the "fun never" manifesto

What we do is for fun. Shouldn't we make sure that we maximize the ratio of fun to grind?

The Fun Never Manifesto cuts to the chase around things that can break a gaming group down and up.

thoughts on brain damage

Excellent article on dysfunctional play up in the Forge. At the core of what we do there is a lot of dysfunctional behavior. I'm beginning to believe that the concept of "bait and switch" that is discussed in the article is the core of most gaming instruction (rule books). "GURPS lets you play in any setting", they promise, unless you want detailed rules that are fortune and resource based to socialize in the game. What it should say is, "GURPS lets you play in any setting that needs detailed combat". Now before you post a comment telling me how you had a session where meaningful social exchange took place understand that what I'm saying is not that *you* can't have social exchange in *your* version of GURPS. I'm saying that out of the box GURPS has little or no social rules.

If you don't believe me tell me how you would set up a scene where a PC and an NPC had a duel of wits. Imagine that both characters have "Social!" at skill 12. How do you determine how long the engagement takes? What are the core arguements in each player's stance? Do the players have to role play to get bonuses? What determines the bonus amount? In other words, isn't it just the GM deciding how well the wits of the PLAYER are acted out? Would your players stand for this arbitrary ruling if combat were involved. Yet, in GURPS, it's acceptable and even sometimes welcomed.

As we shake free of dysfunctional gaming it takes a lot of self observation and awareness to stop the patterns of years of "play". I feel like daily I wake up to some new pattern that is broken for me in terms of game play. When I decide to be open and honest about our play it means admitting all the ways that I've forced stories, bullied players, abused my role, and made it nearly impossible for my players to get their stories told. All of this on top of my players telling me that I'm the best Storyteller they've ever known.

Perhaps it's just evidence that we are starving for stories.

Flag Framing reference

I'm posting this article on good gm'ing mostly for reference for later. It's a really great look at how to GM in terms of game prep and focus.

Plus I think it will help us continue with the awesome gaming we've been having.

GM Fiat sucks

We've made a lot of changes to our gaming. Last week one of my alpha players made a point of exclaiming, several times, that the past session was the best he had ever had. Like me, he's prone to hyperbole so while I believed him (cause it was the best gaming ever) we had encountered a grievous social conflict which he choose to blow up at. He made a choice to drag the rest of the group into it. He was very angry and defensive, pretty much on par with what I’ve seen from him in the past. He and I have always had social difficulties but for the first time I found the event to be something that baffled me. I was able to express myself pretty calmly I thought and let him know.

One of the things that I’m trying to do away with is GM Fiat. Not because I think the concept is evil or broken, I just think I want to move towards a healthier model of socializing. When I read this article above I was struck by the lines:

I mean tell me, how many of you have had to sit there while some asshole in the group role-played through buying shit or had to listen to someone’s long winded soliloquy while the rest of the group had to sit and watch. See, when a game has rules to govern this shit, it doesn’t stop it from happening. All it does is constrain that bullshit so everyone at the table can have fun, including the poor bastard who is tongue tied but likes the idea of playing the snarky diplomat.

We had a social train wreck because I was still stuck in GM Fiat mode. I had strong ideas about what was happening in a scene and was not clearly making room for the players to set it up as they envisioned. It’s the very thing that every GM I know fears about giving up Fiat. “What if the players want to go ‘off map’ or want to something that just doesn’t work with my current plot?” they ask. My alpha player became very agitated and assumed that my desire to move the scene in a specific direction was a desire to block his creativity and expression. Honestly my fear centered more on a desire to avoid what I feared would be juvenile wish fulfillment. After all we had just had an amazing session with realistic character development and story driven events. It seemed like he was falling back to a “must win” situation and I was falling back to a “here is how the story should go” angle. Neither of us was right, but by the time there was conflict we were both pretty emotionally invested in our personal outcome. After he expressed his frustration I was able to see where I had gone wrong. It didn’t matter where my ideas were going or how good I believed them to be, I couldn’t just shift my promise to cut back on GM Fiat.

Good GM Fiat is going to continue to be a simple matter of providing tools to the players so that they can get their stories told. I’ll take care of the world building and kickers. Otherwise nothing is off limits or out of a player’s reach. It’s my promise to my group and my development as a GM.