Suffering and Tribulations
(with thanks to Josh for the title)
Players do not always want their characters to triumph with ease. Indeed, they often want their PCs to suffer -- but on their terms. A GM is likely to be more successful in making a PC's life miserable if she takes pains not to make the player's life miserable.
This seems obvious. After all, the player is not the PC, and should be able to distance himself from the character. But, in practice, it is not obvious. It isn't that GMs set out to make their players miserable. However, GMs often spring surprises on players, and are, in turn, sometimes surprised by a player's negative reaction to what they assumed was an entertaining plot twist. Players generally have a certain amount of emotional involvement with their PCs. This is something most GMs know, intellectually, at least, but can forget to factor in to their plans. If it factored in correctly, a player's emotional involvement can work in everyone's favor.
I have been on both sides of the GM screen, except that, these days, none of us seem to use the screens. No loss. I have found that when Naomi gives me a heads up about certain things she plans to do to make the PCs' lives difficult, I feel like a co-conspirator with her against the PC, rather than like I am in an adversarial relationship with the GM. This does not mean that I have a problem every time she springs something that she does not run past me, but there are certain things that have worked better when I was given a heads up, and certain things that probably would have worked better if I had been given a heads up.
I think it is good that, in the Hub game, Marius does not wind up helpless most of the time. But, I think it important that he does wind up in over his head every once in a while, and sometimes, I try to find a way to tell this to Beth.
It would seem a fairly easy thing to do, saying, "Beth, Marius should get in over his head again." But there's a complicating factor that I hadn't been able to put my thumb on until Josh helped me identify it.
Josh's Principle: The player who asks the question should not supply the answer, whether or not the player is the GM.
For example, I may have a clear idea of exactly how much and what kind of trouble I want my Hub PC, Marius, in, and how I want him to get out of it, but at that point, I'm scripting, not gaming, as Josh explained. For it to be gaming, I might say, "Do something like X" and then let Beth decide where to take it from there. This was also true when Beth decided that she wanted her Cthulhupunk PC, Jay, to get captured by Ox. Or, if Josh asks me to come up with an adventure where his PC, Firemaker, gets to use a magical string with knots that release the wind, he is supplying an answer and having me come up with the question. Note that, even though I am supplying the question / situation / set up, it is Josh who decides when, how, and even whether to use the answer he initially specified.
If the GM sets up a mystery or a situation requiring intervention, the GM should not be the one to decide what the resolution will be. The GM should generally have a solution to problems in mind either, but that's a different issue. "Solution" does not have to mean "solution to the mystery"; it can mean "method of learning the solution that needs to be used."
This is not to say that scripting is always wrong. Avram once posed and solved the problem of one of his Cthluhupunk PCs getting another to come on an adventure. This worked because it was dealt with quickly and did not slow the plot down. It was not something to be solved in session, but something to be explained briefly, as one dots the i and crosses the t.
When Josh read the previous paragraph, he said that, in terms of the essay he wrote on shopping, Avram was dealing with something that was either Routine or Difficult, but was not Extraordinary.
In general, for the Extraordinary, whoever asks the question may not answer it. Whoever sets the terms of the request may not fulfill it. Nevertheless, when a player has a request / question, the player usually also has an ideal answer or a range of answers in mind. This may explain why GM attempts to fulfill player requests may result in frustration, since the GM's answer or range of answers is not always identical to the player's. The player often imagines the situation beyond the point where what he wants can be explained to the GM without scripting, and the GM's ideas can fail to live up to the player's imagination, although Josh notes that it can be extraordinary when the GM's ideas exceed the player's imagination -- or vice versa.
For example, suppose I want Justin, my PC in the Altclair game, to meet Leviathan. Once I tell this to Naomi, the GM, she must be the one to set the terms of that meeting, at least if we're having a game session. If I insist on being the one specifying the details of what happens at the meeting, I should probably just write a story and show it to Naomi. If she has no objection, we can agree that the story describes what happened when Justin met Leviathan. This is fine, if everyone agrees, but it is not an RPG session, and we are not roleplaying.
Thus, I may have a general or specific idea of what I'd like to happen, but I can't tell the GM most of it if I want the experience of being gm'd -- if I want the pleasure of getting what I want while not being in control. The GM has certain assumptions about how her world should work and what I might enjoy, but cannot know with certainty what I do want. It is unlikely that she will write the answer / adventure that I imagined. This would involve telepathy. She may write an adventure that is good enough and that is a different one from what the I had in mind. She may have enough of a rapport to get fairly close to my ideas. She may take things in a direction I don't like.
Again, I have been on both sides of the invisible GM screen. Naomi had a request for an adventure for Cadji, her PC in the Cthulhupunk game, and I don't think the Cadji adventure I ran worked out entirely as she would have wished. But, unless she wants to write a story and ask me if she can treat it as What Happened, she's stuck with my interpretation.
What I am describing here is a power dynamic. The player wants to give up a certain amount of control in return for being given what he wants. This is not a dynamic that is -- or should be -- unquestioned; indeed, much work done at the Forge and elsewhere, including A&E, involves questioning the nature of the GM-Player power dynamic, how it can be modified, whether there needs to be such a dynamic, and whether there needs to be a GM at all. Josh, reading early drafts of this essay, and noting the obvious parallels with certain kinds of consensual relationships best left to the readers' imagination, argued that this power dynamic is one of the key ingredients of RPGs. I am not sure. It is a key ingredient of the type of RPG that I prefer playing most of the time, but I do like other types for variety. And, the way I game is not and need not be the way everyone prefers to game.
