GM Analysis – Type

https://gnomestew.com/what-type-of-gm-are-you/

This is my source for some navel-gazing.

No quiz I can take that I’m aware of.  Of course, one reason to not have a quiz is in next paragraph.

So, I’m obviously a Creator.  Now, the article does go into how GMs are different types for different play, something some people keep ignoring.  Even so, I’m pretty much a Creator for anything that isn’t like running modules in living campaigns, where I don’t really care what type someone is for such things in that pretty much anyone is a Director/Manager when in that role.

For L5R, I’m a Fanatic.  Same with LBS.  Same with Elric/Stormbringer I imagine if I ever run those.  Same with a bunch of things if I ever ran them.  But, generic fantasy?  Even Solomon Kane or Conan (which I’ve run a bit) or even Feng Shui?  Not so much.

While I clearly fit Player in the concept, neither the pros nor cons fit me at all.  I don’t think like a player when GMing, which I’ve mentioned before and which constantly bemuses me.  I think the one to many relationship of GM to players makes the experiences vary for me.  As a GM, I’m busy trying to deal with a bunch of things.  As a player, I can tune out for a while, focus entirely on GM for a while, have a side conversation for a while, look up rules while other stuff is going on, look up setting info while other stuff is going on, eat.  While I may have NPCs that I care about (and the players don’t), I can’t think of any time where my NPCs led parties or interfered with party decisions.  My NPCs squarely fit under Creator for having their own backstories, secrets, special abilities, special weaknesses, or whatever … that the players often never find out about because they don’t care.

The reality is that I’m not terribly interested in running games.  I’m interested in creating settings, creating mechanics, and helping players with understanding systems better.  Probably a great role for me is GM’s creative/rules assistant.

It might be interesting if someone thought I was a Director, but I don’t see it.  I’m actually not that interested in the PCs and may want to keep things moving but allow players to waste massive amounts of time on stuff I don’t care about.  I may write up plots, more than the players may think.  Maybe they are “tighter” than I think, and I don’t give as much freedom as I think.  I’m very much a believer in sessions having a plot or some sort of defined activity, at least until I see a good sandbox game, so I don’t see going too far afield on what’s going on.  But, that’s the same as when I play.  I want there to be a clear objective in every session from the get go.  It can change, but the player agency is in how you deal with something not in ignoring it.

I can’t recall any Romantic GM I’ve had … with one exception.  Witch Doctors GM definitely Romantic.  I probably had one or more in convention games, just don’t remember.

Opponent is something I have had.  And, I find it weird.  But, then, I’m a storyteller, not a tactician.  I may be interested in what good decisions are, but I routinely don’t care about making them and/or the PCs as a group suck at making good decisions, so it’s wasted effort to focus on challenging the party.

What sort of GM do I prefer?

Creator/Director/Fanatic/Manager.  If going to cut one of those, cut Creator first.  Then, lose Fanatic.  “Here’s an adventure.  Here are the rules.  Let’s murderhobo, uh, I mean, let’s craft a tapestry of exquisite, heartrending drama.”  You know, maybe this explains why I prefer convention one-shots.  I care most about plot and resolution.  Can be running a module written by someone else.  Can largely ignore the PCs’ quirks and let the players bring up what makes their PCs special.  Certainly not hoping for a GM who would rather be playing (yet another reason my running things doesn’t seem optimal).

Now, I’m not sure this system is that great.  I have more affinity for player archetype/interests efforts.  I have such an easy time acknowledging that I’m the opposite of butt-kickers and powergamers, that I fit perfectly as storyteller including in such things as wanting the plot to keep moving forward and getting bored when bogged down in stuff that doesn’t progress the story.  This system seems too situation dependent and also seems like it misses somewhat on what GMs are actually like.  Where the casual gamer makes a lot of sense to me as a player archetype, I can see how I’m part casual gamer, very possibly a distant second archetype for me.  Player as a GM type just doesn’t seem to really mean anything.  Just because someone would rather be a player doesn’t mean the GM is going to behave like a player.  Where I like the archetype system better than other ways of tagging players, it could be that it’s better to use features of GMs over trying to allocate to a type.

More than arguing with someone as to whether I’m a Director, I’d be more interested in someone coming up with some adjectives to describe my GMing style.

Exsanguinated

Odd.  Would think I’d use exsanguinate more often in this blog.  Not a single vampire-related thing in this post, which suggests I’ve already thematically failed my blog post.  Bang bang.

Bonus material!!  [Um, what?  Doesn’t that come at the end?]

I was thinking about L5R 4e house rules again (briefly).  In case anyone asked me what the most important to implement, I started building a list which got me into things I’d try.

Obvious first house rule is that grapple rules are gone.

Can spend any number of VPs in a round.

Things like what Wound Penalties and Fear affect are both clarified and house ruled.

Glory and Status.  Yet another spin on having these do something mechanically:  After rolls are made, you may add 5x your Status or 5x(Status-1) or whatever to one roll per day where Status would matter.  Glory can be 1x for when Glory would matter.  Usually this will be a social roll, but abstracted things like research can be justified with “Due to your immense Status, you get more flunkies to help you find the info that you are boringly wasting game time trying to find.”

That may have been it that I came up with for new ideas when I might have been half asleep.

Why would I be thinking of house rules?

Still working backwards as the blog post title has to do with something I’ll get to later, in my PBPish game, we are likely changing characters.  50% of the players are definitely doing so, and I think I join the crowd by switching to something like a Lore:Nature focused, Lion Elite Spearman who kind of sucks at being a Lion.  Another character with a nagamaki who will never get one of the cool nagamakis from canon.

Why are we changing characters?

There may be some idea of story arc having been completed, but I mostly think it has to do with doing things that are different from what players want to be doing.  The early play was exploration and contending with things physically.  Recent play has been economic and social.

Speaking of characters going away, I will now, finally, get to the main topic.

My Bloodspeaker campaign ended.  It needed to.  The GM had gotten burnt out on the campaign.  Players like me were just waiting for it to end.

My first character died in combat against maho-tsukai.  Figuring that the campaign was moving towards a confrontation phase rather than screwing around not really changing things phase, I replaced my paper-selling Chuda with a Kenku trained ronin.  Rather than my usual “everyone should have 20+ skills in order to do interesting things” character plan, I went with a focused combat character that had some minimal outdoorsy skills.

First Kiyomeru session, he gets introduced fighting road bandits with one other PC, the courtier, where that character rolls well in combat, and, so, Kiyomeru thinks he’s a combat badass.  Ninth and tenth sessions of playing Kiyomeru, the last two sessions of the campaign with final confrontation with oni governor and whatnot, there is combat.  In the meantime, court stuff, gathering armies stuff, wedding, and whatever.

At no point was there a reason for me to play after my first character died as I did nothing that mattered.  As much as I put the finishing blow on the oni governor, Kiyomeru’s Driven was really around maho-tsukai, not just any minions of Jigoku.  There was no story arc.  There was:  1, join the party; 2, wait for sessions to end; 3, couple combats.

The two results-style problems should be obvious.  Players should not be playing characters that are bad fits for play.  GMs shouldn’t allow characters that are bad fits for play.  Of course, the source of these problems is some combination of poor communication, poor game management, mismatched expectations going in.

I’m surprised Kiyomeru survived.  Got to walk into the sunset hunting for more maho-tsukai to avenge his friend who got sacrificed by them (as back story).  Did he have any impact on any other PC?  Any NPC?  My Chuda at least had impact on a NPC even if the PCs couldn’t really remember anything about him.

In sports, “we play to win the game”.  In gaming, “we play to play the game”.  Well, that’s why I play.  It’s why I’m reluctant to commit to anything new.  There’s far too little actual playing when part of some campaign.

So, sure, I could have built a different character.  I hate playing nothing-but-combat characters as I don’t find combat that interesting much of the time, and I care far more about interacting with the world rather than murdertime.  This was an experiment.  It was not necessarily a failed experiment but rather highlighted underlying problems with play.

So, sure, I could have taken a more active role as player.  Ignore character sheet and talk to people and scheme and whatever.  In a different age, like before the Flood, maybe I play that way.  I’m too tired to fight for attention.  I’d rather just have play groups that recognize that it’s far more fun when everyone gets spotlight time and where GM and players are collaborators to form compelling drama.  Well, or have something like a dungeoncrawl experience where character in characters doesn’t really matter, and it’s all about how the dice fall as to what produces the emergent story.

Did I learn anything about playing Kenku Swordsman?  Sure, the SR-2 ability is really annoying, and I’d just say that you get +5 to damage or something if you can’t suck out a VP, as rerolling after you rolled damage sucks through online dicerollers.  In person, it’s probably fine.  I got to use the SR-4 ability to ignore WP, but I never had enough VPs to nuke something.  But, then again, I played all of two sessions as a SR-4 character.

For the PBP game, I’m inclined to a more focused character than my original one (who just got named Dragon Daimyo in the Colonies), not because I want to experiment more with one-note characters but because my original character was intentionally unfocused as I had no idea if advancement would occur or what sort of skills would matter in play.  In theory, we have more focus next time around on stuff more like what we did originally.  I can go lava build (Earth/Fire) for niche protection with other PC being a tears build (Water/Void).  We just don’t care if we suck at socializing.

In general, I need to get away from L5R to some degree for a while.  I still have Iron Empire campaign in addition to PBP, but I don’t have HoR or the Bloodspeaker campaign.  I need to remember why other game systems are so vastly inferior to R&K.  I need to get away from Swords & Social play.  Well, get away from lots of S&S play, as it’s kind of hard to avoid that while playing a courtier in Iron Empire.

I need to have other things to complain about.  Mechanics imbalances in other systems.  Grapple rules in other systems.  Genre failure in other systems.  Lack of storytelling in other games.  Poor party composition in other games.

In the meantime, because I’m still in two L5R games, I still keep thinking up L5R campaign ideas and rules modifications and Rokugani NPC ideas and …

VTD 12

New season.  Tomb of Terrors themed dungeons.

Three runs.  All Epic.  None that harsh … to me.

Saturday

Missing one team member, who was at baby shower.  I build high damage, high to hit monk and ranger for others.  I play paladin because I just don’t enjoy casting spells with the dice roller.  I just find it awkward, slow, anticlimactic, and too mechanical as I’m more focused on getting through my clicks than on what the spells actually do.  Sure, Templar spellcaster was fun as I didn’t realize how good Templar is at spellcaster in this day of obscene overpowered builds.

How do you know builds are overpowered?  While we took a ton of damage on this run, we had a ton of healing to where the free rez/full heal effect cleric had never got used.  Admittedly, puzzle room 7’s do vastly reduce difficulty (at least in VTD where puzzles generally get figured out after one or two runs).

So, I did take damage, but paladin means AC 42 to mitigate damage.  The other thing that made me take way less damage but didn’t help others is that I was a ranged build, where melee got hammered in this dungeon.

Room one puzzle … on this run … was spending a ridiculous amount of time getting nowhere close to the solution.  Room four puzzle we solved because of the rogue clue.  We took too much time not doing obvious things.  Room seven puzzle we solved with little time left.  My initial thoughts were “this was a pleasant dungeon” and “there’s way too much looking closely at stuff”.  I think the aesthetics helped make up for how tedious it becomes to look closely at things through someone else’s camera.

I didn’t terribly care for the combats, which usually lasted four rounds.  In particular, the confused NPC schtick triggers me after the obnoxious room six on 4ABC that others kept wanting to do for some reason even though we pretty much always cheated our way out of the combat, making it a pointless exercise.  They just felt repetitive.  I don’t mind the been there, done that for middle rooms if the final room is cool.  Not only is it hard for a final room puzzle to be cool, but just staring at stuff and some memorization isn’t interesting to me.

Sunday

So, we had seven on Saturday.  This was usual Anti-Cabal, so five.  Others used potions.  I had AC 40 and just took little damage … with yet another ranged build.  I learned the first puzzle.  I’m tired of this sort of puzzle.  I understand there are only so many things you can do through a camera, but I’m just really tired of “story” puzzles.  I should notice these much faster than I do – it’s much like having blocks on other puzzle types I’ve seen many times.  I just don’t care about the solutions as it feels like painting by numbers rather than doing something clever, where the cleverness is really just recognizing this puzzle type immediately and blowing through them.

Combats went 6, 6, 5, 5 rounds.

Monday

We had five team members, an adjacent player, and someone I sold tokens to who bought an insane amount of high end stuff in less than a year.  He played paladin.  Beertram did druid.  I gave ranged ranger to Dave and played monk for damage.  So, we had seven again.

Again, mostly four rounds for combats.  I knew all of the puzzles, which was probably unfortunate.  I usually try to ignore rooms where I know solutions as I don’t care about failing, but I don’t have a sense of what other people want.  Seemed like people wanted to succeed at the puzzles.  In particular, the first room didn’t seem fun for anyone where I felt like I just doled out the solution (along with the others who knew the trick to it).  With a room seven puzzle, wasn’t like the combats mattered much as just need to survive them even if could take damage in room seven.  So, this run felt like just doing the dungeon without much accomplishing anything.

After three runs, I think less of the puzzles as first and last were too much examing lots of things and first was a puzzle type I’m tired of.  Middle puzzle was fine, and the room had some amusement for other reasons.  The combats were really forgettable.  I still think the dungeon was decent, but what was important about it?  Just Gib Gub, if that even was Gib Gub, having stuff happen to him.  Sunday’s DM did a good job with room five, but I didn’t really care about the stoned NPC as it reminded me of a room I hated even if it was my primary metagaming (outside of ranged for multiple rooms) of running Supreme Ring of Elemental Command on the second and third runs.

A good start on the season?

No.

A bad start?

No.

As I had gotten terrible treasure pretty much all of 2022, I have little expectation treasure will make me happy.  The stress of figuring out who was playing Monday was not fun.  I like to play with my teammates.  I like to play with a few other people.  I’m okay with playing with a bunch of people.  Then, there are people I’m not into playing with, and I pretty much never want to do a 10 person run no matter who is playing as it’s just too many people where I don’t really do much of anything (I care about doing) on such runs either in person or in VTD.

I really miss 2021’s dungeons where we got variety in the dungeons, didn’t have the dice roller, and where things seemed much harder.  I complain about lack of build variety unless you do weird formats, but I think I can just run suboptimal stuff on runs to try to up the challenge level without really hurting party chances.  Just requires a bit of thought to not go overboard but to make some change that’s actually interesting.

New TACtics

I visited family for Christmas.  Let’s keep this gamey.

My brother who flew in from Germany on the same day I flew in got me TAC as part of the “siblings” Secret Santa scheme to lower the ridiculous volume of presents that occurs when there are six siblings plus in-laws plus others.

https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/17991/tac

We played it once.  My team came out behind, then got a vastly more powerful position.  I didn’t Devil when I should have, putting other team back in game, before sealing the victory.  We didn’t do everything right given that my set is in German … almost like my brother had a reason to get TAC while in the Munich hood, but we probably came close.

Why didn’t we play more than once?

Before getting to that, I played pickleball for the first time.  Didn’t play a lot, less than two hours, outside.  My question about drops got answered when got a clearer idea how the rules actually worked.  Not gaming, but it fits newness.  I don’t feel a great need to compare and contrast pickleball with other racket sports I’ve done to draw analogies with similar games playing similarly or not at this time.

Didn’t play more TAC for couple reasons.  First, nobody is particularly assertive about doing things, so we spend time doing things like watching movies I don’t care anything about.  Speaking of movies, I did watch several on a rest day, including two I had never seen before – A Chinese Ghost Story and Ip Man.

But, the main reason was that the main activity other than looking after my nephews was mahjong.

We start with 5000 points in chips.  Christmas Eve, we play an entire set of winds.  I do reasonably well, then get a hand that starts with six flowers.  Recall that we do old style scoring with side scoring.

I was East (not double East).  I was not calling East Wind, so in many variants this would have all been meaningless.  Instead, I get a couple thousand in side scoring.

I’m up 3440 points at a break point.  After the break, I think I win the first three hands.  But, some big hands are won by others, including an 1120 hand, so I end up up 2540.

We play more mahjong night of the 27th, and I can’t win a single hand in my original seat.  Since we aren’t playing for money and people are coming in and out, I do win a single hand after moving to another seat.  We don’t finish a set of winds.

I did get game stuff for my nephews.  Simple jigsaw for the not yet 3 year-old.  Animal magnet puzzle thing for twins that aren’t yet 6 months.  I got my father mahjong butter knives since I don’t know what to get people as I’m not into gifts.  Did ScrabbleGrams as is my wont when I have a Washington Post available.  For some reason, it was easier than it usually is.  Since my mind must be deteriorating, I’ll call it small sample size.  Lot of crossword action was going on, but I don’t like crosswords, so I was rarely involved.  My brother who got me TAC got Terraforming Mars (hardcopy) for Christmas, but we didn’t try.  I’ve only ever played electronically, and we barely got a game of TAC in.

With trips to China no longer a thing, this once a year visiting is pretty much it for playing mahjong.  I can live with the memories.  I gave some personal views of my grandparents’ generation as I knew them much better than my siblings.

Hmmm … all of the True Dungeon tokens I was expecting to arrive either got to me before the trip or arrived at my father’s, including one trade that arrived the night before I flew back.  I didn’t take a deck of cards to play solitaire or a puzzle book for the plane rides.  I read three mysteries of my mother’s.

First time reading about Travis McGee, Dress Her in Indigo.  Just seemed weirdly macho, sort of like James Bond without any of the cool features of Bond.  First time reading an Amanda Cross book, with her literary heroine Kate Fansler.  No Word From Winifred.  Weird ending for one of the supporting protagonists.  Murder at Teatime by Stefanie Matteson.  Also first time.  Way too much description at the very beginning where fortunately sped up but still seemed to drag to a conclusion.

What did they have in common?  And, why does this have to do with gaming?  For the second, whatever, I’m feeling too lazy to say the same things I usually say.

As for what they have in common, I … think a couple things.  One, perfect supporting characters.  Meyer.  Kate’s husband.  Charlotte’s friend.  They do no wrong.  Meyer is sort of interesting in that it’s mysterious as to why he hangs out with Travis (not in this book but in general), but I guess could learn that from another book in the 21 book series.  The female protagonists’ male helpers are just inconsequential as characters.

Two, all three mysteries drag in the mystery department.  Lots of time is spent not accomplishing progress.  In every case, felt like there should be more urgency, though Travis at least had infinite funds to just bang hot women in Mexico for as long as he felt like it.

I didn’t particularly care for any of the main characters.  They all seemed like “characters”.  Kate constantly drinking and being pretentious.  Charlotte being the famed actress.  Travis being some weird private, unofficial detective who is superathletic.  It all felt forced.  Charlotte is kind of like Murder, She Wrote’s Jessica Fletcher, where I have no problem with Jessica Fletcher (but haven’t watched much in a long time).  Admittedly, I don’t read a lot of mysteries.  I’m actually more used to mysteries on TV, where Thomas Magnum was fine, Rockford was fine (when I watched long, long ago), Perry Mason was enjoyable.  Huh.  I guess I’m not anti-mysteries – I just watched them rather than read them.

How … um … novel [bang bang].

So, I’m not compelled to write fiction.  I’m actually not compelled to write at all, I’m just like the most fascinating writer in all of human history and make up the most geniusy words ever.  My chances of being a fantasy novel writer are rather low because I just want to publish 1+ (good) books for the life achievement, not turn my interest in crafting stories into a job.  Yet, I’m unimpressed.  I guess I’m unimpressed with a lot of stuff I read that’s more modern.  Wait, those books weren’t remotely modern.  One was from 1969, where not only the racism and sexism wouldn’t fly now but where the prices of things and population of Mexico were amusing to me.  The Spellsinger dialogue isn’t as sharp as I may have thought when younger, but I still find some of the stuff I read first as a child being vastly more appealing.

Sure, I would get exceedingly frustrated figuring out how much description to use.  I’d even have to think about first person or third person.  I’d have to do so much … work … to craft an entire novel.  Even short stories would just be work.

Speaking of work, got way off on a tangent.  Hard to think of other gamey things from my trip.  Oh, I read bridge columns when I have newspapers to peruse.  I didn’t do any sudoku, as sudoku just feels played out.