This entry is part 4 in the series Basics For Beginners (and the over-experienced)
Part-4

Frame: Freeimages.com / Billy Alexander;
Dice Image: Freeimages.com / Armin Mechanist;
Numeral & Compositing: Mike Bourke

I’ve been asked a number of times what advice I have for a beginning GM. This 15-part series is an attempt to answer that question – while throwing in some tips and reminders of the basics for more experienced GMs. I plan to complete the series in blocks of three articles, with fortnightly spacing.

I’ve read a lot of nonsense and enlightened theory over the years when it comes to players. It all seems to posses a grain of truth and yet to somehow miss the mark. Here’s the real truth: a lot of the activities involved in an RPG can be entertaining and viscerally satisfying, with each individual enjoying some parts of the process more than others. The single most enjoyable part of the process will vary, from week to week, from character to character, from campaign to campaign, from GM to GM, and from player to player, and articles that attempt to define, analyze, or otherwise codify a “type” of player are always equally misleading and valuable as a result. And that makes them dangerous to use as a guide to what your adventures should contain.

I put most of the problems down to oversimplification and attempting to pigeonhole complex personal characteristics. And yet, there remains that nagging sense that such classification systems seem to make sense, at least partially.

Another problem is that most of these classification systems fail to distinguish causes from effects. If my character is primarily designed for combat, my day won’t be complete unless there is some combat – anything else generally means that I’m not getting my share of the spotlight. Players can and will tolerate a limited amount of that, especially if they are engaged in other ways, but it’s a little unfair to characterize someone as a “power gamer” because their focus is on their character’s combat effectiveness if that is defined as the central thrust of the character archetype that they are playing. Some of the characterization of the players that such classification systems provide is self-fulfilling prophecy, in other words.

The most enjoyable part – factors

Before I go too far, let’s look at those different factors (and one or two additions) that I have mentioned in a little more detail.

Day-to-day variations

Sometimes, a person will feel like blowing off steam; sometimes, they will enjoy putting on someone else’s persona; sometimes, the intricacies of a plot will fascinate. People change with their moods, and those are affected by their state of mind and the experiences they have had in their last week.

These also have a fundamental impact of the characters that they create – if they felt like just letting rip with something destructive in the week when character creation takes place, they will build a combat monster. Thereafter, they are typecast in that role – which is fine if this mood is a regularly-recurring theme within their personality, but not so useful if that particular week was an aberration.

Campaign Variations

Some campaigns will lend themselves to different types of engagement. Others are more universal. If you’re running a zombie apocalypse. there won’t be much room for being a generous, giving person, or for deep politics. Shooting things, hacking at things with an axe or chainsaw, and blowing stuff up – that’s going to be far more prevalent. Nor will there be a lot of scientific insight. On a sci-fi campaign, science, logic, and deduction are pretty much going to be expected week-in and week-out. Fantasy needs to feel fantastic, a sense that anything can happen within the constraints of the campaign concept parameters. Superhero campaigns require the PCs to be the good guys on a regular basis. Pulp campaigns need to have a strong action-adventure element, and Pirates campaigns have an even stronger need to swagger and swashbuckle. Each of these campaign types (and more besides) may appeal to an individual for different reasons at different times, and be totally off-putting at other times.

Character Variations

I’ve already touched on this. Some characters have a natural function within the group setting, and what the player will enjoy more than anything else is fulfilling that natural function in a way that speaks to their personal predilections. If the roleplayer in the group has the ‘combat monster’ of the party, he will want to bring that roleplaying element into the combats (whether he realizes it or not).

When the character’s role within the group aligns with the players personal predilections and the character is regularly given the opportunity to perform that group function, the player will generally enjoy playing that character more than if there is a misalignment in one of these ingredients.

GM Variations

Every GM is an individual person with their own strengths, weaknesses, tastes, and style. Once the players recognize those attributes within the GM, they will find that certain types of game activity play to those strengths and produce a more enjoyable game, while others will simply frustrate. Players who sign up for one of my campaigns, for example, know that there will be great depth within the campaign, and it will never be simply a combat slugfest; that plot and story will be the fundamental drivers of everything that happens; and that characters will be rich and complex in characterization (often more-so than my ability to express those personalities in-game). That means that combat monsters tend to find little challenge in my games, because the combats are often easier to win than they technically should be. Those strengths and predilections inform the choice of genre that I make, and the capacity for enjoyment that is available within the game for any particular type of character. The more that the player’s choices play to my strengths as a GM, the more engagement there is between us in-game, and hence the greater the potential enjoyment that results.

Adventure Variations

Some adventures make the players want to do certain things more than others – a particular villain might get under their skin, so that all they want to do is flatten him, for example. Or the GM may bring a character to life so vividly that interacting with that character becomes a primary reward.

Player Variations

Players do tend to have particular preferences for all sorts of things, from different adventure types to different group roles to different character archetypes. Some players enjoy making sure that each of their characters is radically and fundamentally different to each of the others; some like to stand out from the majority of the group, seeking spotlight time through distinctiveness; some have a marked predilection for playing endless variations on the same basic theme or themes.

Existing Classification Systems

Before I go any further, I should provide a slew of links to the different player analyses that I found in researching the subject. I’ve already voiced my criticism, but they all contain an element of truth that makes it difficult to dismiss them out-of-hand. Any GM who wants to satisfy his players should at least look them over before proceeding, so that we are all proceeding from a common foundation. All links will open in a new tab/window.

Glen Blacow in an article in Different Worlds #10 (Steve Jackson Games, 2001), formulated a list of 4 types of player. Robin D. Laws, in Robin’s Laws Of Good Game-mastering, expanded this to six, and subsequent contributors and discussion have added a seventh. A number of variations have been proposed in different articles and publications through the years. You can read the list of seven, and their defining characteristics, at Darkshire.net.

EnWorld has a thread which extends and modifies these definitions into ten types.

Darkshire.net have attempted to codify player types according to three more fundamental properties: Dramatist, Gamist, and Simulationist, combinations of which yield multiple player types, which is sometimes referred to as the Threefold Model. This took place within a newsgroup discussion of player types on rec.games.frp.advocacy. You can read about the three player types on Darkshire’s website, and it’s well worth reading; in many ways, it represents the state of the art of understanding players.

Ron Edwards has devised an alternative formulation in a 6-chapter treatise, called the GNS Theory, and it is equally a contender for “state of the art” honors. You can read it (each of the chapters, plus the introduction, have a separate web page) at “The Forge“. It’s longer and a bit more technical than the Threefold Model.

Wizards Of The Coast developed a 2-axis analysis of player types based on customer surveys to help better target their products. It’s appealing in that any individual can occupy any given point along each of the axes. You can read about it and view the graph on Sean K. Reynold’s website. The graph is fairly self-explanatory, and yields a five-fold classification system for player types. I definitely think this is on the right track in contemplating player types as being on a continuum between polar extremes, and recommend readers take a look.

Amagi Games list no less than 16 types of pleasure that players may receive from their gaming experience on this web-page. I’m not sure about the names for the different types of pleasure and where they have originated, and at times the writeup can feel like it’s talking about computer games more than RPGs, but there’s a lot to commend this list. If your campaign can provide all these different kinds of pleasure, it’s probably a winner – but I suspect that this is an extreme that’s only achievable in theory. Nevertheless, being aware of these is definitely a step in the right direction.

A richer classification system

I don’t think it’s fair to be so critical without having something better to offer as an alternative. I have devised a classification system that I consider the most definitive on offer.

It’s based on three premises:

  1. That different things can appeal to the same person when placed in a different context;
  2. That game properties can be defined only in terms relative to either an extreme or its extreme opposite that are based on the types of game activities that yield a particular type of pleasure, and in which any given value between and including those extremes is equally valid in terms of providing enjoyment for some potential player;
  3. That any given individual doesn’t occupy a point on any given axis, but instead occupies a region; if you were to rate each axis on a 0-10 scale (with 0 and 10 being the two extremes, and 5 being the exact midpoint), a given individual might enjoy that aspect of gaming from 3 to 6, say, or 2 to 5, or 8 to 9, or even 2 to 8. Boundaries can be strict, but they are more likely to be fuzzy – which means, taking a 3-6 range for example, that the ideal is actually 4-5, if a game, an adventure or a day’s play rates as a 3 or a 6 in that respect they can still enjoy the game if they are in the right mood, but that aspect of the game is beginning to intrude on that pleasure, so they won’t enjoy it quite as much; outside that range 1 step again – a 2 or a 7 – they can still have fun, but that is despite the relevant aspect of the game, and potentially even diminished by it; and one step further than that is definitely a step too far for their tastes. See the diagram below if that’s not clear.

range on axis

Based on those premises, I have identified 9 axes of game content. Some exist in isolation, others can only be understood in the context of one or more of the others, but they all fit the criteria established. They are:

  1. Immersion in Character: from Persona to Tactician
  2. Immersion in World: from Participant to Observer
  3. Immersion in Concept: from Thinker to Action Man / Actor
  4. Immersion in Drama: From Actor to Action
  5. Immersion in Conflict: From Gritty to Clean
  6. Immersion in Plot: From Novelist to Jock
  7. Immersion in Interaction: From Second Skin to Omniscient
  8. Immersion in Amazement: From Fantasy to Simulationist
  9. Immersion in Heroism: From Altruist to Self-indulgence
Players Are Complex Creatures

Before examining these in detail (or at least, defining them), I wanted to point out that players are people, and people can be very complicated. It’s entirely possible for someone to like one particular activity in one particular context and dislike it intensely in another. For example, getting deep into one particular character’s psychology and thought patterns might be a lot of fun because of the personality or originality of that character, while the same player finds the exercise dull with characters that are more “stock”.

Or, the player might normally be a roleplayer of the “Actor” variety, enjoying interaction with NPCs, but in one particular Genre, they enjoy the role of being more of an Action Character who does things because the subjects of discussion don’t interest the player and are therefore tedious.

You can have players who enjoy the sense of wonder in Fantasy but find the science in science fiction to be overly technical and uninteresting – and so prefer a character who doesn’t have to deal with those technicalities and can just get on with creating mayhem on the battlefield.

In technical terms, if you map the axes in 9-dimensional space (something that’s only possible in a computer or in theory), such players would have multiple “locii” or bubbles of preference – and some would require additional labels, because there’s nothing explicitly labeled “genre” in the 9 parameters.

Don’t fall into the trap of pigeonholing people too explicitly!

One word of warning before we begin – a caveat, if you will: I’ve tried not to let my personal style and tastes interfere with an objective position in discussing these player/game traits, but may not completely succeed. Assess them with that in mind, and don’t let your own preferences and capabilities color your judgment as to the validity of any of these approaches. I may not be able to decorate a cake but can still recognize and appreciate the artistry of those who can!

1. Immersion in Character: from Persona to Tactician

The Character Axis runs from deep immersion in Persona to virtually zero immersion in Persona, in which the world is viewed more as a tactical playing field held at arm’s length. If it makes no difference what sort of character you are playing, and everything is viewed as a game or a tactical exercise, then you have a very low Immersion in Character.

Game system choice can be critical to this axis; some game systems mandate more intensive mechanics and those naturally drag campaigns toward the Tactician extreme. Other games explicitly reward actions taken in-character, so that no tactical decision should ever be made without consideration of the personality of the character, and they pull campaigns in the other direction.

Genre is less significant on this axis, but GMing style and strengths are a definite factor. The more focus the GM places on detailed settings, the more a campaign will tend to favor a Tactician over a Persona. The more the focus is on plot or personalities, the more a campaign will favor a tendency to Persona, i.e. exhibit a strong demand for Immersion in Character.

2. Immersion in World: from Participant to Observer

There is a lot of overlap between this axis and the last one. A Participant interacts with the game environment, engages with it, manipulates it, and directs his involvement with it, seeing it as a constantly-evolving place; an Observer sees the world as a static diorama, where nothing changes very much, and where most details that are not immediately relevant to the situation at hand can be ignored completely.

Genre is completely irrelevant to this axis, except insofar as a particular combination of world immersion may be favored by an individual within specific genres and not others; this is more about how adept the GM is at bringing the game world to life around the players and making it responsive to their interaction with it.

A lot of advice makes the erroneous leap of assuming that strong immersion in world is better than weak; this is only true if your goal as a GM is strong immersion in character, because the world provides the context for character. It is much harder to achieve strong immersion in character if you can’t achieve strong immersion in World, and the combination appeals to more players than the opposite combination. A lot of gaming advice focuses on achieving a stronger combination as a way of improving a campaign as a result, but there are more varieties of campaign (and of player) than that, and they are all equally valid to those who enjoy them.

3. Immersion in Concept: from Thinker to Action Man / Actor

Some players enjoy expanding their understanding of a universe and its’ intricacies; others don’t like deeply conceptual or philosophic engagement and want to be doing something. Note that the “something” may be either roleplayed interaction or simulated physical activity, ie Acting or Action; either is equally valid.

4. Immersion in Drama: From Actor to Action

The distinction between the two exists in the next criterion, Immersion in Drama. A strong immersion in drama is more about the players being akin to improvisational actors in a radio play; a weak immersion in Drama is about more visceral modes of enjoyment, whether that be rolling a lot dice, or beating the odds, or getting a high total, or simply thumping something until it says “ouch” – repeatedly and very loudly.

This is one area where player engagement tends to be all over the “map”; they may have a relatively weak preference one way or the other, most of the time, but in the case of any given individual there will be exceptions everywhere along the axis. As a result, the most successful adventures and campaigns tend to be those that demand a blend of the two approaches – a time for talking (in character) and a time for playing the action hero or doing something.

Nevertheless, GMs, campaigns, and even genres have trends one way or the other along this axis. Most Fantasy and Western trends toward the Action; Most Sci-Fi averages around the middle but only by swapping from one extreme to the other; Most Pulp also favors the extremes, though the action elements either occur with greater frequency, greater intensity, or both, and the actor elements tend to be about getting to the next action sequence. Super-spies follow much the same pattern. And so on.

GMing style also introduces a trend; I enjoy, and am good at, GMing Drama, and enjoy less, and am less skilled at, Action. My campaigns naturally play to my strengths.

Here’s a really good test: If you can successfully GM a game in which you are given stats for the NPCs but no personalities, you are strong at Action; If you can successfully GM a game in which you are given personalities but no stats, you are strong in Actor. As you can tell from the recent examples that I have posted, I sometimes have minimal stats or none at all for the featured villains in my Superhero campaign, so I fall naturally into the latter group, as I said earlier. I can only roleplay a stat block by translating it into character terms, and will frequently ignore a stat block if it is contradicted by my visualization of an NPC’s personality.

I have seen other GMs who were/are the complete opposite, utterly incapable of running a combat sequence without first defining the numbers, but excellent at GMing once they have done so.

5. Immersion in Conflict: From Gritty to Clean

Once again, there is a level of synchronicity between this axis and the last, so much so that a lot of people treat it as being a further extension of the Immersion in Drama characteristic. Under that model, the definitive points on the Drama axis run “Actor – Abstract Action – Realistic Action” or even “Actor – Cinematic Combat – Simulationism”. I think these are entirely separate qualities, and that Cinematic Combat and Simulationist Combat are equally valid traits or trends for a campaign; the preceding axis (Immersion in Drama) relates to the relative importance of combat to the game session, regardless of the mode of representation within the game of that combat.

To emphasize this, I have deliberately “reversed the polarity” of the extremes so that the extreme that most people think of last is the one listed first.

Gritty combat is combat where you can smell the cordite and hear the wheet of the bullets as they fly past your ear, and every detail has to be delineated carefully and precisely; “clean”, “abstract”, or “cinematic” combat doesn’t worry about the sand between your toes or the specifics of caliber and muzzle velocity, it focuses on “look and feel and SPEED” instead. As I wrote last year, in my 3-part series on Cinematic Combat, they both have their place, times when one will serve better than the other.

So this is about trends. If 99% of the combats you run are detailed and precise, you tend toward the gritty end of the spectrum; if 50-50, you’re in the middle; and if, most of the time, you incline towards drama and the cinematic style of combat, you’re at the “clean” end of the spectrum. Similarly, player preferences can trend this way or that.

Genre can be surprisingly important to this preference. The more trouble a player or GM has getting his head around the defining characteristics of a genre – the science in Sci-Fi, the fantastic in Fantasy, the supernatural in Call Of Cthulhu – the more they will want the numbers and impacts to be nailed down so that they have a greater measure of control over them, and that pushes the preference toward the gritty end. The more readily they can absorb those things, the more satisfied they will be with a “cleaner” approach, permitting the advantages of the cinematic style an opportunity to make themselves felt.

An example from real life: A former player of my acquaintance, Dennis Ashelford, once came to me with a character concept for one of the spin-offs derived from my main Superhero campaign: a character who can alter the Permeability and Permittivity Constants of the Universe. He had mentioned the concept to others and drawn only blank looks (which I imagine a number of my readers are also sporting right now); I was the only GM he knew who “got” the implications instantly. “That would let you change the speed of light in a vacuum in a controlled manner, which would alter relativistic effects and also – assuming that the energy total in a beam of photons remained constant – would change the amount of that energy that would be expressed in either shorter or longer wavelengths. Ordinary Light could be used to trigger remote controls, you could alter the electrical potentials between two materials so that even turned off at the switch they were activated…” and went on to list another half-dozen applications of this power, Dennis growing more excited with every word. No-one else “got” it; they would have needed to have those applications spelt out in black and white on the character sheet in order to run a game with that character. I got it, but had him do that black and white spelling out for three reasons: one, I assumed that he would have different levels of control over the different applications; two, I assumed that some would take more out of him than others; and three, it simplified the “interpretation of circumstances” part of the process of administering combat, freeing that part of my mind up to process other equally-worthy matters.

6. Immersion in Plot: From Novelist to Jock

I have to admit that I struggled to find an appropriate term for the extreme that is the opposite of “Novelist”. “Jock” isn’t quite right, so don’t read too much into it. (I almost named it “Audience” but that’s not quite right, either).

When the storyline matters, that’s immersion in plot, and it requires that the players be participants in the shaping of that plot before the storyline can matter; if they are mere observers, following the linear plots of the GM, then it doesn’t matter how interesting and compelling the narrative is, players can’t immerse themselves in it. But that’s not to say that campaigns with low levels of Immersion in plot are bad or inferior; that’s only true in the case of this one specific cause of the low level of Immersion. If the plot is nothing more than a dialogue- or combat-delivery mechanism, is simply a navigational route into whatever trouble the PCs have to battle this week, that’s a low immersion in plot, because you can ignore the plot and not miss anything important.

I sometimes think that this axis can also be equated to the inherent degree of situational evolution within a campaign. The more things change, the more plot-driven everything is, and hence the greater the demand for immersion in plot if the campaign is to be successful. If the campaign is more “monster of the week” in nature, and the rest of the game doesn’t evolve very much if at all, then the plot doesn’t matter and there is consequently a low immersion. This equates “high continuity” with “Novelist” and “serialized” with “Jock”. But I have come to the opinion that the relationship is more complex than that, mostly as a result of my recent article, “The Rolling Retcon: how much campaign history is fixed?,” which took a good hard look at the concepts of continuity and serialization.

7. Immersion in Interaction: From Second Skin to Omniscient

There is a very strong resemblance between this trait and the second one listed, “Immersion in World”. When there is a high immersion in Interaction, you wear your character like a second skin, and everything is treated as though it were happening to you personally. When there is a low immersion in Interaction, it’s as though you were watching the game unfold from on high, with virtually no involvement at a personal level.

The resemblance between these extremes and those of “Immersion in World” (Participant and Observer, respectively) almost led me to remove this from the list, but before I did so, I had to ask two specific questions: Could you have a player who enjoyed roleplaying his character in a game in which the world was not well-delineated? and, Could you adopt an omniscient overview perspective on a world that was well-delineated, that engaged you? The answers were yes, and ‘not sure’, respectively – and that to me shows that there is a difference in the two types of Immersion even if one extreme of one (Observer) was virtually indistinguishable from one extreme of the other (Omniscient). More, it occurred to me that truly strong engagement with the game world would distract to some extent from complete immersion in character (and vice-versa); and that was confirmation of the decision.

The two can be rendered synonymous by defining strong immersion in World as “strong immersion in world as the character perceives it”; so the difference between the two is the difference between first- and third-person engagement in the world. That, in turn, defined for me the combination of strong engagement with the World and an Omniscient degree of engagement in Interaction – changing that “not sure” to a “yes”.

Immersion in Interaction is very important to me; this was the aspect of gaming that initially appealed to me as a player. The notion of becoming someone else, who didn’t have the same problems and baggage that I had in my personal life at the time, not only gave me relief from those problems, it was an irresistibly compelling source of pleasure, and one that no other activity available to me had to offer. If I’d been taught to play a musical instrument, I might have become a professional musician; if I had been given an opportunity to write something for publication, I might have become a professional novelist; if I had been presented with an opportunity to join a theatrical association, I might have become an actor; all three of those would offer the same appeal. Instead, I found gaming, and here I am.

Which is a way of saying that this axis tends to be very one-sided-or-the-other, very polarizing – there are those who can’t enjoy playing without a “Second Skin” focus, and those who can, with very little overlap between them. More than any other single factor, the games I have played in and not enjoyed had a low threshold for Immersion In Interaction.

When your character is ‘having a moment’ that you want to roleplay and the GM shifts the focus to someone else, the degree of frustration that is felt corresponds to the strength of your desire for Immersion in Interaction. It could be slight (low need) or intolerable (very high need) – and that makes this one of the most critical traits in terms of matching content to player desires, and hence the success of a game. For some players, in fact, virtually everything else can be on ‘the wrong side of the spectrum’ and the game will be acceptable, even enjoyable, provided they get their immersion-in-interaction fix. For others, it’s less important.

8. Immersion in Amazement: From Fantasy to Simulationist

‘Wait-a-minute,’ I can hear someone say. Didn’t you use the term “Simulationist” when describing the extreme of high immersion within Combat?

Yes, I did, but only in the context of a term that other people might apply. From my perspective, Simulationism embraces both gritty, detailed combat AND a low immersion in Amazement.

‘Fantasy’ is also a slight misnomer, just to compound the situation.

Immersion in Amazement is about the pleasure that is to be derived from appreciating ‘Cool-without-explanation-being-necessary’ to ‘I need to understand it before I can treat it as anything more than colored lights’. A high fantasy content might be “Engage the warp drive, Mr Sulu” or “I cast a spell on him” or “the bridge gives way” – it’s look-and-feel over content. A low fantasy content might be “Engage the matter-antimatter space-warp drive” or “I target my spell using the law of similarity and the clay effigy I made earlier” or “the load over the south-eastern pillar is too great for that rotted structure to sustain; with a tearing, ripping sound, it gives way, collapsing the span of the bridge from that end like a ribbon falling into the river below, and scattering those crossing it into the water like nine-pins.” Mandatory specificity of detail, no matter what the genre, is simulationist; the greater the trend toward Fantasy, the more of those details that can be, should be, and will be, glossed over.

9. Immersion in Heroism: From Altruist to Self-indulgence

The final factor is the one most closely allied to the mechanics of some game systems, and taken for granted in others. It’s also potentially the easiest to understand.

I thought about calling this “Immersion in Morality” which – in some respects – is closer to the an accurate description. Some players can only enjoy playing characters with a certain minimum level of darkness, while others are fine with very black-hearted characters. Some are only comfortable in a world in which morality is very black-and-white, while others enjoy the nuancing of shades of gray.

I also considered the possibility of a tenth axis, but decided it was unnecessary; self-indulgence was inherently amoral. I can’t think of any games in which you have both a strong moral code and PCs who routinely break that code; only when there was an absence of investment in being the hero were players free to walk the darker side, either as outright villains or as the morally ambiguous. Nor could I think of any way of structuring a campaign in which moral issues were central that did not posses a strong immersion in Heroism, because they all focus on questions that don’t matter to the morally ambiguous; it is only the strength of the moral code that gives such questions their force.

A strong immersion in Heroism produces the pleasure of doing good deeds, being heroic, and receiving the acclamation that is accorded to heroes. A weak immersion in Heroism produces the pleasures of self-indulgence, of not needing to try to do the right thing all the time. They can co-exist within the same game continuum because even in a campaign that gives license to self-indulgence, the characters can be compelled by the needs of personal survival to act in the common interest – but the characters are only interested in acclaim to the point where they can ‘spend’ it for their personal advantage.

The Practical Application: Classification Of Game / Adventure

Readers might be tempted to think that they should decide each of these characteristics for their campaigns so that potential players can judge their level of interest. Not so. That would mean that every adventure was a slight variation on a theme, and would become dull rather quickly. In fact, I would contend that no more than six of these should be predetermined characteristics of a campaign, and possibly as few as four, leaving the remainder to combine in various ways as different adventures.

Ah, but which four, five, or six? That’s a more complex question.

If there is any point of unanimity amongst your prospective players about what sort of game activities they enjoy, that should be a predetermined characteristic, and should be supported by the game system where that makes a difference. But that will probably only account for one or two of the axes, maybe three.

Next, we have the GM’s own preferences and skills to consider. If you aren’t good at certain types of game, your campaign design will reflect that and de-emphasize those aspects of your skillset that less developed. If your plots tend to be relatively simplistic, you would not expect strong immersion in plot. As a general rule of thumb, any characteristic in which you are reasonably comfortable with both extreme options should be fixed, if it isn’t already. Normally, that would account for three or four of the axes, but there will almost certainly be some overlap with the first criterion of judgment, the players. So it could be as few as one, and is unlikely to be more than three additional fixed determinants.

Finally, its back to the players; if there is no unanimity, but a strong preference toward one extreme or the other, make up the difference up to those six predetermined factors. The rest are where you will derive the variety within your adventures.

The Practical Application: Recruiting Players based on preferences

The alternative approach, when you have a large pool of players from which to recruit, is to specify only the items decided by GM preference, and by campaign concept, and leave it to those players to decide whether or not the idea holds sufficient appeal.

There is always a strong temptation, if someone has left an existing campaign, to recruit someone to replace them who enjoys the opposite of the departed player in terms of whatever their reason for leaving might have been. That means that if someone left because Investment in Heroism was not high enough for them (and they didn’t like not being able to trust the other players implicitly), seeking a player who enjoys the morally gray or the dark side might be a priority. If a character left because they walked the morally ambiguous line and the other players demanded a high Investment in Heroism, the desire might well be to recruit someone of like mind, even if they didn’t fit other areas of the campaign.

The Practical Application: Designing Campaigns / Adventures based on preferences

I love Immersion in Concept, and a lot of my campaigns focus heavily on it. My Co-GM of the Adventurer’s Club campaign, Blair, has a deep dislike of what he calls “Cosmic” adventures, ie adventures which explore the Concepts in which the campaign is immersed; he would far prefer combat or character interaction. He tolerates a limited amount of Immersion in Concept because he enjoys the character interaction that is always an equally-strong force within my games (and likes playing his character). Which means that I need to focus on character interaction in any adventure that is primarily about Immersion in Concept so that he has something to enjoy. My other players enjoy Immersion In Concept, either in moderation, or in two cases, quite strongly, so Blair is the one that has to compromise a little. It’s just another aspect of sharing the spotlight on an adventure-wide scale.

This is an example of using these axes to determine the requirements of an adventure or campaign around the desires of your players. By leaving the Axis of Immersion In Concept free-floating, or even only trending to one extreme, I am determining that some of the adventures will demand a high Immersion in Concept, while others will demand almost zero. Some adventures will be “cosmic”; others will be down-to-earth.

My campaigns tend to have a strong Immersion in Plot; players who are less interested in that type of Immersion will either need something else that strongly appeals to them about the campaign, or they will leave – if they even join the campaign in the first place.

It’s also worth stating that absolutely none of these decisions are final and set in stone. You can have one adventure in a blue moon that invests heavily in a look-and-feel element that contradicts a more routinely-simulationist approach, for example; but, using these axes, you will know that the adventure will need to be especially in accordance with player preferences in several other areas to compensate.

That’s how to use these for adventure plotting: Decide on the basic premise and outline of the adventure, and then look at what additional requirements are imposed by the need to satisfy everyone else at your table.

Player Surveys

At their heart, what most player surveys is trying to get at are answers to the questions “I do/don’t like a strong Immersion in ____”. The problem is that most of them require interpretation, and possibly discussion; and not all players will take them seriously. They are very hard to make useful, and even harder to make interesting, and even harder to actually use.

What’s more, it’s not enough to make changes based on survey results, you have to be seen to make changes. Speed of response is critical; if you aren’t going to change things as radically as necessary immediately, you may well cause more trouble than you solve.

So, if I were to design a player survey these days, I wouldn’t ask a lot of questions the way some of them do. I would specify the campaign genre, and possibly the premise, and then simply draw ten bars across the page, with the extremes labeled 0 and 10. The first question asks how much the genre and premise appeal to the respondent (0 to 10); the rest simply list the types of immersion and ask how much the player enjoys games that emphasize that immersion. You could also label the extremes, if you wanted to. The final question is which of the above ten items is most important to you?, or perhaps, “which two”.

That takes most of the interpretational problem away, and permits an immediate response. It gets right to the heart of the matter.

Zones Of Intersection

If you were to plot the average responses from such a survey against the ratings fixed by the GM, you would find that there would be some areas of overlap, and some that don’t. Doing such a comparison on an individual basis might well be labeled “what [player] will probably enjoy most about the proposed campaign”.

Those areas of overlap are what I mean by the term “Zones of intersection”, and they form a reliable guide to how healthy that combination of players and campaign will be.

Zero Zones Of Intersection

No-one will be all that interested in that campaign, or anything resembling it. Something fundamental needs to be different, probably several somethings.

One Zone Of Intersection

This campaign will start and sputter to an extremely rapid halt. Some players may be so turned off by it that they might leave the hobby; they will certainly find other things that interest them more.

Two-to-Three Zones Of Intersection

This is a mediocre campaign. It might not thrive, but it can be habit-forming – if you emphasize the things people like over the things they don’t. Sooner or later, though, there will be an adventure that doesn’t hit the mark for anyone. If it happens sooner, the campaign will probably die; if it happens later, momentum may enable you to coast through, learning from the experience.

Four-to-Five Zones Of Intersection

This is a typical of a good campaign. Four-to-five common areas in which the campaign appeals, and making sure that each player has something in each adventure that they like, and you have a good chance of success in the long-term.

Six Zones Of Intersection

This is just about the perfect campaign. There’s enough that people like that you can explore just about any adventure, even contradict one or two of the zones of preference from time to time, and still present an enjoyable adventure. At the same time, you aren’t so constrained that there is no variety in the adventures you can tell, stylistically or in tone. It’s also rarely achieved.

Seven-to-Eight Zones Of Intersection

While it might seem like this is even more perfect than six, in reality this number of Zones Of Intersection indicates problems that will prevent longevity. If longevity of campaign is not a goal, then go for it! The problem is that there is not a lot of variety of adventure possible within the one or two areas of flexibility. That means that you will regularly be violating one or more player’s preferences with your adventure designs, effectively reducing the number of actual zones of intersection to “any four or five at a time” of the promised “seven to eight” – and, after a while, it begins to feel like the campaign is forever “just missing the mark” and is just B+ in grade. Good, but the promise was greatness, and this will only deliver a fraction of the time.

Nine Zones Of Intersection

If unfulfilled promises are a problem for those promising greatness, what of those who are promising gaming Nirvana? For a single-shot campaign module, this might be the gold standard to aim for; the rest of the time, the campaign won’t last – but will be epic while it does. Ultimately, though, it will be remembered not only for that greatness, but for how it all fell apart.

Why? Maintaining each of these standards is an effort for a GM. The more they enjoy an approach, the more of that effort they can tolerate, but it still takes its toll; and having nine zones of intersection sets too high a standard to be maintained.

The Prep-time relationship

Here’s another way to look at it: You can maintain three zones of intersection without a lot of effort – a single night to plan the next week’s adventure and you’re golden. But you will have to improv a lot.

Each additional zone adds a week to the basic prep time (assuming that you can only spend one night a week on prep), and every multiple of three doubles the existing prep time burden before that addition.

  • Four zones: an extra day for a total of 2. Some weekly games can manage this, most fortnightly games can manage it.
  • Five zones: three days. A few weekly games can manage, some fortnightly games. If the GM wants a social life beyond gaming, this campaign can only happen monthly.
  • Six zones: seven days. A weekly game requires the full-time attention of the GM; a few fortnightly games might manage, but realistically, you’re only going to be ready to run once a month. And your social life will suffer.
  • Seven zones: eight days. That social life has just been obliterated. Game prep is what you do on the weekends, every weekend. Not even doing game prep full-time is enough to sustain a weekly campaign any more.
  • Eight zones: nine days. That’s as good as saying ‘running the campaign fortnightly is a full-time job’ – because days spent playing don’t count for game prep.
  • Nine zones: 19 days. That’s as good as saying ‘running the campaign once a month is a full-time job.’

The reality is that whatever target level you set, shortcuts will be needed, whether you want to take them or not. So aim for one level less than your available prep time, and that’s the quality of game you can reasonably hope to provide.

Will there be exceptions? Inevitably. Both this and the Zones Of Interaction analysis in the preceding sections are nothing more than rules of thumb.

Here’s the bottom line:

To some extent, it’s true (and always has been) that the best way to prepare for being a GM is to learn how to be a player first – then analyze what you liked about how the GM did their job and why they have made the choices they have made. What needed greater emphasis? What was over-done?

But even if you’ve never played an RPG in your life, you can still succeed as a GM if you learn one basic lesson about players and made it central to everything that you do when behind the screen (physical or metaphoric):

Give every player a focus on something they enjoy in each and every game session, and your game will be a success. Predefining some aspects of the game to achieve that in the majority of cases frees your attention up to the task of being creative in all the other areas. The rest takes care of itself.

And that’s why the nine-axis theory is a better tool for understanding players: because it’s all about what those players want, and what you are going to be comfortable delivering as a GM, day-by-day, campaign-to-campaign, adventure after adventure, one day’s play after another.

The next part of this series will focus on Characters (I hope I can think of something to say!) and will appear in a Fortnight’s time – I intend to alternate this series with standalone articles.

On a completely unrelated note

Dirk of Shades Of Vengeance has been kind enough to send me review copies of several of the company’s products, including one that they are currently seeking funding to publish through Kickstarter. I haven’t had time to do more than skim the Kickstarter page but what I’ve seen is intriguing. The art looks amazing, if the game is at the same standards (and it looks to be) then this is definitely worth attention, and the premise is interesting. If you are interested in Sci-Fi based gaming (whether it be political games, action-adventure, or even something verging on the superheroic) make sure you check it out. They have already reached 200% of their funding target and there are still 13 days remaining in the campaign – so you are as guaranteed a product as you can be, it’s only a question of how many stretch goals will be unlocked!

I’m not sure when I’ll get the chance to do a more substantial review, but I’ll try to sneak one in over the next week or two. In the meantime, go take a look, and back them if you like what you see as much as I do – and tell them that Mike at Campaign Mastery sent you!



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