After the prospectus

[subplotkudzu]

Since the third prospectus I've been operating in a prospectus free environment, with a mixed bag of results. I originally thought to just fill time in the schedule with a 2 session Arabian Nights game to buy time to rework Psi-men. That expanded to 6 highly enjoyable sessions, and we've just returned to it.


As I have discussed, the Arabian Nights game was clearly GM driven. I then decided to go with the 3rd season of 1001 NYN, but the first session of that ran into problems with integrating Karen's PC and Karen couldn't make some sessions. Again this just felt like a non-starter.

So we took another break for another brief return to the Russia Campaign. Then we needed to introduce two more new players so I pulled out an old 'Dungeon Magazine' piece as the basis for another Arabian Nights game. That's been going fine, and is again GM driven. Right now I'm only intermittently in the drivers seat with this group, since netcurmudgeon is running the game we picked off of his 3 game prospectus.

Eventually I will produce another prospectus (probably after ashacat returns from India), but I'm not sure what might be on it. I do want to include some player-driven games, and suspect I might get a better response now that we've been hashing this out. Of course, a player driven game will either require more advance work to on world generation for me to give to the players, for the players to give me ideas I flesh out between sessions, or for the players to have more ability to co-create in play without it upsetting the apple cart. Otherwise I'm not sure they'd have data to feel like they're making good decisions.


There's also the urge to shift from 'circle of friends' to 'dinner party' ala whswhs, inviting all 12+ of the gamers in my circle to vote and picking two groups of 4-6 players from that to the campaigns with the highest degree of interest. While this would certainly break things up, it would also damage the games as being a set group's social networking tool. I don't know what the players will think of that.

Comments

[netcurmudgeon.livejournal.com]

I don't know what the players will think of that.

I'm iffy on it. On the one hand, more gaming opportunities are better! OTOH, this has been an element of our social glue for several years. While the occupant of the fourth player's chair has changed three times, the rest of the group has been stable, and we have a good dynamic. It's become an institution, and one that I value highly.

[kriz1818.livejournal.com]

I don't know what the players will think of that.

Well, I'm kind of attached to the social networking aspect. OTOH, it might do me good to actually see different people sometimes. I dunno.

[whswhs.livejournal.com]

In a certain sense, this is a natural form of conflict between players and GMs. Even after years of strictly following the invitational model, I've had players express a desire to spend the next cycle of campaigns gaming with the same familiar faces, and even try to work the voting on the prospectus to make it happen—though there was enough diversity of tastes so that this didn't work out. I could see that if I started letting the same group stay together through two successive campaigns, I could face a demand to maintain that group indefinitely—which would limit my options as a GM a lot more. It wouldn't be enough for me to come up with a premise that was interesting to four or five players; I would have to come up with one that was interesting to a specific group of four or five players—kind of like looking for the greatest common factor of their various tastes. Not wanting to be constrained in that way, and liking the stimulus of running games for a new mix of players each time, I've stuck with a procedure that doesn't make it easy for players to ensure that they'll game with specific other players.

Of course, I do let players say that they won't game with specific other players, and in principle one of my players could say, "I won't game with anyone who isn't in my current group" and I'd feel obliged to respect this. But my players haven't thought of this. Or perhaps, precisely because my larger circle almost all know each other socially, they don't really feel ready to say, "I don't want to see X as a fellow player."

This is something of a self-reinforcing process. Having more creative freedom, I can come up with more interesting and unusual campaigns, which let me stretch myself as a GM. As a result, I have a large population of interested and loyal players. If a player, or a small clique of players, offered to drop out rather than accept my "mix and match" approach—I could still run campaigns perfectly well for the players who were left. If I had less creative freedom, I might not have so many players, which would shift the balance of power.

It seems to me that there's something of a transition problem in going the other way, kind of like the problem of shifting from a command economy to a market economy—and that you're facing it. I've never actually had to deal with the resulting political issues, because I had a different constitutional regime from the outset. So I'm not sure how they're best dealt with, even though I believe that in the long run players benefit from GMs having creative freedom—both because they get offered a more interesting slate of campaigns and because each individual player can be put into a campaign that they individually like, not into one that the average taste of their clique favors. (For a comparison, there are statistics that show that the United States, which has no established church and has more denominations than any other Western nation, also has higher church attendance than any other Western nation, several times higher than in monolithic countries like Denmark or Sweden.) Getting into a regime of individual choice may be hard to sell to a population where it's not established. As some of the comments you've received suggest.

In part, it depends on what people value more. Is it getting together with this specific group of familiar faces, with the game only being an occasion to do so? Or is it gaming, with the group of players being valued because good fellow players are needed for a good game?