The Psychology of GM Prep
0GM Prep is a complicated topic that impacts how games are designed and how they’re played. There is a lot of “folk wisdom” related to classically structured RPGs and what should or shouldn’t be prepped, and a lot of interesting new games like Apocalypse World make what is or isn’t prepped by the GM a big part of the game design. I want to look at the topic from the psychological perspective of how different types of GM prep affect the GM and players of RPGs and how it shapes their subjective experience of playing.
I’ve blogged before about the psychological compliance technique of commitment and this is a big part of the GM prep picture: when a GM preps something for a game they make a commitment to contribute what they prepped to the fiction during play. This is very useful in a lot of RPG designs, because the psychological pressures on a GM during play (high cognitive load from keeping track of lots of details, face to face with the players, etc.) are different from those faced during prep. A good game designer will take into account which decisions they want the pre-play GM’s mind to make (and stick to) and call for prep that results in those decisions. This can be a way to get the game to introduce what Vincent Baker calls “unwelcome content”. Humans tend to make different decisions when framing them in short term or long term contexts. Most dramatic stories benefit from emotionally hard-hitting events and most games about challenge benefit from including genuinely dangerous obstacles. It’s frequently valuable to have these decisions made by the more cerebral pre-play GM than the one who is looking his sympathetic players in the eyes and might be tempted to pull punches. By using the principle of commitment, a game designer can get the GM to introduce content that might be uncomfortable in the short term but will provide a bigger long-term payoff (e.g. a more dramatic story, a more impressive victory, etc.).
A story from actual play: When I first tried to GM Mouse Guard, I tried to do it in what is popularly referred to as the “improv style”, i.e. I prepped almost nothing and intended to introduce the obstacles faced by the players on the fly. Although the game seemed to function, it was a totally unsatisfying experience for me as a GM. I felt like the players weren’t accomplishing anything – I was psychologically attributing their successes to my belief that I started throwing them softballs after taking sympathy on their early struggles. I decided to abandon that approach and switch to a strongly prepped game: I decided before each session what situations they’d face that would call for skill rolls, whether I’d be applying conditions or twists if they failed, and what those twists would be. The difference was night and day: by making these decisions before the game, I knew with complete confidence that what the players were or weren’t accomplishing was coming from them, not me, so I could be excited and enjoy their successes, commiserate with their troubles, and appreciate the gravity of their sacrifices – I could be a fan of the players rather than feeling like I was patronizing them.
So GM prep clearly has benefit for some games. Are there downsides? Let me talk about “railroading”. Railroading is when the GM plans for a certain sequence of events to happen, and uses subtle or overt manipulation or negation of player’s fictional contributions to cause those events to happen as originally planned. “Which way do you go?” “We go north.” “You get lost and circle around for a while, eventually ending up back where you started. Which way do you go?” “East?” “You go east for a while and enter a forest clearing just in time to see…” The GM is so committed to a certain element of fiction being introduced that other fictional contributions get stomped on. Why is this bad? Primarily because many games also rely on the principle of reciprocation to build investment in the fiction and game system. It’s OK for me to introduce content that might seem unwelcome because you know you’ll have a chance to respond and introduce your own content. If the players realize that their contributions are either being explicitly or implicitly ignored, then the principle of reciprocation stops working — since they’re not really getting a chance to say something that the GM must respond to, the GM has fewer psychological incentives working to get the players to accept the GM’s fictional contributions (in the classic railroading horror stories the GM ends up relying completely on authority).
What about less overt railroading? Here’s a hypothetical situation: we’re playing a classical “party of adventurers confronts dangerous situations” RPG. As GM, I prep a series of exciting set-piece battles, culminating in a dramatic showdown with the villain on a rope bridge over a river of lava. But, during play, the players decide they want to go to the ice realm instead of the fire realm. Thinking quickly, I reskin the encounter to take place on a bridge over a river of ice-cold water instead. Is this a problem? My answer is that it’s a lesser problem than explicit blocking of contributions, but it’s still a problem because of the frame of mind it puts the GM in: you’ve decided that the player’s contributions determine nothing but meaningless color. And by making the fire snow “meaningless” in your own mind, you undercut some of the value of your prep: you have no commitment to the fictional details of the situation, which will make it harder for you to engage with the fiction that’s happening in the game and increase the odds that you (and likely everyone else) will have a flatter, less satisfying gameplay experience.
The classic overreaction to the problem of railroading is to abandon prep entirely. As I’ve already explained, though, GM prep can be incredibly valuable. The trick is to figure out what kind of prep is right for the game you are playing. On his blog recently, Vincent Baker has been talking about the idea of “open” vs. “closed” questions in a game. When everyone is on the same page about which questions are going to be determined in-play, then there’s no risk of squishing those opportunities for fictional contributions by doing “bad” prep. Different games leave different questions open. In Dogs in the Vineyard, for example, the GM decides that there are mutually incompatible desires between NPCs in a town. There’s really never an opportunity to do an “It was all just a big misunderstanding!”ending in DITV, or have a “Can’t we all just get along?” plea really succeed. Somebody will be unhappy by the time the PCs decide to leave town (and maybe it will be the PCs). If the players came into the game expecting that they’d be able (with enough cleverness and skill) to achieve an everybody-wins solution, then the prep the GM did would likely conflict with that expectation. Once everybody’s on the same page about understanding what sort of the problems exist in DITV towns, though, the game tells the GM explicitly not to plan for a particular solution – players deciding what to do about the problems in the town is what the gameplay is all about, and most of the fun of GMing DITV comes from seeing the players interact with the situation in a way that’s unique to the people you’re playing with and the characters they chose to play.
Some people believe that the only solution to avoiding railroading is to abandon the idea of plot altogether. DITV and some other games solve the problem of achieving a satisfying story without railroading by guaranteeing how a story will proceed (for DITV, it’s in a series of emotionally and morally charged conflicts, in Apocalypse World it’s in a series of gritty situations, etc.) but not where the story will go. For some stories, such as character dramas, this is a great approach. It’s not ideal for all stories, though: some genres have strong expectations about how the plot will proceed. My own game Final Hour of a Storied Age is about Epic Fantasy stories, and I think that genre has strong requirements for how the overall plot happens, so I included a strong plot outline mechanic in the game (however, Storied Age is also GM-less and has no pre-session prep). I also recently participated in a playtest of Boarsdraft by J.B. Mannon which models the Harry Potter novels, so it has a heavy requirement for an overarching mystery plot that lasts the entire school year. These games are up-front about the overarching plot, so there isn’t any confusion about whether that’s an open question or not. In my opinion, pinning down the overarching plot is a design decision that lets you leave other questions open: now will you get there, but how. That doesn’t mean that pre-deciding plot works for every game: the mechanics of a game will often give the participants the impression that certain questions are open, and if believing those questions are open conflicts with a pre-planned sequence of events then something has to give (in so-called traditional play it’s often the game mechanics that give –- the GM will start fudging in order to achieve the planned plot). Most traditional RPGs give the players the impression that they’ll have the freedom to choose where to go and what to do, which is frequently incompatible with a crafted plotline. This explains why some people find it much easier to achieve functional play with these games when they use a sandbox approach rather than a plotline approach to play.
In a well-designed game the psychological incentives aren’t operating at cross purposes, so what you do or don’t prep is an important element of game design, and should rarely be a casual decision made at the whim of one participant.
Final Hour of a Storied Age 0.70
0A new playtest draft of my epic fantasy roleplaying game is available: Final Hour of a Storied Age rev 0.70. Based on feedback and playtesting I’ve added a few examples and also added a new mechanic that gives players a bit more active control over some of the dice mechanics.
Changes in 0.70:
- Added influences and crossings terminology to star charts
- Added mechanic to tweak dice results on viewpoint/adversity rolls
- Added examples to character creation
The default PDF has digest-sized pages which are meant to be read in 2-up view. The pages fit side-by-side on a landscape oriented 8.5×11 page, but it can be tricky to get the PDF to print out like that, so I created this printer-friendly version, too: rev 0.70 printer-friendly (it also replaces the shaded boxes with outlines).
I want to thank everyone who has given me feedback and the playtesters who have tried the game.
Interview on New Style podcast
0On the second episode of the New Style podcast, Scott Dunphy interviewed me about my game Final Hour of a Storied Age. Scott had a lot of good questions and I had a lot of fun doing the interview. Scott’s goal with the podcast is to highlight games that aren’t getting as much attention as the “big names” in the design community, and I think that’s a cool contribution to the community and a great use of the podcast format.
Compliance Techniques and RPG Design 6
0Continuing my series about the commonalities between RPG design patterns (an RPG’s system is the means by which the group agrees to imagined events during play) and the ideas presented in Robert B. Cialdini’s Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion (certain human behavior patterns can be leveraged to get people to agree to things), I next want to talk about scarcity. Humans have an instinct that things that are difficult to possess are typically better than those that are easy to possess, so we often subconsciously use how difficult something is to attain as a way to determine its value. Opportunities seem more valuable to us when their availability is limited, and we will agree to them more readily.
The classic sales techniques for exploiting this tendency is to limit the availability of products, either in quantity (“Act now! Supplies are limited!”) or by a deadline (“Exclusive opportunity! Buy while you can!”). An example of this in RPGs is filtering actions through an initiative order. When operating in an unstructured “free play” mode, some players will be content to let their characters be relatively inactive and allow other players to determine the course of the game. When the game switches to a more structured form with turn-taking, such as D&D combat, each player will feel compelled to have their character do something on their turn rather than let the opportunity slip through their fingers.
Cialdini also points out that people are more motivated by the thought of losing something than by the thought of gaining something of equal value, and that being prevented from doing something feels like a loss of freedom. This relates to the psychological concept of reactance: when our choices are limited or threatened, our desire to retain our choices makes us desire those things more. Basically, it’s the forbidden fruit effect. Cialdini offers an interesting illustration:
Dade County, Florida, imposed an antiphosphate ordinance prohibiting the use – and possession! – of laundry or cleaning products containing phosphastes. … Spurred by the tendency to want what they could no longer have, the majority of Miami consumers came to see phosphate cleaners as better products than before. Compared to Tampa residents, who were not affected by the Dade County ordinance, the citizens of Miami rated phosphate detergents as gentler, more effective in cold water, better whiteners and fresheners, more powerful on stains. After passage of the law, they had even come to believe that phosphate detergents poured more easily than did the Tampa customers.
In studies, they’ve also determined that telling students a speech on a particular topic has been banned makes them more likely to agree with the position advocated in the speech, even if they haven’t actually heard it. There are also indications that courtroom instructions by judges to disregard inadmissible evidence can paradoxically cause juries to weigh that evidence more strongly than they otherwise would. An RPG example of leveraging this effect might be exceptions-based designs: players are often eager to agree to have their characters use powers that let them do things that would otherwise be forbidden by the rules. Putting those powers into an advancement system so that you can only access them after “levelling up” can make them seem even more appealing, encouraging players to accept their use in the game.
Cialdini also describes a “commodity theory” analysis of persuasion – exclusive information is apparently more persuasive than commonly available information. When customers are told that a certain item will soon become scarce they tend to purchase more. When told that this future scarcity information isn’t well known, they’ll buy a lot more. I haven’t seen this technique used in many RPGs, but I believe that some games use secret information to encourage players to accept the idea of their characters acting in ways that they normally wouldn’t, such as with the secret agendas in Cold City.
Psychologists have also determined that something moving from abundance to scarcity seems more attractive than something that is always scarce. This explains the observation that inconsistent discipline tends to produces greater rebelliousness in children – when a rule is freshly applied when it wasn’t before it feels like a new curtailment of freedom, making the forbidden activity all the more appealing. The stat highlighting in Apocalypse World may be exploiting the way that people react to a loss of abundance: since players can expect their highlighted stat to shift from session to session they are motivated to agree to character actions that use the highlighted stat as often as they can while they have the opportunity to do so, knowing that they may not be able to get experience for using those stats in the next session. (The fact that different players will have differently highlighted stats during a session is also a pretty interesting facet of the design, since it showcases for each player things they can’t get experience for).
Experiments have demonstrated that scarcity coming from social demand is more desirable than scarcity for other reasons, such as arbitrary limits on supply. In an example from compliance professionals, realtors will often get fence-sitters to make an offer by suggesting that well-financed outsider is considering the house. RPGs that offer limited opportunities for a subset of players to take an action, such as Mouse Guard‘s “the first player to step forward makes the roll” rule, can make taking action seem more acceptable. Compliance professionals also exploit the momentum that can build up when people try to acquire scarce resources. Like fishermen chumming waters to start a feeding frenzy, department stores will seed sales with highly attractive (but limited) loss-leaders so that people will get excited about buying and also acquire the more conventionally priced items. The equipment selection phase of InSpectres works like this – people get so excited about easily acquiring gear that they forget to constrain their requests to things their character is good at, increasing the likelihood of saddling themselves with comically poor gear as a result of a low die roll.
This post covers the last substantive chapter of Cialdini’s book, but I don’t feel like I’ve fully exhausted what I have to say on the topic. Some ideas I’ve had are to create a final summary post to list the various techniques in a more abbreviated form, to go in-depth and analyze the mechanics of a game like Apocalypse World or Dogs in the Vineyard to see which techniques are used in the design, or to talk about some mechanical design ideas that this analysis has inspired for me that I haven’t seen used in games before. Some of those ideas might take quite a bit of time or effort, however.
Compliance Techniques and RPG Design 5
0As another entry in my series about the commonalities between RPG design patterns (an RPG’s system is the means by which the group agrees to imagined events during play) and the ideas presented in Robert B. Cialdini’s Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion (certain human behavior patterns can be leveraged to get people to agree to things), I next want to talk about authority. Humans have an innate predisposition to obey authority figures. The extent to which people will set aside their own judgment in deference to authority figures can be amazing, such as in the famous Milgram experiments. It can be tempting to jump to disparaging conclusions about people’s response to authority (“Those sheeple are so weak-minded!”) but I think it’s more useful to try to understand behavior patterns without trying to saddle them with value judgments. After all, as with many human behavior patterns, deference to authority figures is often the right thing to do (people in a burning building should listen to the firefighter, people in a courtroom should listen to the judge) but it also means that clever manipulators can leverage the tendency to get people to do things. Authority is obviously a big deal in RPG design circles – many innovative games have come from examining how authority can be parceled out.
In addition to actual authority, people have a tendency to respond to the appearance of authority, which is often much easier to manipulate. Having a prestigious title, for example, can cause people to agree to what you want. For example, researchers have found an alarmingly high willingness for nurses to carry out medical orders from people who say they are doctors (even if the person is unfamiliar to the nurse, and even if the orders seem to be self-evidently inappropriate or dangerous for patients). Con artists frequently portray themselves as people with prestigious titles in order to get their marks to comply. RPGs, of course, have a long history of given certain players titles like Game Master, Storyteller, or Keeper. These players are often the ones who generate fiction that the other players might be inclined to reject (“a monster attacks you!”), so the special title helps get the rest of the players to accept their contributions.
Compliance professionals often use clothing to give themselves the appearance of authority. Con artists love things like uniforms or doctor’s coats, for example. Researchers have demonstrated the people are more likely to obey requests coming from someone dressed like a security guard than from someone in normal clothes, regardless of the type of request. They’ve also shown that people waiting on a crosswalk are more likely to follow a pedestrian crossing against the light if he’s wearing a business suit than if he’s wearing work clothes. I’m not aware of any tabletop RPGs that explicitly ask the players to dress in a particular way, but costumes are common in LARPs, and dressing in something genre-appropriate is sometimes recommended as a GMing technique for gaming conventions.
The trappings of authority can also get people to be more compliant. In an interesting experiment, researchers tested how long it would take people to honk their horns at cars in front of them that stayed stopped at a green light. The delay before honking was much longer if the stopped car was a luxury car than for an older economy model. Many games provide special GM-only accoutrements like GM screens or specialized rulebooks, which may help make the GM’s contributions more acceptable to the other players.
As a type of authority figure, people tend to defer to experts. Although it’s usually not formalized, rules expertise frequently confers increased ability to have one’s contributions accepted in RPGs. For example, many players of traditional games expect GMs (who need to have lots of their contributions accepted for many of these game to function) to also have the greatest rules expertise. Researchers have also found that a perception of impartiality increases people’s tendency to accept the word of experts. In an RPG context, that may mean that games that place players in an impartial role more likely to have their fictional contributions accepted than in actively adversarial roles. In Rob Bohl’s Misspent Youth, for example, the Authority player doesn’t make any mechanical choices at the expense of the other players (the game system dictates them), but roleplays the embodiment of the things that the actual human players hate about real-world authority. The impartiality of the role (and the title of Authority) helps the other players accept these otherwise unwelcome elements into the fiction of the game.
Although a lot of my examples have been about GMs, I think that’s simply an artifact of there being a longer history of RPGs that use GMs from which I’ve drawn the examples. Understanding the human responses to authority ought to have plenty of applications in designing many player interactions, not just across the common GM/player divide.