Players Against Player Authorship
Mason:
I recently wrapped up a short-term D&D 3.5/Arcana Evolved campaign that I ran every other weekend for four or five of my long-time players. ("Long time" meaning the new guy in the group has been around for about two years, everyone else goes back about a decade.) The game was fairly typical for our group; crunch-heavy, rp-lite, a lot of camaraderie at the table. The part that I found frustrating was, this being the first on-going game I had run in about two years-- during which time I had been reading a lot of indie game material-- I was hoping to integrate some player authorship of things that traditionally my group had considered the purview of the GM. Specifically, I was hoping that the players would suggest plot hooks, npcs, relationships and other things that I as the GM would work into the storyline.
The group had gotten together to play both PrimeTime Adventures and Universalis and the general consensus was that while these were fun storytelling exercises, they didn't consider them "games". Hoping to get the players to buy into some player authorship in a more traditional game, I decided that in addition to the Fortune Points that we used (ala Hero Points from Arcana Evolved, or Action Points from Eberron) I'd add in Fate Points which were a limited resource the players could use to define something about the game world. I thought they'd be more comfortable if there was some sort of mechanical component to it. (I considered tying in a PTA fan mail ecosystem to Fate Points, but at the beginning I was more about taking baby steps.)
Play began on this mini-campaign we called Pirates of the Sunless Sea. Underdark pirates. In addition to Fate and Fortune Points we also used something called Swash Cards which was another limited resource that let the characters do cool stuff. Basically, we were doing everything we could to make D&D a swashbuckling system, which is a little like turning an AMC Pacer into an Indy car, but my group places a high value on system familiarity. Mechanically, the system worked well within the limits we had set for it.
The problem was that the players weren't interested in any sort of player authorship. I would say their attitudes ran the gamut from apathetic to mildly offended. I had found a good example of player input in a game in a forum post, and I sent it to my players. One of my players (the lone voice interested in player input) brought up a game called Donjon in which he explained the GM ran the dungeon but the players had some story control, and that was likewise met with resistance.
My group is mostly GMs, and the other GMs in the group didn't want any part of player authorship. As players they were resentful of the GM asking them to think of stuff when they weren't "on the clock", and as GMs they didn't want to have to deal with player input. In the play report I sent out, the player input was limited to a set number of points and was also completely subject to GM fiat, but the feeling they expressed to me was that even with those "safeguards" in place, players suggesting plot elements would wreck the GM's carefully prepared story lines. (The point I found particularly surprising, since my group looks down on both railroading and illusionism.)
I could respect that other GMs didn't want to include these elements in their games. GMing is a thankless enough task (actually, we thank each other a lot but that’s not really the point I'm making here) and I wasn't trying to get anyone to adopt a running style they weren't interested in. But it was a style I was interested in and I wanted to include it and I saw it as nothing but positives for the players. They weren't forced to come up with anything but they had the option. I think games really come alive at the point where the whole group is bouncing ideas off one another, when everyone at the table (or, at any rate, most of the people) are contributing. And I enjoy the improvisational aspects of GMing, when games go in unexpected directions.
We played the first few sessions and things started out okay. Not great, but okay. I understand that my group needs to ease into a game. We started off at a relatively low level and decided that if anything, The Pirates of the Sunless Sea cries out for a more over-the-top style so we jumped up to mid-levels and leveled pretty quickly after that. The problem for me was that other than what I was providing, there was no developing story. I had the usual stuff, plots and intrigue, but for the players these were really only Combat Delivery Systems. There's nothing wrong with that, but I do remember games when the story was important, where the story really determined what combats you were getting into. Characters wanted to do things and a by-product of that was conflict. It seems like my group had gradually become more about the conflict, and less about how we got to it.
In a forum discussion, one of my players expressed to me that one of the stumbling blocks he was having was that as a player, he couldn't come up with ideas for areas of the game that were previously undefined. It wasn't so much that he was against player input, its that he wasn't having any ideas. If it was a part of the game I had defined as the GM, he didn't want to interfere with it (despite my requests for anyone to interfere with anything). If it wasn't something I had defined, it was just a big, grey blob. He felt more comfortable with how our group traditionally came up with player input: The GM runs the game and defines the game world. The players define their characters. At some point, usually after many months of play, the players will get a good enough idea about the game world to pick the stuff they like and focus on that. And then at that point, the players start becoming proactive and defining what they want their characters to accomplish. (Granted, this is the ITBB mixed in with the GM as a autocratic figure right up until the point when due to some unspoken, instinctually understood thing, the players take over the reigns.)
I found that less than encouraging. I really didn't have much interest in running a game for several months and coming up with all the necessary material to keep the players entertained in the hope that one day they might seize upon one idea and run with it. As processes go, it seemed a little like setting up metal poles and hoping lightning would strike when we had wall outlets and extension cords in the house (if that metaphor makes any sense).
The Swashcards included some that could alter things about the game. One made an NPC fall in love with a PC, one destroyed an NPC organization, out of 30 or so there were 5 or 6 that were pretty dramatic from a story perspective. (Most were mechanical in nature: free movement, a free crit, healing or the like.) Another GM had seen these when he used them in his game and removed them. I put them back in for my game (at least in the beginning, but I think since we were trading the cards back and forth for the various games those got lost) but they never came up. Granted, the cards were a pretty haphazard way of getting the players to exercise story control, but I was willing to try anything.
It was during this time that one of my players stopped running his D&D campaign because it had become evident that the players and the GM were playing in at least two separate games (it might have been 3, of you count one player who was completely off on his own, we saw his cohort every so often) and weren't all that interested in getting them back together. I would say that's how most of the group's games end, they fizzle out a few sessions after no one cares.
That's roughly how Pirates of the Sunless Sea ended. The player who had suggested Donjon and got us to play Universalis quit the group after getting frustrated with the traditional style and reluctance to change. I ran eight or ten more sessions of set-piece battles and then called it. Now I'm running SR4 for the group. Shadowrun has always been my favorite system, and we're gradually learning the new edition. It’s possible that’s a better fit for my group, a game where the players are supposed to improvise wildly within strictly defined limits.
But the Pirates game did leave me a little frustrated and a little bitter (if this 1500 word screed is any indication). Ultimately, though the sessions were fun I felt the game was a failed experiment. I did get one of the players who was most resistant to player input to spend a Fate Point (he made a portrait the party found look like him) so maybe that was a minor victory. (His idea was for his character to be a reincarnation of an ancient svirfneblin king, which perhaps with some sodium pentathol I might have figured out in time for it to matter.) That’s probably more frustrating than if he’d simply been uninterested in player input; I mean he was apparently coming up with character and story ideas and still didn’t feel like he should pipe up at the session or in email later.
This post is longer than I intended, which is probably a sign this has been bugging me more than I realized. Currently, I'm more interested in thinking about the games I'm either not running or will never run, rather than prepping the SR4 game I am running. (I've actually prepped stuff for the Pirates game, should it ever come back up.) I'm assuming this is because I'm frustrated running for my group and would rather focus on games I probably won't have to run. This is a cycle I've been in for awhile, prepping games right up to the point I would normally start running them and then abandoning the concept to work on the next thing.
Lord_Steelhand:
If you are frustrated to the level it sounds like, go play Dunjon with the other player who seems to share your goals.
I have also been struggling of late with play that is just driving me up a wall creatively (and, yes, it is a D20 group), so I empathize. It is hard to find a good group, but I have noticed that newer game designs require (and, indeed, thrive) with smaller groups.
Now if I can get one of my pals to run his Sci-Fantasy game using Dunjon...THAT would rock!
Paul Czege:
Hi Mason,
My take on GNS is that a person's play preferences map to their learning preferences. That is, someone with a narrativist play preference believes that there's something important to learn from how others organize and make meaning (theme) from their beliefs and experiences (by authoring). Someone with a simulationist play preference believes that he has something to learn about himself (and about the way the world and society work) by testing his problem solving, relationship skills, decisionmaking, values, etc., in the lab environment of a reality that operates by the same rules as the one we live in. And someone with a gamist play preference believes she has something to learn about herself (her status, the significance of her abilities and accomplishments) by testing her skills, problem solving, decisionmaking, etc., against the motivated efforts of others.
Of course it's not so cut-and-dried as all that, because most people see at least some value in all three social structures for learning, and so they'll play different flavors of GNS. And I think your group is probably like this. They're GMs, so they're totally cool with the "teaching" role that's part of narrativist play, because they've done it as GMs. And they've played PtA and Universalis. But they've said PtA and Universalis don't feel like games...which I read as PtA and Universalis not satisfying their desire for self-knowledge from the "lab environment". (Universalis is pretty competitive, so I'm not thinking the "not games" assessment is them voicing the desire for self-knowledge from competition.)
And what you're asking them to do in your D&D game is "suggest plot hooks, npcs, relationships and other things" that you would work into the storyline. So, you're asking them to have something to say, in the most authorial and thematic sense of the word. And what they want is the chance to chance to learn (not teach).
Yet when they run games they don't want the intrusion of player contributions into what they're trying to teach. When they want to teach, they want to teach. And when they want to learn, they want to learn. Whereas narrativist games ask players to open themselves and participate in an environment where teaching and learning is more fluid.
Part of me wants to suggest that you enjoy what you have. It seems like you have a group that's engaged in play, likes to teach and to learn (but likes the teaching/learning roles cut and dried) and that likes to try new stuff. But I do feel your frustration. You want the collaboration, the give-and-take.
Perhaps it would be enough to tell them that when they have something to say (as above), that you want to hear their suggested NPCs, etc. Or maybe you create a structure where they offer suggestions for each other's characters, which they might not see as too problematic a violation of their learner roles. Maybe send each player out of the room in turn, and have a conversation with the others about NPCs and plot hooks and whatnot that would be cool for the missing player.
Paul
Valvorik:
First, "combat delivery system", never saw that before, quick google didn't turn it up but great turn of phrase!
The swashbuckler cards ~ if you're using the ones based on an enworld post long long ago, downloadable at scratch factory, then I can empathize. Claim I can't substantiate (though I could get witnesses) - I came up with the first draft of them and the flavour text on many is still what I wrote. Mine were the more story ones like Ah Love etc. My players almost completely passed on making story use of them. Only wanted to trade them in for rerolls etc. for mechanical purposes.
I have found getting my long-time D&D group to try newer games or accept more player authorship very hard. It's most been successful via introducing more conflict resolution fast play techniques that "open up" what player can imagine character achieving and that leading to interesting suggestions of what player is doing that in turn carry implications about world.
I too have had to learn to enjoy what I have. A long time group of friends accepting of each other's foibles who make a real effort to show up for game night and have fun thumping monsters with some story along the way. They kinda game for the reason Dresden does at the end of "Summer Knight" book in the series.
Rob
Mason:
Yep, those are the Swashcards we were using. The ones you mention, the "plot cards" were the ones that most excited me as a GM, simply because they were wrecking balls when it came to my established storylines. Granted, I love the storylines I establish, but I love more the charge I get from the improvisation when the game moves in unexpected directions, when the group really starts to create something together and all synapses are firing.
The other GMs I play with are less excited about the prospect of having their established plots wrecking-balled, and as players they reflexively avoid doing things that they perceive would make things "difficult" for the GM (even as I am actively advocating for them to do those things).
Another issue I am just starting to wrap my head around is that in the course of the decade or so I've played in this group, we've become strongly gamist, and this is due as much to practical matters as it is to theoretical ones. When we started playing together, it was during those aimless years after high school but before real life began, when our responsibilities (school, work) were part time, and our gaming was Full Time. We played 8-12 hour sessions, at least two sessions a week. Many games, many characters, a lot of headbutting but a lot of fun too. Now, we play a 4 hour session once a week in alternating games, so the time spent playing any particular game is about 8 hours a month. We play in a month what we used to play in a night.
The old way, we had a lot more time for exploration which was more interesting to me than challenge. Today, time is at a premium, and the game we play is distilled down to the most basic elements. Time spent on story is almost viewed as wasted time, the focus is on getting to the challenge. Its pretty much Combat and Banter, with the occasional important story scene wedged in, time allotting.
One of the reasons story has to take so long in my group is my group isn't comfortable with meta. To paraphrase something I just read over at bankuei's blog, things take a lot longer when everyone is trying to communicate through verbal charades. That's the most frustrating part, not that my players don't have things to communicate, its that they're communicating things in such an inefficient manner. If a player were to say, "I want to be the lost king of the svirfneblin, or maybe mistaken for the lost king of the svirfneblin," that's something that I as the GM can roll with. It takes all of 30 seconds to introduce that element of the plot. But my group has a real problem doing it that way, in part because they feel that if they jut ask for it and it happens, it wasn't earned. If the player puts out hints, coded messages and veiled suggestions that the GM is perceptive (or lucky) enough to pick up on and includes them in the plot, then that's awesome. If the player says it and the GM adopts it, its cheapened because it's just something the GM "decided".
I'm not sure if that's exactly how my players feel, but that's how I perceive it as a GM. There's assumption that story can't be quick or easy because its never been quick or easy before, and if it is quick or easy its not as "real" as story that's brought about by torturous pantomime.
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