Category: Gaming

WISH 66 is about plotting (and, tangentially, the necessity of same):

GMs can spend hours designing an adventure and have their players take off in an entirely unexpected direction. How does a GM handle this—try and steer the players back to the designed plot, or hang back and see where the adventure goes? How does a player handle this? Stay on target or go with the flow?

I’m inclined to disagree with the context of the question. “How does a GM handle this?” Well, which GM?

The No Myth meme currently prevalent over at the Forge rejects preplotting altogether; a No Myth GM doesn’t know anything about the world other than what the players have seen. A failed task resolution check doesn’t mean the players have failed, it means there’s an additional obstacle in the way of reaching whatever objective the players have chosen. And that’s a reasonable approach.

But it’s not reasonable to say (as some Forge denizens do) that it’s the only proper approach. Some GMs spend days designing, not the adventure, but the world. In Brad’s Temple of Elemental Evil campaign, he had the entire world mapped out and spent a lot of time figuring out the actions of the NPCs between sessions. There wasn’t a designed plot, per se; there were NPCs with desires who acted on those desires. The PCs could act and react as they wished.

I don’t believe in a single approach; I believe in behaving as appropriate for the playgroup.

My preferences? I don’t preplot very heavily, so I tend to ad lib when players go off on a tangent. There are more of them than there are of me, after all. As a player, I like free-form stuff because I like the feeling that there’s a whole world out there. Strongly directed plots only bug me insofar as it makes me feel like the world only exists as far as the PCs can see.

Strong genre games can overcome that feeling, perhaps because a strong genre also engenders a feeling of a world outside the limits of a PCs perception. Pulp comes to mind, of course.

WISH 65 asks about jobs and gaming:

Does what you do for a living have any impact on your gaming? Have you had occupational details intrude on your descriptions of how something works? Have you ever dared a player to go “Hotwire a car, then, if that’s how you think it’s done?”

I’m a computer guy, but the answer’s really “Nah.” I’ve played Shadowrun, and I don’t really mind that decking is nothing like real computer work — it’s just an analogy for magic anyway, so I can take it at that level happily enough. I don’t mind if someone gets their hacking descriptions wrong, and I generally assume any modern-day game takes place in a slightly alternate universe.

Now, if you turned the question around, I’d have to say yes. I currently work for a computer game studio, and one of the reasons I got the job is because I’m an avid player of their games. So there’s that.

I also — don’t laugh — attribute some degree of my management skills to spending a lot of time playing Amber online. I know that may sound like rank gamer arrogance. Allow me to elaborate. I think that a lot of management is simply being able to pay attention to what people are thinking and feeling. Gaming doesn’t give you that skill, but it is a good arena in which to practice that skill.

If you’re an insensitive idiot, playing a leader isn’t going to make you any better at it. If you have a certain degree of social eptness to start with, though, it’s just like any other skill. Practice makes perfect. And how many opportunities do you have to practice leadership in a simulated environment?

It’s also a chance to practice sounding confident, and again, practice makes perfect. I don’t manage people by threatening to send their families into exile from Chaos, mind you, but I know how to be direct and reassuring. That skill carries over.

Simple Game WISH question this week:

Name three gods or religions that have appeared in games you’ve played in. Were they good, bad, or indifferent? What made them so?

Off the top of my head, I can only remember one campaign in which deities played a significant on-screen role… no, wait, maybe two. OK, two.

First off, the easy one. Carl’s Babes in the Woods campaign is based on Bronze Age Celtic culture, but the gods are Roman, because the Roman culture in that world was the elves and they conquered everything. I played a cleric of the Traveller (Mercury), Cian, and his restless roguish nature was very defining for the character. Another PC was a paladin of Kore; at one point in the campaign, the gods argued about who would get this new champion, and she got to choose the god she wanted to follow. This sounds like a twinkfest unless you know Carl, in which case you’d be remembering that Greek gods get really petty when mortals deny them something they want.

Which is the key to why the gods worked so well in that game; they were a tangible presence in our lives without being overbearing to the point where player fun was diminished. They had personality. Probably the same reason we like Greek myth so much — they’re fun gods, even if you’d be wary about having a drink with ‘em.

The more complex one: Catholicism was important in UN PEACE, but probably only to me, since my character Paul was Catholic. It’s hard to say the gods were good or bad in that game, since they never showed up (although there was one person claiming to be an angel…). However, Carl did a good job recognizing that religion was an important factor in Paul’s personality and providing roleplay opportunities around that element.