The Contract
Apr. 6th, 2008 11:58 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
subplotkudzuIn the last couple days something reminded me of an old gaming incident, and I'm hoping that sharing it will drive it out of my head. I was at a con some half a lifetime ago (for my lifetime that has a value of 18 years) and had signed up for a Top Secret game. I had read a lot about the game but had never played it and was jazzed to try. Now I would know that running an espionage game for eight players who have never met in a four hour time slot is a hell of a gamble, but then I figured it would be a neat chance to try the system.
So there were are, eight 16-20 year olds with a GM who was, my god, at least 28 or so, and therefore obviously an expert on these things. He hands out the pregen characters, has an NPC give a little speech about familiarizing ourselves with the mission, drops a manila folder on the table with said mission, and has the NPC exit and close the door to our top secret briefing room with instructions that we should knock twice when we were ready to go. Everyone is busy reading their character sheets at this point, with the guy who clearly wanted to be team leader skipping that to grab the mission folder. There's some brief in and out of character chatter as we absorb all the documents, develop a rough plan based on what we know and decide we're ready for step 2. Mr. team leader mimes knocking on the door and...nothing happens.
The door is locked. We're locked in and, given that this is an espionage game, begin to wonder if all of this is a trap. We look for ways out (there are none), yell to the outside, scour our character sheets again to see if someone might be a mole or betraying us, and otherwise stew for a now forgotten but remembered as interminable amount of time before I ask which direction the door opened. It opens in? Fine, I use my pocket knife to pull the pins off the hinges so we can get out. The GM checks his notes and informs me that my character doesn't have the technical skills to have thought of that, but, pointing to another player, his character would have. Fine, right, whatever - we arm ourselves to make a break for it since we might have been compromised.
Outside the door is our mission handler, wondering what we were doing. You see, Mr. team leader mimed knocking three times rather than two, and, as the GM informed us in arrogant, writ from on high tones, gestures counted just as much as words in his games(1).
I don't remember anything else about the session - the characters, the mission, what happened after that point. But I do clearly remember having paid to go to the Con, paid to be at this game and sitting for an extensive period of time not having fun at a table of people not having fun so the GM could feel smugly superior in the absolute accuracy of his world simulation. He, naturally, was right, and for miming three knocks rather than two we naturally deserved nothing less than this time spent not having fun. I remember, and I won't ever do it myself.
Which gets me to the contract. Some people on the web think that too much is made about the unspoken (and sometimes spoken, and sometimes written) GM/Player contract - that part of the GMs job is to help everyone at the table have fun. Now, there are groups of players who would never make that sort of mistake, and whose fun would be diminished if the GM helped nudge them along. Maybe that's who the GM played with normally. But this group of total strangers clearly weren't that sort of group. We had signed on for 4 hours of intrigue and espionage, not 30 minutes of planning followed by an hour plus of sitting in a room because of a stupid, imperceptible error.
Why mention this? Because the GM/Player contract is important, and it needs to be constantly re-evaluated. I had a whole sequence of encounters planned for the relatively linear House of the Dragon(2) game last month that the players avoided with a good calligraphy roll and a clever plan. So they skipped all those encounters and entered the main fight with a big edge. Why? Because the players fun at their clever plan - which nicely highlighted three of the characters secondary skills - was more important that the enjoyment I would have gotten playing a starving peasant bandit as if he were Groucho Marx. In the first episode of the second Old Lives Old Civilizations arc the players started to develop a complicated plan to approach a Klingon ship that was apparently flying in powered-down radio silence and I cut into it with "OK, so you make a plan and execute it, approaching the ship." Why? Because the Klingon ship was actually a drifting hulk and the 30 minutes of complicated plan and execution were meaningless because there was no Klingon crew to surprise and the extensive planning would have produced a negative fun total once the players learned that they had wasted their time.
Everyone might have different ideas of what they find fun in gaming, or even what they find fun in this particular game with this particular group. But at the end of the day, the Fun is all. One of the GMs jobs is to help cultivate the Fun. If you don't or won't do that job, don't sit behind the screen.
(1) if I were back at that table now rather than as a teenager I'd give him a gesture all right!
(2) It's a Feng Shui game, it's meant to be pretty linear.
The door is locked. We're locked in and, given that this is an espionage game, begin to wonder if all of this is a trap. We look for ways out (there are none), yell to the outside, scour our character sheets again to see if someone might be a mole or betraying us, and otherwise stew for a now forgotten but remembered as interminable amount of time before I ask which direction the door opened. It opens in? Fine, I use my pocket knife to pull the pins off the hinges so we can get out. The GM checks his notes and informs me that my character doesn't have the technical skills to have thought of that, but, pointing to another player, his character would have. Fine, right, whatever - we arm ourselves to make a break for it since we might have been compromised.
Outside the door is our mission handler, wondering what we were doing. You see, Mr. team leader mimed knocking three times rather than two, and, as the GM informed us in arrogant, writ from on high tones, gestures counted just as much as words in his games(1).
I don't remember anything else about the session - the characters, the mission, what happened after that point. But I do clearly remember having paid to go to the Con, paid to be at this game and sitting for an extensive period of time not having fun at a table of people not having fun so the GM could feel smugly superior in the absolute accuracy of his world simulation. He, naturally, was right, and for miming three knocks rather than two we naturally deserved nothing less than this time spent not having fun. I remember, and I won't ever do it myself.
Which gets me to the contract. Some people on the web think that too much is made about the unspoken (and sometimes spoken, and sometimes written) GM/Player contract - that part of the GMs job is to help everyone at the table have fun. Now, there are groups of players who would never make that sort of mistake, and whose fun would be diminished if the GM helped nudge them along. Maybe that's who the GM played with normally. But this group of total strangers clearly weren't that sort of group. We had signed on for 4 hours of intrigue and espionage, not 30 minutes of planning followed by an hour plus of sitting in a room because of a stupid, imperceptible error.
Why mention this? Because the GM/Player contract is important, and it needs to be constantly re-evaluated. I had a whole sequence of encounters planned for the relatively linear House of the Dragon(2) game last month that the players avoided with a good calligraphy roll and a clever plan. So they skipped all those encounters and entered the main fight with a big edge. Why? Because the players fun at their clever plan - which nicely highlighted three of the characters secondary skills - was more important that the enjoyment I would have gotten playing a starving peasant bandit as if he were Groucho Marx. In the first episode of the second Old Lives Old Civilizations arc the players started to develop a complicated plan to approach a Klingon ship that was apparently flying in powered-down radio silence and I cut into it with "OK, so you make a plan and execute it, approaching the ship." Why? Because the Klingon ship was actually a drifting hulk and the 30 minutes of complicated plan and execution were meaningless because there was no Klingon crew to surprise and the extensive planning would have produced a negative fun total once the players learned that they had wasted their time.
Everyone might have different ideas of what they find fun in gaming, or even what they find fun in this particular game with this particular group. But at the end of the day, the Fun is all. One of the GMs jobs is to help cultivate the Fun. If you don't or won't do that job, don't sit behind the screen.
(1) if I were back at that table now rather than as a teenager I'd give him a gesture all right!
(2) It's a Feng Shui game, it's meant to be pretty linear.
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Date: 2008-04-06 07:07 pm (UTC)That happens a lot to me, so I've moved toward more flexible encounters that can be fit into various branches of the current plot tree, or the next one depending. It's like adapting a previous work into a film, and picking out a dozen or so set pieces to have ready, and if you get even half of them into the finished product, it's a win, and the rest can hopefully show up in sequels. See the first two Superman movies, the Planet of the Apes oevure, and RAH's THE PUPPETMASTERS for examples; you'll get get Groucho-San in there sooner or later.