Question: What do you guys do as MC’s/GM’s to break that habit to let go and let the players be a larger part of the game?
It is the one thing I have had an issue with, years planning every event and setting up adjectives for places, people and creatures.
You need to focus on planning what your characters and factions are planning rather than things that will happen.
For some great tips about thinking on your feet, I recommend http://thievesoftime.bigcartel.com/product/play-unsafe
My problem isn’t thinking on my feet …. that’s how I have ran 75% of my games ever. Most of them, with decent success. My problem is letting go of control.
Yeah, it’s the first tip then: work out what plans your forces have and let the players interfere with them if that’s what happens. There’s a flip side, that if the players ignore something terrible that’s building up, you have to let that happen too.
I’m going to just back up and quote a principle. “Play to find out what happens.” I was working on an SF dungeon starter and it was right there in the agendas.
I ran a published adventure using an AW hack. It gave me the setup, the environment and the forces acting behind the scenes. I turned the players loose in it. It went pretty classically, for that adventure. Next time I run it, I start the game four days earlier to allow for a lot more deviation. Either way, I had a scenario for the start of the game, I did NOT have one for the end of the game.
What this all means in practice is that yes, you do have to give up your notions about how it ends. * World games are light on the prep as a very strong stylistic choice. But they’re light up front, for the first session. One of the GM principles is “Say what your prep demands.” Once your game gets rolling you have full scope to prepare set pieces, develop NPC backstory, draw maps, make up political factions, and so forth.
What * World games explicitly discourage is running (or railroading) the players through the first draft of your novel. There’s an ideal of player-collaborative campaigns, but there’s a lot of middle ground for heavy prep and published adventures than you might expect if you just focus on the extremes.
I’ll give one more piece of advice. Write campaign fronts that give you GM moves to make. Technically everything the GM does is a move, and there’s a list of those. Coming up with those is your big challenge, you have to do it on the fly. Write your fronts to give you stuff that happens. Stuff happening is very easy to fit into a GM move, having them handy makes running the game easier.
One thing to be clear about is that the moves the MC has are the only moves, and that the MC can discuss if a player made Move or not, but once made the Move is made no matter the result.
There is no room in the rules to gain more control. You can’t make things happen whenever you want, because you have certain times to use Moves. You can’t save your big bad, because if the player is Ice Cold and Merciless and decides to kill them for looking at her little brother, the big bad is probably dead. Trust me though, the looking through their stuff after scenes will probably be awesome.
Basically, you can’t rocks fall, everyone dies. At most you can rocks fall, take harm as established.
It’s always come natural to me since I seldom plan anything!
I find that is less about planning and more about holding control of the world around as the players explore it. AW is so different than so many other games as it ask questions of the players to help show what you see.
Yeah, a strong vision of the Apocalypse and things in it can be both helpful and a pain, because you start wanting to dump stuff on the players.
I find that just thinking about emergent things, keeping yourself open to where your bloody handprints would be best placed, helps to keep from just disgorging a world purely of your own design. Let the players have whatever living space they want within the hard limits of gear / Moves / other guideposts to the fiction. Ask the relevant questions from there. One of them has a little garden? Awesome, start thinking about what it takes to have that and what it means to be the one with it.
You need this supply of player details not just to play to find out, but to maintain the level of player connection to things that really puts their skin in the game.
Personally, by the time AW came out, I had played a lot of other games that helped me get there and had players who were used to having a larger role.
My suggestion would actually be to play some GMless games (Fiasco, The Quiet Year, Microscope) with folks who aren’t part of your standard play group. After all, you can’t fall back on your old habits if you’re in a new context where that’s impossible. And it’ll retrain your instincts for different kinds of play. Plus, those games are really fun!
Or just play in someone else’s AW game and pay attention to what they do. I also benefited greatly from having folks like John Harper in the area to steal ideas and techniques from.
Jonathan Walton That is a great idea.
Force yourself to give up control. When a player says a thing, and you contradict them, instead of barfing forth yourself, ask one of the players how it really is. Don’t be afraid to do this, and then go back to what the first player said. Then take it a step further, contradict their thing, barf forth your apocalyptica of how it really is, then pause and says, “No wait… actually it’s the way you said it.” contradicting yourself. Do this a bit and you’ll get used to letting the fiction have control.
Also, listen to Actual Play podcasts! The The Jank Cast has several up, and my group has 2 seasons of AW up at http://www.podcastmagicmissile.com … listening to APs can be more convenient than finding a second play group and the time to meet.
Finally (and this may be the best of the three) give up on being the MC and pretend you’re a the producer of a documentary. Put the camera on some of the people and see what happens. Just remember that the Player Characters are the Fan Favorites and you get more from shooting scenes with them in! (;
Yanni Cooper, the link to the podcast did not work.
That’s because I can’t spell. Fixed.