Encouraging Player Involvement Outside ‘Their Turn’
Jeff Russell:
Strangely enough, this is one of the few benefits I've noticed about a play-by-post game I'm engaged in over in-person play. Since the rate of play is somewhat slow (waiting on private messages, scheduling chats, et cetera), the players are hungry for game content and read other players' posts with interests. Our game is just starting to have connections between a few characters, but it's mostly an ensemble cast, but I can tell you almost as much about the other characters and what's been happening to them as mine, which is much different from similar 'separate storyline' games I've played in person which were more in the vein that Eero pointed out (your character's not around? Go play 'Captain America and the Avengers', we'll let you know when you're up).
Jeff Russell
Blessings of the Dice Gods - My little blog about games and game design
JB:
Good stuff all around. Thanks people. A couple things I want to follow up on further, then.
Quote from: Adam Dray on April 19, 2010, 08:41:58 AM
If it isn't interesting to the "audience," then ... it should be made more interesting. One way to do this is to have it impact other characters. Another way to do this is to make sure all players care about what happens to all characters.
YES! Care to elaborate further on specific techniques for either of these strategies?
Quote from: Eero Tuovinen on April 19, 2010, 09:19:16 AM
All of the above is not enough to make a group that is practiced in ignoring play not involving their character into one that is "on" all the time; many traditional gaming methods I've seen encourage being uncaring of anything your character is not involved with by having the down-times be very long and by having "good roleplaying" mean not reacting to OOC knowledge in any was as a person. In that sort of environment it's actually a virtue if you can compartmentalize and read comic books or whatever without getting bored while others play their own scenes.
Yeah, as I said elsewhere, we’re having to unlearn some things in order to get what we want from the game. To refer back to the ‘mission games’ and give a concrete example, we recently missed the opportunity to play out a player initiated scenario, partly because the GM wasn’t quick enough on picking up the idea and running with it, but also because a couple of the players focused more on the product of ‘achieving the objective’ than on the process, which meant it was basically accomplished via NPCs acting ‘off camera’. It was perfectly plausible in terms of the ‘fiction’, but probably not as much fun as it could have been had we played it out, which was equally plausible.
Trying to stay closer to topic, I see the ‘compartmentalizing’ behavior you describe; the player may actually be perfectly happy doing this while their character isn’t involved in whatever’s happening. Regardless of how the player feels about doing this, I’m inclined to look for ways to discourage it, as I think it’s detrimental to the kind of play we’re aiming for.
Quote from: Eero Tuovinen on April 19, 2010, 09:19:16 AM
Game systems are involved in this as well - one typical feature of a traditional game is that player characters are not actually inherently interesting; the character sheets are full of means and devoid of goals, which means that the other players don't even generally know why your character is interesting. If anybody knows, it's you, but because nothing is written down or spoken aloud, the other players have difficult appreciating the greatness that is your character.
Absolutely. Add to that a stigma attached to telling others about your ‘awesome character’. And things that are ‘written down’ but never shared with the group as a whole. This is what I was talking about when I referred to ‘Getting stuff off the character sheet and into play’ - it doesn’t have to be mechanically represented stuff, or found on the character sheet per se. I know other players have just as much interesting stuff going on with their characters as I do with mine, but no idea what it is and no good way to share this stuff with one another.
This also may explain what Jeff’s talking about in regards to PbP games. Every PbP game I’ve seen, at least, has players publicly posting stuff like character stats, descriptions, backgrounds and so on where everyone can look at it. While this practice isn’t unknown in tabletop RPGs, I wouldn’t call it standard or common.
Finally, I want to be careful using the term ‘audience role’, as I draw a fairly hard distinction between ‘watching the game’ and ‘playing the game’, regardless of whether you’re ‘on the team’ and watching from the bench or a fan sitting in the bleachers. Watching something awesome play out can be fun, but for me, that very act of simultaneously being author and audience is a big part of what distinguishes RPGs from other fictional entertainments with authors and audiences.
Whether it’s achieved mechanically or not, what I’m looking for are ways for the players to directly participate in the game at times when they would traditionally be regulated to observing, not ways to train players to agreeably accept time spent as a spectator. I don’t think this is actually what Eero means by ‘audience role’, but I want to avoid confusion here.
JB
Judd:
Okay, two thoughts on pro-active players:
1) The campaign is about something they give a shit about.
Getting that player buy-in from the first moment is important. Not having the game be about Waterdeep but about gang warfare in Waterdeep, or the guards who look after the masked councilors, something with situation to it, something with bite and danger.
2) They have a mechanic reference or push.
When a player becomes stalled, they can:
In Burning Wheel, they can look at their Beliefs and pick something they care about and go for it
In Sorcerer they can look at their demon's need and decide how they want to handle it or look over the back of their sheet and decide on someone to seek out and interact with.
They have something to reference, something tangible that can inspire them towards motion.
Ron Edwards:
Hey,
Great thread topics - but JB, please provide a brief account of play so we can really see exactly what you mean. Phrases like "player involvement" lend themselves to a lot of interpretation by the reader, so we need to know what it - or its notable lack - looks like to you during play.
Best, Ron
JB:
Fair enough.
As usual, writing the AP brought some things into focus for me. You're right, 'player involvement' is a vague and not very useful term. When I started this thread, I was mostly just looking for ways to keep people from getting bored 'watching other people play'. (RPGs are a lame spectator sport - how many people do you know who regularly watch a game they're not playing in just for fun?) But now I'm trying to get at ways to give Players ways to exert some influence in scenes their Character isn't present for.
But you asked for some AP, so…
I ran a one-off game a few months ago. Between the scenario and my GMing style, that game contained a lot of 'individual action', with the various characters off on their own pursuing their own agendas as their players saw fit. When I called for feedback about what worked and what didn't after the game, it was mostly positive, but one comment came up about, "getting stuck playing the peanut gallery while other people were doing their thing," and a lot of the players shared this sentiment. Now I'd been cycling thru the players, taking declarations of action and resolving same, and I'd been very conscious about keeping the turns pretty short, crosscutting as needed, so no one was waiting all that long for their turn to come up again. My impression at the time was that it wasn't much different from the way combat encounters are usually played out, and I didn't really understand what the problem was.
Next example: A game I played in over the weekend featured a number of scenes instigated by players (something we're trying to do more often), involving just one or two PCs at a time. Taken by themselves, the scenes had their share of interesting moments and all had at least the potential for things that happened in those scenes to have an impact on the group as a whole. Again, the time spent on any one scene wasn't terribly long. However, the players who weren't directly involved in a given scene displayed varying levels of engagement in what was being played out. One player in particular spent most of the evening reading the rulebook, in contrast with his usual demeanor at the table. (There are a whole lot of reasons the player may have had for withdrawing this way, but whatever it was, he wasn't very involved during the session.) During one scene I found myself having a hard time being an 'appreciative audience' as well, and upon reflection, what was bugging me wasn't that the scene was boring, it was that the consequences of this one player's actions were steering the whole game in a direction I personally had no interest in exploring at the time and I felt like I didn't have any way to influence things in a different direction.
Now, players 'get the ball' and take the game in all kinds of unexpected directions all the time, and I'm a big boy who's willing to share my toys, so why did this bug me? One of the things I've come up with is that it has to do with how much influence someone's able to exert in a given instance, before someone else gets a chance to influence things.
Basically, although it was an exchange between the player and the GM, it didn't feel that much different from those times when a GM delivers a big 'cut scene' monologue, the kind where you just want it to end with so you can take some kind of action? ("So the dragon and the elf are quarreling over the medallion…" "I shoot the elf!" "No, let me finish. Anyway, the elf grabs the medallion and…") Or to draw an analogy to a whole noter game, it's like having your opponent run the table from the break in a game of pool.
I think the group scene or group combat works pretty well to regulate this, first because it generally distributes influence in fairly small portions by limiting what you can do in a turn and also limiting how many turns you get before someone else gets one, and secondly because it gives the players the opportunity to 'interrupt' actions they find objectionable, either using their 'game piece' to do so (Player One: "My guy shoots the elf!" Player Two: "My guy will stop him from doing that." GM: "Roll initiative.") or more literally and directly (Player One: "My guy shoots the elf!" Player Two: "NO! Don't!"). I realize there's not really anything stopping someone from using the latter approach whether their character is present or not, but I have played in games where doing so is considered a breach of etiquette. Just the fact that 'your piece isn't on the board' may act as a subtle discouragement to do so as well.
So our moving away from just playing scenes as a group towards more individual ones has me thinking about player authority and how that's different from character authority.
JB
Navigation
[0] Message Index
[#] Next page
[*] Previous page