Building a bubble around the table

This is a repeat of a piece I wrote in ~ 2007 for Irish gaming blog Direweasel, now lost to bit-rot. I am putting it up here as a good round up of what I look for in a game, regardless of system, whether I play or run it.

I think the best place to start is to lay out where I am coming from - what kind of games I have played, what worked and what did not. I should probably focus on my area of expertise which is that I am a low-system Planescape GM and an Illuminati University (IOU) GM.

I think IOU forms the epitome of 'my style' because it is at it's core adapted bullshit sessions. I'm going to take it apart a little to show you where it came from and how it has just run and run periodically since. The very first game was run over Christmas 2001, four of us were parked in someones apartment late and night and I can't remember how exactly it got started but it did - we pulled majors in Intergalactic Sexual Heroism, Kinetic Physics and Sorcery out of the ether and all of a sudden bizarre fraternities, sororities, dissertation topics, familiars, lab experiments and traditions just sprang into being over the course of the night.

And then on another night I dragged everyone together, fed them full of coffee and again a story evolved, with the minimum of prodding from me.

I like stories, I like big mysteries, I like my players to puzzle things. To my eyes one of the most fun campaigns I ran was the Johnston, Cartwright & Quagmyre Esq. game - Planescape played via AIM chatrooms. I could set up the scene and the PC's would just talk and pull at the plot in character, chew on the clues, speculate, plan and argue. The PC's knew enough about the background to draw proper inferences from the clues and it was like watching my own, very personally dedicated drama spool across the screen.

This was a particular joy of the League game that was run in Trinity Gamers in 2002-03, where the players each played a space-faring nation with a seat on a galactic senate. It was entirely systemless, run by GM fiat and became a study in paranoia, politicking and twisted schemes. It had hordes of players running around at cross purposes and so the universe lived and breathed. You never knew what you would turn up under any particular rock. Was it opposition from the villain, or was it another player trying to muscle you off their perceived patch?

The story was a living breathing thing that noone was entirely sure where it was originating - had the GM thought this all up at the start or were we now living through the consequences of one of the players killing the plot some time ago?

The opposite end of the spectrum from this uncertain world is railroading - the classic 'the king summons you to court and tells you to go kill the vampire' brute force plot hook. This is fine under certain circumstances, when it makes reasonable sense or when it is a con-scenario where there is not time to motivate each player to follow the plot, but it really hurts my attempts to forget that we're really just sitting around a room talking - similar to system-heavy games where the fast-paced action is broken up by long pauses to consult a small library of reference books.

This is the core point to me - for the players to forget that its just a game, even for a little while, and for them to care about what happens to some virtual characters in an imaginary world. As a GM you have to build a little reflective world around the players - and if you're really good it will expand to envelope you as the players make it live and breathe in ways you never imagined. A large part of that is including the uncertainty and surprises that happen in the real world. I have found the best way to do this is to hand out the universe to the players themselves, tricky as that can be to manage.

It has to be fun for everyone, and if you really make it work, if you really pull it off, it becomes a little slice of 'otherwhere' - where you walk away slightly dazed and smiling, feeling like you've spoken with creatures that don't exist and shared drinks in bars on worlds that never were.

And thats what I look for when I game, and what I try to bring about when I GM.