Playing without the GM present?

[The Soloist]

A long time ago, in the mid-80s, our AD&D characters acquired a valley. It had a ruined castle and a small farmer community. We divided the valley into four sectors, one for each character.

One afternoon, all the players were in a coffee shop. We had just seen a movie. The GM was not present. The Fighter player started talking about his plan for a militia to protect the valley. We talked for about an hour, more or less in character, and created a set of laws that governed how the militia could cross into our sectors in case of trouble. We wrote everything down and gave it to the GM at the start of the next session.

The GM was a true poker face. He took the document and respected it. I could never tell if he was happy, upset or just jealous he wasn't there to witness this.

Did you do this? How did it go?

 

[Wofano Wotanto]

This sort of thing used to happen pretty regularly IME, although I haven't seen it much in the last 25 years or so. Sometimes it was like you describe - discussing "domain" stuff in and out of character and telling the GM about it afterward. More often it was scheming about what the PCs would do in various circumstances, whether in general (eg if there's an ambush, this is our default game plan for dealing with it) or against a specific foe or situation (eg if the council of wizards refuses to negotiate, this is how our surprise attack begins). That last tended to be "secret plans" that weren't shared with the GM, which felt very adversarial even back then. Of course, sometimes that was the de facto relationship between party and GM, so it wasn't surprising that the players didn't want to put their cards on the table and have the GM metagame to ruin them.

If it really is less common these days, it's probably because there's less of that awful GM vs. players nonsense now than in the 70s and 80s, which is where I saw it most commonly.

 

[Richards]

When I first taught my kids AD&D2E (the current edition at the time) - they were 10 and 8 - we would often play through a game session, finish up, and then they'd be in their room recreating the adventure (and expanding upon it) with their Legos.

Johnathan

 

[The Soloist]

This sort of thing used to happen pretty regularly IME, although I haven't seen it much in the last 25 years or so. Sometimes it was like you describe - discussing "domain" stuff in and out of character and telling the GM about it afterward. More often it was scheming about what the PCs would do in various circumstances, whether in general (eg if there's an ambush, this is our default game plan for dealing with it) or against a specific foe or situation (eg if the council of wizards refuses to negotiate, this is how our surprise attack begins). That last tended to be "secret plans" that weren't shared with the GM, which felt very adversarial even back then. Of course, sometimes that was the de facto relationship between party and GM, so it wasn't surprising that the players didn't want to put their cards on the table and have the GM metagame to ruin them.

If it really is less common these days, it's probably because there's less of that awful GM vs. players nonsense now than in the 70s and 80s, which is where I saw it most commonly.

The only time we were truly adversarial was during a battle against invading Saracens. We were all wargamers. We pulled a few stunts the DM didn't expect because of out-of-game meetings. We effectively won the battle because of that and became heroes of the realm.

Adversarial doesn't have to be toxic.

 

[Blue]

Sure, anything that doesn't interact with the world, go ahead.

There are even memes of the DM saying "play among yourselves", it's not an unknown thing at all. I've done that when the party is split, taking one group to do something and having the other side play among themselves.

But yeah, realistic characters with relationships with others made this common in at least one of my groups back when. Great way to flesh out characters and their interactions while still leaving the session for advancing the adventure.

The internet has made this even easier. In discord I set up for a superhero game, one of the players requested a "text channel", where the characters had an in-game group text going and would chat at various times. One of my players took that for a supers game she was running, but she would occasionally also post to it as a particular mentor NPC who was also in the chat in-world so that's a bit of a subversion.