It’s always traumatic when you discover at the 11th hour that there’s absolutely no way you’re going to finish the article you’ve been working on and have barely enough time to throw together another to fill in. Fortunately, just yesterday, I came across a thought for just such a fill-in article…

I came across an interesting discussion on Reddit sparked by one of my old articles. It contained a pearl of wisdom,

As a player, every time, I get more invested in my character than in the DM’s world. This is natural. I created the character, the GM created the world. The process of playing the game is one that explores how the player’s investments and the DM’s investment interact.

– Dr Peppercorn

And that got me to thinking down a different tangent to that of the conversation.

Revelation 1

The more a GM gives players control of the game world through their actions within a campaign, the more it transforms from his initial vision into something created by all. Giving the players the opportunity to influence and shape and, ultimately, to reinvent the game world creates investment in the shape of that game world by the players.

Revelation 2

At the same time, the more influence the players give the GM over their characters and circumstances, the more investment the GM will have in those characters, and the more any GM bias will be in the player’s favor, and not in opposition.

Implications

This completely inverts the normal and fundamental ownership structure of the campaign and its elements, and is so radical a concept that it took me a while to actually assimilate it. Even now, I’m sure that there are ramifications and possibilities that have escaped me.

Opportunities for the GM to yield control

I get a lot of my adventure ideas from player suggestions – usually separating idea and implementation by enough margin that the source and hence content is not initially clear, and almost always putting my own spin on events. Nevertheless, the basic idea is recognizable after the fact.

Occasionally, when a critical fumble or critical success manifest, I will ask the player what he thinks the results would be.

When the players want to undertake some action, I always let them try it – even if, through an NPC, I have voiced a problem with their logic. I just make sure that they can bail out of the ‘missed approach’ before splattering the campaign all over the tarmac.

And if the players really make a mess of their opportunities, I always let the NPCs win – while making sure there’s a 13th hour solution available to the PCs.

Finally, if there’s a key NPC required by the character’s background who is due to appear in a near-future adventure, I will get the player to generate the character within parameters that I establish. These then become NPCs like any other – occasionally with a little tweak here and there so that the player doesn’t know everything about them – but giving the players greater opportunities to invest in the campaign world. Similarly for bases and vehicles and anything else that the PCs are supposed to create: I’ll help with the mechanics, and may contribute to the concept and design, but the prime movers are the players whose characters are responsible. It’s my feeling that this adds to the sense of the character being the originator of the item, whatever it might be.

It doesn’t always work; attempts to get the players to generate the Zenith-3 charter and by-laws in character, based on the charter and by-laws of their parent organization (which had also been written by players operating in-character), and in turn, modeled on those of the United Nations, floundered when players continually failed to respect the boundaries established. The result was a lot of interesting side conversation and very little progress. At least in part, though, this was an result of attempting to collaborate by email, and not face-to-face.

A lot of the time, traditional GMing reminds me of the Kia Sorento ad with Pierce Brosnan for Superbowl XLIX – which is still playing on Australian TV in edited form (Link is to both the Ad and a transcript). The GM starts describing a scene, and the player (Pierce) jumps in with what he thinks the GM is going to say next, only for the GM to say “No, an [X]” – with the X being something completely different. “A sniper” – “No, an owl. You come around a bend, there’s something blocking your way” – “A missile launcher, right” – “No, a moose”. The style of GMing I try to employ works with the player expectations as much as it confounds them: “A sniper?” – “Yes, in the form of a bird knocking icicles off a tree limb. You come around a bend, there’s something blocking your way” – “A missile launcher, right” – “No, a moose – but it’s charging toward you like a missile, if that’s any consolation.”

In other words, I’m continually looking for ways to give the players input into the process of GMing. I knew it worked; suddenly, I have insight into why, and that will help avoid the occasions and problems when it doesn’t.

Opportunities for the Players to involve the GM

Unless he’s (1) trying to preserve the fun of the game for everyone, or (2) speaking in character, the GM should never lie to the players. He can tell them, “there’s no way for you to get an answer to that question”, he can mislead in his phrasing, but any reasonable question about what a character knows, what a character has experienced in the past, what the character thinks the game world is like, the GM is bound to answer both fully and honestly. Even if that means telling the players “I haven’t figured that out yet”.

GMs should encourage their players to ask such questions before making irrevocable decisions. Once the players realize that the GM is doing his best to be fair to them, they will exploit the opportunity more often, giving the GM greater opportunity to influence their decisions, not by deception, but through nuance, and altering the players’ perception of their situation.

The other big opportunity that a GM has to involve themselves in a character is during construction. Always remember, the GM knows the game world at this point, while the player typically does not; yet this is supposedly a character who integrates perfectly with that world because that is where he comes from. This is the perfect opportunity to educate the player about the game world and customize the design to make the game world part of the character and the character reflective of the game world. Once the character is in play, options of this sort are smaller, more rare, and infrequent.

In fact, they come only when an adventure incorporates a revelation of some sort about the character’s background. It’s always essential to have the player on-board about and contributing to such decisions (and so the player assists in the creation of a key part of the adventure), just as it is essential for the player and GM to confer about what this means for the character and how the PC fits into the game world. Make these moments collaborative and there will be a lot less for players to complain about – and a lot more fun to be had at the game table.

Opportunities for player input into campaigns

Every decision the players make, especially those that are big-picture and strategic and about priorities for their characters, carries a subtext that the GM must observe and decode. Why? Because these decisions will hint at the directions that players want the campaign to head in, in a stylistic and metagame sense. This is doubly- or triply-true of any such decisions not prefabricated into the adventure or campaign plan.

Case in point: When the players in the Zenith-3 campaign encountered “Mortus,” they were supposed to simply find a way to get him to back off, leaving him floating around in the background (to be the central character of a later plotline in which it became possible to “cure” the character by imposing a heightened sense of Medical Ethics within him, though they didn’t know that at the time). Instead, they decided that his other-dimensional analogues posed too great a threat; the one they were faced with was just about the best of the bunch, and a confrontation between those analogues being inevitable, they wanted to shift the odds in “their” favor. They found a way to undertake immediate action, in effect triggering the future adventure immediately – an adventure that went on to consume the next six months, real time,

In the past, when I’ve discussed this situation, I talked about the impact on long-term campaign plotting and how a plan didn’t have to tie you down. This time I want to point out something deeper – the implication that my players would prefer a little more self-containment in the adventures, a little more dealing with one problem at a time instead of letting them all stack up on them. This is something that I took on board at the time, without making a great deal of fuss, and that I immediately incorporated into subsequent adventures. I won’t always be able to do it, but so much as possible, I’ve been able to make the adventures more self-contained, more often.

Some of these results may be more overt than others. The dialogue at Reddit talked about a crisis at Village A, by way of example; if the PCs, upon learning of this crisis, choose to go to village B instead, the GM has any number of options. He can have the threat to Village A show up at Village B; he can have the threat at Village A continue uninterrupted until it is a much bigger problem; or he can can simply accept that the players aren’t interested in the plot he’s dangling and have the problem go away somehow. The suggestion was made that simply having the problem occur at Village B instead was railroading of the plot; whereas, dropping the hint that the same thing was happening at Village B as Village A offers players the choice of continuing to B – accepting the GM’s hint – or turning aside for Village C, making their feelings abundantly clear.

This is all relevant to the discussion at hand when viewed from a slightly different perspective: sometimes you can’t be completely sure of what the players were hinting at (heck, sometimes, they aren’t sure and may not even realize that they are telegraphing their subconscious reactions!) – in which case, the only thing to do is postulate a theory and test that theory.

My normal preference, and certainly what I would advocate (and have in the past), is to go with the “crisis continues at Village A” option, if the PCs choose to do something else instead of, or in advance of, tackling the problem. This is both more plausible (ignoring problems in real life rarely makes them go away, but neither do problems that don’t directly affect you yet come chasing after you) and gives the characters free will. Only if the threat becomes both imminent and dire and the PCs are still reluctant to engage with the plot would I decide that (a), someone else needs to solve the problem, and (b), the players really are not interested in that type of plotline.

It’s also important to remember that everything is subjective, and that includes player reactions. The plotline the GM has in mind might be completely different to the last 3 that he’s run, but if the players can’t see that difference, or don’t perceive it as being sufficiently profound, they are going to react as though this was the fourth adventure in a row that essentially follows the exact same blueprint. I don’t know about you, but I wouldn’t be all that enthusiastic. Or interested.

In the other guy’s shoes

This all puts a new spin on the old adage about “walking a mile in the other guy’s shoes”. It’s worth doing so not merely to understand “the other guy” better, but to help change the shape of those shoes to something a bit more comfortable to both.

GMs, be alert to opportunities to get the players involved in creating game elements and adventures, and be alert to the nuances and possible implications of player decisions at a stylistic and meta-game level; if necessary, find a way to test your conclusions.

Players, be prepared to create not just the character but his personal life, his family and friends and colleagues, or to at least collaborate on these things with the GM. Try to be clear about your expectations with reference to a character’s domestic situation but not insistent, but remember that not everything will work out to your liking. Also, remember that the GM will never have a monopoly on good ideas, so if you have one, throw it out there; you never know when it will be just what the GM has been needing.

And some final advice to both: actively look, as often as possible, for ways to make the game better. Everyone benefits from such improvement.

And now, it’s back to working on the article that was intended to appear here, today….