Which are you, The plan everything out GM, or the Ad lib?

[Piperken]

So this will vary from game to game because I think different games need different levels of prep… but generally, this is what I do.

Yes, I'm much more what is the game you're playing?

• 5E D&D campaign? Yes, I do more planning between sessions.
• Vaesen? Some planning; generally more improv at the table involved.
• Brindlewood Bay? Very little, if any.
• Paranoia? None.

 

[Laurefindel]

Lol you may have a point.

Improv, as a stage performance, requires an impressive amount of prep. Even late-night standup comedy that interacts with the crowd requires a lot of prep.

Thing is, prep doesn’t mean taking precise and extensive notes. A fair amount of my “prep” is just browsing Pinterest and reviewing the MM, or running some ideas by my coworker and students.

 

[John Dallman]

I mean, I tend to run games that are very PC/player focused, and the emerging story is driven almost exclusively by players. Not exactly sure how that could possibly be seen as a railroad as I never force players to follow a predetermined series of events, or interact with specific scenes or encounters, but...okay.

Oh, you can steer players into trouble even when you're letting them dictate what the adventure is about.

I improvised an adventure in a weekend game session in my homebrew fantasy setting. It started with a bunch of AD&D characters who knew each other deciding to look around one of the countries on the map that they didn't know much about. That country had, in the past, a very strange social system, where it was illegal not to be a human. That had been overthrown in a war (largely financed by different PCs), but there were believed to still be traces of the old thinking around.

The most assertive character in that group is an elven racist bigot. He considers all non-elves to be inferior to elves, and is quite loud about it. When he heard about the old social system he immediately wanted to find people who thought in the old way, and kill them. The player is an anarchist, and the character is broad political satire. The player was well aware of the likely effects of this mission, but the other players were slower on the uptake.

It was thus easy to feed the bigoted elf ambiguous information that set them off on a wild goose chase to a village high in the mountains in mid-winter, hunting for human extremists who certainly didn't exist there. The character assumed anything whose meaning wasn't blindingly obvious was part of a conspiracy.

The amazing part was that they didn't kill anyone. They gradually realised they were chasing shadows and had the sense to get out of the village (which they could readily have destroyed) before things escalated too far. It was a comedy of errors.

 

[zarionofarabel]

Either they share narrative authority ("Here, create some fact that is true about this world that I can't overrule."),

Oh yeah, do that all the time. I run all knowledge skills in a manner similar to how Burning Wheel's Wises work, no matter the system. So most of the time when a player makes a knowledge skill check it's not a prompt for me as GM to provide more information, it can be, but usually isn't. In most cases it's to check the accuracy of a fact the player has added to the shared fiction in a statement immediately prior to the roll. If the roll succeeds then the fact the player has stated is true. If the roll fails then the fact is mostly true (or sometimes false, but much less often as that is boring) with the details being slightly different. So, for example, a player might state that there is a Wizard's Tower in the nearby woods, then roll a Knowledge (Local Area) check. If the check succeeds, then there is in fact a Wizard's Tower in the nearby woods. If the check fails then something about the information the PC has is flawed. Perhaps it's not a Tower but a Hidden Grotto, that is still in the nearby woods, but must be searched for. Or perhaps there is indeed a Wizard's Tower nearby, but instead of being in the woods it's in the hills on the far side of the woods so a longer journey needs to be made to reach it.

Sometimes I literally just ask players to add things to the fiction, particularly if it is facts pertaining to aspects of the world directly tied to their PC.

or else they bow to established fiction ("This is already true so I can't overturn it."),

Well, once fiction is established it remains true. Once it's established that there is a Wizard's Tower located in the nearby woods, it will remain so unless circumstances within the ficition (the PCs burn it down; a demon teleports it into the Abyss) cause that fact to change.

or else they submit to the outcome of fortune ("The dice are in control.").

Sometimes the dice are in control. This is especially true in circumstances where conflict is happening. I as GM don't decide if an NPC successfully stabs a PC, the dice dictate the outcome of the NPC's attack.

As far as I can tell, you don't do the first two at all. Your theory is that nothing is true until you say it, which means you are never really beholden to established fiction.

I am beholden to the fiction, once it is established. That's were my whole "it doesn't matter if you prep it beforehand or make it up on the fly" comes from. You can have a thousand pages of prepped material, but, until that material actually becomes established as fact within the narrative, it's just as non-existent as something I haven't ad libbed into the narrative.

And in particular, you seem to make no differentiation between mechanics that are tied to the fiction or mechanics that have no relation to the fiction or which create the fiction. That leaves you only submitting to the dice, but only in the sense that in this exact moment the dice say the players fail or succeed, but you as a GM have full ability to interpret what that means ("A motorcycle comes into existence!"). This is from my perspective no real check on your ability to fully control the narrative at all. With no ways to share your narrative authority, you run a GM centric game in which you are in full control. The players give you idea prompts or they act as random number generators to prompt your story, but it is essentially your story. It could be a fun one, but agency as I see exists only as minor aesthetic of play.

Yeah, I think I failed to properly explain how I go about ad libbing narrative elements.

My definition of a railroad is, "Do the players have meaningful agency." Your definition of a railroad is "A preplanned series of encounters." I grant you that a preplanned series of encounters can be a railroad, but not that something isn't a railroad just because it isn't. I do think you probably are trying to give the players as much agency as they can have within your process of play, but from my perspective as a player that's not a lot. As I said, if I was inclined to railroad my players the easiest way to do that was prepare nothing and always just respond to what they do. Schrodinger's Dungeon is the most powerful railroading technique available.

I do agree that Schrodinger's Dungeon can be a powerful railroading tool. I actively strive to ensure that it does not become that.

Consider a case that we've already considered, picking from three chests to find the magic ring. This is a meaningful act only if the ring is already in one of the chests. If the ring doesn't come into existence until I open it, you are in the same position as a con artist who can put the shell into any cup he wants only after I choose. If I have no reason to believe the ring exists until I open the chest, it doesn't matter which chest I pick. I will always only be right because you decided at that moment if I was right. But if you at any time before I choose a chest write down where the ring is, then there is a sense in which my choice can be right or wrong. That is, there is now a sense in which my choice has meaning and your choice as the GM has been negated.

Okay, so, I would "write down" where the ring is by deciding where it is and then remember where I decided it was and not changing it's location on a whim. The only difference is that I wouldn't physically write it down on a piece of paper (I actually might as I take a buttload of notes during play). Also, if I were to ad lib the existence of the three chests I would also decide which chest the ring is at the same time.

I got so angry watching that game. I don't even like Wil Wheaton, but I felt so bad for him in that game. That constituted player abuse and was some of the worst GMing I've ever seen. I'm not sure what you picked up on because there were a lot of things wrong with that game, but one of the things I picked up on was just how random cloud cuckoo land the world they were playing in was. Any action could lead to any outcome whatsoever, at the GMs whim. I think the worst moment for me in the game was when they beat the bad guys trivially and then the GM improvised that the bad guys clothes animated and attacked them. This is straight up victory negation, where the GM feels his encounter turned out too easily and the PCs won to easily, and instead of going "good job" the GM fudges something to rob them of their victory ("More orcs arrive!", "The bad guy just got 30 more hit points!"). In effect, a roll that said "success" was turned into a roll that said "failure". That's one of the many problems with improvising things on the fly.

Yeah, I'm pretty sure that's the I watched too. I thought it was a great example of how NOT to GM a game! I felt sorry for Will, and there was another player too if I remember correctly. What a crappy experience that must have been, and a really bad way to promote TTRPGs IMHO.

 

[zarionofarabel]

[REDACTED]

Oh, yeah, I see what you mean. Bad example on my part. I mean, you could use the system that I used in my example, then introduce modifiers to the rolls based on the terrain, traffic, etc. All those factors can be ad libbed on the fly though. I don't need to know before the chase begins what the terrain or traffic is like, I can ad lib that the moment the chase actually begins. As long as I establish those facts within the ficition before calling for player decisions or rolls the result is the same as if I prepped the encounter days in advance.

I was kind of thinking that maybe I wasn't explaining myself well, my apologies. I think that you would consider what I do when I run a game to be a form of prep. It's just extremely short notice prep, as my prep often happens literally moments before facts get established within the fiction, in a lot of cases anyway. I do spend a fair amount of time "daydream prepping" in that I create ideas and decide upon facts of the game between sessions. I just don't write it down on paper. Also, just like any GM that is running a published module, I mostly stick to the facts I have established in my mind, unless I feel that they need to be changed for some reason. Usually to conform to previously established facts within the narrative, or to maintain internal logical consistency of the setting or narrative.

I mean, one thing that absolutely has to happen for me is a Session Zero, which includes collaborative PC creation. Simply because I need a starting point for my fevered dreams so I have some sort of framework for things I'm going to improvise when running the game. Heck, in a way, I would argue that I might actually do as much prep as you do, I just don't physically write it down. I only keep track of stuff that has actually been established within the narrative via the ridiculous amount of notes I take whilst GMing. As a funny example, as I said earlier, I recently came into possession of a collection of used TTRPG material. While I immediately gave a fair portion of it away, due to the fact that alot of the material was for a game system I vehemently dislike, I did end up with a number of other books I skimmed before giving away. I also got a few super awesome things that I have be reading with glee. I also was gifted a few choice items because my generosity was apparently well received within my local gaming community. Suffice to say over the last few weeks my brain has been exploding with "imagination prep" to the point where I have been having trouble sleeping because my stupid brain won't SHUT UP!!!

Good times to say the least. I was just given a copy of Mothership a couple days ago, a system I skipped out on cause I have the Alien TTRPG so I figured, what's the point? Boy was I wrong! Alien is a good game, as all Free League stuff tends to be, but Mothership is a different beast! What an elegant and simple (but not simplistic) system. I especially love how fast and easy PC creation is as I'm assuming (as I haven't run it yet, obviously) that PCs are gonna get bumped off on the regular. I've been bouncing ideas around in my head non-stop for the last couple of days because I can't wait to run it and want to at least have some things "prepared" for when I pitch running a game on my local TTRPG web things. One thing I'm going to make sure to do is have the players decide on the particulars of what androids are in the setting as the system itself is ambiguous as to what they are and the interwebs suggest several options for what they may actually be. Ahhh! I'm all jacked up just thinking about it now! Hahaha! Anyway, my psychologist told me I need to work harder on making my brain shut up so I can sleep good...but it's just so hard when I have so many awesome ideas to contemplate!

Cheers!