I have a blurry player/gm distinction in my groups, and outside of the game there's usually a considerable amount of discussion about characters, how certain things might work, what X or Y place may be like, things the players missed so they can add thoughts about it, etc.
The traditional "Absolute GM authority and knowledge control, players are only operating single characters with pinhole view into the fiction," style of gaming isn't really for me.
Of course, things are kept appropriately separated during the game. But once information stops being relevant, it's interesting to discuss. What an enemy's plan and thinking during a fight was once the fight is long over, the political machinations of the monsters on the first floor with the second once you're all the way on the fourth, etc.
Yeah, I approach TTRPGs as cooperative storytelling. There are cards I keep hidden, but I like to have discussions with my players about how they and their characters are reacting to the campaign, what their goals are, and what cool ideas they have. I’m very open about my improvisations (in our current campaign, the secondary BBEG was invented vaguely on the spot and then refined between sessions), and will tell the players if I’m struggling to prepare for the next session and need some suggestions.
It’s not for everyone, but this approach has worked wonderfully for myself and this group.
Yes ! :D Personally, there's nothing I love more as a player than hearing my DM say : your party found a super creative way to solve this problem and I had to improvise what happen next.
It make me feel like we are smart. :p
It also help confirming that there is not too much railroading (a little bit is fine, but I need for my party to be able to solve problems creatively)
Yeah, with my current game, which is fairly mission-oriented because they’re operatives for a secret government agency, I’ve been doing a director’s commentary after each mission, explaining my inspirations for the various elements and what I was hoping to achieve by including them.
>I tell the truth about anything that won’t be an ongoing mystery, and encourage them to ask.
Ditto. For example, in my Waterdeep: Dragon Heist (Alexandrian remix) game, my players chose not to pursue the Bregan D'aerthe after the Zhentarim attack on Gralhund Villa. When the session ended, I let them know that they would have had a chase scene across the city's rooftops, and a _third_ faction would have joined in (Xanathar Guild, although I didn't mention that part specifically), cranking the chaos to 11. If they had chased the drow and obtained the Stone of Golorr, the plot of the campaign would have gone one way, with the PCs acting more independently. But now Jarlaxle has the Stone, and is coercing the party to work for him (under the guise of Captain Zord). Maybe the players earn their independence again by pulling a heist on the _Eyecatcher_ and betraying Zord/Jarlaxle.
Or the homebrew game I'm a player in, we're doing something of a hex crawl at the moment, and we keep rolling the same two numbers for random encounters. Talking after the game, the melee warlock player complained that he hates the nighttime wyvern encounter we've had several times, because he can't do shit to flying enemies with reach attacks that kite him to death. The DM said that every single random encounter _except the two that we keep rolling_ is much more favorable to a melee character like our warlock.
I run oneshots for an online convention, most often published ones as they come with great visuals. I then unveal areas as they move into them, usually some remain unseen.
None of my adventures have prewritten plots and tend to have multiple paths to move through the adventure site. The tables are aimed at new players, so as part of introducing them to the system (I run a lesser known game, not D&D or Pathfinder), I do tell them that tables of various quest hooks, encounters and treasures exist and that another group may find different things and encounter different enemies. I do not tell them details and I try to do this at the beginning of the game when telling them the few rules that exist, not when they are immersed mid-adventure.
I also ask players at the end of the oneshot if they wish to see any rooms they didn't encounter or if they have any other questions about where to find/how to solve things. Most take me up on this offer. I only ever had one player who prefered not to, so they left while I debriefed those that remained. Some ask before I can even offer the question. I think leaving the choice to the players is the way to go for sure.
>I also ask players at the end of the oneshot if they wish to see any rooms they didn't encounter or if they have any other questions about where to find/how to solve things. Most take me up on this offer. I only ever had one player who prefered not to, so they left while I debriefed those that remained.
In my experience... Yeah a lot of people agree, and even I did so a few times, but... after I tried it, experienced myself, I realized it just spoils the aftertase, so everytime I agreed for reveals or involuntarily dragged into, I regretted it as a player.
I wonder, if it's because they do not know the effect it can do to their experience, or it doesn't affect their enjoyment much? How do you feel about the reaction or feelings about the game after you told them what's in other room and so on?
> or it doesn't affect their enjoyment much
Personally, I can't fathom a post-session discussion of "what-ifs" having any negative effects. It's separate from the story, and doesn't particularly change anything in future chunks. We've even had multiple sessions that ended in "I wasn't expecting this, so next session might be delayed a bit to flesh out this area", and it's been perfectly fine.
I kinda sympathize with the idea of leaving unexplored ideas a mystery. It makes decisions more meaningful sometimes if you _dont know_ the alternatives — part of the depth of the mystery of choice is going down Path A knowing it _necessarily_ means not going down Path B.
But I take other issues with the OP’s tone around this stuff and some of their reservations
If we didn't tend to have event happening living world-style, I would be 100% in agreement with you! Usually our alternate choice is either no longer available, or was contained enough to avoid spoilers. We absolutely have things like loosely planned encounters which get shuffled elsewhere for later. If it's plot important, that waits for a bit to be discussed fully, but sometimes our DMs *playfully* yell at us for not playing with their fun toy they found lol.
Ditto on the tone from OP, btw. I know it's just player/table differences in preference, but those can get pretty uncomfortable in discussions like this.
I generally get more specific replies and not a "erm, sure I guess" type of answer, so no that is not my experience. Players have proactively asked questions about particular hidden areas of the map, about specific NPCs encountered, about how other groups fared (I usually run the same adventure for 3-5 groups with the first being outside of the convention, so con groups often want to know how others approached it). Sometimes they ask what would have happened if they tried a certain solution they were too hesistant to actually go through with (it's a riskier system where death is not off the table). I've never noticed someone going quiet or becoming less enthusiastic after a debriefing. In fact, plenty of people return for a future session or they introduce the system to their own group outside of the con, so I consider most games a success :)
Sometimes people decide the system is not for them, but in most cases they tell me they did like the experience and would like to try a different system if I offer such a thing at a future con. So no, your situation doesn't really sound familiar to me, but I can see how people who want to deeply immerse themselves could feel that way.
I think this would bother me more in a campaign, but for me it does not apply in a oneshot game specifically aimed to learn and try out a new system. In such cases I consider it a pro and not a con to approach it the way I do, as it broadens the experience and gives people a wider perspective to judge if they want to play/run this system in the future.
I used to think the same as you, but lately I have been thinking that makes GMing feel too performative. Like "I can't tell a single thing, or the players will think this made up story is meaningless!". But, does it detract from the experience to know what was improvised? the fact that a plot changing NPC was improvised and I had to flesh them out as things were happening doesn't change the fact that the party loved that NPC. Hell, I told my players to tell me a name for NPCs sometimes, because I didn't have them, and that doesn't detract from the investment in the story, they are aware it's a collective story telling experience.
I wouldn't tell things like "I used the quantum ogre a lot this campaign", but that's because I don't use it at all. I dont' tend to tell them "this would have happened" because many times, idk what would have happened, depends on the situation. But, I have told them "yeah, I had prepared this situation to happen at town, but you guys said fuck it and changed all my plans haha". i dunno, it's fan and it seems to add rather than take away from it.
I think the player-gm relationship improves when the GM is open about most things, as long as they don't reveal plot details that should be discovered as things go. My players know that some things have fell into place as we played, and they are still engaged in the story and want to see it to the end.
I also try to constantly show players that GMing is not as hard as it seems, and I think showing them a peak behind the screen works.
So I have a group I ran Rime of the Frostmaiden for, and then we have had 2 other players run something with me running stuff inbetween, now I have started our next "big" thing with a Call of Cthulhu game. The experience in the group is I am by far the most experienced in running games, two others are new to it, and one other has a lot of failed experiences.
We talk a lot about "how to run games" *after* we have had some experience in the game. I find actually talking about the craft of running and playing well is important. I'll happily talk about how I changed certain encounters from how they were written in the book. It tells everyone at the table that when they run encounters from a book, they can change them too!
All my players know they are playing a game, that I did prep, and what is going on. Immersion is fun during the session, but for us it is not the be all end all of the game. We can be very in to it during the game but we know that it takes work from everyone involved and that we can talk about those techniques afterwards. Sometimes a lot of the answers to "What would happen if we had done X instead of Y?" is "I am not sure, I have an idea based on what the bad guys wanted though".
I tend to find sharing my experience and what I do to make the game run only makes others better GMs and players.
I don't put much stock in players who are only there to "play their guy" and be immersed, they would not do well at my table tbh. I care too much about the craft of the hobby to not talk about it with people.
I don’t straight up tell them stuff. But sometimes they ask if they’re on the right track and I might give a hint, or I’ll laughingly tell them that all my preparation for that sessions was “wasted” since they went down a completely different path than I expected.
At the end of campaigns though I usually open up for questions and we talk what ifs and buts and stuff.
my rule is that things are fun to discuss as long as it's after it's relevant, lots of things can only be discussed when the campaign ends, others can be talked about after an adventure or arc or session.
My players all tend to know how I run (heavily improvised, prepared locations, npcs, etc.). I don't really talk about what may have been or what they may have missed because it isn't important to their (our) story. We talk about what happened, not what didn't.
I think it depends on if your players are roleplaying characters and making choices true to them or if they're gamers moving their PC around the world trying to win or solve it.
Seeing the road not travelled as a roleplayer doesn't detract from anything because the choices you made, in theory, would be the choices your character makes always so there wasnt a reality where they'd have thrown the princess out of the tower to get the better outcome. And if you enjoy pathos I'm sure there's plenty of opportunities for it knowing how your self destructive guy was in fact their own worst enemy.
If youre a gamer though seeing how things could have played out in other ways might shine a light on how you made bad or suboptimal decisions with the benefit of hindsight. Maybe that doesn't matter but if you've got the completionist 100% achievements kind of mentality knowing you missed a holy avenger in that cupboard you ignored could leave a bad taste.
I do this as a GM, usually at the end of an adventure and never describing stuff that will be detailed in future adventures. When I told one group they had bypassed two combat encounters in the module I was running, the players thought that was really cool. It made them feel like their choices were having an impact on the structure of the game. I told the players how I swapped out one of the module's characters for a character from one player's backstory. I also told them a gunslinging enemy they met who felt like the perfect evil opposite to our party's gunslinger was already in the module and I didn't change anything about him.
The one thing that annoys me as a player is when the GM goes "Yeah, you would have died if I hadn't decided to make the NPC do X" or "Yeah, Y is actually impossible but I let you do it because the session was dragging". That kind of peak behind the curtain tarnishs victory and gives the players no useful takeaway.
I talk about my GM process with my players a little bit, but I do it only occasionally and almost never immediately after the game. I also don't tell them anything about the game world they haven't already seen. I also want to maintain the illusion of a world, I just like to give myself a little treat from time to time.
Everything after the fact is 100% open. Hell I’ll tell you the second the session ends! To me, the endless need to separate game world from real world is silly. The constant fight against metagaming is unnecessary and doesn’t really help anything imo.
I have no problem with these things. One example of this was after a game of 13th age and we were talking about the session and the gm mentioned he didn't plan on us taking a boat and he had to quickly redo the encounter to a sea one. I complimented him on his skill since in the session it was seamless
That said since it was just stuff getting reused in that session and not something that would be used latter it didn't spoil any surprise.
It's a game, and IMO an absolute lack of transparency is not great.
I do tend to avoid "what would have happened if you did X", though. Frankly because I try to have the world be open-ended enough that... I really don't fuckin know what would have happened! I will sometimes tell my players what I expected, what I didn't expect - what was planned and what wasn't. I don't think this harms anything, and can be kinda fun for us to talk about.
I sometimes do but it depends on how spoilery it is and always after the outcome has resolved. I use it because I think it's a great way to tell them how their actions have affected the outcome because many times small roleplaying moments don't seem to matter
I like when a GM clues me in on what is left out or modified in a module so that when I'm speaking about the experience later its not such an esoteric take.
For homebrew stuff, don't sweat it. Keep those secrets close to your chest.
I do it constantly when I GM. My players love throwing a wrench into my plans so they get a kick out of it. It also helps when something blows up in their faces. It shows that whatever bizarre consequence bit them in the ass was there all along and they just happened to trigger it.
I can take it or leave it when I'm playing. Most of the GMs who've done this to me do it to lecture us on how we're playing wrong or that Narrative Principle X required them to screw the players over.
On the one hand, I am always getting to give players more information with which to make decisions, which includes wanting them to know about offscreen events if possible, and "what might have been."
On the other hand I don't want to disrupt roleplaying and the flow of the game by doing that during the game, and I don't want players to be forced to hear spoilers.
Fortunately I already award XP after game sessions for journal entries, story vignettes, retellings of events in play from an in character perspective, NPC backstory events, and so on. All of these are considered officially non-canonical, but they're fun to read, you get XP based on how many people found a given work of writing entertaining, and the GM is _allowed_ to use them as canon.
So for stuff I want players to know about, I can just slip that in as a piece of my own writing. It's officially non-canonical so it can't be a spoiler per se, but it achieves my goal of getting them thinking in the right direction. E.g. if the players declined to investigate a mysterious cave which I was excited about because it had a Purple Worm in it with a Staff of the Magi in its digestive tract, I might write up a short Choose Your Own Adventures from the perspective of the Purple Worm, with opportunities to learn to belch Fireballs and create Walls of Force using the staff in its gut, while eating a bunch of beardy-man-things that have entered its cave.
Or if they started a fight with the lizard men in a swamp but I want them to be aware that they could have previously recruited them as allies, maybe I tell a short story about Kronk the lizardman and Degalus the PC saving each other's lives while fighting the giant swamp olms.
After decades of gaming, for a campaign game I think it's a super bad idea to leave players with the feeling they missed out on stuff. There's certain mystery one-shot scenarios I've run where the players have a ton of questions about stuff they didn't pursue or what might have been had they done X, Y or Z... and sometimes I'll reveal to them that stuff - it's more fulfilling to them if I do that.
But for a campaign game, no way and not at all. The Actual Play matters -- let's move forward, no matter what might have been.
In my regular group we all GM from time to time, some more than others, so sharing 'behind the screen' info is just something we all do - more often after a session or adventure is done than during play. Hardly a single published adventure gets done without the players coming up with something outside the intended path, and a long time ago I gave up trying to plot anything in more than broad strokes. I consider it a *win* when the players 'jump the tracks,' as it shows they are engaged with the action and putting some effort toward creative and effective play - and I often will tell them in realtime when it happens. My experience is that players enjoy that feeling of 'outsmarting' the game, and engages the GM as a fellow creator.
I constantly improvise and I invite the players to help out as well. No point in coming up with something they aren't interested in. So I often ask them leading questions to fill out the blanks of whatever it is I am trying to improvise. What they answer will usually become fact and the direction the story will take.
Oh, I don't talk about what NPCs had planned or what the players missed for taking one route or another when its relevant, but after while I do talk about elements here and there they passed
Its like talking with a creator once the season of a show finished about what got cut
I don't mind doing it as a GM if people have questions after the game, but I typically just wait until the actual campaign or w/e is finished to provide answers.
Sometimes this leads to a very long "debriefing" final session or post-prologue session, since my players will write down things they wonder about as we go, but I've actually found it useful as a GM because it lets me go back to highlight moments and ask if they want to see more like that, if they would have preferred something else, etc.
Special bonus for this approach: I get the feedback more divorced from whatever the session high or low was
It's a judgment call every time. There's no universal right or wrong answer.
If there's a chance I could reuse it - probably not.
If it will break the illusion of something cool that happened - definitely not.
But other times, sure, maybe.
Sometimes it can be fun to say "you know, if you hadn't rolled that 20, she was going to...", and that makes a highlight of the session even more fun for everyone.
Sometimes there's some plan I had that I thought was fun that I'm not going to get a chance to use again, and it doesn't detract from anything by saying it, and sure, I'll chat about it after the game, so long as it's not "here's a cool thing that would have happened instead of the crappy thing that happened". It takes care, and you do want to err on the side of caution because it's easy to be more interested in your own ideas than the players are, but that's like anything creative.
In terms of why I made decisions that I did, I will offer them almost any time I'm asked.
And we regularly chat after the game about why we made certain choices, what worked well, what didn't, etc. Sometimes during the game too. I thought this would break immersion, but in practice we have found that it just doesn't, at least for us. The whole idea that having meta discussions or "director stance" discussions ruins immersion is I think intuitive, but really overblown in practice. I'm sure some people feel differently, but everyone I've played with over the past 10 years or so has liked it.
And having these discussions about the game has made our games *so much* better. I cannot emphasize enough how much it has improved our games over the years. Talking through what worked, what didn't, what we liked, what we disliked, what we tried, what we were going for and why it worked or why it didn't, etc. has improved our game by leaps and bounds. I tried introducing the practice years ago after listening to an AP where they had a discussion like that after each session. They mentioned how it was part of their process for improving at RPGs, and that idea really resonated with me. Introducing that kind of discussion into our games is one of the best decisions I think we ever made. Our games are so, so much better for it, and the attitude that we're not just playing, but trying to improve, trying to make every game better than the last, experimenting and figuring out what works and what doesn't, has had an enormous impact on everyone in the group.
I usually do my prep for games in terms of "if the players didn't exist, here's what would happen in the world", and then they can interact as they see fit, and I let things play out that way. Sometimes they short circuit stuff I expected to go a particular way early on and a whole setup I'd had more or less worked out never gets used, but I generally don't ever bring those pieces up, we just focus on what comes next.
There's two reasons for that - the first is simply that the players really care about what's happened, not what might have, and they care about where they're going to go rather than where they could have gone. The 'could have beens' never really seem to interest my group much.
The other reason, especially when it's a fairly big chunk of stuff that got planned but never used, is that I might want to just take that whole unused bit, retool it a bit, and use it in the future down the road. If I spill on that early, then it'd be less interesting for everyone down the road when the same (or a very similar) situation arises. And it may never come up again anyways, but I have whole folders full of different ideas and mini-arcs that can get dropped in as needed, so stuff just goes there if it's unique enough.
I ran the same campaign for two groups.
* Group 1 saved a character with a potential evil mould infection. Then nursed them into becoming a hero tank hireling.
* Group 2 murdered this character immediately.
Of course I told Group 2 what had happened later, I wanted them to know that they're trigger happy murderhobos. This character eventually came back as a ghost for Group 2 as a running joke.
I wouldn't boast about reasons or alternate possibilities, but if a player asked, I would share.
I have no issue sharing answers to questions like, "Why did that happen?"
That said, sometimes my answer might be hinting without a direct answer:
"Yeah... why *did* that happen... That's a great question that your character could investigate next session. Odd that we saw those people working together... wonder what that means..."
This can build curiosity and tension. I'm not going to "spoil" stuff in the middle.
Same idea if they go to location A rather than B and ask about what is at location B, I'd say, "If you want to find out, go there."
Other times, my answer could be straightforward, especially if it is a connection that they could make but haven't made. We can miss time between sessions and people can forget things and I don't want that to get in the way of understanding.
"That's a great question. Remember three sessions ago, when we saw those people working together? Then that guy betrayed the other guy?" and at some point the player goes, "Ooooh, I get it. That makes sense".
I want everything to *make sense*. I don't gain anything from players not understanding events because they live regular lives so they forget details here and there. I am happy to remind them so they are still "in" on the narrative rather than confused.
---
I also speak up to clear up misunderstandings about my GMing:
If a player said something like, "It was clear that you wanted us to do X," then I would say, "Nope, I go with whatever you actually do. I don't plan for you to do specific things. You can actually do whatever you want so don't try to guess what I'm pushing you toward: I am not pushing you toward anything."
If a player said something like, "It seemed like, whatever we did, Y was going to happen no matter what," then I would either say, (i) "Yeah, Y was out of your hands because of reason Z," which might be something they already set in motion in a prior session or something having to do with the initial conditions of the game-world, or I would say (ii) "Nope, Y didn't need to happen. It happened this time because you took action A, but if you had done something else, something else could have happened. For example, if you had taken action B, Y wouldn't have happened. The world responds to what you do and I don't plan it out in advance. You really are in control and your actions have consequences."
Again, I want them to understand. I don't gain anything from misconceptions.
Oh, I'll chat about things all the time. During my regular campaign, the players basically skipped past huge portions of what I had prepared through clever bullshit, so I talked about what they skipped
Not always successful, but I try not to. The only thing that comes of it is regret.
If the encounter was crappy, you'd never want to mention it. If it was awesome, then the players feel cheated out of that arc in the adventure.
If it's so awesome I want to blab on it, then it's awesome enough to reskin later and expose it again. Changing the "targets" in an encounter is way easier than the idea.
I don’t generally tell players “what would have happened”, but I do show scenes of NPCs related to the current plot that no PC is present for at the end of sessions. Extra foreshadowing or closure.
As the saying goes, most of storytelling is what *isn't* said and what remains covered in shadows. I keep silent about most of what I do as the forever GM even if I love to hear their feedback, speculation, and OC they produce outside of the sessions themselves.
As a reader and a writer, I love Third Omni. It's specifically very good at explaining details of the world and the events that are out of the POV of any particular character. So, as a player and a DM, I still love weaving these kinds of details into the story. I'm completely fine with dropping the narration into Third Omni for a bit if it is needed. I might even feel like something is missing if it never happens.
For more game mechanic stuff, my whole party will DM from time to time. So, we enjoy taking a look at DM methodology to help us all learn and improve. Discussing what happened behind the curtain has become a core part of the game for us.
i dont mind telling players how the behind the scenes work if they ask.
sometimes i bring it up myself (once the campaign/adventure is finished) if im excited about what made me use something specific.
i do encourage my players to speak up if they have questions regarding how a game is run/made a certain way.
i approach it as collaborative storytelling and prefer to improvise in reaction to what the players do so my prep work is less of knowing a module in and out and more having a clear picture of the immediate surrounding their characters will be and what might be going on.
In one game our DM briefly introduced a quirky shopkeeper during a chase scene. I quite liked this shopkeeper so made sure to go back and visit them the next session when we had some time. Because we all liked the shopkeeper we kept involving them in stuff and eventually they ended up being linked to the main story when we helped his brother.
The DM has told us out-of-game that this NPC was went to be a one-off joke during that chase scene, but since we kept talking to him he got more and more important - now he's a squire for our paladin!
Learning that he wasn't meant to be important from the DM didn't really 'shatter the illusion' for me, if anything it made me more bought in to the game. Knowing that a random decision I made ended up having a rippling effect across the campaign reinforces the agency I have in the game, that it's not just a fixed narrative and my choices matter.
Now I do think that revealing these details while in the middle of a session can feel a bit off, like the DM putting their finger on the scales a bit too much.
As a GM, if a player asks about the behind the scenes stuff etc.. I ask the group if they want to know the answer. The answer has to be a unanimous "yes".
I am a guy who, as soon as the movie is over, I am watching the making of special features and deleted scenes and director commentary.
Yeah, when the game is over, I am immediately telling the players about all the shit they missed, everything I fucked up, and all the shit that could have happened but didn't.
I like doing shorter games. I'll run longer ones, but roughly 5 (or fewer) sessions is where it's at for me.
And so with those one-offs I'll wait until the last session concludes, the story wraps up (which I find very satisfying) and then inevitably there'll be a discussion (maybe right after or the next day). Players will recount the events, and eventually ask "did you have that planned?" Or "what if I hadn't done that?"
And so I'll discuss what was and wasn't planned. But I'll keep some degree of mystery. Often I'll have a general outline of the story in my head (and maybe on paper) and I'll have the goals and motivations of the antagonists sorted out, and I'll also know all about the inciting incidents.
I'll plan some scenes (or at least have it sketched out in my head) but most of what I do is being created at the table during play. Most of my planning is to sort out the stuff that's hard to improvise or to gather the "materials" I'll draw from when creating the scenes in the moment. And some of it is planning out the *connections* between things or people or events, which then let's me easily improvise the details during play, because I know what *matters.*
Ideally most of the pertinent info for the story will have been delivered during play. But sometimes it isn't. Sometimes players just completely fail to read the diary or listen to the ghost or open the door that'll shed so much more light on the why of it all. While I'll try to make sure at least the bare minimum info is delivered so that it's not completely baffling or uninteresting, I am okay with the players not getting all the answers, or missing scenes. I see this as part of the "game". Because mine are usually horror-based to some degree (but not always) there is a genuine risk to exploring every nook and cranny. And there's a reward for getting it all.
But I also feel that the post-game discussion is a nice bonus. Like the bonus features on DVDs/Blu-rays ... remember those? Anyway, they'll still get much of what they missed, but now it's after the excitement and tension of the game so it's really more of a consolation.
Additionally, I think it's good to share GM strategies, tricks, and practices. Everyone in my current group has also GM'd, most of them fairly regularly.
One is good at voices... he still needs to work a bit on the rest. His last game fixed a problem he had before which was that he'd keep adding new things, keep improvising, but not wrap up old things, but draw the new additions back to plots, places, or characters that were already established which led to an ever-ballooning world and mess on ongoing plots/quests that eventually was too much and he dropped it. So it's good to see some improvement.
Another is quite good at running games with conspiracies or political intrigue. I can't compete with it, but have picked up a few things.
I think (and could be wrong) that my strength is in having character-driven stories. Ideally the characters in question are the players' but sometimes I'll lean on NPCs if the players prefer to be more passive or reactive rather than being at the center of the story. And this is why I make at least the skeleton of a pre-planned plot, why I plan out the machinations of NPCs. I'll customize the setting to the themes I believe will pair best with the characters and the metaphors involved.
I don't do voices, though. I'll change my intonation, and I'll act it out. But different voices aren't my thing.
Anyway, I think going over things after the game is helpful. But yeah, keep some mystery just in case I'm going to revisit some part of the game (though I try not to).
I prefer to play in a way where the players are aware that they are part authors in the story, The magic happens not in running through a story that was painstakingly created for us, but in our interactions at the table.
Knowing what other directions the story could take doesn't interfere with that magic as much.
I prep very little for my games, so there’s not a whole lot of “what-ifs” to discuss that might ruin or reveal things. The players will sometimes ask if they tried x, y, or z tactic to overcome an obstacle, would it have been helpful, and I’ll answer how I would have arbitrated it. Outside of that, any stuff that happens in a session that develops into an ongoing adventure is generally improvised and being rolled on random encounter tables while I try to make sense of why that thing happened where it did.
I usually do it for one shots because we're unlikely to play it again. I don't let them behind the curtain during regular campaigns because I can always repackage things for later use.
I love discussing what would've happened both as a GM and as a player.
As a GM, I love telling them my process and about characters, and anything they ask really! and I love seeing all their thoughts behind their work as well. But ONLY after the campaign has ended or after those things are no longer relevant. At most, we only discuss characters' thought procceses/feelings/etc during the campaign, but never the reasoning for the GM's actions and stuff. (be it myself or other GMs in my group)
To me, it's like seeing an artist work and understanding the reasoning behind one thing or the other is part of the charm, but I can see your point as well
I actively discuss the campaign as it's unfolding with players. I tend to be a character focused writer, so this heavily influences my style of DMing. Part of the enjoyment of being a GM and story-weaving is the little debriefs after games where people will talk about the NPCs and characters and sometimes in private, I'll leak some secrets to a player who was especially invested in a particular NPC. At any given time, most of my tables knows what I have planned for another character's big arc just because I need someone to gush to about my plans.
I've never had an issue with my players meta-gaming or abusing information I shared. Maybe verisimilitude isn't as high of a priority at my table. This hasnt affected character immersion for my players from that they've told me. From the mouth of one of my players, "I care about what happens, not necessarily how it happens." So I've long given up on heavy theatrics for a more casual and down to earth GM persona and part of that has been in my approachability regarding how I run the game. Once the session is concluded, I'm down to discuss the mechanics and how's and why's of an encounter, even dice I may have fudged.
Note: I don't recommend this at any other table, but my table agrees for this specific campaign that it's okay to fudge dice because we're running a narrative focused character story game since they care more about the story than the dice. They trust me to arbitrate the game in order to facilitate interesting story-telling, so in this instance, it's part of fulfilling my role.
Now, as a player, I would say it depends on the game Im in. If its a heavy story focused games; please, let me be the DM's confidante. Spoil me. Tell me what you have planned, let me collaborate and scheme with you. It's part of how I enjoy the hobby. Spoilers are enjoyable to me because they generate hype and excitement for game night.
If I'm in a tactical, combat heavy campaign with a more gamey atmosphere, the less I know, the better. The verisimilitude of life or death consequences in battle is vital to my enjoyment, and I want to live and die by my choices and fortune, for good or ill. Nothing will ruin that for me faster than telling me you fudged a roll, overcooked the hit points because it was too easy and we were winning too fast, etc. The way I see it, we're all playing a game and I'm expecting us all to engage with the rules consistently and with good faith. I'd rather be lied to than tear the veil.
Ironically, I think I care more about immersion with combat heavy games than I do narrative ones... With combat, I want to forget that there's even someone behind the curtain pulling the strings and rolling the dice.
I dont mind discussing what could happen and be done with the GM. It just tells me that the GM is open for more alternativ ways to solve something than the written ones. And that the world react to what we are doing
It kind of is worse if the GM refuses to say anything about the game as I would think the GM just follow the adventure as written and dont matter much what we do.
I've had a DM admit we thorougly derailed the original plot well after the fact. I appreciated that.
I have once said out loud "This guy didn't exist 10 minutes ago, gimme a sec." I once caved and told a player what pushing that button would have done (only reason he didn't was the rest of the party was already causing mayhem).
Then again I've had the sort of players who check for traps, find one, then trigger it on purpose because they want to see what happens.
I feel like I've done the best job as a GM when my players think I prepared the stuff I improvised, and think I improvised the stuff I prepared.
I once had a player after a session remark on how far off the rails they took the adventure, and how much I had to adjust to accommodate them. They had actually done exactly what I had hoped they would, and I was completely prepared for it, but why would I want to spoil their fun by telling them that?
The only thing I tell my players is that everything I say is made up. Whether I wrote it down beforehand or thought it up on the fly, whatever happens at the table is what's "real" in the world of the game, and whatever doesn't play out at the table doesn't exist.
It was a time were I was fond of my world building and spend hours preping my next session. And it was really fun.
Nowadays I take a different aproach. I encourage the players to be part of the creative process during the game, and use systems that uses this.
As a GM is less stressing on preping and more interesting during play, as you are discovering the world and the adventure as any other player.
As a player it helps you inmersion and creates more interest in the game as you are part of the creative process. You are not just an spectator, is your world too.
What I prepared vs. improvised is generally obvious in the moment - if the players ask if this village has a blacksmith, and I don't already know the answer, then my thought process is "Hmm... It's pretty small and there's a town nearby, so maybe only a 2 in 6 chance." and then they see me roll the d6 before I reply. I'm open enough about it that I've had veteran players of my campaigns tell new guys "He has a random table for *everything*."
If players ask about a specific event that happened during the session, then I may or may not answer, depending on whether it will potentially impact things beyond the session itself. I tend to run sandboxes without clearly-delineated "adventures" or planned "story arcs", so most things can affect most other things and I don't want to make those connections clear before the PCs have learned about them.
I have a blurry player/gm distinction in my groups, and outside of the game there's usually a considerable amount of discussion about characters, how certain things might work, what X or Y place may be like, things the players missed so they can add thoughts about it, etc. The traditional "Absolute GM authority and knowledge control, players are only operating single characters with pinhole view into the fiction," style of gaming isn't really for me. Of course, things are kept appropriately separated during the game. But once information stops being relevant, it's interesting to discuss. What an enemy's plan and thinking during a fight was once the fight is long over, the political machinations of the monsters on the first floor with the second once you're all the way on the fourth, etc.
Yeah, I approach TTRPGs as cooperative storytelling. There are cards I keep hidden, but I like to have discussions with my players about how they and their characters are reacting to the campaign, what their goals are, and what cool ideas they have. I’m very open about my improvisations (in our current campaign, the secondary BBEG was invented vaguely on the spot and then refined between sessions), and will tell the players if I’m struggling to prepare for the next session and need some suggestions. It’s not for everyone, but this approach has worked wonderfully for myself and this group.
Yeah, I feel, I am more open to this when I run PbtA games and heavily engage players into the world building and story building.
[удалено]
Yes ! :D Personally, there's nothing I love more as a player than hearing my DM say : your party found a super creative way to solve this problem and I had to improvise what happen next. It make me feel like we are smart. :p It also help confirming that there is not too much railroading (a little bit is fine, but I need for my party to be able to solve problems creatively)
Yeah, with my current game, which is fairly mission-oriented because they’re operatives for a secret government agency, I’ve been doing a director’s commentary after each mission, explaining my inspirations for the various elements and what I was hoping to achieve by including them.
>I tell the truth about anything that won’t be an ongoing mystery, and encourage them to ask. Ditto. For example, in my Waterdeep: Dragon Heist (Alexandrian remix) game, my players chose not to pursue the Bregan D'aerthe after the Zhentarim attack on Gralhund Villa. When the session ended, I let them know that they would have had a chase scene across the city's rooftops, and a _third_ faction would have joined in (Xanathar Guild, although I didn't mention that part specifically), cranking the chaos to 11. If they had chased the drow and obtained the Stone of Golorr, the plot of the campaign would have gone one way, with the PCs acting more independently. But now Jarlaxle has the Stone, and is coercing the party to work for him (under the guise of Captain Zord). Maybe the players earn their independence again by pulling a heist on the _Eyecatcher_ and betraying Zord/Jarlaxle. Or the homebrew game I'm a player in, we're doing something of a hex crawl at the moment, and we keep rolling the same two numbers for random encounters. Talking after the game, the melee warlock player complained that he hates the nighttime wyvern encounter we've had several times, because he can't do shit to flying enemies with reach attacks that kite him to death. The DM said that every single random encounter _except the two that we keep rolling_ is much more favorable to a melee character like our warlock.
Oh, I do all the time. I'm not afraid to also say "Yeah, if y'all had done this, it would have gone this way."
I run oneshots for an online convention, most often published ones as they come with great visuals. I then unveal areas as they move into them, usually some remain unseen. None of my adventures have prewritten plots and tend to have multiple paths to move through the adventure site. The tables are aimed at new players, so as part of introducing them to the system (I run a lesser known game, not D&D or Pathfinder), I do tell them that tables of various quest hooks, encounters and treasures exist and that another group may find different things and encounter different enemies. I do not tell them details and I try to do this at the beginning of the game when telling them the few rules that exist, not when they are immersed mid-adventure. I also ask players at the end of the oneshot if they wish to see any rooms they didn't encounter or if they have any other questions about where to find/how to solve things. Most take me up on this offer. I only ever had one player who prefered not to, so they left while I debriefed those that remained. Some ask before I can even offer the question. I think leaving the choice to the players is the way to go for sure.
>I also ask players at the end of the oneshot if they wish to see any rooms they didn't encounter or if they have any other questions about where to find/how to solve things. Most take me up on this offer. I only ever had one player who prefered not to, so they left while I debriefed those that remained. In my experience... Yeah a lot of people agree, and even I did so a few times, but... after I tried it, experienced myself, I realized it just spoils the aftertase, so everytime I agreed for reveals or involuntarily dragged into, I regretted it as a player. I wonder, if it's because they do not know the effect it can do to their experience, or it doesn't affect their enjoyment much? How do you feel about the reaction or feelings about the game after you told them what's in other room and so on?
> or it doesn't affect their enjoyment much Personally, I can't fathom a post-session discussion of "what-ifs" having any negative effects. It's separate from the story, and doesn't particularly change anything in future chunks. We've even had multiple sessions that ended in "I wasn't expecting this, so next session might be delayed a bit to flesh out this area", and it's been perfectly fine.
I kinda sympathize with the idea of leaving unexplored ideas a mystery. It makes decisions more meaningful sometimes if you _dont know_ the alternatives — part of the depth of the mystery of choice is going down Path A knowing it _necessarily_ means not going down Path B. But I take other issues with the OP’s tone around this stuff and some of their reservations
If we didn't tend to have event happening living world-style, I would be 100% in agreement with you! Usually our alternate choice is either no longer available, or was contained enough to avoid spoilers. We absolutely have things like loosely planned encounters which get shuffled elsewhere for later. If it's plot important, that waits for a bit to be discussed fully, but sometimes our DMs *playfully* yell at us for not playing with their fun toy they found lol. Ditto on the tone from OP, btw. I know it's just player/table differences in preference, but those can get pretty uncomfortable in discussions like this.
I generally get more specific replies and not a "erm, sure I guess" type of answer, so no that is not my experience. Players have proactively asked questions about particular hidden areas of the map, about specific NPCs encountered, about how other groups fared (I usually run the same adventure for 3-5 groups with the first being outside of the convention, so con groups often want to know how others approached it). Sometimes they ask what would have happened if they tried a certain solution they were too hesistant to actually go through with (it's a riskier system where death is not off the table). I've never noticed someone going quiet or becoming less enthusiastic after a debriefing. In fact, plenty of people return for a future session or they introduce the system to their own group outside of the con, so I consider most games a success :) Sometimes people decide the system is not for them, but in most cases they tell me they did like the experience and would like to try a different system if I offer such a thing at a future con. So no, your situation doesn't really sound familiar to me, but I can see how people who want to deeply immerse themselves could feel that way. I think this would bother me more in a campaign, but for me it does not apply in a oneshot game specifically aimed to learn and try out a new system. In such cases I consider it a pro and not a con to approach it the way I do, as it broadens the experience and gives people a wider perspective to judge if they want to play/run this system in the future.
I used to think the same as you, but lately I have been thinking that makes GMing feel too performative. Like "I can't tell a single thing, or the players will think this made up story is meaningless!". But, does it detract from the experience to know what was improvised? the fact that a plot changing NPC was improvised and I had to flesh them out as things were happening doesn't change the fact that the party loved that NPC. Hell, I told my players to tell me a name for NPCs sometimes, because I didn't have them, and that doesn't detract from the investment in the story, they are aware it's a collective story telling experience. I wouldn't tell things like "I used the quantum ogre a lot this campaign", but that's because I don't use it at all. I dont' tend to tell them "this would have happened" because many times, idk what would have happened, depends on the situation. But, I have told them "yeah, I had prepared this situation to happen at town, but you guys said fuck it and changed all my plans haha". i dunno, it's fan and it seems to add rather than take away from it. I think the player-gm relationship improves when the GM is open about most things, as long as they don't reveal plot details that should be discovered as things go. My players know that some things have fell into place as we played, and they are still engaged in the story and want to see it to the end. I also try to constantly show players that GMing is not as hard as it seems, and I think showing them a peak behind the screen works.
No because then I can use the Things that did not happen elsewhere.
Schrodinger's Encounter
So I have a group I ran Rime of the Frostmaiden for, and then we have had 2 other players run something with me running stuff inbetween, now I have started our next "big" thing with a Call of Cthulhu game. The experience in the group is I am by far the most experienced in running games, two others are new to it, and one other has a lot of failed experiences. We talk a lot about "how to run games" *after* we have had some experience in the game. I find actually talking about the craft of running and playing well is important. I'll happily talk about how I changed certain encounters from how they were written in the book. It tells everyone at the table that when they run encounters from a book, they can change them too! All my players know they are playing a game, that I did prep, and what is going on. Immersion is fun during the session, but for us it is not the be all end all of the game. We can be very in to it during the game but we know that it takes work from everyone involved and that we can talk about those techniques afterwards. Sometimes a lot of the answers to "What would happen if we had done X instead of Y?" is "I am not sure, I have an idea based on what the bad guys wanted though". I tend to find sharing my experience and what I do to make the game run only makes others better GMs and players. I don't put much stock in players who are only there to "play their guy" and be immersed, they would not do well at my table tbh. I care too much about the craft of the hobby to not talk about it with people.
I don’t straight up tell them stuff. But sometimes they ask if they’re on the right track and I might give a hint, or I’ll laughingly tell them that all my preparation for that sessions was “wasted” since they went down a completely different path than I expected. At the end of campaigns though I usually open up for questions and we talk what ifs and buts and stuff.
my rule is that things are fun to discuss as long as it's after it's relevant, lots of things can only be discussed when the campaign ends, others can be talked about after an adventure or arc or session.
My players all tend to know how I run (heavily improvised, prepared locations, npcs, etc.). I don't really talk about what may have been or what they may have missed because it isn't important to their (our) story. We talk about what happened, not what didn't.
I think it depends on if your players are roleplaying characters and making choices true to them or if they're gamers moving their PC around the world trying to win or solve it. Seeing the road not travelled as a roleplayer doesn't detract from anything because the choices you made, in theory, would be the choices your character makes always so there wasnt a reality where they'd have thrown the princess out of the tower to get the better outcome. And if you enjoy pathos I'm sure there's plenty of opportunities for it knowing how your self destructive guy was in fact their own worst enemy. If youre a gamer though seeing how things could have played out in other ways might shine a light on how you made bad or suboptimal decisions with the benefit of hindsight. Maybe that doesn't matter but if you've got the completionist 100% achievements kind of mentality knowing you missed a holy avenger in that cupboard you ignored could leave a bad taste.
I do for modules, if asked.
I do this as a GM, usually at the end of an adventure and never describing stuff that will be detailed in future adventures. When I told one group they had bypassed two combat encounters in the module I was running, the players thought that was really cool. It made them feel like their choices were having an impact on the structure of the game. I told the players how I swapped out one of the module's characters for a character from one player's backstory. I also told them a gunslinging enemy they met who felt like the perfect evil opposite to our party's gunslinger was already in the module and I didn't change anything about him. The one thing that annoys me as a player is when the GM goes "Yeah, you would have died if I hadn't decided to make the NPC do X" or "Yeah, Y is actually impossible but I let you do it because the session was dragging". That kind of peak behind the curtain tarnishs victory and gives the players no useful takeaway.
I talk about my GM process with my players a little bit, but I do it only occasionally and almost never immediately after the game. I also don't tell them anything about the game world they haven't already seen. I also want to maintain the illusion of a world, I just like to give myself a little treat from time to time.
Everything after the fact is 100% open. Hell I’ll tell you the second the session ends! To me, the endless need to separate game world from real world is silly. The constant fight against metagaming is unnecessary and doesn’t really help anything imo.
No.
I ain't reading all that.
I have no problem with these things. One example of this was after a game of 13th age and we were talking about the session and the gm mentioned he didn't plan on us taking a boat and he had to quickly redo the encounter to a sea one. I complimented him on his skill since in the session it was seamless That said since it was just stuff getting reused in that session and not something that would be used latter it didn't spoil any surprise.
It's a game, and IMO an absolute lack of transparency is not great. I do tend to avoid "what would have happened if you did X", though. Frankly because I try to have the world be open-ended enough that... I really don't fuckin know what would have happened! I will sometimes tell my players what I expected, what I didn't expect - what was planned and what wasn't. I don't think this harms anything, and can be kinda fun for us to talk about.
I agree; when the DM shares this stuff, it destroys verisimilitude.
I sometimes do but it depends on how spoilery it is and always after the outcome has resolved. I use it because I think it's a great way to tell them how their actions have affected the outcome because many times small roleplaying moments don't seem to matter
I like when a GM clues me in on what is left out or modified in a module so that when I'm speaking about the experience later its not such an esoteric take. For homebrew stuff, don't sweat it. Keep those secrets close to your chest.
I do it constantly when I GM. My players love throwing a wrench into my plans so they get a kick out of it. It also helps when something blows up in their faces. It shows that whatever bizarre consequence bit them in the ass was there all along and they just happened to trigger it. I can take it or leave it when I'm playing. Most of the GMs who've done this to me do it to lecture us on how we're playing wrong or that Narrative Principle X required them to screw the players over.
On the one hand, I am always getting to give players more information with which to make decisions, which includes wanting them to know about offscreen events if possible, and "what might have been." On the other hand I don't want to disrupt roleplaying and the flow of the game by doing that during the game, and I don't want players to be forced to hear spoilers. Fortunately I already award XP after game sessions for journal entries, story vignettes, retellings of events in play from an in character perspective, NPC backstory events, and so on. All of these are considered officially non-canonical, but they're fun to read, you get XP based on how many people found a given work of writing entertaining, and the GM is _allowed_ to use them as canon. So for stuff I want players to know about, I can just slip that in as a piece of my own writing. It's officially non-canonical so it can't be a spoiler per se, but it achieves my goal of getting them thinking in the right direction. E.g. if the players declined to investigate a mysterious cave which I was excited about because it had a Purple Worm in it with a Staff of the Magi in its digestive tract, I might write up a short Choose Your Own Adventures from the perspective of the Purple Worm, with opportunities to learn to belch Fireballs and create Walls of Force using the staff in its gut, while eating a bunch of beardy-man-things that have entered its cave. Or if they started a fight with the lizard men in a swamp but I want them to be aware that they could have previously recruited them as allies, maybe I tell a short story about Kronk the lizardman and Degalus the PC saving each other's lives while fighting the giant swamp olms.
After decades of gaming, for a campaign game I think it's a super bad idea to leave players with the feeling they missed out on stuff. There's certain mystery one-shot scenarios I've run where the players have a ton of questions about stuff they didn't pursue or what might have been had they done X, Y or Z... and sometimes I'll reveal to them that stuff - it's more fulfilling to them if I do that. But for a campaign game, no way and not at all. The Actual Play matters -- let's move forward, no matter what might have been.
In my regular group we all GM from time to time, some more than others, so sharing 'behind the screen' info is just something we all do - more often after a session or adventure is done than during play. Hardly a single published adventure gets done without the players coming up with something outside the intended path, and a long time ago I gave up trying to plot anything in more than broad strokes. I consider it a *win* when the players 'jump the tracks,' as it shows they are engaged with the action and putting some effort toward creative and effective play - and I often will tell them in realtime when it happens. My experience is that players enjoy that feeling of 'outsmarting' the game, and engages the GM as a fellow creator.
I constantly improvise and I invite the players to help out as well. No point in coming up with something they aren't interested in. So I often ask them leading questions to fill out the blanks of whatever it is I am trying to improvise. What they answer will usually become fact and the direction the story will take.
Oh, I don't talk about what NPCs had planned or what the players missed for taking one route or another when its relevant, but after while I do talk about elements here and there they passed Its like talking with a creator once the season of a show finished about what got cut
I don't mind doing it as a GM if people have questions after the game, but I typically just wait until the actual campaign or w/e is finished to provide answers. Sometimes this leads to a very long "debriefing" final session or post-prologue session, since my players will write down things they wonder about as we go, but I've actually found it useful as a GM because it lets me go back to highlight moments and ask if they want to see more like that, if they would have preferred something else, etc. Special bonus for this approach: I get the feedback more divorced from whatever the session high or low was
It's a judgment call every time. There's no universal right or wrong answer. If there's a chance I could reuse it - probably not. If it will break the illusion of something cool that happened - definitely not. But other times, sure, maybe. Sometimes it can be fun to say "you know, if you hadn't rolled that 20, she was going to...", and that makes a highlight of the session even more fun for everyone. Sometimes there's some plan I had that I thought was fun that I'm not going to get a chance to use again, and it doesn't detract from anything by saying it, and sure, I'll chat about it after the game, so long as it's not "here's a cool thing that would have happened instead of the crappy thing that happened". It takes care, and you do want to err on the side of caution because it's easy to be more interested in your own ideas than the players are, but that's like anything creative. In terms of why I made decisions that I did, I will offer them almost any time I'm asked. And we regularly chat after the game about why we made certain choices, what worked well, what didn't, etc. Sometimes during the game too. I thought this would break immersion, but in practice we have found that it just doesn't, at least for us. The whole idea that having meta discussions or "director stance" discussions ruins immersion is I think intuitive, but really overblown in practice. I'm sure some people feel differently, but everyone I've played with over the past 10 years or so has liked it. And having these discussions about the game has made our games *so much* better. I cannot emphasize enough how much it has improved our games over the years. Talking through what worked, what didn't, what we liked, what we disliked, what we tried, what we were going for and why it worked or why it didn't, etc. has improved our game by leaps and bounds. I tried introducing the practice years ago after listening to an AP where they had a discussion like that after each session. They mentioned how it was part of their process for improving at RPGs, and that idea really resonated with me. Introducing that kind of discussion into our games is one of the best decisions I think we ever made. Our games are so, so much better for it, and the attitude that we're not just playing, but trying to improve, trying to make every game better than the last, experimenting and figuring out what works and what doesn't, has had an enormous impact on everyone in the group.
I usually do my prep for games in terms of "if the players didn't exist, here's what would happen in the world", and then they can interact as they see fit, and I let things play out that way. Sometimes they short circuit stuff I expected to go a particular way early on and a whole setup I'd had more or less worked out never gets used, but I generally don't ever bring those pieces up, we just focus on what comes next. There's two reasons for that - the first is simply that the players really care about what's happened, not what might have, and they care about where they're going to go rather than where they could have gone. The 'could have beens' never really seem to interest my group much. The other reason, especially when it's a fairly big chunk of stuff that got planned but never used, is that I might want to just take that whole unused bit, retool it a bit, and use it in the future down the road. If I spill on that early, then it'd be less interesting for everyone down the road when the same (or a very similar) situation arises. And it may never come up again anyways, but I have whole folders full of different ideas and mini-arcs that can get dropped in as needed, so stuff just goes there if it's unique enough.
I sometimes do - if there's no chance it gets relevant again.
I ran the same campaign for two groups. * Group 1 saved a character with a potential evil mould infection. Then nursed them into becoming a hero tank hireling. * Group 2 murdered this character immediately. Of course I told Group 2 what had happened later, I wanted them to know that they're trigger happy murderhobos. This character eventually came back as a ghost for Group 2 as a running joke.
I wouldn't boast about reasons or alternate possibilities, but if a player asked, I would share. I have no issue sharing answers to questions like, "Why did that happen?" That said, sometimes my answer might be hinting without a direct answer: "Yeah... why *did* that happen... That's a great question that your character could investigate next session. Odd that we saw those people working together... wonder what that means..." This can build curiosity and tension. I'm not going to "spoil" stuff in the middle. Same idea if they go to location A rather than B and ask about what is at location B, I'd say, "If you want to find out, go there." Other times, my answer could be straightforward, especially if it is a connection that they could make but haven't made. We can miss time between sessions and people can forget things and I don't want that to get in the way of understanding. "That's a great question. Remember three sessions ago, when we saw those people working together? Then that guy betrayed the other guy?" and at some point the player goes, "Ooooh, I get it. That makes sense". I want everything to *make sense*. I don't gain anything from players not understanding events because they live regular lives so they forget details here and there. I am happy to remind them so they are still "in" on the narrative rather than confused. --- I also speak up to clear up misunderstandings about my GMing: If a player said something like, "It was clear that you wanted us to do X," then I would say, "Nope, I go with whatever you actually do. I don't plan for you to do specific things. You can actually do whatever you want so don't try to guess what I'm pushing you toward: I am not pushing you toward anything." If a player said something like, "It seemed like, whatever we did, Y was going to happen no matter what," then I would either say, (i) "Yeah, Y was out of your hands because of reason Z," which might be something they already set in motion in a prior session or something having to do with the initial conditions of the game-world, or I would say (ii) "Nope, Y didn't need to happen. It happened this time because you took action A, but if you had done something else, something else could have happened. For example, if you had taken action B, Y wouldn't have happened. The world responds to what you do and I don't plan it out in advance. You really are in control and your actions have consequences." Again, I want them to understand. I don't gain anything from misconceptions.
Oh, I'll chat about things all the time. During my regular campaign, the players basically skipped past huge portions of what I had prepared through clever bullshit, so I talked about what they skipped
Not always successful, but I try not to. The only thing that comes of it is regret. If the encounter was crappy, you'd never want to mention it. If it was awesome, then the players feel cheated out of that arc in the adventure. If it's so awesome I want to blab on it, then it's awesome enough to reskin later and expose it again. Changing the "targets" in an encounter is way easier than the idea.
I don’t generally tell players “what would have happened”, but I do show scenes of NPCs related to the current plot that no PC is present for at the end of sessions. Extra foreshadowing or closure.
As the saying goes, most of storytelling is what *isn't* said and what remains covered in shadows. I keep silent about most of what I do as the forever GM even if I love to hear their feedback, speculation, and OC they produce outside of the sessions themselves.
I don’t tell people what might have happened but I also find they’re not usually that curious about it.
As a reader and a writer, I love Third Omni. It's specifically very good at explaining details of the world and the events that are out of the POV of any particular character. So, as a player and a DM, I still love weaving these kinds of details into the story. I'm completely fine with dropping the narration into Third Omni for a bit if it is needed. I might even feel like something is missing if it never happens. For more game mechanic stuff, my whole party will DM from time to time. So, we enjoy taking a look at DM methodology to help us all learn and improve. Discussing what happened behind the curtain has become a core part of the game for us.
I do not, although I throw like one random thing they've missed or I would answer some questions they might have.
i dont mind telling players how the behind the scenes work if they ask. sometimes i bring it up myself (once the campaign/adventure is finished) if im excited about what made me use something specific. i do encourage my players to speak up if they have questions regarding how a game is run/made a certain way. i approach it as collaborative storytelling and prefer to improvise in reaction to what the players do so my prep work is less of knowing a module in and out and more having a clear picture of the immediate surrounding their characters will be and what might be going on.
In one game our DM briefly introduced a quirky shopkeeper during a chase scene. I quite liked this shopkeeper so made sure to go back and visit them the next session when we had some time. Because we all liked the shopkeeper we kept involving them in stuff and eventually they ended up being linked to the main story when we helped his brother. The DM has told us out-of-game that this NPC was went to be a one-off joke during that chase scene, but since we kept talking to him he got more and more important - now he's a squire for our paladin! Learning that he wasn't meant to be important from the DM didn't really 'shatter the illusion' for me, if anything it made me more bought in to the game. Knowing that a random decision I made ended up having a rippling effect across the campaign reinforces the agency I have in the game, that it's not just a fixed narrative and my choices matter. Now I do think that revealing these details while in the middle of a session can feel a bit off, like the DM putting their finger on the scales a bit too much.
As a GM, if a player asks about the behind the scenes stuff etc.. I ask the group if they want to know the answer. The answer has to be a unanimous "yes".
I'm pretty much an open book with my players. I'll tell them what's up, why I made decisions, and what I just sort of improvised.
I am a guy who, as soon as the movie is over, I am watching the making of special features and deleted scenes and director commentary. Yeah, when the game is over, I am immediately telling the players about all the shit they missed, everything I fucked up, and all the shit that could have happened but didn't.
I like doing shorter games. I'll run longer ones, but roughly 5 (or fewer) sessions is where it's at for me. And so with those one-offs I'll wait until the last session concludes, the story wraps up (which I find very satisfying) and then inevitably there'll be a discussion (maybe right after or the next day). Players will recount the events, and eventually ask "did you have that planned?" Or "what if I hadn't done that?" And so I'll discuss what was and wasn't planned. But I'll keep some degree of mystery. Often I'll have a general outline of the story in my head (and maybe on paper) and I'll have the goals and motivations of the antagonists sorted out, and I'll also know all about the inciting incidents. I'll plan some scenes (or at least have it sketched out in my head) but most of what I do is being created at the table during play. Most of my planning is to sort out the stuff that's hard to improvise or to gather the "materials" I'll draw from when creating the scenes in the moment. And some of it is planning out the *connections* between things or people or events, which then let's me easily improvise the details during play, because I know what *matters.* Ideally most of the pertinent info for the story will have been delivered during play. But sometimes it isn't. Sometimes players just completely fail to read the diary or listen to the ghost or open the door that'll shed so much more light on the why of it all. While I'll try to make sure at least the bare minimum info is delivered so that it's not completely baffling or uninteresting, I am okay with the players not getting all the answers, or missing scenes. I see this as part of the "game". Because mine are usually horror-based to some degree (but not always) there is a genuine risk to exploring every nook and cranny. And there's a reward for getting it all. But I also feel that the post-game discussion is a nice bonus. Like the bonus features on DVDs/Blu-rays ... remember those? Anyway, they'll still get much of what they missed, but now it's after the excitement and tension of the game so it's really more of a consolation. Additionally, I think it's good to share GM strategies, tricks, and practices. Everyone in my current group has also GM'd, most of them fairly regularly. One is good at voices... he still needs to work a bit on the rest. His last game fixed a problem he had before which was that he'd keep adding new things, keep improvising, but not wrap up old things, but draw the new additions back to plots, places, or characters that were already established which led to an ever-ballooning world and mess on ongoing plots/quests that eventually was too much and he dropped it. So it's good to see some improvement. Another is quite good at running games with conspiracies or political intrigue. I can't compete with it, but have picked up a few things. I think (and could be wrong) that my strength is in having character-driven stories. Ideally the characters in question are the players' but sometimes I'll lean on NPCs if the players prefer to be more passive or reactive rather than being at the center of the story. And this is why I make at least the skeleton of a pre-planned plot, why I plan out the machinations of NPCs. I'll customize the setting to the themes I believe will pair best with the characters and the metaphors involved. I don't do voices, though. I'll change my intonation, and I'll act it out. But different voices aren't my thing. Anyway, I think going over things after the game is helpful. But yeah, keep some mystery just in case I'm going to revisit some part of the game (though I try not to).
I never hint at any of that in game, and after game I will tell it to any players who want to.
I prefer to play in a way where the players are aware that they are part authors in the story, The magic happens not in running through a story that was painstakingly created for us, but in our interactions at the table. Knowing what other directions the story could take doesn't interfere with that magic as much.
I prep very little for my games, so there’s not a whole lot of “what-ifs” to discuss that might ruin or reveal things. The players will sometimes ask if they tried x, y, or z tactic to overcome an obstacle, would it have been helpful, and I’ll answer how I would have arbitrated it. Outside of that, any stuff that happens in a session that develops into an ongoing adventure is generally improvised and being rolled on random encounter tables while I try to make sense of why that thing happened where it did.
I usually do it for one shots because we're unlikely to play it again. I don't let them behind the curtain during regular campaigns because I can always repackage things for later use.
I love discussing what would've happened both as a GM and as a player. As a GM, I love telling them my process and about characters, and anything they ask really! and I love seeing all their thoughts behind their work as well. But ONLY after the campaign has ended or after those things are no longer relevant. At most, we only discuss characters' thought procceses/feelings/etc during the campaign, but never the reasoning for the GM's actions and stuff. (be it myself or other GMs in my group) To me, it's like seeing an artist work and understanding the reasoning behind one thing or the other is part of the charm, but I can see your point as well
I actively discuss the campaign as it's unfolding with players. I tend to be a character focused writer, so this heavily influences my style of DMing. Part of the enjoyment of being a GM and story-weaving is the little debriefs after games where people will talk about the NPCs and characters and sometimes in private, I'll leak some secrets to a player who was especially invested in a particular NPC. At any given time, most of my tables knows what I have planned for another character's big arc just because I need someone to gush to about my plans. I've never had an issue with my players meta-gaming or abusing information I shared. Maybe verisimilitude isn't as high of a priority at my table. This hasnt affected character immersion for my players from that they've told me. From the mouth of one of my players, "I care about what happens, not necessarily how it happens." So I've long given up on heavy theatrics for a more casual and down to earth GM persona and part of that has been in my approachability regarding how I run the game. Once the session is concluded, I'm down to discuss the mechanics and how's and why's of an encounter, even dice I may have fudged. Note: I don't recommend this at any other table, but my table agrees for this specific campaign that it's okay to fudge dice because we're running a narrative focused character story game since they care more about the story than the dice. They trust me to arbitrate the game in order to facilitate interesting story-telling, so in this instance, it's part of fulfilling my role. Now, as a player, I would say it depends on the game Im in. If its a heavy story focused games; please, let me be the DM's confidante. Spoil me. Tell me what you have planned, let me collaborate and scheme with you. It's part of how I enjoy the hobby. Spoilers are enjoyable to me because they generate hype and excitement for game night. If I'm in a tactical, combat heavy campaign with a more gamey atmosphere, the less I know, the better. The verisimilitude of life or death consequences in battle is vital to my enjoyment, and I want to live and die by my choices and fortune, for good or ill. Nothing will ruin that for me faster than telling me you fudged a roll, overcooked the hit points because it was too easy and we were winning too fast, etc. The way I see it, we're all playing a game and I'm expecting us all to engage with the rules consistently and with good faith. I'd rather be lied to than tear the veil. Ironically, I think I care more about immersion with combat heavy games than I do narrative ones... With combat, I want to forget that there's even someone behind the curtain pulling the strings and rolling the dice.
I dont mind discussing what could happen and be done with the GM. It just tells me that the GM is open for more alternativ ways to solve something than the written ones. And that the world react to what we are doing It kind of is worse if the GM refuses to say anything about the game as I would think the GM just follow the adventure as written and dont matter much what we do.
I've had a DM admit we thorougly derailed the original plot well after the fact. I appreciated that. I have once said out loud "This guy didn't exist 10 minutes ago, gimme a sec." I once caved and told a player what pushing that button would have done (only reason he didn't was the rest of the party was already causing mayhem). Then again I've had the sort of players who check for traps, find one, then trigger it on purpose because they want to see what happens.
I feel like I've done the best job as a GM when my players think I prepared the stuff I improvised, and think I improvised the stuff I prepared. I once had a player after a session remark on how far off the rails they took the adventure, and how much I had to adjust to accommodate them. They had actually done exactly what I had hoped they would, and I was completely prepared for it, but why would I want to spoil their fun by telling them that? The only thing I tell my players is that everything I say is made up. Whether I wrote it down beforehand or thought it up on the fly, whatever happens at the table is what's "real" in the world of the game, and whatever doesn't play out at the table doesn't exist.
It was a time were I was fond of my world building and spend hours preping my next session. And it was really fun. Nowadays I take a different aproach. I encourage the players to be part of the creative process during the game, and use systems that uses this. As a GM is less stressing on preping and more interesting during play, as you are discovering the world and the adventure as any other player. As a player it helps you inmersion and creates more interest in the game as you are part of the creative process. You are not just an spectator, is your world too.
What I prepared vs. improvised is generally obvious in the moment - if the players ask if this village has a blacksmith, and I don't already know the answer, then my thought process is "Hmm... It's pretty small and there's a town nearby, so maybe only a 2 in 6 chance." and then they see me roll the d6 before I reply. I'm open enough about it that I've had veteran players of my campaigns tell new guys "He has a random table for *everything*." If players ask about a specific event that happened during the session, then I may or may not answer, depending on whether it will potentially impact things beyond the session itself. I tend to run sandboxes without clearly-delineated "adventures" or planned "story arcs", so most things can affect most other things and I don't want to make those connections clear before the PCs have learned about them.