(no subject)
Feb. 8th, 2004 10:10 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
the_rckThis stuff's been bubbling in my head for a while. A few days ago, I decided that I might as well write it up since I wasn't getting anything else written. I should note that I'm pretty much talking about tabletop games because that's where the bulk of my experience is. I suspect that this stuff generalizes to other types of games, but my experience is mostly tabletop and LARP. And the LARPs I run work differently because they're one shots in which I've designed everything and then have to step back and let go. I don't interact with the players that much in the process of running the game.
The last year has, effectively, been a fallow period for me as a gamemaster. In 2003 at about this time, I closed down my on-going campaigns because I couldn't keep up with them due to fatigue from pregnancy and due to the long list of things that had to be done before the baby arrived. I'd already made the decision not to try to write a new LARP that year or to go to GenCon. I was planning to rerun an old game once we got to UCon because that would place the least strain on me as I adjusted to being a mother.
I miss running games very nearly as much as I miss playing in them. At the moment, I'm playing in three games, a PBEM with moves every day or two, Scott's Traveller campaign (which meets infrequently) and an LJ based game that's been, at least from my point of view, pretty much on hold for a couple of months. This may sound busy, but... At the height of my role playing participation, I was GMing three campaigns (one meeting weekly and the other two biweekly) and playing in three campaigns. And writing and rewriting LARPs.
Over the years, I've met a lot of gamers. Many of them never GM. A few of them refuse to participate if they aren't the GM. Most do some GMing and some playing. People have all sorts of reasons for running games, ranging from "No one else would" to "I can't deal with someone else being in charge." In my experience, the motive for running the game doesn't have a lot to do with the quality of the resulting campaign. It affects the GM's style of interacting with the players to some extent, but most of what makes a GM good or bad has to do with skill and with understanding the job.
On the face of it, GMing is a straightforward task-- You just plan your story and then let your players walk through it, making sure they see all the sights. This approach, however, often makes for a lousy game. Good players can still manage to build a group experience that's worthwhile, but they'll always remember the game as having something lacking. The best example of this that I can recall is a campaign that turned out to be a story the GM wanted to tell. The player characters were, in effect, the audience for a drama that didn't involve them. The GM just wanted us to see what he'd created. Fortunately, all of the other players were top notch, and the GM was willing to be pulled off course a bit, so we found time to explore our characters and build relationships with each other, but... I ended up feeling rather cheated.
I distinguish between the "look what I made!" approach and running characters in a modular adventure because the latter can still be about the player characters, what they do can still change events. A good module includes more than one possible ending. This is not to say that running modules is easy. I can't do it to save my life (though I'm quite capable of writing them), and I've seen a number of other people botch it as well. My husband, on the other hand, does an excellent job with modules because he doesn't forget what the game's really about.
What the game is really about is the pleasure of the players.
I'd qualify that with an "it depends" except that it doesn't. If the players don't have fun, the game is a failure. If the players have fun, the game is a success. The only quality that matters is player enjoyment. The scenario can be stupid, poorly constructed, self-contradictory-- It doesn't matter as long as the players have fun. The corollary is that a perfectly constructed scenario must still be considered a failure if the players go home unhappy. The task of the GM is not to construct a good story but to construct a story that works for the players.
I see GMing as a contract of sorts. The GM agrees to set up and manage the situation, creating the fantasy world and making it safe and comfortable for the players (not for the characters!), but to allow the players to control their experience to a large extent. To that end, the GM has to have a good idea of what each player wants and expects and of what his or her abilities, shortcomings and comfort levels are. The GM also has to recognize his own limitations in terms of things like style, genre, system and so on. (For example, I could never run Paranoia. My mind doesn't work that way. I also couldn't run a good dungeon crawl. I excel at political intrigue and do okay with urban fantasy.)
The players have a mirroring set of responsibilities. They have to respect each other's limits and needs, and they're the ones ultimately responsible for choosing to be in the game. There are some cases in which GMs and players just can't work together. It doesn't mean that anybody's necessarily incompetent or evil, just that what the GM offers isn't what the player enjoys. A GM may spot that problem, but it's the player's responsibility to decide when other factors (enjoying time with friends, it's the only game in town) are more important than liking what the GM's offering.
But the GM has an obligation to enforce standards of behavior for the player group. That can be as simple as asking players not to swear because one of the players (or the GM) isn't comfortable with such language, or it can get more complicated-- Two players having personal problems outside the game who start using their characters to attack each other. One player using in character interactions to hit on another player and not picking up subtle hints to stop. One player alienating the other players and not realizing it's happened. These are all things that the GM has agreed to deal with simply by virtue of saying, "Hey, I'll run a game."
I often say that GMing is hard work. A lot of the people I talk to are confused by that statement because they don't see me spending time preparing maps or rolling up npcs. I don't generally do that sort of thing. I may do a little desultory research. I will generally talk to my players between sessions about game events and what they want. Mostly, though, I show up at a game session with a vague idea of what might happen and a sort of frame built out of the npcs and big background events that I've got in my head. Then I sit down and start talking to the players, and sometimes I use what I planned, but sometimes I don't.
From my point of view, the hard work of GMing isn't the preparation and planning. Those can be time consuming, but they're also potentially fun (and avoidable if you don't enjoy them). The real work is the responsibility. When I say, "I'll GM," I'm saying, "I'm going to get my fun entirely from your fun."
Within the boundaries of my abilities and imagination (there are things I simply can't run well), my story, my characters, my complicated plot twists, puzzles and traps all have to be subordinate to the players' fun. I suspect that's why I don't bother with too much preparation-- There's too much risk that what I invest myself in will end up going out the window because it doesn't fit my players' mood.
And just to forestall some questions-- Yes, I do see some parallels between my description of the GM's role and certain other types of interactions. I simply thought that, if I started by stating that comparison, I'd lose some people before they looked at my logic. You might also consider a final point-- Part of the pleasure of role playing for most players is simulating experiences that would be very unpleasant in reality. The GM mediates the experience and is the one person who can't (well, shouldn't) submerge fully in any role without endangering the game.
The last year has, effectively, been a fallow period for me as a gamemaster. In 2003 at about this time, I closed down my on-going campaigns because I couldn't keep up with them due to fatigue from pregnancy and due to the long list of things that had to be done before the baby arrived. I'd already made the decision not to try to write a new LARP that year or to go to GenCon. I was planning to rerun an old game once we got to UCon because that would place the least strain on me as I adjusted to being a mother.
I miss running games very nearly as much as I miss playing in them. At the moment, I'm playing in three games, a PBEM with moves every day or two, Scott's Traveller campaign (which meets infrequently) and an LJ based game that's been, at least from my point of view, pretty much on hold for a couple of months. This may sound busy, but... At the height of my role playing participation, I was GMing three campaigns (one meeting weekly and the other two biweekly) and playing in three campaigns. And writing and rewriting LARPs.
Over the years, I've met a lot of gamers. Many of them never GM. A few of them refuse to participate if they aren't the GM. Most do some GMing and some playing. People have all sorts of reasons for running games, ranging from "No one else would" to "I can't deal with someone else being in charge." In my experience, the motive for running the game doesn't have a lot to do with the quality of the resulting campaign. It affects the GM's style of interacting with the players to some extent, but most of what makes a GM good or bad has to do with skill and with understanding the job.
On the face of it, GMing is a straightforward task-- You just plan your story and then let your players walk through it, making sure they see all the sights. This approach, however, often makes for a lousy game. Good players can still manage to build a group experience that's worthwhile, but they'll always remember the game as having something lacking. The best example of this that I can recall is a campaign that turned out to be a story the GM wanted to tell. The player characters were, in effect, the audience for a drama that didn't involve them. The GM just wanted us to see what he'd created. Fortunately, all of the other players were top notch, and the GM was willing to be pulled off course a bit, so we found time to explore our characters and build relationships with each other, but... I ended up feeling rather cheated.
I distinguish between the "look what I made!" approach and running characters in a modular adventure because the latter can still be about the player characters, what they do can still change events. A good module includes more than one possible ending. This is not to say that running modules is easy. I can't do it to save my life (though I'm quite capable of writing them), and I've seen a number of other people botch it as well. My husband, on the other hand, does an excellent job with modules because he doesn't forget what the game's really about.
What the game is really about is the pleasure of the players.
I'd qualify that with an "it depends" except that it doesn't. If the players don't have fun, the game is a failure. If the players have fun, the game is a success. The only quality that matters is player enjoyment. The scenario can be stupid, poorly constructed, self-contradictory-- It doesn't matter as long as the players have fun. The corollary is that a perfectly constructed scenario must still be considered a failure if the players go home unhappy. The task of the GM is not to construct a good story but to construct a story that works for the players.
I see GMing as a contract of sorts. The GM agrees to set up and manage the situation, creating the fantasy world and making it safe and comfortable for the players (not for the characters!), but to allow the players to control their experience to a large extent. To that end, the GM has to have a good idea of what each player wants and expects and of what his or her abilities, shortcomings and comfort levels are. The GM also has to recognize his own limitations in terms of things like style, genre, system and so on. (For example, I could never run Paranoia. My mind doesn't work that way. I also couldn't run a good dungeon crawl. I excel at political intrigue and do okay with urban fantasy.)
The players have a mirroring set of responsibilities. They have to respect each other's limits and needs, and they're the ones ultimately responsible for choosing to be in the game. There are some cases in which GMs and players just can't work together. It doesn't mean that anybody's necessarily incompetent or evil, just that what the GM offers isn't what the player enjoys. A GM may spot that problem, but it's the player's responsibility to decide when other factors (enjoying time with friends, it's the only game in town) are more important than liking what the GM's offering.
But the GM has an obligation to enforce standards of behavior for the player group. That can be as simple as asking players not to swear because one of the players (or the GM) isn't comfortable with such language, or it can get more complicated-- Two players having personal problems outside the game who start using their characters to attack each other. One player using in character interactions to hit on another player and not picking up subtle hints to stop. One player alienating the other players and not realizing it's happened. These are all things that the GM has agreed to deal with simply by virtue of saying, "Hey, I'll run a game."
I often say that GMing is hard work. A lot of the people I talk to are confused by that statement because they don't see me spending time preparing maps or rolling up npcs. I don't generally do that sort of thing. I may do a little desultory research. I will generally talk to my players between sessions about game events and what they want. Mostly, though, I show up at a game session with a vague idea of what might happen and a sort of frame built out of the npcs and big background events that I've got in my head. Then I sit down and start talking to the players, and sometimes I use what I planned, but sometimes I don't.
From my point of view, the hard work of GMing isn't the preparation and planning. Those can be time consuming, but they're also potentially fun (and avoidable if you don't enjoy them). The real work is the responsibility. When I say, "I'll GM," I'm saying, "I'm going to get my fun entirely from your fun."
Within the boundaries of my abilities and imagination (there are things I simply can't run well), my story, my characters, my complicated plot twists, puzzles and traps all have to be subordinate to the players' fun. I suspect that's why I don't bother with too much preparation-- There's too much risk that what I invest myself in will end up going out the window because it doesn't fit my players' mood.
And just to forestall some questions-- Yes, I do see some parallels between my description of the GM's role and certain other types of interactions. I simply thought that, if I started by stating that comparison, I'd lose some people before they looked at my logic. You might also consider a final point-- Part of the pleasure of role playing for most players is simulating experiences that would be very unpleasant in reality. The GM mediates the experience and is the one person who can't (well, shouldn't) submerge fully in any role without endangering the game.
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no subject
Date: 2004-02-08 11:43 pm (UTC)*pines for D*D*
Re:
Date: 2004-02-10 07:05 am (UTC)The big difference for me between role playing games and writing is the obligation to other people. I write for myself. I GM for others. When I GM, I feel like I'm saying, "Trust me. I'll take care of you."
no subject
Date: 2004-02-09 04:38 am (UTC)I'm generally the sort of GM who makes up a bunch of NPCs and has maps and stuff. That's because I like visual aids, because I am, deep down inside, not horribly confident in my abilities as a GM. Intellectually, I know that's a little dumb, because I've run lots of games, and at least a few people are effusive in their praise of them, but there you have it.
I try to set up my games with a LOT of detail worked out beforehand. That's because I want the players to have the flexibility to do whatever they want while I try to guide them in the right direction. If they end up going off somewhere else, I don't want to have to just put up a big flashing neon sign by the side of the road saying "The Game Ends Here, Go Back From Whence You Came" because I didn't plan anything.
There was one time I planned a game which was primarily set on one island. There was a ring of mountains around the area and they couldn't get out. I planned where about 30 cities were located and created some sort of trouble that was happening at EACH one. That way, the players had total freedom to go whereever they wanted - I already had something worked out. Crazy? Probably.
My goal for the next week or two before my game continues is to work out two things
a) What was heaven like - that way the players will have a much better grounding in their characters, so they'll have more fun roleplaying. I noticed the roleplaying was a little awkward, because no one had much idea of their background.
b) What's the world like in their immediate vicinity, so I can stop leading them by the nose - because we BOTH have more fun that way.
Re:
Date: 2004-02-10 07:26 am (UTC)I was a little startled that the first thing that popped into my head was that GMing is like being the dominant in a BDSM scene. I was further startled when the analogy didn't break down as I extended it.
Good luck on figuring out the background for your game. I still say it sounds fascinating.