What do you enjoy about RPGs?

[somecallmetim]

Apropos of nothing, I was thinking about the different things players and GMs get out of playing RPGs. I am aware of the “gamist/narrativist/simulationist” division from the Forge site, and while it definitely has some applicability, I feel like each category contains elements that could be profitably broken down further. And some elements don't feel like they are well contained by those distinctions. Here are the things I could think of that I enjoy, in roughly least-to-most essential order for me:


(By the way, I play a character so rarely, that I really don't know what my preferences are from that side, so pretty much all this is as a GM.)

• Challenge: I suppose that this maps pretty closely to the “gamist” element. It is fun to give the players something they can solve (as opposed to their PCs solving it). It isn't a main element but it always seems to add a little sense of satisfaction when they pull something off in a clever, in-character way. My players do not enjoy tactical combat and the threshold for frustration is pretty low, so I try to avoid making player cleverness a requirement to advance. And of course, I try to avoid creating situations where there is only one solution, or not enough details to formulate a clear plan. (I took Steven Marsh's TORG story to heart.) When I add those elements, I try to make them sidelines, where the players can engage them if they have an idea about the situation, or otherwise can move on without feeling like they “failed”.

• Scene Building: I really like creating memorable descriptions for characters and scenes. Gaming is not a visual medium, so conveying sufficient detail without talking the PCs ears off requires finding a few strong hooks they hang a scene on. But there is a lot of satisfaction in seeing the players eyes widen when an impressive or overwhelming scene is described, or watching them wrinkle their noses in response to a purely verbal description of a smell. Evoking a strong sense of fear (in horror) or wonder also works on this level for me.

• Character Development: Watching the PCs grow into more realized versions of themselves, or watching them change in response to their environment and develop relationships with each other and the NPCs is very important to my enjoyment, and is the number one most important thing to my wife when she is playing (she primarily appreciates scene building and storytelling as ways to experience her character's reaction to these elements). A character going from a detailed but static point, to a dynamic arc with lots of connections to the world around them is awesome.

• Storytelling: Getting a cool story is great. Whereas my wife tends to remember character's responses, I remember the stories more as a visual narrative like a movie or comic. Having a compelling description is great, but weaving the character responses and scenes together into a story that feels satisfying and thematically complete in its totality is really great to look back on.

• World-building: This is my primary joy in running games. Part of the thrill of gaming is letting my players see the world I've constructed for them. Blending in elements, adapting rules, and forging connections between seemingly disparate elements is almost always the first way a new campaign occurs to me. Developing story hooks places for PCs are essential to making a decent game, but for me they are almost always a post-facto revision of the original idea. Very seldom does a narrative structure occur first.

So, those are my thoughts. What you enjoy in gaming, and what do you do to make sure your players enjoy themselves?

[zorg]

First and foremost, I enjoy spending time with my friends. I wouldn't play a RPG with a total stranger, or someone I didn't care for - for me, it's mostly a social activity.

Second, I enjoy the escapism. I have an ordinary job in an ordinary world. From time to time, I want to have a weird job in an exciting world full of fantastic ways to blow off steam, where I can summon a demon, or fire a laser cannon to solve problems. Real life is sadly lacking in such opportunities.

Cooperatively telling a compelling story, usually within certain genre assumptions and according to specific movie tropes, is added fun, and definitely important. But it isn't what's bringing me to the table.

[whswhs]

Just as a preliminary note, so far as I'm able to understand the Forge terminology, which isn't very, it seems to me to be counterintuitive: What they mean by "N" isn't all that close to what I mean by "narrative," and what they mean by "S" is flatly contradictory to my understanding of "simulation" (as the term is used by people who perform simulation professionally). I will use the ordinary English words in a nontechnical sense; I will use "G" and "N" and "S" for the technical Forge ideas—or rather, refrain from using them, as I don't want to talk about Forge categories here.

Your list includes a lot of things that I think have value. But it also seems very much to be a literary or cinematic list, one that emphasizes aspects that are also found in narratives that are composed in a fixed form. I tend to like some other aspects:

*Stunts: I find it really cool when my character, or someone else's character, is able to pull off some spectacular feat. This is doubly so because there is an actual chance of failure and of things turning out badly.

*Improv: I really like coming up with good, entertaining dialogue, especially the sort that gets quoted later by the other players. I like seeing spontaneous character interaction that goes somewhere unexpected. I've had it happen that I came up with a line for an NPC who was interacting with one or more PCs, and that brought the NPC to life in the players' minds—and that's a big payoff. (Of course I could promote the NPC to quasi-PC myself, by using my GM Powers. But it's vastly more cool if the players do it.)

*Emotional resonance: Some of the very best moments in gaming for me have been ones where the players were emotionally affected by the scenes being played. I've been on both sides of that transaction, and both are a delight. My current Call of Cthulhu GM, for example, excels at coming up with vivid dreams for my character, dreams that draw on emotional issues in his background.

*Socialization: Gaming is a social activity, one where we see each other face to face.

*Comedy: Some of the very best bits of gaming for me have been character interactions that achieved good comedic timing.

There may be others, but those come to mind readily.

Bill Stoddard

[ULFGARD]

As a player:

• Crowning moments of awesome.
  Let's face it, it's cool when you try something that is difficult, risky, or even just plain crazy-stupid and yet prevail (due to luck, skill, genre convention, etc.). Just last night two of our characters did a duck and roll on the top of a Zepplin from a float plane after climbing down a rope. That's crazy-stupid-awesome, and we both survived that challenge, albeit just barely (used Luck to avoid going over the side).
• Moving the plot forward.
  Finding a way to split meta-game conventions, player knowledge (against character knowledge), good role-playing, etc., to move things along (whatever the plot requires) is fun. It's the part that makes it collaborative fiction insofar as something is happening -- GM creates a scenario, players act through their characters to react and deal with it. Something no single ONE of them could have produced occurs and a story evolves and plays itself out in real time before those at the table.
• Playing with imaginary toys.
  Okay, having cool gear is, well, cool. I have my real life toys, but it's highly unlikely I'm ever going to pilot a starship, or deck myself out in tactical gear to assault a fixed position, or strap on armor in preparation of fighting for honor and glory (and my life) in front of thousands of cheering Romans. But I can obsess over my characters' gear and get into minutia, looking for anything that gives a little gain, anything that might be useful, or anything that I can think of a creative use for out of the box. That's a "let's pretend" version of getting a new action figure was when I was a kid, or getting an erector set, or legos, or...
• Getting into the character.
  And this is the coolest part -- the part that I simply cannot get from GM-ing: getting into character to such a degree that my character starts to make decisions that *I* think are stupid. And this isn't just the head scratching "what would my character do" questions, but rather something much deeper, to the degree that I have internalized something of the personality of my character. Suddenly he (almost always a he for me) is doing things that I would never have thought of doing before I created him and got to know him. He has transcended the paper and become a full fledged character, even if the paper statistics define what he can do in the game -- that's just the "physics" of the world he lives in. The character then possesses a certain "reality" far beyond that of a playing piece.

As a GM:

• World building.
  This is one of the most attractive things about GM-ing. Long after a fantasy world has a map I'm still defining parts of the world. And it is collaborative -- if a player comes to me and wants to play a character, I try VERY hard to find a way to do so. It may be "my" game world in the sense that I created it initially, but without happy players, it's just me sitting alone. So I follow Kromm's advice and find a way to make it happen, even if that requires a bit of modification of concept for the player (and for my game world) by way of negotiation. Still, there's NOTHING so satisfying as creating a guild that serves as a backdrop for an adventure or character, a locale with which the players become familiar, personalities with whom they interact regularly, etc.
• NPCs
  Speaking of personalities... I like making characters. So there are pretty much three modes of NPCs in a campaign I run -- the "back of the envelope" version (which usually exists ONLY in my mind unless there's combat, and even then it's just something like a HP number), the "back of the envelope + name & characterization", and a full fledged sheet. If someone gets a name, they generally get some characterization and start to become something with an exclamation or question mark over their heads. And the more often they come up, the more characterization they get. If it seems likely that knowing their capabilities will be valuable, I do a full character write-up. By that time I usually have the "feel" of the character, so fleshing it out takes little time. All of this is intensely entertaining.
• Scenarios.
  Finally, thinking of scenarios -- that is, adventures and arcs -- is fun. I usually have a starting scene plus a timeline of what's going on and a couple of sketches of likely scenes set out in my head (and possibly fleshed out much more) before I run an adventure. I also try to look up any rules that I expect will come up in play, be they magical, combat oriented, etc. All of that prep is fun. But nothing can compare to the actual play.
• Play.
  Yes, everything else was about preparation or quick in game note taking. But the interaction between GM and players as well as the in-game character interaction is fun. The side-bars and jokes at the table make for a mood enhancer or lightener depending on the tone of the game and/or adventure. I can recall seeing players almost in tears over the death of a cherished NPC. I can also recall many a joke used to lighten the mood of "grim" or "gritty" adventures. And genre convention jokes or references enhancing the experience of MH, Fantasy, etc., in a fashion that just doesn't work in other media.

So that's what I like.

[Kromm]

Socializing, mainly. I am a very social person. Every month, I attend/help out at a cabaret and have friends around for a cocktail evening at least once; every week, I dance tango and go out somewhere with friends; but at least once a week, and often more frequently, I game. It's one of my more regular, reliable social activities.

To a lesser extent, I enjoy play-acting: voicing people who aren't me, trying to immerse myself in their values and approaches to life, and making very different decisions from the ones I would make in reality. As the GM, I try to ensure that each NPC has a clear personality and a recognizable voice. As a player, I try to "become" my PC.

All the rest is "That's nice, I guess . . ." territory for me. Formerly it was not, but as the saying goes, "If you like laws and sausages, you should never watch either one being made." The same goes for RPGs. Working on RPGs for 8-10 hours/day for 19+ years has left me fairly neutral on appreciating them as games. What matters to me is the excuse to be around other people and play a part. I could leave out the dice, rules, and stats and not miss them at all.

[Turhan's Bey Company]

Originally Posted by Kromm

Socializing, mainly.

This is my #1, though ironically for the complete opposite reason: I'm not a very social person. Games are one of a relatively short list of social entertainments I enjoy.

Beyond that, RPGs offer a unique mix of sub-recreations. There's socializing and game-playing and play-acting and world-building and escapism/wish fulfillment and so on. It's not that there's a particular thing about RPGs which makes me enjoy them. Rather, it's a well-balanced combination of elements.

[johndallman]

Originally Posted by Turhan's Bey Company

This is my #1, though ironically for the complete opposite reason: I'm not a very social person. Games are one of a relatively short list of social entertainments I enjoy.

Beyond that, RPGs offer a unique mix of sub-recreations. There's socializing and game-playing and play-acting and world-building and escapism/wish fulfillment and so on. It's not that there's a particular thing about RPGs which makes me enjoy them. Rather, it's a well-balanced combination of elements.

This is pretty close to what I enjoy, but there are a couple of things I'd add:

A large-scale mystery, that underlies the plot arcs. As a GM, I like creating and embellishing this, and seeing the players gradually understand it. As a player, I like figuring it out, piece by piece, expecting to follow some false leads but gradually understanding the truth of the created world.

The experience, as both GM and player, of becoming a character or NPC. I've become a rather "method acting" kind of role-player over the years, rather than someone who thinks about and deliberately constructs actions and lines, and this makes the experience more intense.

[whswhs]

Originally Posted by johndallman

A large-scale mystery, that underlies the plot arcs. As a GM, I like creating and embellishing this, and seeing the players gradually understand it. As a player, I like figuring it out, piece by piece, expecting to follow some false leads but gradually understanding the truth of the created world.

I actually, as a GM, like something that is almost the converse of this: Introducing a variety of thematic elements, seeing which ones the players pick up, looking for a common underlying theme that they can all reflect, and finding a way to bring the campaign to a focus on that theme. I really don't feel I've ended a campaign properly if it doesn't come to such a summation in its late episodes.

Bill Stoddard

[johndallman]

Originally Posted by whswhs

I actually, as a GM, like something that is almost the converse of this: Introducing a variety of thematic elements, seeing which ones the players pick up, looking for a common underlying theme that they can all reflect, and finding a way to bring the campaign to a focus on that theme. I really don't feel I've ended a campaign properly if it doesn't come to such a summation in its late episodes.

We're not actually that different. While I can state the mystery for my current campaign ("Why are the Infinite Worlds like this?"), its explanations are still evolving after 50 sessions of play, under the influence of the PCs' interaction with the setting.

[Armin]

Originally Posted by Turhan's Bey Company

This is my #1, though ironically for the complete opposite reason: I'm not a very social person. Games are one of a relatively short list of social entertainments I enjoy.

Beyond that, RPGs offer a unique mix of sub-recreations. There's socializing and game-playing and play-acting and world-building and escapism/wish fulfillment and so on. It's not that there's a particular thing about RPGs which makes me enjoy them. Rather, it's a well-balanced combination of elements.

This is pretty much exactly me, as well. I don't even really have anything to add to it.