For the last few posts I’ve discussed the difference between objective games and story games. One uses its mechanical framework to create challenges, immersion, and a logical deterministic resolution for fiddly and hard-to-visualize things like combat and horse racing. The other uses the mechanics to guide, enhance, and empower the player’s creative expression. As a new GM, you’re naturally going to wonder which game is better for your group.<\/p>\n
There are numerous simple considerations; story games are designed for self-contained sessions and objective games are designed for long-term campaign play, typically. Story games are the result of a modern renaissance, representing recent improvements and collaborations within the medium, while the most famous objective games are classic self-contained enterprises from the days before this hobby was big enough to support a renaissance. Story games seek to reward with drama, objective games seek to reward with drama and<\/em> accomplishment. But beyond these simple considerations is a central question, one I haven’t addressed very much–a deceptively simple way to figure out what game is right for you.<\/p>\n What doesn’t <\/em>your group want to worry about?<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Telling stories is hard. A single person left to their own devices can just about tell a good story with many hours of labor. A group working together can tell an acceptable one in an evening, but with so many cooks in the kitchen it’s bound to be missing some direction, some flavor, some resolution–something to make it memorable. As I’ve explored, mechanics exist to make games memorable.<\/p>\n But there’s another important function of mechanics: mechanics remove <\/em>a barrier or obligation from the players. The difference between story and objective games lies in what<\/em> is removed.<\/p>\n When a player sits down to create their character in an objective game, they’re not faced with a yawning void. They are faced with a list of races. A list of classes. Skills. Talents. Weapons. Spells. For a human to assemble a character from these lists is implicitly a creative act, but it doesn’t actually require <\/em>creativity–a computer could <\/em>do it. And once you’ve got everything from these lists, technically speaking, you’ve got everything you need. You’ve got your baseline <\/em>for existing in the gameworld. It’d be a pretty mean campaign where every character remained at the baseline, but for individuals, the option exists.<\/p>\n It happens–genuinely quite often–that in recruiting your friends for RPGs you’ll get somebody who’s not very interested in roleplaying. Someone will want to show up and have a good time with friends, but isn’t interested in anything that happens on the board unless it’s an objective challenge defined by rules, like a board game or videogame. As long as the rest of the party’s willing to navigate overland and talk to NPCs and solve the riddle of the tiger and decide what kind of rations to buy, this player can do just fine <\/em>with their strictly mechanical, picked-from-lists objective character. They can have a good time. Everyone else <\/em>can have a good time. There’s nothing that character actually needs to do that can’t be resolved, to everyone’s satisfaction, with a glance at the character sheet and a roll of the dice.<\/p>\n More critically, if your group is of mixed levels of interest in creative storytelling, this baseline means objective games still work beautifully. Alma loves roleplaying her character and coming with creative solutions–and the rules never actually stop <\/em>her from doing so, so she’s happy. Bob is new to roleplaying, so he’s a little anxious about putting himself out there with flamboyant roleplaying gestures, but the rules provide him a comfort zone he can always fall back on. Catherine doesn’t know anything about roleplaying, so she doesn’t know what her limits and capabilities are, but she’s played board games before and she knows she can handle her character as a statistical entity–whatever else she discovers she’s capable of is gravy. Dominic really just cares about mechanics, so he’s usually nose-deep in a rulebook during play, but occasionally–<\/em>every so often–it tickles him to bust out with an offbeat roleplaying moment that catches everyone off guard. Elizabeth likes roleplaying, but she also works in a hospital and some nights she’s so fried she can just about move her mini on the grid. With their powers combined, they form a pretty standard Dungeons and Dragons <\/em>group.<\/p>\n Creativity is great, and spread across a group you’ll need at least a little of it to make a campaign work, but objective games mean it’s not constantly demanded of everyone. Even for some very creative people, that’s a relaxing proposition.<\/p>\n Storytelling games demand more. Even a quasi-story quasi-objective game like FATE requires creativity to mechanically <\/em>create a character<\/em>–the stage where you name your character’s Aspects and come up with stunts, to some players, is an intimidating you-must-be-this-original-to-ride bar. Even for players perfectly capable of being creative, it can be intimidating when the rules actually require <\/em>them to come up with stuff in front of their friends. Other players are creative and <\/em>willing, but lack experience with telling narratives and will struggle with the game’s demands.<\/p>\n Hybrids like FATE exist when players don’t need the baseline of objective games, but still want the sense of challenge and accomplishment and structure they provide. So when it comes to the true story games, where objective rules are thin on the ground–who do I recommend those to?<\/p>\n People who don’t want to worry about those rules.<\/em><\/p>\n For some players, it falls between inconvenient and frustrating to see what should <\/em>happen, given their personal understanding of a scene and characters, be overtaken by what does <\/em>happen. Why should their dwarf die from a poison dart? Their dwarf is really tough<\/em>. Why should Count Montrose escape? That’s a terrible ending–he should be caught, even if there’s consequences. Why should their own character survive<\/em> when everything’s been leading up to a gruesome last stand? Why should the cross-country journey be played out with survival checks and checking of ration boxes when it makes more sense to just skip it and say it went fine? Why should the bomb go off when it’d be much, much, much <\/em>funnier if it miraculously didn’t?<\/p>\n Why should thousands of years of good sense and storytelling take a backseat to rules designed two decades ago by people the group will never meet?<\/p>\n When considering your group, ask yourself what’s more likely to annoy them. Being told they can’t <\/em>do something creative–or being told they have <\/em>to?<\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" For the last few posts I’ve discussed the difference between objective games and story games. One uses its mechanical framework to create challenges, immersion, and a logical deterministic resolution for fiddly and hard-to-visualize things like combat and horse racing. The other uses the mechanics to guide, enhance, and empower the player’s creative expression. As a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[15],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-34665","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-tabletop-games"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34665","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=34665"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34665\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=34665"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=34665"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=34665"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}Baselines and Guidelines<\/h3>\n