Lamentations of the Flame Princess: my job as GM
lumpley:
Session 2 was fun. (Here's some about character creation and session 1: Lamentations of the Flame Princess is made of lies. Please don't bring discusson of that thread's topics into this thread.)
The PCs' guide, Phillip the converted Mioonkhtuck, abandoned the PCs on the edge of Rechgawawanc territory, perhaps made nervous by the idea of cannibal giants. Eventually they tried to follow him, but got lost in the forest. At night they encountered a pair of spider-monsters, one of which Brom killed when it leapt upon Brother Leobald. The rest of the night, the other complained from the darkness that it was lonely because they had murdered its spouse, and begged one or another of them to come out from their camp and console it in its grief. None of them did, even after it promised them that it had hidden gold, arrowheads, and a silver crucifix in a deep well, and would be willing to lower them down on its line to retrieve them.
They eventually found their way to the trappers' camp, which was celebrating a bounty of colony scrip. (Zef, a trapper, had taken an antique Vikano-dwarfish gold bedknob down to the colony stockade for trade, on the camp's behalf, and had returned with the shares.) They had a pleasant, companionable, and drunken evening. In the morning, Brother Leobald (and most likely the dwarf Van Joost) left Northward to visit the crazy old man with the mountain lions, the source of Zef's antique Vikano-dwarfish gold bedknob, about whom we know nothing else. Brom and Leike stayed in camp to work, being now in the camp's debt, and had an unfortunate then hilarious time wading through giant leeches and baiting wolverines with poisoned offal.
Both Meg and Rob were nodding off during the game, so we called it pretty early.
I want to say what I've taken to be my job, as GM, in this game:
1st, wherever the PCs decide to go and whatever they decide to do, to contribute things to the game that I personally find entertaining, without worrying whether the other players will find them as entertaining as I do. Timid, malicious, talkative spider-monsters? Wading through giant leeches to bait wolverines with poisoned offal? I'm having lots of fun. I hope the other players are having fun too, but whatever, if they aren't they'll drop out.
2nd, to provide, occasionally, opportunities for the PCs to recover lost treasure (which is how you get XP in Lamentations), without worrying whether they'll decide to take them or decline them. If they want to follow the spider-monster to its hidden spoils, and presumably fight it to retrieve them, they can! If they don't, they won't. It's not my job to decide for them, only to offer.
3rd, to make the safe, conventional life - settling in a place to work a job - under no circumstances a source of XP (this is by the rules), but more, to make it appalling and horrible, unthinkable to a person of imagination and spirit.
I've taken it as NOT my job to concern myself with dramatic satisfaction. I don't try to contribute pacing, dramatic escalation, climax or resolution at all. Brom named her sword "Sad Anticlimax," to celebrate killing the spider-monster, and I foresee plenty of anticlimaxes and non-climaxes in this game. It feels a little odd, like I'm not quite holding up my end of the deal, but I'm resolved.
I almost killed Brom! For the wolverine I rolled a damage die with more sides than she had hit points. It happened without my really realizing it, but then afterward, we were a bit whoa. Life on the edge of the dice.
-Vincent
stefoid:
I like the point about the GM having fun!
But why is it not "NOT my job to concern myself with dramatic satisfaction. I don't try to contribute pacing, dramatic escalation, climax or resolution at all." ?
Particularly the pacing. Doesnt a poorly-paced game lead to people dropping off and calling an early night?
James_Nostack:
Vincent wrote:
Quote
I've taken it as NOT my job to concern myself with dramatic satisfaction. I don't try to contribute pacing, dramatic escalation, climax or resolution at all. Brom named her sword "Sad Anticlimax," to celebrate killing the spider-monster, and I foresee plenty of anticlimaxes and non-climaxes in this game. It feels a little odd, like I'm not quite holding up my end of the deal, but I'm resolved.
This is well observed, and better phrased than one of my complaints about sandbox play in the other thread. This family of games is very odd about anti-climax. In my experience as a player and as a DM, I've found that play will demonstrate what the players aren't yet ready to handle (usually via the "red shirt ensign on Star Trek" method of surprisingly horrible death), but once the players are ready to handle something it's very anti-climactic.
There's this range where the DM considers an enemy likely very devastating, yet the players end up surprising themselves and killing it after a hard-won battle. That's a good range to work with, but it's hard to get it right. If you wanna talk about how do that, I have some thoughts about that, but don't wanna de-rail the thread.
Another variation of anti-climax is when the players plan the hell out of something, and then either
* it all goes perfectly according to plan (gee that was dull), or
* something random happens and the plan gets totally blown to hell and is useless (god why did we waste so much time planning)
So one way to address that is to have the plan backfire in exactly the worst way, at the worst time. To my eye, that seems like a philosophical betrayal, but on the other hand, the players are telegraphing that they really want to play a heist movie with all that meticulous planning. They're asking you to screw them. But of course if they know for certain that you're screwing them, you lose all their trust and it sucks. So I would suggest maybe making a list of several spectacularly bad ways for the plan to go wrong (and a chance it goes right!) and let the dice decide. Apparently in this style of play, making a completely loaded, unfair, b.s. random table is totally fine, so long as you're not actually taking away luck and playing the world "fairly." (I think this is a serious intellectual weakness in the OSR broadly, but whatever.)
Also! Get ready for Entire Session of Preparation or Aftermath Play. Ugh, I hate that session. But, it too is part of this style. I've come to regard it as a palate cleanser and plot-thread gathering type of thing, listening to what players are interested in doing next.
stefoid wrote:
Quote
Doesnt a poorly-paced game lead to people dropping off and calling an early night?
I can't speak for Vincent, but in our own games it's more like, "The players set the pace." If the players want to spend 4-5 hours exploring a cave, they'll do that. If they get badly hurt and want to retreat after Hour 2 and go back to town to handle business there, they will. Some folks might leave the game early, but that doesn't mean the others can't keep playing. (These style of games typically don't require the entire group to be there every night.)
lumpley:
Yeah, no, here in the probability-space of first level, ain't nobody controlling pacing. The dice are, and they've got no dramatic sense whatsoever.
I can accept this or cheat. I accept it. This is the game we signed up to play.
James, this isn't really a planning kind of outfit, at least not yet, so I haven't had to worry about any of that.
-Vincent
Moreno R.:
Hi Vincent!
What you describe is very, very similar to the way I GMed AD&D in the '80, before turning little by little to illusionism, except for a specific point:
Quote from: lumpley on November 08, 2011, 09:26:47 AM
1st, wherever the PCs decide to go and whatever they decide to do, to contribute things to the game that I personally find entertaining, without worrying whether the other players will find them as entertaining as I do. Timid, malicious, talkative spider-monsters? Wading through giant leeches to bait wolverines with poisoned offal? I'm having lots of fun. I hope the other players are having fun too, but whatever, if they aren't they'll drop out.
I didn't worry at the time about drama and pacing (I despised the railroading ways used by dome GMs to get them), but my principal preoccupation at the time was to contribute things to the table than the players would find entertaining. Because... well, their appreciation was the bigger reward I did get, and by the other hand it was the "duty" of the GM as written in the manuals.
Thinking about it, this preoccupation caused me a lot of stress and burnout, so jettisoning it is probably a very good idea: but I still find difficult to understand how the GM can find entertainment in what he add if he doesn't get appreciation for the same things from the player. For example, the talkative spider-monsters I suppose worked only because the other players found them equally entertaining and talked with them (or interacted in some way). What if they had simply said "well, whatever" and proceeded to kill them with swords and spells, without talking?
Probably the second time you would gave chosen a different kind of monster, and again and again, until you had found what your players find entertaining (or frightful, or in any case worth interacting in some way in the fiction), and stick with that.
Can you talk more about this point?
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