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View Full Version : DM and player collaboration Vs. reactivity. Or: Planning vs. improvisation.



Kol Korran
2015-04-03, 10:04 AM
Hey folks! Happy Passover to any who celebrate it!

I'd like to discuss the extent, methods and styles of how you collaborate with players into the story, and how much you leave to be played at the table.

So, in my group two of the player are quite heavily into character characterization, story development and similar roleplay concepts. At times, they approach me with specific requests for themes, scenes, and such things to happen in the game. For example, while the party was trapped in a castle with their army dying out of a great curse outside, a player asked for a scene where he can witness the dying army, appeal to their god, and make a deal with another force, to help the suffering of the soldiers. Or Another player wishing to recruit people for an organization of his, he talked to me extensively before hand about what he was planning, and what sort of scenes he would like to prepare for the people he was about to recruit.

The requests and discussions that follow generate scenes with different amounts of room to improvise and surprises in the scenes. While we like to have SOME idea of what will happen I insist that we roleplay the actual interactions at the table. This has upsides and downsides though:
- On one hand, roleplaying things at the table give the most organic feel to the play, the least scripted, and allow room for small surprises, changes, inspirations and cool moments, which are amongst the things we come to the game for.
- On the other hand, none of us are that good actors, and less so improvisational actors. Many times it feels a bit like stumbling along, and ends up feeling a bit awkward and the scene loses a bit of it's punch, of it's flavor.

So how do you do it? What sort of a balance do you strike with the character who wish to add their own stuff to the game? Our group's approach is to set sort of "scene's goals", as guidelines to the scene, but to leave the roleplay to the table. Works ok I guess, but might work better.

The above is about specific scenes, but sometime the players wish to call for a longer running theme- Like character development, or a character's endeavor, or relationships (Not necessarily romantic ones, but possibly those as well) I find this is very specific to the player and character of course, but find these great fun. I'm curious what approaches/ method other GMs take towards these.

Discuss! :smallsmile:

JeenLeen
2015-04-03, 10:22 AM
I think my group might be in a middle ground, so I'll share my experience.

We generally roleplay things at the table. We also might tell the DM some things we'd like to happen during the game or cool ideas, but we usually don't talk about actual scenes we'd like to play out. Instead, we try it in game. In your examples, the player could say his character goes to look over the army, or the other player starts assigning his people to do specific jobs.

However, for things that only involve one character (or that char & NPCs), we often do things between games. For example, in an Exalted game, my guy wanted to recruit some smiths to be his worshippers. It wouldn't have added anything to roleplay this out, and I personally felt uncomfortable roleplaying a guy converting people to worshipping him, so we did it OOC by e-mail.

In another example, in a Mage game, my character was talking with a demon about various things. It would have really annoyed the other players to do it while we were all gathered together, so the GM and I e-mailed the conversation back and forth.

I can really see telling the GM that you'd like a scene like x, and if it works out, it works out. I do think the GM should have final say, since some things might work contrary to the plot or setting.

Anyway, I don't know if the above will help or not, but I hope it does.

Thrawn4
2015-04-04, 11:08 AM
Players occasionally tell me OOC what they would like to achieve IC in the long run, and I usually plan accordingly, but for short-term goals like "I want to help them" or "I want to have a look at this" my players just say that their characters attempt to do so.

The wish for a certain theme is quite reasonable, and I usually tend to adapt the future adventures, but wishing for a certain scene sounds kind of weird to me, as it takes the surprise away and renders the scene contrived.

Thrudd
2015-04-04, 11:34 AM
It really depends on what type of game it is. Talking about "scenes" implies a very cinematic approach. Like you have planned out a story and the players have roles to play in it, and the game is about dramatic acting in different scenes. In this case, I don't see any harm letting the players suggest ideas for their character development and incorporating them, if it makes the story more interesting.

If the goal of your game is more about problem solving and overcoming challenges, then players really can't have that kind of input. The whole point is for the players to come up with solutions to the situations you introduce to the characters. If they know ahead of time what will be happening, there is no point.

It also depends what sort of immersion they are meant to have with the game world. In the situation described, their participation is more on the story/meta level rather than the character level. If you prefer character level immersion, the player would not be controlling anything the character can't control. They interact with the game world as the character, not as a narrator that is telling the story of a character.

Maglubiyet
2015-04-05, 12:25 AM
Some players are happy to show up and play whatever you've planned for them. For the ones that make long-term plans, I request for them to let me know ahead of time where they'd like to go. Usually I like it in writing if it's elaborate so I can set something up.

It's not fun for anyone when the PC's decide on the fly to set up a microwave transmitter/repeater network on an isolated world and try to start charging people for using it when you, the GM, have nothing planned for this. (I managed to deflect this fledgling comm business for a session or two by weaving the adventure I had prepared into their attempts to acquire the materials necessary to build the hardware they required).

Mr.Moron
2015-04-05, 12:35 AM
I don't think we plan things too intensively in my group. Sometimes I will actively poll for the sorts of events/themes they'd like to come up but more often than not players are pretty good about finding and perusing goals on their own.

For example:

Iin my long-running game they've been visiting some of the last tribes of a certain ethnicity to be holding on to their traditional way of life as most were subjugated/absorbed/converted by a nearby theocracy. They were there following some plot hooks about legend that might lead them to a vaguely-defined artifact that might help defeat the current big threat to their home nation.

While they are there I put in some stuff about recent raids from the north by another force and the tribes inability to trade for supplies. The basic plot hook was that each of the 5 remaining tribes had one piece of legend. The players were pretty on-board with piecing it together. Then one player was "Wait. What if the tribes unite? Surely they'd be stronger together". A few lore and very high negotiations rolls later and sure enough he's got the elders on board with trying it.

So now the players are off to unite the tribes while also piecing together the legend. It's something I hadn't considered, it was a goal they set and its going to introduce a few new interesting plot points. They didn't need to ask ahead of time about it they just sort of made it happen.