The Blog of Roon

Tough one in Game WISH this week. What is, or should be, the relationship between GM and players?

I hope I’m not the only responder whose immediate instinct was to discuss the GM’s relationship to the game universe. This of course does not answer the question.

I found out a little bit ago that my husband and I have fairly widely variant expectations of GMs. When I explained the entire recent debacle in my gaming group to him, he asked me where the GM was. After all, it’s the GM’s business to ensure that characters in his/her game fit the game and the rest of the party, right? The offending character should never have been greenlighted.

“Uh… our GMs don’t work that way,” was the best I could muster. Well, they don’t. Aside from ensuring that a new character fits the universe, they let the party muddle along on its own. Maybe that is part of the reason we keep getting into messes; there are no clear expectations regarding party unity or party alignment.

On the other hand, I doubt such expectations would have avoided the problem, as the player in question was emphatically not playing the alignment and personality he claimed for his character.

Anyhow. I suppose what this proves is that there is no one single relationship between GM and players. The GM must step in and out of various roles, including but not limited to:

• Referee. Obvious enough.
• Mediator. When there’s friction, it’s the GM’s business to see what can be done about it.
• Director. Who sets the scene, guides the characters, challenges them to react properly, if not the GM?
• Event manager. Unfortunately.
• Friend, I earnestly hope.

Off to see what other people remarked on that I forgot.

This week’s WISH asks what is to be made of cross-gender gaming, people who play characters of a different gender.

I think it’s an aspect of the greatest gift of gaming: the chance to walk around in another person’s shoes.

Like any gift, it can be horribly misused. Chainmail-bikini-clad elf babes, damsels in distress, willing barmaids… most gamers know the drill here. Any game I play in had better do better than this.

I confess that I don’t play male characters often. I took over a male NPC in our Temple of Elemental Evil campaign and tried not to make a mess of him. Got him killed, unfortunately (not that I could have avoided it). I have played other players’ male PCs in the players’ absence, and again tried to be true to what I knew of the character.

I don’t always succeed, though for reasons unrelated to gender. I took over a cleric character a few sessions ago, and got the comment, “When you play [character name], he’s a scholar and a gentleman, whereas when [character’s owner] plays him, he’s blissed-out on [deity].” Oops. My bad.

I haven’t found playing male characters particularly jarring or difficult, though I get a tiny (tiny!) bit irked when other players accidentally refer to the character as “she.” I’m sure there’s something to be written there about the male as norm and the female as Other, but you’ll be glad to know I don’t have the energy for that at the moment.

My male gaming buddies are a little more adventurous; we’ve got a female barbarian and a female ship-captain played by (different) males, to add to my two gals and those of the other female player. I have no quarrel whatever with the gender portrayals of the characters in question. None. Lest you think that’s because there’s no sex involved—the ship-captain is pretty promiscuous. Since it fits with her personality and history, and promiscuous is a long way from being all there is to her personality—it’s perfectly fine.

A game a (male) friend of mine recently pointed out to me makes gender-bending all but a necessity, for most gaming groups anyway. (Has anyone, anywhere, ever managed to put together an all-female gaming group?) The game is Trollbabe, and despite the truly terrible and off-putting name, I recommend it highly, as much for the innovative notions of “narrativist” game play as for expanding one’s gender horizons. (Spring for the download—it’s only ten bucks!)

The setup is thrillingly simple, in contrast to most games that rely on complicated mechanics. Your character is a trollbabe, a female troll-human hybrid with human intelligence and social orientation, the brute strength of trolls, and the ability to learn either troll or human magic. Humans hate trolls; trolls hate humans. Trollbabes live in between; whenever they show up, stakes get higher because trollbabes disrupt the status quo.

A trollbabe character has one statistic (one!), that controls how well she fights, slings magic, and handles social situations. The player chooses what the number will be, and can adjust it in play.

End of setup. Go and game. Honestly, it’s not much more complicated than that.

(And if anyone already familiar with Trollbabe wants a player for a PBeM, call my name! I gotta try this thing!)

Anyway, I’m all for gender-bending, and I may have more to say about it once I read the other WISH responses. If all our characters were exactly like their players, what would be the point?

So they find this tiny little passageway in a pyramid, too small to enter. And they build a little gizmo to go and see what’s down it.

And they find another door.

Well, heck, any dungeoncrawler coulda told ’em that.

I’m a week behind on Game WISH, so let’s tackle two at once.

The last but one was a plaintive question about keeping the mood of the game constant, without the interruptions of puns and humor and geek talk. Myself, I don’t think that’s entirely possible, but I do think some strategies bear consideration:

• Ritual. Allow some time at the beginning of the session for chatter, and then have a signal to stop it—be it the GM putting up the GM screen (or putting on the GM hat), the music starting on the CD player, the summary of last time, or whatever. Likewise, develop rituals for breaks. They don’t have to be anything drawn-out or weird; just something that demarcates game time from non-game time.
• Music. Don’t just put on whatever’s handy. Make it fit what’s going on.
• Visual aids. It’s vastly easier to stay in character with some images to fit the character into. It’s not hard to find a pile of old National Geographics to cull pictures from.

What to do about persistent offenders? A gentle chide in-game sometimes does it. Last night our GM quashed us by making our cleric keel over from the heat. Worked. We needed him, so we shut up.

(Oh. Yes, in fact, the situation with my gaming group is slowly resolving itself, and it looks as if I will not have to leave, at least short-term. I’m not placing any bets on the long term, but not for lack of optimism. For future reference, though: it is a bad idea to try to blackmail one’s gaming group into a retcon by laying out a scenario in which your character sics assassins on the rest of the party. Poor form, don’t you know. Tends to irk other players, especially irascible ones—like, say, me—who get very fond of long-playing characters. GMs have a license to kill PCs. PCs don’t, at least not in a basically good-leaning campaign.)

This week’s question is about initial character development: how much do I do, and how do I do it?

Depends. For a one-off, I’ll play the numbers like any munchkin, or try some combination I’d not risk in a campaign. Background? Why bother? All you need is a gimmick. I don’t think that’s the scenario envisioned by the question, though, so let’s move on.

I notice a difference in the amount of detail I pour into a character’s background that I think depends on how well-established the campaign is and how much I know about the campaign and the other characters in it. If I know exactly how I’m slotting a character into a long-running campaign (for example, if I’m replacing a character who died), I will be quite concrete and specific about both personality and (at least recent) history.

The danger here, of course, is making a character too narrow to live with or too boxed-in to grow. The more situational the character’s motivation, the greater danger. A revenge motive that fits with a campaign’s immediate goal is fine, but it’s wise to leave the character a trap door in case revenge is out of reach—or attained.

For a brand-new campaign, I’m more willing to leave holes to be filled in later as inspiration (or whatever) strikes. I’m also more willing to play wet-behind-the-ears characters, with no background to speak of.

I’m just joining a long-running Al-Qadim PBeM, and the character creation process is somewhere in-between. I know the world well, but I know nothing about the campaign and very little about the other characters. So Farangis has a pretty well-sketched-out history, but I’ve left leeway. I know who her children are and what they’re doing, for example, but I don’t know anything about her siblings except that she has some. If it becomes important, I will improvise; otherwise, I’ll let the GM surprise me.

I’ve never used quizzes or questions to flesh out my characters; I’d rather see such development happen during play. I don’t have any positive objection to the notion; might even be useful. Again, though, I don’t want to have to box in a character before I’ve played him/her a while. Ideas do change.

Attack of Opportunity: An attack that you draw by moving out of an area threatened by your enemy.

Attack of Importunity: An attack from your Goth-kitty that you draw by taking the milk jug out of the refrigerator in the morning.

Courtesy of David.

I think my tabletop gaming group may be about to dissolve, and I’m more than a little upset about it.

I would actually really like to pull my usual “it’s all my fault” gag, but for once it stretches credulity too far even for me. It isn’t my fault this time. It’s just not. (And you will have to take my word for that, because I have no intention of airing dirty laundry of this sort in public.)

And yet I will probably have to leave the group because I have proven to be an easy target for dissatisfaction.

I like the people I game with a lot, and leaving the game probably means I will lose touch with them. That makes me sad; I don’t make friends easily, and these people are not easily replaceable in any case—inventive, geeky, articulate, smart. And that’s not even touching the game itself, which is the best I’ve ever played.

You know, I wish I really were the problem, so that I could just leave the group and know that it would still continue. I wish the owner of the finger pointing at me had simply asked me to go, rather than escalating his discontent to the level he has. Instead, I think he has ruined the entire enterprise for everyone. I hate being even peripherally and unfairly considered responsible for that.

I really hope something can be salvaged from this, for the others if not for me. From what I’ve been reading, though, I’m not optimistic.