Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 6101351" data-attributes="member: 42582">Why not?Is there any evidence that this was actually the case in the situation you're discussing?Is there any evidence that he wasn't?Of course there'll be player engagement, in the sense of player participation. Presumably [MENTION=22779]Hussar[/MENTION] participated too, if only to try to make things go faster. I mean, if the players have turned up to play the game, and the GM serves them second rate-stuff, the choice is either play the second-rate stuff or go home. The fact that the players choose to hang around and play the second-rate stuff doesn't show that the second-rate stuff is really first-rate, or that bad GMing is really good. It doesn't show that the GM has engaged the players in the sense of drawing them emotionally into the ingame situation.No doubt this is true, but how does it shed any light on Hussar's experience?Fair enough. Some other people would assume that, when a GM sets a scene that is obviously at odds with what (one? some?) player(s) want, the GM would rethink and cut to City B, which is where the players want the action to be.I still don't get this. What has running a playtest/demo of a new system, as a one-session one-off, got to do with what counts as good or bad GMing for Hussar in his ongoing campaign with established PCs and player-defined goals for them (namely, getting to City B)?If I agree to playtest D&Dnext, and the GM breaks out the Caves of Chaos, it's not going to be any different. But I'm pretty sure the game Hussar is describing is not a playtest to find out how D&D works, and whether or not he likes it. So I still don't understand how it sheds any light on what counts as good GMing to discuss the circumstances under which a group might agree to playtest BW using The Sword demo module.Which already makes it different from what I queried. HeroQuest revised also has a "limited mechanical benefits from a given narration of an augment" rule. That wasn't what I referred to, though. I talked about a purely ad hoc of more-or-less process simulation action resolution mechanics.I guess every instance of bad GMing could in principle be redescribed as a clash of agendas - the GM's agenda was do whatever it was that s/he did, and the players' agenda was at odds with that.If you want to narrow the notion of "agenda" in some way - say, a self-conscious program of play - then I want to know what the evidence is that Hussar is describing an agenda clash, as opposed to just bad GMing. I've had crappy GMs who are more interested in running the group through their preconceived scenarios, than in running a game that is actually responsive to and riffs off the players. Hussar's description reminds me of those GMs.Perhaps. But there's zero evidence that Hussar and his fellow players didn't want to engage. They had City B to get to. They had a grell to take revenge on. They were raring to engage. And the GM responds by framing scenes at best orthogonal to those concerns: a desert trek; a sequence of job interviews. I'm not seeing an almighty clash of agendas - I'm seeing bad GMing; a GM who has engaged, enthusiastic players and is framing scenes in such a way as to actively kill that off. [MENTION=6681948]N'raac[/MENTION] has said above that just because the players want to get to City B, or take revenge on the grell, the players can have no reasonable expectation that the GM will frame those scenes. My question is, why the heck not? When was the last time a GM advice book said "Don't pay attention to what your players want" or "Make sure that if your players are really keen to engage some part of your scenario, you run 90 minutes of orthogonal, low stakes stuff before you get there"?Cool. Which leaves me a bit puzzled about why you said upthread that it's a problem to be resolved by GM-as-god.Who said it does?Who said anything otherwise? My point was to say that the contrast between incharacter choices and out-of-character decisions is not always an illuminating one.I don't think those differences are unimportant. My own experience as both GM and player makes me think that there is (for instance) a huge difference in play experience between a game where a GM works out this sort of stuff via a random dice roll, and a game where a GM works out this sort of stuff by following player cues. Likewise between a game in which that sort of gap in the background is considered a weakness of prep, and where that sort of gap in the background is a deliberate part of prep.And given discussions I see about the sense of "a real world", not wanting to notice that the scenery is realy props, Schroedinger's this-and-that, etc, around issues of exporation, sandboxing, fortune-in-the-middle mechanics, etc, I don't think I'm the only one who thinks those differences matter.I actually think it's hugely relevant. Hussar's GM had players "opting in", so riled up by their defeat at the beak of the grell that they went out to hire spearcarriers to come back and beat it. And instead of following the players' lead, telling them how much gp to mark of their sheets, and getting back to the action, he brought the game to a halt for 90 minutes.That's bad GMing. I mean, suppose the GM has all these wonderful ideas for the personalities and backstories of these NPCs: a good GM would use that material in the fight with the grell. Only a bad GM would think that the time and place for that material, in a context in which the players so overtly want to engage with that bit of the scenario over there, is to bog them down here with 90 minutes of job interviews.</blockquote>

Verification