head games
Paul Czege:
Hey Matt,
Your relationship with Khaia is the most dramatically powerful thing about your character. I think every player has been waiting on the resolution of that situation. If other NPCs are a distraction, my advice is to bypass them and pursue the things that are important to you.
(I lost track of Amycus because you scrambled his head. I have no idea what he's thinking. Maybe you and I need to talk through the ending of the quest scene so I can figure him out.)
Paul
Paul Czege:
Quote from: stefoid on March 06, 2011, 04:29:30 PM
This is a great thread.
You know this is what The Forge is all about? Everyone confronting gaming with honesty, and getting your hands dirty with game design and creative challenges in an effort to be a better gamer and create better games.
Paul
contracycle:
Wrote a moderate sized post about why I thought Ben was wrong, but I've had to ditch it due to subsequent remarks. This thread makes me think of two things, one that I'm having some sort of flashback to 2001, and two that it serves as a fine example of why the word "story" should be taken out and shot and never, ever referred to again.
Will say this though. There's old school GMing and there's new old-school GMing. Contrary to Ben's description, that stuff worked perfectly well until someone got the bright idea that play should conform to some sort of "story". It was that novelty that lead to most of the impositional GM control that seems to give it its bad name. Players and GM's in an open world type of game can have a perfectly healthy relationship based on the explicit understanding that not all the world is prepped and that the GM, by offering jobs etc, is flagging up the bits that are. And players too can flag up to them which bits they would like to see detailed for future play. Given Matt's account of the experience, it does not seem to me that there was the kind of pernicious game-sabotaging rebellion against the GM that Ben alludes to, but more a mismatch in terms of recognising interests and expectations. If so, that should ber a much easier problem to solve.
stefoid:
This is great for me to hear, actually, because it is reinforcing a design decision in my own game that I am currently working on -- to have players set explicit goals for their character and then to explicitly reward the player for (a) introducing them (b) elaborating on them and (c) achieving them. As well as instructions for the GM to concentrate dramatic action specifically around those goals and to mix in hooks and revelations concerning the goals whenever possible.
This is possibly getting tangential, but are there any games out there that reward desired GM behaviour explicitly?
Quote from: Matt Gwinn on March 06, 2011, 05:48:51 PM
Paul,
My character's primary focus since the beginning of the campaign has been his relationship with with the NPC Kaya. From his very first scene in fact. Yet over and over he is confronted with NPC after NPC that have continually led him away from that story. I kind of agree with Ben and Renee about the situations placed before our characters. Many times they are distractions or obstacles that clutter up our story, yet we feel compelled to participate in them, especially since we know how much effort you have put into creating those story arcs.
The one time I made a concerted effort to ignore one of those obstacles the system kicked me back and I was forced to waste a scene on it. Which by the way are huge resources to us. With 4 players who usually do not share scenes we only get a few scenes per session, sometimes only 1, so what we do in those scenes HAS to matter to us.
I have hoped that ultimately all of the different story arcs placed before my character would lead him back to the Kaya storyline, that they somehow all tied together, but either they're not or they're taking too long. I've been saying it for weeks that there are too many NPCs to keep track of and that's a result of adding more and more story arcs that seem to be cluttering things up and preventing us from grasping on to a single goal to focus on. I think the new feature that we recently added about our goals might help curtail this kind of thing and more clearly alert you to what we find compelling. I now find myself forcing the issue trying to get back to the story which has clearly been at my character's core.
Going back to the scene with the seed, my character's actions were in part influenced by his desire to return to that original storyline with Kaya. While impersonating the dead woman he took the opportunity to convince his employer that he (the employer) needed to find some kind of quest to give him fulfillment. I knew full well that I'd be offering up that very opportunity once the scene reached a conclusion. That quest was to help my character find the woman he loves. And since his employer is indeed accompanying him on that quest, I consider the scene to have been a success. The fact that you forgot that he was even with my character the next session highlights that we clearly see different aspects of the campaign interesting.
Judd:
This reminds me of the player-version of running zig-zag patterns so that the GM can't get a bead on you and can't hit you with the trap that is set. I have played with folks who do things like this and it feels like they are trying to avoid something terrible I have planned, rather than trusting that I am going to enjoy what their character would do.
It is, in my experience, playing to the GM as another player, rather than staying in character and playing to the situation and fiction at hand.
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