What is the point of GM's notes?

[Fenris-77]

Once the players are doing stuff, even in a sandbox, words like fiction and scenario work just fine. It's not like sandboxes completely lack connective tissue between events, or consequences, they just aren't determined before hand.

 

[Emerikol]

What causes puzzlement and objection is combining the above with (i) denials that the GM is authoring this fiction, and (ii) denying that a good part of what the players do in a game like this is learn the GM's conception of his/her world.

I like to think of it as having a correlation to the real world. Yes, I am interested in finding out truths about this world that I live in but that is not my only focus or even necessarily the primary one.

The GM plays two roles and to a degree they are separated. One is the creation of the world. In chess this would be the initial placement of the pieces, the size of the board, and the general rules of play. The second is acting as a judge as the players carry out their agendas. Those agendas cover many things, only one of which would be figuring out the GM's notes etc...

So I guess it seems to me that you overemphasize the point about "learn the GM's conception of his/her world". I mean if God appeared and offered to run a game in a real world that he'd create that allowed for magic, I don't think necessarily our only purpose in life would be learning what he had created. We'd have other agendas. We'd still fall in love, try to make money, and seek ways of prospering.

 

[Emerikol]

Once the players are doing stuff, even in a sandbox, words like fiction and scenario work just fine. It's not like sandboxes completely lack connective tissue between events, or consequences, they just aren't determined before hand.

Well in my sandboxes, and correct me if I'm not understanding you, there are some things determined ahead of time BUT they are not locked in stone. So perhaps determined is the operative word. I may have an NPC that is plotting a murder. If the PCs do not become involved then the murder will happen. If they do the murder might not happen. It's the calendar idea I've mentioned. Most things predetermined before hand happen because the PCs are not getting involved with everything coming and going. They do though affect the things they choose to affect. So it's not foreordained I guess.

 

[Bedrockgames]

Once the players are doing stuff, even in a sandbox, words like fiction and scenario work just fine. It's not like sandboxes completely lack connective tissue between events, or consequences, they just aren't determined before hand.

My problem with the term fiction, is its a loaded term. The issue with scenario isn't an objection to the term itself. There are things in sandboxes one can easily describe as scenarios. My issue with the approach Pemerton has been taking to describing sandbox play is it kind of suggests all a sandbox really is, is a bunch of paths or adventures waiting to be triggered. There are sandboxes that can be run that way, but a living world sandbox is absolutely not that. You have pieces on the board, that are in motion, and you don't know how those pieces will interact with the players once they start doing things. You also have things like locations that are firmly rooted. But you don't know how those will come into play until the players begin interacting with them. Something that might appear as one GM to be a simple site for a dungeon crawl, could get used by a party as a way of trapping and killing an enemy faction. That bolded bit is important. And what's more, it isn't like the GM has that much control over how the events play out because it is a back and forth between the players. Unless the GM is failing to seriously consider the things the players are trying to do, ignoring the rules system, and just barreling a plot down their throats, it isn't really about the players discovering what the GM has prepared, what adventure he or she has in mind, etc. It is about finding out as a group, through that player and GM interaction, where all these things lead to.

 

[Imaro]

Whether your position has moderated, or whether it's the wording, I find this much less objectionable (as in almost not at all) than your prior way of putting it, which A) focused on the GM's notes and B) at least seemed to imply that finding out what was in the GM's notes was almost the entirety of play.

EDIT: And I know exactly why that other phrasing bothered me so greatly: It sounds an awful lot like playing through an AP-style campaign, where the point--the only reason for play the style really supports--is to find out where the AP's story goes. Nothing any character brings to the game matters at all.

I loathe AP-style play, as a player. Even shorter published adventures intended as one-shots almost inevitably get on my nerves by the end. I make a concerted effort not to run an AP-style campaign--that's most of why I don't prep more than the current session.

I think you hit on something here. In fact I'd be curious to hear what if any differences @pemerton and others who feel the descriptor of "Playing to find out what's in the GM's notes" is apt... see between that style and pure AP play. Is it just a matter of book vs. GM creation?

 

[Campbell]

Shared fiction is not meant to be diminishing. I mean it's how I think about and describe my own play in various styles. It's just pointing to our shared experience of play. The here and the now that we all experience together. The Magic Circle of play.

 

[Bedrockgames]

EDIT: And I know exactly why that other phrasing bothered me so greatly: It sounds an awful lot like playing through an AP-style campaign, where the point--the only reason for play the style really supports--is to find out where the AP's story goes. Nothing any character brings to the game matters at all.

I loathe AP-style play, as a player. Even shorter published adventures intended as one-shots almost inevitably get on my nerves by the end. I make a concerted effort not to run an AP-style campaign--that's most of why I don't prep more than the current session.

A point I made earlier in the thread is when I was at my wits end with the adventure path structure, I used to complain "I might as well just show my players my notes and call it a day". Now that is not really a fair characterization of adventure paths either, but it show this is basically a negative framing, and its also important because it was a frustration with feeling like the game was just discovering the GM's notes, that led me to seek, explore, and blend structures like sandbox and living world.

 

[Imaro]

I like to think of it as having a correlation to the real world. Yes, I am interested in finding out truths about this world that I live in but that is not my only focus or even necessarily the primary one.

The GM plays two roles and to a degree they are separated. One is the creation of the world. In chess this would be the initial placement of the pieces, the size of the board, and the general rules of play. The second is acting as a judge as the players carry out their agendas. Those agendas cover many things, only one of which would be figuring out the GM's notes etc...

So I guess it seems to me that you overemphasize the point about "learn the GM's conception of his/her world". I mean if God appeared and offered to run a game in a real world that he'd create that allowed for magic, I don't think necessarily our only purpose in life would be learning what he had created. We'd have other agendas. We'd still fall in love, try to make money, and seek ways of prospering.

Good post. I feel like in my games, the purpose of play is much closer to "Playing to exert agency in an independently (for the most part) GM generated/run world.". I'm not sure my game is so much about them learning about the world as exerting their will in it through the actions of their PC's with the learning of the world being either a tool to exert said agency or secondary to this focus... at least for me.

 

[Maxperson]

You're not playing the game right.

This is not the part where you console me. This is the part where you point at me and laugh.

 

[Bedrockgames]

Shared fiction is not meant to be diminishing. I mean it's how I think about and describe my own play in various styles. It's just pointing to our shared experience of play. The here and the now that we all experience together. The Magic Circle of play.

I don't think it is diminishing. I think it is one that can be used to equivocate and one that tends to get you lost in the metaphor of fiction (I'd rather get lost in the metaphor of living world )