IF YOU PLAN FOR SOMEONE, THEY WON'T SHOW UP
Last night we scheduled the grand finale for the second arc of our Mutants & Masterminds campaign. In our previous session First Wave confronted and defeated one of the last Cabal Overlords- Kang, revealed to be Tony Stark- with their own armor-wearing Tony Stark revealed to be a clone. But that victory proved to be short-lived as they looked out upon NYC and saw the horde arrayed against them: gargantuan monsters of legend like Fin Fam Foom; Dog Demons; and Hela and her armies- and alongside, her general the Mighty Thor!
...which would have been awesome except one of the players had a power outage so we had to reschedule for two weeks from now. I'd planned on writing something about the campaign for today, so instead I'll offer another piece that I've been working on and is more than a little raw- I'm still not sure about the concepts.
...which would have been awesome except one of the players had a power outage so we had to reschedule for two weeks from now. I'd planned on writing something about the campaign for today, so instead I'll offer another piece that I've been working on and is more than a little raw- I'm still not sure about the concepts.
BEYOND ROLL CALL
At a recent session of our new Legend campaign, we found
ourselves in an Inn. That’s pretty standard fare- a stopover for rumors as we
headed on to deal with the question of the silent village. It has been a while
since I’ve had a chance to play rather than GM. I’m enjoying the slow reveal
we’re getting about the GM’s world- a place with lots of interesting bits and
pieces. He’s smartly presenting those in drips and drabs. In any case as we
come in- the GM describes the common room, with a few striking characters and
clear plot hooks. Then he mentions that one of the groups in the room consists
of members of a particularly brutal mercenary company from my home region. They
recognize my heraldry and give me some scowls. It prompts some discussion in
the group about my history.
And that’s it- we don’t get into a fight with them until a later session. They
didn’t seem to tie to the main plot. They’re there and offered some color. More
importantly they acknowledged that the GM remembers who my character is. I gave
Derek a pretty Spartan background, a few details, but those details remain
importantly to me. It has been a while since I played with Derek; the last
campaigns were more procedural. We had cases or assignments. If something
popped up from someone’s backstory it was because it tied to our current
undertaking tightly. Here, in just a couple of minutes of scene I felt like my
character mattered in the world and that the GM was thinking about cool stuff
for me. Not just random plots, but ideas and concepts which played off of the work
I’d done.
The moment stuck with me when I caught up on Ken & Robin
talk About Stuff podcasts the following week. They had a segment on the
perennial question of railroading, something I think every gaming blog and podcasts
has wrestled with. I’ve written on it more than few times; Sandboxes & Finales and Another Inevitable Post on Railroading. Anyway that discussion plus
some ideas about ways to use skill competency to mark players got me thinking
about another way to see the tensions between what some might call “directed”
versus “free” in an rpg. Instead of seeing that simply as a tension between the
GM and players, I think we can three poles operating in a game. I’m hoping that
thinking about it this way might help me understand where my campaigns- run and
played in- work or didn’t work.
Story: We traditionally
considered the GM’s core interest. The idea that the GM has a tale to tell that
links or works at a meta-level to the scenes and sessions. Some gamers discuss
this negatively- where a GMs focus on the story means that they don’t get to
make meaningful choices, don’t have their characters acknowledged, and their
result have been effectively mapped out. Gamers often point to Dragonlance as an
exemplar of this kind of story orientation. As with all three poles, focus on
this can exclude other elements. Story can be softer than this- where there’s a
plot the players explore, such as in a mystery. Struggling to defeat a big
bad’s a story trope and form. There’s a difference between plotting and plot in
this case. Story can also be added later- with an emergent story, crafted by
the players and/or the GM as things move along.
Characters: The
narrative and details players tell about who they are. It includes character
sheet bits and also how that gets expressed at the table. At the most basic
level, this consists of the PCs class/race/role. In other games, this includes
stories about those details (i.e. The Elves of Alfheim bear no ill-will towards
the Dwarves of Rockhome). In games with an emphasis on character this often
includes somewhat mechanical details like aspects, merits, flaws,
disadvantages, complications and so on. More broadly it includes the backstory
and character history which players come up with- told at the table or written
up. Generally these elements are of greater value to the player than to the GM.
Taken to the extreme offers a game that’s simply about the characters
interacting. A negative spin on that might be to call it diddling around.
GM-less games like Fiasco focus on this.
Environment: The
setting and backdrop. Not the backstory, but simply the things which the group
interacts with. Places, battle maps, described locations, discrete incidents,
NPCs- these all make up the environment. This may be more or less interactive
and responsive- for example NPCs on one end and a dungeon room on the other.
This also includes the rules covering the game since that’s a both a kind of
environment and the laws governing the backdrop. Hex and Dungeon Crawls often
put an emphasis on this over anything else. In extreme versions, there’s no
compelling story beyond a win condition or goal. You characters don’t really
matter to the game, except as they impact available rule choices. But generally
any characters could be slotted into games with a focus on environment.
Some games focus on one of these poles- that’s less
interesting and less fun for me. Below are some notes about the extreme
versions of these positions. What might be the implications of an obsessive
focus?
Story Focus: No power, no interactivity, no choice. What the
players do doesn’t really matter. I’ve played in games where it became pretty
clear that the GM had a plot and we were going to get there regardless of what
we wanted. Work we did to shape events would be washed away or dismissed. I’m
not sure if it is better to know that up front or find that out as the campaign
progresses. Sherri played in a game where she had the opportunity to build up
resources and contacts for her character. She was given the impression that
would be a significant part of the game. After several sessions of that, the GM
threw them away and moved the party on to the location he wanted them to be at.
Her worked ended up discarded and unmentioned.
Character Focus: No driving group goals, lack of direction, potential
for misreading. I think when people dismiss some games as being dithering,
dollhousing, or pointless, they’re talking about games like these. Character
focused games draw plots and details from the PCs. Exclusively doing that
suggests that the world revolves around them. If the group has players with
different levels of energy, some can get left to the side. If can also devolve
into everyone playing in parallel rather than towards something collectively. A
character focus requires the GM to know the characters as well as the player.
We had a series of campaigns with a player who communicated their goals and
desires badly- and moved the goalpost. They became resentful when they weren’t
given what they wanted, but wouldn’t communicate what that was. It meant they
didn’t have to justify themselves.
Environment Focus: Characters don’t matter, board game play,
disconnection, higher rewards for system mastery. Could devolve into a
mechanistic approach: calculated challenges needed: monsters, traps, skill
rolls, and plug those in. Strip away materials to get to the engine and result
underneath- a procedurally generated approach. Games become samey. Characters become
dismissed as tools. Non-optimal characters for the environment don’t work.
IS THAT USEFUL?
OK what does breaking that down actually do for me? Is it a
useful way of doing things? I’ll say this- I tend to have a Story and Character
focus in my games. I know and can identify that, so how can I bring that better
into balance with the Environment. How can I present and scale challenges to
make them interesting. I’m thinking about the mechanistic side of things there.
But how can I present the environment/setting in a way that allows the players
to muck around with it.
Crucially the GM- in the early days of a campaign, and then
on a regular basis throughout the campaign- should show the players they know
and remember their character. I talked before about the importance of
establishing trust with players. This can be mechanical- showing that you have
mastery of the system and want to use it for fun rather than straitjacketing
the group. It can be about attention by demonstrating that in a scene everyone
will get an opportunity. It could even be about taking them seriously- taking
them at their word and considering even the goofiest ideas with some care. I
believe that players need to trust that a GM recognizes who they are and
acknowledges that the player has a kind of cool character.
As a side note, in an ideal game, as a GM, I love all of the
PCs. I have affection for them or at the very least I don’t hate them. That
doesn’t mean I’m not going not put them through the ringer. It doesn’t mean I’m
going to protect them. But I’m going to do that because I want to see them rise
to the top, I want to see how they overcome the challenges set before them.
Depending on the game, I come to enjoy the character in several ways. In more
classic games, that’s purely through personality and play- clever, funny,
interesting, whatever. That’s how the player puts themselves out at the table
in a heavily procedural game- like a dungeon crawl. In longer games or those
with a greater narrative focus, I’ll come to that additionally through things
like backstory, personality flaws, and dangling plot threads.
So how can a GM acknowledge the characters? At the basic
level that’s remembering who the characters are- names, classes, event details.
Where characters have competencies, like thiefly skills or particular kinds of
spells, I can present opportunities to use those. Call on those players who
have those skills and abilities- which in many cases may be several at the
table. The nature of these games is that there’s often overlap. A GM has to
figure out how to give people with a focus in something a chance to use it,
while at the table time giving others who’ve invested in it some opportunity:
offering a bonus, an insight, or even splitting the group to give additional
players shots at those things.
But that’s really a set of crunchy conventions- about practical
play. Most often I’m running more narrative games, so I have to figure out how
to integrate the player’s backgrounds and history. Every session, I want to at
least once mention something about a character that’s a call-back: a tie to
their history, a past event they were key in, a description that centers on
skills they’re excellent at, an NPCs comment on them, mentioning them to
another PC or an NPC, putting forward or highlighting something that their
character likes, getting them to express a goal, even something as little as
asking them to describe their character or how they’re acting in a particular
situation.
This isn’t about planning the session around the PC or
shaping the story to them- I figure GMs will know how much they want to do
regarding that. I’ve posted before some ideas on how to do that easily in GM
prep (my Three Things sheets or the 3 Up/3 Down character assessments.)
NEXT WEEK: Practical applications and further thoughts.
