A Diary of Campaign Creation - Page 3 - OG Myth-Weavers

Notices


GM Workshop

A community-created and maintained place for Game Masters of all systems to bounce ideas around. It's a place for inspiration and sharing tips.


A Diary of Campaign Creation

   
Quote:
Originally Posted by Vladim View Post
I, too, cannot for the life of me understand why proactive players are not more common in games both here and elsewhere. I mean, many people complain about railroading and lack of player agency, but when it comes down to deciding to which direction the narrative should be pushed, the majority of players (in my limited experience) just freezes and stops posting…
This is just me theorizing with little empirical or logical evidence to back it up, but I do believe the reason for this is twofold: first, many players expect the GM to be the one to present a story, and only the GM. There's the whole "the GM is a storyteller" thing many books tell the reader. Heck, in some games the role is even called the Storyteller. "The GM is in control of the story" isn't an uncommon belief. And who wants to go against the GM? There are few people willing to do that.

Second, players don't want to be "that guy". If a player is pushing their own proactivity, that means the other players might feel like their characters don't matter: that one person's plotline is apparently somehow super important now. To make things worse, players often don't create characters in unison, meaning that one player's own proactivity leads to complete exclusion of all other characters outside of their presence. Can be very disheartening.

Quote:
Rant aside, I’ve found that having just one proactive player is enough to keep things moving. The cynic in me says you don’t really need more; too many proactive players pushing towards different directions can be a GM nightmare. The experimentalist in me would like to play in a game where more PCs are proactive, but it hasn’t happened yet.
As long as there's a consensus of who drives what and when, it shouldn't be too much of a problem for multiple proactive players. And if there are only a few, it always needs to be made sure that the other players are okay with that, for the reasons given above.

Quote:
As for the “Five-man band” example, I personally don’t see a great need for striving for this type of party composition. I guess the original idea of “balanced party” (if I can use a D&D reference) is to have the spotlight shift from PC to PC, giving them all similar air-time. But, I think spotlight is something to be achieved via role-playing, and character skills don’t matter too much. I definitely like the character story-arc idea though! Maybe I steal it…
There's a reason I loathe using TVTropes: it leads to narrowly defined ideas when those aren't what I truly mean. The idea of party composition is tied in the dynamics of the party: the best stories work because the characters play off each other well. Their personalities compliment each other in a narrative sense. I find a lot of pleasure watching the party interact within itself, and a group made out of different personalities that work well together is an absolute delight to watch (narratively speaking. The characters can be terrible at teamwork, as long as there's a good playoff to it). When one character acts as a foil to another, both characters gain significantly more depth than they would have alone.

As a contrast, when you have a group of characters who are all essentially the same, or who refuse to have anything to do with each other beyond hitting things until they die, the ensuing roleplay will not be as satisfactory.

Quote:
In relation to your “organic storytelling” idea, in my younger and more idealistic days I run parallel threads for different PCs; the threads slowly converged as the party got together. It was all very neat and natural-feeling and rewarding, but A TON of work for the GM (me!). So don’t do that! Parallel threads --> GM burnout (I’ve experienced another example since then )
Oh god no. Parallel storylines do not work. It's a terrible way to burnout. That's not what I'm advocating here, and in fact, cannot. What I was saying is that you just ignore the PCs who aren't in the story yet. Let them come in when they come.

Of course, this does highlight the main difference in expectations: I'm not a PbP GM. I don't run PbP. And hence, what I write here is never really meant for a PbP medium. I run live games through virtual tabletops, and those allow for far faster progression of the narrative, reducing the time a player spends in limbo before they're introduced from months to mere hours. Similarly, there is no real possibility for parallel threads in a live game. A GM can only focus on one thing at a time.

Quote:
I guess I could say more, but these massive posts are difficult to go through! Very interesting; though, I’d definitely be keeping an eye on this.
Hopefully this is because there's a lot written and not because it's badly or incoherently written. Though knowing myself, it's both. Fun fact: all of the "phase posts" come up to more or less 12 thousand words. Nice to hear you're enjoying it though.

Well, that's another reason to like solo games. You know who's guilty if the players aren't proactive (hint, it's you)!

And yes, I agree with the feeling in favour of proactive players. When someone starts rocking the foundations of the campaign area before being the equivalent of 3rd level, you know you've got one of those! Doesn't work if the Referee believes the crap about "the GM is THE Storyteller", though.
Add to this the empirical observation that IME, you see more pro-active players emerging in groups where the players had started with a GM that rewards being proactive. Many players who expect to follow a plot despite starting in groups where the GM's notes don't contain one tend to speak of computer games where you follow the story, and a pattern starts to emerge.
In short, I suspect everyone starts as a proactive players. Other games, as well as GMs that reward player followers (I'm avoiding the word "characters" purposefully) and peer pressure tend to teach them not to do that. Which is a waste of potential, if you ask me!




 

Powered by vBulletin® Version 3.8.8
Copyright ©2000 - 2024, vBulletin Solutions, Inc.
User Alert System provided by Advanced User Tagging (Lite) - vBulletin Mods & Addons Copyright © 2024 DragonByte Technologies Ltd.
Last Database Backup 2024-03-19 12:45:26pm local time
Myth-Weavers Status