way

This is great if you like this sort of game. The rules say the players do this and the rules say the DM does that. So each round the players pick from the list, and the DM picks from the list, and the game moves forward.

Nobody can or wants to FORCE anyone to do anything. Do you FORCE players to do stuff in your games?

Yes.

And, don't all the highly praised games, like Dungeon World and Blades in the Dark force the players to do things? Is this no really a huge point of these games: to force the players to play the game? Though sure "force" is too harsh, as it's more "strongly encourage", but it's the same at the end.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

That's your problem and your admission.



No, it's a very surprising and controversial statement. I mean, one of the huge take aways of Forge was "system matters". I'm suggesting that system matters less than some other things.

What particularly matters about something like AW or BitD is less the system and more the fact that those games tell you different ways to prepare and think about playing the game, and if as you say your are naive person that has only been exposed to specific sorts of play then encountering those different ways of thinking about a game can revolutionize how you play. And those people legitimately experience radically different gameplay experiences associated with changing the system. It's a real and valid thing.

But what I'm saying is that prior to games encoding the processes of play, people invented them organically. And if you were the sort of person that played 12 different systems with 10 different GMs by the time you were 22 and were like B.A. from 'Knights of the Round Table' always trying to figure out how to play an RPG as an artform, well you hit on a lot of ideas 30 years ago in various forms that were only described and encoded and normalized later. And so when people come to you and say, "You can't do X in Y system, but Z does X", then that goes against your own experiences of play.

I probably played 12 different systems with 10 different GMs by the time I was 17! in the late '70s we had a group of over 200 active RPGers and you could literally go to The Bunker on Saturday at 10AM when it opened and play RPGs until Sunday night at 8PM when it closed without a break (and we regularly did so). We had available to us in the club library basically almost every RPG published from 1974 to 1980 (when I left) and there were a LOT of them. Ever played Bunnies and Burrows? The first ever game with a skill system (and like, the 3rd RPG ever published). Probably played another 100 different RPGs at least a couple times in the '80s too.

System Matters, that's just how it is. Yes, people can 'do whatever' and think various ways, etc. etc. etc. but you still really want a game that goes with the thing you want to do at that particular table at that time.

 

[Thomas Shey]

Well, I think this is a place where principled play of a game with good rules regarding process helps a bunch. Obviously its also helpful if the players are self-aware enough to not be dicks about this sort of thing. Like, I'm pretty assertive in my own way, and I'm sure in a lot of groups I could get whatever I want. I just don't actually want to 'get what I want', I want to see what happens. GMs can help to instill this sort of ethos into play. Still, I don't disagree that a group could suffer from this sort of problem. Note that it is not at all limited to narrative play though. I mean, anyone who's run enough trad games (and I certainly have) has had the dominating player who runs everything!

To a point, but I can't help but think when its entirely player-driven that's simulataneously going to lead to more unfulfilled expectations and more ability to the players with that tendency, whether done in a conscious and deliberate fashion, to do so more severely.

Basically, for better or worse, when there's more authority centered in one person, that person is in a better position to drag things in the direction they want. If that person doesn't do so with a light hand, it can easily end up being him just overriding what the players are trying to get out of the game. But if there's problems with uneven social power in the group, if he's trying to make sure everyone gets what they want, he can rein in the people who are not capable of reining in themselves.

(Yes, to save people trouble, don't play with people who do that. I've expressed my opinion about that sort of solution to common problems before, so I won't waste everyone's time doing it again, but I consider it a useless sort of response).

 

[pemerton]

You want to play an RPG that focuses on what the players decide their characters will do, and is about that, then go get a copy of the Dungeon World PDF and go to town! Its that simple, really.

Personally I'd recommend Burning Wheel!

But yes, there are games that do exactly what the OP wants. They're not hard to find. They're not very expensive (DW is $25 here: Dungeon World - Burning Wheel).

There's no mystery about how this can be done. I mean, maybe it was all a bit uncertain 30 years ago, but not any more!

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

Not the best of ideas.

First off, many players won't care enough if something happens to their character. And that goes double if "the bad guys are just after their character as the DM says so".

Sure they won't if the only game you offer is "play my story."

Player Driven is where the game is made for the real life players. They are playing their character as a self insert: as themselfs. If the player likes combat and loot, then the character likes combat and loot. The player cares nothing about the fiction at all. For example if they have an elf character and some elves ask for help, the player utterly does no care and just asks "can we have more combat now?"

Well, that certainly isn't what everyone else means by that term. I'm pretty much 100% certain @Yora didn't mean that in the OP.

Character Driven is where the player takes on the role of the character they have created. The basic definition of Role Playing. No matter what the player thinks or likes or dislikes, they will role play the character in a unique way.

I can assure you that your definitions are not shared with at least half the people in this thread. This is just 'role play', there's no need to give it any other term.

This is great if you like this sort of game. The rules say the players do this and the rules say the DM does that. So each round the players pick from the list, and the DM picks from the list, and the game moves forward.

you have not the faintest idea... Really, seriously, if you think that's what it is, OK. Dungeon World for instance, which I assume is what you are basically referring to, is vastly more than 'picking moves from a list', there's no such procedure within the game. Moves exist, they're basically something roughly equivalent to class features, spells, whatever in 5e. In the 'tactical' play of Dungeon World the players simply describe what their PCs do. It is largely up to the GM to determine if any of those actions are specifically 'moves' that require dice to be thrown and more specific rules applied beyond "if you do it, you do it" which is the basic "apply the fiction to the game state" mechanic. But how is this, at worst, any different from 5e where your battlemaster picks a maneuver and 'does it'? Except in DW the game is 'fiction first' (one of the principles being 'start and end with the fiction'). This creates much more RP than what typically happens in D&D. And this is clearly where your lack of experience shows. You may be very familiar with D&D, but you are not familiar with games where the fiction and the process of play and the game state are so tightly fused in all aspects of play.

Yes.

And, don't all the highly praised games, like Dungeon World and Blades in the Dark force the players to do things? Is this no really a huge point of these games: to force the players to play the game? Though sure "force" is too harsh, as it's more "strongly encourage", but it's the same at the end.

Nope. I mean, if you mean by 'play the game' to play Dungeon World or whatever, this is a given. I mean, we are talking about HOW a game is played and which games might play in which ways, so presumably the players decided to play? The game sure didn't force them to do that! Presumably once they decided to play DW they followed the rules of DW, what else would the phrase "play the game" possibly mean? lol. You guys get caught up in a lot of silly rhetoric. Everyone plays Dungeon World, they describe their actions, moves may or may not be declared, the results of whatever they did are determined, possibly by rules and GM moves, possibly by GM rule and fiction interpretation (noting that in DW the table as a whole can review these things if there's a dispute). Finally the GM may make a 'move' of their own. I'd note that the way Dungeon World describes a GM move is "just do what GM's normally do." In other words, you describe how the fiction plays out from that point until a player wants to jump in again and say they are doing something. You can call this 'soft move', 'hard move', and there's a list of move ideas, but the GM doesn't REALLY have distinct moves, they have 'a move', a time in which they are asked to advance the fiction as their part of the process of play. DW says there are 3 situations where this comes up 1) A player provides a golden opportunity (usually by ignoring some sign of danger) 2) A player makes a move and the results call for the GM to do something (in which case the GM's options might be specified and limited) 3) When the players look to the GM and ask 'what next'? (they may not explicitly ask, but you will know).

 

[chaochou]

I think my preferred number is two or three players. I've had four and five. In my experience of those larger groups, sometimes one or even two players are somewhat "hangers on" rather than driving the action themselves.

Reflecting on it, I think part of what makes three players good is that you can set up a situation which involves two players' characters, and then cut from that to the action involving the third. But the two trajectories are not quite parallel because of the different number of PC's involved - there's a type of instability/invitation to dynamism.

It'd be good to hear your thoughts on working happily with five players.

I find my play with five ends up very similar to what you describe with three players, except instead of two sets of activity (your group of two and then the third player alone) you end up with at most three sets (two groups of two and a lone actor) and often two (three and two or four and one).

I find the game makes some difference - my players will look for aid and back-up in Burning Wheel more readily than in Apocalypse Word, which I think is a function of AW characters being generally more badass from the outset than three lifepath BW characters. But even in AW it's extremely rare for me to have five players doing independent and unconnected things.

If I've made a move and Sickboy is missing, there's always more than one player that wants to know how and why, and that will naturally lead the players to seek each other out as different moves catch or require their attention.

I really like running for three in Apocalypse World, but it only takes two or three rolls to go against the players and things can spiral out of control for a hardhold pretty quickly. So I find with three, my players won't seek out confrontation with each other directly or overtly - there's enough adversity (and tension and fun) from scarcity and the apocalypse without really needing to.

Whereas, with five players you've got enough manpower to make the hardhold feel reasonably secure, and that gives greater opportunity for conflicts of interest between the characters.