Are there any games in which the GM levels up? Why should the players have all the fun of getting new moves and more interesting things they can do as time moves on?
There doesn’t seem to be a mechanical way for GMs to get better at GMing, it’s just letting loose everything you’ve got right out of the gate.
“Bank” hard moves and you can turn them in when you get X of them, to give yourself a bonus.
It’s now AW but Stars Without Number has factions that the GM controls and they war and fight and improve between pc adventures and in response to PC actions. Something like that could be used?
I’m not sure how it would work if you weren’t focusing on specific characters or organizations but find the idea interesting.
Oh yeah Todd Grotenhuis Headspace actually does this. Different moves give you different emotional feedback that keeps adding up, and when an emotion fills up the GM can just go to town on the characters, and you work in like four hard moves over the next scene.
World doesn’t really work if you saved stuff in thrives on the snowball.
Blades in the Dark has factions that the GM controls. The GM sets progress clocks for the faction’s goals. If the players aren’t on the ball the factions can easily get more powerful.
Huh, that’s interesting. I’m picturing something like a countdown clock or series of grim portents, each of which unlocks one or more GM moves (ala threats/dangers).
Another possibility would be “threat playbooks,” where the GM unlocks new custom moves as the threat progresses.
Ryuutama (not pbta) has GM advancement.
Fellowship, a DW hack kickstarting soon, gives the GM an Overlord playbook that levels up along with the players to represent the big bad of the campaign – could be worth a look: https://storify.com/Veliministriari/fellowship-hype
Well, leveling up does a few things. It does the Skinner Box thing that players like. But it also introduces complexity over time, and allows the experience of play to change a bit. That’s not just for the PbtA games.
So the gradual introduction of complexity as well as the change in how the game is played both can affect the GM as well. Burning Wheel actually addresses this directly, telling you to play with the basic stuff for a while until you’re ready to move on.
Most PbtA games do have a pretty high curb for the GM to initially climb, but fortunately there an Internet of help out there as well.
I did that in a dream park game but i don’t think that was actually part of the game mechanics as written
The Marvel Heroic system (and its system constellation, like Leverage and the like, based out of the Cortex Hacker Guide, I think?) has the Doom Pool, and mechanics for escalating threats over time, which I quite like.
Players usually own single characters, while the GM has a whole stable — starting up the next major antagonist and how he/she/it influences the troops is a fairly direct analog.
While there are many ways to slice it, two important roles of the GM in most games with levels are
1) run the antagonists
2) arbitrate the rules.
1) you get to level up by upgrading or creating or respecing the antagonists.
2) is weirder. It makes me think of the Age of Supplements, especially for Shadowrun: each new supplement added a whole additional level of tweaking and powering up characters, along with a whole extra realm of detail and complexity, and way more ways for players (and player characters, but explicitly players too) ti be wrong about what was reasonably safe to attempt.
Also, most campaigns I’ve been in have had a level for the campaign — all the pcs pick up bennies haphazardly, but the big power bumps happen together. I understand that people rub successful campaigns with big level differences, but I’m not clear on how that wouldn’t get majorly frustrating.
I guess I’m in part thinking about Descent and Imperial Assault, where the overlord player controls all the enemies, and gets experience over time that gives them special abilities.
But I’m also thinking about ways to mechanize plot progression. Like, what should happen before a recurring villain is revealed, when the PC’s family should be put in danger, the big cinematic punches. I can only see GM XP being tied to the story progressing.
Many games use XP as a guide for players (get XP for trying things that fail, XP for interacting with other players a certain way, etc), I’m wondering if it can be used in the same way to steer GM behaviour. Say one XP for every time a move fulfills an agenda in a scene.
I think I’m getting dangerously close to rambling territory now.
Just play Paranoia and give yourself experience every time you kill a player. If a player tries to stop you saying “hey that’s not in the rules” then have the computer kill their character for treason as reading the rules are obviously way above their color. If you kill a character in this manner mark 2 experience.
Well, fate does something sort of like this with the fate point economy, but it’s not tied to character advancement — instead it lets the “side” that’s taking a pounding store up bennies for a strong return. Players using fate points to smash the opposition and running out of fate points are both forces that encourage the GM to pile it on, often with players acting as gatekeepers so they buy in a little more.
Alternately, what you’re describing sounds a lot like a board game — the Antagonist Player gets to level up threats based on victory conditions and certain party gambles.
Again, this works better when “the GM” doesn’t have all the vast fuzzy world authorship power, because of conflicts of interest.
It’s not explicit about it, but this is a feature of traditional D&D.
Think about it: if you plan and stock a dungeon for 1st level PCs, you have made a 1st level dungeon, and you are a 1st level DM. Your options are limited to, with a few exceptions, the options that make a good threat for that party. By the time your party has hit level 7, you’re stocking your dungeons with all the new level 7 treats, and maybe some beefed-up versions of things that you really liked from previous levels.
You actually do that in Burning Empires.
Doesn’t mouse guard give the XP that lets them do things during the GM turn? It’s been a long time since I read it thoug and I never played it so it doesn’t stick in my head
In Mouse Guard the players need to hinder themselves while the GM pushes them around in order to be able to get more done in downtime.
There isn’t really GM leveling in MG.
Kevin Farnworth if I’m reading you right, you’re thinking of this as a pacing mechanism more than a reward cycle, yeah? If so, I think it’s got some interesting potential.
If you’re thinking of it as a reward cycle, I think there’s a lot of conflicts of interest going on that would be hard to design around. You’d probably have to go back to core agenda and principles: challenge the players instead of play to see what happens; test the character’s mettle instead of be a fan of the characters. That sort of thing. And that’s got a lot of ripples through the rest of the system.
I guess I’m thinking of a pacing mechanic disguised as a reward cycle. Like how so many PbtA games make players take risks and get themselves into trouble through a reward system.
What GM behaviors are you hoping to reward? Or to make it look like you’re rewarding?
Really the same thing the Agenda and Principles are saying, I just want something more than ‘please try to do these’.
Fronts are the GM’s level up system in AW engine games.
The countdowns (or Impending Dooms if you’re using DW) are the increasing levels of badness available to the GM. Their threshold criteria are the level up points for the GM’s side of the game.
Of course, all this assumes a power dominated game. When the game is more focused on character (in the personal rather than the RPG sense) and story, then the power creep of leveling up becomes much less relevant.
So quick question.
Am I right to say that what you want is a system that dictates pacing by putting it, to some extent, in the hands of the mechanics rather than in the artful hands of the GM/MC, all the while giving the GM a mechanical minigame to engage in?
I really like this idea, I’m just curious about exactly what you are looking for.
I’m not entirely sure what I’m looking for, but I’m sure it’s not the same thing as when this conversation started. I think what you described is right? A way to direct GM behaviour and story development through mechanics, without depending on a strict scene progression like Fiasco or Misspent Youth, but giving more direction than what AW hacks do now.
Kevin Farnworth That leads straight into question of:
What sort of story are you wanting to create?
That’s kind of a big question. ALL SORTS?
(To be imagined in a terrible Russian accent)
Problem too big. Subdivide.
Continue divide and divide until problem too small.
Generalize.
Then solve.
Kevin, is there some specific area that you, as the GM, feel unsupported by the PbtA games? Specifically, is there something you feel you are always forgetting, neglecting, or avoiding?
If so, probably start there.
Then, think about:
1) How could you give yourself an objective way to check whether you are doing those things?
2) What sort of reward would encourage you to do those things?
This does sound like a good exercise. Ok, time to talk out loud for an hour. Let’s try the agenda and principles.
*Make Apocalypse World Seem Real.
*Make the players’ characters’ lives not boring.
*Play to find out what happens.
*Barf Forth Apocalyptica
*Address Yourself to the Characters, not the Players
*Make your Move, but Misdirect
*Make your Move, but Never Speak Its Name
*Look through Crosshairs
*Name everyone, make everyone human
*Ask provocative questions and build on the answers
*Respond with fuckery and intermittent rewards.
*Be a fan of the players’ characters.
*Think offscreen too.
*Sometimes, disclaim decision making
When I run games I always forget to do some of these, I forget to focus on them. I forget to use some of the moves, too, but there’s the trick of ticking them off when you use them so you can see which ones you’re not using. Maybe something similar? I mean, the moves are the mechanic that enforces the principles and agenda, right? The same way player moves support the player agenda (play as if they’re a real person, etc). Ideally, everyone should be following their agendas and if they do, the reward will be the great story. I think the GM has to buy into this a lot more strongly than the players, the players just have to follow their sheet on focus on their highlighted stats and follow whatever goals that emerge, then react to things.
Hey, highlighted stats, maybe that’s something to consider. So instead of being hot or sharp, the MC brings forward hunger or fear or decay or weirdness or whatever. What if each player highlights one of those for the session? I’m starting to think about Dream Askew, where the GM moves are split up into the different fronts for the Psychic Maelstrom, Scarcity, Outlying Gangs, etc. Ooh. Ok, so what if the MC’s playsheet had these different ‘stats’ (they might not be numbers), had the GM moves under each one, and the players each highlighted a stat at the start of each session? Or maybe they’re based off of what playbooks are at the table. I’m starting to want to write this up. It’d be easy then to keep track of which moves you should be trying to do, but it still doesn’t exactly address making sure you fulfil the agenda. You should be doing all of the agenda, every session.
For the reward, it could be extra front moves you could do? Or introducing new NPCs, opening up a new front or new locations after some time? I really like those shows that just get bigger and bigger each season (The 100 is a great example of this, where each season they bring in a new front that completely changes the perspective of the show, or Angel where it starts out as a shitty PI beating people up in alleys and turns into the heads of a law firm fighting forces on a cosmic level). Yeah, filling in those blanks you leave at the beginning would be a great way for the GM to level up, as long as you can do it in a collaborative way.
I think there’s enough here for me to sleep on and think about.
So the ‘advanced moves’ for a GM would probably be very similar to the regular moves, but would feel bigger and would probably be one-time events. Like ‘two fronts join together or start a war’ or ‘take away something important, like the hardholder’s hold or the gunlugger’s guns’, the kind of big events that sessions lead up to, or that start off new threads to a story. These are things that the GM throws in anyway every once and a while, mostly based on gut, but if the GM had to build up ten hard moves from decay before they were able to say the hold’s generator explodes, it would give more direction for pacing.
I can see this butting heads with fronts and countdown clocks, not sure how to reconcile that (or if I should).