Cardboard Anxiety

 

I can't remember how I used to run games in the past, like what I found difficult or easy to GM, was I worried about being unfair or overly generous? I don't think I was ever a killer GM or terribly indulgent with the magic items and such. I was probably always earnest and a wee bit stingy, maybe a tad mudcore. 
Mind you, I do remember one time killing off the whole party so I could get back to playing Berzerk on my pal's Atari 2600, but hey I was a teenager and it was the 1980s.

GNS 

Coming back to it all as an adult I am more self conscious about GMing, whether that's age or because I  returned after reading so much about it online during the pandemic, I'm not sure. Discovering Ron Edwards (long after the end of the Forge) introduced me to the first RPG theory I think I'd probably read, his notion of  there being 3 approaches to play seemed compelling; Gamist, Narrativist and Simulationist. 

These map quite nicely on to our group, I sit squarely in the Simulationist camp. At least that's where I aspire to pitch my tent. I like to set the world going then see where the players push or get pushed by it, see where the momentum will take it. I like to be surprised by what they do even if it does mean binning a lot of prep. The thing I find difficult now, which I suspect bothered me less in the past, is making things happen which are supposed to happen because of the (purchased) adventure or because I want to contrive some particular situation.

The Enemy Within 

For the past 4 years we have been playing The Enemy Within, and to some degree it is a big chain of contrivances. I think at first I found it easier to go along with as I was just getting back into the hobby so maybe lacked the confidence to go off piste. I did feel really awkward about how forced some of it's situations were - i remember feeling an intense flush of cringe pushing the Max Ernst confrontation on the players in Altdorf. The PCs are in a bar and this guy picks a fight with them, but its a whole scene involving these 2 idiot nobles etc. 

It worked fine at the table, the players didn't bat an eyelid, besides due to a fluky dice roll Max Ernst got cleaved in twain and it was the first combat in a few sessions which spiced things up. But it only happens in order get the PCs into trouble with the authorities and push them out of town and on to the next encounter, and they will end up in that trouble regardless of what they do so they are forced to move on. It feels cheap to me and like a deception has taken place.

Pure Cardboard

Skip forwards a year or so and we're on part 2 of The Enemy Within, Death on the Reik. The PC's are on their barge sailing through some treacherous marsh, lead by a local huffer on a skiff ahead of them. For reasons I can't remember, possibly just pacing and world building, I wanted to have the players attacked by a River Troll. More specific than that I wanted the huffer to get killed and the PCs be on their own in the marsh. I wanted to describe this whole thing, the huffer being suddenly pulled from his boat to disappear beneath the misty surface, and not roll dice until the troll came for the PCs. 

By this point I had come come across  a potential solution to my narrativist anxieties. I suspect I had seen a few narrative control meta currencies before, but it was reading Flames of Freedom (a sort of descendant of WFRP set in revolutionary colonial America) which lead me to adopt this house rule: if I as the GM arbitrarily have something happen which would normally require a dice roll, the player's receive a Destiny Token, which can be used before the end of the following session to have the players' exercise some form of narrative control (such as - 'my character knows a reliable Fence in this town we've just arrived in'). So I gave them a destiny token (eh actually a Glen Marnoch cork whisky stopper) and the poor huffer bought it. 

I think we might have used this mechanic a couple of times, but the players would often forget about it and ultimately it just didn't feel quite right. Having the game move along through contrived events in the official adventure was bad enough, adding my own extra contrivances was just too much. Actually back in the day we had a name for this - when a player character did something which everyone regarded as out of character, they were accused of 'being cardboard' - I guess as in a cardboard cut-out rather than a three dimensional person, they were not believable. The GM would be accused of this too if the world behaved in an unbelievable way - 'that's pure cardboard!' would go the cry. 

Somatic Components

As the campaign has gone on I found have myself instinctively trying to minimise all the many deus ex machina, playing it as much like a sandbox as possible. Death on the Reik in particular is full of things which happen conveniently just as the players show up. Where possible I added some kind of conditional logic to these, like the ghost at the comet crater in the Barren Hills only appears when Morrsleib is out, and the Skaven will only break into the cave when the ghost is present. Consequently the players never met the ghost or ran into those Skaven. And when they arrived at Wittgenstein I rolled a d6 to see how many days it would be before the Skaven blew the whole place up. 

I should say I do all my rolls in front of the players, I might not tell them what the roll is for, and more often than not I will get them to roll the actual dice. This way I need to adhere to what the dice say, it keeps me honest. They can't really complain if a failed roll results in character death - it was the dice that did it, see - not me. Is this just abrogation of responsibility? The dice wot did it. 

No its about impartiality and the believable, and playing to see what happens, resisting the urge to shape things towards the story you want to tell, or the story you find easiest to tell. This attitude is clearly a bit Quixotic when it comes to running an off the shelf campaign as story driven as The Enemy Within. Still you live and learn. Now if I'm unsure about something, or even if have a thing I want to happen, I'll set the chances and roll the dice. Sometimes it will give me the drama or convenience I'm after, other times not so much. For me that's the price I need to pay to create the magic circle. The campaign has taken some seriously unscripted forks, but nearly five years later we're still playing it.