I apologise if this post is a little long winded. I found some discussion in the Your campaign style, player v. story.  In particular I found the discussion about “Situational GMing” very interesting and wanted to try to get it straight in my mind.

I don’t really have any conclusions to offer, so fair warning; this may turn out be a bit of a shaggy dog tale.

Pacing
Pacing is the mechanism through which you open up new content in a game.
For instance in a dungeon, moving to a new room opens up new content. Likewise the player saying "I'll check out the hospital to see if there were any witnesses" starts a new scene the opens new content. The concept of new content and new scene are clearly related, but for the time I want to focus on the content aspect.

Not all content is of the same quality. If the next room in the dungeon is empty, there really isn't much you can do with it. Likewise there could be no witnesses at the hospital. Let's call this Empty Content. Empty Content isn't always a bad thing. It might help express the sense of time passing or it may be that the players make something out of it anyway as in "I didn't find any witnesses at the hospital, but on other hand I got the telephone number of this cute redhead nurse."

Generally though you'd expect new content to be a little more significant. So there might be in the next room contains a bunch of orcs and a treasure chest or maybe a clue to help further the investigation. We'll call this Significant Content. Significant Content can be viewed as the meat of the adventure.

On the top of the pile is Super Content. This is content that resolves the adventure, the reason you began the quest or investigation in the first place like a Boss room. But by it's very nature there any one adventure will have few, or possibly just one instance of Super Content and it will naturally occur towards the end of the adventure for if the quest item were found in the first room of the dungeon, there would be pretty little point exploring any further.

Pacing and Choice
Dungeons are not normally linear. A room could have more than one exit, each exit linking to a different set of Significant Content, each exit providing a different journey (in terms of length, risk and rewards) to the Super Content. This makes the choice of exit is a significant one (ideally the players might have some clues to help make the choice more meaningful, but even if the choice is just down to luck, it still matters).

Note that if GM is winging it or if the content is being generated on the fly using by random tables for instance, the choice of exits is not longer meaningful. The Super Content is a bit like Schroedernger Cat in this instance, it could exist anywhere.

What Makes for Good Pacing?
Part of the process of designing an adventure then is getting the balance between Empty, Significant and Super Content. In a dungeon it comes down to things like how many rooms or even levels between the entrance and the Super Content, what sort of ratio between Significant and Empty Content and how challenging is the Significant Content. It might even involve trying to arrange the content rhythmically so that the pace varies to avoid monotony.

Note that if the dungeon were entirely linear, the GM could design things to be rhythmically varied. In so much as the dungeon offers choices (multiple exits in each room), the GM surrenders the ability to control the pacing. In the worse case this can mean the players finding a route to the Super Content that avoids virtually all the Significant Content or conversely taking a long, boring and frustrating route to the Super Content of even getting stuck on the way.

The point of this example is simply to illustrate this:

There is a trade off between optimising pacing and giving the players meaningful choices.

Improvised Content, Choice and Pacing
Outside of the dungeon context (or any very tightly pre-plotted adventure), every scene has a virtually endless number of possible exits. The GM cannot possibly prepare all of these in advance and shouldn't even try. What the GM is required to do is improvise.

When improvising, the GM is faced with the having to decide what new content to make available each scene, be it Significant, Empty or Super. The decision my be driven by logic ("Based on the given backstory, there logically wouldn't be any witnesses at the hospital at the moment"), based on pacing considerations ("The players look a little bored, I'll stage a fight at the hospital") or even practical considerations (“Gosh it’s getting kind of late, better not stage the ambush now.”).

This leads to an interesting little paradox. When the GM is improvising, while the range of player choice increases, the importance of the player's choice of is diminished. That is to say the players choice is tempered by the GM's judgement.

Most crucially though is the GM decision of when to make the Super Content available in this context, or rather what must the party do in order to gain access to the Super Content. In the dungeon the answer is obvious, clear a path to the room the Super Content is contained in. In a game with largely improvised content this becomes less an absolute and becomes subject for negotiation. It comes down to the talent of the GM to read the room and decide when it feels right to unlock the Super Content. Note that deciding in the planning stage that the Super Content can only unlocked when, say, three key clues have been discovered doesn't really change anything, it just means there are four bits of Super Content in the scenario rather than one.

Note also some games have taken to using some other meta-game resource to determine when the Super Content can be unlocked, but let’s not go there.

So I guess if there is a question here it's for the Situational GM about how do there decide what kind of content (Empty, Significant or Super) to unlock and when? What is the criteria?

I'm afraid you missed the point, SG. There's nothing to unlock in a Situational game. NPCs are  processes, verbs, vectors. Even settings can change - they just have lots of inertia. There is no solution, just a resolution. Eventually. Even if that resolution is that you get distracted by something shiny.

-clash

Dang, that was a lot of wasted text then!

No but really. The party says "We go the hospital to see if there were any witneses." The presence or abscene of witnesses is content. It's the the Gm choice whether they are witneses or not. What is the criteria to determine this?

Quote from: Soylent Green;379756Dang, that was a lot of wasted text then!

No but really. The party says "We go the hospital to see if there were any witneses." The presence or abscene of witnesses is content. It's the the Gm choice whether they are witneses or not. What is the criteria to determine this?

I judge how probable it was that there were witnesses, and if any, were they taken to this particular hospital. Then I roll the dice.

-clash

I see, sort of like Mythic rpg? Cool.

Is the roll  and probabilities open/hidden? Is there negotiation with the players? Is it based on the the character's skills or background in anyway or is it just  a flat roll?

Are you influenced by other considerations beyond "how likely", as in for instance "the players look bored, maybe we should have some combat"?

Sorry tobe a pest, this isn't a trap it's just something I'm really interested in but I don;t have a firm position or method myself.

Quote from: Soylent Green;379765I see, sort of like Mythic rpg? Cool.

Is the roll  and probabilities open/hidden? Is there negotiation with the players? Is it based on the the character's skills or background in anyway or is it just  a flat roll?

Are you influenced by other considerations beyond "how likely", as in for instance "the players look bored, maybe we should have some combat"?

Sorry tobe a pest, this isn't a trap it's just something I'm really interested in but I don;t have a firm position or method myself.

I suspect you may be over thinking the topic. Those all really depend on the system you use. I think at the core, situational GMing is really about doing things on the fly, based player actions and the NPCs and power groups in the mix. That's my understanding of the term at least. Actually the savage worlds rule book has a couple of paragraphs on the subject in the GM section.

Quote from: Soylent Green;379765I see, sort of like Mythic rpg? Cool.

Is the roll  and probabilities open/hidden? Is there negotiation with the players? Is it based on the the character's skills or background in anyway or is it just  a flat roll?

The roll is open. The probabilities are improvised, but not hidden. There is no negotiation with the characters, unless they are using some Luck type mechanic. The modifiers to the roll are dependant on the situation. Say the incident is a gangland slaying. This might really depend on how ruthless the hitman would be in eliminating witnesses, not on the character's skills at all.

QuoteAre you influenced by other considerations beyond "how likely", as in for instance "the players look bored, maybe we should have some combat"?

No. The NPCs are moving towards their goals, using their resources according to their personalities. The game comes out of the PCs interaction with that. If they for some reason refused to interact, I'd assume they weren't interested and ask them if I should drop the whole thing. Since my characters are not in the least passive-aggressive, I've never seen that action - or lack thereof - be taken. They are much more likely to say "Hey, clash? Let's play something else."

QuoteSorry to be a pest, this isn't a trap it's just something I'm really interested in but I don;t have a firm position or method myself.

No problem. It's an old game style, but not the most popular. A lot of people know nothing about it. Others have been running this way for years and never known there was a name for it.

-clash

Quote from: BedrockBrendan;379770I suspect you may be over thinking the topic. Those all really depend on the system you use. I think at the core, situational GMing is really about doing things on the fly, based player actions and the NPCs and power groups in the mix. That's my understanding of the term at least. Actually the savage worlds rule book has a couple of paragraphs on the subject in the GM section.

That is very much it, Brendan. It's not real complex. It's a flow thing to a large extent.

-clash

Thanks, that makes sense. I can see how it works. I imagine a minority of players might find the rolling of dice to determine the state of reality a bit anti-imersive, but I'd be fine with it.

But just to expand on the general principle of Situational GMing, not because it needs to be, but just so I understand what fits with within and what doesn't, where are couple more follow up questions if you don't mind.

1) Would you consider letting the players make these rolls if it made them feel more involved in the outcome?

2) In Robin's Law of Good Game Mastering (and I don't quote this book as though it were some sort of authority) has a section on improvising. It suggests that the GM when responding to a player has the GM should consider broad options:

What is the most obvious outcome?
What is the most challenging outcome?
What is the most surprising outcome?
What is the most pleasing outcome?

The idea being that alternating between these criteria makes for the most entertaining and unpredictable game experience.

The book even includes a little table so you can roll randomly between these options. How does switching criteria based on a random roll fit with your idea about Situational GMing?

Quote from: Soylent Green;379756No but really. The party says "We go the hospital to see if there were any witneses." The presence or abscene of witnesses is content. It's the the Gm choice whether they are witneses or not. What is the criteria to determine this?

Well, at its best, the sandbox prep you did prior to the game will inform your adjudication there. That is, the whole purpose of prepping a sandbox prior to the game and not just roll on a bunch of wandering monster tables is that you create a coherent environment with its own logic and dynamism, which then is impacted by the PCs each time they interact with it, leading to all sorts of ripple effects, if you will, on the sandbox's inner workings, which will make its different elements or moving parts evolve differently, elements which will then be impacted again by the PCs choices, and so on, so forth.

Prep is fine, but as I exaplined in the wall of tet above, you can't cover everything all the time. If the players never do any thing totall unexpected then either they are not really trying or the GM has way too much time on his hands.

And there are many, many situations the GM has to improvise content which could just as easily fall either way which end up either rewarding the player characters with something they wanted or denying it to them. There are a lot of differnet theories out there how the GM should handle this. As I don't have not entirey made up my mind on this, I like to hear how people approach this.

Quote from: Soylent Green;379814Prep is fine, but as I exaplined in the wall of tet above, you can't cover everything all the time.

Nor should you try, but that's not what I just wrote. I didn't write that the way you prepped the setting ought to answer all your questions for you, but that, at its best, it INFORMS your ADJUDICATION in the game by providing a frame so that you don't make judgment calls in a vacuum. That's the overarching coherence, logic of the thing that matters, not whether your notes spell out the answers for you or not (which I actually would not advocate).

Hope it's clearer.

Quote from: Benoist;379815Nor should you try, but that's not what I just wrote. I didn't write that the way you prepped the setting ought to answer all your questions for you, but that, at its best, it INFORMS your ADJUDICATION in the game by providing a frame so that you don't make judgment calls in a vacuum. That's the overarching coherence, logic of the thing that matters, not whether your notes spell out the answers for you or not (which I actually would not advocate).

Hope it's clearer.

Does that equate to Robin Law's "What is the most obvious thing?" and gioing with that every time? Doesn't adding a randomiser inthe adjudication process, which is what I think Clash suggest spice things up a bit without losing realism?

In fact it adds realism, because in reality, it's unlikely that the most likely thing will happen all the time. (It also adds spice. And I agree that it's similar to Mythic.)

Quote from: Soylent Green;379820Does that equate to Robin Law's "What is the most obvious thing?" and gioing with that every time? Doesn't adding a randomiser inthe adjudication process, which is what I think Clash suggest spice things up a bit without losing realism?

It could. I don't think that's an either/or choice, here. You can do both.

Also, as a GM, you can take into account that in reality the most likely thing does not occur all the time.