Threefold mismatch
Brett Evill
G'day
I have been thinking for a while about how the Threefold, which we tend
to talk about in terms of GMing activities, applies in character-play.
Simulationist character-play is fairly similar to simulationist GMing.
But dramatist character-play is very different from dramatist GMing: the
GMing has more access to structure than the character-play. And the
extreme is gamist character play, which is almost the opposite of gamist
GMing (analyse the syntheses, overcome the constraints, and excellent
despite the GM's attempts to make you equal). {Note: I understand 'game'
here to mean 'contest' or 'challenge', not 'amusement' or 'play'.}
Anyway, I suddenly realised that the style of many games is determined,
not by the GM's threefold mode alone, but by the interaction between the
threefold modes of the GM and of the players. For example, I try to run
dramatist games with basically simulationist players. They enjoy drama,
but they aren't prepared to work to get it, because they see it as my
job to provide drama. And they don't mind heavy plotting, so long as it
is tight plotting. I can arrange situations to make them act in certain
ways and they don't object any more that water objects to running in a
riverbed. They don't care if their actions are predestined by my
plotting, so long as it isn't *constrained*. (Which bears on the
reconciliation of determinism and free will, but we won't go into that.)
Our problem, I think, or one of our problems, is that I find tight
plotting too much work. I want to run dramatist games for dramatist
players. I should go out and find some.
Does anyone else find a problem because his or her players use a
different mode to him or her? What are games like where the players,
among them, use several different modes? Does anyone find the the GM's
choice of mode sets the pace, and that the players conform?
Regards,
Brett
Jim Henley
Brett Evill wrote:
>
> Does anyone else find a problem because his or her
> players use a different mode to him or her? What are
> games like where the players, among them, use several
> different modes? Does anyone find the the GM's
> choice of mode sets the pace, and that the
> players conform?
I think I'm about to find out. My current (and very new) campaign has at
least one player that I suspect is simulationist in preference (he is a
gaming newbie so he wouldn't put it in those terms) and another who is a
pretty contented dramatist (_assumes_ hard script immunity, says he's
always admired my _plotting_ talents etc.). I came into the campaign
wanting to be _more_ simulationist than in my last several, and I admit
to some trepidation about how I am going to integrate possibly radically
different player preferences.
Best,
Jim
Mary K. Kuhner
>Does anyone else find a problem because his or her players use a
>different mode to him or her? What are games like where the players,
>among them, use several different modes? Does anyone find the the GM's
>choice of mode sets the pace, and that the players conform?
I've been in these situations now and again....
I think there are three issues on which conflict is likely:
(1) The three kinds of players define "good play" differently,
particularly with regard to how PCs make decisions; they are likely
to regard each others' decisions as suboptimal (when disadvantageous) or
cheating (when advantageous). For example, a gamist player may be
affronted that a simulationist PC breaks under pressure even though no
rule requires him to do so--this is seen as stupid, like throwing a
piece away in a chess game for no reason.
(2) The three kinds of players take different kinds of responsibility
for the success of the game. A simulationist player, even if the game
is not simulationist, is unlikely to want to help the GM with issues of
drama or game balance. Dramatist players often describe the other
two kinds as hopelessly self-centered, willing to let the rest of
the group down in pursuit of their own enjoyment. On the other hand,
a simulationist or gamist player may see a dramatist player as bossy
and manipulative, since drama goals generally involve the whole group
and not just the player's own character. "What do you mean, you want
my character to be a foil to yours?"
(3) Nobody wants to compromise in the area of their greatest interest.
Simulationist players balk at introducing metaworld considerations into
their play, no matter how helpful it would be. Gamist players
aren't willing to stand by and allow cheating. Dramatist players hate
to see a potentially wonderful story spoilt by dull, or worse
disruptive, play. This can lead to horrendous fights. It is very
hard to understand why someone else is being stubborn if you don't
value the thing they are fighting to preserve.
In general, PC-PC conflict is a lightning rod for all of these
disagreements; in a mixed group you should probably try your hardest
not to provide occasion for it.
It has not been my experience that most players immediately adapt to
the GM's style; they are likely to stick to their usual one, no matter
how much conflict it causes. There are exceptions, but they're rare.
After all, a gamist player (for example) sees the simulationist's
behavior as "cheating". Even if other people cheat, does that mean
he should? He's more likely to stubbornly continue to play "well" and
resent the other players' refusal to reciprocate.
Maybe the GM can improve matters by talking about the desired
style of his game, rather than assuming that players will pick up
on it.
I had one resolute gamist in _Sunrise War_ in a party of resolute
simulationists, but actually he was little trouble; he was a very
relaxed, laid-back player and didn't worry over what the other players
did. Once in a while he'd find a broken rule and exploit it, but
I could live with that. However, we had to be careful not to ask him
to carry too much of the narrative or world-interaction weight; his
was the wrong PC to make the subject of a narrative hook, for example,
or to ask for information about world issues.
I have been a resolute simulationist in a party of gamists on several
occasions, never with good results. My character would refuse to tackle
challenges unless she thought they were tractable, whereas the other
players knew the GM was providing appropriate challenges, and felt I
was just being willfully obstructionist. If I quit doing this, I
felt that I was cheating, and I also felt extremely angry if my initial
risk estimate proved correct. I think the only thing the GM could have
done was to try to insure that each challenge looked good to my PC, so
she wouldn't balk; but that's hard. In retrospect I was in the wrong
place. If I want to enjoy myself with a roomful of gamists I should
play something other than an RPG; I am too stiff-necked to adapt.
Mary Kuhner mkku...@genetics.washington.edu
D. A. Kelly
In article <5seg27$ic...@cook.dot.gov.au>, BEv...@email.dot.gov.au (Brett
Evill) wrote:
> G'day
>
<pins>
> Does anyone else find a problem because his or her players use a
> different mode to him or her? What are games like where the players,
> among them, use several different modes? Does anyone find the the GM's
> choice of mode sets the pace, and that the players conform?
>
Certainly one gets some friction when the various party members (sounds
positively Marxist, doesn't it?) have different expectations. In my
longest-running campaign, a Space:1889 game which everyone loved, we had a
definite mix.
The Gamemaster (me) was somewhere in the middle of the "triangle" but
tending more to simulation than anything else (although simulation of the
Victorian adventure genre includes a lot of dramatic opportunities).
The players were an assortment of gamist, dramatist and simulationist
attitudes, though if there was some way to graph them, all would probably
be within a fairly small circle. Friction occurred when my simulationist
tendencies got in the way of gamist desire to "win" a given adventure.
I've noticed that some types tend to get along better than others.
"Dramatist" players, particularly those with an egotistical streak, are a
real problem as the non-dramatist players resent all the play-acting and
the other dramatists want their turn. We had one player who finally had
to leave the group because he was a mix of hyper-gamist and
hyper-dramatist, which didn't fit with me or the others at all.
It would be an excellent thing if more people knew of the triangle
typology and used it to describe themselves, their play styles and their
campaigns. It might prevent a lot of disappointments and arguments.
Cambias
Shazemar
On 8 Aug 1997 06:58:15 GMT, BEv...@email.dot.gov.au (Brett Evill)
wrote:
>G'day
>
>I have been thinking for a while about how the Threefold, which we tend
>to talk about in terms of GMing activities, applies in character-play.
>Simulationist character-play is fairly similar to simulationist GMing.
>But dramatist character-play is very different from dramatist GMing: the
>GMing has more access to structure than the character-play.
Well, not always. I play as well as run, which means I have a lot of
access to the character play.
I didn't set it up this way intentionally. The players surprised the
heck out of me, and I pulled out one of my main characters, Tzaich
Vra Dire, intending him to be a cameo appearance and plot device
to save the party from a disaster I neither intended nor foresaw.
Tzaich is one of two characters I play immersively, and the game
suddenly 'clicked' when Tzaich encountered another one of the
characters and they reacted. I played Tzaich's reaction to Andor
Ironbeard and the rest of the party in a strictly simulationist
manner, but it had plenty of dramatic tension built into it (their
people were blood enemies and Andor's player is a dedicated
storyteller).
I realize that having the GM's favorite character in play is held to
be one of the worst mistakes you can make, but for Ao it turned
out to be the spark that made the campaign inspired.
I've always found it easiest to get the effects I want by getting
directly involved in play. It's often easiest and most effective
to lead by example. There are certainly groups it won't work
with: if you have players who persist in treating the gamemaster
as an authority figure who's trying to interfere with their having
a good time instead of facilitate it, it blows up in your face.
> And the
>extreme is gamist character play, which is almost the opposite of gamist
>GMing (analyse the syntheses, overcome the constraints, and excellent
>despite the GM's attempts to make you equal). {Note: I understand 'game'
>here to mean 'contest' or 'challenge', not 'amusement' or 'play'.}
As do I; therefore I'll describe the 'threefold' as 'fourfold'. In
this I agree with Sarah. Considerations of contest and challenge
are not the same as consideration of social dynamics.
>Anyway, I suddenly realised that the style of many games is determined,
>not by the GM's threefold mode alone, but by the interaction between the
>threefold modes of the GM and of the players. For example, I try to run
>dramatist games with basically simulationist players. They enjoy drama,
>but they aren't prepared to work to get it, because they see it as my
>job to provide drama. And they don't mind heavy plotting, so long as it
>is tight plotting. I can arrange situations to make them act in certain
>ways and they don't object any more that water objects to running in a
>riverbed. They don't care if their actions are predestined by my
>plotting, so long as it isn't *constrained*. (Which bears on the
>reconciliation of determinism and free will, but we won't go into that.)
I'm not sure what you mean by 'predestined but not constrained,'
unless you're drawing a contrast between directly overriding the
characters' actions to make the plot come about, and setting up
situations in the world which naturally channel the characters'
actions in a given direction. Is that it?
>Our problem, I think, or one of our problems, is that I find tight
>plotting too much work. I want to run dramatist games for dramatist
>players. I should go out and find some.
>
>Does anyone else find a problem because his or her players use a
>different mode to him or her? What are games like where the players,
>among them, use several different modes? Does anyone find the the GM's
>choice of mode sets the pace, and that the players conform?
To a limited extent. I described leading by example above. However,
there were players I *never* managed to connect with. I'm inclined
to suspect most of them were gamists, because their salient
characteristic was that they expected the GM to challenge them
with particular problems to solve, whereas I expected them to bring
their own plot hooks and grab for any others that arose in play.
They seemed to have 'GM poses the problem; players try
to solve it' engraved into their skulls. I expect the GM and the
players to propose and counterpropose elements of dramatic
tension and movement toward resolution.
We tended to see two major reactions. Those who brought their
own plot hooks and were good at following the world model,
allowing them to build on it, found the loose structure of Ao a
heady and liberating experience. Those who didn't bring their
own plot hooks or couldn't follow the world model got hopelessly
lost, floundered around, and frequently got run over by the
plotmakers. I had a laissez-faire policy with respect to getting
a piece of the action. Those that grabbed, got.
I tried very hard to explain to the ones that got lost in the
shuffle. I don't know whether they didn't understand what
I recommended, or couldn't execute it, but none of my attempts
were successful.
There was one player I suspect of having a strong gamist
leaning who didn't get lost, and I think it was because he
had a good grasp of the portion of the world model he was
playing with (combat). I still found it an awful effort to keep
him occupied because, while he was a decent RPer, what
snagged his interest wasn't generally the same.
I think if we had been playing face to face, I wouldn't have
found it so much effort. The problem is, we play online in
real time, I don't visualize well, and the bandwidth to convey
information you have typing is much lower than you have
when you're playing face to face and can use diagrams and
gestures to convey positional information. It was extremely
difficult to convey enough information to let players think
their way out of tactical problems without slowing the game
down to a crawl, and if you don't convey adequate information
about where things are and how they're moving, what you
have is not a tactical problem but an arbitrary exercise in
how the GM stacks the dice. I never dealt with this to my
satisfaction, and instead I ended up gradually scrapping the
mechanics and focusing more on story and strategic world
modelling instead. When net technology reaches the point
where I can transmit quick sketches to my players on the
spot, my campaigns will develop a much larger tactical
element.
My campaigns have immensely strong world model inputs.
I'd expect primary gamists, social players, and the pure
simulationists to be unhappy with it; any story player who
expects a weak world model would probably be unhappy
with it. It has a reasonable likelihood of suiting storytellers
who insist on verisimilitude and simulationists who give
priority to character.
I don't change my style much these days to accommodate
players whose approaches I find truly foreign. I do it badly
and I can't keep it up over the long term. One of my best
players is more of a dramatist than I am and his taste runs
to epic, world-changing plots, whereas I like mine smaller
and grittier, with the result that our combined inputs usually
produce something in between, but that's an acceptable
sort of adjustment.
Shazemar
kera...@mail1.nai.net
http://nw3.nai.net/~keranset/
keranset.telmaron.com 5252
Brett Evill
In article
<2C0FBA1F35AAD614.D429B93C...@library-proxy.airnews.ne
t>, kera...@mail1.nai.net says...
>>dramatist games with basically simulationist players. They enjoy drama,
>>but they aren't prepared to work to get it, because they see it as my
>>job to provide drama. And they don't mind heavy plotting, so long as it
>>is tight plotting. I can arrange situations to make them act in certain
>>ways and they don't object any more that water objects to running in a
>>riverbed. They don't care if their actions are predestined by my
>>plotting, so long as it isn't *constrained*. (Which bears on the
>>reconciliation of determinism and free will, but we won't go into that.)
>
>I'm not sure what you mean by 'predestined but not constrained,'
>unless you're drawing a contrast between directly overriding the
>characters' actions to make the plot come about, and setting up
>situations in the world which naturally channel the characters'
>actions in a given direction. Is that it?
Pretty much, although the danger of my actually ruling 'you do this' is
small. What my players like is the economical, considered use of plot
devices, so that each one is well established in play before it is used to
direct the plot. They do not want plot devices to appear after they have
formed intentions that void those intentions. They want me to devise a
situation which, when their characters encounter it, will induce them to go
through an interesting and well-structured story and reach a dramatic
conclusion, with all the nuts and bolts hidden and no conspicuous plot
devices being added as things go on. Designing such stuff is hard work.
scott....@3do.com
> different mode to him or her? What are games like where the players,
> among them, use several different modes? Does anyone find the the GM's
> choice of mode sets the pace, and that the players conform?
>
Funny you should mention that. See 'The Value of Style Analysis" later in
this newsgroup.
Scott
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John Morrow
da...@cornell.takethisout.edu (D. A. Kelly) writes:
>It would be an excellent thing if more people knew of the triangle
>typology and used it to describe themselves, their play styles and their
>campaigns. It might prevent a lot of disappointments and arguments.
A potential way to use the triangle is to use it to identify which
*regions* of the triangle a player or GM finds intollerable so they
can be avoided. Yes, everyone has an ideal spot but most can have fun
in a broader range of games. And many people have whole classes of
games they would simply like to avoid and zoning them out helps
illustrate that.
A gaming group could produce a bunch of thin white paper copies of
triangles with the vertices labeled "DRAMA", "SIMULATION", and "GAME".
The participants could then draw lines on the triangle and color in
the areas they really don't like. For example, I prefer simulationist
games but I'm pretty tollerant of the game aspect, as well. I can
stand some drama but not too much of it and can stand more of it in an
otherwise simulationist game. My triangle would probably have a line
cutting from the GAME vertex to the 50% point between SIMULATION and
DRAMA with the DRAMA side of the line colored in.
"OK, so now what?" you might ask.
You can stack the pages together and shine a light through the pages
and look for uncolored regions that everyone can live with. The GM
and players should try to run in that common region so that no one is
unhappy, even if a person's ideal point isn't in that region.
There are some potential problems. First, the participants might not
be honest when they fill in their triangles either because they don't
understand their preferences well enough or because they have some
agenda for doing so. This will produce a false agreement. The second
problem is that there might not be a common area. That suggests that
you should start pulling pages until you get one. Each page is a
person. That can get messy. So long as everyone understands that the
purpose here is to maximize enjoyment, these problems could be minimal
but they should be kept in mind.
A final step might be to adress the social aspect of the game
seperately -- how personal or impersonal should things be. I don't
think that really needs to be integrated and tetrahedrons are just too
difficult to stack and shine lights through. Of course some
enterprising soul could always write a program or Java applet or
something...
John Morrow
Mark Grundy
mor...@newton.crisp.net (John Morrow) writes:
| A potential way to use the triangle is to use it to identify which
| *regions* of the triangle a player or GM finds intollerable so they
| can be avoided. Yes, everyone has an ideal spot but most can have fun
| in a broader range of games. And many people have whole classes of
| games they would simply like to avoid and zoning them out helps
| illustrate that.
| There are some potential problems. First, the participants might not
| be honest when they fill in their triangles either because they don't
| understand their preferences well enough or because they have some
| agenda for doing so. This will produce a false agreement. The second
| problem is that there might not be a common area.
This approach might work with some players, but it doesn't help me
solve my play compatibility concerns. In my case, the sim/drama/
game-balance mix isn't the key to my play satisfaction.
The key to my play satisfaction is the group -- and more
specifically, how they interact in a particular game. To a small
degree, this is influenced by sim/drama/game-balance, but it's also
affected by game background, character concept, personal relationships,
player personality and experience, world knowledge, and strategies for
interaction. While the triangle helps fix how the GM plans to play in
broad brush, it doesn't cover how the players will interact with each
other, or what the GM will be doing in specific, key situations, or what
the game will actually be about.
For instance, say it's proposed to play an investigative game like
Cthulhu in a strongly dramatic way. We peer at each other through our
triangles and discover that we all don't hate dramatic games. Okay, so
we play. Then I discover that the players are all hams, and are too
busy playing off each other to follow the plot. The GM has already
established a dramatic contract with these people, and what they are
playing is dramatic (if irrelevant), so he can't get them out of the
coffee-shop with a shoe-horn. Too late, I realise that with this group
I'd much prefer to play a sim-driven game, which would help damp their
hammage and help the GM move the action along.
So, attractive though the idea is to establish group contracts
visually, I wouldn't be buying little coloured set-squares off the shelf
of my local roleplaying store. :) Instead, I like to ask lots of
questions first, or as happens more often these days, do a one-session
one-shot to get the feel of how the game might play.
-----
Dr Mark Grundy, DCS, Phone: +61-6-249 3785
Education Co-ordinator, Fax: +61-6-249 0010
CRC for Advanced Computational Systems,
The Australian National University, Web: http://cs.anu.edu.au/~Mark.Grundy
0200 Australia Email: Mark....@anu.edu.au