Biasing the moment; also mechanical spines (rather than organic ones)
contracycle:
Just hold the fuck on. Indoctrinated? Snapping people out of things? Let's not get carried away with pathologising other peoples actions here.
I make no apologies for being a strong, leading GM. Whats more, as a player, I play in the way I would like players to play, and make it my business to follow the GM's lead. And the GM's I have played with for the most [part have like this, and the synchrony between us has been good and functional and produces engaging and enjoyable play. So much so, in fact, that in most cases I have become something of a central character/player and often the lynchpin which holds the players together. This bollocks about indoctrination really needs to be knocked on the head.
None of this seems even relevant to the OP. If I were your mom, or partner, or housemate, and as you were walking out the door I said to you "haven't you forgotten something", that would be an enirely normal prompt and cause you to review your situation. Check for your keys, your phone etc. Seems to me the action that Callan took had the same effect and isn't anything out of the ordinary for human interactions. None of this requires any speculation as to how someone may be "conditioned", and to the extent that there is any such conditioning its origin would lie in a much broader range of stories and media than just RPG.
Callan S.:
Kinch,
Where'd you get the idea it's taking it "easy" on the players? Or that a second choice matters? Ideally you could give someone several dozen second chances at a choice, and apart from wasting time doing so, if their characters going to do X, then they still will. Indeed I should be able to tell them what how apparent ongoing actions will affect the near future (to confirm I understand their action right - like your computer confirms 'are you sure you want to reformat your hard drive?' not to put you off doing so but because you might have missunderstood something), and they wont interupt their characters action because that is what their character would do. Yeah, for some it's a big old cue from the GM to change. Is that what I was doing, or are you just used to big old cues like that and so treat me as doing that? I'll grant, from the outside, ignoring my internal intentions, I'd look identical to a GM giving a subtle cue. That's part of what I'm asking - can I look any different to people who are used to such cues, ever?
I really have had too many players go 'Oh, but I didn't understand what you meant by, so I would have saved him' or 'I was just about to save him, but you butted in and said he was dead!'. How do you eliminate that without apparently looking like your giving a cue to change the characters behaviour? Or perhaps such people just want to blame it on the GM rather than soak up that their character might not be an ideal ivory tower person?
Also I think you've gripped the term narrativism to mean something other than the forge usage - you don't have nar games that are about heroism and if the players characters don't engage it, they are taught something about not engaging heroism. Your refering to some sort of teaching behaviour there. Indeed I think your reading my behaviour as one of the cues that teaching system uses, but not toward what you mean by narrativism.
oculusverit:
Callan and contracycle,
I certainly didn't mean to make anyone upset. Sorry about the fact that I misunderstood Callan's point, after reading your latest post and in re-reading your original one, I think I have a better grasp of what you mean.
Callan, I have done it myself and I agree that it is difficult to differentiate, but I do think that in this case it is some sort of player conditioning. And by this, I don't mean "indoctrination" (for contracycle's sake), it's more of many years of roleplaying that have caused certain personal responses to perceived social cues, and not anything conscious on anyone's part. I think this is closer to one of the main points of your post.
When I'm playing chess or Risk or whatever, some sort of competitive board game, when the other player is taking a turn I wait patiently until they are finished. When they put down the piece, I can say something judgmental like, "Wow, I can't believe you didn't take my knight, he was right there," or even with praise, "Nice move!" Either way, the move itself is by agreement irrevocable for the most part, unless I'm teaching a beginner--you know you can't pick that piece up and make a different move based on my judgment of your move.
With RPGs, it's different. The moves aren't irrevocable, so when someone, especially one with so much perceived power as the GM (you dole out the XP, after all!) makes a comment on one of your moves ("Can't believe you didn't save that guy") you might mean nothing by it... but players are not only conditioned to take that as a social cue, but are also allowed by most gaming convention to "redo" their move.
So my conclusion here is that the only way you would be able to make a comment like that without being seen as a social cue for them to do something different would be if their moves were known from the start to be irrevocable, too. Then they might think, "Hmm, wonder what would have happened if I hadn't done that," but it's agreed upon to be impossible from the start that you might be nudging them in this way.
Also, thanks for your feedback on my grasp of Nar Agenda. It's the one I have the least grasp on, so I have to go back and do some re-reading!
Anders Gabrielsson:
I think Kinch makes good points.
I have resorted to dealing with these GM clarifications by explicitly pointing out that I'm not trying to make the other players change their minds and that I'm only offering additional information.
As a concrete example, the past several sessions of the D&D4 game I'm running has taken place in one specific city where the characters have been trying to forge a deal on behalf of the Wizard's Guild in another city. This has involved upwards of a hundred named NPC:s, some major, some bit players that have shown up in a scene or two. When someone they have had significant interactions with shows up I don't just introduce them by name, but also point back to one of those significant moments so they will remember who it is and what their role has been so far so they won't make mistakes based on misremembering the identity of the person they're talking to, or sometimes adding this information when they start to interact with this person. At other points I have prompted them with information about the situation in the city and the relationships between the various factions when it is something their characters know of but the players may have forgotten. Sometimes I have done this after they have annonced an action, just to make sure they had taken that information into consideration and at these times I have pointed out that I'm not trying to get them to change what they're doing, just that I want them to make their decisions based on full information.
(As a sidenote, they were free to fail to make this deal. I just didn't want them to fail because of misunderstandings.)
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