[AW] The Rules for GMing are Magic
stefoid:
Quote from: Narmical on March 19, 2011, 06:09:01 AM
I just started GMing Apocalypse Word. I was GMing as part of my preparing for interviewing Vincent Baker about the game. Because of this reason, i followed the rules of the game slavishly, even when i didn't total trust them. Usually my GM sense would lead me to change things, in an "i know better" way, but i controlled myself, The interesting thing was, it made me, almost magically, successfully GM in a way that I have tried to GM before, but been unable to. Namely the kind of game where each player is a prominent member in society with there own power structures perusing there own, not necessarily aligned ends.
Hi. This is really interseting.
Which rules did you think of subverting but didnt?
Which rules were responsible for your new way of GMing.
If the answer to both is 'too many to mention' pick the most important top 3 or 5.
Narmical:
Quote from: stefoid
Which rules did you think of subverting but didnt?
Which rules were responsible for your new way of GMing.
If the answer to both is 'too many to mention' pick the most important top 3 or 5.
If I was just playing business as usual, I would have only read the character creation and conflict resolution sections. A feeling of "I know how to GM" would have made me feel like reading anything else would have been a waste of time. In other words information I already knew.
But to get more specific here are things I might have done, even if i had read those sections, and wasn't compelled to follow the rules slavishly.
The first situation is a combination of 3 rules
1. Don't prepare anything as the GM before the first session
2. Draw your game inspiration from listening to the players create there characters.
3. Start the game by following the characters about there normal day.
These rules all come together to create the game world and to create the fiction for the first session. If any one of them is not in force, the others fail as well. So I will discuss them together. Firstly rule #1 would have gone straight out the window. I am an easily excited person, the excitement would have gotten me planning. And therefore the rule about listening to the players as they create characters would not have worked either. I would have had my idea, been married to it for a week, and just not listened, not out of malice or spite, just out of circumstance. Next I would have started the game with a brief description of MY conception of what apocalypse wold was, and MY conception of were the game began and then said "So what do you do?".
This game, and indeed games that share the character directed play style, rely on building strong player intentions. The players need intrinsic motivation to go out and do. I draw the above prediction about what I would have done from a rather boring attempt to play a similar style of game using Rifts. What happened is the players stared back at me blank faced, waiting for me to hand them something to do. They had no intention. However, AW's rules build that in from the gate. The characters creation rules, give each player a very real idea of what there character controls and what there motivations might be. Also the character creation rules force the players to speak aloud the relationships between them. This plain speaking allows #2 above. In the Rifts example, the characters arrived fully formed with respect to the rules before the first session. And "fully formed" in Rifts imply nothing about motivations or relationships with other characters or anything about in world influence. In Rifts, even if I had wanted to I could not have done #2. The third rule from above I could have done, but never thought of. Even so, in Rifts, little is stated or implied about what a "normal" day for a cyber knight is.
So what happened at the start of AW was, I started with the Chopper, he woke up bright an early at the strike of noon, and went down to the biker bar to find his men, but there were only like 2 or 3 bikes out front. What happened? The Choppers gang and the Hard Holder's gang got into a bit of rough and tumble, now the chopper's gang was being "held in custody".
Where did this come from when my previous attempt at this was so poor? We I came into the game truly disinterested and unprepared. I listed around the table, the Hard Holder decided the Chopper betrayed him during the Hx pass out, so I keyed in on that. It said to me that the Hard Holder wanted to but heads with the Chopper. So I played with that. Also the rule "make the characters' lives not boring" and "there is no status quo" helped there too.
An interesting observation that I just made about this game is that normally GMs when they chat about player intention talk about "hooking" the players into there plot. Giving them little bits of information to try and spark motivation to follow the plot. What I notice about AW is that it works the other way round here, the players hook the GM and the GM runs with there plot.. Thats what happened to me, and the rules seem to be in support of that kind of play. I think this is a better way to play, the GM is only one person, its easer for 4+ people to throw out at least one thing to hook the GM. But if one GM needs to hook all 4+ people, it seems like a harder job.
I also have some stuff about the front sheets, but this post has got too long. Ask me about it if interested.
stefoid:
gold!
thanks!
Narmical:
Ive done some more thinking on this topic and I'd like to share my new thoughts.
Quote from: Chris_Chinn on March 19, 2011, 07:48:20 AM
When I end up talking about it in a more particular manner, I usually end up talking about the differences between a game's procedures ("mechanics" is usually the word used) and the game's directives ("soft advice", "GMing style", "spirit of the rules" etc.).
( Links to posts I've written about this:
http://bankuei.wordpress.com/2010/04/11/gming-broad-authority-clear-directives/
http://bankuei.wordpress.com/2010/06/09/procedures-vs-directives/ )
Chris,
I want to respond to your blog about Procedures-Vs-Directives in the context of your suggestion to "[Talk] about the differences between a game's procedures ... and the game's directives". When you talk a bout the difference between procedures and directives, you make a very interesting and very real distinction, however for the remainder of this post i will group these two concepts into the word mechanics.
That said, simply comparing the mechanics of games (procedures or directives or there sum total) is not enough to get at the 'thing' abut RPGs that i am calling for the categorizing of. Rather I want to talk about the dynamics of the game, in other words, the emergent behaviors or the take away play experience.
From your blogs I know that you understand this concept. but please bear with me because this is a subtle idea that many people miss, even ones who intutivly understand it. I mean no offence if you already fully grasp the concept. I'm just trying to be thurogh, not assume anything, and make the post accesable to others who this concept may be new to.
Quote
If you play D&D 4E and follow the procedures, you will get a tactically focused strategy game. You don’t have to think about it, or put a guiding hand on the rules- they do what they do and the resulting game naturally rises from it.
When you make the statement about about D&D and the "tactically focused strategy game" thats its dynamics. If you follow the rules, thats what you get. D&D is an easy case, the dynamics follow almost at face value from the mechanics. Its rather clear from reading the book what play is going to be like. However, that is not always the case. Let me provide an example.
Poker is a game who's mechanics do not give away its dynamics. The dynamics being "Decit" the whole culture of poker faces and bluffing that surrounds the game. The mechanics being the hiding of some cards, the showing of others (in texas hold-em) the rounds of card gain and betting where you can give up when you want, the ranking of hands etc. Nowhere in the hard rules of poker is poker faces mention. But its an emergent behavior that everyone who plays poker for long enough eventually just understands. I contend, that just a reading of the rules does not obviously show that deceit is a dynamic.
Lets compare to Blackjack. This game as very similar mechanics to poker. Some cards are hidden, some are shown; There are successive rounds of card gain and betting where you can give up when you want, and a way to rank hands. But the dynamics of Blackjack are "Card Counting" not deceit. There is no Blackjack face. Why is this when the rules seem so similar?
The reason is there are small key differences that make the play experience diverge.
On the other hand there are other games which share few if any rules with poker that have a strong deceit element to them. If i compare dynamics, its possible for me to say, "you liked the bluffing in poker? well you might like Battle Star Galictia, Shadows over Camelot, Werewolf or Mafia". All those games have a strong deceit component, but share none of the rules of poker (except hidden cards)
Brining this back to RPGs, i want to be able to say the same thing. You liked the play that happened in game X, you might like the play in game Y because they play the same even though the mechanics are different. On that note I've come up with 3 categories with 2 game that fit into each. I will present one now, and the rest later as time allows.
Spheres of Influence Game
In this kind of game, each PC has a sphere of influence that they control. This is something greater than themselves that they are the leader of, each PC has there own. The PCs know each other but are not necessarily friends, and could be enemies. In this kind of game we play to find out how each faction deals with the badness of he greater world and its limited resources. "Do the spheres clash, do they work together, who comes out on top" are more important than "was the badness solved".
In this group we have two games, Apocalypse World and Vampire the Masquerade: Minds Eye Theater.
Apocalypse World is rather plain to see why this is the dynamic of that game. The mechanics really push it, PCs are defined primarily by the sphere of influence they control, and the GMing rules are all about how to make, track and announce the badness. And there is even a directive "Play to find out what happens".
Vampire is slightly less clear, for one its from the era where rules for GMing were not something that was even talked about. However 3/4 of the games of it that i played in where of this type. This is enough to convince me that there are its dynamics. The reason this happens is that in the larp the traditional set up has each player being either there clan's Representative in the ruling council, or one of the clan's oligarchs. This was coupled with the games unpredictable rock-paper-scissors conflict resolution mechanic, but very powerful influence mechanic. Influence allowed you to effect the world beyond the immediate play area, there were concrete rules that translated a level of influence into real results. The best example was Resources, this represented having a vast fortune. I may be misremembering the levels but with a 1 in resources you could call a private car once per game. With a resources of 2 or higher you could call one as much as you wanted. With a resources of 5 you could call a private jet. The outcome was, to resolve conflicts, people relied on using and trading influence, because it was predictable and easy to transfer, rather than the conflict rules. These realties of the mechanics came together to create the spheres of influence dynamic.
But notice the mechanics of these two games are wildly different. if we were to compare the mechanics, we might reach a conclusion that these games are not the same, which, from my argument above they clearly are.
Do others agree that these games play very much the same? Is there another game that you have played that might fit into this category, if so why?
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