The Unbearable Lightness of GMing
In response to last week’s post on the functional reasons behind the gamer preference for procedural stories over dramatic narratives, mrteapot poses an astute question:
What about on the GM side of the table, though? It seems like there is a stronger tradition of the GM setting up villains without being sympathetic toward them. (Some kinds of problematic gaming can be traced to the GM not having the goal/sympathy divergence strongly enough, but that's another matter.)
I know that when I GM, my sympathy is with the players, and that I set up my NPCs to fail in entertaining ways at the PC's hands.
I agree that this is (a. usually, b. in a well-functioning game) what is going on for most GMs. The GM’s experience paradoxically occupies both ends of the roleplaying continuum between authorship and audience, but not so much the middle bit.
Her perspective is on one hand less vicarious than the players’. She’s presumably rooting for them to do well, but does not identify with any one PC as strongly as its player does. In reacting to their actions, she resembles the audience member of a traditional, passively-consumed narrative form like the book or movie.
On the other hand, assigned greater responsibility for giving shape to the evolving narrative and nudging it to a satisfying and hopefully surprising conclusion, her perspective is at the same time more detached and authorial than the players’.
From both sides of continuum, she is more likely to undergo an unintended shift in sympathies, when a character does something foolish or repugnant. Players tend to be more focused on winning (whatever that means in context) or, conversely, on faithfully exploring their character's impulses and motivations, no matter how self-destructive they might prove. Unlike authors, they don’t typically worry about keeping their characters sympathetic and engaging to others. This is a big reason why roleplaying stories often seem weird and unsatisfying when later recounted. (We can label this the “And then you just cut off the guy’s head?” syndrome.) This can be emotionally troubling for a GM in audience mode, because she no longer likes the guys she’s supposed to be rooting for, and in authorial mode, as the characters have inexplicably cast aside genre expectations in revealing themselves as charmless sociopaths.