A great post over at the Reef: The Surest Way to Become a Better Game Master.
Spoilers:
STFU AND LISTEN TO THE PLAYERS
She approaches the issue with a slew of anecdotes about games gone wrong (and also games gone right). I’ll back it up with a bit of theorycraft that I’ve mentioned here before: Your players have a pretty good idea of what they’ll find interesting and entertaining. Let them pursue the goals and plans they want to pursue and you’re far more likely to meet with success than if you try to second guess what they “really” want.
You don’t need to take on total responsibility for the game. In fact, you shouldn’t.
Also of value are the follow-ups she and her husband wrote:
How to Do This (in Practical Terms)
Why It’s Generally a Bad Idea to Say No
Answering Other Objections
As I mentioned recently in The Principles of RPG Villainy, it’s amazing how often saying “don’t railroad your players” results in people agreeing that it’s a bad idea while simultaneously trying to justify why they do it all the time.
I don’t really agree with the premise of those articles.
It supposes that the players are on an ego boost trip, expecting the GM to please them with “You are so good”, “Oh my, you are a real hero!”, “What a good idea” comments.
That is, indeed, the direction taken by storytelling games which have suppressed the notion of failure, or at least have developed mechanisms to ensure that even failures still lead to the an “happy ever after” end. I think that it is a kind of railroad, a narrative railroad instead of the usual scenaristic railroad, but a railroad none the less.
IMHO the essence of roleplaying is the question “If I was a warrior (or wathever), in this situation, in this kind of world, how would I fare?” A kind of living an alternate life.
The problem with the attitude of the GM in the articles above, is that it makes the game meaningless. Yes, as a player, I did succeed and my character looked cool. So what? My choices were meaningless. That I made brilliant or stupid choices had no consquences, I was deemed to succeed anyway by a gamemaster fudging the game to obtain this result.
I play for more than a pat on the shoulder. I play to visit places and live adventures, not to have my ego boosted by someone trying to please me wathever stupidity I can commit.
Bhoritz wrote: “It supposes that the players are on an ego boost trip, expecting the GM to please them with “You are so good”, “Oh my, you are a real hero!”, “What a good idea” comments.”
Interesting. That wasn’t my reading of the article at all. In fact, even looking at it again I can’t seem to see anything about the GM needing to “ego boost” the players.
In fact, the only GMs she mentions talking about the “awesomeness” of the PCs and puffing them up are the GMs she’s criticizing. By context, she appears to be inherently rejecting the style of play you claim she’s endorsing.
I’m wondering what passages you read that gave you the impression of the article you’re reporting here?
Those passages. Maybe I am reading too much into them but I think that the job of the GM is not to make the characters (and even less the players) look cool. I think its job is to provide a world where the player shall have a chance to be cool, if they succeed at what they try.But being or feeling cool or crap is with the players, not with the GM.
“As a GM, it is your job to make your players feel supercool.” (…)”…but until any of these intersect with the characters that the players are playing, they’re just window dressing or, at best, foreshadowing of something coming up that will make the players feel supercool.”(…)
“Characters should be seen for what they are – a collection of information that tells you how the player wants to have fun and look supercool.”
“If your player has a wizard, then they are telling you “I want to have fun and look supercool by being Gandalf – casting spells and exploring old tomes and being really, really smart!” If your player has a monk, then they are telling you “I want to have fun and look supercool by being Bruce Lee – getting all badass with my bare hands or some exotic weapon!” Players come to games to have fun and to feel supercool.”
This meshes with something I learned from friends in the improv scene and have been applying to D&D for years: “yes, and”. To be specific, there’s a spectrum, with “yes, and” on one end and “no” on the other:
“Yes, and” > “Yes” > “Yes, but” > “No, but” > “No”
Always aspire to be as far left on this spectrum as you can. Whenever you make a decree, ask yourself “is there a good reason I’m here, and not one to the left?” Going one to the left if you can will make it more fun for your player and more fun for you. (Going more than one to the left is always good, but it may be more comfortable to take shorter steps.)
> I think its job is to provide a world where the player shall have a chance to be cool, if they succeed at what they try.But being or feeling cool or crap is with the players, not with the GM.
Yes. But if for example a wizard player comes up with a nifty way to solve some problem using a spell (something at least plausibly within the rules, but maybe requiring a bit of creativity) the GM shouldn’t stomp all over this notion because it doesn’t fit the preconceived plan of how the encounter should go. The DM should adjudicate actions, not decide some actions are doomed to failure because it doesn’t fit THEIR expectations. Failure is still allowed.
Like, the example of blowing up the phylactery by gluing a bead from a necklace to an arrow and firing it over the undead legions … I don’t know that I’d allow that to actually work: I wouldn’t rule that a fireball would actually do much damage to a gem, or a metal icon, or whatever. But if the target was made of paper, hell yeah, great idea! I’d certainly allow the glue-the-bead-to-the-arrow bit, it’s just the results of that that I’d end up adjudicating.
The Angry DM (angrydm.com) has a bunch of articles that end up hitting on this basic theme. In a nutshell, your job as DM is to adjudicate the success/failure of actions, and to do so reasonably fairly and honestly. If there’s some actual reason why a crazy plan won’t actually work, you don’t have to allow it. But the idea not matching how you EXPECTED things to go isn’t a reason for it to fail.
My gaming group is kind of between campaigns right now, and we’re discussing what we want to do next: what people liked, what they didn’t, and so on. And one guy had an interesting comment: he said that his favorite gaming moment (in probably 7-8 years of playing in multiple campaigns) was when he was playing a fairly high-level dwarf fighter (loads of hit points) on a platform at the top of a high shaft, with enemies on the platform and also far down below (like, 100′ or something like that). The moment: he just stepped off the edge trying to land on the enemy below. And he succeeded, killing it instantly. Did it bother me? Sure, a bit, mainly because of the notion that a dwarf could just make the calculation that “eh, it’s only 100′ to fall — I’ll be fine.” And he kind of circumvented some other elements of the encounter (like, I think there was another platform part-way down with other enemies on it, or something — I don’t remember the details anymore). But there was no REASON why he shouldn’t be able to do that, so I allowed it. And it’s something he remembers and talks about years and years later.
I completely agree with what you say. The GM is not there to restrict what the players may want to try. The players should be in full control of their characters decisions (and only that). He should adjudicate the results according to the situation and not what he wants to happen. No problem about that.
What I did not agree with is the idea that the players come to play to look cool. Some are probably (and are probably not the best players), but there are a lot of different expectations from lot of different players. If players were just wanting to look cool, they should play storytelling games (I mean those that are just exercises in stories writing), which are designed just for that, instead of roleplaying games, which are not meant for that.
Listen to the players and build on it.
I was bouncing some ideas off one of my players about the my current campaign a few weeks back when I was still building it up and mentioned one important NPC “Th Oak King” and the player looked up and asked “The Oat King?” and right then and there I realized The Oat King was a heck of a lot more interesting than The Oak King was ever going to be.
Fair enough, but you said you disagree with the “premise” of the article, and I think you’re mistaken about what that premise is. You cherry-picked one paragraph from the second follow-up article (written by a different author than the rest, to boot). I’ll admit to only skimming the articles myself, but if you look at the concrete examples of “bad” GMing, especially the ones involving the goblin adventures, it seems to me that the premise is “Players shouldn’t be barred from trying things just because they don’t fit the GM’s idea of how the adventure ought to go,” rather than “Players should never be allowed to fail at anything.” I don’t think you intended to, but you’ve basically constructed a strawman.
The premise of the article seems to me to be “the players are playing to look supercool, let’s give it to them”, which is repeated a lot of times. The rest follow from there. But, as I said, maybe I am reading to much into it.
I didn’t wanted to make an analysis line by line of a post that is on another blog. It would have been longer than the article itself. So, I did concentrate on the worst offender (in my opinion, of course) in the article. I find it unfair to be accused of cherry-picking for that. The alternative wouldn’t fit a reply on a blog.
The word “supercool” appears a lot in the third article, I’ll grant you. I don’t see anything in the other three articles (of which I’ve read most of the first two, and skimmed the other two) that comes anything close to your summary, except for the statement in the fourth article that people sign up for games “because they want to *be* something cool… or *do* something amazing”. Hence, “cherry-picking”. I didn’t mean it to be fighting words, I just think you’re seeing something that nobody else is.
If you’re looking for a premise statement, you should look for it in the initial article. So let’s do that. The first 3/4ths of the article are anecdote, so the first sentence which could be really considered a premise is this: “GMs need to stop talking, stop thinking about their precious plot, stop thinking about how they want this or that character to be played, STFU and listen to the players.” This is repeated twice in different words: in the summary at the top of the article (“TL, DR: Let go of the story in your head, shut your mouth, and listen to what the players are saying.”) and in the recap at the beginning of the second article (“shut up, forget the story you’ve built in your mind, and listen to what the players are saying”). Later on in the second article, she writes “Chances are the players will come up with something you had not planned on anyway and they should be rewarded for it, not punished,” which she obviously considers important because she marked it with boldface.
I think this is pretty clearly the premise of the article, and it’s *not* the same as “the players are playing to look supercool, let’s give it to them” (which is not the say that the two statements are necessarily contradictory). I get that the bit you quoted rubs you the wrong way. I understand why. But I think you’re missing for the forest for the trees here. The bit you quoted is only a small part of the whole, and is *not* the major premise. (If you still can’t see that, we’ll just have to agree to disagree, because I also have no desire to pick the whole thing apart any more than I’ve already done.)
Based on the examples she gives of “bad” GMing, it seems to me that she’s simply trying to remind GMs that role-playing is a collaborative effort, not a one-man show. Ignoring what the players want to do is just as bad, if not worse, than letting them succeed at everything.
I was not looking for a premise statement, I was looking for the premise itself. Yes it says to reward the players for coming with ideas you have not planned. But the other half seems that all that the players want is just to look supercool. So, give it to them?
I am afraid that it is still the wrong look at the situation. The GM is not there to punish or reward the players (which would just be a way to drive them by the nose, carrots and sticks). The GM should just adjudicate fairly the results of their choices.
Maybe I am indeed missing the forest for a few trees. I suppose that it is the effect of too much use of the word supercool on me (and I did begin reading the posts by reading the third one, so, I suppose it probably antagonized me from the beginning).
But indeed the whole set of posts rubbed me the wrong way.
I don’t want either to dissect them more than you (for example, the situation in the fourth post where the GM asks a player if there should be a jeweler in town would also drive me nuts!). It would take too much time and efforts.
So, indeed I think that we should just agree to disagree on that one.
I think that the post “don’t prep plots” here, on the alexandrian, makes a much clearer explanation about the same topic, without confusion or mixed message. Those four posts only muddle the issue.
The thing is that I don’t have enough knowledge to react and prepare for things, and I get a blank head, and players staring at me with blank faces and no idea what to do. I wanted to go over what they did over time and try to build up some knowledge.
Like, I just can’t go freeform until I planned it at least once, the more familiar the more things you can come up with.
It feels a bit wrong to me to do so much studying to get a satisfying game, it doesn’t seem like a relaxing game anymore, and I’m not sure why I feel compelled to do so. Not to bad for me, but how can I introduce anyone to be a GM like this?