Matts Gaming Maniphilosophesto
Instead of working at work, here I am talking about the kind of roleplaying I like to do. Fantastic.
It's probably no surprise to anyone, but my penchant is for roleplaying where a story is told, collectively. The reason we all sit around at the table with dice in front of us is because when you tell a story to yourself, a) there's no one to listen, and b) you already know what you're going to say. With your friends, when you tell a story, they say, "that's cool, but what about if this happens?" and you realize, hot damn, that is way more compelling!
I'm firmly convinced that we as a group can tell stories that, by virtue of all our participation, can come out with more gripping, and more entertaining than the best TV, because we made it, but also because there's real depth and real choices we made during play.
What helps make those choices neccesary are the rules. We're all attached to our characters, and our friends, and we all get that sort of sick feeling in our stomachs when we're watching tv and something goes horribly wrong for the people we love on that show. It takes discipline to get past that sick feeling, whether you're writing a story and it's time for your favorite character to take some real licks, or whether you're running a game with your friends and it's time for the character everyone likes to really get hammered. The rules, in my opinion, should help facilitate that sort of discipline.
I know I harp on Dogs a lot, but reading and running that game jumpstarted a lot of thought for me, and I expect I'll diverge more in opinion the more I think. But he said something that really stuck with me, on his forum or something: The rules need to make me, the GM, impartial. I can referee from a legalistic perspective, making sure everyone sticks to the rules, but what I'm not supposed to be doing, or more accurately what I as a GM don't want to do, is to say, "this is how the plot's going to happen." I think that for me to have a "plot", with predefined villians and places I'm trying to steer the game for high and low points.
In the one-shot, all I did was define some characters. Sure, some trended towards turning the villians in your characters' mind, like Ronald Tester. That was by design; we've gamed long enough that I've got a reasonable idea of how you as players are going to see the NPCs. But it would have been an equally valid thing for your characters to have pegged George Milk as a selfish loony who had turned the town into a dependent abettor to his revenge fantasy, and shot him in the street. Granted, it wasn't set up so much that way, but the point is, by the time I get to where I want to be as a GM, *it should be*, so that all I'm doing is creating a setting, adding enough hooks in it to keep you guys as players engaged (including between-session conspiracies and the like), and then seeing what happens.
I'm not saying that the way we've done things up until now is somehow wrong; I think that to whatever degree you guys agree with me, we've been getting at a similar thing from a number of different angles.
But, again, I'm at work. I'll wrap it up with a bullet list, because that's my favorite wiki feature.
IN SUMMARY, I THINK GAMING SHOULD BE ABOUT:
- collaborative storytelling; everyone shapes the story
- having to make hard choices, and then having to make hard choices about those choices.
- As the GM, setting up the pins, but not interfering with how they fall (assuming they all obey the proper rules in their falling)
- As a GM, making sure those pins do fall
