Just wanted to quickly share: Played in a semi-regular 5e Hangouts game last week. One of the other players was one of the ones I had GM’d for a few weeks ago for my first UW game. The DM was hemming and hawing and constantly looking things up and I finally blurted out, “Put down the book and just play to the fiction!”
A second later I got a private message from the other player: “I miss your game.” 🙂
Good man.
While I can appreciate the sentiment, I do hope you weren’t so brusque. GMing a crunchy game like D&D or Traveller or whatnot is hard work, especially if you don’t have all the rules memorized (or if you don’t have a resident rules-guru as a player).
Those games are designed to be played by the book. They rely on numerous cogs to provide a total play experience, and omitting one or more of the mechanics in favor of narrative could break the underlying system. It’s entirely understandable that the GM would not want to stray.
It’s like painting vs baking.
In our more free-form corner of roleplaying, we can be abstract, go with the feel and the mood, and slap on paints and glazes will-or-nil, and while it may not be a masterpiece, it comes from the heart and is full of personal meaning.
In the more mechanically driven side, it’s a near-alchemical chemistry, a bonding and transformation of ingredients where the goal is to create and savour the result. If you start free-styling with ingredients, ignoring steps or adding new sauces and techniques on the fly, you’re likely to end up with a giant mess that doesn’t taste very good at all.
And that is why I have largely soured on D&D. I love the story game and I tend to run it like a story game which frustrates the typical D&D player.
Sean Gomes – well said and I should have shared more of the event.
All of us playing have been friends for years. After the last gaming session (back in I think October, a week after my first UW game that Chalice In Chains ran) I spent some time crafting a longish email to him sharing some thoughts about how the session went … two of us didn’t want to continue the campaign because the game flow was non-existent; he (and his wife and daughter, who also play with us) had to look up everything, to the point of driving things to a halt every turn where a die needed to be rolled.
I explained the concept of playing to the fiction and how it relieves a lot of the pressure from the DM and really brought the players deeper into the story.
So at Saturday’s session when I blurted it out, he looked up at the camera, closed the book, and said, “You’re right” and began to improvise what was happening around us. The pace increased dramatically, the story moved along (it had been more than an hour and we hadn’t even left the town yet – a town that wasn’t really going to play into campaign) and it was the most excited we’ve seen him in ages. Granted, he only kept it up for an hour before slipping back into his usual play style, but it was a great hour….