How to Run a Game (Part 7) - Reading the Room

The last post looked at limiting the number of players in your games to make sure everyone gets enough time to interact with the shared collaborative story unfolding amongst the group.  It suggested that everyone should get an equal amount of "screen time", but I'll add a side note before I go much further. Some people will try to hog the spotlight regardless of how much time you give them, and other people will prefer to take a back seat. I've played with plenty of both over the years. I generally aim to be pretty democratic in my methodology of running games. I try to make sure the majority of people are having an enjoyable time (even if it means one person is complaining that they're not getting their desired limelight), rather than giving a single person an awesome gaming experience at the expense of the rest of the table.

Yes, I've had players walk away from my games because I didn't let them run rampant in my sessions, but the remainder of the players have often had a better gaming experience once that person left anyway.

Let's look at a few of the students I've got in my school gaming groups, then I'll consider a gamer I played with back in the day (all of their names have been deliberately altered for legal reasons, and to avoid any incrimination). If any of my readers come from my school sessions, they'll probably be able to identify key figures. I'll try to mostly use these example gamers in some of my later posts, but might add in a few others here and there.

Tommy

Tommy's play agenda is somewhere between gamism and simulationism, like many gamers he has many of the traits that indicate he is on the Autism spectrum and he has been using roleplaying games as a method to experiment with social development.  His gamist tendencies see him wanting to create characters who are absolute masters in their field, who have appropriate redundancies to prevent them from encountering their weaknesses. He plays to win. His simulationist tendencies see him thoroughly researching settings, and expecting things to be played right according to those settings (this obsession element factors into a part of his Autism). Tommy wants the game-play experience to reflect the way he understands a game should be run; he likes his dungeons dark and dusty; he likes his dragons chromatic and dangerous. Tommy struggles with social cues, I know this in-game and out-of-game because I have taught the class he is in. (Tommy is in a support class for special needs students, and loves his gaming as a social outlet with mainstream kids) 

Tommy tried to dominate the time in the game, and this became somewhat frustrating for many of the other players. Compounding this issue, he appeared to use pawn stance as he meticulously calculated statistics and bonuses, but underlying it all he was in a form of actor stance. He really identified with his characters, and it could be seen that each of his characters was an idealized version of himself with some kind of power set overlaid on the template. If his character "won" in a session, he'd be happy in the real world for days afterward, if he "lost" or if his character died, he'd go into a depressed state for days. There's a fairly well-researched phenomenon in LARPing called "Bleed", where the barrier between game and world is more of a permeable membrane, and events from one side flow across to the other... it describes what we were seeing in Tommy pretty well. 

When I found that Tommy kept trying to dominate play, I tried limiting the screen time that his characters received. However, at that stage I didn't realize that he had the self-identifying factor the fact that he wanted to bring his character from a home campaign into the school sessions probably should have been a warning sign there). When we limited his character's opportunities to dominate the game, he tended to become really sullen... his characters would either drink at the pub or get involved in brawls (which meant more time because combat is slow), out-of-character he'd either get depressed or sometimes disappear from sessions altogether (with news from other teachers that he was upset). If it was a home game, we might have lost contact with him, or even lost him from the hobby. 

Further background data showed that he had been enjoying the games previously, and was still immersed in his rulebooks, but not getting the play experience he desired. So I tried a new tactic with Tommy. Since most players were playing with random pre-made character sheets, I gave Tommy one of these and let him have a bit more screen time... but I made sure it was the kind of screen time that would be entertaining for the other players. I figure everyone should be having fun, so they could watch something interesting. This would be a learning experience for us all.

I let him take control, and let the dice dictate what would happen. He couldn't say that I was victimising him, I was just reading the dice in a way that the rules backed me up. At the same time, whenever anyone is having screen time, I make certain that they know that they are the focus of any risks that might be in play. If Tommy wants twice as much time in the spotlight, he gets twice as many risks, and I'm vicious (but funny) with my repercussions. At one stage he lost a string of rolls, so I tore up his random character sheet in the first game. He was shocked out of his state of complacency, the rest of the group got a feel for how dangerous the setting was, and because I described the comedy of errors and untimely death humorously he saw the funny side of it. The rest of the table got a good laugh and for the next week, his epic demise was a story doing the rounds at school. In another session, he had characters lose limbs, and worked through three characters in a two-hour session.  

Over the course of time, Tommy has gotten better, but we're playing a very different game with him where he kind of functions as comic relief for the rest of the players he is with. We're deliberately making sure that he is in on the joke, because otherwise that would be mean. Now he uses his gamist tendencies to try and survive as long as possible, and using the tropes of the game system we're playing through to keep him on his toes. Other players see how deadly a setting is by seeing how long one of Tommy's characters survives in a game.    

Izaac

I guess you'd say that Izaac is gamist to the core, because that's the only option that remotely fits him. His head is full of statistics and mechanical interpretations of play experiences. He might be described as a "murderhobo" in some circles because his gut reaction is to attack supporting characters in the story, and steal their stuff. Izaac lives near me and I saw him outside of school at the local supermarket where he once asked me what D&D level he needs to be before he can be a Dungeonmaster. That's a red flag for "bleed" right away. He also sees me when I'm assigned to playground duties, and tells me how he has calculated a new character who can do twenty five points of damage with his fists every second round, if he's willing to go blind from crying tears of blood in every other round, but that's alright because his skins absorbs fourteen and a half points of damage from every incoming strike. This is still D&D we're talking about, so I'm not sure where the bleeding eyes are coming from, nor the fractional damage amounts. 

There are a few red flags here, and while I didn't think he was ready to run a game at all, I thought it might be interesting to see what happened when our regular student DM wasn't present for sport one day. I picked a cluster of vetern players who wouldn't be too hard on him, and just told them to go along with his game style. If their characters died during the game, it could all be a dream, or something like that. The players weren't too happy, but none of them wanted to step up to run a game so they accepted the offer. I was hoping this would shock him out of his bubble, and show him that there is a lot more to running a game than simply wanting to run a game.

At the start of our sport sessions, as coordinator for the sport, I let Dungeonmasters run a loose sandbox style of play, but provide them with a sheet including about four different things that should be present in each of the sessions. This helps everyone maintain the feel that it's a shared world, and those elements often build up over time as the sequence reaches a climax in the final week or two of the term. Apparently, it was D&D but he had players rolling d6s and d12s for attacks, he applied penalties arbitrarily on characters whether they had been hit in combat or not, and he didn't include anything from the information sheet. Instead he ran a plane hopping adventure where the characters ended up at various stages in hell or on Earth (despite there being no dimensional travel present in the setting so far). The characters basically went through a string of fragmentary fight scenes, a demon, an insect monstrosity, a dragon, a blobby fungus thing, and lost each and every fight before being whisked away to another realm where the next fight would begin using arbitrary rules. They hated every minute of it (and some of them offered to run games in later sessions as long as they never had to put up with that again).

I asked Izaac how the session went... he said it was great, and he wants to run more. The imagination is there, a lot of refinement is necessary, and if he reins it in he might reach the level of storytelling we've come to expect from Zack Snyder, but at the moment there's a lot of work to go. I reinforced to him the idea that there is only one thing that makes someone a Dungeonmaster, and that's having players willing to play in a game that you're running. That was actually a part of the inspiration behind this series of blog posts. 

John

John is a smart and imaginative kid, and he's always pushing boundaries. Whenever he comes up with a new idea for any of the games we might play, he pushes the ideas of how it might work in the world, then tries to justify how the ability might work. So I guess he works from a loose simulationist perspective, then follows it up with a bit of gamism (as he works out the rules). He uses a blend of actor stance (sometimes really getting into character), and pawn stance. One of his biggest issues is a tendency to use knowledge that he has acquired outside the game session to influence events within the game. Then, when called out for this he's often quick enough to justify his responses with references to recent in-game events, but there is often a circular logic to those arguments, and other players have started to notice too many coincidences of right-place/right-time for his characters (or strange changes of plans between one session and the next...when critical events have occurred in other interconnected sessions where his character hasn't been present).

Every time we call out John for his metagaming, he gets sullen and it derails the current session. Since I've already mentioned that I prefer to ensure everyone has a good time in my sessions, or at least make sure the majority have a better time at the expense of the one disrupting things, I had a few tactics to take with John. One was to force him to roll dice every time we caught him bringing that outside knowledge into sessions... "yes, you know that, but does your character?". Another idea was to give his character the knowledge, but reward other players' characters in different ways. John's character gets a network of spies and contacts, Tommy's character gets a random upgrade because he'll probably not last long enough to make use of anything else. John complained that other players were getting advantages that he wasn't, until other players explained that their advantages were just offsetting the advantages he was taking with out-of-character knowledge. It wasn't a perfect solution, and we're still working on some better ideas.

Max

The best fit for Max's play style is probably somewhere near the narrativist point of the triangle, and his typical method of getting there uses a combination of Actor and Author stance. He just enjoys the story, and follows along with what other players are doing. He doesn't demand time in the spotlight because he spends a lot of his time writing notes for the group and archiving what is happening over the course of the session. Max's value to the group is indispensable because no one else wants to take notes, and I'm usually ad-libbing and riffing off decisions made by players during the course of play. I've got big picture ideas happening, and thinking about how the choices of the characters might impact the overall plot, but Max is working from a small picture perspective and giving the actions of the game a personal story.    

Even though I try to make sure everyone gets fair screen time, it would actually be a distraction and disservice to Max, so I give him a bit less time in the spotlight, but offer him a reward for his low profile services to the game. Regardless of the game we're playing, I'll throw Max a bit of extra experience for his characters. In one case (during sport sessions) I gave him a more resilient shape-shifting character, just to make sure that character would survive and the in-character journals would survive along with him. The key here was to make sure no-one else in the room knew that this was the case, so I took Max aside and let him know that if anyone found out about the different character they would flee the area, and Max would have to go back to playing a regular character. Max managed to keep things secret, and kept making notes and journal entries over the course of a full term of play. I notified the other teacher Dungeon-Master about the situation with Max's character, and also made sure he was never included in the student DM's group (because this could have been a potential information breach that could have disrupted the whole situation). No-one uncovered the truth, and many players came to Max outside of game sessions as a source of in-game information. Unlike previous examples described, this is a type of "positive bleed". When we're hamstrung by short session times, this is a great way to add depth and interest to the campaign. 

Every character at every level should have a chance to influence the story in some way. I don't run a "balanced campaign" where every player is the same level and they face off against carefully balanced encounters, I have no problem placing newbies with veterans, and consider it to be like the Justice League or the Avengers. Hawkeye is an expert marksman, Thor is a verifiable god... but in my games they both have a chance to influence the story in positive ways (and bring their own issues to the table). If a player shows responsibility and adds something to the group's experience, they get rewarded for their services. If Max had revealed their secret to the group, that part of the game would have been over, but various players across the game have been given their own secrets and mysteries, so hidden information is a generally accepted part of the game at my tables.

Mary

I have some hope for Mary when it comes to running games. She's a part of my lunch-time gaming club and also my sport D&D sessions; Mary also has a home group consisting of players from across the club and sport sessions. Mary's play style is confrontational and she loves her home-brew stuff. So she's probably pretty firmly in the gamist camp, with a side order of simulationism, she doesn't try to embody her characters in any way and sees them as a collection of statistics that she can tell anecdotes about later. When she tells those anecdotes she focuses on what abilities the characters used to achieve certain effects, rather than describing how the scenes and effects might have changed the characters or the world around them. This probably shows pawn stance, and maybe a bit of director stance (especially when she is in Dungeon Master mode).

Mary has a tendency to come up to me between games with ideas for new characters. I've specifically said during sport D&D games that we're only using the basic rules with limited additions to accomodate the setting we've developed. A bit like the descriptions of Izaac earlier, Mary wants to introduce new home-brew concepts; but unlike Izaac, Mary knows the basic rules of the games really well and wants to find ways to tweak them to her character's advantage. It's all about optimizing the results, and stealing as much of the limelight as possible. As an example, Mary asked if she could use magic to "create water" in an opponent's lungs to instantly cause them to drown. I said that I'd allow it, but as soon as I did so, there would be NPCs capable of using the same tactic on her. Suddenly she didn't like that concept.

On the positive side, Mary has taken the step toward running her own games. She has taken some inspiration from the way we've been running games at school, as it seems that she has two small groups and is using them to tell interconnected stories. However, I'm hearing conflicting reports on how well she's doing. Key active players seem to be driving the narrative, while other players are happy to play more supportive roles. The downside is that other active players who are trying to be active are being shut out of the story. I heard about a few specific incidents in game sessions that were held over the summer holidays. 

Mary's home game includes John in it, and he's having trouble with the sessions. I don't know how much John was metagaming (or using knowledge from outside the game to influence his character's actions inside the shared imaginary space), but he found a range of clues that led to a quest, and resolved that quest with his group. He was following the story, piecing together clues, and hoping to see the result, only to be told at the end (and I'm paraphrasing based on second-hand hearsay) "No payoff for you, no reward, that's someone else's quest." I can sort of see where Mary was coming from here. Allowing John to finish a quest related to someone else's character really deprotagonises that other character by undercutting their potential choices, but why would Mary give John those clues, and why lead him along if she didn't want him to finish it. There's a disconnect happening in the session. John has one expectation, Mary has another. It could probably have been resolved with a proper "session zero" where expectations were laid out.

Between this and other stories I've been hearing, Mary is telling stories with her groups of players, but like her attempts to claim as much screen-time as possible during sport D&D sessions, she seems to be fairly dominant in the stories and doesn't like it when things don't go her way when running games. There's probably a lot more to it, but that's how things red on the surface. She's starting to see the limitations in D&D, and I'll probably revisit Mary in some later posts. 

Steve

Here's an example of a player from the long past, maybe 25 years ago. He was a bully at the table, and the kind of person who would do little favours in real life, then ask those favours to be paid back multiple times (conveniently forgetting that the favours had been repaid). He'd blackmail people at the table (and in LARPs), and was very susceptive to bleed. Steve was one of those "take charge" type of players and if anyone challenged his authority he took it personally whether that challenge occurred within the game or in real life. He was gamist in real life as much as he was gamist in his play style, he just wanted to be a winner.

I played in a couple of games with Steve, but only ever ran one for him. Looking back on each of the games I saw him in, I'd now say he had a solid director stance (always trying to manipuate the environment around his characters to maximise benefits and minimise penalties), but he also treated the other characters in the game as though they were his own sub-characters played in pawn stance by proxy through other players. He couldn't handle people "doing the voices", because that often meant he had less screen time, and it took away what he consider his authority and agency in the session. I've seen a few folks in gaming circles who are similar to Steve, and have seen several groups destroyed by "Steves" over the years. Sometimes it's more effort than it's worth to change a play experience for a group just to accommodate a single player who isn't willing to make changes for the rest of the group. From what I heard, a number of the games that Steve was in quietly disbanded and reformed without him, often going on with more success afterward.    

If I understand correctly, Steve dropped out of the hobby a few years after I stopped associating with him. (Please don't take this example as an attack on everyone who plays with a gamist agenda, I could just as easily have included "Mephisto", the infamous member of the 1990s Sydney goth scene who was a high-bleed simulationist. He had a belief that the lore of Vampire the Masquerade was real, but was probably highly medicated, quite likely delusional, and a major risk to run a game with....bt when we did run games with him, they were intense)