Ben's Gaming Maniphilosophesto

"There comes a time in a young GM's life, when he must write his maniphilosophesto. Your time was yesterday, and on account of tardiness, you get to clean the privy for a week."
-Jens Svenkmeyer

Jason did it. Matt did it. Now it seems I'm motivated to do it. Meaningless pontification, by and large, and essentially stream of consciousness.

I'm going to break my "principles" down into 3 categories, layers if you will, where I think different things are important: Out-of-game, Meta-game, and In-game. I'm not really that interested in where you think things fall in this spectrum, unless it's crucial for some more substantive debate. It's just an organizational structure for my thoughts.

Out-of-game This is a very general category, mostly relating to simple group dynamics. As such, the principles I'm putting here are largely redundant with any primer on "how to hang out/work/play with a group of people".
For the most part, I think that for the things in this category, Concordance is by and large the most important thing, by which I mean that everyone is "on a level" with everyone else: things start going sour when one or some fraction of the peoples is doing significantly more or less than everyone else. I'll make specific notes about where I think there's more to it.
1.) Commitment: pretty self explanatory. I think it has two components: time, and resources. In both cases, it's basically a purely quantitative issue
-Time: the more important factor. In general, I think it's important that people are attending sessions, and that people are in agreement about how long a session should be.
Ben's personal opinion: while I think time concordance is crucial, I personally think that a given session should last at least 6 hours. less than that is ok, but really only if people are very focused (see below). I actually think frequency of play is less important, though if you go too long, the feel of the game disappears. more important than frequency, I think, is that most of the players are present for every session: I think the game suffers when there is a steady rotation of present characters.
-Resources: Everyone should do what their means allow, and do it freely. That means if you have a car, you should offer rides, and if you have money for food/drinks/books/cards, you should contribute. Not much more to say about it than that.

2.) Focus: I think a good game is immersive: since tabletop rpg's provide no visual or auditory cues, everybody has to contribute to some hazy collective unconscious of what's going on. The problem is, this is disrupted easily if just one person isn't on board. As long as everyone understands what the level of focus in a given game should be that's fine, I suppose.
Ben's personal opinion: I think that even small drops in focus during play time come with a high cost and a feed forward loop in terms of the game sucking ass. less focus makes for a less imersive game, which encourages less focus, etc. I think these sorts of things should be gotten out at the beginning and the end of a session, and maybe in defined "breaks", but during playtime, I think anything not directly relevant to the game needs to be gone. Small deviations from this are ok, but anything more than ditzels is a problem.

3.) Respect: Seems obvious, but still worth saying. Oddly, I don't really think any interpersonal ties beyond this are required: I don't think you need to like the people you play with, I don't think you need to trust them personally, or think they are great people, but I do think that you need to treat them respectfully. Most importantly, never let your temper get the better of you during a session, and obviously, communication is key.

Meta-game This category is for things relating to the roles of players and GMs, the rules of a game, how disputes are handled, and how people RP.

1.) Trust: I think that when it comes to actually sitting at the table and gaming, everybody needs to trust one another in one important respect: that they are all committed to telling a good story (see below). For players and GMs, this means slightly different things:
-The GM: The GM should trust his players actions as being directed towards telling the story they like since (see below) I think that the story that ends up being told should absolutely be a collaboration.
Ben's personal opinion: Players should get a lot of leeway, and a good GM must adapt his/her own ideas of what "good" and "bad" RPing is based on their players' playstyle. Importantly, this does NOT mean that the GM is not entitled to an opinion (see "the players", next).
-The players: The players first and foremost must trust the GM: mostly in the sense that the GM is stewarding the story and that the actions he/she takes are in the interests of making that story interesting. They should also trust each other to the same end, meaning that they don't get upset in the meta-game realm about character treachery, irritating-ness, or PvP.
Ben's personal opinion: Of all the things up to this point, I think player trust towards the GM is the most important. As the only nominally "objective" participant of the game, the GM is by definition the arbiter of the rules and the game world mechanics. As such, players must operate on the idea that the GM is trusting them, as above, and that there is method to whatever madness he/she cooks up. While I have some vague fantasies about a "GM-less" system, as long as there is a GM that person is in charge and requires the good will of his/her players, or the story suffers. The bottom line: players that do not trust their GM and second guess/argue with them on a "meta-game" level are disrupting the game severely.

2.)Cooperation: This is mostly a player-player issue. What I mean is not necessarily that all the characters get along, since some groups can presumably handle PvP. However, at least superficially (and probably on a deeper level to some degree) most groups are working together on some level, and the story suffers if players do not remain aware of this from the time of character creation and throughout the game.

In Game I think there is a lot of crossover with the metagame category, but this section is basically about the actions players and GMs take in character, directly affecting the game world:

1.) The Story: This should be the highest priority of both players and GM, since it is the only finished product at the end.
Ben's personal opinion: That the story trumps everythign is why I think players need to give the Gm so much leeway: he/she is the primary guide of the story and interfering with that for one's own personal gain is completely counterproductive. The GM MUST be the highest authority because he/she is the chief steward of the story (with the players assisting). This comes down to the fact that at my core I am a "narrativist". If the players/GM use this as a meter of what should and shouldn't be allowed, the overall effect will be positive.

2.) Consistency: This applies, again, to both players and the GM. I think this is a broad one, and should be broken down into subsets: -The GM: the Gm largely needs to be consistent in terms or raw rules interpretations.
Ben's personal opinion: The GM should be free to change the rules, even at short notice. This is where trust from the players is tantamount. however, this should by and large be done only in the most dire circumstances, and should only apply to ambiguous or unknown rules, and once a ruling has been made, it should stand in perpetuity. Also, the game world should be largely consistent, although this can be on a purely thematic level: I mean by this that the GM should not be expected to provide every tiny detail of a world, but as new things come to light, they should fit the world. -The players: the PCs should behave in a way that is, above all, internally consistent. They should also produce characters that are consistent with the game world, and most importantly, the story, from the getgo.
Ben's personal opinion: internal consistency is part discovering who your character is, and part forcing the character to fit the concept. I would also add the important note here that combined with the GM trust issue, this means that players should consciously try not to game the system too much, and make characters of roughly equal power level to one another. Assuming high trust of the GM, the GM can act as a good arbitrator of this.

Corollaries and Musings The stuff above are principles that I see as self-evident. I don't think that I have perfected them by any means but rather see them as goals to shoot for in any campaign/group. What follows, on the other hand, is what I like and how I interpret the above principles to get some of my personal quirks as a player and/or GM. Here, I'm happy to have roiling debate/criticism/feedback, and I do plan on using some examples.

1.) Corollaries deriving from The Story as the highest good For me, there are several things that fall out naturally from the story being the most important thing: -Rules Apathy: This has been a sticking point between myself and several players (Gabe and Ed especially, but also Jason) and one that I've done my best to scuttle in more recent games like OAAAA. The reasoning goes like this: If the GM is the highest authority (as the principle steward of the Story), then rules are nearly superfluous. Their primary purpose moves from creating balance to providing structure and reinforcing thematic elements. Although I now stick to a "what the book says goes" principle (which is essentially the diametric opposite of this position) I still feel like most games are rife with examples of the fact that rules are secondary: in general, GMs and players will seek to bend or even break the rules when those rules do "uncool" things. My fundamental belief, and this is one where I know Jason strongly disagrees, is that a given game's ruleset is all but arbitrary and unimportant. The "stories around a campfire" comment, typed with clear derision by several people, is actually by and large a goal of mine: a fluid story, immersive, uninterrupted. The rules should facilitate, not hinder, this.
-The GM as God: another one where I've rubbed other gamers the wrong way, and another one where I've backed off considerably because of that. In OAAAA I've essentially adopted a conciliatory, players-as-the-final-arbitrators, approach. But my core belief is that the GM should be given essentially dictatorial authority by the players, and should be free to manipulate reality and rules in a game at will.
-Power imbalance: Since I think the most important thing is that players all get to contribute equally to the story (or at least have the opportunity to), I think that straight up "power", how many points you have, etc, is not that important. In fact, I like the idea of games where not everyone is exactly lined up in terms of everything. It's convenient, because without extreme vigilance imbalances are unavoidable: gamers are smart and good at exploiting systems, and inevitably something will come along that's more efficient than the alternatives. Hrulfgarr, for instance, due to a rules fluke, had that "move hit locations" ability which made him a terribly fearsome fighter. I paid the points for it, but those points had a very, very high yield. OAAAA is in direct opposition to the idea of imbalances, because I have gotten in trouble a lot for championing it: however, whereas I think OAAAA has worked beautifully on this front, I think that the hero system alone, or possibly D&D, is amenable to it, because it has been carefully balance for points in every arena.

2.) Personal Preferences -I love long form, open ended/player directed storytelling. When all is said and done, I vastly prefer it to one-shots, episodic campaigns, etc. I think that long, complex, multilayered campaigns in worlds/events that are much bigger than the players best capture what makes tabletop RPGs superior to other media. To me, one shots and episodic games begin to move closer to essentially videogames without the video: and I don't like the idea of replicating somethign that is done better on a PC. In long form games, characters take on real personalities, which helps people like me, who like to be clever but are not inherently good actors/RPers, RP in a consistent and lifelike manner. Most importantly, players take charge of creating more and more of the plot/game world, which both enriches the story and makes the game less work for the GM, which improves sustainability. Per hour of game time, the more episodic (with a one-shot being the extreme) a game is, the more work it is. The best one shot I ever ran, the House of Usher adventure, was 6 hours of game time and probably 30+ hours of prep over 2 months. That's incompatible with a normal life on a regular basis. OAAAA or Champions or Gemini required between 0-2 hours of prep a week, after the first 2-3 sessions. Not to mention that the OAAAA world and the Champions world and the Gemini world all had huge player contributions.

-I like unorthodoxed solutions. As a GM, that means things that I think are clever and that I had not thought of. This tends to create problems when players feel like I don't give credit for things THEY think are clever...another thing that I have tried to work on in OAAAA. But again, I think that in OAAAA I have perhaps come too far over onto the side of just allowing anything the players do to succeed. As a player, it means that even given obvious solutions, my preference is to find an alternate route, preferably one that doesn't require dice. A corollary to this is and the "story" clause above is that when not actively pursuing an established story line, I want to be creating more story. The whine-sale of lore, nearly vampiric in it's endless resurrection, is a good example of this and how this preference of mine is not shared by everyone.

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