At My Table: Conversation Café

At my table, instead of characters meeting in a bar, we use Conversation Café. It's a method of discussion which encourages deeper character descriptions and leads to each of the players having a better understanding not just of the other characters and their place in the party dynamic, but often their own as well. It's been effective with new players and experienced ones, and serves as a kind of round robin fireside chat.

Starting A Game

This is something I should have talked about right at the beginning, and happily we're close enough to the beginning that I don't feel terrible about it. Starting a game. It might be as simple as getting people together, finding a game, and going, but I want to take the time to consider a series of actions that can make your fledgling game a lot more fun for everyone.

Problem Players

This came up in the comments here, and it's one of those things that comes up a lot in any co-operative exercise, I think. What does a person do with someone who won't co-operate, or won't co-operate in a way that's useful for the group? It's not an easy question to answer, and I don't think it's possible to do it in one post, but I want to outline some of the best ways I've found to deal with the issues that crop up.

The first thing to mention though, is that I don't believe in problem players. I'm not even sure I believe in problems, which I discuss here and here. I do believe in problematic behaviours, but I'm even a little cagey about that. I'd mark a behaviour inefficient or non-constructive before problematic, because they're usually better labels. It's often a behaviour that isn't helping the person achieve their goals, and we can take that to be a problem, or to be an opportunity to help them achieve what they're really after. I like to give people the benefit of the doubt, and find that very few people who might seem like jerks think that they're being jerks. People do things for reasons, and if we can understand what some of those reasons are, we can help.

GM Style Overview

So over the last three weeks I've looked at three different styles of GMing, Linear, Semi-linear, and Sandbox. I thought it'd be good to do an overview and directly compare them. The real question, of course, is which one is best? And that's a complicated one to answer, because they're good for different things. I also want to try and illustrate what they're like a bit better by using example of video games which execute these styles particularly well. If you haven't played these games, I highly recommend them. So let's get right to it.

Sandbox GMing

The time has come for the third and last of my GMing style posts, and this one's a doozy. the first thing that I have to admit is that I'm a sandbox cheerleader. I like it, I like what it tries to do, and I think it does a pretty good job. However, I'm not going to let that distract me from the challenges that it presents to a GM who wants to pursue that style. I designed a sandbox setting about a year ago, and run two separate games in it at the moment, and have been for about eight months now. I've had to adjust some of the ways I think about the game and the players, and it's been an interesting experience to do so. That said, this is definitely the style I have the least experience with. This isn't a post about how to design a sandbox setting, just an analysis of the the strengths and weaknesses of the style. So, sandbox!

Semi-Linear GMing

Last week I took on linear GMing, which is a bit of a touchy topic for me, but this week I want to explore semi-linear GMing, which is a style I have a lot of experience with. I've run a number of semi-linear games over the past decade, though I'm finally making a try at turning that setting into a sandbox (and at developing a wiki, the results of which can be seen here). In general, I find that semi-linear is usually a good starting point, because it accords people more freedom than a linear style while maintaining a balanced workload for the GM.

Linear GMing

Something I've wanted to do for a while is explore the benefits and challenges of the three essential styles of GMing. Linear, semi-linear, and sandbox. To make my biases clear, I think sandbox is definitely the best, but each style certainly has its strengths and weaknesses. So here we go with linear GMing.