Creating an exhaustive list of disruptive player types and combonations is both fiddly and unproductive. There is really no other reason to do it other than there are people who just obsessively like to make lists about things.
What is important to notice about the list I made is that there is an antagonistic relationship between the player and the rules themselves. This, I think is of absolute critical importance. Because the crux of the antagonism comes between the player and the rules then there is the belief that there is a sort of equal footing between the players. Everyone can indeed become a power gamer or a rule lawyer. It isn't really that hard, except for the part where you sell your soul.
What throws a monkey wrench into the entire works is the GM. The gm is the avatar of the rules. He is allowed to break them, bend them, fudge them, ignore them, and there is hardly a mainstream rule book on the market that doesn't give the gm the express permission to alter something s/he doesn't like. So all the sudden the power gamer comes onto shaky ground, the rule lawyer gets out his big book of argumentations and they get to work. Here is where the role player extrodinair and the goof ball also really start to shine.
The supposedly inherent disjunction between the GM and the players doesn't excist. The disjunction is then created by the rules themselves, and the agression twords the gm is created as a sort of proxy argument.
As a result plot interference, killing of NPCs, raping of bar maids, dismembering of corpses, grave robbing, and everything Mr. Welch is no longer allowed to do, is a result of testing out the human component that comes along with the rules. Is the gm going to use the rules to dick us over, how much freedom do we actually have, how well does he know the game background, if I make him laugh will he let me pass the role (in paranoia you do!), how much argueing can he take before he gives in and lets me have my way... et cetera. All of these questions and thousands more usually end up taking the place of the actual important question, which is how would my charecter respond in this situation considering his place in the world.
I can pretty much guarantee that it isn't kill the king.
So having come to this rather brilliant realization, what can be done about all of this? Well first step is to moderate gm behavioure but my lunch is over and tonight I think I want to write fiction so I'll get back to it later.
5 hours later and I'm back!
Unlike last post which makes a decent little unit all on its own this one clearly isn't finnished yet. So lets get on to it.
First and foremost, the most visable part of the equation is the GM's reaction to the pressure the players put upon him in reaction to the rules. Most game master sections devote quite a bit of atension to how to properly run a game and diffrent amounts of advice, all of which is useful to varying degrees. It is, after all, the gm's adherence to the rules that gives or takes away power to certain types of different players.
Lets go past that real quick and get into forge terminology. The forge, along with some of the other independent games that surround it take a different view than moderating GM behavior. Instead they seek out to clearly define the GMs role, limit it, and in some cases they all but remove the gm from the equation. This presents an interesting approch to the problem of the rules/gm//player conflict but ultimatly I think it fails to deal with the actual problems inherent within the player rule divide.
Lets start with the idea that "System Matters" which is an essay by Ron Edwards. To be honest it has always bugged me and it is the ultimate reason why I am here tonight typing about it. The idea that the way to solve all game play problems is to have games that have specific systems. The system will be tailored made to the deisred game play.
I believe that this works to a point. But it isn't the end all be all of rpg design. It doesn't matter how well you design a system a disruptive player will still be disruptive, an uncreative player will still be uncreative. It doens't matter if the game is D20 ad&d with all source books available, or something as tightly regulated as My Life With Master. The disruptive player problem is still unsolved because there is a fundamental disjunction between the players, the rules, and the gms interpretation of the rules.
The solution, it isn't so much a radical change to the way gming works, or even a removal of the gm. Instead game developers, paticularly independent ones should be focusing on better system based forms of conuication between the players and the gm. This along with better comminication in the charecter generation process and campain set up will help turn around the vast majority of the in game problems that the players suffer from.
K NOW I am finally on the right fucking track. I'll do some more of this later.
Monday, October 12, 2009
Sunday, October 11, 2009
Once Again onto the Breech
I actually wanted to write a little bit of fiction but I want to spend longer than a half hour on it. So I am going to go do something else.
Last night I totally failed at writing about the contract between GMs and their players. This is mostly due to a poor approach to the problem.
So lets start with some of the basic problems.
The Rules of Fear Syndrome- Lets say you are going to play 3.5 for the first time and you've never really been exposed to dungeons and dragons before. At some point you are going to make a series of realizations. There is a book full of things that give you examples of things you can or can not do with your new pretend charecter. There are a lot of rules for combat and, they are somewhat boggling depsite the fact that everyone else tells you that it is really easy to pick up. Then that person is going to see that the GM has his own book that is full of all sorts of things, and another book full of things that want to kill you.
I've observed that there seems to be a sort of instinctual understanding that the players are expected to play a major part in the story. And they want to, why the hell else would they be there? So they want their character to be good. Because there is a whole book full of monsters over there and a GM who isn't afraid to use them. When the gm starts to narrate the opening lines of the game all the sudden? This shit becomes real. There is a desire to do well.
How each player handles that desire is what will eventually define the cohesivness of the group. Fer instance:
The rules lawyer- In trying to know all the rules at the same time, and by twisting those rules as much as possible he seeks to wrest away as much power from the GM as humanly possible in order to keep his stop as a protagonist.
Power Gamer- A close cousin of the rules lawyer and the two share pleantly of overlap. Power gamers use the rules to make perfectly legitimat charecters who are capable of dealing with threats that should be impossible at their level.
Goofball- The kid who wants to suceed, doesn't know how, so he shoots for comic relief instead because it becomes much easier to have no investment in anything when nothing is taken seriously.
Deer In the Headlights- These players I've seen alot of. They freeze up, don't really know what to do, and take a back seat while the others determine the action. Sometimes these players will turn into something else. Sometimes they just stay locked in place.
The Role Player Extraordinaire!- These people are weird. They will do everything they can in charecter to ensure that they never have to pick up and roll the dice ever. They will give thousands of arguments both in game and out of game as to why they should just be able to role play out the situation instead of just rolling the damn dice.
The Critic- These are pople who kinda sit back and heckle just about everything the gm does until the get the exact game they want.
To be perfectly fair I've been both the critic and the goofball. There are more of course but this covers, in a broad sense, the diffrent play modes inherent in D&D along with the various extreams players will take these modes.
Last night I totally failed at writing about the contract between GMs and their players. This is mostly due to a poor approach to the problem.
So lets start with some of the basic problems.
The Rules of Fear Syndrome- Lets say you are going to play 3.5 for the first time and you've never really been exposed to dungeons and dragons before. At some point you are going to make a series of realizations. There is a book full of things that give you examples of things you can or can not do with your new pretend charecter. There are a lot of rules for combat and, they are somewhat boggling depsite the fact that everyone else tells you that it is really easy to pick up. Then that person is going to see that the GM has his own book that is full of all sorts of things, and another book full of things that want to kill you.
I've observed that there seems to be a sort of instinctual understanding that the players are expected to play a major part in the story. And they want to, why the hell else would they be there? So they want their character to be good. Because there is a whole book full of monsters over there and a GM who isn't afraid to use them. When the gm starts to narrate the opening lines of the game all the sudden? This shit becomes real. There is a desire to do well.
How each player handles that desire is what will eventually define the cohesivness of the group. Fer instance:
The rules lawyer- In trying to know all the rules at the same time, and by twisting those rules as much as possible he seeks to wrest away as much power from the GM as humanly possible in order to keep his stop as a protagonist.
Power Gamer- A close cousin of the rules lawyer and the two share pleantly of overlap. Power gamers use the rules to make perfectly legitimat charecters who are capable of dealing with threats that should be impossible at their level.
Goofball- The kid who wants to suceed, doesn't know how, so he shoots for comic relief instead because it becomes much easier to have no investment in anything when nothing is taken seriously.
Deer In the Headlights- These players I've seen alot of. They freeze up, don't really know what to do, and take a back seat while the others determine the action. Sometimes these players will turn into something else. Sometimes they just stay locked in place.
The Role Player Extraordinaire!- These people are weird. They will do everything they can in charecter to ensure that they never have to pick up and roll the dice ever. They will give thousands of arguments both in game and out of game as to why they should just be able to role play out the situation instead of just rolling the damn dice.
The Critic- These are pople who kinda sit back and heckle just about everything the gm does until the get the exact game they want.
To be perfectly fair I've been both the critic and the goofball. There are more of course but this covers, in a broad sense, the diffrent play modes inherent in D&D along with the various extreams players will take these modes.
Saturday, October 10, 2009
To be fair...
I typed up something else for most of lunch and now I only have less than 20 minuts left. I suppose I could just do something else but I don't feel like finishing A Void, starting The Feaverhead, or reading Time. I like Time and all but not today. I think I need to give politics a rest. I want to refocus my atensions back onto lit theory and stuff like that. It is been awhile since I've really done stuff like that. Politics is neat but it is sort of all encompassing. There really isn't to much of a middle ground with it.
I remeber I had this same issue when my teacher wanted me to join the foresnics team and I turned her down. I told her that I had time issues and that I simply wasn't willing to spend that much time with it. I am starting to come up against that now. Like the whole Isreal/Palistine thing. Forming an educated opinion of that was going to take weeks if not months. It is such a multifaced problem that coming to even a partial understanding of it would take forever and it always changing.
Oh well. So yeah! Lit theory though I have all sorts of fucking opinions on it and I am good at it. So I am going to refocus on that for a bit. This means I am going back to reading multiple things at the same time and prolly updating less. OH and I want to do some more of that RPG theory thing, it is exciting to me. I might do that tonight! I dunno okay werk time even though I dun't wanna.
I remeber I had this same issue when my teacher wanted me to join the foresnics team and I turned her down. I told her that I had time issues and that I simply wasn't willing to spend that much time with it. I am starting to come up against that now. Like the whole Isreal/Palistine thing. Forming an educated opinion of that was going to take weeks if not months. It is such a multifaced problem that coming to even a partial understanding of it would take forever and it always changing.
Oh well. So yeah! Lit theory though I have all sorts of fucking opinions on it and I am good at it. So I am going to refocus on that for a bit. This means I am going back to reading multiple things at the same time and prolly updating less. OH and I want to do some more of that RPG theory thing, it is exciting to me. I might do that tonight! I dunno okay werk time even though I dun't wanna.
It's now 3:30am
I'm not sleepy which is strange because I should be about now. I'm not though. Ah well. So recently I've been feeling really creative. Not in the writting sense of the word but in the building shit with my hands sense.
Currently it is manifested itself in two ways. One I am not going to talk about because I don't feel like it. The other is I really want some ties. Ties are neat, and they make me look sharp. The problem is that my ties are normally mono colored, and they don't really reflect me. I mean sure sure I wear a red shirt, black tie, and look fabulous but it doesn't really capture me really all that well. So I've turned to custom ties. I found a place on the interwebs that will make me a custom tie for 30 bucks. All things considered that isn't so bad. I mean I only really need two or so. So right now I am kicking around designs seeing what will work and what won't. I really want a tie that features the katana wielding nun from hellsing ultimate. It looks like this:
Currently it is manifested itself in two ways. One I am not going to talk about because I don't feel like it. The other is I really want some ties. Ties are neat, and they make me look sharp. The problem is that my ties are normally mono colored, and they don't really reflect me. I mean sure sure I wear a red shirt, black tie, and look fabulous but it doesn't really capture me really all that well. So I've turned to custom ties. I found a place on the interwebs that will make me a custom tie for 30 bucks. All things considered that isn't so bad. I mean I only really need two or so. So right now I am kicking around designs seeing what will work and what won't. I really want a tie that features the katana wielding nun from hellsing ultimate. It looks like this:
I think my desires might be impossible though considering how long and skinny the tie is and how square that image is. I was going to mess around with it in photoshop tomarrow and see if I can get it to where it will fit in the tie template without looking like total ass. Somehow I don't think it is going to happen but it will certainly become the focus of my atension and there will be much creative swearing going on.
Or just me shouting fuck a lot who knows.
I definatly know that I am going to get something from visitor Q. There is a black screen with white kanji that asks, "Have you ever been hit on the head with a rock"? Fucking priceless. Since the way they write is handily vertical that is totally going on a tie. It is one of my favorite moments in one of my favorite movies. I also think it will look really snazzy.
There are some other things I am kicking around but those are the two things I would gladly pay a lump sum of money for to have on a tie. Especially the visitor Q thing, that is totally going to happen and I am really excited about it.
Taking a screen shot from a dvd on your pc used to be bitchy though. I figgured it out once though which means I can figgure it out again. It will just take time. I could do the calligraphy myself but that involves a scanner, and that just is a huge pain in the ass. Speaking of caliigraphy I think it is high time I started doing chinese caligraphy again. This means 2-3 things.
1) I need a table. Well I've needed a table for awhile now. I am a big man, I take up big spaces. So I need a mofoing table.
2) Time. This can be made. By video games. For now at least.
3)...nope looks like it was just two things. OH BOTTLED INK! Cause while I appreciate the meditative uses that grinding my own has, it sucks.
I stopped doing it primarily because I was doing the kanji wrong. See there is a specific order in which you make the strokes. I didn't know this when I started. I just messed around with the brushes and was drawing some kanji I got from a english to chinese translation page. When I tried to go back and relearn it the right way I found that my brain was stuck and that it really didn't want to. Stupid brain. So I had to shelve it. I figgured I'd pull it out later when I had forgotten everything I had learned and start again.
Number three now needs some explanation cause I just added something.
See I am not really much of a traditionalist I generaly and genuinly have no problems ignoring traditions when I think they are restrictive or silly. I think it comes from being left handed. I've had a life time of watching people do something one way, and then being told that their way won't work for me and I just need to figgure out my own path. That is how I roll and I am pretty good at it. Chinese caligraphy is diffrent though. The kanji is formed in such a way so that the whole thing fits together better. THe ink traditionaly comes in sticks, and you put some water on a grinding stone and you slowly and paciently grind out some ink. It is supposed to give you time to think of what you are going to be saying and to give you a chance to reflect on the task ahead. Believe it or not it works amazingly well. Still when I am just trying to do some practise strokes to get a few kanji into my muscle memory it is not helpful. AND so I need some bottled ink. I wish I thought of that while I was at hobby lobby today.
Man I had the strangest time trying to buy an exacto knife. You would think that is something target would have? I mean everyone needs an exacto knife they are amazing. Apparently not though. Oh well. Alrighty now it is 4 and I should at least lie down and make a show of being asleep. Hopefully I can lull my body into a false sense of sleepyness. Stupid body.
Or just me shouting fuck a lot who knows.
I definatly know that I am going to get something from visitor Q. There is a black screen with white kanji that asks, "Have you ever been hit on the head with a rock"? Fucking priceless. Since the way they write is handily vertical that is totally going on a tie. It is one of my favorite moments in one of my favorite movies. I also think it will look really snazzy.
There are some other things I am kicking around but those are the two things I would gladly pay a lump sum of money for to have on a tie. Especially the visitor Q thing, that is totally going to happen and I am really excited about it.
Taking a screen shot from a dvd on your pc used to be bitchy though. I figgured it out once though which means I can figgure it out again. It will just take time. I could do the calligraphy myself but that involves a scanner, and that just is a huge pain in the ass. Speaking of caliigraphy I think it is high time I started doing chinese caligraphy again. This means 2-3 things.
1) I need a table. Well I've needed a table for awhile now. I am a big man, I take up big spaces. So I need a mofoing table.
2) Time. This can be made. By video games. For now at least.
3)...nope looks like it was just two things. OH BOTTLED INK! Cause while I appreciate the meditative uses that grinding my own has, it sucks.
I stopped doing it primarily because I was doing the kanji wrong. See there is a specific order in which you make the strokes. I didn't know this when I started. I just messed around with the brushes and was drawing some kanji I got from a english to chinese translation page. When I tried to go back and relearn it the right way I found that my brain was stuck and that it really didn't want to. Stupid brain. So I had to shelve it. I figgured I'd pull it out later when I had forgotten everything I had learned and start again.
Number three now needs some explanation cause I just added something.
See I am not really much of a traditionalist I generaly and genuinly have no problems ignoring traditions when I think they are restrictive or silly. I think it comes from being left handed. I've had a life time of watching people do something one way, and then being told that their way won't work for me and I just need to figgure out my own path. That is how I roll and I am pretty good at it. Chinese caligraphy is diffrent though. The kanji is formed in such a way so that the whole thing fits together better. THe ink traditionaly comes in sticks, and you put some water on a grinding stone and you slowly and paciently grind out some ink. It is supposed to give you time to think of what you are going to be saying and to give you a chance to reflect on the task ahead. Believe it or not it works amazingly well. Still when I am just trying to do some practise strokes to get a few kanji into my muscle memory it is not helpful. AND so I need some bottled ink. I wish I thought of that while I was at hobby lobby today.
Man I had the strangest time trying to buy an exacto knife. You would think that is something target would have? I mean everyone needs an exacto knife they are amazing. Apparently not though. Oh well. Alrighty now it is 4 and I should at least lie down and make a show of being asleep. Hopefully I can lull my body into a false sense of sleepyness. Stupid body.
Saturday, October 3, 2009
September In Review
This is something new I want to start doing. At the end of the month I kinda want to review the previouse month just to see any trends in my writting and stuff like that. I dunno it seems fun and I am in the mood to do it so here it goes.
Last month I published 10 blogs.
Which adds up to just a little over 12 pages of text. I know this cause I copied it into microsoft word out of curiosity!
The vast majority were about politcs.
It was a relativly light month idea/concept wise. I think mostly because I was pretty intently reading.
High point of the month was the health care trilogy
Low point of the month? Eh I dunno all the other posts were pretty average so I guess the rest of the month really. Fuck the average.
I'm going to do August here too because why not.
10 blog entires!
the majority were devoted to politics
3 devoted to theory, and two to my theory
14 pages of text Nice!
High point, expounding on my theory a little bit.
Low Point, the whole migrain doctor thing. Man that sucked.
Last month I published 10 blogs.
Which adds up to just a little over 12 pages of text. I know this cause I copied it into microsoft word out of curiosity!
The vast majority were about politcs.
It was a relativly light month idea/concept wise. I think mostly because I was pretty intently reading.
High point of the month was the health care trilogy
Low point of the month? Eh I dunno all the other posts were pretty average so I guess the rest of the month really. Fuck the average.
I'm going to do August here too because why not.
10 blog entires!
the majority were devoted to politics
3 devoted to theory, and two to my theory
14 pages of text Nice!
High point, expounding on my theory a little bit.
Low Point, the whole migrain doctor thing. Man that sucked.
G/N/S frantic fun time
If you take the r out of frantic the word becomes 75% more fun to say! True fact. It is Saturday night and there are all sorts of people at books a million. They should all be somewhere else having well protected sex with willing partners. See I don't hate the world! When I want people to go away I wish nice things on them sometimes. Oh yeah the title. So I want to do a series of blogs on RPG theory and I figgure I'll start with the gran daddy of all rpg theory and move on from there.
G/N/S theory stands for gamist/Narrativist/simulationist and it is a representation of the three primary modes of gaming that rpg gamers both experience and propigate. I have lots to say on the subject including my desire to branch off on my own. However, before I do so I am going to summerize the GNS stance here because most people grossly misread it and go off into crazy town when they do so. CRAZY TOWN I tell you. So I think it is important to establish what I mean when I say GNS. Oh yeah I am going to be reffrencing D&D a lot in this post. For our purposes I am reffering to 3.5 and under.
For thous who are actually curiouse and would like to follow this the original theory is here. Okay so now that I've reduced my audience to 1 I can keep going! I owe the GNS a lot. Most of my skills at GMing were developed because of my understanding of the theory. It helped me to understand the underlying flaw of mainstream rpgs and what I can do to help mitigate thous flaws and for that I am more than grateful. But it isn't perfect so lets get a basic list of terms down then rocket off on our own.
Schizophrenic Game Play:
Originaly used as a descriptor for dungeons and dragons, but I tend to broaden the definition to include the vast majority of mainstream games. SGP comes from the sort of open ended view that D&D takes to its desighn process. D&D can be played in any one of three modes and as a result player expectations from each other as well as their gms can be easily misconstrued without massive communication before hand between both the players and the gm. In your average game this communication doesn't really take place ever. Who knows why something to do with human group dynamics. In an attempt to identify the problems with D&D, the GNS model was developed. Most D&D games don't strictly fall into any one aspect of the GNS model but instead they have a blend of two elements with the third taking a distant seat.
G stands for Gamism. Gamist games are sometimes called, rather disparagingly, roll playing instead of role playing. They focus more on the rules elements provided by the games. Gamist games tend to use all the rule books, the battle mat is present, and well the rpg is run more like a board game than a game proper. There is a whole lot more to it but it gets highly nuanced and rather silly. Right now gamism stands for pretty much for what it sounds like it means. Skill roles instead of roleplaying it out blah blah blah. It isn't a bad way to play really. Grab a dungeon modual and a few friends and it makes for a fun evening. It is the inherent confilict between gamism and narrativism that causes the majority of the problems. Gamism is often times reffered to as dismissivly, this isn't fair it is a compleatly valid mode of game play. One important thing that we need to do is to seperate the players from the play mode. 90% of all dooshbag players I met were people who liked to use the rules of the game to their advantage when playing rather than you know the setting or something like that.
N stands for narrativism. N is where most of the games that are written over at the forge come from. It is exalted on high as the prefered mode of role playing. It is also my prefered mode of ropleplaying but that has nothing to do with it. Narrativist game play focuses more on the story. In a D&D game the rules would take more of a back seat, some combats would be a more loosely based affair and and the players would be expected to be in charecter more. Again it isn't all its cracked up to be. Sometimes it is nice to just roll dice and kill things. The amount of contiuned creativity required for naravist game play is pretty intense and not every role player is capable of it. It is definatly something you work up to. Still it is neat. In general narravists and gamists are at odds mostly because of a personality thing. Gamists work long and hard knowing the ins and outs of all the rules and sometimes they get testy when someone just talks thier way through a situation without roleplaying it. This mode of game play can lead to sevear railroading by the gm. It can also lead to a couple of creative players dominating the game while the gamist kids sit back and wait for combat to start.
S stands for Simulationist. Or as it is better known, that other thing. Simulationist isn't really a most of play so much as it is a by product of play. This is especially true in D&D. It also the most poorly defined of the GNS three. It even gets its own essay by Mr. Edwards and you know what? It is a terrible disorganized mess. It is also something that isn't really directly adressed very often and unlike the other two terms it doesn't really mean what it sounds like. Okay here we go. Simulationist gameplay are all those little things in RPGs that try to simulate life and realism. It is like the rules for starvation in D&D. Or that combat is broken into 3 second intervals called turns and that in order for combat to take place unfettered it needs to do so in a 5 foot by 5 foot square. It is the modification for the dice rolls that you make when you are fighting in an area smaller than that square. It is the rules for building, and maintaining a fortress. Oh here is a good one it is pages upon pages full of gear that all have carefully calculated weights so as to not go over the charecter's encumberance. I think I am being clear. It is a slipery motherfucking topic. But I think I got it down.
Okay!
So those are the basics.
By codifying the three main modes of gameplay we can begin to adress what it is that goes wrong during so many sessions of D&D or Shadowrun, or White Wolf, and hopefully come up with a more hollisic, satisfying gaming experience. I find that it works best when you don't take the whole system to seriously. Some GNS followers are postivly militant and about their adherence. They have their heads stuffed full of vocabulary and concepts that they only half understand, and that drives them crazy. For example you can't mention a thread on RPG.net about alternative fantasy gaming with someone barging in and making all these bizzare claims about the GNS.
To be fair though the GNS is a pretty specific attack against D&D so it does make sense, but hey lots of D&D games suck when they don't have to so...whatcha gonna do?
So stop worrying and use as much or as little as the theory as nessisary. I see it more as a list of problems than solutions.
HERE IS WHY!
Okay first things first. Roleplaying game theory is a relativly new thing, it is also a relativly small thing and it ignores one major elephant in the room. There is both a gm as well as players. Any coherent theory needs to adress the fact that both of these entities excist...and hrm I don't really know how to finnish this sentence so that it is both clever and logical so you get this stream of words instead. The GNS system is dominated by one important idea that kinda lurks behind all others. And this is:
The System Matters. This is where my basic split between the GNS starts! Okay the idea behind system matters is this: D&D is, more than less, an open ended system. The number of diffrent types of stories you can tell, the types ways you can play, they are infinate. Its part of the beauty of the game system and I would say it is a definate factor in its longevity. However! This comes at a price. Everyone comes to a table thinking D&D is one thing. Over the course of a few game sessions the vision of what D&D is, is kinda hammered out an a social contract is formed. Or not. I mean these things do happen. More often than not in fact. The idea behind the system mattering is that by applying the GNS theory to the game desighn process, we can eliminate schizophrentic game play before it has a chance to manifest. As a result most games that come out of the GNS camp tend to be very specific.
Sorcerer is a game where the players have entered into an agreement with a demon in exchange for power. The demon is not a benighn entity and it messes with things, it also has needs of its own which must be met. You can not play sorcerer without demons.
My Life With Master is a game where you and the other players play the equivalent of Igor, or Amiadab if you know your Hawthorn. You have to play a servant. You need to make moral choices, hell there are even win loss conditions. The game play will follow a predifined path and it will end in one of 4 ways. Man when I put it like that this game sounds horrible. It is one of the most brilliant pieces of game design ever.
There are some other examples. I plan on tinkering with these concepts a whole lot more. What I plan on doing is finding some free downloadable games that really encapsulate these ideas. But that will take awhile. Its been a long time since I've been involved in the indie rpg scene 2003 specifcally.
I just spent 15 minuts trying and all I got were broken links and dead ends. So I am going to have to select from a crop of newer games. ANYWAY. The main problem behind these games is that they really like to remove the gm from the picture. In My Life With Master, the flow of the story and the out come of the events are dictated by both system and dice rolls. It is mearly up to the gm to fill in the blanks. The gm and the player negotiate before hand how the scene plays out and certain elements of the out come, such as items the player is garenteed to remain in control of. Heck the gm isn't even allowed to come up with his own master. Instead it is a colaberative effort between the gm and the players to create a master that everyone is happy with.
I would like to take this moment to reiterate that I truely love my life with master. It does, however, take the game mostly out of the hands of the gm and place it in a community center shared by everyone. However, to be fair My Life with Master is a highly exparamental, and awesome game.
It makes for a good example though because it is the ultimate example of system mattering. The actions of the players are sevearly curtailed, and as a result there is a simple system for everything and everything is in its place.
Okay I need to take a break from this for a bit. It is a lot of thinking and organization I just did and I feel my self switching gears but I nned to make a good transition and a break from this post. IE Start with a new post.
I don't really want to clutter up my GNS summary post with to many of my own ideas. I would rather like to present the theory in a more non threatening form stripped away of a lot of extraneouse ideas that have come up because the theory has failed to really adress the inherent diffrences between a gm and the players.
G/N/S theory stands for gamist/Narrativist/simulationist and it is a representation of the three primary modes of gaming that rpg gamers both experience and propigate. I have lots to say on the subject including my desire to branch off on my own. However, before I do so I am going to summerize the GNS stance here because most people grossly misread it and go off into crazy town when they do so. CRAZY TOWN I tell you. So I think it is important to establish what I mean when I say GNS. Oh yeah I am going to be reffrencing D&D a lot in this post. For our purposes I am reffering to 3.5 and under.
For thous who are actually curiouse and would like to follow this the original theory is here. Okay so now that I've reduced my audience to 1 I can keep going! I owe the GNS a lot. Most of my skills at GMing were developed because of my understanding of the theory. It helped me to understand the underlying flaw of mainstream rpgs and what I can do to help mitigate thous flaws and for that I am more than grateful. But it isn't perfect so lets get a basic list of terms down then rocket off on our own.
Schizophrenic Game Play:
Originaly used as a descriptor for dungeons and dragons, but I tend to broaden the definition to include the vast majority of mainstream games. SGP comes from the sort of open ended view that D&D takes to its desighn process. D&D can be played in any one of three modes and as a result player expectations from each other as well as their gms can be easily misconstrued without massive communication before hand between both the players and the gm. In your average game this communication doesn't really take place ever. Who knows why something to do with human group dynamics. In an attempt to identify the problems with D&D, the GNS model was developed. Most D&D games don't strictly fall into any one aspect of the GNS model but instead they have a blend of two elements with the third taking a distant seat.
G stands for Gamism. Gamist games are sometimes called, rather disparagingly, roll playing instead of role playing. They focus more on the rules elements provided by the games. Gamist games tend to use all the rule books, the battle mat is present, and well the rpg is run more like a board game than a game proper. There is a whole lot more to it but it gets highly nuanced and rather silly. Right now gamism stands for pretty much for what it sounds like it means. Skill roles instead of roleplaying it out blah blah blah. It isn't a bad way to play really. Grab a dungeon modual and a few friends and it makes for a fun evening. It is the inherent confilict between gamism and narrativism that causes the majority of the problems. Gamism is often times reffered to as dismissivly, this isn't fair it is a compleatly valid mode of game play. One important thing that we need to do is to seperate the players from the play mode. 90% of all dooshbag players I met were people who liked to use the rules of the game to their advantage when playing rather than you know the setting or something like that.
N stands for narrativism. N is where most of the games that are written over at the forge come from. It is exalted on high as the prefered mode of role playing. It is also my prefered mode of ropleplaying but that has nothing to do with it. Narrativist game play focuses more on the story. In a D&D game the rules would take more of a back seat, some combats would be a more loosely based affair and and the players would be expected to be in charecter more. Again it isn't all its cracked up to be. Sometimes it is nice to just roll dice and kill things. The amount of contiuned creativity required for naravist game play is pretty intense and not every role player is capable of it. It is definatly something you work up to. Still it is neat. In general narravists and gamists are at odds mostly because of a personality thing. Gamists work long and hard knowing the ins and outs of all the rules and sometimes they get testy when someone just talks thier way through a situation without roleplaying it. This mode of game play can lead to sevear railroading by the gm. It can also lead to a couple of creative players dominating the game while the gamist kids sit back and wait for combat to start.
S stands for Simulationist. Or as it is better known, that other thing. Simulationist isn't really a most of play so much as it is a by product of play. This is especially true in D&D. It also the most poorly defined of the GNS three. It even gets its own essay by Mr. Edwards and you know what? It is a terrible disorganized mess. It is also something that isn't really directly adressed very often and unlike the other two terms it doesn't really mean what it sounds like. Okay here we go. Simulationist gameplay are all those little things in RPGs that try to simulate life and realism. It is like the rules for starvation in D&D. Or that combat is broken into 3 second intervals called turns and that in order for combat to take place unfettered it needs to do so in a 5 foot by 5 foot square. It is the modification for the dice rolls that you make when you are fighting in an area smaller than that square. It is the rules for building, and maintaining a fortress. Oh here is a good one it is pages upon pages full of gear that all have carefully calculated weights so as to not go over the charecter's encumberance. I think I am being clear. It is a slipery motherfucking topic. But I think I got it down.
Okay!
So those are the basics.
By codifying the three main modes of gameplay we can begin to adress what it is that goes wrong during so many sessions of D&D or Shadowrun, or White Wolf, and hopefully come up with a more hollisic, satisfying gaming experience. I find that it works best when you don't take the whole system to seriously. Some GNS followers are postivly militant and about their adherence. They have their heads stuffed full of vocabulary and concepts that they only half understand, and that drives them crazy. For example you can't mention a thread on RPG.net about alternative fantasy gaming with someone barging in and making all these bizzare claims about the GNS.
To be fair though the GNS is a pretty specific attack against D&D so it does make sense, but hey lots of D&D games suck when they don't have to so...whatcha gonna do?
So stop worrying and use as much or as little as the theory as nessisary. I see it more as a list of problems than solutions.
HERE IS WHY!
Okay first things first. Roleplaying game theory is a relativly new thing, it is also a relativly small thing and it ignores one major elephant in the room. There is both a gm as well as players. Any coherent theory needs to adress the fact that both of these entities excist...and hrm I don't really know how to finnish this sentence so that it is both clever and logical so you get this stream of words instead. The GNS system is dominated by one important idea that kinda lurks behind all others. And this is:
The System Matters. This is where my basic split between the GNS starts! Okay the idea behind system matters is this: D&D is, more than less, an open ended system. The number of diffrent types of stories you can tell, the types ways you can play, they are infinate. Its part of the beauty of the game system and I would say it is a definate factor in its longevity. However! This comes at a price. Everyone comes to a table thinking D&D is one thing. Over the course of a few game sessions the vision of what D&D is, is kinda hammered out an a social contract is formed. Or not. I mean these things do happen. More often than not in fact. The idea behind the system mattering is that by applying the GNS theory to the game desighn process, we can eliminate schizophrentic game play before it has a chance to manifest. As a result most games that come out of the GNS camp tend to be very specific.
Sorcerer is a game where the players have entered into an agreement with a demon in exchange for power. The demon is not a benighn entity and it messes with things, it also has needs of its own which must be met. You can not play sorcerer without demons.
My Life With Master is a game where you and the other players play the equivalent of Igor, or Amiadab if you know your Hawthorn. You have to play a servant. You need to make moral choices, hell there are even win loss conditions. The game play will follow a predifined path and it will end in one of 4 ways. Man when I put it like that this game sounds horrible. It is one of the most brilliant pieces of game design ever.
There are some other examples. I plan on tinkering with these concepts a whole lot more. What I plan on doing is finding some free downloadable games that really encapsulate these ideas. But that will take awhile. Its been a long time since I've been involved in the indie rpg scene 2003 specifcally.
I just spent 15 minuts trying and all I got were broken links and dead ends. So I am going to have to select from a crop of newer games. ANYWAY. The main problem behind these games is that they really like to remove the gm from the picture. In My Life With Master, the flow of the story and the out come of the events are dictated by both system and dice rolls. It is mearly up to the gm to fill in the blanks. The gm and the player negotiate before hand how the scene plays out and certain elements of the out come, such as items the player is garenteed to remain in control of. Heck the gm isn't even allowed to come up with his own master. Instead it is a colaberative effort between the gm and the players to create a master that everyone is happy with.
I would like to take this moment to reiterate that I truely love my life with master. It does, however, take the game mostly out of the hands of the gm and place it in a community center shared by everyone. However, to be fair My Life with Master is a highly exparamental, and awesome game.
It makes for a good example though because it is the ultimate example of system mattering. The actions of the players are sevearly curtailed, and as a result there is a simple system for everything and everything is in its place.
Okay I need to take a break from this for a bit. It is a lot of thinking and organization I just did and I feel my self switching gears but I nned to make a good transition and a break from this post. IE Start with a new post.
I don't really want to clutter up my GNS summary post with to many of my own ideas. I would rather like to present the theory in a more non threatening form stripped away of a lot of extraneouse ideas that have come up because the theory has failed to really adress the inherent diffrences between a gm and the players.
You Know What? Never Mind
So originally this was going to be a blog post about the palistine & isralie conflict. But I have a head ache! So I don't feel like doing something complicated and hard. So instead I am going to go talk about all the little things.
Little thing 1: It is almost november! Well okay specifically it is a month away from november. November is a slightly big deal because it is national novel writing month. YAY! I plan on participating. I was participating last year too and I was moving a long at a pretty decent clip when all the sudden my palm pilot lost a huge chunk of my novel. That sucked. It sucked hard. It is actually the reason why I am sitting there typing this out on my baby laptop now instead of the palm pilot. It was nice for just utterly pointless text generation but it had zero abilities to edit, or format. It also was just kinda a pain in the ass, and well occationally it would eat my writting like it did during last years NANO. So now that I have a baby lap top and will I am going to participate this year too. I am thinking of making a speperate blog for it. From now until then I plan on writting lots of neat little micro fiction, and some other things just to flex some of my more useful muscles. I might also do some rpg campain plot layouts just to get those muscles working again too. At any rate I am in a state of preparedness... and pain. Man those two things don't work out.
Little Thing 2: Fuck you .MKV format. Fuck you in your shit spewing mouth deep and hard. Seriously, throat rape. That is what you deserve. So what's teh problem? Well sometimes .mkv files won't render subtitles correctly so they get cut off at the edges. Seriously cut off though, at least 6-10 charecters, which is a decent amount of words. It is annoying to me and it makes some things unwatchable. The thing is that the files play perfectly on the computer, and it all looks okay in the preview window...it is just during the actual burning process. So I am not sure what to do. I'll be turning to the forums sometime soon I am going to try converting to AMV first then doing it. I might also try breaking the mkv files into both a video file with a seperate subtitle file. Alternatly I could just buy the fucking animes in question. Gurren Lagan would be worth the money but Hare+Guu is not. So who knows.
Little Thing 3: There is this MMO I've been playing called Dungeon Fighter. It is fucking rad. http://dungeonfighter.nexon.net/ Look there is a link! Essentially it is a side scrolling brawler in an mmo format. So far I really really like it. It is extrodinarly repetative but there is just somehting about side scrolling brawlers that make me really happy. Not only that but this game seems to under stand what it is that makes side scrolling brawlers a fuck of a lot of fun. Now if only they would get off their asses and start banning all the gold farmers and what not we can ger things underway! The thing about the game though is that people come at with a complealty wrong sense of scale. I mean seriously, you long on clear a couple of dungeons, maybe pvp a lil bit, then go do something else. It isn't really something you play for hours on end. Oh well whatever I like it.
Little Thing 4: I don't usually write about my personal life here very much. But when I went to go visit Sasha this last couple of days she got thrown out of her house and I had to spend all sorts of time helping her move and such. It was sad and slightly stressful bu we got it all taken care of. There is something to be said about our problem solving abilities. That something definatly involves staying out of our way because heaven help you if we unite against you.
Little Thing 5: Well never mind lunch is just about over. Scribblenauts rocks, I haven't tried the new Kingdom Hearts, I want to play Victoria but there aren't enough hours in the day and I am addicted to dungeon fighters, and I am trying to get Gurren Lagan to burn right.
Little Thing 6: No seriously go see Gurren Lagan.
Little Thing 7: Dear Hellsing. Seriously? Are you dragonball fucking Z? Stop waxing poetic and mother fucking get on with it. Ultimate Hellsing my overly pasty white ass needs a kissing.
Little thing 1: It is almost november! Well okay specifically it is a month away from november. November is a slightly big deal because it is national novel writing month. YAY! I plan on participating. I was participating last year too and I was moving a long at a pretty decent clip when all the sudden my palm pilot lost a huge chunk of my novel. That sucked. It sucked hard. It is actually the reason why I am sitting there typing this out on my baby laptop now instead of the palm pilot. It was nice for just utterly pointless text generation but it had zero abilities to edit, or format. It also was just kinda a pain in the ass, and well occationally it would eat my writting like it did during last years NANO. So now that I have a baby lap top and will I am going to participate this year too. I am thinking of making a speperate blog for it. From now until then I plan on writting lots of neat little micro fiction, and some other things just to flex some of my more useful muscles. I might also do some rpg campain plot layouts just to get those muscles working again too. At any rate I am in a state of preparedness... and pain. Man those two things don't work out.
Little Thing 2: Fuck you .MKV format. Fuck you in your shit spewing mouth deep and hard. Seriously, throat rape. That is what you deserve. So what's teh problem? Well sometimes .mkv files won't render subtitles correctly so they get cut off at the edges. Seriously cut off though, at least 6-10 charecters, which is a decent amount of words. It is annoying to me and it makes some things unwatchable. The thing is that the files play perfectly on the computer, and it all looks okay in the preview window...it is just during the actual burning process. So I am not sure what to do. I'll be turning to the forums sometime soon I am going to try converting to AMV first then doing it. I might also try breaking the mkv files into both a video file with a seperate subtitle file. Alternatly I could just buy the fucking animes in question. Gurren Lagan would be worth the money but Hare+Guu is not. So who knows.
Little Thing 3: There is this MMO I've been playing called Dungeon Fighter. It is fucking rad. http://dungeonfighter.nexon.net/ Look there is a link! Essentially it is a side scrolling brawler in an mmo format. So far I really really like it. It is extrodinarly repetative but there is just somehting about side scrolling brawlers that make me really happy. Not only that but this game seems to under stand what it is that makes side scrolling brawlers a fuck of a lot of fun. Now if only they would get off their asses and start banning all the gold farmers and what not we can ger things underway! The thing about the game though is that people come at with a complealty wrong sense of scale. I mean seriously, you long on clear a couple of dungeons, maybe pvp a lil bit, then go do something else. It isn't really something you play for hours on end. Oh well whatever I like it.
Little Thing 4: I don't usually write about my personal life here very much. But when I went to go visit Sasha this last couple of days she got thrown out of her house and I had to spend all sorts of time helping her move and such. It was sad and slightly stressful bu we got it all taken care of. There is something to be said about our problem solving abilities. That something definatly involves staying out of our way because heaven help you if we unite against you.
Little Thing 5: Well never mind lunch is just about over. Scribblenauts rocks, I haven't tried the new Kingdom Hearts, I want to play Victoria but there aren't enough hours in the day and I am addicted to dungeon fighters, and I am trying to get Gurren Lagan to burn right.
Little Thing 6: No seriously go see Gurren Lagan.
Little Thing 7: Dear Hellsing. Seriously? Are you dragonball fucking Z? Stop waxing poetic and mother fucking get on with it. Ultimate Hellsing my overly pasty white ass needs a kissing.
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