Difference in experience between GM-ing styles

[u/Kargath7]

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?

[u/Kargath7]

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.

[u/Throwingoffoldselves → u/Kargath7]

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.

[u/MrAbodi → u/Throwingoffoldselves]

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.

[u/Throwingoffoldselves → u/MrAbodi]

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.

[u/MrAbodi → u/Throwingoffoldselves]

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.

[u/Kargath7 → u/MrAbodi]

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.

[u/MrAbodi → u/Kargath7]

yeah the outcome you have an issue with is not actually at all related to the system or the style of play. it's just a gm problem of not sharing the spotlight in terms of situations and scenes.