I have had this experience as well. A good realization from this discussion for me is that the Watsonian and Doyleist approaches formalize what I have thought of as rigid and flexible approaches at the table. If it is appropriate to discuss the ‘feel’ of social interactions at the table.
In particular along the lines of DrBob’s quote players’ wishes before play can alter dramatically when the players start competing for the spotlight at the table, as mine are wont to do.
I’m not sure if I’ve ever had that problem; I didn’t think of it as an issue, but of course that could be a lack of perception on my part. But I’ve been using the approach I describe for a quarter century, more or less, and it didn’t jump out at me as something I needed to watch out for.
I wonder if we’re using slightly different approaches? What I do isn’t hand out a list of concepts or themes to be included in a campaign, after which I put together a campaign based on what the players tell me they want. Rather, I hand out a list of specific possible campaigns and ask the players to bid for them (allocating a total of 2 points x number of possible campaigns).
For example, in my last cycle in San Diego, the highest ranked campaign that I didn’t run:
___ Blows against the Empire. Martial arts fantasy. Run in GURPS.
The armies of the king of Qin are threatening all the other kingdoms with conquest-but defenders of freedom have sprung up to resist him. Player characters will be knightly warriors, masters of mysterious elemental powers, and practitioners of advanced science and technology in an alternative early China where Taoist natural philosophy is scientifically accurate. Play will focus on action and adventure, cinematically presented, but will be framed in Chinese cultural and ethical ideas of the Superior Man (or Woman). Mechanics will include the material I worked out for GURPS Thaumatology: Chinese Elemental Powers—which I hope will be out by the time the campaign starts!
I’m not sure, though, if that would make the difference. Maybe I’ve just been lucky in my players.
I have seen a couple of clear failure modes. Several times I picked a rules system for a campaign, only to find that my players hated it in actual play; that happened with Godlike, In Nomine, and Space 1889. And once I proposed a campaign based on Eddison’s Zimiamvia novels, only to find that four of the five players who were eager to try it hadn’t looked at the novels, and were unable to do so when they came to it! So what I intended as mythic fantasy evolved into Shakespearean comedy mixed in Dumasian swashbuckling.
OK, here’s an example of a game that’s based on linear fiction, where you need to abide at least somewhat by genre convention, and which I know @JGD has played and enjoyed: Pendragon, specifically in the Great Pendragon Campaign mode. The system is very much built round making things happen that are the sorts of thing that happen in Arthurian stories, rather than the sorts of thing that happen to real knights.
(And I’ve run some of the GPC myself, and so has Michael.)
So what makes that different? It certainly seems to be a regular complaint from other people who’ve run the GPC that their players don’t want to watch the whole Arthur/Guinevere/Lancelot triangle play out along its predestined tragic tracks.
The Arthurian mythos may be fairly linear now; everyone who writes Arthurian material in English has been influenced, directly or indirectly, by Malory, and likely enough by White for present-day writers. But I don’t know that that’s inherent in it. Why couldn’t a player create a character who would become the greatest knight of the Round Table, and lead it either to preservation or to even faster and harder fall?
After all, there was a time when French fans of the Matter of Britain started telling their own stories, and next thing you knew there was this French knight who had become the greatest knight of the Round Table, and with a complex high-drama storyline involving his being both Arthur’s friends and Guenevere’s lover. So it isn’t as if newly introduced characters taking on starring roles were impossible, or contrary to the spirit of the mythos.
It seems to me that there are at least two ways for PCs to have freedom in a game with a built in plot. One is to change the built in plot. The other is to carry on their lives somewhere out of reach, with concerns that are only marginally touched by the doings of Arthur, Guenevere, Lancelot, Elaine, Galahad, Morgana, Morgause, Mordred, and all that lot.
I understand that in the original myths Kai was Arthur’s best knight. Gawain, Lancelot, Perceval, Galahad, and Hank Morgan were added one by one as successive great interpreters of the Matter each one-upped the one before.
That wasn’t in the foreground in the campaign I played, and I’m not sure the characters ever knew about Guinevere/Lancelot. The GM was certainly using the GPC book, but there were lots of other plotlines keeping the PCs busy.
I wonder if we’re using slightly different approaches? What I do isn’t hand out a list of concepts or themes to be included in a campaign, after which I put together a campaign based on what the players tell me they want. Rather, I hand out a list of specific possible campaigns and ask the players to bid for them (allocating a total of 2 points x number of possible campaigns).
My usual approach is closer to what you do. But Summerland has a specific mechanic for the players to choose their preferred themes (the GM gets a vote too). I’d already done the ‘choosing the campaign’ bit by saying “I could run Summerland or I could run this other RPG”.
And of course if you were playing the game you’d want to follow its defined procedure to see how it worked.
Theme is an important part of my campaigns, in most cases, but I would never have a step where players explicitly chose it. In some cases I define the theme on the prospectus, by saying what activity the characters will engage in and possibly what sorts of content will be emphasized. In others the players do a lot to define the theme, either by choosing their characters’ shared mission statement or by creating characters who would naturally be concerned with certain things, which I use to build situations. Usually that works fairly well, though back in my early days of using prospectuses, the players chose a focus of a campaign of 2300 A.D. and then became bored with the campaign after about three sessions, and we agreed to shut it down. . . .