More Gamer Geek Crap
Had a breakthrough on UA stuff while walking into town to see Rudi's play last night. To celebrate, here's that long entry I thought I'd lost in my disk-erasing fiasco, cleaned up and posted for your geeky reading pleasure.
For me, the initial planning phases of a roleplaying campaign are always both the least and the most enjoyable part of the campaign itself. Least enjoyable, because they definitely involve the most work and thought on my part; most enjoyable, because they're probably the only time in the gaming process when my vision is ever completely clear and unchanged. That's because the players haven't had the chance to get involved yet, of course. Now I realize that the uncertainty and dynamism that players provide is an essential component of gaming, and it's one of the reasons I run so many games instead of just using that time and those ideas to write novels or something instead. But the involvement of players can sometimes take a game so far from where I've intended it to go that it's also nice to have that tiny reprieve in which I can think about what I'd do if things went exactly the way I wanted them to go.
Campaign planning also always carries with it a hint of desperation. I always feel pressure to achieve (what a weird word to use in terms of a hobby), to reach some illusory benchmark in storytelling, to do things better than I did them the session before and make my players clamor for more. My players tell me that I'm a good GM and that they enjoy the stories I tell for them every week, and I don't think they'd lie to me if they didn't. But I am my own harshest critic, and I've never run a game that fully satisfied me. I'm always very fond of my beginnings, and my middles are steadily improving the more experienced I get, but endings...I'm never happy with how things turn out in the last session. Not because the players didn't succeed, or because things didn't end the way I wanted them to, but because I always feel like I could have helped them succeed and planned things to end in a way that would be so much more dramatic, so much more interesting, so much more satisfying, so much better. Each full campaign I've run has taught me a lot, however, and I suppose that's what counts.
I've come a long way since my freshman year of college, when I ran the Glamour & Strife campaign of Changeling. We were mostly new players and I was a new GM (at least when it came to running something of that scale), so it certainly had its rough spots. Like many beginning GMs, I tended toward the "monster of the week" syndrome - whenever I found something new and interesting in a sourcebook, I had to find a way to include it the next week, whether it made sense in the story or not. The result was a campaign that was so top-heavy with wonders and weirdnesses - El Chupacabras, Mischa the Malkavian Prince of Los Angeles, the aliens, the blatant House of Leaves ripoff that went over better than I ever could have dreamed, the onyx men, the ship, the keys, the treasure map, the Wand of Flaming Chaotic Death - all of which were supposed to somehow tie in to a central story, that sometimes it scarcely knew what to do with itself. The four-session-long mystery quest in New Orleans, while a very interesting and ambitious idea, was perhaps a little too ambitious for me and certainly far too complicated for my poor players to follow. And the prophecy...dear God, the prophecy. Probably the biggest mistake I ever made in GMing, and the cause of many a moment of sheer blind panic. But I bounced back, and I learned my lesson, and never again have I counted on players to act a certain way in order for my campaign to turn out well, because I know now that they won't.
But somehow Glamour & Strife turned out well in spite of itself. Thistle Delacroix definitely worked as a villain, though perhaps she would have seemed more menacing if I'd given her a slightly better defined personality and more screen time earlier in the game. And ironically enough, the giant field battle that was its ending was probably the most successful last session I ever ran, though it left a lot of loose ends dangling because I'd tugged upon too many to ever tie them up fully. To this day the players look back on it fondly, tell stories that resulted from the game and repeat quotes from it, and count the characters they portrayed as among their favorites. So I'd call that as a success, despite how dissatisfied I felt with it when everything was said and done.
Then we had *cringe* the Technocracy campaign of Mage: The Ascension. Great idea, terrible execution. I have to thank peloria and chia_rhino for playing such great characters with such awe-inspiring precision and at least giving me some good memories of that ill-fated campaign. The problem was that for everything that worked (Grey's struggle with her inner demons, Adrian's quietly unrequited passion for Lindley and its literally transcendent conclusion, the tragic end of the Denny's cabal) there were five or six more that didn't (everything about Ahlic, almost everything about Reed, about half of everything that happened in the Umbra, the clumsy integration of Julia into the story, the sudden departure of Technocracy Barbie, Faisa's moment to shine that turned into her moment to stab herself in the heart and thus invalidate an entire plot thread, the total blandness that was Branwyn, the improperly game-balanced showdown with the hunters that ended in TPK-ful stupidity and GM's Option). Now a lot of that stuff I didn't have any control over, but perhaps if I had given them more direction toward the beginning it would have been diminished. After the relative rigidity of Glamour & Strife, I was so afraid of railroading that half the time I gave them nothing to grasp onto, and those players were just not the type to go out looking for plot hooks unless I waved them right in front of their face or screwed them over first. I doubt that would have fixed everything, though - there were a lot of OOC problems going on with that group at that time, and I'm sure the lines between character conflict and player conflict got blurred to the point where ugliness started creeping in and messing with the game in not-so-subtle ways.
Nonetheless there were positive lessons I took away from the whole experience. Technocracy Chronicles, more than any other game I've run, had some GREAT characters. Adrian is still probably the best and most fleshed out NPC I've ever made and I look forward to finding a way to use him again in the future. Seiji Amarillo is still probably my most unapologetically evil and menacing villain (he did drive one PC to suicide, after all), even if I didn't know how to use him half the time. Astrid Kota was a terrific evil lieutenant who the players started hating the instant I introduced her, just as I'd wanted. Carmen Bright would have done well to have more screen time, but was an intriguing informant in the time that she appeared; perhaps I'll reuse her someday as well. Alvin Constantine was a memorable supporting character who moved into a leading role with grace and ease when one PC took a romantic interest in him. It's just too bad the story had to stall out so badly toward the conclusion. Even my players agreed that the ending was anticlimactic, but at that point I had pretty much given up and just wanted to be done both with the campaign and with the group. It had taught me all that it could at that point, and despite the disappointment that the players felt when I told them I wouldn't be resuming it after Technocracy ended, I know it was the right choice to make.
Even my throw-away silly games (Summer Mage, Summer Changeling, High School Mage) have educated me in their own ways. First and foremost, they've taught me how to improvise. My deliberate lack of planning for all three forced me to use skills and abilities I'd let slide or just never developed back in the days when I planned every session to death and started breaking out in cold sweats whenever my players dared to deviate from the "script." I've learned how to relax, sit back, and go with the flow when something unexpected happens. I've realized that I improvise all the time when I'm a player, because I don't know what's coming next - why should I let those muscles atrophy when I'm a GM? Besides, I know a lot more about the story than my players do when I'm GMing, so I have that many more avenues available. I've learned that it's okay to admit it when you don't know what's going to happen next, when you make a mistake, or when you overlook something. It's not necessary to wear the Infallible GM mask all of the time, because we're here to have fun, not prove something to each other. I've learned that it's okay to be stereotypical from time to time, that it's okay to give people what they're expecting when you can't think of anything else, because they enjoy it and because it makes it that much more unexpected and powerful when you throw them a real curveball later on in the story. Now I don't plan so much. I work out a general idea of where I want the story to go, and then just do the first logical thing that comes to mind when the story starts to change. Sometimes (make that most of the time) I get my best ideas and plot points that way. It's helped me more than I ever imagined it would.
My most recent large-scale effort, the Thorson Imbued Hunter: The Reckoning game, had by far the best start of any of my campaigns. At first I didn't think it would go nearly so well. I remember looking at my roster of 8 players (the most I'd ever tried to manage) and freaking out - how was I ever going to do this? How would I manage the sessions? And how would I give sticky to a group of characters that was made up of a hobo, a high school student, a stock car driver, a mall security guard, a heart surgeon, an EMT, a news reporter, and a convicted felon? But I calmed myself, and I thought it through, and by the end of the second session they wouldn't have dreamed of ditching each other even though they'd just met. To this day that remains one of my greatest triumphs as a Storyteller. The overall story was definitely my most coherent and interesting, since I had the end in mind from the beginning onward. The players were certainly my best group, considerate enough to go along with what I had planned but also smart and motivated enough to take it into their own hands to change things (Joe and Suzanne, anyone?) And my NPCs (Nikolai, Isaac, Claudia, Suzanne, even minor players like Carrie and Detective Klein...all very memorable for me) weren't half bad, either.
Yet even with all of those positive things working for it, I still wasn't happy with the ending. In fact I don't think I was happy with a lot of the second half of the game. The first story arc (the vampires) went so incredibly well that maybe I just psyched myself up too much for the second half and raised my own expectations to the point that they could never be satisfied. Or maybe I just overcomplicated the story with all the things I wanted to incorporate, which is a common failing of mine in games. Maybe trying to deal with Tradition mages AND the Technocracy AND the repercussions of the vampire stuff AND hunter infighting all at once was just too much to tie into a unified whole. Whereas the first story arc worked so well because I was only focusing on one group, one threat, one goal.
Or maybe my problem is that I'm a lot better at raising questions than I am at answering them. Coming up with new plots is easy; it's resolving them that is hard. And this is made even harder by the structure I often shoot for when I GM. In movies and books I am a total sucker for twist endings. I love the feeling of jaw-dropping awe when you realize that things aren't what they seemed and that you have been taken in by the story so utterly that you missed all the clues that had been in front of your nose all along, and I try to replicate that experience in my games. I try to come up with the twist that will take my players' breath away, the twist that will keep them up nights wondering where to take things next. They seem so great to me when I come up with them, but when I finally get to them in the game my players just seem to shrug and get on with their lives. My revelations never seem to have quite the same heft to my players as they do to me when I am thinking them up.
Although in retrospect perhaps this is because I've done the same thing to death. In all three of those campaigns the twist was revealed toward the end of the story, and it was more or less "the villain is not who you thought he/she was initially, in fact he/she may have even been someone you trusted." That reached its peak with Claudia and now I can't do it anymore. This time around I'm not going to make it OBVIOUS who the villain is (inasmuch as this campaign can really be said to have a villain, because it doesn't as much as others have), but I'm definitely not going to shroud it in so much mystery. I've thought of other ways to put off the confrontation until its appointed time. Also, this game will have a somewhat large twist, but I'm going to experiment with having it happen much earlier (maybe even before the halfway point) and spending the rest of the game exploring its repercussions.
As far as the complexity of my story and the number of plot threads goes...I'm still not sure if this is an improvement. My "plot map" for UA is a lot less convoluted and smaller than the one for Thorson Imbued, but it's still not as streamlined as I would like. There's nothing to be done about that at this point, though. When I was explaining it to paulkedarkhanna a few nights back it made sense when I explained it out loud (and he was a great help in getting me to clarify the parts that weren't, so thank you), so I think it will be okay. If I stay focused and don't deviate from the story I want to tell it *will* make sense. I've done it before and I'll do it again.
So my hopes are high for this campaign. I have learned from both my successes and my mistakes as a Storyteller and I've applied them to UA. I know the rules, I know the setting, I know the NPCs, and I know the story I'm trying to tell. I have a GREAT way of getting the PCs together and enforcing sticky until it starts to develop on its own. Best of all, it's a system my players don't know at all, and that I'm just beginning to learn, so it will be fresh and new and exciting for all of us. Except for some last minute preparations I'm more or less ready to roll, and I can't wait for it to begin (in just under three weeks now...wow, hard to believe the start of the school year is that close).
More than anything, I'm excited about no longer having to run a game under the Storyteller system. That'll be the first time in three years that I've run anything in a different system. Just think, no more declaring actions, no more soak rolls, and only one roll for every round of combat. Sweeeeet. One more week of Mage and it's all over for a year at least! I can hardly wait.
Now if my players would just send me their goddamn backgrounds so I can do the last little bit of planning, everything would be just peachy keen.
For me, the initial planning phases of a roleplaying campaign are always both the least and the most enjoyable part of the campaign itself. Least enjoyable, because they definitely involve the most work and thought on my part; most enjoyable, because they're probably the only time in the gaming process when my vision is ever completely clear and unchanged. That's because the players haven't had the chance to get involved yet, of course. Now I realize that the uncertainty and dynamism that players provide is an essential component of gaming, and it's one of the reasons I run so many games instead of just using that time and those ideas to write novels or something instead. But the involvement of players can sometimes take a game so far from where I've intended it to go that it's also nice to have that tiny reprieve in which I can think about what I'd do if things went exactly the way I wanted them to go.
Campaign planning also always carries with it a hint of desperation. I always feel pressure to achieve (what a weird word to use in terms of a hobby), to reach some illusory benchmark in storytelling, to do things better than I did them the session before and make my players clamor for more. My players tell me that I'm a good GM and that they enjoy the stories I tell for them every week, and I don't think they'd lie to me if they didn't. But I am my own harshest critic, and I've never run a game that fully satisfied me. I'm always very fond of my beginnings, and my middles are steadily improving the more experienced I get, but endings...I'm never happy with how things turn out in the last session. Not because the players didn't succeed, or because things didn't end the way I wanted them to, but because I always feel like I could have helped them succeed and planned things to end in a way that would be so much more dramatic, so much more interesting, so much more satisfying, so much better. Each full campaign I've run has taught me a lot, however, and I suppose that's what counts.
I've come a long way since my freshman year of college, when I ran the Glamour & Strife campaign of Changeling. We were mostly new players and I was a new GM (at least when it came to running something of that scale), so it certainly had its rough spots. Like many beginning GMs, I tended toward the "monster of the week" syndrome - whenever I found something new and interesting in a sourcebook, I had to find a way to include it the next week, whether it made sense in the story or not. The result was a campaign that was so top-heavy with wonders and weirdnesses - El Chupacabras, Mischa the Malkavian Prince of Los Angeles, the aliens, the blatant House of Leaves ripoff that went over better than I ever could have dreamed, the onyx men, the ship, the keys, the treasure map, the Wand of Flaming Chaotic Death - all of which were supposed to somehow tie in to a central story, that sometimes it scarcely knew what to do with itself. The four-session-long mystery quest in New Orleans, while a very interesting and ambitious idea, was perhaps a little too ambitious for me and certainly far too complicated for my poor players to follow. And the prophecy...dear God, the prophecy. Probably the biggest mistake I ever made in GMing, and the cause of many a moment of sheer blind panic. But I bounced back, and I learned my lesson, and never again have I counted on players to act a certain way in order for my campaign to turn out well, because I know now that they won't.
But somehow Glamour & Strife turned out well in spite of itself. Thistle Delacroix definitely worked as a villain, though perhaps she would have seemed more menacing if I'd given her a slightly better defined personality and more screen time earlier in the game. And ironically enough, the giant field battle that was its ending was probably the most successful last session I ever ran, though it left a lot of loose ends dangling because I'd tugged upon too many to ever tie them up fully. To this day the players look back on it fondly, tell stories that resulted from the game and repeat quotes from it, and count the characters they portrayed as among their favorites. So I'd call that as a success, despite how dissatisfied I felt with it when everything was said and done.
Then we had *cringe* the Technocracy campaign of Mage: The Ascension. Great idea, terrible execution. I have to thank peloria and chia_rhino for playing such great characters with such awe-inspiring precision and at least giving me some good memories of that ill-fated campaign. The problem was that for everything that worked (Grey's struggle with her inner demons, Adrian's quietly unrequited passion for Lindley and its literally transcendent conclusion, the tragic end of the Denny's cabal) there were five or six more that didn't (everything about Ahlic, almost everything about Reed, about half of everything that happened in the Umbra, the clumsy integration of Julia into the story, the sudden departure of Technocracy Barbie, Faisa's moment to shine that turned into her moment to stab herself in the heart and thus invalidate an entire plot thread, the total blandness that was Branwyn, the improperly game-balanced showdown with the hunters that ended in TPK-ful stupidity and GM's Option). Now a lot of that stuff I didn't have any control over, but perhaps if I had given them more direction toward the beginning it would have been diminished. After the relative rigidity of Glamour & Strife, I was so afraid of railroading that half the time I gave them nothing to grasp onto, and those players were just not the type to go out looking for plot hooks unless I waved them right in front of their face or screwed them over first. I doubt that would have fixed everything, though - there were a lot of OOC problems going on with that group at that time, and I'm sure the lines between character conflict and player conflict got blurred to the point where ugliness started creeping in and messing with the game in not-so-subtle ways.
Nonetheless there were positive lessons I took away from the whole experience. Technocracy Chronicles, more than any other game I've run, had some GREAT characters. Adrian is still probably the best and most fleshed out NPC I've ever made and I look forward to finding a way to use him again in the future. Seiji Amarillo is still probably my most unapologetically evil and menacing villain (he did drive one PC to suicide, after all), even if I didn't know how to use him half the time. Astrid Kota was a terrific evil lieutenant who the players started hating the instant I introduced her, just as I'd wanted. Carmen Bright would have done well to have more screen time, but was an intriguing informant in the time that she appeared; perhaps I'll reuse her someday as well. Alvin Constantine was a memorable supporting character who moved into a leading role with grace and ease when one PC took a romantic interest in him. It's just too bad the story had to stall out so badly toward the conclusion. Even my players agreed that the ending was anticlimactic, but at that point I had pretty much given up and just wanted to be done both with the campaign and with the group. It had taught me all that it could at that point, and despite the disappointment that the players felt when I told them I wouldn't be resuming it after Technocracy ended, I know it was the right choice to make.
Even my throw-away silly games (Summer Mage, Summer Changeling, High School Mage) have educated me in their own ways. First and foremost, they've taught me how to improvise. My deliberate lack of planning for all three forced me to use skills and abilities I'd let slide or just never developed back in the days when I planned every session to death and started breaking out in cold sweats whenever my players dared to deviate from the "script." I've learned how to relax, sit back, and go with the flow when something unexpected happens. I've realized that I improvise all the time when I'm a player, because I don't know what's coming next - why should I let those muscles atrophy when I'm a GM? Besides, I know a lot more about the story than my players do when I'm GMing, so I have that many more avenues available. I've learned that it's okay to admit it when you don't know what's going to happen next, when you make a mistake, or when you overlook something. It's not necessary to wear the Infallible GM mask all of the time, because we're here to have fun, not prove something to each other. I've learned that it's okay to be stereotypical from time to time, that it's okay to give people what they're expecting when you can't think of anything else, because they enjoy it and because it makes it that much more unexpected and powerful when you throw them a real curveball later on in the story. Now I don't plan so much. I work out a general idea of where I want the story to go, and then just do the first logical thing that comes to mind when the story starts to change. Sometimes (make that most of the time) I get my best ideas and plot points that way. It's helped me more than I ever imagined it would.
My most recent large-scale effort, the Thorson Imbued Hunter: The Reckoning game, had by far the best start of any of my campaigns. At first I didn't think it would go nearly so well. I remember looking at my roster of 8 players (the most I'd ever tried to manage) and freaking out - how was I ever going to do this? How would I manage the sessions? And how would I give sticky to a group of characters that was made up of a hobo, a high school student, a stock car driver, a mall security guard, a heart surgeon, an EMT, a news reporter, and a convicted felon? But I calmed myself, and I thought it through, and by the end of the second session they wouldn't have dreamed of ditching each other even though they'd just met. To this day that remains one of my greatest triumphs as a Storyteller. The overall story was definitely my most coherent and interesting, since I had the end in mind from the beginning onward. The players were certainly my best group, considerate enough to go along with what I had planned but also smart and motivated enough to take it into their own hands to change things (Joe and Suzanne, anyone?) And my NPCs (Nikolai, Isaac, Claudia, Suzanne, even minor players like Carrie and Detective Klein...all very memorable for me) weren't half bad, either.
Yet even with all of those positive things working for it, I still wasn't happy with the ending. In fact I don't think I was happy with a lot of the second half of the game. The first story arc (the vampires) went so incredibly well that maybe I just psyched myself up too much for the second half and raised my own expectations to the point that they could never be satisfied. Or maybe I just overcomplicated the story with all the things I wanted to incorporate, which is a common failing of mine in games. Maybe trying to deal with Tradition mages AND the Technocracy AND the repercussions of the vampire stuff AND hunter infighting all at once was just too much to tie into a unified whole. Whereas the first story arc worked so well because I was only focusing on one group, one threat, one goal.
Or maybe my problem is that I'm a lot better at raising questions than I am at answering them. Coming up with new plots is easy; it's resolving them that is hard. And this is made even harder by the structure I often shoot for when I GM. In movies and books I am a total sucker for twist endings. I love the feeling of jaw-dropping awe when you realize that things aren't what they seemed and that you have been taken in by the story so utterly that you missed all the clues that had been in front of your nose all along, and I try to replicate that experience in my games. I try to come up with the twist that will take my players' breath away, the twist that will keep them up nights wondering where to take things next. They seem so great to me when I come up with them, but when I finally get to them in the game my players just seem to shrug and get on with their lives. My revelations never seem to have quite the same heft to my players as they do to me when I am thinking them up.
Although in retrospect perhaps this is because I've done the same thing to death. In all three of those campaigns the twist was revealed toward the end of the story, and it was more or less "the villain is not who you thought he/she was initially, in fact he/she may have even been someone you trusted." That reached its peak with Claudia and now I can't do it anymore. This time around I'm not going to make it OBVIOUS who the villain is (inasmuch as this campaign can really be said to have a villain, because it doesn't as much as others have), but I'm definitely not going to shroud it in so much mystery. I've thought of other ways to put off the confrontation until its appointed time. Also, this game will have a somewhat large twist, but I'm going to experiment with having it happen much earlier (maybe even before the halfway point) and spending the rest of the game exploring its repercussions.
As far as the complexity of my story and the number of plot threads goes...I'm still not sure if this is an improvement. My "plot map" for UA is a lot less convoluted and smaller than the one for Thorson Imbued, but it's still not as streamlined as I would like. There's nothing to be done about that at this point, though. When I was explaining it to paulkedarkhanna a few nights back it made sense when I explained it out loud (and he was a great help in getting me to clarify the parts that weren't, so thank you), so I think it will be okay. If I stay focused and don't deviate from the story I want to tell it *will* make sense. I've done it before and I'll do it again.
So my hopes are high for this campaign. I have learned from both my successes and my mistakes as a Storyteller and I've applied them to UA. I know the rules, I know the setting, I know the NPCs, and I know the story I'm trying to tell. I have a GREAT way of getting the PCs together and enforcing sticky until it starts to develop on its own. Best of all, it's a system my players don't know at all, and that I'm just beginning to learn, so it will be fresh and new and exciting for all of us. Except for some last minute preparations I'm more or less ready to roll, and I can't wait for it to begin (in just under three weeks now...wow, hard to believe the start of the school year is that close).
More than anything, I'm excited about no longer having to run a game under the Storyteller system. That'll be the first time in three years that I've run anything in a different system. Just think, no more declaring actions, no more soak rolls, and only one roll for every round of combat. Sweeeeet. One more week of Mage and it's all over for a year at least! I can hardly wait.
Now if my players would just send me their goddamn backgrounds so I can do the last little bit of planning, everything would be just peachy keen.