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: 6108432" data-attributes="member: 42582">I guess I don't self-consciously think of my GMing as heavy-handed, but it's certainly not light touch! When I describe a situation to my players as they are coming into it (be it geographic, or social, or combative, or whatever) they are expecting pressure. Sometimes they might be surprised about where the pressure comes from - for instance, in the <a href="http://www.enworld.org/forum/showthread.php?312367-Actual-play-another-combat-free-session-with-intra-party-dyanmics" target="_blank">Torog cleric negotiation</a> the pressure ended up being sourced not in some external story element, but in the conflicting values of the PCs themselves, as the PCs ended up being bound by a promise that the feckless ones had intended insincerely and that they upright one (in whose name the promise had been given, and so whom insisted on it being kept) would never himself have given. But they never surprised that it's there.JC, I know you don't especially care for indents but others may be following along too. The idea of "heavy-handed" or "decision-forcing" GMing is pretty inherent in my preferred approach. It's front-and-centre in <a href="http://isabout.wordpress.com/2010/02/16/the-pitfalls-of-narrative-technique-in-rpg-play/" target="_blank">Eero Tuovinen's blog</a> on the standard narrativistic model:One of the players is a gamemaster whose job it is to keep track of the backstory, frame scenes according to dramatic needs (that is, go where the action is) and provoke thematic moments . . . by introducing complications. . . [O]nce the players have established concrete characters, situations and backstory in whatever manner a given game ascribes, the GM starts framing scenes for the player characters. Each scene is an interesting situation in relation to the premise of the setting or the character . . . The GM describes a situation that provokes choices on the part of the character. . . The GM . . . needs to be able to reference the backstory, determine complications to introduce into the game, and figure out consequences.The idea of the GM deliberately applying pressure is also inherent in this <a href="http://www.indie-rpgs.com/archive/index.php?topic=1361" target="_blank">Paul Czege quote</a> which I think is a great description of my preferred approach (and I think it has a lot of application outside the sort of highbrow, avant-garde games that Czege himself is interested in):Tim asked if scene transitions were delicate. They aren't. Delicacy is a trait I'd attach to "scene extrapolation," the idea being to make scene initiation seem an outgrowth of prior events, objective, unintentional, non-threatening, but not to the way I've come to frame scenes in games I've run recently. . . [W]hen I'm framing scenes, and I'm in the zone, I'm turning a freakin' firehose of adversity and situation on the character. It is not an objective outgrowth of prior events. It's intentional as all get out. . . I frame the character into the middle of conflicts I think will push and pull in ways that are interesting to me and to the player. I keep NPC personalities somewhat unfixed in my mind, allowing me to retroactively justify their behaviors in support of this. . . [T]he outcome of the scene is not preconceived.Compared to Czege's "firehose of adversity and situation" my game is somewhat more like a garden hose, but the basic technique still applies. For isntance, in the case of the Torog cleric negotiation, I didn't have any prior sense of the captured cleric as manipulative or not, but it came out in the course of the interrogation as a natural way to amp up the pressure on the players and lead them into the situation that eventuated, of being bound by a promise that none of the PCs wanted.I don't understand how you think this is going to happen. If the players just sit back, the "train car" won't go anywhere. There is no "next stop".I don't understand in what sense my play is simulationist. I'm following No Myth conventions on backstory (ie nothing is settled until it emerges in play). Much of the backstory is made up on the spot to interlink with things the players are having their PCs do, or are otherwise interested in (as per the exploration scenario described above). Consequences and complications are adjudicated on the basis of "going where the action is" and turning a [garden] hose of "adversity and situation" on the PCs (and thereby putting pressure on the players).Matters of ingame causal logic are not driving scene framing; not driving complication framing; not driving consequence-application.Also, evaluation and moral/thematic commentary is provided by the players and not the setting or system, as per <a href="http://www.indie-rpgs.com/articles/15/" target="_blank">this</a>:In Simulationist play, morality cannot be imposed by the player or, except as the representative of the imagined world, by the GM. Theme is already part of the cosmos; it's not produced by metagame decisions. Morality, when it's involved, is "how it is" in the game-world, and even its shifts occur along defined, engine-driven parameters. The GM and players buy into this framework in order to play at all. . . [A] character in Narrativist play is by definition a thematic time-bomb . . . when you-as-player get proactive about an emotional thematic issue, poof, you're out of Sim.In the example of the interrogation of the Torog cleric, one important point of the way I played the NPC was to force the players to get proactive about an emotinal thematic issue, namely, the giving and keeping of a promise.Maybe you're using "simulation" and "narrativism" in some non-Forge sense, I don't know. But in the standard Forge terminology, my game is what a thematically light, mechanically vanilla narrativist game of D&D looks like. (Mechanically vanilla in so far as all the player flags stuff is informal. 4e does have certain mechanically significant features that support narrativist play by avoiding putting a range of traditional obstacles in the way.)</blockquote>

Verification