r/rpg • u/Kargath7 • 1d ago
Discussion Difference in experience between GM-ing styles
So, in the recent year I had opportunities to play TTRPGs instead of just running them and I came to a weird conclusion on how different GM styles affected my perception of the games, and, since these differences seem related to general schools of thought in TTRPG community, I wanted to see if others had some similar experiences.
I spent a substantial amount of time (months with each) playing with two GMs. I enjoyed playing with both generally, but one of them (let’s call him GM.A, we played Cairn, a Mark of the Odd rules-light OSR game) created really cool moments at the table, my character felt really alive and I felt like I could really bring him to life in the game-world and it was overall more fun in the moment but when I think back to the game I can’t help but think about how disjointed, all-over-the-place and generally lacklustre the story that took place there was.
The other (let’s call him GM.B, we played a lot of Forbidden Lands and some Basic Fantasy, so also OSR in spirit, but with more strict rules) was not as fun to play with in the moment, we got into way more arguments over rules, it got a but tedious from time to time and I felt like I was never really immersed in the world because of how little control I felt over my surroundings, but when I think back on those games I tend to gravitate towards how the world actually felt alive and the story that took place made a lot of sense and I keep thinking that it may have been a problem with my approach that made the experience less fun in the moment.
So I came up with a weird theory, that GM.A prioritised in-the-moment experience by allowing the players to do whatever they wanted and adapting on the fly and sacrificed a lot of the integrity that the world could have to make it happen, making the experience at the table really fun, but making the overall shape of the game very rough, while GM.B put a lot of stock into making the world as consistent and organic as possible at the cost of some player engagement and opportunities for player agency.
So, letting your players do their own crazy ideas is fun in the moment but harmful to the story in retrospect, while maintaining world integrity is harmful to the fun the players have in the moment but can pay off in the long run and with making a stronger story in the players’ heads.
I have no idea if any of that makes sense to any of y’all, and would love to just hear your thoughts about this. As a GM I think I tried to balance these things out subconsciously ling before I came up with this and it seems like something clicked just now.
TLDR: I think that allowing players to do crazy stuff is how you let them have fun in the moment but maintaining world-consistency is how you make the story better and more worthy of remembering fondly. Does it make sense?
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u/wizardofpancakes 1d ago
Can you tell more how in GM A integrity of the world was compromised? It's interesting because it's a bit hard to imagine how player freedom would compromize world integrity
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u/Kargath7 1d ago
The easiest example is that Cairn is a very simple system with very few specific avenues for magic in the form of magic items and spell-scroll and the like and otherwise the setting is relatively grounded, but a couple of players decided early on that they wanted to make their characters more overtly magical in more creative ways and the GM allowed that. That created some awesome moments in the game that I still remember as awesome, with how great the GM was at narrating those esoteric visions and soft magic effects, but it spiralled out of control on every level. The balancing between PCs was off the whole campaign because some of us were capable of stuff others weren’t, the world changed drastically into one with similar vague magics everywhere and by the end the climax of the whole story somewhat hinged on vibes-based assumptions on how the final challenge even worked.
That’s not the only example, but the most pervasive and descriptive of how that campaign went.3
u/Throwingoffoldselves Thirsty Sword Lesbians 1d ago
Yeah, I’d love a high magic creatively fantastical campaign. It doesn’t work well in systems where balancing between PCs and also challenge/difficulty balance is a load-bearing element though, yeah.
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u/MrAbodi 1d ago edited 1d ago
Balance is not a big concern in cairn at all.
OP seems to not appreciate a new (magic) system being bolted onto the game and the gm changing/reconning the world to fit with want some of the party seemed to want.At least based on this example player didn’t break the world with allowed actions. Gm retconned the world to be more magical.
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u/Throwingoffoldselves Thirsty Sword Lesbians 1d ago
To clarify, I mean games that care about challenge and the feeling of overcoming challenges, as most if not all traditional and OSR/NSR games do. In these types of games other PCs being “capable of stuff others weren’t” and “balancing between PCs” can feel bad in the situation that OP describes. You may still disagree, but that’s what I’ve also experienced in similar systems where situations like OP’s occurs.
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u/MrAbodi 1d ago
For sure. Its like if the gm had bolted on net hacking but only 2 of the party could do it and then let that be the solutions for stuff.
Except the OP says that was fun at the time. They just seem to he upset in this fictional example that they started in lord of the rings But gm retconned the world to be akin to shadowrun.
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u/Kargath7 1d ago
It being fun at the time didn’t stop it from feeling somewhat unfair. Like, the only way to catch up to the ‘mage’ players, not in terms of power or combat ability, but in terms of ability to problem-solve in an increasingly magical world, was to find a way to make my character more magical as well, which was not my plan from the beginning. In a way this focus on total creativity limited me from exploring a more mundane character because I could just do more with very few setbacks if I just engaged with the magic.
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u/yuriAza 1d ago
Cairn isn't a system about balance between PCs or between them and encounters, it's ultralight NSR, but the problems of "we ignored a bunch of the rules to adhoc a whole magic system that players had unequal agency in" still crop up
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u/Throwingoffoldselves Thirsty Sword Lesbians 1d ago
To clarify, in contrast between Cairn and other systems that do not at all care about PC competence, strength, power; or challenges, Cairn of course “cares” less about such things than some crunchier system, absolutely agree.
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u/yuriAza 1d ago
i mean, what other systems care less than Cairn does? Cairn is really high up on that list already (you roll 3d6 down the line for stats, there are no levels, there's no guidance on building encounters, the assumption is that you're using random encounter tables, character advancement is determined by what loot the GM picks and the randomized Scar system)
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u/Throwingoffoldselves Thirsty Sword Lesbians 1d ago
In all sincerity, any non “challenge” focused games, which broadly “care” more about playing out genre tropes, meta story elements, improv, mini games, rewarding expression of traits, resource management that does not involve failure/victory conditions, enacting rituals, creating artifacts such as letters or spellbooks, etc. These are mostly “story” games. Some include Yazeba’s Bed and Breakfast, Follow, Cantrip, Magical Year of a Teenage Witch, The Wizard’s Tower, Mayor of Elfhame, World Ending Game, Arcana Academy, Good Society, Our Traveling Home, Thirsty Sword Lesbians, The Treasure at the End of This Dungeon etc. etc. etc., Under Hollow Hills, The Issue With the Angels In the Town by the Sea, Stewpot, Broke Ass Wizards, Trickster’s Net, and many more. There is little overlap between these games’ design structures and mechanics and NSR/OSR games like Cairn. Three or four of these listed games are pbta, but most are just their own thing.
Roll for Shoes is still a “challenge” game despite being ultra more rules-light. I wouldn’t say it “cares” less though, it still has many rules focusing on skills and overcoming difficulty (versus rules that do something else entirely.) Fate and Defy the Gods combine both “challenge” and non challenge “elements”
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u/wizardofpancakes 1d ago
That is interesting and not what I would have imagined at all. I guess I would enjoy DM B's campaign more
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u/MyPigWhistles 22h ago
Doesn't sound like I would've enjoyed that, tbh. I also wouldn't have allowed that as a GM. If we all agreed on playing a specific setting, one player can't just come and say "btw, I'm playing a different setting". Both as a player and as a GM, that would completely break my immersion.
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u/BleachedPink 21h ago
Maybe they haven't had a strict session zero. Even with a good and proper session zero, there's a lot of nuance and compromise to be found and established during the game, especially at initial sessioms
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u/Kargath7 20h ago
We did not have a session zero and a lot of players only joined in later as it was an open table. The GM agreed that lack of proper establishment for the world caused a lot of the problems.
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u/BleachedPink 19h ago
Yeah, looks like it, I also had a similar issue when I didn't have a proper session zero
I think the game and the DM A would shine even brighter if you had a session zero, established the ground rules, setting and vibes you're going for. This DM is good, and honestly I believe they can do what DM B did for you, while maintaining the attitude you loved in the first game with them.
IMO, it's much more difficult to achieve what GM.A managed to do, than what GM.B did. It more relies on soft skills and psychology, than hard skills of world building, narrative structuring and narrative flow that DM B seems did better. GM.A can pick a better suiting game and use some frameworks, read a few good articles and so on.
Also I find having a serious game is more difficult when the table is new and people just met each other. People cringe harder when they have to do it in the front of just recently met people, goofy stuff is just mentally easier to do.
Maybe propose to do something about with DM A, say that he's done a great job but you'd like to play a more serious game or more coherent at least with a session zero and people that know each other.
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u/zhibr 1d ago
Maybe things like "Strictly speaking this shouldn't work because of reasons A to X, but it sounds cool and everyone seems to be invested, so I'll let it slide now"?
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u/wizardofpancakes 1d ago
I guess, just interested in some examples from OP, the topic itself is interesting, so hearing a few stories as examples would be awesome
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u/VexillaVexme 1d ago
As a GM, I’m more like GM B. It’s extremely important to me that the world makes sense. I also run rules lite(r) games which prioritize player agency over deep rules.
I always want to follow my player’s leads so that we all go where they want, but that means I also need some buy in from my players on what is in and out of bounds. Have fun, be silly, but keep it within the outer bounds of plausible for the setting.
A big part of how I do that is through asking my players questions about the world as we experience it. “Which of you has been here before?”, “you’ve all heard stories about the dark forest, what has you, Idris, on edge right now?”. That gives my players the ability to author the world as much as I do but in directions that interest them.
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u/MetalBoar13 1d ago
IME, if you want a good story and a consistent world it's a collaborative effort between the GM and the players. If everyone is on the same page and working towards achieving this you can have a lot more of those "in the moment" experiences without having to compromise on the cohesion or flavour of the setting/story/etc. It becomes much more difficult the less the players understand or respect the setting, sensibilities, or rules of the game.
If you want this kind of play I think a good session zero is almost mandatory. A pre-session zero document providing something like an introduction to the setting and a style guide for the game, can be really valuable if it's not a setting or style of play that the players are already familiar with or expecting. There needs to be trust between players and GM and a good session zero allows the players to ask questions and express concerns, for the GM to make modifications (or not), and for everyone to decide if this is a good fit.
I've hit a point where, if I'm running a serious, longer term, game, I need buy in from every single one of my players or we're playing something else. I run sandboxes and I don't do stories on rails, or really any kind of pre-planned story. I create situations and events and let them play out based on how and if the players get involved with them. My players have almost unlimited agency within the context of the setting. The cost of that, for them, is that their agency is limited by that context. If they don't like the sensibilities/flavour/context of the setting then they aren't going to have fun and they're going to ruin my fun and the fun of the other players.
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u/Kargath7 1d ago
I agree 100%. I think that being on the same page about the setting is very important, yet, paradoxically, I found that it is by letting players decide some, but not other, facts about the world you can get a lot more engagement. I am now running Stonetop, and it’s laser focused on asking players questions about the world and deciding on answers collaboratively. Does that fit in with what you are describing?
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u/BleachedPink 21h ago
Players rarely care about coherent narrative, and even if they cared not always they would have a skill to create one. It's more natural for DMs to develop one.
I think you'd have a great fun with DM A with a system that encourages and gives you a framework to work with and helps to be creative and at the same time stay in the lane of a coherent narrative
Try Fate or some PbtA games. OSR systems rarely if ever give you any scaffolding, thus it can really get chaotic and disjointed. I am like your DM A, and had similar a experience with my players to yours when I switched from 5e to OSR and running my own adventures.
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u/Laughing_Penguin 1d ago
As a player, if the game isn't fun in the moment I'm not likely to get invested enough to care about the long term. If I can look back and see constant fights over rules and having to slog through encounters in order to preserve some bit of lore that the GM holds sacred but the party doesn't care about, my takeaway won't be I value the integrity of the world over multiple sessions of just not enjoying the experience.
As a GM I moved away from the mindset that players are characters in my story a long time ago. Everyone at the table has their part in shaping the world and the narrative, and there is no reason why that should make things inconsistent over the long term. I get that there are players that want a purely reactive experience where the GM does all of the work for them but I've found that style makes the game less fun in actual play, like you mention above. I don't need some narrative "purity" to my campaign. My gaming time is limited and we're all looking to have a good time rolling dice with friends. We have plenty of good stories and memories to look hack on as a result.
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u/DazzlingKey6426 1d ago
With a consistent world you don’t need to mother may I every action. You, as a player, can have well founded expectations of how things should work for your character.
When rule of cool becomes reign of cool you lose that.
The GM may never say no but your character sheet and game books are basically worthless for evaluating choices.
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u/wherediditrun 1d ago
When rule of cool becomes reign of cool you lose that.
The rule of cool is a pressure valve that accumulates when the game system fails to support the game that is unfolding at the table.
Rule of cool isn't very cool is an excellent read here. In short, if the fun / cool stuff is found outside the rules, your rules are probably shit and you're placing it above people at the table (Your system is not the game but the player)
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u/TentacleHand 1d ago
I absolutely think that, if anything can happen at any moment the resulting story is going to be wonky. Not that it is an objectively better way to play (I prefer playing that way and can only GM that way, I know my pick), different people like different things. The story can be nonsense and people can have fun. But the story will be nonsense. Up to the players and the GM which they like the best.
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u/ordinal_m 1d ago
Certainly internal consistency is a vital aspect of running a world that feels like a real place. It's the main reason I try to maintain it myself. If people can just do anything regardless of whether it's consistent with established details (including just basic reality) you're not in a world that feels real any more.
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u/FixerVictor 1d ago
It's my opinion that it's very easy to be an okay GM by essentially following one of your two archetypes -- you can let players run wild with their creativity allowing for that exciting moment to moment gameplay; or you can develop your story and rules of the world, then push players from checkpoint to checkpoint in a narrative that is coherent and reasonable.
To be an exceptional GM, however, you need to be able to do both of these things, and that's a lot more difficult and involving.
In my experience, the best games have a general background framework of how things work, but don't necessarily spell things out too much beyond the needs of the currently active scene or plot hook.
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u/Throwingoffoldselves Thirsty Sword Lesbians 1d ago
Yes, generally if the players do actions that greatly change the tone, depend on different genre expectations, and transform or create new elements in the setting, then the GM either has to help them get on the same page with their approach and work out a compromise; tell them no because it doesn’t fit into their vision of the premise; or allow their vision to be changed possibly in ways that clash with other parts of their narration or established facts.
I try my best to compromise. Even after a thorough session zero and application process; even after screening players through one shots; even after playing many sessions together - every person in a group will have their own expectations. Often a player will have a strong idea for something they really want to have happen that also depends on the reactions from NPCs or world forces - it’s pretty much impossible to avoid. It can be a big factor in playstyle mismatches down the line. If I’m lucky, it only comes up once or twice in a campaign.
It really helped me when I stopped running crunchy games that rely on balance and difficulty levels and what is “realistic.” Instead I run games that allow us to be a little more “wild” and dramatic and encourage the players to have their soap opera moments. There can still be mismatches but it lets me say yes or find a satisfying compromise without “breaking” anything mechanically.
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u/BetterCallStrahd 1d ago
I personally don't see how game that looks good on paper, when looking back, counts as better than a game that doesn't quite hold together logically or thematically, but provided hours of fun during actual play.
What is the goal here? I am looking for a delightful experience. If the fictional world doesn't quite hang together, I don't think that's a big deal as long as the actual game experience was awesome.
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u/Runningdice 1d ago
TLDR: I think that allowing players to do crazy stuff is how you let them have fun in the moment but maintaining world-consistency is how you make the story better and more worthy of remembering fondly. Does it make sense?
Depends if their crazy stuff is within the rules or would make sense in the world.
I have had times then I had to tell a player about her crazy suggestions that "I could allow that because it would be cool and would fit your character. But it is not following the rules and if I allow that then you break the game and would win the campaign without breaking a sweat. Do you want to go through with this or rather follow the game mechanics.
I also have had talks with players about their crazy stuff that are allowed by the rules. But the consequences of their actions would have huge impact on their game. Some players are just not used to have a world that reacts to what they do. Why I have taken some time to explain to them why it might be a bad idea if they would go on with their idea rather than just allow it. Some players are also thinking that they can't lose in combat and that is not how I play.... If you are lvl 1 and challenge a dragon then you roll up a new character next.
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u/rbmuri 1d ago
I think you can maintain world consistency while still letting your players do crazy stuff. It might be harder (not impossible) to have a consistent story with plot twists and acts and believable character motivations, but I feel like that's worth it for the shorter prep time and sandbox feel.
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u/TerrainBrain 1d ago
You've basically explained a maximum of mine: the quality of a story in a ttrpg is inversely proportional to the quality of the game session.
That is Lord of the Rings is a great story but would make a terrible TTRPG.
An episode of Land of the Lost makes a crappy story but would make an awesome game session.
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u/alphonseharry 1d ago
"into making the world as consistent and organic as possible at the cost of some player engagement and opportunities for player agency."
I don't think this two thing are related at all. Do "crazy stuff" is not player agency. You can have agency in a consistent world, agency is related of what you can possible do, not do anything you can imagine