What is the point of GM's notes?

[AnotherGuy]

Why not?

@Ovinomancer is likely right in that we probably should remove the romance out of the definition, however the various definitions come across as:

Setting Tourism -
Play to Discover GM's Notes -
Railroad -
Sandbox neutral to +
Protagonist Play +
Skilled Play +

I very much doubt I'm alone in this - in fact even @innerdude commented similarly on Play to Discover the GMs Notes in this very thread.

Analysing playstyles is far from my forte, however if I had to come up with something neutral for the two specific styles that exist between the various participants here... and this is not original as I've heard it before, but I'm unsure of the context.

I would charactertise your style as Player Stance and BRG's as Character Stance
Your Player Stance fits well with the active authorial power granted by the game/GM and Character Stance fits well with players passively digesting the setting/GM notes.

Maybe someone has a better suggestion.

 

[Campbell]

Playing to explore a living world with characters vs. playing to explore a living character in a world?

I used to refer to more character focused as character exploration, but I am not entirely comfortable with that label or any depiction of something is living or having an independent existence. I think that erases the act of authorship. That includes the pride we should feel for the things we actively create through play and prep. It also includes the responsibility we bear for those creative decisions. I'm not a big fan of when authors or actors talk that way about their own material either.

I tend to view authorship in RPGs as a necessary evil (on both sides of the screen) that enables play. We author so we can play, but we still engage in acts of authorship. All of us do.

If anyone thinks I am wrong about this feel free to tell me how, but this is my honest perspective.

 

[pemerton]

One of the issues I have personally experienced with traditional sandbox techniques (particularly OSR style sandbox techniques) where a GM will spend months designing a setting with the expectation that players will want to actively explore it is that on both sides of the screen it often feels like space aliens coming to a new planet. Characters seldom feel like integrated parts of the setting, often because there is very little effort in actually building out a real life for them. Games like RuneQuest, Classic Traveller, and their modern cousins like Conan 2d20 feel slightly better here, but often the setting is constructed too high a level for my tastes.

I find a lot of sandbox design tends to over focus on social groupings and not enough on characters as people with real relationships and connections to the outside world. In gaming I think there is often an over intellectualization of setting material where GMs often fall into the economist's trap of treating everyone like rational actors. In my personal experience most people (myself included) are phenomenal at posthoc rationalization, but not often guided by their rational minds when making decisions.

This is a really good post. Upthread I quoted Gygax telling the GM to tell the players that they know nothing of the world except that they are in this village where they can pick up rumours of the nearby dnugeon.

Keep on the Borderlands starts like this. X2 is like this both for the castle and Averoigne. In Hidden Shrine of Tamoachan I think the default starting point is a shipwreck.

You are correct that Classic Traveller is very high level in its default setting (a noble-dominated Imperium with navy, space marines and an Imperial scout service). My current game has involved a reasonable amount of world-hopping and so the PCs have never been in a place where they should feel at home. That is most likely to happen if they return to the ship-owning PCs homeworld of Hallucida, in which case I will give that player the stats (that I've rolled up) but probably let him decide on a lot of the details.

In the BW game where I'm a player I am returning to my ancestral estate which I have been exiled from for the past 5 years. So to the extent that it feels alien that will reflect the changes that have taken place in that time - a bit like when the Hobbits return to Sharky's Shire towards the end of LotR.

On NPCs as "rational actors": the only game where a version of this makes sense is The Dying Earth (in fact it's practically a trope in that game). Classic Traveller with its bribable bureaucrats and predictable costs for travel and for goods, can come close but the reaction table changes this. When the PC von Jerrel kissed the NPC Lady Askol and the reaction roll was a 12 (genuine friendship) the whole dynamic of that relationship, and the interaction between the PCs and the local Navy outpost (which Lady Askol was in charge of) changed. She has since acted quite non-rationally to advance the interests of von Jerrel and hence (as she sees it) of her relationship with von Jerrel.

Without this sort of thing, NPCs can seem like robots.

 

[pemerton]

Interestingly, while I have GMed PbtA I find myself using some of those techniques in just about any game I GM. I think it's got to do with the clarity with which some of those techniques and precepts there.

Right. I don't think that Apocalypse World breaks new ground at every moment with its GM advice/techniques. "Reveal impending badness", "Think offscreen", "Misdirect and never speak you move" - these are all things that GMs have done before Vincent Baker wrote them down as principles.

But Baker puts them all together in a coherent, clearly-set out package. And shows what you don't need as much as what you do - eg you can reveal impending badness, and hence get the pacing and dramatic benefits of foreshadowing, without knowing what exactly it is that is being foreshadowed. Likewise for thinking offscreen. There is real insight there into what RPGs, as an interactive medium carried by audience participation, are able to do that different narrative forms (eg books, film) can't.

 

[pemerton]

A properly prepared GM would have a random chart for Elminster's Stockings.

Appendix I of Gygax's DMG has a lot of random charts, including one for condiments in a kitchen. But I think it omits haberdashery.

 

[Fenris-77]

Appendix I of Gygax's DMG has a lot of random charts, including one for condiments in a kitchen. But I think it omits haberdashery.

QED I think. No gentleman of quality would omit haberdashery.

 

[Ovinomancer]

@Ovinomancer is likely right in that we probably should remove the romance out of the definition, however the various definitions come across as:

Setting Tourism -
Play to Discover GM's Notes -
Railroad -
Sandbox neutral to +
Protagonist Play +
Skilled Play +

I very much doubt I'm alone in this - in fact even @innerdude commented similarly on Play to Discover the GMs Notes in this very thread.

Analysing playstyles is far from my forte, however if I had to come up with something neutral for the two specific styles that exist between the various participants here... and this is not original as I've heard it before, but I'm unsure of the context.

I would charactertise your style as Player Stance and BRG's as Character Stance
Your Player Stance fits well with the active authorial power granted by the game/GM and Character Stance fits well with players passively digesting the setting/GM notes.

Maybe someone has a better suggestion.

Except that Setting Tourism has been defended as not a bad thing, in and of itself. Nor has playing to Discover the GM's notes. Nor, even, a railroad. Meanwhile, the definition of Protagonism has been rounded decried as "shallow" by others. Skilled play is, to me, neutral, and not a positive connotation -- it's specifically talking about player skilled play, and so is divorced from character, and so would seem to argue against a lot of the goals sited in this thread.

Arguing about word connotations is, really, just surface analysis and detracts from the discussion. It's a tone argument, not a substance one.

 

[AnotherGuy]

Except that Setting Tourism has been defended as not a bad thing, in and of itself. Nor has playing to Discover the GM's notes. Nor, even, a railroad. Meanwhile, the definition of Protagonism has been rounded decried as "shallow" by others. Skilled play is, to me, neutral, and not a positive connotation -- it's specifically talking about player skilled play, and so is divorced from character, and so would seem to argue against a lot of the goals sited in this thread.

Arguing about word connotations is, really, just surface analysis and detracts from the discussion. It's a tone argument, not a substance one.

Yes, tone poisoning the waters of conversation was what I was answering.
Would have been nice if someone had made a comment about my proposals.

 

[Bedrockgames]

Arguing about word connotations is, really, just surface analysis and detracts from the discussion. It's a tone argument, not a substance one.

Word connotations matter though. I don't want to beat this further into the ground, but "playing to discover the GM's notes" came up as a dismissal of sandbox and living world in a much earlier thread. That was the first time I saw it used. I am not saying people should be on edge all the time for perceived slights, but when there is a long history between posters of different styles feuding, just accepting terminology that seems both inaccurate (it is only accurate if you accept many of Pemerton's critiques of living world and sandbox---which many of us do not) and insulting, I don't know that doesn't seem wise to me. As the reaction to my own posts show, tone matters. There were clearly moments in this thread where my tone not only impacted peoples' ability to read what I was writing charitably but also probably distorted the meaning of what I was trying to say because my words reflected my biases not an even handed measurement of things. I would argue that stuff like playing to discover the GM's notes contains a lot of biased assumptions and overlooks so many of the things we have pointed to that are in fact well encapsulated by terms like Living World, Living World Sandbox, etc (provided one is permitted to explain what those mean: which isn't unique, playing to discover the GM's notes also requires further explanation)

 

[Bedrockgames]

Except that Setting Tourism has been defended as not a bad thing, in and of itself.....

I can't see how this isn't bad. It is almost always used as a pejorative in gaming circles.