Thursday 18 July 2013

Story game advice: sometimes you just need to be a twat

Sometimes the GM just needs to be a twat: you need to enforce consequences no matter whether your players like it or not. Those of us who play and love traditional games understand this.

It needs to be stated more openly in the story game community. (Maybe it is; it's not really a community I'm connected to.) We spent this evening playing two games, The Sundered Land and Vast & Starlit, and they were a lot of fun (although once Patrick and I had turned a carefully constructed weird SF setting about a space ship made of coral into a game about angry, smelly hippos crossed with flying snakes the moment we were left alone, it's fair to say it lost a little focus) but I was constantly aware while we were playing them that none of us wanted to make tough decisions when we were 'in control' of the narrative. We kept offering easy-way-outs. And when we didn't, it was very easy for somebody in a tough spot to weasel out of it through narrative control rather than actually using their brain.

This is a problem with story games, I've found. Without the dice TELLING you there are severe negative consequences and also what they are, you feel like an arse if you try to impose severe negative consequences when you are in the driving seat. And this makes the games lose tension and conflict and thus real meaning. It's almost as if in a traditional game the dice are a kind of pressure valve which allows the GM to get away with being a twat, and without that you avoid generating any real pressure in the first place.


24 comments:

  1. It's a tragedy of the Story Games community that they don't seem to realize how good they are at writing comedy engines.

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  2. My contact with the story games crowd is also minimal. When I've tried playing these games, though, I found that players were usually just fine trying to inflict negative consequences on other players' characters, but that the rules for shifting narrative control and metagame resources like story points allowed players to evade the negatives, rather than engage with them.

    Anecdotal evidence from my limited experiences. Take them for what they're worth.

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    1. Yeah, that too. I might put up an example in my next post to illustrate what I mean.

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  3. Agree heartily, and not just for story games. I have gotten a lot of plausible deniability and backbone toughening as a DM out of using other people's modules, as well as rolling dice and letting them fall where they may on the table. I don't want to have complete narrative control, I want to be surprised. If there were only some way for people to experience the autokinetic effect (Ouija board motion) in roleplaying - each one influencing the narrative, but each also feeling the narrative is moving on its own.

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  4. As you might expect, I don't necessarily agree with this or my perspective is a bit different. It may also be that the story games I play are a bit more traditional (or the traditional games more story driven...or both).

    Again and as always, it depends on the game, the GM and/or the players.

    Part of the point of some of these games is that (unless GMless) the GM is providing the scenarios and difficulties and the players arrest the narrative in order to find clever ways out of the situation that's been set up. InSpectres kind of works this way.

    In other instances, if you have control of the narrative and you make it too easy to get out of a dilemma, that's not the games fault per se. That's like a traditional player blaming the GM for 'unfairly' trapping the party in a room that could only be escaped by using fire when said player refused to light a torch with the wood, oil, flint and tinder that he had. You make it hard on yourself or easy on yourself. Ok, that example is kind of backwards but I hope you get what I mean.

    I do agree with Zak that the potential for comedic story games is largely untapped. Many creators take this stuff too seriously and don't recognize the wackiness inherent in what they (we're all) doing.

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    1. I do not get what you mean.

      If I can, as a player, create the gamespace, then there is no threat of danger, ever, because I can bill & ted my way out of any situation.

      "Remember a trashcan!"

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    2. I think undoubtedly the best use for story games is to make comedy. We were pissing ourselves laughing last night.

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  5. Story Telling games without a GM seem snoozy to me, but I have never been a part of one, I have played diceless and narrative driven games though.


    A cool depiction of what story gaming really should be (but isn't) can be found in Blood: A Southern Fantasy (Michael Moorcock):

    Within the subplots, gamblers weave psychedelic shared experiences as they spin classic tales with narrative variance and styling to throw the other gamblers off their game by introducing obstructions, ultimately winning only by overcoming the hurdles presented by others and allowing their representative protagonist to complete their role and emerge triumphant, kind of like dueling directors all making their own adaptation of Romeo and Juliet, each trying to showcase a different character, but in real-time with a live audience.

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    1. Maybe you should make that story game.

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  6. Dices are numbers; numbers are objective. People are not.

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  7. As usual, I am merely trying to point out another way of thinking about this stuff. I can't make you make things more interesting for yourself and the other players and I'm not here to teach objectivity.

    We've used a controlled version of the 'Bill and Ted' thing, with rules and parameters, in games like InSpectres and 3:16 to great success. YMMV.

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    1. It's a matter of limitations. In a traditional game, you find clever ways out of a situation by thinking creatively, but you have to use the resources you have available and the actions that you as your player character could take, and both of those limitations are dictated by external factors - the DM, verisimilitude, the dice.

      If it's even possible for you as a player to "make it too easy to get out of a dilemma", it's already a different experience, and it's absolutely the game's "fault". In a traditional game, I'm stuck with circumstances beyond my control and I have to strive to make things turn out as well for myself as possible. If I have control over the circumstances, the game loses that puzzle element. Sure, I can arbitrarily make things harder on myself, but that's like your trapped room example, except it's for everything, all the time.

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    2. Exactly. I read something in PC Gamer or Kotaku or somewhere, about how some of the best games aren't empowerment fantasies... they're disempowerment fantasies. I like to play where it's a disempowerment fantasies for both my players, and me, as the GM - for my players, because of the situations they find themselves in, and for me, because I want them to succeed, but the rules tell me otherwise.

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    3. I think this is a reply to -C rather than me, but I basically agree with him. It's not that I don't think the "controlled Bill and Ted thing" isn't fun, it's just that it's a bit less fun for me than the traditional.

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  8. I suppose this gets to a deeper question of what your group dynamic is. How competitive are the players v the GM? I've played in groups where it is pretty much the Players vs the GM in a struggle for survival, where the GM "wins" by killing players. On the other hand I've played in groups where the GM "win" comes from having players full immersed in the virtual world. That's not to say a traditional game can't achieve that, I believe it can, it just depends on the players.

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    1. I think any game where the GM wins by creating a subjective condition, such as immersion, isn't a game I want to play.

      How do I play such a game? I'm willing to bet the object isn't quantifiable. And if it's not objective and not quantifiable, then it's just jumping through some individual person's arbitrary hoops.

      I play games to get away from that kind of bullshit.

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    2. I'm not sure the GM should be trying to "win" anything, in a traditional game. They're supposed to be refereeing.

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    3. I agree with John. The GM only wins in the sense that he referees so well that the players stop noticing he's even there.

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  9. I think that the whole "players vs. GM" concept is the result of a false dichotomy. The way I run games, its the players and the GM vs. the game mechanics, and when these are associated mechanics, full immersion results. Without mechanics, the game is forced into a GM vs. players situation, because there is no third party for both sides to interact with. It defaults into opposition or unimpeded cooperation.

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    1. I think that's quite a profound insight actually. Opposition or unimpeded cooperation, with the latter being by far the most common (because opposition requires somebody to act like a twat, which brings us back to the OP).

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  10. It's funny, it is stated openly, but not as "a thing", apart from in a few cases. Here's an example thread.

    On a related note, both games you played were really small, any stuff you noticed they were missing?

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    1. Vast & Starlit is a nice concept in theory but I don't think we understood the rules properly, or they were poorly explained, or something. Anyway it quickly devolved into a comedic farce which was, essentially, free-form. I don't have the rules, so I can't really explain or remember in great detail; sorry.

      The problem with The Sundered Land was basically none of us was confrontational enough, as the OP suggests. But that's also partly a function of the dice mechanic (borrowed from Apocalypse World) which almost always allows a player to squeeze out of a difficult situation. Again, if I had the rules I could explain better, but this was a month ago now and my memory is a bit hazy.

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    2. No prob! I've got this standard curiousity about how big a set of game rules need to be in order to properly represent themselves, the usual "I found D&D and made this..." stuff.

      My suspicion is that if you have more talking around the subject, like in old D&D, you get more "oh so they were trying to do this". Or can you just find the common confusions and head them off with mechanics, so that you have the bare minimum number of hints sort of surrounding your game?

      Anyway, seems like games like this should form a good test, are they just small enough, a little too small etc.

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