It?s Not Your Story

[Therumancer]

Great article, you've identified and addressed an issue with PnP RPGs that I've been argueing with people about for close to 20 years now, and did so far more articulatly than I have been able to.

Simply put I think the theory of GMing your quoting from the DMG II (which I don't have) has been a rising problem since "White Wolf" started encouraging that kind of GMing back in the early days. Truthfully I can see why that advice exists because it is far easier to fudge things/railroad/script encounters than GM seriously. It's also much easier to write modules and adventures that move from plot point to plot point rather than encouraging free form exploration and player creativity/planning/strategy. I tend to look at modules like "The Isle Of Dread" (which is similar to what you were talking about with your maps) as being pinnacle of adventure design even now, while deceptively simple, I think they have done the job better and in a more satisfying fashion than a lot of what I've seen produced nowadays.


One piece of advice I tend to give most GMs, and try to practice myself, is to have more than one adventure ready to go just in case the unexpected strikes. That way if the wrench gets thrown into the proverbial gearworks, you aren't stuck trying to ham handedly fix things, can let the chips fall where they may, and simply start the next adventure.

I will also go so far as to say that the most memorable things for me have always been when things have not gone as planned (both as a player and GM). This has included things like the party falling for a deception and leaving an adventure early, thinking they finished it when they didn't (think of Acerak's "false tomb" in the original Tomb Of Horrors), or one case where I played in the worlds (accidently) shortest Ravenloft adventure... the GM was running some variation of Castle Ravenloft, and using a bunch of house rules for critical hits and such... as well as some gothic horror trappings like saying that Holy Water is like Napalm to the forces of evil and lights on fire when it hits them (as an incentive to get us to be careful with it). During one early encounter we were in this church and had Strahd in person(unknown to us) screwing with us from in hiding. Despite warnings and attempts to be careful we wound up lighting the church on fire by using Holy Water. As we were evacuating however a Paladin who had this legendary quality intelligent Holy Avenger with undead slaying abillities and god knows what else happened to find a secret door with an undead behind it. Given the character's girdle of giant strength he decided to be a smart arse and instead of opening the door or whatever said "I slam by sword through it to impale the undead on the other side". He rolled a massive crit which was defined as a "heart impalement" for quadruple damage on the GM's table, combined with some fancy undead slaying stuff. Given that the item in question was defined as a minor artifact one Strahd Von Zarovich died instantly, pretty much losing all hit hit points in one blow and suffering enough additional slaying junk to blast him out of existance. ICly the party never realized why everyone suddenly collapsed into mist (including the burning church), all we knew was we arrived at our next adventure... but well... it was worth some epic chuckles for a while (high level campaign needless to say). The point of this rant is that it's things like that (and including the opposite when they go bad) that are unexpected and can't be scripted that make gaming fun. Had something like that been glossed over, fudged, scripted, or whatever else in either direction it simply would not have been half as entertaining especially seeing as none of the players saw it coming.

 

[Fearzone]

This article reminds me of a time I was GM'ing Call of Cthulhu, in a scenario of my own making. At some point, the PCs stumbled into a large tentacled beast rising from a fissure in the earth and had to escape.

I gave the beast two attacks per turn, and if successful players were wrapped in a tentacle and had to escape by killing the tentacle. Each turn, the tentacle dragged the players closer to the gaping maw. This was over 15 years ago so details are fuzzy, but long story short, there was a point that all the players were wrapped in a lot of tentacles, and I didn't think they were going to make it. It wasn't a broken challenge and they were playing it okay, just getting bad dice rolls. I wasn't sure what I was going to do if they all died. But I kept the dice honest, and then their luck changed, and one managed to break free and helped the others, and finally they all made it. At the end of the campaign they commented on how actually frightened they were during that encounter.

Anyway, wise advise indeed. I'd play at your table anyday. Hmmm, I wonder if these principles of game design are coyly targeted at non-table-top roleplaying.

...

Final thought: rarely did I find much discrepancy between player agency and GM content. Players will tend to go in the direction where the story is, as there would be the most well-thought-out content there and likely the most treasure. But yeah, if instead of visiting the Arkham library to research cultist activities on the date a key NPC went missing whose defiled remains have just been uncovered, if instead of that they want to go to a bar and gamble and pick up hookers, well then, who knows what horrors might yet lie there...

"Everyone make a sanity roll."

 

[Rocketboy13]

I have tried for this a dozen times. I want it more than anything else, because I like world building and exploration above all other things. I have had things start on a peninsula with a half dozen hot spots and a dozen plot thread dispensers in the form of NPC's and miscellaneous treasure that has some zing to it (artifacts of various quality mostly). But it never really works, because players like to have goals that I give them, rather than goals they give me.

It works for a time, but I can never get it to hang on for long enough.

 

[Korhal]

I think the article presents a false dichotomy. You design a web of things the players might do, places they might visit and you let them decide. But it's also poor form to not give them the motivation to pursue your story arc, whatever their motivation might be.

A GM presents a scenario, the PCs respond in character, and the GM goes from there. But if the GM knows the group, and they aren't just being contrary, odds are he can guess their most likely courses of action.

So basically I favor (and have routinely used for years!) Emergent games where I was able to predict character actions to set up Directed moments.

In fact, this is the playstyle encouraged by Crafty Games' "FantasyCraft", which is a retooling of D&D 3.5 from the ground up (official site: http://www.crafty-games.com/node/348 and yes, the review by "korhal23" is mine). I suggest anyone with the spare change to buy the book check it out. In that game, you design encounters and monsters and basically every NPC as a series of roman numerals dictating relative strength in every key stat (all the stats go from I being miserable to X being best of the best), and then you plug those roman numerals into some super easy to use charts when the PCs get there, and those roman numerals translate into stats which are perfectly balanced for the difficulty you prescribed, whether the players are level 1 or level 20 when they get there.

EDIT: Though I will say that fudging die rolls to tell a better story is pretty terrible. Yes, when you're new to GMing there's a learning curve where you might make mistakes... make a fight too hard or too easy. Live and learn, and eventually you'll get to where you know your system in and out to get the balance you want. If you're a player, don't take it personal.

 

[Fearzone]

I wonder: if by giving players freedom to choose between different content, then that means some of the content will not be experienced--which might make your average GM less likely to put the extra effort and energy into crafting excellent content if there is a good chance it will never be seen, thus watering down the effort they put in all content?

 

[Georgie_Leech]

I wonder what would happen if RP's ever returned to their roots as war games. Imagine if alongside the main group, being all adventurous and heroic (or not, as it may be), there is a seperate "villain" group, working to... acomplish X. Neither group knows about the other, or maybe just dimly. It would most likely have to be done online or something, but I think it might lead to some interesting stories.

 

[Zannah]

I wonder what would happen if RP's ever returned to their roots as war games. Imagine if alongside the main group, being all adventurous and heroic (or not, as it may be), there is a seperate "villain" group, working to... acomplish X. Neither group knows about the other, or maybe just dimly. It would most likely have to be done online or something, but I think it might lead to some interesting stories.

There's no need to do something like this online, we've done it several times - with a little preparation there's no problem doing it while sitting at the same table. The problem is, you need really dedicated roleplayers for this, because having human antagonists always means, one party or the other will eventually loose, and loosing a campaign is not something a lot of people from the "classical gamer crowd" are comfortable with. It's probably best, to try something like this in a setting where, thanks to some deity or DocWagon, death isn't a too permanent thing, so people do not loose precious characters, that a lot of work might have gone into.

 

[lordofsteel]

I just stumbled across this article, and I have to say I was really inspired. I've been doing roleplay for about 15 years or so, but I haven't even attempted to DM anything in nearly as long. I have a regular gaming group on Monday nights, and after reading this article I'm seriously tempted to try and put together a "story web" like the article suggests and see what happens. I certainly know how it feels to be railroaded as a player, and I also know the satisfaction as a player of actually working toward specific, player/character driven goals. When the player makes choices like that, it's not even so important to actually get what you want, as much as it is to work towards it.

Yeah, I'm actually really inspired to try this out. I'll have to get some thinking on. Thanks!

 

[Kaihlik]

Something that bugs me is the confusion between story arc and railroad that people are making. A railroad is where you define everything that the players can do and basically only let them roll the dice when fighting.

A story arc is a situation where the GM plays out a story that the players are involved in, it can be the premise of the game and the characters can be build around the story arc or it can just be a situation where they have to play out the events for one reason or another.

That doesn't mean that within the story the players don't have complete choice on what to do. In a good story arc game they can still kill whoever they want, ally themselves with whoever they want or act in whatever manner they choose.

For example, my recent game resulted in players having to root out a cults influence on a planet, they knew what region the cult was based in and had some clue to what they were doing but once they got there they could basically go anywhere and do anything. They could have killed all the NPC's they shouldn't have but they decided against it. Their actions resulted in them rooting out some cultist influence but they didn't stay with my planned story till the end, that wasn't a problem, the events happened anyway without them. They instead skipped over a couple major scene and went straight to where the cultists were hiding.

If I was railroading them then they would have been prevented from leaving and have been forced to play the game as I had designed it. Instead they played the story arc which involved finding the cult and attempting to kill its leader (we are unfortunately paused before that fight begins so I can't tell you how it goes). This in turn is part of a larger arc that has been going on for the past three missions to deny the cults ambitions.

Its still an arc approach because the game I am running is based on the fact that these characters are all members of an organisation (the Inquisition) who are tasked with carrying out these jobs. If I wanted to play a web approach I would play a different game with a different preferance but I enjoy having different styles of games. If all games I played were the web approach for generic fantasy games I would likely get bored of it.

On another note I plan on running a story web game for the other 40k roleplaying system, Rogue Trader which suits that style of play. Alot of what happens will be based on the players backgrounds and actions in game, other than a small taster mission at the start for us to get used to the new rules.

Kaihlik

 

[KaiusCormere]

I haven't ever trusted my players to really do anything "good" for the game. Mostly I have to herd them along because they will try to bully/steal/kill from anything that they think they can get away with. I'd love to have players mature enough that they would create a satisfying story if they were left in a "sandbox" world but honestly I don't think many people would.

I'm completely fed up with players who pick the "Chaotic Neutral" alignment so they can act out their destructive anti-social fantasies in my game. (What I see happen is players basically abuse the townsfolk till the guards show up, then try to sneak away or kill the guards, creating an experience as if they are playing GTA. That's not the kind of game I ever want to waste my time running again.)

I always get people who want to do random things that are often cross-purpose with the parties' goals. Honestly though, I do prefer story-driven games such as Bioware's Jade Empire to "sandbox" style games like Morrowind, and it's the style I'd prefer to emulate. You have choices to offer the player, but if the player outright rejects the game and it's premise and would prefer to just screw around in a tavern pickpocketing people...I'm not willing to work with them - my time is worth more to me than that.

 

[BlueInkAlchemist]

I definitely feel that allowing players' backstories to inform the plot of the game as it moves forward is the best way to proceed, but I also feel that the GM should provide at least something of a spine upon which the 'ribs' of those backstories can hang. To extend the metaphor, ribs without a spine are tasty enough, but they tend to be a bit messy.

Take a look at Mass Effect 2, speaking of BioWare. The characters were all great, with interesting backstories and unique personalities. I could see this as a tabletop campaign, with the GM being approached by people who have Miranda or Garrus or Grunt or Jack as their characters. However, the plot, as it was, is a bit lacking, and without major reasons to weave those different plot threads together it really just became a series of side-quests focused on those characters. The writing was good, but a stronger plot would have made the experience a bit more coherent.

Just an example, and my 2 coppers.

I haven't ever trusted my players to really do anything "good" for the game. Mostly I have to herd them along because they will try to bully/steal/kill from anything that they think they can get away with. I'd love to have players mature enough that they would create a satisfying story if they were left in a "sandbox" world but honestly I don't think many people would.

Sounds to me like you definitely need better players.

 

[Archon]

Unfortunately neither of those options is what you wrote. The beginning of this article much more closely resembles "that which does not kill you makes you stronger, and cannot ever cause chronic illness, and people who say it can cause chronic illness are idiots." Inflammatory phrases are more interesting to read than bet-hedging, but actual information is several orders of magnitude more interesting and valuable than either. You wrote a very good three-page article on emergent gameplay, but I very nearly didn't read it because of the preceding fourth page telling me that the type of game my players specifically request from me is dumb. You would do well to re-read the disclaimer you just quoted and apply it to yourself - specifically the phrase "...and respectfully explain why". I am quite interested in hearing about this 'secret sauce' that you have, but I would prefer to do so without being told I'm wrong. You may have intended to just be entertaining, but that first page just comes off as mean.

Far Wanderer, in my opinion, there is difference between being respectful to a *person* and respectful to a position. You will not find me make an ad hominem attack on a person, but I am absolutely on the offensive against the position of "story first" gamemastering. I think it's a flawed GMing style, for all the reasons I have been sharing. I don't think that people who GM in ways are dumb, bad, or evil; I think they simply learned the GM craft during an era which over-emphasized story, and they haven't had ever had the flaws of that approach pointed out or heard of other ways to do things. Since at least the early 1990s, the proponents of narrative and story have loudly proclaimed from the mountain top that story is the be-all and end-all of gamemastering. The point of my bombast against the DMG2 is to show how deeply embedded this worldview has become. It's like the Protestant Reformation and I'm nailing 14 points to my church door.

So, in terms of "respectfully," I am happy to have anyone who disagrees with me on these forums say "I disagree with you. You're selling story short. Here's how I've made it work." Or "Newbie GMs, don't listen to Archon! He's steering you into an abyss! Here is the true secret sauce...." Or "I don't find this advice useful at all. You're missing all these important truths..." All good. I'm not interested in censoring anyone's views.

What would be disrespectful would then be to say "You f**king sh*t, you don't know s**t about GMing. Go back to picking your nose in your mom's basement." We don't generally have that level of discourse on The Escapist, but that's because we try hard to NOT be that place on the internet. That's what I mean by respectfully.

I hope that clarifies where I'm coming from. I will now go back to flinging rubbish at the DMG2.

 

[Fenixius]

I'd love to have players mature enough that they would create a satisfying story if they were left in a "sandbox" world but honestly I don't think many people would.

Definitely sounds like you need better players, mate :\ Try to get one of them to DM, or sit down and talk to them before you set anything up, to try and get them to come together on a coherent goal. If they want to be villainous characters, then you can definitely work with that - just make it more than meaningless violence and crime; bring some larger goal into it, an authority to overthrow, etc.

The point of this article is that the DM should be more reactionary than instigative: to let the players decide on the course, then help them follow it. You can throw in whatever you like along the way, so long as the players have the power, or at least some of it.

It's fair enough to set boundaries, but if people are dead set on being villainous reavers, rogues who prey on the weak, then you can totally support that with your DMing, and keep it interesting for you, too.

 

[Fenixius]

I hope that clarifies where I'm coming from. I will now go back to flinging rubbish at the DMG2.

Oh, if you like, check out DMG2 for Dungeons & Dragons 4th Edition. It's got a lot of much more interesting ways to make a story work. It's not so much focussing on player freedom, but it does offer a lot of ways to make a story work better, and provide an approach which would appeal to many different kinds of player. Primitive psychological profiles are detailed, and methods for appealing to players who fit into those classes (which are things like "storyteller", "explorer", "powergamer", etc) so that they're more active within a game.

Using a combination of those techniques and the "web"-style campaign that you spoke about before will likely result in a higher quality roleplaying campaign than either apart. Less important for experienced and proficient roleplayers, however, who I'm sure can find the fun in almost any campaign.

 

[Kaihlik]

I just dont see one point of view as incompatable with the other. I can have fun playing both types of game, I see the merits in both, they are different but both have merits and flaws. I am planning on running both, and I am planning on playing in both.

I would rather get insightes on how to achieve your method of GMing rather than hear how it is the right way because to me there is no right way. Yes maybe one way has become too prevelent (although thats a basic premise that I disagree with) and there is a lack of knowledge about how to achieve the style you are advocating but I feel that your articles would be better served by instructing people how to achieve it.

The total dismissal of one type of Roleplaying in favor of another just seems stupid, fair enough point out the cons of that system and the pros of yours but don't be so arrogant as to think that because you like one method the other one is wrong.

That really is whats bugging me, this notion that there is a right and wrong way. Fight for your side but dont do it by dismissing the other side. Yes, one style of game may have become deeply entrenched but that doesn't make it wrong, yes you can rubbish the fact that the DMG2 only espouses one facet of GMing but that doesn't make that facet wrong, it just makes the DMG2 a bad book for not giving a rounded view of things.

I have a feeling that you are going to basically dismiss this post which saddens me.

Kaihlik

 

[Hurr Durr Derp]

Another great article, and another I don't fully agree with.

I get the feeling that you're polarizing things too much. It's not a matter of running an emergent story or a directed story. There's no reason you shouldn't use elements from both schools of thought. They're two extremes, but in the end it's a much more analogue choice than just that. Purely directed stories risk being too confining for the players, but a fully emergent story runs the risk of being too 'sandboxy', resulting in the players faffing about aimlessly much of the time. Of course, this depends just as much (if not more!) on the players as it does on the DM, but it's certainly something to keep in mind.

I guess what I personally do is a mix of the two. I tend to have directed 'mini-stories' within a larger emergent tapestry. Players still get to choose what to do and how to do it, but when tackling a certain problem (like the example used in the article, "the local King will come down with Bubonic Ebola, which will only be cured if the Polyhedral of Power can be recovered from the Lost Temple"), that part of the story becomes more directed. They need to go to location X, collect object Y, and on the way they'll encounter problems Z1, Z2, and/or Z3. Of course this isn't a purely railroaded sequence, since players will always come up with stuff you never anticipated (which, if you aks me, is half the fun of being a DM), but the basic layout of the mission is pre-planned, encounters and all. All I do is improvise to make sure my plans don't get in the way of the players' crazy schemes to ruin my plans.

Something I don't really like about the web structure is that it plans too much. You've got all these locations that you try to make interesting, but the players might never see most of them. And that's not even the worst of it. What if players go somewhere that isn't an immediate part of the web? Are you going to steer them back onto the web? Are you going to draw a new web? I also dislike how inflexible it is. As I mentioned in my reply to the previous article, if the MacGuffin is in the Forest of Doom and the players go to the Dungeon of Boring Cobwebs in stead, who's to say that the MacGuffing wasn't in the dungeon all along? That way you can plan one or two adventures while still maintaining the illusion that the players have dozens of places to go to and keeping the action going at the pace you want it to be.

 

[Archon]

Kaihilik, I suppose my answer is that I do think there is a theoretical "Right Way". The point of discussion between experienced gamemasters is to present different arguments about what that Right Way constitutes and share lessons learned and viewpoints. But as between an experienced gamemaster and a new gamemaster, the experienced gamemaster should present his current view of the Right Way, i.e. his own best practices.

It's akin to martial arts. The masters of the different martial arts will hold tournaments to determine which fighting style is best. But when the master is giving a class to his new students, he presents his fighting style as best, not everyone else's. Jujitsu teachers don't tell you that Karate is the better way. They tell you Jujitsu is best, and teach you how to whip the Karate Kid's butt.

So continuing the analogy, my columns are the dojo where I instruct, the forums are where I come to fight other masters and test my fighting style against their fighting style.

Hope that makes sense!

 

[Callate]

Hmm... Po-tay-to, Po-tah-to...

You see, to me, "plot arc" doesn't necessarily speak of railroading. But it does suggest a line of events in which the players probably would be interested, which they could conceivably alter or change, and which will continue to work themselves out whether the players intervene or not, much like the "King's Plague" scenario the author describes.

The last major campaign I ran, there were a couple of major villains going about their business: a wizard crafting increasingly sophisticated insect-like constructs that were capable of turning humanoids into zombie-like things, and a military officer using the spreading of this "plague" and an under-utilized army as a means to usurp power. Now, there was nothing in particular to demand immediately that the players go do something about this; in fact, there weren't immediate suggestions that this was going on. But they did meet this military officer early in the campaign, and had cause to reflect on it when word started coming in of cities "contained" under "quarantine" on that officer's authority. And they did start to wonder when the "zombies-but-not-zombies" started to show up in abandoned farmsteads and villages, with tiny metal insect-like things imbedded in their flesh.

I like improvising. I'm happy to come up with things on the spur of the moment to accomodate what players want to do. The same campaign began with the players going to a dwarven fortress and being faced with a decision whether to let an old crime against local elves go unpunished in the name of local diplomacy or allow the resident elven magic to destroy said fortress, and the players insisted upon- and found- a third way through. I was proud of them.

Not every GM has a gift for improvisation. Not every GM can make random encounter tables seem like a living thing rising out of the environment rather than what it is- a roll translated into an encounter. Not every GM has the ability to take the copious notes sometimes necessary when players go off the beaten path and the GM has to remember what was there later. Like others have said, I hesitate to wholeheartedly criticize one style of GMing because it isn't what works for me. I think there's plenty of room in between wholesale railroading and entirely emergent play, and that only experience will teach a GM where their own strengths lie. I can very easily imagine a GM with a carefully crafted plot that keeps the players enthralled, just as I can imagine a more "emergent" GM whose random encounters and refusal to fudge the die rolls got the whole party killed through no particular fault of their own.

 

[PedroSteckecilo]

Kaihilik, I suppose my answer is that I do think there is a theoretical "Right Way". The point of discussion between experienced gamemasters is to present different arguments about what that Right Way constitutes and share lessons learned and viewpoints. But as between an experienced gamemaster and a new gamemaster, the experienced gamemaster should present his current view of the Right Way, i.e. his own best practices.

It's akin to martial arts. The masters of the different martial arts will hold tournaments to determine which fighting style is best. But when the master is giving a class to his new students, he presents his fighting style as best, not everyone else's. Jujitsu teachers don't tell you that Karate is the better way. They tell you Jujitsu is best, and teach you how to whip the Karate Kid's butt.

So continuing the analogy, my columns are the dojo where I instruct, the forums are where I come to fight other masters and test my fighting style against their fighting style.

Hope that makes sense!

The problem with this method of presentation is that it can be very intimidating to newcomers, despite your attempts to make it otherwise. By your method I don't really see any REASON to put myself through all the headaches and hoop jumping required by a GM. Where's MY reward for taking on the most grueling, thankless and difficult job required to play the game?

Different people have fun in different ways, by presenting your method as the one true way you're breaking the most important rule of gaming, that being that there is no such thing as "Bad Wrong Fun". Essentially, as long as you're enjoying yourself, you're doing it right enough.

 

[Gantoris13]

I've really been enjoying your series. As a rookie DM with my group we recently started playing d&d 4E and started using the pre-packaged adventure arc. These are pretty much nothing but a huge railroad, and in my mind I get a bit disappointed every time the adventure storyline forces me to direct the players somewhere that they didn't necessarily want to go. After reading your article I'm going to start working on a "web" type adventure, from reading my player group I can tell this would be more fun for them. Especially since they all come from a MMOG background and the "web" style is more akin to that anyway.