What is the point of GM's notes?

[Ovinomancer]

Last night I ran a GURPS game and had a situation where my notes ended up being less useful than I had hoped. The group had just begun exploring the ancient vaults of a long-dead dragon. It's a relatively traditional dungeon crawl. I focused my "notes" on preparation for a few combat encounters and a trap. I underestimated the amount of time I needed to spend getting the maps set up for the VTT. The one thing I had left on my prep list was thinking through two role-playing encounters with undead spirits. But, time was up so we played the game.

The combat prep material was very helpful. A big battle early on was fast-paced and rewarding, partly because I had reviewed the relevant rules in advance and anticipated some likely questions. When the first role-playing encounter came along, I found myself stumbling a bit. I felt like it would have gone better if I had curtailed the VTT prep and spent a bit more time considering who this person was and what she wanted. As it was, it was acceptable but clunky.

In the terms of this discussion, which I have been attempting to loosely follow in my spare time, I think it is clear that the function of my notes is to contain material that the players will discover through play. Though I initially found the phrase "playing to find out what's in the GM's notes" a bit reductive, I've mostly come to terms with it. I also think of the game world as a "living world" in the sense that I try to portray a sense that the world is larger than the bits that the PCs are engaged with and that PC action (or inaction) will cause ripples that have consequences.

I don't believe, however, that anything is "real" until it actually enters the played fiction. In other words, nothing in my notes is "fixed" until the players have experienced it. If I change it up during play (or, as sometimes happens, forget what was in my notes), I go with the logic of how things played out. The players add elements to the fiction that I hadn't anticipated. Also, they sometimes come up with connections and ideas that were better (more dramatic, more fun, more connected to the characters...) than what I had in my notes. In which case, I always toss my notes.

Great post, you've laid out how your prep works for you in play and given some concrete examples.

 

[Lanefan]

This is patently laughable. The whole movement against the 5 minute workday was as a result of 1e and 2e. You do realize that every single one of the wizards spells were once per day in 1e and 2e.

Er...not quite. Yes you had limited slots but you could memorize the same spell more than once to fill said slots if you wanted.

E.g. if you've got three 3rd-level slots you could memorize fireball-fireball-fireball one day and haste-fly-lightning bolt the next, assuming all those spells were in your book.

But yes, spells were a very limited resource. In some ways it's annoying (I detest pre-memorization and have removed it in my game) but in other ways I kinda like it (that the limits force sometimes-difficult choices on players/PCs).

 

[Lanefan]

It also stopped once the party got continual light and create food and water. Clerics were great for that. I bet there are more permanently glowing copper pieces spread around the game worlds than any other single object.

In my game it's glowing pebbles, usually called "light rocks". They're too cheapass to waste copper pieces on this.

 

[pemerton]

the important part of running a living world is being able to know how a given faction would act and respond when something occurs

the pushback you are receiving is against the idea that this is a viable way of achieving an objective entity (what some here are terming "the fiction," which you resist) outside of the GM's beliefs of what that would be.

I've bolded what I take to be the key word/phrase in each post.

There is no "knowledge" here other than what the GM decides is the case. The GM does not and cannot undertake an empirical enquiry into some matter of fact, because there isn't one.

That's not the sort of action that involves invoking a living, breathing world. Assassinating the Duke is that kind of action and would involve assessing the consequences of what happened and applying it throughout the world.

The bolded assess here means decide. There is no independent phenomenon to be assessed.

 

[Bedrockgames]

There is no "knowledge" here other than what the GM decides is the case. The GM does not and cannot undertake an empirical enquiry into some matter of fact, because there isn't one.

There is knowledge. Again, no one is saying he is going off somewhere to verify the facts at a library how the faction would act. But he is checking against his own canon for the setting (which is part of the model: and that is going to include fact he has established in his head, facts he has written down, principles he has laid out governing how things work in the setting, in the subculture the organizations in question belong to, etc). If I make a faction and give them a clear set of motivations, goals, conflicts, etc; it is very easy for me to know how they will respond to certain actions taken by the party, and it is very easy to think through their response to make sure it is logical outgrowth of things existent in the sect (even if one of those things is illogical, like the leader is incredibly impulsive and responds with aggression to acts of provocation). What is more, I have a working model of the world that I need to play out any of their plans and actions in. I don't just decide 'the rival sect wants you dead so an assassin shows up at the next inn' in a living world: I have play things out through the pieces (the living NPCs) and the imaginary board (the setting). No one is saying those things have the same reality as a real world or even a real world model. But they have consistent parameters. I can chart the movement of an NPC the same way I can chart PC movement. They are limited by the time and space of the setting. Why this is important is this approach is significantly different from one where I am not making an effort to model these things (and not all approaches need you to do that: if I am running a noir adventure, that kind of modeling might be excessive). When I am running a game like this, I am not simply at liberty to just 'decide'. I have to check it against my own canon and setting model, and I am limited by the stats, resources and abilities of the pieces in play.

 

[pemerton]

What I am saying is you are zooming in on one increment, in order to disprove the larger existence of something like the living world.

I don't know why you're saying that. I'm not proving or disproving anything about the existence of sandbox RPGing.

I'm denying that the "living world" authors itself. But that's self-evident. And I'm asserting that the players come to know of the "living world" because the GM tells them. I've even given examples of that from my own play.

 

[Bedrockgames]

The bolded assess here means decide. There is no independent phenomenon to be assessed.

Again, this isn't just a decision. Maxperson has to consult his model of the setting to weigh and judge what courses of action would result from the assassination. Maybe he doesn't have information on that, and will make things up. Maybe though he has the Duke's family tree laid out, the line of succession, the political and legal structures described enough that he knows what the standard procedures are going to be when a duke is assassinated. He has to assess his setting details and his NPCs.

 

[Bedrockgames]

I'm denying that the "living world" authors itself. But that's self-evident. And I'm asserting that the players come to know of the "living world" because the GM tells them. I've even given examples of that from my own play.

No one is asserting that living worlds author themselves. We are saying they can be modeled. What we are saying is there is more to the process of running a living world is more complex than the players merely being passive recipients of what the GM tells them. What is more, it issn't just what the GM says. The GM is also providing things like maps, background information, etc. There are other tools for helping the players understand the setting they inhabit. And a lot of their understanding is going to come through interactions with NPCs. Again if you just focus on the binary of the GM side, with the GM giving them info, it think that distorts the process. But even more I am not sure what the end of this argument is. Like I said, if you have an ultimate point, state it clearly. Otherwise we are just wrestling over an academic point about the level of realness of a living world.

 

[pemerton]

How does deciding on the DC work differently within indie games?

In the post you quoted, @Manbearcat identified 4 ways (maybe 3 ways - objective/causal, genre, "rule of cool" - plus some blend thereof as a 4th).

In Burning Wheel, difficulties are to be identified the first way: objective/causal. The rulebook has lots of examples (dozens, probably 100s - I haven't counted them all - many more than any version of D&D I've read and more than Rolemaster). It is vulnerable to the problem Manbearcat identified (of GM ignorance) but there are player-side tools to mitigate obstacles ("fate points" - in 5e D&D the analogue might be a clerical Bless or Guidance or a bard's Inspiration, but under the action-declaring player's control) and there are also player-side reasons to want high difficulties (for advancement reasons). The rules that guide failure narration (failure of intent, not necessarily of task) also mean that failure is not the cost either to verisimilitude (as Manbearcat worries about) or to progress in play that it might be in some approaches to D&D.

In Cortex+ Heroic/MHRP, there are no difficulties. Every check is opposed; the appropriate dice pool is determined by the context of the attempted action in the fiction - if in doubt, the Doom Pool opposes. The Doom Pool thus becomes (among other things) a pacing device. It is comparable although less straightforward then the process for stepping up difficulties until someone fails then stepping them back found in HeroQuest Revised - which I would regard as the paradigm system for "subjective" difficulties.

My thinking was, that the party declares an action or a series of actions which may affect x faction directly or indirectly. X faction may be an offline faction - using the @Manbearcat's terminology or secret backstory using @pemerton's.
In the traditional game, the GM having understanding of x faction and the authorial authority, without a mechanic, narrates a hard move by x faction thus bringing consequence to the party's action/s, thus enforcing the idea of the Living World.

In an indie game, from my limited understanding the GM can only bring about such force if the mechanic via the die rolls allowed for it OR the force is limited, whereas in the above example the GM is only limited in terms of the setting's internal consistency. For an indie game the Living World lives so long as the die say so.

In the bit that I've bolded, my understanding is that this hard move might be narrated so as to determine the outcome of the action declaration prior to any sort of check.

So as opposed to "saying 'yes'" rather than calling for a roll of the dice, it would be saying 'no' rather than calling for a roll of the dice.

In Burning Wheel the rule is "say 'yes' or roll the dice" and so this sort of saying 'no' is prima facie out-of-bounds. It is taken for granted that we are talking about an action declaration that is already well-formed with respect to the fiction. In his Adventure Burner Luke Crane elaborates on this, and how what is already well-formed (my phrase, not his) might be connected to the GM's "big picture". The emphasis is on GM transparency. The rulebooks have a lot to say about how to integrate/reconcile GM "big picture" with player-authored PC dramatic needs, with various examples. It's the closest BW gets, at least as its designer present it, to the PbtA idea of "ask question and build on the answers". So if/when this sort of "saying 'no'" occurs, if it is a shock to the player then that means something has gone wrong in the play of the game. Not necessarily fatally wrong or irrecoverably wrong, but wrong nevertheless. I think this is different from the "living world" sandbox, where the player being shocked in this way is fair game.

Soft moves are standard fare for scene-framing in BW (and for me, by extrapolation given how I approach it, Classic Traveller). You drop out of jump space at Planet X. You detect many Imperial vessels about - X must be under attack or interdiction is fair game. You drop out of jump space at Planet X - you're under fire from multiple Imperial vessels is not. The former opens the door to the use of Admin, Bribery, Liaison, Leadership etc to manage interactions with the NPCs - a core part of the game system - whereas the latter is (in Traveller) an incredibly hard move. (In a Star Wars-type game of course maybe that could be a fair soft move, opening up the door to raisings of shields, evasive action, powering down the droids, etc.)

Is it fair, in Classic Traveller, for the GM to frame You drop out of jump space at Planet X. You detect many Imperial vessels about - the same armada that you were previously fleeing from and that surely recognise your ship? That would be highly, highly contextual. It's like the framing being You wake to find the assassin standing over you, a knife at your throat. In a lot of context that might be an unfair hosing of the player. But in some it might not be.

 

[pemerton]

No, I don't think this the case. It isn't and it wasn't for me when I read the paragraph in question. Up to that point for me at least, things were either tied to locations on the map or they were tied to events the GM wanted to happen. Obviously it is an approach many GMs can take regardless. But I have said again and again it isn't unique to living worlds.

<snip>

But I have definitely been in games where NPCs are rooted more to a spot, are not acting like living pieces on the board (but maybe in service to some plot: a good example of this is simply having an NPC show up at a dramatically appropriate time, rather than when they would act: as Crawford said about them acting when they are ready to act).

When you referred to characters in the post that I replied to I took you to mean player characters. If you mean NPCs - "you are operating on the model of Ravenloft when you run the setting (and that matters: you can't just say 'its all active creation-its all 'the fiction'). The [NPCs] are imaginary pieces moving in the imaginary model of ravenloft" - then I agree that that is not trivially true of all RPGing. But we are now back in the realm of the GM making up imaginary things.

But this brings us right back to the modeling I was talking about. It didn't exist simply because you said so, or simply because you told the players it did. It was there as part of the model, prior to that. So while obviously you talking to the players is part of how players explore that model, there is a model that exists outside you and the players (the shaft's existence isn't dependent on the conversation between you and the players: it is dependent on the model). Sure that map existed on a page. But that map could just as easily exist in a GM's mind , and the same level of objective exploration could take place

When I refer to the GM's notes, you say - no, it's not notes, it's the GM's mental model. Then when I change my vocabulary, at your request, to refer to the GM's conception you say - no, it's not something the GM just conceived of, it's the GM's notes.

I don't really care which one you want to emphasise. My point is simply that at some point the GM makes some stuff up, and then the GM during play communicates that stuff to the players. I've never said that what is made up is arbitrary or pointless. I've never said that the communication is arbitrary or pointless. My point is that it is taking place and is key to how this particular sort of RPGing works.

There is no objective model of Ravenloft which answers the question where should this character be right now, and what is she doing? That has to be decided.

History isn't perfectly predictable like math, but events flow from one to another. You can see the logic and you can anticipate future possibilities.

<snip>

events might be unpredictable, but they do have a rhyme and reason. But even a granular exchange isn't total chaos. We can follow a conversation between two people and understand how it gets from point A to B to C. And when we run a game we simply doing our best to achieve that kind of fidelity to what is plausible

If you were GMing a game of subversives and insurrectionists in the early 20th century Balkans, would you extrapolate from the assassination of the Archduke to the death of many many millions of soldiers across Europe and its near neighbours, and the collapse of the German, Austro-Hungarian, Turkish and Russian governments?

I had conversations yesterday which ended up in places I didn't predict at the start.

Plausibility is not a constraint that yields unique answers. Anticipation of possibilities likewise does not yield unique answers. That's why the language of "model" is misleading, once we get beyond a map which might permit simple distance and timescale calculations- and even those are very limited (eg I don't know of any version of D&D that allows for sprained ankles causing a change in a PC's movement rate).

if you accept the notes as a kind of model, then surely you can't reject my argument that there is a mental modeling going on.

There's no model. There's a description of an imagined place or situation. Which is then referred to to facilitate framing and, in some approaches to RPGing, resolution.

No one is saying you can extract information about he model that the GM hasn't told you. But you could explore it room to room and get a sense of the overall structure based on what is emerging, provided he is accurately conveying the model details to you.

The phrase what is emerging is just euphemism for what the GM tells the players. Exploring room to room just means declaring actions that provoke the GM to do some of that telling. Getting a sense of the overall structure is another way of saying learn what the GM is imagining abot the house.

And if the GM hasn't written down whether the dining table is oak or pine, there is no "model" that will answer that question. Someone will have to make a decision.