This is long, so if you're not interested in the discussion of gm styles/plot advancement, please ignore... Has anyone ever seen an index or commentary on different gm styles as they pertain to moving the plot along? This is hard to explain. I've seen gms run the game where the plot follows the characters. In other words, if the characters decide to go to town and spend the night drinking at the bar - the story follows them there. The gm modifies what he/she might have been planning and just creates encounters for them at the bar. He/she may throw out some plot hooks at the bar, but if the PCs ignore them and head down the street in a different direction, that's the way the story goes. Random encounter charts for the street are brought out and the story follows the characters' decisions. It "reacts" to the players. I've seen other gms run adventures where the major plot is the center of the story and one way or another, the PCs will follow it along. More like a choose-your-own-path storybook, the players are given descriptions of scenes and then allowed to interact with NPCs in that scene. Then, the scene ends with them choosing from several courses of action or plothooks to follow. The gm has already prepared these next scenes and just has to modify them slightly based on the outcomes from the previous scenes. The "doing research" scenes, and the "shopping for gear" scenes, and the "journey to get there" scenes are glossed over as the PCs are quickly brought up to the next prepared scene. I've seen Modules written using these two different styles (and a million variations). Remember old d&d modules that were essentially just a map of a cavern with static creature/treasure encounters? Anyways, I was wondering what others thought about the various styles. This comes up after a particularly long (8+hour) gaming session we had the other night where the pcs spent almost the entire time trying to analyze the clues they had found and researching new leads. This is usually just a musical montage in most movies where you see the protagonists doing library research and calling up their contacts for info. Well, we roleplayed this for 8+ hours. How? Every lead someone went after was turned into a scene played out by him/her and the gm. Every internet role was a (slow) adventure in cyberspace, and every reconnaisance mission was gone through like a mini-adventure (with no tension or danger). Needless to say, this was rather unproductive (because 99% of the leads turned up nothing) and it bored the tears out of most of the players. And I don't know HOW it moved the plot along at all, after 8 hours of playing. This got me thinking about the various styles of running the game and moving the plot along. Apparently this gm comes from the school of letting the characters create the story. If we, as players, were indecisive or too obtuse to follow the plothooks, then he was going to let us sit there and roleplay every conversation or action we'd take. The plot would not come to us. We would have to go and find the plot. This reminded me of other gm styles. I've seen gms who would have said, "gimme a list of all the shopping items you want and gimme a list of all the contacts you go to and what skill you're using to get info out of them". Then they would have given us the info/gear we were after and only roleplayed any critical or dangerous scenes. After this, it would be time for us to put our heads together and make a decision as to our next step. If we took too long, the action would come to us - either in the form of a random encounter, a completely new plot hook, or a side adventure. Either way, the gm was less concerned with following the characters around and more concerned with getting the players to feel the various elements of a traditional story plot - intro, rising action, climax, denouement, etc. ---------------------------------------------------------------- GMAST Home Page: http://www.phoenyx.net/gmast/
