Gms are Bastards - blurb and notes from my Panel

Mar 06, 2013 22:13

This is a presentation that I did at Intercon M on the Thursday night entitled GMs are Bastards
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Comments 15

castalusoria March 6 2013, 23:44:46 UTC
Thank you for posting! Wish I could have been there, this helps!

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acousticshadow2 March 7 2013, 00:52:13 UTC
I feel like a lot of these apply to campaign larps and not theater style larps, so my answers are slightly skewed towards being for theater style larps ( ... )

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mneme March 7 2013, 20:43:49 UTC
response 3 of 3 ( ... )

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mr_malk March 7 2013, 09:29:00 UTC
Ooh. some good stuff there. Did your audience understand the meaning of "a fruit tea game"?

I recognised quite a few of them, obviously; we were in the same games for quite a few, and in the same post-game frothing/ranting sessions for quite a few more!

I was surprised that no edict against Directing Players ["No, do it again, but this time with more angst!"] was there, though I suppose that was implicit in #10 ( ... )

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ext_1687545 March 7 2013, 19:16:16 UTC
Small Gods gods work fine, because they don't actually have godly levels of power.

The underlying rule is: Do not have a character (or small clique of characters) with sufficient power to render other players' actions irrelevant.

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mneme March 7 2013, 20:45:49 UTC
I don't get the fruit tea game thing. What's up with that?

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mr_malk March 8 2013, 09:08:19 UTC
There are times when, if queenortart or a few of her close friends are anticipating that a game might not provide enough entertainment on its own merits, they will take a flask or bottle of something that they euphemistically describe as "fruit tea". The drink in question may or may not have had fruit somewhere in its history, but it's fair to say that they don't take it along because it represents one of their five-a-day.

If their fears are justified, and the game in question sucks golf balls through a hose-pipe, they will break out the "fruit tea", and try to mitigate the general awfulness of the next few hours via the gift of alcohol.

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mr_malk March 7 2013, 09:55:20 UTC
Oh, and there was one more thing...

No culture in Gloratha (AFAIK) actually has a Tuesday. Most cultures use the Theyalan calender, in which it would be Waterday, although the Lunars would call it "Gerraday"*, and Malkioni cultures call it "Fronday".

The word "Month" has a rather different application in Glorantha as well of course, as the cycle of the Red Moon is only 7 days long, the White Moon is heretical**, and appears only once in a blue moon (as it were), while the Blue Moon itself is invisible, and not used for calendrical calculations, although it does affect the tides. It would be more usual for religious restrictions to be set on a particular day in one of the eight-week seasons (again, the Lunars do things differently, but they would, wouldn't they?)

The panda. You just made that up, didn't you? Personally, I always liked the geases handed out by some trollish deities saying that only vegetables must be eaten at particular times, but with the caveat "Elves count as vegetables*Technically, this is the third day of ( ... )

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watervole March 7 2013, 13:12:23 UTC
I would add - never have a scoring system.

Encountered a couple of those. Remember having a good game once, but was pissed off at the end by a low score. The low score was unavoidable because my personal and faction objectives were opposed and the points were awarded for achieving the objectives.

(I had no problem with different objectives, just the use made of them at the end)

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No scores ext_1687545 March 7 2013, 19:12:23 UTC
Seconded. There are many ways a score can make the players' game worse, and absolutely no conceivable way to improve it.

If your objective was so dull that the player isn't happy about achieving it, then saying it was worth 10 points will not make them happier. But it might make them more upset at failing to achieve it.

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Re: No scores mneme March 7 2013, 20:49:26 UTC
I've had a game with a score that worked (karma in Ghost Fu), but that's because:

1. We didn't bother telling the players what their score was. They could keep track of it and treat it as a goal, or they could decide other character goals were more important.

2. It was just one goal among many; something that could motivate players, but not an overall "here's how you did in our game!" As such, players who ended up with a low karma score didn't have that invalidating what they did--
who cares (much) if you're getting reborn as an ant if what you really cared about was defeating the Demon King?

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