Players: it's your responsibility to carry a story.

[S'mon]

Nameless1's techniques of grounding the PCs and getting straight to the action are perfectly viable techniques. It's the default in eg Pendragon, or the Super Hero genre.

Having the PCs start out as strangers, exploring the setting without prior links to the immediate area, is also a viable technique, and the traditional default in D&D and similar games.

The latter has some advantages IMO, especially with proactive players. The PCs are finding out about the setting at the same time as the players. It's very easy for the GM to introduce new adventures/hooks as the PCs explore.

I find with having the PCs start as established part of the setting, the GM has to work harder to create adventures, because the adventure disrupts an established status quo which includes the PCs. Think Murder Mystery TV shows, especially those set in a defined geographical locale - a city (Oxford - Inspector Morse) or island (Jersey - Bergerac). Or most Super Hero plots (eg Superman II, Buffy the Vampire Slayer TV show). The adventure/plot may originate from an NPC within the setting, such as the local super villain escapes from jail yet again, but too much of this can strain credibility.

Whereas when the PCs are new to the area, they themselves are the disruptive element (A Fistfull of Dollars. Conan the Barbarian. Desperado. Kung Fu). In this latter case the GM can just sit back, introduce the PCs, and see what happens.

 

[pemerton]

From an in-character perspective, your character is an adventurer, right? Isn't seeking out adventure part-and-parcel of living the life of an adventurer?

What I do have is a group of adventurers with goals to pursue. The adventure is what results from that pursuit.

<snip>

Relationships established in play are the building blocks of a great game.

<snip>

You're standing at the gates of Paris. The year is 1625. You have a sword and some coins and your wits. Make your fortune.

Does it really take more than that?

In my view, there is a bit of tension between these two posts. The first suggests that, as a player, I should be thinking about the game from an in-character perspective. And this is reinforced by the comments in the second post about goals and relationships. But then the last bit, about "standing at the gates of Paris", assumes some sort of metagame thinking, or at least appears to. Because if I think about that situation from within the gameworld, then I have to realise that most fortune seekers will end up living lives that are boring, or miserable, or both. For a fortune-seeking game to work, I think there has to be some sort of understanding (be it explicit or implicity) between players and GM that the odds of having interesting stuff happen are greater, for a PC, than they are for a statistically average fortune-seeker.

Once you let in that much of a metagame agenda, there seems to be no constraint but taste on how much more you admit. Including, perhaps, starting somewhere other than on a street corner.

I always cut the "find the adventure" crap out of my games. We have a plan for play before we sit down at the table. Characters are made with the plan in mind.

My preferences are closer to this than to The Shaman. Although my current D&D campaign did begin in a tavern, the PCs had already been designed with some links in mind, and with backgrounds/relationships that would predispose them to engaging with the gameworld. The tavern wasn't an alternative to metagaming, just a handy ingame location for the metagame to be implemented.

These connections are not necessary. RPGs can work without them. And have. For years. But they are useful. And take very little time. They actually help to combat the complaint that the original OP outlined. Just an optional technique for most games, but one with results.

I agree with this. If a good part of the pleasure in RPGing comes from seeing the players invest in the gameworld via the medium of their PCs, then it makes sense to design the PCs and/or the world to help ensure that investment from the get go, rather than make everyone faff around at the table to bring it about.

And this is very easy to do in a bog-standard fantasy RPG. Clerics and paladins have their gods and temples. Fighters have their families and communities to who they have to prove themselves. Even rootless wanderers have their one-time home villages destroyed by marauding gnolls, upon whom they are now sworn to have their revenge.

As you said above, D'Artagnan actually has at least one connection. I think that you might also be overlooking the fact that he has a connection to the Musketeers. He wants to be one.

This is right, and it fits in with the use of "relationships" rather than "goals" as being helpful properties of a PC. Goals, on their own, don't necessarily invest a player in the game, because unless there is some sort of metagame understanding between GM and player, the player does not know how feasible it is to achieve his/her PC's goal (assuming it's not something completely mundane). It is goals that integrate into the existing gameworld elements - ie goals that are also relationships - that produce player investment. But to get this requires having players and GMs who are on the same page when it comes to world and PC design.

What you call "find-the-fun" is to others the very necessary (and fun) step of exploring; during which both characters and players can learn many things about the game world and the DM respectively.

I think Nameless1's suggestion is that this can all be done more quickly and less tediously at the metagame level, before play starts, so that once play begins there is no need to do all this stuff. Once play begins the players, the GM, the PCs and the gameworld can all already be on the same page.

the philosophy of "Characters with no roots should cannot be hurt" and "You should always hurt the characters", applied broadly, is precisely why some people create rootless characters with no attachments to the world. They've been taught that background ties can bring them more grief than good.

I think this is about the type of grief. The idea is not that the PCs should be driven into the ground, or that all the game elements that a player, via his/her PC, has become invested in should be destroyed. It's rather that the things that a player has become invested in should be the things that the game, as it is played, puts at stake.

Exploration also adds depth to the world, and thus the game, from the players' perspective.

I don't agree with this. Exploration for its own sake is not of very much interest to me as a player - and as a GM, I try to consciously rein in my own tendency to overemphasis aspects of the gameworld that are of no interest beyond exploration for its own sake.

In my experience, what adds depth to the gameworld for my players is when the gameworld returns upon their investment in it. So if they set out to defend their church against an evil cult, and start exploring the cult, and its demonic sponsors, and so on, the gameworld yields up answers to these investigations that the players can then respond to. The campaign I ran previous to my current one ran for 10 years, and I would guess that of the six players in that game only one or two would remember the map. But all remembered the relationship map that they drew up to keep track of their allies, their enemies, and the connections between all the other NPCs of the world.

It is about giving players choices that are meanigful to their characters. It is about allowing the players the choices to define their characters and their role within the world.

Agreed. I suspect that my game is not as focused on this as yours. It is still a D&D game, not an indie game, and so apart from anything else doesn't have quite the same mechanical techniques to force this as many indie games do. On the other hand, it is a 4e D&D game and so has more than zero techniques of this sort - paragon paths, epic destinies to come, and not to mention all the history and myth that the 4e D&D world is full of and in which players can very easily become caught up.

I find it funny that the OP had a problem with the fact that players never engage with the fiction unless the GM railroads them, many people agreed, and yet when techniques are suggested that can help you to engage the players interests through their characters, without a railroad, they are blown off as producing shallow games without time to develope character. That accusation is just not true. Many fine games advocate this type of GMing explicitly in the rules, and many other games thrive off of it, even if not made explicit. I found the complaints of the OP to be very true until I learned some tricks from other games. Not everyone will like them. Many people use these tricks without knowing that they use them. Telling me that they are a bad idea is silly. They are techniques with wide acceptance, and have produced good results for me and many others. Ignore them if you will, but it is not like these are untried or even all that controversial.

Nicely put.

 

[pemerton]

Whereas when the PCs are new to the area, they themselves are the disruptive element (A Fistfull of Dollars. Conan the Barbarian. Desperado. Kung Fu). In this latter case the GM can just sit back, introduce the PCs, and see what happens.

I think this is right. But I think that there is more to be said about the different options that are available here. While of course it's all about taste in gaming, in my view it's not "mere taste". The different options have their own underlying logics, which can be analysed at least to some extent.

First, as Nameless1 said upthread, this presupposes that the PCs are mercenaries, or something like that (in the case of Kung Fu, maybe something closer to wandering do-gooders - "enlightened mercenaries").

Furthermore, if you keep on going with this sort of play - the PCs always on the move to somewhere new - then you get strongly episodic play, which not everyone wants. Conversely, if the PCs become embedded in the local situation over time, and this is what everyone wanted, then why not just start there?

Early D&D seems to have been conceived on the Conan model - start out wandering, end up embedded - and thus to have anticipated a change over the campaign in the style of play (reflected mechanically, to an extent, in the shift from dungeons to castles and politics as the PCs gain levels). This is one way to play an RPG, but it's not obviously superior, and to be honest is not even obviously that attractive. Again, if I want to play an RPG with PCs embedded in the world, why not just start there?

One answer to that question might be - unless you do it in the Pendragon or Lo5R style, and make the PCs part of the ruling families by default, it takes metagaming to achieve it, as the GM and the players conspire to design PCs and world that complement one another. And some players at least - including, it seems, at least some early D&D players - have a strong dislike for this sort of metagame. So they opt to subsitute play for metagame, and make the embeddedness emerge organically in the course of play.

But if you look at The Shaman's posts upthread, then (as I pointed out in my earlier post) he already seems to presuppose some degree of metagame - namely, that the fortune-seeker at the gates of Paris has more than a realistic chance of finding fame and fortune, or at least interesting adventure. And this is reinforced by The Shaman's upthread remarks about his "random" encounters. This is all quite different to high-lethatlity, no-special-treatment-just-because-you're-a-PC classic D&D.

Once you have this much metagame, why stop there? Which brings us back to the question - If you want to play a game in which the PCs are embedded in the gameworld, why not just start there?

 

[Neonchameleon]

But then it just seems to be to be kind of pointless. If you have to lead them around everywhere and point out every single bit of information, then for me the fun is completely gone. If I wanted that i would work on my book. There I'm in control of pretty much everything that goes on. Half the point of playing D&D is seeing what the players will do, seeing how they will figure things how, what kind of unexpected things they do. Over the years I learned one very important thing: omit needless words. If it doesn't need to be said, don't say it. When you describe a room to your players, you do so telling them what they see. You don't say, "and behind the barrel is a key." While that's important, they don't see it.

Now let me add more to this story so you can see how really obvious this cat is throughout everything...

Campaign Title: The Good Merchant
The Good Merchant gives them a coin saying it will turn gold when they have done a deed worthy of the item they want. Good Merchant: Implies it must be a good deed.
They go and see a cat. Oh hey, stray cat. I didn't just say there's a cat on the steps. Its a stray cat, and obviously so. Good deed to be done? Give it a home or find whom it belongs to.

They didn't get this the first time. Ok fine, that's ok. Cat's still there when they come out and I point it out again. Nothing. Then a serries of very unfortunate events occours.

1. One of the players decides to hunt a deer, cook and cure it, and donate it to the church as food. As a joke they find the cat and put it inside the bundle. They finally noticed the cat, but did not get the hint.

2. Same cat shows up again. Its been brought up four times. No one takes the now obvious hint. They ignore it.

3. One player is frustrated and doesn't know what to do so, upon seeing the cat, they take it and throw it as hard as they can. I decide to play god at this point, realizing they are never going to get it. At this point I've also given them about five other deeds they could have done, all of them ignored. So I say the cat lands in a young tree, which bends to the ground and the cat gently slides off into some girls lap. She is overjoyed at her newfound pet and rushes inside to take care of it, saying "MOMMY! MOMMY! LOOK WHAT FELL OUT OF THE SKY!"

DING! coin turns gold. Not the way it was suppose to work, but oh well. For my own entertainment and to try and make the game actually move forward, I cursed the player, making it so any evil they did turned out to be good somehow. The session quickly degrades into absolute idiocy as he tries again and again to do evil and i keep coming up with ways to make it good.

And as a side note, no one else in the game turned their coins to gold. At that point, I realized that unless I made things that were so blatantly obvious that no one on earth could miss them, the game was going to go nowhere. Thats the last time I DMed, and will probably be the absolute last. What exactly is the point of doing everything for the players besides rolling their dice for them?

EDIT: A really good example of fail players: http://shamusyoung.mu.nu/images/comic_lotr15.jpg

...

Wait a second. The merchant gave them coins which would turn gold when they did a good deed worthy of it. Not "the specific good deed magically bound to that coin" but "a good deed worthy of it". So the PCs tried to do a good deed - providing food for the poor. In what sense is this not a good deed? The players here were providing their own solution to the adventure - exactly what you claim to want. It just wasn't the one you wanted which magically had something to do with one of the hundred or so stray cats there were likely to be in the town. (Or one of the other few good deeds on your magically approved list.)

You're running a Solve the Soup Cans game there. (Warning: TVTropes link). And when the players had their own idea for plot, you rejected it as worthless (providing food to the poor is somehow not a good deed?). Some of the players did exactly what you claim you wanted them to - and you ignored this. So of course they were frustrated. They couldn't read your mystical list of approved good deeds - and knew that any good deeds they came up with that weren't on your approved list wouldn't count for anything - you had demonstrated this.

This isn't fail players. This is an example of a fail DM. What you were supposed to do was take the ideas the players had provided and run with it. Use their deed to open up a plot (for instance instead of going to the poor, the priest the next day invited all the rich merchants and minor nobles round for dinner - at that point the good deed becomes exposing the priest's corruption so charity can flow to the poor (far more of a good deed than giving a home to a stray cat)).

So how do you get players to provide their part of the story? Simple. Listen to their ideas. Act on them. Let them matter. If you reward the ideas the players come up with by taking them and expanding on them then the players will find that fun and will keep adding new ideas and story to the mix until you get overloaded. If you reject them (e.g. by restricting your definition of "good deed" to a DM-approved list of good deeds) then it won't be fun for the players, they won't give you ideas because there's no point - they won't get any reward for them and will, in fact, be frustrated as their ideas are rejected. So they will stop trying because they know it won't do any good.

 

[The Shaman]

In my view, there is a bit of tension between these two posts. The first suggests that, as a player, I should be thinking about the game from an in-character perspective. And this is reinforced by the comments in the second post about goals and relationships. But then the last bit, about "standing at the gates of Paris", assumes some sort of metagame thinking, or at least appears to. Because if I think about that situation from within the gameworld, then I have to realise that most fortune seekers will end up living lives that are boring, or miserable, or both. For a fortune-seeking game to work, I think there has to be some sort of understanding (be it explicit or implicity) between players and GM that the odds of having interesting stuff happen are greater, for a PC, than they are for a statistically average fortune-seeker.

Once you let in that much of a metagame agenda, there seems to be no constraint but taste on how much more you admit. Including, perhaps, starting somewhere other than on a street corner.

And another FoRE* joins the discussion. Hi, pemerton!

Presumably most people interested in joining a game about swashbuckling adventures possesses at least a passing familiarity with the genre. The rules of the game produce swashbuckling adventurers for the players to play, and provide guidance on some of the possibilities open to an adventurer to make one's fortune during l'Ancien Régime. And, since we're all sitting down to play a game together, I believe we can safely assume that the referee will take a few minutes to embellish the material provided by the rules of the game with some campaign-specific details (what I like to call 'The Five Things Every Character Knows') and encourage the players to set goals for their characters, which hopefully the players will take to heart.

The "metagame agenda" is, "Let's play a game like the Three Musketeers!" The (well-written, in the case of Flashing Blades) rules of the game we are going to play produce genre-appropriate characters, and I'm providing a setting which reflects the period and place and the accounts (both historical and fictional) they inspire.

A "statistically average fortune seeker" in 1625 Paris is a laborer hoping to find steady work. The roleplaying game we're going to play doesn't produce these characters.

With that in mind, does 'standing at the Porte Saint-Antoine' really sound like such a huge conceptual hurdle to cross? Here's your character; here's Paris. Go for it.

If a good part of the pleasure in RPGing comes from seeing the players invest in the gameworld via the medium of their PCs, then it makes sense to design the PCs and/or the world to help ensure that investment from the get go, rather than make everyone faff around at the table to bring it about.

What you seem to disparage as "faffing around" is what some other gamers call "playing the game."

In Flashing Blades "faffing around" includes such boring, time-wasting, genre-typical activities as courting another man's wife and her serving girl at the same time, or gambling in a gentlemen's club against a duke and peer, a great officer of the King's Household, or challenging a rival swordsman to summon his seconds to a little alley behind the Église Saint-Eustache.

And somehow fun manages to be had.


* Friend of Ron E.

 

[pemerton]

The "metagame agenda" is, "Let's play a game like the Three Musketeers!" The (well-written, in the case of Flashing Blades) rules of the game we are going to play produce genre-appropriate characters, and I'm providing a setting which reflects the period and place and the accounts (both historical and fictional) they inspire.

A "statistically average fortune seeker" in 1625 Paris is a laborer hoping to find steady work. The roleplaying game we're going to play doesn't produce these characters.

With that in mind, does 'standing at the Porte Saint-Antoine' really sound like such a huge conceptual hurdle to cross? Here's your character; here's Paris. Go for it.

I don't disagree with any of this. But this seems to me to be quite some way away from what the OP was complaining about.

You have an agreed genre with agreed thematic material and an understanding both that the game will deal with those things - swashbucklers, musketeers, corrupt clergy, courtiers, etc - and that if the players have a bit of good luck with the dice and their decisions they will see their PCs grow from fortune-seekers to fortune-attainers.

The OP is (or at least seems to be complaining) about D&D players whose PCs won't act. But D&D doesn't set a genre (or at least, does not set a genre with anything like the specificity of tropes and themes as musketeers) and doesn't establish any baseline understanding about the prospects for PCs (indeed, we regularly see threads on these forums disagreeing about what those prospects should be in a typical D&D game).

I don't mind you having a bit of a dig at "metagame agendas" - I know you're not a FoRE - but Flashing Blades, as you describe it, has much more of such agenda than does a D&D game, when all I know about the game is that it is a D&D game.

In light of this problem with D&D play - a probelm that I think is fairly widely recognised (it's not as if the OP is the first time I've heard this sort of complaint) - Nameless1 seems to me to be making some fairly basic suggestions, based on familiarity with non-D&D games, about how to provide the context that will motivate those players to have their PCs act. The alternative approach, of specifying genre and PC prospects much more specifically than is normally done in D&D play, might work equally well, but (perhaps because I'm a FoRE) I tend to think more in Nameless1's terms.

What you seem to disparage as "faffing around" is what some other gamers call "playing the game."

I think we might have had this conversation before.

In Flashing Blades "faffing around" includes such boring, time-wasting, genre-typical activities as courting another man's wife and her serving girl at the same time, or gambling in a gentlemen's club against a duke and peer, a great officer of the King's Household, or challenging a rival swordsman to summon his seconds to a little alley behind the Église Saint-Eustache.

But what makes you think I (or Nameless1, for that matter) would classify this as faffing around? I'm talking about reducing the level of pure exploration of the gameworld. What you're talking about isn't exploration. It isn't looking for the adventure - unless I'm missing something, it is the adventure.

What I am describing as "faffing around" is the bit where the player has to discover, through play, who the local powerholders are, whose wives are worth courting, and where all the clubs are. I prefer a game where at least some of this is known at start up, so that we can cut straight to the action (of course some, perhaps even the most interesting, stuff can be secret at the start and emerge in the course of play - but not everything that is necessary for the fun stuff to happen).

 

[S'mon]

Once you have this much metagame, why stop there? Which brings us back to the question - If you want to play a game in which the PCs are embedded in the gameworld, why not just start there?

Sometimes I want to play a game where the PCs determine in-play whether, where, and to what extent, they become embedded in any particular part of the game-world.

In OD&D-AD&D, embedding is a reward for successful play. I like that. YMMV (and apparently does).

 

[Doug McCrae]

D&D doesn't set a genre (or at least, does not set a genre with anything like the specificity of tropes and themes as musketeers) and doesn't establish any baseline understanding about the prospects for PCs (indeed, we regularly see threads on these forums disagreeing about what those prospects should be in a typical D&D game).

It sets goals, doesn't it, through the level up and magic item acquisition systems. PCs are 'supposed' to go to dangerous places, fight monsters and acquire treasure. And, in old school D&D, become a military commander. That's what one could call the genre of D&D.

If a player wanted their character to become the mistress of the wealthiest, highest status man she could find, if the goals were wealth (just like trad D&D, but with totally different methods), love and security for oneself and one's children then the game would completely break down. The text of D&D just doesn't cover that, it's all about going down holes, fighting monsters and finding treasure, not seduction, relationships and child rearing.

People say you can do anything with it, but it seems to push very strongly in a particular direction, a tiny subset of all the activities that could be taking place in the game world.

 

[Neonchameleon]

Sometimes I want to play a game where the PCs determine in-play whether, where, and to what extent, they become embedded in any particular part of the game-world.

In OD&D-AD&D, embedding is a reward for successful play. I like that. YMMV (and apparently does).

Could you explain that please? Do you mean that embedding is a reward because of the free followers/castle that come with your level? Which seems to cut against letting the players decide.

 

[Dausuul]

...Some of the players did exactly what you claim you wanted them to - and you ignored this. So of course they were frustrated. They couldn't read your mystical list of approved good deeds - and knew that any good deeds they came up with that weren't on your approved list wouldn't count for anything - you had demonstrated this.

...

So how do you get players to provide their part of the story? Simple. Listen to their ideas. Act on them. Let them matter. If you reward the ideas the players come up with by taking them and expanding on them then the players will find that fun and will keep adding new ideas and story to the mix until you get overloaded. If you reject them (e.g. by restricting your definition of "good deed" to a DM-approved list of good deeds) then it won't be fun for the players, they won't give you ideas because there's no point - they won't get any reward for them and will, in fact, be frustrated as their ideas are rejected. So they will stop trying because they know it won't do any good.

I must spread some XP around, et cetera.