OSR and the New GM

#41

I don’t know this game, but that GM mechanic strikes me as akin to the odd intro to Dragonlance DL 1 (Dragons of Despair) where Tracy Hickman talks about the GM role as playing a diety in the adventure, directing the story.

This, “The Hickman Tendency” is one of the places where classic play breaks down as it encourages the GM role of storyteller rather then adjudicator. When the GM acts to protect or maintain a narrative it encourages both forceful illusionism (aka railroading) but also antagonistic GMing. Now this isn’t to say Ruutyama does this, but I do wonder.

There are mechanics and ethics of play that push back on those tendencies, most effectively I think the story buy in and expectation setting of genre emulation and mechanics for shared narrative. Of course these also work against open world play and center meta play (e.g. “This is a cowboy story, what happens next in such a story?” v. “How is my character, Bad Bart to handle these Rustlers?”). Not to say this is a bad playstyle, or that fusion isn’t possible, but it’s a big departure from classic play.

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#42

No, Ryuutama is not adversarial between the GM and Players. Th GM-character-as-Ryuujin is (speaking meta-textually) simply a vehicle to explain/color/codify the role. The majority of the GM section (the book is divided into “seasons,” so Spring is the Character Creation, Summer is the skills section, etc.) is given over to adventure creation and adjudication. It is explicit in this regard but there are many, many elements that encourage collaborative town and world building and even combat that feel quite “indie.” Which is not to say that anything couldn’t turn into something railroad-y, but not more than any other game couldn’t.

This discussion has inspired me to reread it this weekend. For any hypothetical RPG university course, I would definitely put Ryuutama on the syllabus.

Well, then, you are certainly looking for something quite specific, and I doubt that would be a feature in most, if not any, game rulebook. I would point to the supposed audience for any given game, which defaults to players who want to take something off the shelf (even if it’s an ongoing campaign) because friends are coming over the next day and we have a few hours to narrate our characters through an adventure while we eat unhealthy snacks.

Yes, one can find cookbooks that both give a recipe and also break down the science and choices for any given technique/procedure, but that’s for a different, more experienced audience that is ready for that level of knowledge and experimentation. Most recipe books, on the other hand, are simply so that you can cook up what’s the specialty of that title/author for your family and friends.

I would guess it would be difficult to find something that is very basic for beginning GMs that also has theoretical-ish explanation at the same time as those are two different audiences and purposes.

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#43

I’m not saying it exists, only that I wish it did. When I learned to bake bread I didn’t seek out a book that held my hands and delivered a rote formula. I sought out books that gave me some amount of theoretical grounding in what I’m doing. My favorite book presented the layman’s guide in the main of the text, and provided deeper context and more of the science in lengthy appendices. The book was aimed at both home bakers and professionals, and it really is exceptional.

Take something even more complex, learning to design software, the first chapters were easy and tutorial-like, but then turned around and showed the deeper concepts that made it work. And throughout the book I have in mind, concepts were enriched with each new chapter while also building on the previous lessons and concepts. Iterative, almost concentric, teaching which is rooted in both theory and practice is how I learn best. I may be unusual in identifying that I want something with this kind of depth, but I doubt I’m unusual for benefitting from it. It may be silly to ask this from a gaming hobby, but I also know how I learn and am skeptical that I’m really all that strange. Then again…

#45

The conversation is so long already, it’s hard to jump in and feel relevant.

Testimonial: For me, a lot of my actual “OSR” learning came from some specific places…

1 source texts (not a retro clone, but Mentzer Basic & Moldvay Basic)

2 blogs and GM’s who thought about praxis and procedure not just aesthetics and maxims (Gus, and Brendan and Ram in particular)

3 and stay with me on this… the “story game community” who’s focus was different depending on the day or the idea. Design, Aesthetics, Praxis, Outcomes, Intent etc.

I agree that the original texts are interesting just as much for the design gaps as the actual design. My personal stance is that, even for, and maybe especially for starting GM’s…the best system is small, has a design that will make itself apparent with some small amount of use, and that has a TON of holes in it.

(WoDu plug here)

The backstop for this must then be access to another human or a community of people or a pool of other texts that demonstrate pretty easily how some design plugs one of the holes.

That’s why Knave is cool, or original Maze Rats (an Into the Odd hack ) or World of Dungeons. Just take the illusion of training wheels off right at the start.

Testimonial:
I’d been GMing Savage Worlds for about 2 years while trying to understand the first D&D that I’d ever played and rooting around G+ and discovering the clones and all that. One day I realized I’d started solving some of my SW GM problems using D&D systems. They worked better for me. That’s when I felt I was first turning a corner into ENJOYING being the person running. When Dungeon World and it’s community came along, they helped me realize that the GM is just another player who has a modified role. That let a lot of weight off me and helped me personally synthesize ideas like agendas and principles and taking turns and make them part of how I run ANY game.

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#46

I find this very relevant, for what it’s worth.

At this point I’m focusing more or less on Into the Odd because conceptually it clicks with me and the author has quite a few posts which talk about how he approaches play and running the game. But I’m also dipping in and out of other approaches and bringing them back and thinking how I can make use of them generally.

Long term I feel like all these game systems are something like opinionated toolkits on how to approach “crawly” adventure gaming. I like opinionated approaches—they’re far more likely to lead to insights and understanding than a system that tries to please everyone. And very rules-light approaches tend to highlight what they most value through what they include and what they leave out.

Your thoughts about a small system with an obvious design and lots of holes really clicks with me, as do your thoughts about finding support for the holes via other systems and and people engaged in discussions around handling them. This is a succinct statement of the direction in which I find myself headed.

I’ve also found reading/playing and listening to discussions about running PbtA games with their variety of concerns immediately sparks ideas and associations with the more traditional crawly sort of games. The local people I play with aren’t interested in story games, but they may very well be interested in ways which story games can inform contemporary play of the systems to which they’ve married themselves. Thinking about ways of borrowing ideas and applying them to other contexts is another way that the bones of a system become more visible to me.

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#47

This gels pretty well with my headcanon that ttrpgs are as much philosophy manifestos as much as they are rulebooks. I think if both writers and readers can be more cognizant that rulebooks are selling a mode of thought a much as they are describing a system it would benefit everyone.

I think your comments about borrowing PbtA themes/rules for OSR is spot on. As someone who is not invested in either camp, having read some of the OSR primers and “how to run Old Skool” writings my immediate response was “oh, these are DnD dungeon runs but as a storygame instead of a wargame”.

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#48

Yeah, and I’m not married to any camp, either. In fact any time I try to commit myself to a camp (in pretty much anything) I soon find myself banging my head on the boundaries imposed by some sense of camp-orthodoxy. So being committedly polygamous to ideas, perceptions, and insights of various camps helps me stay sane and allows me to experience benefit rather than limitation.

But I also realize that I’m pursuing what works best for me. I was just talking to a friend of mine last night, someone who is entirely committed to D&D5e. I’d mentioned that I really dislike the time and energy spent in planning out a character build and would far prefer to random roll stats and gear and then figure out how to use them. He responded that he played something like that once and hated the experience so much he’d never play a game in that system again. He’s the kind of guy who has developed an encyclopedic knowledge of the rules as written. He leans heavily on player knowledge to strategize. That’s how he has fun. He’d probably be annoyed with a lot of the things I enjoy. I don’t really want dungeons full of known monsters and nostalgic tropes. I want to be surprised. I want monsters to be unknowns. I think by our natures he leans more into the mechanics where the fiction is a pleasant way to contextualize the mechanics, whereas I lean heavily into the fiction and want the mechanics to stay the hell out of my way. Despite these differences, we’re both able to sit down and have a good time playing a game together, and that’s something I don’t want to lose. Remaining ideologically polygamous helps insulate me from a type of narrowness that has a tendency to form in every camp.

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#49

I think you are onto something with the gaps.

It’s related to one of the things I find hard about many modern systems - totalizling mechanics and from them over-simplification/universal mechanics or absurd complexity and RAW formalism. The nice thing about the gaps and contradictions in old rulesets is that each table needs to fill or unwind them and this helps form specific style of play.

The rules can’t have control, because they are incomplete. The mechanics can’t colonize every aspect of the setting because they don’t claim to be universally applicable and thus the players and GM will need to reach agreement about various issues and have a system for ajudicating novel situations.

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#50

My personal revelation was that running a game is running a meeting. The GM calls the meeting, shapes the agenda with input, and then tries to move the spotlight around in service of the assembled and the agenda.

Two items that really inspired and illuminated me were the Principia Apocrypha and the…dungeon world guide.

I tend to apply the “Sorensen? Questions” to the games I run now and try to see if the answers match what I think I’m going for. That’s one way that “system matters” is that, as a text and as a design what and how it pushes all the assembly to do things counts.

I often find that I WANT to run a specific type of game, but never quite nail that down successfully. That’s one way that “system doesn’t matter” in that my personal tendencies and tastes lead me away from some things in play and that’s okay. Maybe the praxis and theory never line up…it’s all practice.

If you really want a head trip…read the revised Stars Without Number sections on how to run a game. Crawford goes right at concrete support for a GM in a manner that I’d call “very old school” even though he doesn’t bill it that way.

And that’s kind of at the heart of immersing your self in designs and theory…the proof is in the pudding, and not on the label. Once you’re eyeball deep in this stuff, you’ll find it’s much easier to “barf forth”

Good hunting, and I’m looking forward to talking it over with you here.

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#51

Slightly OT

Oh my word, THIS a thousand times.

One thing I’ve found about COMPLETE or universal systems is that they entirely pave over one thing I’ve always loved about TTRPGs … the conversation.

Big rpg systems and designs promise the new gamer structure and safety and then remove the situations where the most useful skills of gaming are applied. Human interaction skills.

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#52

Can you give an example of a “complete” system that does this and an “incomplete” one that doesn’t? Because I’m failing to grasp the correlation.

#53

@Airk
These aren’t terms of art (I don’t think) just my own expressions as a reaction to that anecdote above. Systems I had in mind were when I said “complete” are systems like Pathfinder, GURPS, and Savage Worlds…who’s proponents will kindly tell you (not untruthfully) that “you can do that with X” or “it’s covered in Y supplement”

When I was a new GM, these games looked good to me because of the large volume of precedent design their publication history implies. It’s often touted as a feature to new players and GM. The level of structure is certainly a support frame that can help. It didn’t help me as much as implied, simply due to tastes, style, and how my mind works. I want to be surprised as a GM, so I wasn’t doing myself any favors trying to front load huge amounts of system info thinking I needed to master that system or I was failing my players.

Systems I had in mind when I said incomplete were systems like Lasers & Feelings or World of Dungeons or Knave, or The Mustang. For various reasons, one of their chief design constraints is brevity. They cannot, and won’t attempt to address every ruling or system gap that may come up in play.

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#54

Okay. I see the division between the types of games quite clearly. Could you expand on how the former category “paves over the conversation”? I’m not big fan of those types of games, but that isn’t really a problem I would have ascribed to them.

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#55

My opinion of them is that their presentation of completeness and attempt to harmonize any gaps in the design often misdirect new people away from the fact that all games of this type are a kind of negotiated conversation between people.

My opinion is that systems that facilitate this and fade into background are doing new players a bigger favor by emphasizing that there is no appeal to an outside, higher, most-orthodox, answer to a gap or pause or question about play.

A smaller design with more gaps, better illustrates that the authority lies in those who are assembled, here, now, in the moment of play. They need not…search or wait for someone to uncover the authoritative ruling. They must be bound by the negotiations of the moment. Which is what I’d call “human skills” rather than the player with the largest rule book collection or deepest system mastery or newest system expansion occupying more time at the table.

This is a personal judgment of 3.X D&D for me, and a critique of my personal experiences with D&D 2nd revised when I was a new player. The brand Orthodoxy removes agency and squashes people skills in a way that I don’t love. It’s a trade off for recognition and uniformity and that’s not bad, but it’s not my bag.

Now that I’m 40, and people find out I “run D&D” I usually don’t point them right at any game when they ask me about it…I ask them if they want to play sometime and then when we meet to play, I give them WoDu 1978 on two folded pieces of paper and we play. Then if they’re into it, and want to buy something we start a conversion about what they liked or didn’t like about what we have already done. I suggest I bunch of free things and blog articles if they’re really excited. I suggest Dungeon World a lot, and good deals on the starting 5e boxes, but I usually tell them not to go all in on any one product unless they’re already leaning that way.

Mostly because my experiences have led me to regret going “all in” or even searching for a “generic” system that will handle all genres. They each offer appealing benefits but the trade offs in my experience…are not worth it in most cases, to me, personally.

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#56

Interesting, thank you for taking the time to expand on that. My patterns for introducing new people to the hobby are similar, if a little more traditional (I’ll get a few people together for Dungeon World, though I expect if I do it again I’ll be using Homebrew World instead) as are my taste in games (Mostly; I don’t really have much interest in the ‘old school dungeon crawl’ these days) but I never really thought about it as the game restricting/quashing conversation or negotiation. Though I agree that by “seeming” like they are “complete games” they tend to make people miss the idea that not everything is covered by the rules.

I’m not sure that it has that much to do with brand orthodoxy so much as the design of the games themselves though.

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#57

This is one of the key reasons I started roleplaying again. My gaming helped my organizational skills and running meetings. Then, the work skills cycle back into my gaming. It was at that moment that I realized that rpgs were not just for kids.

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#58

I absolutely love this.

I’m just back from the eye doctor and can’t see without zooming to 300%, so I didn’t intend to respond at all until later when I’d had a chance to re-read and contemplate. But this just rings an important bell for me. Most games I’ve read, including D&D5e, at least nod towards the GM making rulings rather than slavishly following rules. But in my brief experience of table-cultures, there’s been a whole lot of focus on RAW and various, mostly implicit, appeals to orthodoxy. I really appreciate that the smaller, truly rules-light games expect there to be hacking and swapping of bits and bobs to suit what’s happening at the table and for the table.

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#59

I’m not familiar with this—can you provide a link or a brief summary?

This has been on my radar for a while, but I haven’t picked it up, yet.

Yeah, I’ve had a bit of that, too. I tend to binge at the beginning of a new interest. And I don’t see the binging as being inherently problematic, but if I’m going to binge I need to do it widely rather than digging into a single thing. When I binge deeply from one stream I don’t actually derive depth, just quantity of content, whereas when I binge broadly, I get exposed to a diversity of ideas that are likely not all compatible. I probably get more from the disagreements than I do the agreements. I feel like my motto should be “Success with complication for profit!”

#60

I started up for my own sanity. I’m a remote employee working from home. In general I love it, but I got to a point where I realized that it had been more than 6 months since I’d had an interaction with someone outside my family that wasn’t either a cashier or the wait staff from a restaurant. And truth of the matter is that rarely leaving my home was making my social anxiety worse rather than better. Jumping into RPGs—while really taxing at first—has made a huge improvement in my quality of life. I dunno how much it’s helped my work—perhaps a little with my readiness to encounter new people—but it’s been great for my personal life.

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#61

Jared Sorensen’s Three Questions

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