Swiped from another source (can I get a link, Chris?):
"The role of a superior DM is NOT to tell a story
to his or her players. The DM need only provide an interesting and
challenging environment for the players to explore and then administer
that environment totally impartially. Superior players will be able to
create a character-driven, interactive story from these raw materials,
and neither the players nor the GM can tell where the story is headed."
- The Gospel of Papers&Paychecks
11 comments:
It was originally posted by Wheggi at the K&K Alehouse many moons (years) ago.
Where he got it from? Something Papers And Paychecks said in one of predecessors to the current Alehouse.
Alas, I have no link. Only an incomplete citation.
I'm not sure I agree with that mentality, mainly because at that level there's no way that you can beat what is essentially a computer server doing the same things. Things like Elite and Starcrossing are providing that experience in the sci-fi world. I don't think a DM has to actively tell a story, but people do seem to enjoy building their own story while being involved in some overarching storyline - i.e. players love NOT playing in a vacuum. Games like the old fallout series and the rebooted wasteland series try this (time limits not to fail and restart but that change the outcome of the entire fate of various people and areas, etc.), but it becomes a limitation of content creation - one area where we still retain superiority to our binary creations is in our ability to dynamically create content on the fly. In that regard, I'd agree with the original statement.
See, Charles, that's the difference that I'm trying to make here. You are referring to computer games and I've given up on them being anything more than time wasters. I infinitely prefer to sit at a table and play or run a game. I have never played with a "story" in mind. And by not having a story does not necessarily mean that there's a vacuum. I lay out the geography of the land, some legends and myths and rumors, and then let the players determine where to go. That's the main point I'm making and it's what I think the statement is making.
In fact, I believe some of the biggest problems recently with tabletop gaming is this felt "need" to have a story because computer games had a story. But that's putting the cart before the horse. Pen & Paper gaming has been around much longer than computer gaming, and computer gaming owes its popularity to the groundbreaking work of pen & paper gaming.
Of course, (putting on grognard hat) I remember when there wasn't anything other than pen & paper gaming and the only computer-ish game was Pong.
See, that's where maybe you're misunderstanding me - the reasons that Starcrossing and Elite are making inroads are because the servers essentially offer up an omnipotent DM that never argues over rules and never screws up math. The idea there is that you *are* making your own story, with combat and roleplay that isn't so tenuous (we both know that when combat gets large, combat gets tenuous, at least in anything that requires low level combat rolls). There is no more impartial a judge than a computer DM, and the only limit to the interesting environments are the actual bits of content - something that the imagination is usually better at dealing with, but procedural gen on the next generation of games seems to be trying to tackle (because computers are better than us at procedural things).
In reality, if the adventurers are experienced, I let them drive themselves. If they're not, I give them a bit more to cling onto so they can find the ropes of things, and then drive themselves. But my worlds always have time based story progressions, because I abhor a vacuum and I want them to have a sense of ... well, time passing.
But I also haven't had a dedicated group in a few years at this point, mainly because I've fallen so out of it that I'm afraid of being slow at it (it being the responses and the rolls and the calculations) when I start back up. But such is life, and eventually I'll get there.
No, I get what you're saying Charles. But I was not even thinking of including computer gaming in any form in this viewpoint because I've given up on computer gaming completely. Thus, I've not heard of Elite or Starcrossing. I mentioned Fallout and Wastelands because I've heard my students talking about those or Drew talking about them. I have absolutely zero interest in computer gaming because it cannot simulate the experience of being at a table with creative and funny people exploring a new world/dungeon/wilderness together while making fun of relationships or causing groans from bad puns or commiserating over a bad day at work. If folks like or prefer the computer experience, more power to them. But I prefer to sit at the table, and I would rather not play at all than play a computer game anymore.
As for experience vs. novice players, there should be novelty in the experience for either one. The experienced players should be thinking "how is everything connected?" while the newbies should be amazed by every new experience. Or at least, that's what I try to go for when I'm in the DM seat.
Charles, don't let the fear of looking slow keep you from running games. If you feel it's taking too long to find a rule, then make up something reasonable for the situation and move on. Only rules lawyers would care if you got it "wrong". Then they'd be able to tell you exactly where to find it in the books, if you really felt the need to look it up. Put their OCD to work for you.
Charles, by definition a computer cannot adjudicate impartially and it MUST know "where the story is going".
That's demanded by the nature of a written, compiled, tested, and debugged piece of software.
So, in the more recent sets of rules where the adventures have a pre-determined story line written into the structure of the adventure, whether there are meaningful player choices or not is a different discussion, the DM really is replaceable with a computer. Completely fungible.
In the kind of gaming Steve and I prefer, that's impossible. The computer cannot improvise on the fly when the players take their characters off the map, kill the main villain "prematurely" (assuming there is one), or do any of the million other things that entertain the DM.
A computer runs code. Code only does exactly what you tell it to do. Give it a command it can't process and you either crash the program or trigger the error handling.
You can't crash a good DM.
I will stipulate, in anticipation of the response, that many DMs suck. This is true. You can crash a sucky DM. And, insofar as the average computer game is more engaging than the average pen-and-paper game run by and average-to-below-average DM, the game will be better run and could be more fun.
But no computer game, no matter how "open ended" a "sandbox" the developers create will ever be as open ended as what I can put on the table inside of 15 minutes and keep going for decades.
I disagree completely. A computer is the most impartial judge when it comes to rolls and computations because it can't decide that 15 + 7 = 22 would be better for the story as a 24 so let's fudge the numbers. But that's the beauty in having a human DM - they can recognize a good flow and keep with it, adapt around the rules. Obviously, this is completely disallowed in tournament / ladder play, but as a student of Steve & Co., I was never one for that sort of rule lawyer play.
But you underestimate the true power of a computational cluster if you think you can crash them any easier than you can crash a human. How do you crash a human? Ask Steve - god knows when we threw 7-10 players at him at once during my heyday combat became inexorably slow. 7-10 players is a fraction of a fraction of a percent of what a cluster can handle without breaking a sweat (or lagging, for that matter).
And part of the way to tackle debugging software is to debug the generation step of content. There are games now on the horizon which have literally billions of systems you can visit - such that you couldn't visit them in a lifetime. Talk about endless scenarios, but you need sleep. You don't always feel like DMing. You get tired. You have to spend at least a large portion of your life "regenerating".
I'll be honest, I'm not familiar with the most recent version of tabletop WOTC rules. I don't use them. But then again, we're not limited to using them, and we like that. We adore, demand, revere the homebrew, the basic, the easily tuned rulesets. Having players make meaningful decisions in a sandbox environment is easy in either the CRPG or tabletop environments - it just requires a who kills who and some factions. In the newer procedural gen, they just have tradelanes and the players can do whatever they want. Entire organizations form around escorting trade, or sharing new space lane routes that appear, etc. To make such a grandiose claim as that the computer can't deal with characters off the map - they can, but most gamemakers choose not to deal with it because they don't have to in order to sell well. Most computer game players seek either a very definite end to a game, or some mode where there is no end (see even things like the GTA series). If there's a group that wants to run around hack-n-slash, there's no better way to do that than a computer because it's just hack-n-slash. I'll put even my workstation against anyone trying to manage complex battles (not to harp, but this is one area where I've always encountered the most difficulty maintaining both flow and player attention, as it only takes one player screwing up addition for things to get sloooowww). This is inherently part of the tabletop experience, but don't expect everyone to swallow that same bitter pill and claim it as candy.
Or you trigger procedural content to generate new bits. The biggest lack we have is not in physical spaces but in actual speech content - and that's being tackled by efforts in crowdsourcing. And if you want to talk about crashing a good DM, I can say that Dr. Balog has even talked about being crashed on this blog, not from player decisions, but rather player antics around the table and away from the table that effect gameplay in the meta state (people become real life antagonists).
The only comment I have on your 15 minute comment is that it's mostly bluster. People take 3 to 4 times as long just to get settled in for a game. But that's part of the table dynamic. Also, insofar as procedural gen, 15 minutes at 5 Ghz and 12 cores is a LOT of clockcycles :| - long enough that no one would play a game who's level gen took that sort of time. Patience issues? Maybe.
You keep claiming "can't". I am countering with "hasn't been done yet because $$, but is completely technically doable." We like our human element. You *really* like your human element. That's great. But don't think that because you've seen something played in a certain single way that all such instances are played in that single way. We're talking about a niche here, a niche where people aren't using CRPGs to replace good novels / films in an interactive fashion. That's the niche reserved for the Tabletop-style open-ended non-laddered RPG.
I can sense you want to turn this or are attempting to turn this into an "Us vs Them" argument. I don't care for it because there are so many ways to play RPGs but you'll be lost in finding the "right" way to play. There is no right way - there's a fun way where you feel you spent your time in a worthwhile manner. And that's about as subjective a measure as I've dealt with.
Hmmm, I think we've digressed rather far from the original quote. I do not disagree with you, Charles, about what a computer can and cannot do with the proper amount of materials and programming. But that's not the point of the quote. The point of the quote is that a good DM doesn't railroad his players with "stories". As you have witnessed yourself, I have never tried to make you follow the railroad tracks of a story. Ever. I presented the options of what you all could do and you all chose which rumor to follow.
Sure, a computer can easily handle large battles and the ridiculous amount of rules in the various modern versions of D&D. Sure, a computer can present a pretty set of pictures as you wander through the wilderness or space or what have you. And sure, it might even be set up to be open ended and not story driven. But, the unstated part of the quote is about what happens around a table with a group of players. Sure, MMO's can have you link up with folks and play in the virtual world(s) of the game. But you can't see their faces as you play. You can't share some of your Doritos with them. You can't surreptitiously touch their dice and watch them freak out. And that's part of the fun that a computer cannot match.
Honestly, I've stopped playing or running anything newer than 1st ed AD&D. I count Swords & Wizardry as older because it's just a cleaned up version of OD&D. I sold my 3.0 and 3.5 books. I have a copy of Pathfinder but it's gathering dust and I'll probably sell it when I need the shelf space. They're too rules heavy. I don't need skills or feats or powers or anything like that because I can roleplay it and let the DM decide.
So, we're not bashing your choice to use computers. If you like that style of play, more power to you. But I find that if I had the choice of playing a computer game (any type: pc, console, mmo, whatever) or not playing anything at all, I'll choose the nothing over the computer. I'm just that tired of and turned off by that style of play. But again, if you like it, more power to you.
Okay, leaving computers completely out of the conversation here, Jeff Dee posted this to some gaming forum and then again to his FB page. (BTW, Jeff Dee is an artist and game designer who's been working in the field since the early 1980's.)
Rules are tool for GMs, so they don't have to literally make everything up, and so that events generally follow some kind of logic that the players can grasp, and base their decisions on. Those are important functions, and GMs who don't understand that are liable to put a whole lot of extra work into running games where the players don't particularly feel like the decisions they make matter. That's less fun for *everybody*.
So yes, the GM's authority trumps the rules - but that can also be taken too far. The job of a game designer is to create rules which, when used as written, result in as little *need* for GM trumping as possible. Too many rule sets lean on the idea that the GM can always veto the rules, as an excuse to not offer good reliable rules in the first place. And yet -
The more nit-picky a set of rules becomes, the *less* well it performs its primary function - as a tool for the GM.
I'm arguing both sides a bit, because I believe there's a sweet spot somewhere between sketchy or non-existent rules and total reliance on the GM to make everything up, and totally overwhelming and detailed rules that try to do *everything*.
Charles, you completely missed the points I was attempting to make.
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