How Should You Gamemaster?
Inspire the Unplanned
Hypethral Platform
This is basically where the fun’s at. It’s the unwritten, unlimited part of play. It’s hard to see at first, because few games express what it is explicitly (and because there are few to no guidelines covering it), but you can find it if you know how to look. Read the game through and listen for what it expects you to be playing; look for the gist of play. Reflect on the mechanics you also read, except look for what they don’t quite cover. There’s your basic platform! For example, if the game gives a lot of combat rules, you have to expect a lot of combat, but does it give rules for who the good guys and who the bad guys are? If every character described seems shady, then you can bet that a large part of the platform is about these shades of grey.
This platform is where you should pull your intriguing bits out of; it’s where you confront the players, rather than the characters. (House rules can be easily used to change where this is in an existing game.) This is the meat of the game and the best thing you can do is put the players right at a crossroads and force them to make (painful) decisions, thus especially ‘meaningful’ decisions. And you’ll have no rules that cover it.
Sometimes it’s quite hard to figure this one out, so don’t worry if you can’t ‘get it’ on the first try. You might try imagining climactic scenes; now ask yourself, what was decided that made it cool? I don’t mean, ‘who won’; I mean what did the player have to do to make whatever the rules said (he won) into teh awesome? Y’know, it wasn’t Luke overcoming Vader; it was the son versus the father (or in other words, the platform was about Jedi succession – you know Jedi vs. Jedi?). There aren’t any rules in any of the Star Wars games regarding how to handle the Jedi hierarchy, yet everyone wants to play one. Thus, no rules but it is focused on, so that is your platform. (Talk about giving Luke’s player a tough decision, good vs. father.)
Did You See It?
Remember when you read the game for the gist of it? The ‘substance’ I mentioned, the second-most important thing to know in order to gamemaster, is the way things get done in the game. All the things the rules and mechanics talk about are where this is at. Lotsa combat? You’re running an action / adventure game. Detailed class rules? You run the clash between classes². Exhaustive powers lists? Players will have to solve their problems with great force!
Yet there’s more to it than that. Consider what all the rules cover in terms of the overall game; This is the ‘how’ in what gets done. Cyberpunk is all about guns and computers; if you need something done, you will use guns and computers to do it. Chassis & Crossbows has lots of car-to-car combat rules and guess what? If you want something, you jump in your car and go get it (but expect trouble along the way). The way your game will work is players solving the problems you pulled off the hypethral platform using the substance of the rules given. When you stray from that, you’re on your own, vaguely playing the game you bought. (But, just like house rules, you can definitely have fun with that too!)
Forget Everything I Just Said
Doesn’t that just drive you crazy when you hear that? Well, in a way, it’s true. You see, all of the above should grow to be completely unconscious habit or ritual on your part. If you find that you are frequently thinking about the platform for material or the substance for the ‘feel’ of the game, you’re still running like a brand new gamemaster. I know; we are all new two or three times. Once you get it down, the knack of confronting the players on the platform and drowning everything in the evocative substance ‘river’, then the real ‘art’ of gamemastering begins. (And, of course, on a bad day, you’ll still know what to do too.)
As this sophisticated of gamemaster, you begin communicating with the players on multiple levels. You get feedback not just by how cool they think things are, but also by how much they enjoy being put ‘on the spot’. You will learn to tell them what to pay attention to, not by you shoving it in their faces, but by your wrapping it in the motif. They will ‘get’ that when something is expressed deeply in the motif of the game, it’s significant; when something is expressed generically, they will learn to avoid it without thinking.
What the motif does is give you the recipe for making anything in play seem more stylish. Running a personal discussion in cyberpunk? Rather than face-to-face, it’s more in-genre if it takes place over VOIP or virtual reality with the attendant worry of the call being tapped. How well you attend the genre this way is up to you (right after being the choice of the players) and it’s very flexible. The biggest strength of tabletop gaming is that it’s all about the interactions between people. The way you differentiate between each game is how present the genre is.
This is not a technique for leading the players around by the nose; that’s just bad gamemastering. The motif lets you focus on the important elements of the scene in play in a genre-compelling way. Hmm…let me put it backwards, you’ll understand it better that way. When the players are chugging along and just happen to be grabbing every target steeped in motif, won’t their play be so much more about what makes this game cool? That’s why you lay it on when it’s important; it’s not to ‘tell’ players where to go. Think of it as a way to save effort working the game for them; if you motif everything, worthwhile or not, won’t it be a lot more work for nothing?
Now, because it comes from strutting the game’s stuff, there is another use for motif elements; they can set the mood or tension of a scene. Try it sometime; use the games motif to describe a thing or happening in your game, but choose your language in dark and rundown tones. This would be how you describe tech mods in cyberpunk in a back alley; you know, contrasting the polished chrome against the ancient, dirt-encrusted street, really sets the tone, doesn’t it? Now take things ‘upstairs’; express how ‘at home’ the tech mods look with all the apple-mac architecture and white surfaces of the upper class levels far about the streets of shanty town. Completely different tenor, yet describing the same thing steeped in specific motif. Not bad, huh?
Of course, there are also things you run that don’t matter, yet are steeped in motif. I tend to call these running gags. For example, if you have a trio of elementary-school-aged super-heroines; a good Running Gag would be ‘kid issues’ (like going to the doctor or taking baths). You can overtly make every session (or two) appear to be built around one of these running gags, but make sure you keep it mostly superficial (or the running gags will take over the motif changing the timbre of the game). There is nothing that says that ‘kid issues’ couldn’t be the hypethral platform, nor is there anything that says you should even have a running gag. Just sayin’.
All that should be pretty inspirational, right? Right?
Fang Langford
p.s. You can always take things to a higher metaphorical level than the hypethral platform. For example, in a superhero game, sure it’s about the struggle of good versus evil (and from the above, you may realize ‘the right thing’ and ‘personal sacrifice’ are high on the platform), but taken metaphorically, it becomes the conflict between good and evil within the self. While werewolves are a metaphor for the struggle between the conscience and the baser urges, it’s actually the superheroes that do a better job filling out the neo-Freudian pattern. The hero (like spider-powered guy) is the super-ego; the villain (like Octopus MD – eight legs, college grad, tech dependant – these guys could be twins!) is the id; and the secret identity (photo copy-boy) is then the ego, struggling to live up to everyone’s ideal of his super persona and to contain his personal villain (ever notice how personal all the villains are? Did penguin-guy ever go after the red/blue, super boy scout?), all while trying to maintain the semblance of a ‘real life’.
p.p.s. Some of you might be wondering how ‘story’ fits into all of this. If you want to run a game with an overriding theme, make that the thing behind all the elements on the hypethral platform; when you pull something off there, think about how it relates to your ‘story’ theme to orient how you drop it into play. If you want to run a ‘story-based’ game with an ascending tension ladder, culminating in a climax, use how you set up things in the motif to be suggestive of tension level; for the climax, simply keep an eye on what the players expect to be the final confrontation and then don’t disappoint them.
¹ Not that important of a word; it roughly means ‘the sky is the limit’.
² Prestige, interdependence and niche protection are all about class war.
3 Responses to “How Should You Gamemaster?”
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June 4th, 2008 at 3:42 am
Is there a significant difference between the hypethral platform and Vincent Baker’s fruitful void (http://www.lumpley.com/comment.php?entry=119)?
I’m getting the exact same thing from both, but maybe there is some subtle point I am missing.
June 4th, 2008 at 5:36 pm
You’ve got me!
Well detected. Yes, I am talking about exactly the Fruitful Void. (It is one of my favorite ideas; thanks Vincent!) However, as Fruitful Voids, it is a game designer technique; designers can and should design for them.
After days of consideration, I decided to separate gamemastering from designing by speaking from a stage theatre metaphor rather than a…well, ‘void’. This is the idea of a platform full of ideas rather than a void that sucks in the direction of play.
Recognition where it’s due; this is a mere shadow of Vincent’s idea. I turned it on it’s head so gamemasters can use it too.
Fang
August 4th, 2008 at 1:38 pm
[...] the up side, I still seem to be the only one teaching how to gamemaster without plotting. So I have that. Yay [...]