Vive la Difference!

In his blog, Ryan Dancey has been theorizing a lot about the next generation of role playing games (or, in his terminology, Storytelling Games), about how D&D plays at the table and its similarities to MMORPGs, and what these similarities mean for the future of RPGs.

While agreeing with some of Dancey's points and remaining skeptical about others, I've been reading his posts with interest. In a recent post, "Storytelling Games 1: Thinking Hard," he proposed a technique / game mechanic that was immediately nixed by many others who commented on the blog entry.

I'm not going to go into the whole mechanic here--you can read that for yourself by clicking the link. What I found interesting was one of Dancey's responses to the objections:

One of the things we learned at WotC in our observational research of play patterns (especially of young kids, 6-8 years old) is that they need to be given good "models" of how a game is supposed to work, but once they have one, they internalize it quickly and can replicate the experience with relative ease.

Part of the challenge here is that we're discussing a very high level theoretical concept, and trying to imagine how the groups we already have, and the players we already have, using the patterns they've already learned, will use such a game platform.

I suggest to those of you who are skeptics that if you started with a small group of people who did not have much prior TRPG experience, showed them a game session driven by player input & consensus rather than GM/player divisions, then asked them to replicate that experience, you'd have a much higher success rate (and the success would be "better" than the current average success in TRPGs).

When I ran "The Secret Lives of Gingerbread Men" for a very diverse group, many of whom had never played an RPG of any kind previously, some needed a little bit of help to work the story, and some needed a lot of help, but by the end, the players were making most of the key decisions and were driving the story forward themselves. I was doing far more "narration" than game mastering. They learned from the "model" I showed them in the first hour, and by the second and third hours, they were able to successfully use that model to play the game.

That history (both formal and anecdotal) leads me to the conclusion that a lot of conventional wisdom about the inability of play groups to make good choices for fun stories is wrong, and that with a good effort to model & launch a new way of play, a lot of people could (and would) embrace it and succeed with it.

There's more than a bit to unpack in those paragraphs, but one of the things I've noticed that jives with my experience as a GM is a blend between the third and last paragraphs. Gamers seem to be more comfortable with RPGs that are similar to what they've already played. No surprise there. When I've been GM for a group of players who have been into RPGs for about as long as I have, they seem to be more comfortable with, and have more fun with, games with strong rules structures, similar to D&D or Hero system (Champions). Gamers who started in the 1990s with White Wolf games are most comfortable with games of that style, with that level of crunchiness. Again, no surprises.

Of my many activities, one of them is running a game for local teens. (And it always strikes me forcefully that, while they're all still teens, they are all either adults or on the verge of adulthood. Funnily enough, it doesn't make me feel old; rather, I've taken great joy in seeing them mature, and watching my relationships with them evolve from "adult mentor" to, simply, "friend.")

Right, where was I?

The teens I've gamed with, who haven't had years / decades to solidify their tastes for particular games / systems / mechanics (before I started GMing for them, various members of the group had some experience with D&D 3.0 and West End Games' D6 Star Wars system) have been extremely flexible in their willingness to try new games and adapt to new styles of play. They have had a lot of fun with a variety of less crunchy systems, including FATE and Cold City. They've eagerly adapted to having greater and greater influence over the course of an RPG session, including having the freedom (through Story Point mechanics and whatnot) of introducing a variety of elements into the session. We've gone a good deal of sessions without even one instance of player / GM conflict over the rules or rules lawyering, almost unheard of in the many other groups I've gamed with. They are often fully immersed in their characters. And yes, they care about crafting a coherent narrative from a session, and enjoy doing so.

And most importantly, they've had a lot of fun, which to my mind is the real point of playing a game. Adding the elements of story, of narrative, do not in themselves ruin a game when the GM and players trust each other and the experiements and introduction of new elements is paced well. It does not result in chaos, and it doesn't result in the end of fun.

So yes, in my experience, I agree with Dancey when he says: "if you started with a small group of people who did not have much prior TRPG experience, showed them a game session driven by player input & consensus rather than GM/player divisions, then asked them to replicate that experience, you'd have a much higher success rate." And they have at least as much fun as the longer-term TRPG players do with their standbys, all of which is well and good.

While I see the points of a lot of people who disagree with Dancey, how the techniques he proposes might fall flat with them or in their gaming groups, I can't help but think that some of Dancey's propositions would succeed magnificently with groups who have no prior biases. And this, ultimately, seems to be his point--he's proposing some different ways of doing things for a new generation of players. It's quite possible that Dancey's propositions might seem as new and fresh and eye-opening as the original Red Box D&D did to me, and might be just as effective an introduction to RPGs, fun games full of adventure and imagination.