Gary's Visit

Gary visited me last night.

Or rather, I had a dream where I went to Gary's house for the weekend. It was a shack in the woods, half a mile up a pitted dirt road. Snow had fallen overnight, losing the battle against spring's warmth. The next morning his house lay just out of the center of town, across the railroad tracks and through a park where people in Victorian finery rode horses. Maybe it exists everywhere, sort of a Gaax's Magnificent Mansion. It fits.

Dreams are dew, evaporating in the morning sun. Splinters of this one stuck with me a little longer like frost on the grass. I got up and started typing this out on my phone in the bathroom in the wee hours before dawn.

After-Action Report: Iron GM as Player

For those of you who weren't following along, I didn't get to compete in the Iron GM competition on Saturday. Since I decided to go after pre-reg was closed, I registered for the con Saturday morning as a walk-in. By then, 10 GMs had already signed up, and I was one of 2 walk-ins on the wait list hoping for more players to show up. My bad on that one - next year I'll pre-reg for sure.

So I loitered around the Iron GM stage hoping for a registered GM to suddenly develop an acute allergic reaction to room service and not show. No such luck. I got pressed into service as a minion and got rewarded with some free picks off the prize table, which was primarily White Wolf's World of Darkness and Exalted books. I fetched T-Shirts (and scored one for myself), I handled paperwork and release forms, I lined the GMs up and handed the intro cards over to Lou for the introductions. I slipped into stage manager mode and did whatever needed to be done - mostly GM wrangling.

That gave me some insight into the GM pool. Our 12 potential GMs were from upstate NY, NH, CT, MA, and RI. Most boasted over 20 years of gaming experience (Old Sk00lers Unite!). All were male. T-shirt sizes were predominantly XL, though they ranged from L to XXXXL (too bad they only printed XXXL shirts). Math jokes abounded around years of experience, and there were 2 references to the age of dirt.

The question "Why will you win Iron GM?" separated the men from the boys, which for the most part played out during the competition. About half were complete jokes ("I already paid the players" or "So that guy won't beat me again"), but the other half were introspective and downright philosophical. "Because someone has to win" struck me as very Zen and very accurate, even though it was a joke. "Because stories must be told" hit the nail on the head (thank you @brickk).

That's the point. We tell stories. More than that, we set the stage and let the players tell the story of their PCs. And that takes trust and faith, especially in a convention setting.

First gut-level impressions: Bleedin' Hell, those speakers blew my eardrums out. Table 2 sat directly in front of one of the speakers. I can understand calling attention to the event, but when there's a line of gamers saying they can't hear themselves think, I think that gets more negative publicity than the positive curiosity. They recorded a Total Confusion-specific song, which probably had some pretty cool lyrics if I could comprehend them over the bassline and mental shutdown from overall volume.

Second impressions: Ceremony works, but keep it moving and have enough helpers available to direct your GMs. Eye candy works for Vegas, but the whole fantasy chick awarding Mardi Gras beads made of dice on a natural 20 didn't really make sense to our table. That didn't stop one of the other players (older than me, BTW) from faking a 20 just to get a closer look at their costumes. And it certainly didn't stop me from grabbing some necklaces for my daughter.

With the GMs announced and tables chosen at random, the GMs offered their tables different systems if they wanted - mostly Pathfinder, but one D&D 4 and one FUDGE variant were offered, both shot down. We ended up with 9 D&D 3.5 and 1 Pathfinder table. From that point until the start of play, for the entire hour of prep time the GMs could only say 3 words to the players. Written notes worked, pantomime was funny, but only 3 words spoken. I think that rule would have hurt since I'm a very collaborative GM and I was looking forward to character creation with the players.

The secret ingredients came next. Weretiger, Winter Storm, and Wounded Pride all needed to appear in the adventure. Interesting mix, but fairly easy to pull together in a myriad of ways. We had minimal guidance on character creation, but we pulled together a party of 9th level characters. We had a halfling druid riding his snow leopard companion, an elven rogue without a tongue, a half-orc cleric, a dwarven transmuter with a mighty 4 charisma, and a human bard who tended to show her 17-Charisma-based-*ahem*-"assets" to get her way.

Now here's the part that sticks in my craw: I introduced the party to the GM because he never asked about races, classes, or levels. He gave us "above 5th, balanced party please" in a note, but he never checked with us to make sure we didn't make a thieves' guild like we talked about. In retrospect, this baffled me the most about our GM, but it made a certain amount of sense that he didn't care given the game he ran for us.

The character intros were handwaved with "You're all orphans and you're doing a job for your adoptive father, the Lord of Spring." Works for me. The scenario seemed straightforward as well: "I got drunk with the Lady of Winter and she swiped the seeds of spring from me so spring will never come - can you get them back and not let anyone know?" In 15 minutes we were off to the adventure.

Or so we thought. We got in touch with the jealous sister for help in exchange for the Lady of Winter's throne. We journeyed overland to the town outside the ice castle, encountering a single winter wolf one night. A baleful polymorph into a bunny and a healthy throttling by the half-orc ended that encounter in half a round.

Once in town, our activities centered around the smoke shop and the troop of pre-pubescent female weretigers known as the Grrl Scouts. Yes, they sold cookies, which the Lady of Winter loved. We got the weretigers hooked on catnip and their guardians playing with the biggest ball of twine in Minnesota, bought a pile of cookies, and headed back to the smoke shop to deal with the forgetful, perpetually stoned shopkeeper. Stoners can be frustrating in real life. To play that frustration out in a game that's supposed to be fun just didn't work. Decent joke, but overplayed.

We eventually got polymorphed into Grrl Scouts to gain entrance to the Ice Castle. We treated the cookies with a potion of gaseous form and a healthy supply of special herbs, making the Lady of Winter compliant and gaseous. We got the idea to put her gaseousness into any container we could find, thus separating her into tiny bits, and when the effect wore off, her sister could ascend to the throne and clean the mess in the throne room.

We did a little dungeon crawl to recover the seeds of spring, then needed to escape through the ice. Summon Nature's Ally to the rescue - fire worm tunneled through the ice and gave us our escape hatch. We rode the ice flume out into the chasm/moat around the castle and almost died slamming into the opposite wall. The druid managed to get an Entangle off to keep the party from falling to certain death.

I was surprised by the two very brief combats presenting near zero risk to the characters. I think the ice chute of death was cool and completely character-driven to boot. And the idea of weretiger Grrl Scouts was simply inspired.

The rules stretched like taffy to support the story, the table talk was raunchy ("I ain't eatin' that rabbit after the druid injected it with his special sauce."), at points we cracked jokes more than we gamed, and I had a great time.

The scoring dragged a little, and many players lost interest while their score cards were tabulated on stage. Of the 4 GMs that I eyeballed as possible winners before the competition, I picked 2 of the top 3. I didn't ask, but I hope the GMs got some feedback based on the score cards. It's never a good thing to waste an opportunity to learn about yourself.

In short, I'm really looking forward to being on the other side of the GM screen next year.

And I've had some thoughts about smaller, game store based competitions to be used as fundraisers for contenders. Not sure if that idea has any legs, but I'm planning on picking brains via email, and we'll see what falls out.

I'm not sure I would do anything differently. It was my first experience at Iron GM. Heck, it was the first con I've been to since I did ops at Intercon C, I think. I would have liked to see some WotC books and/or a few indie games on the prize table, but that can change in future years.

Now onward to PAX!

Time Crunch, Now for PCs!

In your campaign, shouldn't your PCs be at least as busy as you are in real life?

Your group of characters is a band of heroes operating at least a little outside of the system to fix things that can't be handled well within the system. "We've got to do something about the kobold raiders now since the army is still a week away!" And once the word gets out about the new adventuring group, everyone in the surrounding area will come up with a wrong that needs righting.

When my players argue about what to do next in character while I leave the room, I know I'm doing my job as a GM in populating a world that my players care about enough to invest the time and effort to argue about the best course of action. My world has grown beyond the confines of my own mind and into the minds of my players, and that's a huge win. Nothing gives me more satisfaction as a GM.

So how do I give my PCs too much to do? Let them overhear rumors. Drop hints. Have them make enemies who want revenge. Offer paths. Hide hints and mysteries in a character's backstory. Give them an arc with several avenues to explore and questions to answer. Let them figure out that there's something making the barkeep edgy. Create another adventuring group in town and start a rivalry.

In short, offer your players a menu of adventure hooks and let them decide as a party what to focus on next. Make them feel that there's not enough time to do it all, then have the menu change whenever they take the time to tackle an adventure just to prove that their choices have consequences.

This sounds like a monumental task for any GM, but it's not all that bad. There are tricks to make it easier. Adventures can be retooled to fit circumstances so all that prep work won't go to waste. If they can reach a decision about what to do next at the end of a play session, you've got the time to flesh out the next adventure. Recurring villains tend to write themselves, especially if your players start giving you ideas in character followed by "That's what I'd do." Have a stable of side quests ready if the party needs a break from the main story arc.

Above all, don't worry that your players have destroyed your plans. Just because they're not following the script that you wrote for the adventure, that doesn't mean that all your preparation is worthless. The best plan never survives first contact with reality, never mind an enemy. Sometimes they capture the bad guy in the first act; just remind yourself that everything will be OK.

The "Overbusy PCs" approach requires plenty of prep-time work, but it needs to flexibly respond to the will of your players at run-time. For me, that's harmonious GMing, and it works for me. Roll with the punches and let your players write more of the story, because in the long run that's far more rewarding for everyone.

I'll be exploring some tips and tricks to GMing this way in future posts, so stay tuned.

The Gaming Experience and Virginity

I want to expand on an idea I just tweeted.

The desire for Old Skool gaming is the quixotic quest to re-experience gaming for the first time. http://bit.ly/dbopYY - From @gelconf

The video shows a talk from 2009's Gel Conference given by a sleight-of-hand magician named Jamy Ian Swiss.  He talks about user experience and how marketing is about empathy, about connecting with people, about getting inside your audience's head and telling a story that resonates with the person going through the experience you're providing.  At the end, he does a magic trick with a volunteer to illustrate his point.  Trick is, the volunteer is the only one who can't see how the trick works - then he apologizes to the audience for spoiling the experience of that trick for them forever.


He talks about magicians losing their "visual virginity" and how they can't see anything with innocent eyes any more since they know the trick and their job is to fool the audience.


How does this tie to gaming?  Many of the laments I've heard over the past few years are tied to re-experiencing the sense of magic in games.  "Today's games aren't as good/exciting/mysterious/wonderful as the games in the old days."


The games haven't changed.  We have.  We've lost our gaming virginity.  We've played and discovered and learned, and now our minds have categorized and been limited by our experiences with the games we've played.  We know not to try things because they don't work well.  We know that D&D isn't great for non-combat encounters since the point of the game as written is to meet interesting monsters, beat them up, and loot the bodies.  We know the Monster Manual entries.  We memorized THACO tables.  Fill in your own examples, you've got plenty to choose from.


Point is, we'll never have that experience of newness ever again because of our past experience with the game.  We've lost our innocence, and that means we've learned to limit ourselves.  The glory of children comes from their fearlessness, their lack of knowledge of what's possible, and their ability to throw their entire selves into what they do.  How many 40 year olds do you see balancing on one foot on the back of the sofa in an attempt to do a flip?  Not too many.

In our quest to discover what the game's all about, we paint more details onto our mental model of the game, and we eventually make that mental model solid, unchanging, brittle, and much less fun.


We have ways around this to re-inject a sense of wonder into the game:
1) Become a GM.  Game Masters perform magic by bringing a world to life.  They can take their knowledge and relive their innocence vicariously through their players.  Nothing is more satisfying to me as a GM than watching a player's face light up because they've had a breakthrough in the context of the game.


2) Have experiences in new contexts.  Whether you play a new game system every month, or shake it up and do a game at a con instead of at the dining room table, changing the context can change the game.  I remember my first LARP experience - at one point I was huddled in a bathroom in a friend's apartment ready to cast a teleport spell because the lynch mobs ran the streets.  It felt real because I let myself get into my character and I had no expectations about what was possible.


3) Remove the system.  Much of the shared experience comes from the shared rule set.  A player may know more about how the rules work than the GM does.  In the past I have removed the rules from the game with success.  Players create their characters and then I gathered all the character sheets during play.  The players focus more on the world of the game since they don't have a list of pre-fab rule options on a sheet in front of them.  The extreme result of this is to play without rules at all, but that requires absolute trust between every person in the entire group.


I may focus some of these ideas into another post, but I just wanted to get my ideas down before life washed them away.