What is the point of GM's notes?

[Emerikol]

My experience is that players do (or ask about) things I didn't anticipate. There are times--my last Saturday session was one--where I look at where the PCs are and I realize I have literally no idea what they'll do or ask, after a few things pending from the previous session (the players are more-than-reasonable about letting me work out answers between sessions, where it fits to do so); in those instances I prep very little--this past Saturday I prepped literally nothing at all (other than answering a couple pending things). I don't think the fact the session was more-improvised than most sessions I run was damaging to anyone's suspension of disbelief. Now, I'm running in a setting I've made up, and I know it pretty well, so--especially since the PCs weren't spoiling for a fight right away--I was able to fall back on that. I wouldn't argue that I'm more knowledgeable about my setting than the players are, but I'd be kinda reluctant to say I'm that much more committed to it.

Maybe I overstated a bit. I realize that there is a point no matter how well prepared where the GM may have to improvise on minor details. And as you say there are times where the players will do things like hang around town and see what trouble they can get themselves into when the GM has to make some judgments.

I may be a bit further along on the prep dial than you but it is a dial. And no matter how well prepped you may have to improv. Most of the time for me this is conversations between NPCs and PCs. I try to inform my improv a lot with good notes on the NPCs and judicious use of die rolls for reactions etc... to maintain fairness.

 

[Fenris-77]

I might go further than that. Regardless of prep depth, it's actually really easy for players to zig when you'd thought they'd zag and end up deep in the blank spaces of your prep. Even a single city will never be completely prepped, and the best prepped keyed hex map still needs all manner of other details to actually use. It's just part of RPG play.

 

[prabe]

Maybe I overstated a bit. I realize that there is a point no matter how well prepared where the GM may have to improvise on minor details. And as you say there are times where the players will do things like hang around town and see what trouble they can get themselves into when the GM has to make some judgments.

I may be a bit further along on the prep dial than you but it is a dial. And no matter how well prepped you may have to improv. Most of the time for me this is conversations between NPCs and PCs. I try to inform my improv a lot with good notes on the NPCs and judicious use of die rolls for reactions etc... to maintain fairness.

I suspect you are quite a lot further on the prep dial than I am, which is fine--it's how you prefer to run and the people at your table/s are happy to play in that style (and plausibly are specifically looking to play in that style); I wouldn't be surprised if--in the unlikely event you were to play at one of my tables--you thought I was making too much stuff up for your tastes--which again is fine.

 

[Emerikol]

Sure, that's a perfectly fine way to play. I do think it works for certain approaches, or certain types of games. I don't think I'd ever want that to be the default for my PCs. I prefer when my PC actually feels like a part of the world....that they existed and had a life before the game starts, and that those past experiences can matter to what we do in the game.

That makes me feel much more involved and immersed than if we're both strangers arriving in a new frontier in every game.

I'm not replying to this post so much as the many posts you've made recently where this subject was mentioned. So it's an aggregate response.

Specifically as it regards character background knowledge.

Yes on average, I tend to have PCs arriving from out of town. Before the game starts though I interview each player and we work out his or her background. We establish some allies and usually where they came from and how much they know. I may even give them a map and a list of NPCs. If that is appropriate. It varies from game to game. if someone is a cleric then I give them a lot of notes on their religion, it's practices, rituals, and the hierarchy.

 

[hawkeyefan]

I think that for me at least I would be as unsatisfied if the GM made it up at that moment as I would if the PC made it up. I will readily say that historically my rejection of campaigns has been more about GM's making too much stuff up on the fly than it has been about players authoring the fiction. I suspect my belief that a GM can't effectively make up something so central to the game in a believable way is why I am hesitant about players doing it.

Face it, the average GM is more knowledgeable and more invested than the average player. Now there are players who are every bit as invested. GM's play too and of course there are just really good players. So I said "on average". So my doubt that a good GM can pull it off just continues on to players doing it.

This is something that comes up a lot, and I don't think is very accurate. Pretty much every game I've ever played or GMed has involved some amount of improvisation. Even the most railroady of adventures still had the players do something that made the GM have to think on their feet and narrate stuff on the fly. And all of those games worked perfectly fine in that respect.

The GM having to wing it does not cause everything to fall apart.

Now, I do think that any game needs to have some information established as a foundation. I'm not saying that GMs should start at zero input and then expect to craft a world for the players on the fly. But the amount of prep and pre-determination that is often considered "necessary" simply isn't.

It may be a preference on the part of a specific GM. It may be something that helps them or that they enjoy doing in between game sessions. But no, when it comes to gaming, something that a GM has already decided days in advance based on 12 pages of backstory that he's written is not inherently more believable than something else another GM made after taking 30 seconds to consider, and making a call.

Very often, I find not having to track all that pre-determined history to make crafting believable details much easier. A lot of times, once you commit to a detail, the why of it becomes very clear on its own.

I think generally this is how my games have went. D&D doesn't really have a disadvantages system so it's not really been a big challenge. There are disadvantages though you could put on a PC that would be playable like bad eyesight which would just give negatives in certain instances. But those involving willpower vs addiction, are hard to do without going to metagame approaches which is too high a cost for me. Even with a player that would roleplay an addiction in a believable way, I would not like it because it's still separating the player from the character.

So you don't want any kind of meta mechanic or incentive (although I expect you do use XP, or no?) because that would break immersion, but having a world where no one actually suffers from things like alcoholism doesn't break immersion?

 

[Emerikol]

I might go further than that. Regardless of prep depth, it's actually really easy for players to zig when you'd thought they'd zag and end up deep in the blank spaces of your prep. Even a single city will never be completely prepped, and the best prepped keyed hex map still needs all manner of other details to actually use. It's just part of RPG play.

This becomes a bit more of a hazard at high level when the sandbox starts to creak a bit. At low levels, I really do have the starting sandbox pretty detailed out. Of course I roll for wandering monsters because I don't know every transients movements in the game world. I do though especially with town locations build my own "wandering peoples" tables that reflect where at a given time certain NPCs could theoretically be.

 

[Imaro]

Of course, but to bring this to my earlier point, as I think that a potential pitfall of this fourth possibility again comes from minimizing/excising character flaws in practice, particularly when it comes to the ability "for the player to choose when and how severely it affects their character," as there is a potential conflict of interest between the player's rational meta-analysis of play (e.g., win/victory conditions of the game) and the character's own irrational psychology (e.g., the character's alcoholism). A "hinderance" than can be easily turned off or on at-will by the player as convenient for them is often in practice not a hinderance at all.

But if this is the concept the player has determined for their character and rewards have only a slight mechanical benefit shouldn't we trust the player to play the concept as they have envisioned it in an honest manner? Especially if said small mechanical benefit is still under the jurisdiction of the GM and/or the table as a whole?

 

[Emerikol]

So you don't want any kind of meta mechanic or incentive (although I expect you do use XP, or no?) because that would break immersion, but having a world where no one actually suffers from things like alcoholism doesn't break immersion?

We are talking PCs here not the entire world. So no it doesn't bother me that a small group of five people does not have an addict. I encounter such groups in the real world all the time. I can have NPC alcoholics because I as GM are not immersed at all. I am just playing roles.

At least with D&D, I don't think killing monsters and taking their treasure as a motive for adventurers is hard to sustain. To the degree x.p. motivates that is about it. My players engage in lots of other things and have all sorts of desires that don't come back to the x.p. motivation. The x.p. will come from playing and it's not a driving force. If I told my players "I'll just tell you when you level", it wouldn't be the end of the world.

 

[Fenris-77]

This becomes a bit more of a hazard at high level when the sandbox starts to creak a bit. At low levels, I really do have the starting sandbox pretty detailed out. Of course I roll for wandering monsters because I don't know every transients movements in the game world. I do though especially with town locations build my own "wandering peoples" tables that reflect where at a given time certain NPCs could theoretically be.

I wasn't impugning you sandbox prep at all. It's just the nature of the game that certain detail, descriptions, etc etc etc will always have to be improv-ed. It's not possible to prep everything about a world or even desirable. We each do out best to prep the things we think we'll need, or the things we think the players will interact with, to the extent we feel we need to, but you never escape the need to improv in a sandbox (or any game for that matter). Random tables are the usual answer, as well as my personal answer to this issue.

 

[Emerikol]

I wasn't impugning you sandbox prep at all. It's just the nature of the game that certain detail, descriptions, etc etc etc will always have to be improv-ed. It's not possible to prep everything about a world or even desirable. We each do out best to prep the things we think we'll need, or the things we think the players will interact with, to the extent we feel we need to, but you never escape the need to improv in a sandbox (or any game for that matter). Random tables are the usual answer to this, and my personal answer to this issue.

I wasn't denying that. Perhaps it was your blank hex comment that got me. There are no blank hexes inside my sandbox. Of course if the hex is a woodlands hex, I will describe some trees. I don't have that description noted other than maybe broadly that the forest is a temperate climate forest. So if I describe branches with leaves rustling in the wind, I don't have it noted that the wind will blow at 2pm on Friday or that there is a tree in spot X that will have branches that rustle. I agree that some details must be improv'd.