Information in Prospectuses

[whswhs]

Originally Posted by Brett

It seems to me that as the person who has to do most work to prep a game, I ought to have at least some say in what game I get to play. If I want to play the campaign I described in my example I ought to be allowed to say so and to recruit players who also want to play that game. I ought not to be obliged to run The Shield contrary to my inclinations, and without warning until game time just because the character-players want to play that rather than the game I offered. Worse yet, I should not be obliged to run The Shield to indulge one player, contrary to the wishes of everyone else involved.

I agree with this. When I handed out the prospectus that had Salle d'Armes on it, it said

Salle d’Armes: In pre-revolutionary France, a master fencer teaches his art to a number of students, mostly from aristocratic families, though students with unusual backgrounds will be possible with a good character story. Player characters will be talented but not highly trained as yet. The focus of play will be divided between combat and social encounters, including carousing in the streets, rivalries with other schools, and displays of savoir-faire in aristocratic gatherings. Play style will be mildly cinematic, but with realistic injuries. Rules system: GURPS Martial Arts.

Now, I was fairly specific about the limits on player character abilities; I defined a default character (and two of the six PCs were default characters); and I indicated what skills would by needed by listing the types of activities that would take place. In particular, since everyone would be a fencing student, everyone would have to have a defined Smallsword skill. I was willing to allow a character to be a complete beginner (we had two PCs with skill 7 and 8, though the one with skill 7 had Broadsword-13), but if someone had built a character who didn't have a defined Smallsword skill, even at default, or who had a personality that gave them no motives to study fencing, or who would be too antisocial to spend any time with the other students outside of class . . . I would have asked for a redesign. I wanted characters built to concepts that fit the kind of action I wanted to run. And I wanted players who, having signed up for a swashbuckling campaign, would swash a few bucklers when occasion arose.

It's sort of like the way disads work. You can take Lecherousness (15) or Bad Temper (9), and roll to see if you succumb to it when occasion arises. But if you try to resist a failed roll, or minimize the behavior that results, I'm going to suspect you of not having wanted to play the disadvantage in the first place, and of just having taken it for the points. And likewise if you only play the trait when absolutely forced to it by a failed roll, and do nothing the rest of the time to demonstrate a streak of rage or lust.

In my campaigns, characters have freedom of choice. But when players sign up for it, I expect them to build characters who will freely choose to do the sorts of thing that the campaign is about. I'm willing to accept both some flexibility about methods, and some creativity about the PC's specific motives for getting involved; but I don't want a PC whose characterization resists the whole premise of the campaign.

Bill Stoddard

[Agemegos]

Originally Posted by Crakkerjakk

All us Jarheads are interchangeable, eh?

Yes. At least to the extent that it is militarily useful and drill sergeants are able to make it so, right?

Oops. Sorry.

[Agemegos]

Originally Posted by whswhs

It's sort of like the way disads work. You can take Lecherousness (15) or Bad Temper (9), and roll to see if you succumb to it when occasion arises. But if you try to resist a failed roll, or minimize the behavior that results, I'm going to suspect you of not having wanted to play the disadvantage in the first place, and of just having taken it for the points. And likewise if you only play the trait when absolutely forced to it by a failed roll, and do nothing the rest of the time to demonstrate a streak of rage or lust.

It is possible to view many advantages and disadvantages as the terms of a contract between the GM and a character-player. The character-player has free control over the actions of his character, but he enters into a binding commitment that the character will behave as set down in her advantages. Similarly, the GM has free control over the actions of NPCs, but he enters into a binding commitment that they will behave as defined by the character's Status, Rank etc.

You might say that character-players in your campaigns have free choice and the ability to enter into binding contracts.

In my campaigns, characters have freedom of choice. But when players sign up for it, I expect them to build characters who will freely choose to do the sorts of thing that the campaign is about. I'm willing to accept both some flexibility about methods, and some creativity about the PC's specific motives for getting involved; but I don't want a PC whose characterization resists the whole premise of the campaign.

Hear! Hear!

This being the case, it is prudent to include in any prospectus an adequacy of information about what sort of PC deeds each campaign will be about.

[Crakkerjakk]

Originally Posted by Brett

Yes. At least to the extent that it is militarily useful and drill sergeants are able to make it so, right?

Oops. Sorry.

No worries, as they say down in your neck of the woods. :-)

Sir Pudding has been eloquent and thoughtful in this thread, I'd be a fool to take offence for such qualities causing a person to mistake the poster for me.

[Agemegos]

Originally Posted by trooper6

I can say what game we are playing, set up the rules, and stack the deck, but once the cards are dealt, I can't dictate how the players are going to throw their cards.

Agreeing in advance that everyone is going to play Whist and not Hearts is not even the same kind of thing as playing everyone's hand for him.

Whist only works if everyone tries to maximise the number of tricks that he takes with his partner. Whereas Hearts only works if everyone tries to avoid taking tricks with hearts in them. If a group of friends sit down for a game of Cards, and three try to play Whist while the fourth tries to play Hearts, the result will not be an enjoyable game. Everyone has to agree on what they are going to try to do for a game of cards to work.

Sir-pudding is offering a range of choices: Bridge, Hearts, Gin, Poker. He might end up with a pretty serious Bridge game one night a month and a beer-and-pretzels Poker game on another night, with the people who want to play Bridge playing Bridge, and the people who want to play Poker playing Poker. If he were less specific, and simply offered four different dates for games of "cards", he might end up with two groups neither consisting of four blokes who wanted to play the same game. Some fellows who wanted to play Bridge would end up in a game of Gin and vice versa. If someone got into a Poker game and insisted on playing as though it were Gin there might even be a punch-up.

It's not a case of "I'm gonna play your cards for you". It's not even "You have to come to my place and play Gin." It's a case of "If you want to play Poker and drink beer, come on Friday. If you want to play Bridge and drink Martinis, come on Saturday.".

[whswhs]

Originally Posted by Brett

It's not a case of "I'm gonna play your cards for you". It's not even "You have to come to my place and play Gin." It's a case of "If you want to play Poker and drink beer, come on Friday. If you want to play Bridge and drink Martinis, come on Saturday.".

But I think it's clear that everybody is doing that, and the continuing argument is really more over the semantics of the word "unavoidable."

Bill Stoddard

[trooper6]

Originally Posted by Brett

Agreeing in advance that everyone is going to play Whist and not Hearts is not even the same kind of thing as playing everyone's hand for him.

For me. Telling a player that they will have to engage in combat, that combat is unavoidable regardless of if it makes sense for the PC at the time, if it is a smart move, if it is what the PC would do--that is akin to playing everyone's hand for them.

Originally Posted by whswhs

In my campaigns, characters have freedom of choice. But when players sign up for it, I expect them to build characters who will freely choose to do the sorts of thing that the campaign is about. I'm willing to accept both some flexibility about methods, and some creativity about the PC's specific motives for getting involved; but I don't want a PC whose characterization resists the whole premise of the campaign.

What makes Bill's approach to GMing great for me is that he does allow flexibility about methods and creativity about motives.

This means in that fencing game he is speaking about, we all made fencers, people who would be likely to get into fights. But even in that campaign that was geared towards fighting, fighting was not generally unavoidable...nor always a good idea. My character was almost always up for a fight, as was another character...and that ended up with us about to duel each other at one point! A third character talked us down. There were moments where characters were at fancy parties and being goaded...but fighting there would have been a really bad choice. Characters avoided or engaged in combat depending on the ingame reality of the situation. There was one combat that was less avoidable than the others...when three of the characters (including mine) were out late drinking, then while walking home in the dark got ambushed by some thugs. Now...we saw them coming just before they got to us...which left us with some choices...about what we wanted to do. My PC, a prideful fellow, and two lady fencers. He wasn't going to run...because he was prideful...and would have wanted to protect the women. One or two of the women *could* have tried to run...but they didn't. But they could have, and I never got the feeling that if the one PC who was brand new to fencing had run away in a clever way that Bill would have thrown in a deus ex machina to stop her. The problem then became that she knew that if she had run away, things would go badly for the rest of us...so she stayed--but it was her choice at that moment.

For me. I like combat, talking, etc to be opportunities. And then I like the players to react to those opportunities as their characters would at the moment. I can tell the gang we are playing poker, so make poker players...in my reading that means, I can tell the players we are playing a game where everyone is a beat cop, a la Hill Street Blues but in a particularly violent area where things are very dangerous. But I'm not going to tell them that combat will be something they have no choice over. Because sometimes the cops may want to deescalate some of those encounters.

Even if the campaign frame was that they were hitmen for the Mob, where it is there ingame job to kill people, there may be times when they want to vary the means, or jobs they don't agree with in game and then have to wrestle with what they want to do. And what they decide to do might be to avoid the hit their boss gave them. How they decide to avoid it would be a big moment for the PCs. Do they fake the kill and spirit away the target so they can keep working? Do they do investigation to prove that the target was targeted wrongly? Do they defy their boss and declare refusal?

If I'm running a mob hit man game, I'm not going to allow a player to create a pacifist character. But they do have choices in that game...and there are consequences for those choices. And mob hit man is far on the extreme. Your average party of Dungeon Delvers could, rather than killing creatures and taking their loot, decide they want to be sneaky and avoid most of the monsters in the dungeon until they get to the big bad boss at the end. I'm not going to force them to kill their way through the dungeon if they've come up with a way to avoid that.

Similarly, I'm not going to force the PC to fall in love with NPCs or to have their PCs get into relationships--unless their is coercion in the actual game world.

[whswhs]

Originally Posted by trooper6

Similarly, I'm not going to force the PC to fall in love with NPCs or to have their PCs get into relationships--unless their is coercion in the actual game world.

Well, that's true. But, on the other hand, both Diarmuid and Neville had Lecherousness, and neither of them ever made moves on Blake, who was a Very Beautiful Ishtar with Voice and Sex Appeal-12. And when Tim had Blake act provocatively toward Diarmuid, Eben did not roleplay Diarmuid's reactions more than the absolute minimum. I put this down to Eben being a guy who didn't want to act a romantic scene opposite another guy . . . but then he probably shouldn't have taken Lecherousness (twice!), because that's a predictable consequence of that trait.

I don't believe in "your character slept with Fred's character and now she's pregnant." But I will describe the perception and/or the emotional reactions, and ask the player how the character deals.

Bill Stoddard

[Michael Cule]

A title.

A game system.

A paragraph (maybe three or four sentences) describing the proposed game.

That's all I have at the start of most campaigns so that's all the prospectus I feel like delivering.

[whswhs]

Originally Posted by Michael Cule

That's all I have at the start of most campaigns so that's all the prospectus I feel like delivering.

Well, you've seen what I have. Are my descriptions substantially more detailed than yours?

Bill Stoddard