Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 8973948" data-attributes="member: 4937">I've listened to like enumerable podcasts and "how to DM" videos and read books about DMing theory, and I've come to the conclusion that the vast majority of the ones that think they are running character driven games are really running high illusion GM driven games.  I don't want to name names here, because I don't know who is reading, but there are some quite famous GMs in the OSR community and the Nar community who are obviously not running the game they think they are running.   A bit of illusionism is fine, and I think for example Seth Skokowski as a GM who is trying his best to balance neutrality with illusionism and seems to be getting a good mixture of both, but so many of the at least public facing and popular GMs advocating for player agency are very clearly saying one thing and then running their game in another.  And there are even a couple of designers who I once admired for their innovation whom I've very much fallen out of love with having tried to run their game and apply their principles, and then going back for advice and finding that they just patch all problems with illusionism.There are definitely players that do really get into thespianism and exploration of character and melodrama as aesthetics, but they are in my experience the minority.   Getting most players to connect with NPCs is hard, and IME very unpredictable.  But even when I get players to connect with NPCs, it's very rare for them to value them more than say gear - much less their own PC.   And you can play in styles where survival is less of a risk factor and gear isn't all that important and the system narrows down the aesthetics to that thing that the player is supposed to care about, and the majority of players simply won't respond to the system the way they will to one that rewards challenge, competition, fantasy, exploration of setting, and cinematic narratives.   Indeed, there is this weird thing even if you get into the Forge theory, that the theorists themselves will agree that "Story Now" and "Nar" play isn't actually designed to produce long form coherent literary narratives.   So there is often a disconnect between what the system is trying to provide and what the table wants to produce that is only mitigated by the fact the table doesn't know any other approach beyond something like a Pathfinder AP and treating the text like gospel.  (Which won't work, especially given the highly uneven quality of most Pathfinder AP's.)And you can have a group with intraparty conflict that works, but because most players are playing self-inserts and can't play anything else, then it's really rare to have a group of players that can have intraparty conflict that is fun and not frustrating and inevitably going to turn to real world table conflicts.  And this is especially true because in most healthy groups, the guy wanting to introduce intraparty conflict is not the most emotionally healthy, talented, and mature player at the table.  Again, I've seen it work, but the trust level has to be really high and the players can't actually be driven by competition as an aesthetic.  It's more than half.  Conservatively I'd say it's like 80%.  The trope called out by 'Knights of the Dinner Table' where every player is playing the same character regardless of system, setting, or rules is so true.  Of the 30 or so players I've had the pleasure to game with for a lengthy period, I can really only call out one or two as capable of playing a wide range of personalities and motivations.  Mostly they wear attributes like skin suits over their own personalities.</blockquote>

Verification