What with the flurry of activity over here at Elwood Heavy Industries and my rampant ADD I’ve been barely keeping up with my regular Tuesday night game let alone even taking the slightest look at working on my own campaign, which has already gone through dozens of plot revisions in my head. I really enjoyed working on the first part of the campaign, although running it felt like holding a tornado by its tail, and really would like to get cracking on the next section.
Our GM for the moment is running his second game and I have been really enjoying what he has worked out not just as a player but from the perspective of writing a campaign. He does a great job of setting up a basic plot, along with some devices and alternate endings and solutions, and then letting us run loose with it. It never feels like it runs on rails but he has a skill for keeping us moving towards the ultimate goal all the while making us feel like we have had a challenge that we ultimately overcame after a long struggle. Balance is key: provide challenges but make it enjoyable. For myself, in GMing I find the most enjoyment out of providing intellectual puzzles and I struggle with finding ways to incorporate that into the game itself.
The specific challenges I seem to be facing as a GM are the structure of the plot and the world. I find that I am creating these infinitely complex plots and sub-plots without properly designing structures to navigate the players through the world and more importantly, will it even be enjoyable? I think that the problem is that I am approaching the role of a GM as more of a novelist rather than a puppet master. Not terribly fair to the players as they are there to interact with a world not play out scripted events and rolling dice to add an element of interactivity. The other problem with developing vast plots is that the players, like people in the real world, are often minor players and that large scale happenings are made up of a cast of millions. How, as a GM, do you convey a sense of purposefulness without the plot devolving into triteness, hence, “You are the last of your kind,” “The fate of the world rests on your shoulders,” kind of tripe.
Depth and complexity to the world and the players purpose in it are the two things I really want to get across. To have the players face difficult decisions, gray areas that challenge their characters chosen alignment and background, and to have tangible consequences arise from those decisions. The first part of the campaign that I ran was essentially a modified fetch quest, “Find out why A is happening and make sure that solution B is applied.” Not very dynamic nor terribly epic feeling but my goal was to use that first dungeon as a means to springboard the party into a real conflict, one with many different sides and to hope that the party’s differing motivations would allow for some real struggles in unraveling their purpose.
As I sit back and think about the above I ask myself, “Is that fun for the players?” Sure, there are bound to be people out there that enjoy games with plot twists, ones that abound with puzzles and challenges that go beyond the dice but do the people I game with want that? Added to that is whether or not a game like that can work well in a once a week four hour window. I’m not sure. As a player I try and keep game notes so that in a week or two I know approximately where we have been but it is not unusual for me to forget who we’ve talked to or even where we have been. It is like I suffer from dissociative amnesia and am entering a fugue state once a week. Would a complicated plot do the same to my players and thereby lessen their enjoyment?
Tough questions and it comes back to balance. I suppose that the best course of action is to work out the world, its cast of characters and the overarching plots and then select a small trajectory for the players to travel. To treat their journey as a thread in a tapestry, one where there are many intersections but where the game is clear in terms of motivation and purpose. To simplify their role in whatever convoluted and complex world I am tinkering with. Certainly, something to chew on.
Here’s a link dump of some articles over at Treasure Tables that I’ve been reading over (and over):
Worldbuilding Ideas from Principia Infecta
Prep and Running Games: Oil and Water, or PB and J?
The other place that I have found a LOT of good info for GMing is at http://www.roleplayingtips.com, Johnn Four’s weekly contribution to out hobby. I’ve fallen out of practice reading them recently, but he has quite an archieve of good articles and reader input.
I’ve given up on GMing. I love the world creation aspects, but I’ve acquired the nickname “TPK [Silas]” due to my inability to balance encounter level vs. player impulsiveness.
Roleplaying Tips is excellent, I currently subscribe to the email but am eying the RSS feeds as it is a little more to my pace of reading.
As for being Capitan TPK, I like to think you run campaigns with classic boss battles ala Legend of Zelda and the Metroid series. Battles that frustrate and flummox but keep us coming back. Plus I love the mulligan option you throw it to keep us happy, sort of like going back to a saved game.