Always Be Playing

 Believe it or not, this post is inspired by my experiences at Wasteland Weekend. In order to cover the cost of my ticket, I volunteered to help the event happen. This mostly consisted of patrolling the grounds overnight one night and again on the last day as the attendees were filing out. As it turns out, Wastelanders are a well-behaved lot, so the patrolling was very uneventful. Which gave me lots of time to get to know my patrol partners, and it turns out that a couple of them were D&D players. (It would be great if they were into other RPGs as well, but I'll take what I can get.)

At one point in one conversation, there was the classic discussion of the balance between combat and roleplay/social interaction. Everyone has their own opinion, so it's a conversation I've had dozens of times over the many years I've been gaming. The idea that an RPG plot is fight scenes separated by talking, or social scenes in between fights..When I was running games much more regularly than I am now, this was part of my adventure writing rubric.

But this time, my brain rebelled. Since that time, how I game, how I GM and how I think about gaming had changed so much that it felt like we were having the wrong conversation. 

The big shift, when you get down to it is from GM-driven campaigns to player-driven campaigns.

There's nothing necessarily wrong with GM-driven gaming. When I wrote my D20 Modern tabloid-world nostalgia adventure, I dove right back in to my old adventure writing methods, which were still in that GM-driven model. And "social interaction vs. combat" is still something that I need to think about, because even if I'm not railroading, I'm still providing a structure to the scenario.

In a player driven game, the players have much more impact on the play experience. In my OSR megadungeon campaign, the players decided which hallway to go down and which door to open.Fiasco and InSpectres both lean heavily on player input to create the plot, with Fiasco not even having a designated GM role. The debate between social interaction and combat is lessened for a couple of reasons. Firstly, the GM has less of a role in setting the pace of the game, Secondly, being player driven means that the players can call for the types of scenes that they prefer. In the megaidungeon, players can choose which section of the dungeon they want to explore. In InSpectres and Fiasco, the players have a degree of control over the narrative itself and can directly call for the things they want to see in the game.

I don't know if this is a deep thought or just me rambling, but I felt like I needed to get it out.