[gamist RPGs] Player Driven Games and
Natespank:
In my experience it's up to the DM to organize the games and ensure participation; lay down ground rules for play; keep things on track, and, well, design the adventures. For me it's been a leadership role. The DMs I know who don't do the organizing quickly lose their players; those who don't keep things on track lose their players to smirnoff; those without ground rules lead to some real chaos. It'd be interesting to play without a GM leader role.
Honestly, in my experience the role of DM is primarily as roleplay group leader. You've shocked me! I wonder what those groups are like! :D
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the existance of a unifying goal is not actually dependent on the existence of the GM, or indeed the GM's individual and personal inspiration.
Unifying goals can actually be rules-based and programmatic.
I'm afraid that's a little vague. Could you clarify and use an example?
Callan S.:
Well, it's worth remembering that you have played without a GM already. The zelda example and the other games.
Also I think in those games you can just lead yourself, and you'll do fine. You don't need someone else to lead you.
This might apply to my history as well, but heres a hypothesis: if you take up the leadership position, then players will cease leading themselves.
This is further exacerbated by the fact that traditional RPG designs have shit procedure design - someone can end up doing shit at the table, mechanics wise, no one else previously agreed to (as a contrast, that can't happen in chess - you know everything that can happen, mechanically). The traditional example of this is where some player goes to backstab another player, because the rules don't preclude it. Then the other players bitch about it and this player who was leading himself gives up leading himself, cause he doesn't know when someones going to crack the shits the next time he decides to actually follow his own lead. So he gives up. I've done that - I just sit there, waiting for my cue for what I do get to choose that's just fine with everybody (apparently). If I get a cue at all. Even then I've sometimes been told X worked really hard on it - like I'm supposed to start bouncing around excited about doing nothing and waiting while the other five players pretty much do everything which seems fine to do.
It's a narrativist example, but Ron gave a story once where a player was required to give some sort of background for his character, but kind of tried to shirk it onto the GM and say whatever the GM wants. He'd given up on leading himself (and given the standard RPG culture/texts, as noted above, I can understand that). So the GM politely said no worries, you don't need to turn up to the game.
I know that goes against your idea of "Must retain players at all costs!" - it certainly goes against mine. But apparently the guy calls up the GM latter on, having put alot of effort into that background and started leading himself.
Recently I've been mulling over RPG's that can be played true solo (one person), or with more, simply because A: That's how zelda worked and B: it gets rid of this bullshit. There was even a competition for solitare RPG's on another site recently - I should have entered, but I just crashed on that opportunity.
Natespank:
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Also I think in those games you can just lead yourself, and you'll do fine. You don't need someone else to lead you.
This might apply to my history as well, but heres a hypothesis: if you take up the leadership position, then players will cease leading themselves.
Insofar as we're talking about player-driven games, how do you encourage and create a game where the players effectively lead themselves? I had considered providing zero direction for them and rewarding their exploits while having NPCs give them ridiculous quests that pale in comparison to what they'd do on their own. Zelda did it- it awes me. The player's emergent behavior is to dig in and try to clear the dungeons, probably in order. Neat stuff! How do you create/encourage this stuff?
Remember those old threads about West Marches campaigns? I linked to it below in case you guys are unfamiliar with it. I'd love to be able to run a game similar in ways to this, but it's so hard. How do you get your players into it- and what exactly does the DM do?
http://arsludi.lamemage.com/index.php/94/west-marches-running-your-own/
Next session's tomorrow, adding a major quest and a bunch of minor quests- all optional. I think I'll reward quests with fame instead of gold/gear, saving gear/gold for player-driven activities. It makes sense and includes a reward mechanism for taking the initiative.
Natespank:
May I ask what people's experiences with player-mapping is? I've taken a board-game style approach: if they're in a hex, they're in the middle of it and they can travel to the center of another hex in 1 hour. Grossly simplified, but it made player-mapping practical using hexes.
As for in dungeons- I can't imagine how this would be practical, but I'd love to be able to do it. It's another way to put the game in the player's hands, making him responsible for what happens to him.
Callan S.:
Nate, to genuinely do it, then I think every mechanical action a player takes either takes them mechanically closer to the end, or mechanically closer to the start. Imagine 1000 is the end and you start at zero, and each mechanical action you take increases your number up or down (possibly back to zero). If you think about it, that's how zelda was - every movement got you closer to something, either that gets you nearer to the end, or sets you back/further away from it.
Mollases and murk. What happens in roleplay, I think, and makes people cease leading themselves, is that play ends up just alot of talk. "I go to the tavern" "Okay, you go to the tavern, it's half full". Did going to the tavern get you closer to the final victory? Or did it send you further away? Or are we just talk, talk talking and have ceased to go forward or backward at all? Are we wading through molasses or stumbling blind in murk, not getting toward either direction? Hell, even if we roll dice, did a pass get us closer (or even further away)? In traditional design even dice rolls aren't connected to the win/lose track/even the dice have no traction.
Now to me, that first paragraph is the genuine way to do it. The non genuine way is that players already were self leaders, they talk fiction about what their character 'does' and they think and feel they are getting somewhere. And the GM humours this feeling, unless it gets too big when they aren't that close to the GM's decided end, in which case he swats down their self leading with something, but not too much, don't want to extinguish it. To me, it's pretty illusionist. And I mean illusionist whether you wanted it to be or not. I've run games that way without wanting to be illusionist - and that west marches would fall into this as well, barring it having some overall mechanical spine like in the first paragraph and traveling on it on every single mechanical action the players take.
Even if you wanted to take up the illusionist option, if your players aren't self leaders, you can't. They are disillusioned! They have given up the belief they can decide their own destiny - and rightly so, in an illusionist campaign.
In a genuine win/lose track - it might become apparent to them that their destiny is back in their hands. Maybe. Or maybe they are burned out on the idea forever and just come for social reasons.
And finally, the more you really want the PC's to pursue their own goals, probably the more your drifting toward narrativist inclinations. If it's a gamist game, they are NEVER going to genuinely follow their characters own goals - it is always going to be contaminated with the pursuit of the final win of this real life game. If contaminated PC goals aren't good enough for you, then you'll just have to go full on narrativism. If contaminated PC goals is okay, then I've given my suggestions above :)
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