Making the transition from mission based play?
JB:
Callan, as I hope I indicated, you make some good points. Since the AP reports are taking longer than anticipated, I'll try to address this in the meantime.
There are two clauses in the phrase, 'character driven story through assertive player participation' and I think you're focusing too much on the latter one as the source of our problem, whereas we're actually wrestling with the former. I chose to use the full phrase in an attempt to be clearer, but it's having an opposite effect by distracting folks.
It's possible to have 'character driven story' without the players being the ones driving, for example. I personally find such games agonizing, but it's a commonly held belief that such people exist who play games this way and enjoy it.
Conversely, just because you have active players doesn't mean you have 'character driven story', especially if the game setup doesn't allow or especially encourage them to engage in the game in a way to create that, and that's more where we're at.
I'm currently of the mind that mission based scenarios are part of the barrier to getting character driven story from our play more frequently and consistently. I see a parallel with written fiction and film here; different texts will give the two foci different names but we can call them 'character driven stories' and 'situation driven stories'. All stories have characters and situations, but most give more primacy to one or the other. There are certain stories that change completely if you alter one or more characters. There are other stories where the situation the characters are in has more bearing on the plot than the nature of the characters themselves. (For whatever reason, the majority of the film and fiction that has inspired/influenced RPGs over the years falls in the latter category as well.) When you set up a situation driven story, in order to shift the emphasis to a character driven story, one must, to again misquote/paraphrase, 'abandon or subvert the goings on'. It's true in fiction and it's true at the game table. My guess is that it's easier to just set up for a character driven story to begin with, but we don't grok how to do that yet, nor do we have a reliable means to consistently 'abandon or subvert the goings on'...
Hope this helps. The APs are coming, and should clarify further as well.
J
Eero Tuovinen:
Looking at your goal, JB, I notice that the practical answer to your question might simply be to get a new game. If I understand it, your problem is mostly the lack of a framework that'd show your group the way to a drama-oriented procedure of play. That's what games are for, so you'll just need to pick up a clear game text that gets explicit about how to set up a non-traditional campaign.
There are many games that are pretty clear about how to accomplish the goal, but I'd say that Trollbabe is probably one of the clearest. It's worthwhile in many ways even if your group hates women, for the structural advice alone. Depends on how set your group is on a specific genre and style of play - there might be some game that's just right for you, and clearly written.
JB:
So I started writing APs of some games we're playing and have played in the past year or so. These reports ended up being excessively long and filled with too much information that's irrelevant to anyone but me, so at this point I'm not going to post them per se. I'm providing an overview of our games for the benefit of Frank and anyone else who's interested.
I am glad I wrote the APs though, as in doing so some things became apparent to me that may help us improve our games. Basically, I'm starting see where some of our procedures of play are hindering us in this regard, and how they might be changed to better allow and encourage this kind of play. I see the following two things as being necessary to make the transition.
1) Better procedures for communicating about the game. We need some method of distinguishing between elements in the character's background that the player wants to be part of the present as well, and stuff they want to stay in the background. As the GM, if left to guess about this stuff I'll probably just let it all lie rather than risk upsetting someone if I guess incorrectly, and I imagine the other GMs feel the same way. For example, in games with 'disadvantages', say '+5 pts, Dependent NPC', the rules may exhort the GM to threaten said NPC regularly or whatever, but in actual practice, there's this tendency to largely disregard those kinds of things on the character sheet because of bad past experiences.
So we need a way for players to say, "I so put this on the character sheet BECAUSE I'm ok with it coming into play. In fact, I want it to come into play!" or, "I want this stuff to remain in the background. (I think of the intro to Everybody Loves Raymond, where he tells us that he has two kids, and then states that "This show isn't about them." - and he's dead right. The character needs to have the kids, as they inform who he is and so play into his interactions with everyone else, but we hardly ever see the kids or learn very much about them. There's a 'relationship' there, but it's not one that's explored much, because that's not what the show is about.)
Right now I'm thinking maybe some kind of 'player requested scene' procedure may work, as well as some actual session time dedicated to talking about the game rather than this occurring haphazardly before, after, and in between sessions.
2) Adjust our attitudes about 'non group actions and scenes', and the 'party mentality' in general, just like Eero says. In our group it's considered bad form to put the other players in the position of sitting around watching while one person plays. I understand where the attitude comes from and have espoused it myself, but it's a hinderance rather than helping in this situation. Again, just communicating and putting this out in the open may help.
Finally, Eero: I got Trollbabe a while back, so I'm rereading it now. Thanks once again.
J
JB:
Frank, here's the basic 'group bio'.
Our group is fairly large, say about 10 or so people that I know well and play with often,but includes more people I know less well and have played with occasionally; friends of friends and so forth. With a group this large, obviously not everyone plays in every game - who's playing in a given game is going to depend on schedules, personal interest in the specific game and so on. As a plus, we have a lot of games: I play in two right now, and if I just count other games that people from those games are also playing in there are about 10 games running right now, although it's unusual for any one person to be playing in more than two or three of them. Individual games tend to still be pretty large; one of the games I'm playing in has seven people, the other has nine. Again, because of the size of the groups, it's not uncommon that someone can't attend; unless that person is GMing or an overwhelming majority of players are absent, it's not generally cause to cancel a game. Groups still ascribe to the 'long running campaign' ideal; most games will run for at least a couple months, and games running for a year or so aren't uncommon. Game sessions tend to be weekly, and last about 4 hours per session.
What are these games like? The GM basically gives the party an objective to try and achieve. The option to refuse the mission and do something else is there in some games but everyone's also aware that it's more likely to be fun if we play along than if we monkeywrench what the GMs prepped, so if the mission doesn't appeal to someone the general tendency is for a player to just say so rather than trying to 'fix' the game IC. The difficulty and complexity of the mission depends on who's running, and to an extent, who's playing; some people run harder games or want harder challenges than others. We've had 'tailor-made scenarios requested by the players, trivial missions where the meat is elsewhere, very challenging missions where a lot of effort by the players is required to even complete them successfully' and so on. The 'heavily railroaded “dramatic” scenarios where the mission works as a plot hook' aren't popular, but they still show up from time to time.
What game system do you guys* play? There are a bunch (again, ~10 games going right now), but they're mostly mainstream/traditional design games. Quite a few people favor 'setting heavy' games like Fantasy Flight's Warhammer40K stuff, Shadowrun, and the like. We've tried DitV and Burning Wheel, but so far those games have delivered more frustrating "Are we doing this right?" moments than anything else.
How do you know the other players? I met them thru gaming. Most of the people I'm currently playing with I would now count as friends, and we do other stuff together besides play RPGs.
Are you the only GM / enthusiastic role-player? No and no. There are some people who GM a lot, some who GM occasionally like myself (I'm not GMing anything right now), and some people who 'just play'. I don't know anyone who 'only GMs' though. Individual enthusiasm may fluctuate by the day and the game of course, but everyone involved is pretty devoted to the hobby; I think if anyone would rather be doing something else, then they actually would be.
How do you typically prep your missions, and how do you run them when you guys play? I don't really enjoy running long games consisting of missions so I don't do it super often. When I do, my prep usually involves coming up with a location, some NPCs, and some objective for the PCs to shoot for. I'll try to come up with an obvious, plausible rationale for the PCs to 'go there and do that' to give the players an excuse to become involved, and think up and stat out some potential challenges/opponents. Running the game means presenting the players with the opportunity to 'do something' and then giving them free rein within the 'bounds of the game' to accomplish it while presenting them with obstacles to doing so. How they want to approach overcoming those obstacles is again up to them.
Do the characters have personal stuff going on, and how much time and effort goes into that, as opposed to the missions? No personal stuff going on. Some people put a fair amount of time into giving characters 'potential' for personal stuff to be going on; I know I do, and from what I've seen other players do as well. But there's a disconnect in terms of getting this stuff 'off the character sheet' and into the game. That disconnect is a BIG part of what we're struggling with, I think.
* It is mostly guys, but there are usually a couple gals playing in a given game as well.
contracycle:
Hmm, I'm still not greatly enlightened about what it is you want exactly, not least because analogy to stuff that goes on in novels and the like has to be pased qwuite differently in RPG, IMO. There are several ways I could read what you wrote and each requires an assumption on my part about what you meant.
There are some things to remark on though. There was quite a lot of diuscussion about representation of characters on sheets a while back; probably, if it's not meant to come up in play, it shouldn't be on the sheet at all. That is, it would be quite reasonable to have a character who had off-screen dependents. This would come up in narration and IC speaking, but does not exist mechanically. It's likely that the shift you need to make is from seeing the character sheet as a whole description of the character, to instead seeing it as an interface with the game itself. So, stuff only goes on the sheet if it is to be used, not merely for the sake of completism.
For mission structures, one effect I have encountered is that if the general structure of play is to travel to some far away place to do some thing, this effectively always makes the characters strangers in their local surroundings. They're just passing through, they are not invested or interested in stuff that may impnge upon those surroundings, except inasmuch as it affects them. And this means, they tend not to initiate actions based on the locale, buecuase it has neither permanence nor relevance. It is just detail on the way to the important stuff, and the important stuff always comes from the GM. It might help to instead do some work on a base of operations for the characters, and to integrate them into the broader setting that way; they may then be more likely to develop autonomous interests in the locality, and thus likely to initiate actions etc. Don't just treat it as a safe haven, treat it as a venue for action.
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