[Don't Rest Your Head] How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the System
ODDin:
I've been running convention games, and one-timers in general, for some time now. I used to run freeform games, or more precisely, games were I, as the GM, had all responsibilities on myself. It's not just about things like narration, it's more generally about making sure the game works, that the players enjoy what's going on in it (especially important in conventions, where the players actually pay money to be there). Even if the games had stats and things like that, still the most important duties remained on me. I had to constantly remain in focus, to see how all players were doing etc.
For some time now, however, I've been running one-timers using Don't Rest Your Head. An awful lot of them, in fact. (The reason is that I translated the game to Hebrew and am thus busy running demos and making sure it sells.)
In the first times I ran the game, it didn't work all that well. The players had fun, sure, but I couldn't get rid of the feeling that I somehow wasn't getting the game. The mechanics were all there, the rules were all there and applied correctly, but something didn't click.
And then I realised what I was doing wrong. I was still hogging to myself all of my GMing responsibilities. IThe system was sitting there, begging to GM the game with me, if not for me, and I was not letting it.
When I began to let go, it worked marvels. When I run it now, I feel as though there's another GM sitting in the room with me, doing a large chunk of my work. I feel that I can essentially run one-timers of DRYH on auto-pilot. I need to think of things that happen within the game world, yes - which I either improvise or lift from the given setting, mostly. But the real-life responsibilities, those of making the game "work", are largely gone. I mostly just keep an eye to see that the system is doing fine - and 90% of the time it is.
It's a wonderful feeling, really, although I think this post is kinda vague and I'm not sure I'm getting my point across. Hopefully I am, but if I don't, do ask me to clarify.
I'm not saying all one-timers have to be like this. There are other one-timers where I still handle all of those responsibilities myself, because I don't think delegating them to a system is possible in that specific case. But, I think, if you already use a system, this is how it should work, this is how it should be.
(To clarify, I'm not saying that they're run without a system - I've read the Big Model articles and I agree that there's no such thing as no system. What I mean is that I am the system and nothing else - everything runs through me, I pull all the strings etc.)
And, of course, I'm not here to say that DRYH is the only system that does that. It's just the first system with which I've really felt it so strongly - probably because of the concentrated experience I've had with it. Hopefully I'll be able to feel the same way with other systems with time.
Paul Czege:
My sense is that Lacuna works the same way. But I've never successfully run Lacuna myself. I think I probably fought the system when I ran it, the way you did with DRYH at first.
Paul
ODDin:
Pondering about it, I see that I wasn't really truthful saying that the rules were all there. When I run it in conventions, I use pregenerated characters and essentially drop the questionnaire, because (sadly) there just isn't enough time in a one-shot game for all that. (A side result, I think, is drifting the game towards Sim rather than original Nar, but I'm not too sure of that.)
Within the game text, there are lots of useful advice on running the game, but they mostly revolve around the questionnaire, and thus when I dropped it, it was harder for me to see what was actually said there - while the game did actually tell me, though not quite in those words, not to hog the GMing responsibilities.
So, it's not really the game's fault that I didn't realise how to use it correctly.
Although I think that no matter what GMing advice the game gives you, there are things you just have to learn to do on your own and need to realise on your own, probably because when we come to GM a game, we don't come as blank slates, but rather we bring our previous experience as GMs and our previously used tools, which are not always proper for a given game.
ODDin:
And I admit to never having even read Lacuna, but still: Paul, do you think the game could've given more advice on how to correctly use it?
Tim C Koppang:
Michael,
Your post is interesting, but I'm having a bit a trouble figuring out what changed from the time when you were fighting the system to the time when you took a more hands off approach. Could you give me one or two examples of how the system helped you "co-GM" the game? I think that would go a long way towards helping me understand what you and Paul are getting at. As just one possible example, are you talking about something in the mechanics that help you, or are you talking about letting the players guide the action more directly?
Thanks,
- Tim
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