Despite my strong indie-rpg leanings and all that narrative stuff I like, I also believe that many gaming groups are more comfortable and more functional with a GM-led setting, at least initially. As characters grow the players discover their own goals and can increase their input into the campaign direction and in-session narration. Our old Amber Diceless game started off fairly narrowly defined by me as the GM with a quest format, but soon developed in many directions I'd never of planned by myself.
By and large, I take an approach to gaming that I like to call "auteurist," borrowing a term from film criticism. I feel that what I'm offering my players that makes my games more appealing than other people's is my personal creative vision, embodied in a campaign premise, a setting, and/or a style of handling the premise and setting in actual play. If a democratic consensus could achieve creative inspiration, they wouldn't need me—but it can't. On the other hand, in actual play, I tailor scenarios to fit the abilities, motives, and agendas of PCs and the interests of players; and a "scenario" is a situation that will be interesting and/or challenging to players, with no preplanned conclusion—it's always "let's throw this at them and see what they do with it."
On the third hand, one of my current campaigns, Manse, started out with my asking each of the four players to make up an entire aristocratic household of mages, with its own magical style, cultural traditions, rules of marriage and succession, and family tree, and to make up characters from that household; then I took what they individually had created and wove it all into a larger pattern. This wasn't group consensus creativity; it was four people's individual creativity being tapped, with all the clashes being sources of plot and theme. This may be what you actually mean by "shared creativity," but an essential ingredient in this case, I believe, was my individual creative contribution of managing the sharing.
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timeasmymeasure
no subject
Date: 2006-09-05 03:33 pm (UTC)By and large, I take an approach to gaming that I like to call "auteurist," borrowing a term from film criticism. I feel that what I'm offering my players that makes my games more appealing than other people's is my personal creative vision, embodied in a campaign premise, a setting, and/or a style of handling the premise and setting in actual play. If a democratic consensus could achieve creative inspiration, they wouldn't need me—but it can't. On the other hand, in actual play, I tailor scenarios to fit the abilities, motives, and agendas of PCs and the interests of players; and a "scenario" is a situation that will be interesting and/or challenging to players, with no preplanned conclusion—it's always "let's throw this at them and see what they do with it."
On the third hand, one of my current campaigns, Manse, started out with my asking each of the four players to make up an entire aristocratic household of mages, with its own magical style, cultural traditions, rules of marriage and succession, and family tree, and to make up characters from that household; then I took what they individually had created and wove it all into a larger pattern. This wasn't group consensus creativity; it was four people's individual creativity being tapped, with all the clashes being sources of plot and theme. This may be what you actually mean by "shared creativity," but an essential ingredient in this case, I believe, was my individual creative contribution of managing the sharing.