What is the point of GM's notes?

[Campbell]

I think there are some broader cultural differences that extend beyond gaming that can sometimes make these conversations difficult. I work as a software developer, but I have also trained extensively in graphic design and before I joined up with the Army went to film school for a time. I would never use the phrases mere aesthetics or only subjective. The aesthetic, the subjective, and the deeply personal parts of life and media are what make life worth living to me.

The following quote from Aesthetics Are Moral Judgements (a blog entry) summarizes my feelings quite well :

For me, personally, my aesthetic sensitivities are precise in a way my moral intuitions aren’t. My “conscience” will ping perfectly innocent things as “bad”; or it’ll give me logically incoherent results; or it’ll say “everything is bad and everyone is a sinner.” I’ve learned to mistrust my moral intuitions.

My aesthetic sensibilities, on the other hand, are stable and firm and specific. I can usually articulate why I like what I like; I’m conscious of when I’m changing my mind and why; I’m confident in my tastes; my sophistication seems to increase over time; intellectual subjects that seem “beautiful” to me also seem to turn out to be scientifically fruitful and important. To the extent that I can judge such things about myself, I’m pretty good at aesthetics.

It’s easier for me to conceptualize “morality” as “the aesthetics of human relationships” than to go the other way and consider aesthetics as “the morality of art and sensory experience.” I’m more likely to have an answer to the question “which of these options is more beautiful?” than “which of these options is the right thing to do?”, so sometimes I get to morality through aesthetics. Justice is good because symmetry is beautiful. Spiteful behavior is bad because resentment is an ugly state to be in. Preserving life is good, at root, because complexity is more interesting and beautiful than emptiness. (Which is, again, probably true because I am a living creature and evolutionarily wired to think so; it’s circular; but the aesthetic perspective is more compelling to me than other perspectives.)

It always puzzles me when people think of aesthetics as a sort of side issue to philosophy, and I know I’ve puzzled people who don’t see why I think they’re central. Hopefully this gives a somewhat clearer idea of how someone’s internal world can be “built out of aesthetics” to a very large degree.

I also have a tendency to view myself as separate from the communities I am part of. As an individual first and part of the community second. I see a lot of value in questioning the way things have always been done. I work in a space where I am often an agent of change. Viewing processes critically is part of my daily existence.

The impression I often get from folks like @Bedrockgames is that a significant part of their personal identity comes from being part of the mainstream part of the community. Even when criticism does not apply to the way they play there seems to be an element of questioning orthodoxy that seems to rub them the wrong way.

For instance I do not believe playing to find out what's in the GM's notes is a very accurate assessment of the sort of game @Bedrockgames describes, but it absolutely does describe a fair portion of more mainstream play. So I am a player in D&D 5e game that has the following features:

• An expectation that players will hunt for and follow the GM's linear plot.
• An expectation that a significant amount of our enjoyment should come from exploration of the GM's world building and exposition.
• Spotlight balancing as an important element of play
• Engaging in colorful characterization but not really playing to any particular dramatic needs unless the GM weaves it in.
  
  From my experience this sort of play is pretty typical mainstream play. I think it's important that we are able to actually talk about this stuff. There is a substantial portion of anodyne RPG play that can adequately be described as play to find out what's in the GM's notes. I do it every two weeks.

 

[Bedrockgames]

The impression I often get from folks like @Bedrockgames is that a significant part of their personal identity comes from being part of the mainstream part of the community. Even when criticism does not apply to the way they play there seems to be an element of questioning orthodoxy that seems to rub them the wrong way.

You couldn't be more wrong at all about this Campbell

 

[Bedrockgames]

I think my biggest issues, both in the commentary in this thread and also historically, from living world proponents comes down to what I see is a lack of acknowledging the cognitive limitations all us must deal with and what I personally view as a fairly reductive view of their own play. Basically my personal experience both with other GMs (I have played with and talked to in person) as well as in online communities is a sense that they have found the secret sauce. That they are literal Mentats who do not operate under the same limitations we all face. There also seems to be an erasure of the messier elements of running a game that do not fit their aesthetic goals. Stuff I cannot help but see when I run or play a game.

In all honesty Campbell I think this is more a reflections of issues you are carrying into the conversation than anything I am saying at all.

 

[Bedrockgames]

@Bedrockgames

That seems like fairly anodyne sandbox play to me. The sort of stuff I would do when running RuneQuest, Godbound or Stars Without Number. Lots of high level detail, but pretty impersonal stuff. That's not meant as an insult either. It's a tradeoff. We all have a limited amount of energy and it has to go somewhere. Both away from the today and at the table we need to prioritize.

It might be, I don't know (not sure what you mean by impersonal here, so I can't really say). Like I said, Godbound and Stars without Number, those are living world sandboxes. My point about living world is you need both the macro level (which is what I was just describing) and the micro level (the NPCs and factions the players are immediately dealing with). It isn't some high concept, elusive thing. And it isn't something that everyone is going to like (it does involve a lot of prep, because sandboxes by their nature require that, and it involves a lot of thinking on your toes and putting elements together rapidly: some GMs seem to have no problem with this, some have great difficulty---like with any style of play). For me, the core concept that makes this click is the idea that things in the setting have volition, treating them like live players in the game.

 

[Bedrockgames]

For instance I do not believe playing to find out what's in the GM's notes is a very accurate assessment of the sort of game @Bedrockgames describes, but it absolutely does describe a fair portion of more mainstream play. So I am a player in D&D 5e game that has the following features:

• An expectation that players will hunt for and follow the GM's linear plot.
• An expectation that a significant amount of our enjoyment should come from exploration of the GM's world building and exposition.
• Spotlight balancing as an important element of play
• Engaging in colorful characterization but not really playing to any particular dramatic needs unless the GM weaves it in.
  
  From my experience this sort of play is pretty typical mainstream play. I think it's important that we are able to actually talk about this stuff. There is a substantial portion of anodyne RPG play that can adequately be described as play to find out what's in the GM's notes. I do it every two weeks.

I have used it as a criticism myself of mainstream play. Heck the very reason why I moved towards sandbox play was because I felt that running adventures during 3E, I might as well hand the players my notes. That was my honest response to those kinds of adventure structures. But as much as that was how I felt about it, I never for a moment honestly believed that was what was drawing people to the game (that for them the point was discovering what was in the GMs notes: clearly they were interested in the interactions that the GMs notes were providing them, in making decisions within that framework that mattered (even if it is a more limited path than I might have desired), etc. And importantly, this was a way of insulting the style because I was fed up with it. It isn't a sound foundation for understanding why people play something and what they are doing.

 

[Bedrockgames]

Even when criticism does not apply to the way they play there seems to be an element of questioning orthodoxy that seems to rub them the wrong way.

I have no love of orthodoxy at all. If anything I am probably a contrarian more than orthodox. If you need to affix a negative label to what I do: stubborn and a little annoying I can accept (even my friends would attach that to me at times). Those two are fair criticisms. But I do tend to react negatively when I perceive elitism, so I will defend mainstream tastes against attacks that paint it as simple minded, not enlightened, etc. I don't really play a lot of mainstream games myself (I don't play 5E for example, I like dice pools--which are usually highly disliked in sandbox communities--at least the ones I travel in, etc). I think this might be why you think I am here to defend orthodoxy. Also I do tend to take the stance of not throwing the baby out with the bathwater a lot (but I see that as just being mindful of what you are changing, not being against change)

 

[Bedrockgames]

I think there are some broader cultural differences that extend beyond gaming that can sometimes make these conversations difficult. I work as a software developer, but I have also trained extensively in graphic design and before I joined up with the Army went to film school for a time. I would never use the phrases mere aesthetics or only subjective. The aesthetic, the subjective, and the deeply personal parts of life and media are what make life worth living to me.

The following quote from Aesthetics Are Moral Judgements (a blog entry) summarizes my feelings quite well :

Definitely much of our disagreement may be here. I read the whole blog entry and couldn't disagree more. I think it is too big a topic and too real worldy to discuss in this thread, but my only agreement with the writer is I like Bach. Beyond that, I think it runs the danger of mistaking the aesthetic for the message (as well as the content for the message).

 

[Fenris-77]

In all honesty Campbell I think this is more a reflections of issues you are carrying into the conversation than anything I am saying at all.

Having had many of those same conversations with similar people, I would say he's entirely correct. Not about you perhaps, but correct none the less. Lots of role players treat their personal style as if its some kind of magic bullet, or that they have discovered or are doing something that other players or GMs don't. Every other style, and games that aren't built to support their style, get characterized as 'less than'. This is the very foundation of one true wayism.

 

[robconley]

EDIT: Just want to note that the video of me GMing, wasn't a living world sandbox session. It was a playtest of a straight forward dungeon crawl, with a bit of light 'living adventure' thrown in, but mostly it was just run as a standard crawl as I was trying to playtest something. The video in which I was a player, I believe was a sandbox with training wheels session that Rob Conley ran (I could be wrong on that, he would know, but it was a limited scenario: we weren't exploring the full map of the setting or anything in that).

Nominally it was about roleplaying in authentic medieval setting however I used a sandbox adventure that I am writing "Deceits of the Russet Lord" up so it serve and example of how I run adventures in a sandbox campaign.

While it may have started out as a mission there is no particular way how it could have played out. The only constant is the inciting incident which was the encounter with the young couple in love. Of the 6 groups I ran this for the adventure started to diverge from that point onwards. Starting with how they handled the runaway young couple (a son of the village blacksmith, and the daughter of the local knight).

 

[Bedrockgames]

Having had many of those same conversations with similar people, I would say he's entirely correct. Not about you perhaps, but correct none the less. Lots of role players treat their personal style as if its some kind of magic bullet, or that they have discovered or are doing something that other players or GMs don't. Every other style, and games that aren't built to support their style, get characterized as 'less than'. This is the very foundation of one true wayism.

Every style has people like that in it. I definitely know living world proponents who do that (not seeing them in this thread really). But that critique can be lobbed at any position in this thread: there are people who do that with styles of play and games folks on the other side of the debate are advocating. I usually push back against people saying they have 'the secret sauce' (whether they are proponents of living world sandbox or proponents of a style not my own). This isn't an issue unique to more widespread among living world GMs than others. One of the reasons I jumped in an rejected the premise of the thread is because I felt there was a secret sauce premise baked into the whole GMs notes thing