[TSOY] Um, is this a problem?
Eero Tuovinen:
Writing GMing advice is actually pretty difficult. I have this new campaign/project based on D&D which is all about figuring out what it even means to design a roleplaying game based on method (as opposed to rules). Solar System is not a full treatise on Story Guiding, but that's because it'd have been delayed quite a bit if I'd tried to catch the complete picture of my method on paper.
In the real world, though, the GM is limited to what his players are willing and interested in doing. My numero uno advice in this regards is communication. Always make sure that the players understand what you are doing as a group, what you are doing as the GM, and what you expect the players to be doing as players. When you do something new, tell them what you are doing. When you are rolling for that wandering monster, tell them why. (The real reason, which probably has something to do with time-based resource constraint in their decision-making, not some bogus "realism"-explanation.) When you are not certain why a player is acting or not acting in some way, ask them. Functional roleplaying seems to always be predicated on mutual understanding of goals - I've had fun playing without understanding what others are doing, but it's often fun on their expense or fun regardless of what they are doing, not fun with them.
From this viewpoint, when Story Guiding Solar System, I've had my share of failures. These mostly concern matching the right person with the right game. I remember especially vividly how the game crashed out of simple boredom when I tried TSoY with some teenage girls combined with teenage boys - it's a fact that TSoY is a gamer's game, it requires buy-in to the mechanical process. The character generation and the necessary mechanical choices kill interest in people who don't want to bother with it, and even if the SG fibs somehow to get them through that, such a player is easily left out of the interesting bits by the game's concern for mechanical resolution, leveraging your mechanical strength and receiving mechanical rewards. Another clear failure was when I tried to run TSoY with the Dealership methods I'd learned from Dust Devils and got a group of completely disparate characters who actually lived in separate parts of Near - the game worked in theory, but was much too slow in practice, as the player characters were all over the place.
Aside from that sort of thing, though, it's pretty difficult to give one-size-fits-all GMing advice. The real process of play only starts when you hook up with the player on the other side of the table and affirm a mutual appreciation of each other's input into the game. To get there you reach with some color, some thematic possibilities, some genre conventions - and when the other player answers, you get to start play. After affirming connection you can each start pushing and pulling according to how the given game is structured. I write quite a lot about the accorded responsibilities of each player in the Solar System booklet, and this writing basically concerns a situation where the mutual affirmation of participation has already been established. When you know that the players are getting you, just play according to those responsibilities: judge the rules, coordinate drama, play the NPCs and whatever it was I listed at the beginning of the SG chapter.
The great majority of problems that surface in this process are because you and the players are not getting each other. My first example of problems above, the one with the teenagers, is an example of this: a player is not correctly perceiving the purpose and use of the rules of the game, so she's not receiving the signals of communication. I can talk about the different Secret choices until I'm blue in the face, but that will mean nothing if she doesn't realize how the choice interconnects with the cool stuff. Such communication problems might be cleared by having the player read the rules in advance (I made the SS booklet cheap and a bit disposable exactly because I want you to give it to your friends), by talking theory with him (only works with some rare players, usually other game designers and such hardcore activists) or by playing through some mock transactions, to list some possibilities. This is basically a pedagogical issue, so whatever the individual rules-responsible person (practically always the SG, as he needs to have the most solid grasp of the game to begin with) finds smart to do is probably better than what I could suggest.
Yokiboy:
Quote from: dindenver on December 10, 2008, 08:06:04 AM
I am set to GM this next week, I have myself (SG) and two other players, is that a big enough group to get the full Solar System experience?
Heck yes! I'm SGing a campaign for just two players myself, and we're having a blast! The campaign started with just one SG and one player, but we've since added another player.
However, Clinton R. Nixon did not exactly support my decision to run a game 1-on-1. He states that the game was designed for 3-6 players.
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