I can’t turn off my GM brain when listening to an actual play podcast. As entertaining as the content may be, and as much as I can appreciate different styles of GMing, it is hard for me not to listen to an RPG session unfolding and say “I would handle that situation so differently.”
With that in mind, listening to 3d6 DtL’s recently concluded Arden Vul campaign has been an interesting experience. About 90% of the time, I'm on the same page as Jon, the podcast's GM. He prioritizes player choice, adjudicates fairly, and isn’t afraid to present consequences when the PCs get in over their head.
But the 10% where we do things differently is the interesting part. One example is that Jon is quite transparent when the text of the Arden Vul campaign doesn’t provide the answer to a question the players have proposed. At times he even says something like “Richard doesn’t say,” referring to Richard Barton, the module’s writer.
Early in listening to the show, this made me wince. While I try not to be too precious with verisimilitude, I do make an effort to preserve it. Why remind the players of the layers of artifice at work between the creation of the game and their experience with it? Not just that they are playing a game, but that the game is being mediated from the author through the GM, and that there is no easy, in-session way for the latter to seek clarity from the former.
But the more I heard of this approach, the more I warmed up to it. Because it is entirely viable to cast the GM less as the storyteller and master of all knowledge, and more as an interpreter and medium of exogenous content.
The GM is an interpreter in that they are taking an inherently incomplete text and attempting to translate it for the benefit of the players. Except perhaps for read-aloud text, everything in a published RPG product needs to be translated. Descriptive notes need to be translated into what the players can perceive. Tables need to be translated into actual events. A monster stat block must be translated into an in-fiction diegetic entity. And the text is partial, inevitably missing information that will come up in the game. The GM must emendate the text for the players, making reasonable decisions to fill in the blanks that the players will inevitably find.
The GM is also a medium, in that they must intuit the will of the creator, going beyond what is on the page. Even a writer creating the most painstakingly thorough RPG product in the world is only going to anticipate a tiny fraction of the things PCs will do with that product. This is a feature, not a bug. The magic of roleplaying is that no matter how many times a new group runs Lost Mines of Phandelver or Keep on the Borderlands or any of the other most popular modules in the history of RPGs, the output is going to be different. The GM can act as medium, and allow the spirit of the creator to act through them. In a good RPG session, the writer is like a ghost that is dimly perceived, as the GM intuits their will beyond what was explicitly written on the page.
We can and should have strong opinions about the role of the GM. But we should also keep an open mind when observing how others run games. You never know what strange truths they may reveal.
No comments:
Post a Comment