I haven’t had very many adversary players, but I’ve used a number of guest players—the one who played Lord Blakeny, king of the jungle, in my campaign inspired by Planetary and League of Extraordinary Gentlemen; the one who played Peter Pan in the same campaign; the one who played Galadriel in the alternate Middle-Earth campaign; the one who played Frankenstein’s creature in my Buffyverse campaign; the one who played the millennia-old archnemesis of one of the superheroes in Sovereignty, showing up to suggest that they team up to challenge the gods who had compelled them to fight against each other . . . I think guest stars can add a lot to a campaign. They also let players who aren’t in the campaign get a little play time, or offer someone who isn’t a regular a chance to sample my play style.
That brings one back to pre-Forge GNS, I think: as far as I can tell from having listened to some play recordings, quite a bit of modern D&D/Pathfinder is predicated on knowing at a mechanical level the stuff your character can do and working out when to do it – pretty much canonically the Gamist element that rewards mechanical understanding with in-game success. (Obviously there are other elements as well! But this is a thing that players of those games recognise and value.)
Whereas my usual approach as GM is “OK, what do you want to do” and then if necessary work out in collaboration which the player what the mechanical interpretation would be that most accurately models what’s in the player’s mind. They don’t need to know about All-Out Attack, but they can say “I want to attack fiercely, and I don’t mind if I get hit in return”.
That’s rather close to my style. I may also ask, for example, “Do you want to attack forcefully, without regard for defending yourself?” or some other paraphrase of an option that’s in the rules. I routinely ask “Are you aiming at any specific location, or are you just going for center of mass as a target?”
There is a point where if the player knows how to describe their actions and invoke the game system correctly and efficiently, the pace of the game greatly improves. The GM doesn’t have to stop the action to ask the players what they want to do and translate that into game terms; instead, the players does it themselves.
Is it critical that the players know the game system as well as the GM? No.
Should players take some responsibility to learn the rules? Ideally; I wouldn’t suggest they do something they don’t enjoy, but neither should they impede the enjoyment of everyone else.
Can player rule knowledge make for a more engaging, entertaining game? Absolutely.
Yes, if an option gets used a lot I find the player usually works out the fast way of asking for it. On the other hand I don’t want them to see a list of manoeuvres and think those are the only things they can try to do.
Agreed. It’s part of the process/cycle of understanding the rules. At first, you have to ask the GM for everything. Then you graduate to understanding what all the standards options are. Eventually, you start wanting to make your own maneuvers and cooperate with the GM to figure it out mechanically.
On one hand, I’ll grant that that’s true. On the other hand, the pacing you refer to is not as high a priority for me. I’m more concerned with characterization and dialogue and with the ability to get into a persona other than your own everyday self. I’ll agree that it would be ideal to have a player who had both that skill and the rules knowledge that makes for faster pacing, but for me personally, a player who has the roleplaying is an A or B player, and one who has the rules skill is a B or C player, if they don’t have both.
I lately ran an entire session of my fantasy campaign Tapestry running combat between the PC and a war party of elves, where I repeatedly asked “are you targeting any specific location?” and said “okay, roll 3d for hit location” and “roll for damage” and occasionally “roll 3d to find out what kind of critical success/failure that was.” It didn’t seem as if that took away the players’ focus on the course of the battle.
From the late Eighties to the early Noughties I used quite often to take part in presenting games at cons in Canberra and sometimes Sydney¹. In those efforts a designer or design team would write a scenario, design pre-gen characters, write briefings for the players, apply to the organisers for inclusion in the con (and perhaps run a demo session for the organising committee), and write a promotional blurb to go in the prospectus for the con. If we got enough applicants for slots at the tables we would then recruit GMs, run a demo session for the GMs, de-brief and re-brief, and give them a copy of the scenario and the related materials. The organisers provided rooms and furniture, handled recruitment and scheduling, etc.
I would consider what the recruited GMs did in those games to be the barest core functions of a GM. GMs often have to recruit a party or players, organise a schedule and premises, design a setting and write a briefing on it, choose mechanics, generate characters, write or conduct briefings on the party and characters, supply crockery, cook a pot of chilli, and supply lolly-water. But if you pass those duties off to designers, organisers, hosts, and delivery restaurants the labours that you thus escape are not, in my view, exercises of the core skills of a GM.
¹ We even tried Melbourne once, but the Fates were not kind to us.
That con game submission experience is completely foreign to me. For DunDraCon, you just need to submit a some basic info about the game and a blurb and you’re in. This has been unchanged for decades. This is for individual games run by individual GMs; there was no recruitment for GMs to run the game. Organized play (via the RPGA, now Adventure’s League and it’s Pathfinder equivalent) is more like a con-within-a-con that is given space by the con, but no direct oversight by the con committee.
Canberra is a place where people love their bureaucracy. But also a good blurb in the Cancon leaflet could easily attract 50–60 participants. Phred Smith and I got more than that for Canberra By Night, and needed multiple sittings each from six GMs to get through everyone who signed up.
RPGs are a fuzzy category of rather different practices and experiences. It is the overlap that most have in common that constitutes the core.
So, open question:
Is the topic of this thread ‘what are the skills that all GMs should get a hold on to have basic competency’
or is it:
'What skills are irreducibly foundational to the task of GMing so that we can consider them to apply to all possible GMing situations"
?
(no snarkyness intended I’m legitimately confused)
“First, we taxonomise!” I think it’s both – the core functions, and the halo of skills around that which are often useful.
(I’ve met the “one person writes, many GMs run” thing peripherally with D&D tournaments – something I’ve always found a bit alien, but many people seem to like them. For that matter at the YSDC Games Days, 30-ish person conventions, several of the regular GMs choose to run published adventures, though they usually blurb them themselves.)
“Ontology is over-rated!” First we ask what we need the answer for.
It’s halfway from the kind of GMing that you and I do usually to running a published adventure, and probably not strange to most GMs.
On the other hand, it’s almost entirely strange to me. I did it once, back when I was still running D&D, sometime in the 1970s, but I haven’t been involved in convention gaming since then.
You are as weird as Roger or I, Bill, if not weirder.
I am frequently assured that 99% of the market for RPGs is for dungeon-crawl fantasy, which none of us has run in thirty-five years or more. Besides which I’m told that most DMs run published adventures.
The thing I was thinking of a particularly strange was RPG tournaments. Gary seems to have been a fan, and TSR-run events always seemed to have them, but I was never associated with anyone who thought of them as a good idea.
(And I’m running a dungeon-crawl fantasy at the moment, as a break from the sort of thing I normally run. Though I am also being a translation layer between the Pathfinder adventure and GURPS.)
Players want to attack fiercely and get bonuses from that.
They aren’t so likely to come up with ‘and to heck with the chance to defend myself’ on their own. I have to remind them of that. Some of them every damn time.
We ran one at UNSW in 1983. I designed the “module”. It was called Escape from Castle Fohgidon (not my choice). Everyone seemed to have a good time, though two of my tricks were considered particularly fiendish. There was a Cloak of Poisonousness with a Scarab of Death in its pocket. And the battlements were machicolated out from the wall just far enough that the monk couldn’t use his ability to fall without damage so long as he was near a wall.