hello and welcome everybody to my very first episode of Fumbling Forward
name is Maurizio and I feel truly blessed that you joined me for my very
first pilot episode here on YouTube! So, fumbling Forward is a channel about
role-playing games - specifically tabletop role-playing games. You know the strange
hobby where you sit around a table with your pals telling each other stories and
using rules that need 20 sided dice or a 12 sided dice or 10-sided dice and you
got like rule-books that are so heavy that you could kill your grandmother
with it? Yes! That's tabletop role-playing in a
nutshell. We're not only gonna talk about role-playing games in general but
specifically about the job as a game master. So, the game master is the one guy
normally the one guy at the table who is kind of the director for the narrative
you're all gonna play and - yeah - create together and he also is the one who has
all the rules in his head - and if he doesn't have them in his head, he has them - you know - the big book with wich he could kill his grandmother...
What's up with this grandmother thing? ... Strange...
The other part of Fumbling Forward is talking about ya creating your own
role-playing games developing your own role-playing games and how you can come
up with interesting rules, interesting setting ideas and - yeah - how to match both whith each other. So, for my very
first episode I want to talk about my style of game mastering and it's called
"Scenic game mastering". Yeah, because it's based on scenic narration. I think that's
a very good starting point for this channel because we're gonna talk about
quite a lot of stuff that scenic game mastering is the basis to. So, before we
dive right into the topic I would like to take one minute to talk about myself
and to introduce myself to you. My name is Maurizio and I'm from Germany. I am
a hobbyist game master and game developer for tabletop role-playing
games and as you maybe can imagine I have quite a lot of experience in game
mastering and my unique play style. So, everything I'm gonna talk about is my
personal view on how game mastering works best - not necessarily the "best game
mastering" period. So as always with game mastering game developing and gaming in
general there are several different styles and ways to go about it and I
only will cover the one I am familiar with and I think is best. I'm a game
master for I think like 12 years now. I play in regular groups each week and I
develop my own role-playing game for approximately seven years now. As you can
imagine there were quite a few drawbacks during this seven years. Nobody should
actually take seven years for developing their own role playing game - to be honest.
But I'm here to try to help you avoid making the same mistakes as I did and
yeah coming about your game idea a lot faster than I have because I started
over like 20 times. So, if you are from Germany and interested in more stuff I'm
doing I'm also part of a podcasting group about role-playing games
it's called "Pen & Podcast". You will find the link to this podcast here below
and yeah I also am a host of my own podcast called "Hinterm Schirm". It's also a
German podcast - as you maybe heart... and it's about game mastering and game developing
so much of the stuff you will be hearing in "Fumbling Forward" is also part of
"Hinterm Schirm" and if you are interested in further analysis of game mastering
styles and how to develop your own game -??? So, with no further ado let's dive right
into the juicy bits of this episode: we're talking about "scenic role-playing"
and scenic roleplaying, as I said before, is a specific kind of structuring your
narration and a specific kind of game mastering style. in my opinion there are
two big branches of how you can structure your campaign or your sessions
and those are called narration driven style and simulation driven style. Okay
as you see I'm quite interested in the theoretical part of role-playing. So many
of the topics on this channel are gonna be quite theoretical... yeah... I hope you're
okay with that and stay with me. I'm gonna explain to you in detail what I
mean and it's not so complicated as it may
seem now from the get-go... So, you've got these two styles and they are quite easy
to distinguish: The narrationist-style or the narration driven style is more of a
cinematic approach to structuring your narration, whereas the simulationist style
is more naturalistic. So, imagine you as a game master are not only the narrator
but also the "camera man". So you decide which specific aspects of your story are
shown to the players and are played by your players. Okay, let's give you an
example: let's say your players or your group - the characters of your
players just entered a new metropolis, a city, and the first thing they want to do
is go to the tavern - Every character always wants at some point in the story
go to the tavern... And now you have several different options: You could like
start with them entering the gates of the of the specific city, let them walk
through the streets, narrate each street by itself and at some point they manage
to actually find the tavern. Maybe they have to ask around where the tavern is
and some friendly NPC is gonna help them but at some point they will find the
tavern and then yeah we can move on from there. That's the one way. The other way
is a more cinematic way. If we decide that the the journey from the city gates
to the tavern is actually quite boring and there's nothing
really happening in there we can just skip this. We can just say okay you want
to go to the tavern. BAM! You're at the tavern! Opening the
door to the tavern: Now what do you do? You see we're skipping certain parts of the
narration to move the story forward and to drive the story to
get to the juicy bits of the evening. That's a more cinematic approach and we
call that approach narration driven or I would say scenic
game mastering style. For those of you who are really into roleplaying theory there is a specific term there is a specific term that is
normally associated with really bad game mastering and it's called
"railroading". The term means that your story is like a train on Rails and your
characters can't branch out to the left or to the right. They can only go one way
and that's the way the rails gonna lead them. And in this specific analogy you as
a GM are the rails. You decide where the characters go and if the characters want
to do something else that's not in your story you as a GM try to get
them back on the tracks. So normally the big advantage of tabletop role-playing
games in contrast to maybe PC role-playing games or console
role-playing games is that your characters are able to do whatever they
want. Your players can say "okay I don't want to go to the tavern" or "I wouldn't want
to fight a dragon" "I want don't want to talk to this very
important NPC. I would rather kill him and eat his flesh" - .. okay maybe... maybe not
eating his... okay you can... but you shouldn't... and.. -never mind. So, you get the
general the gist and we're gonna talk about railroading in detail in a future
episode. So, normally one could argue that scenic role-playing is a kind of of
railroading. Why is that? Scenic role-playing takes away some of
the agency of the players because you don't have this naturalistic approach.
Going back to our example: players are at the city gates
and they want to journey to the local tavern. Now how they do that is up to
them and you as a GM could give them the opportunity to explore the city by
themselves. So, you're at the city gates and there's this main road or this main
Street right in front of you. There are several dozen citizens walking
about doing their day-to-day business there are merchants there, they're city
guards, they're different alleyways you could use and you could
explore. What do you want to do? So, this approach by asking the players how they
want to go about finding the local tavern is a very naturalistic approach
because you as a GM don't decide what's happening. You don't take away the agency
from the players. The players decide by themselves: "Okay I wanna
ask one of the guards." Okay good. Go to the guards - the players
go to the guards - and ask: "A good day dear sir! I want to go to the tavern! Do you know the
way around?" And the guard answers: "Yes of course I know way around! Who are you?..." and so on and so on
Yeah you could argue that's kind of boring and everybody is like falling
asleep but that's a naturalistic approach and you don't take away any
agency from the players and you show everything. Like I said, when you imagine
you as a GM are a camera man: The camera in the simulationist-approach is never
off. You show everything! Of course there are gray
areas. I'm talking about the extreme on the one side and in the extreme-
simulationist approach the camera is never off. So you would actually show that
character is taking a dump. - Maybe not taking a dump - but you know what I mean. By
skipping all that, that's taking away agency from the players. In some way I
think every GM is doing that. We all do not show each and every path of the
life of our characters. We all like to narrate specific scenes which have
conflict because conflict drives our story. Of course sometimes it can be very
nice to give the characters some room for themselves to decide where they
wanna go next, what they want to explore. But in the end we decide which aspects
of the journey or which aspects of the life of our characters - as a GM - we're
gonna show a players. In our example - I think it's a very good example for
showing the general idea of scenic role playing - but we can take this whole
approach a little bit further: By deciding which scenes we're gonna show
our players we can - to a certain extent - help ourselves coming up with
great story ideas. So, for example maybe I come up with a specific scene in my head
where some bandits are gonna lay a trap for the characters on the road so I
wouldn't skip the road obviously. Because I want the the players to encounter
those bandits on the road. So you see there is a specific idea
behind which scene I gonna show and which scene I gonna skip. And the aspect
that is most important for me to decide if I gonna show something or not is if
there conflict - and if this conflict interesting for my storyline. So, as I
said when I start a game session I'm normally sitting in my bathtub and writing
down some notes and those notes are all about different scenes
and the conflict in those scenes. For example I know that the party is gonna
journey from city A to city B. And when I'm sitting there in the bathtub I'm
thinking about "okay is there something on the way from city A to city B that's
pretty interesting is there something I can come up with it's gonna make a great
story and it's gonna introduce a great conflict to the story. If not I'm gonna
skip that. So for me the most important thing is is there something to narrate or
is it just like "okay I'm showing it because yeah the characters have to walk
all those miles to get to the city." Journeys can be quite
problematic in a way that if you always skip the journey - because you find them
boring or you don't like this "road movie" style events on the side road, players
can easily lose their sense for distance. So specifically in a medieval setting
distances are quite a heavy burden for characters. So moving from one city to
another can take several weeks or even months. To not lose this sense of distance
I sometimes find it very important to give to come up with some ideas for the
journey and to maybe spend an evening or two on a journey and developing
ideas and plot-hooks specifically for the way from point A to point B. So as you
can imagine scenic role playing is all about "pacing". And pacing is a term coming from
narration and constructing stories in general. You will find it in books, you
will find it in movies and it's about how things progress inside a greater
narrational construct and how fast they progress. It's like the heartbeat of
a story. If you want to take this analogy, each beat is a conflict that
drives the story ahead and gives the story some kind of momentum. And the
space between each beat can be longer or can be shorter. And this
this rhythm is called "pacing". And sometimes it's very important to slow
down the pacing to give the characters space. Because if a character is always
only confronted with conflict and doesn't have time to to maybe just sit
around the campfire and talking and reflecting about the things that happened
to them... yeah it's gonna get too stressful.
For example, I talked with a good friend of mine: He told me: "Okay if you gonna
construct a horror game for example. If there's constant fear and constant
terror inside your campaign or your evening, your session, then it's not gonna
work the same way as if you have some downtime. Some feeling of
relief, some comic relief and then going back to this straight forward hammering
in terror into the characters. So you need this "up and down" and that's a good
pacing. Coming up with conflict after conflict after conflict... it's
getting dull at a certain point. So it's important to find the right
rhythm for your story. And that's something we're gonna talk about
specifically in another episode. But scenic role-playing can do other things
as well. If you take examples that are.... yeah.... that are more
problematic I would say - in the eye of some game masters with different play
styles. So let's imagine we have a group of three people: Yeah we have CARL
he's a dwar,f we have OTTO, he's a human and we have RICHARD, he's an elf
so Carl, Otto and Richard each wanna do a different thing. So maybe Carl decides
he wanna visit the blacksmith now. "So I'm gonna visit blacksmith now!" and
Otto decides "Okay I'm a human I need I need money. We all need money." So he's
visiting the local bank. And the last one is Richard the elf. He maybe
decides: Okay he wanted to smoke some fantasy weed in a bar. So each of them is
going off to some different locations. So now something interesting is happening
with scenic roleplaying. okay now we got our three characters and one of them as
you know is Otto. And as we said Otto is going to the bank and maybe we decide as
a GM "Okay when Otto is going to visit the bank
there will be like robbery taking place" So actually Otto is
waltzing in to a robbery. So as Otto enters the place from the front door
maybe the robbery already took place and the bandits turn around with sacks full
of money and coins and they see Otto waltzing in through the front door. And
Otto - being Otto and a hero - he's unsheathing his sword and calls them to
surrender. So now we got a conflict in the scene and that was the reason why we
actually decided to show this scene. As you remember in scenic role-playing we
could've just said "Okay we skipping this part of the story because there's
nothing interesting happening at the bank. So there's no need for us to
actually show what Otto is doing there." But since we decided "Okay there will be
a robbery taking place" it's maybe more interesting and let's show that. Okay so
far so good. Now what we could do is taking one of the other characters for
example Carl, who was at the blacksmith, and putting him in the scene. Pulling him to
this scene - to Ottos scene. Okay and now things get interesting!
Tthe the player of Carl never decided to - never decided by himself to move to the
bank after he visited the blacksmith. Maybe he only wanted to get a new axe or
to sharpen his weapons and then maybe moving to the tavern to his friend
Richard the elf. But you as a GM decided it would be more interesting for the
dwarf Carl to have a scene with the human Otto in the bank while there's a
robbery taking place. Because there are several different reasons for this: The
first reason could be maybe it's an interesting dynamic between Otto and
Carl going on and you wanted a scene with both of them alone - without
Richard. So they can yeah maybe resolve some conflicts between them. Maybe it's
interesting because Otto is normally not the quite aggressive guy and Carl is
very aggressive - being a dwarf. So there could be a conflict of interests
between them if they are both confronted with the conflict of the robbers. But
whatever reasons they are, you decided that the dwarf Carl is introduced to the
scene of Otto being at the bank. So you took away agency from Carls
player. It's totally ok to do that in my opinion. Some of the GMs will now say "Oh
my god! Okay, that's totally railroading. Carl never decided to visit
the bank and that's totally railroading! And never do that!" But I think unless you
are doing something that is totally against the motivations of a character...
For example let's say the dwarf Carl swore an oath to never visit any bank then
it would be a very bad idea to come up with this way of introducing Carl
to the scene. But unless there's a real good reason for Carl
not to to help out his friend Otto at the bank.. Why not?
Obviously Carl could have said "Okay I want to visit Richard because I have
some stuff I want to go over with Richard concerning our next adventures
and so I will never decide to go to the bank!" And it's totally fine. If the
player of Carl decides: "Okay excuse me GM,
I don't want to go to the bank after the the blacksmith. I clearly decided to go
to Richard." That's okay! So you go with that and you say "Okay
sorry! You're not in the scene. Otto, you play the scene by yourself." That's
totally fine. But in my experience most players are quite okay with them
being pushed to certain scenes. Because they then get interesting and new
opportunities for them to act. Because they - you as GM in scenic role playing -
it's your job to come up with interesting conflicts. You actively
decide which scenes you're gonna show. And therefore you should have a very
good idea or a very good selection mechanism which scene is interesting and
which is not. And so in generally players can trust you and come to trust
you in your decision whether a scene is interesting for them or not. So if I
decide that would be a great scene for Carl to help Otto at the bank
normally my players trust me that it's a real good decision. If I - for some reason -
did not calculate that - for example, Otto does not have any motivation
to do that or to be there, whatsoever, then as I said that's totally okay and
that's totally fine and we can skip that part and leave Otto there alone and
maybe even decide that Richard - totally baked - enters the bank
instead. You can create certain constellations in scenes without asking
the de players to do so. And it's a specific style
of narrating and the players should know that this is your style but it helps you
a lot especially in scenes where characters are separated from each other
and you can get them back together again. As you probably noticed this format and
Fumbling Forward in general is not railroaded. I tend to digress from the
path and touch certain side-topics all the time. But I think for a first
overview of what scenic role-playing can do - for the first episode that's enough.
The term scenic road playing is a little bit clearer now, I think. There are some
aspects that are quite confusing still, but we're gonna clear them up in future
episodes. Especially how to create your own scenes how to pick the right
ingrediences and what the right ingrediences are for creating really
great scenes. Obviously there are many many more aspects about what scenic
role-playing can do and can't do and there are quite a few question marks still
there and we gonna try to reduce them to zero in future episodes. So if you got
some comments, critique, praise or just want to contact me or give some warm
words to me and support me please hit the comments section below!
I will comment you back on those as soon as I see them and also: If you liked this
first video of mine please consider also to give me a thumbs up or even subscribe
to my channel! That would be really really awesome because - as you already
know - this is my very first episode and my very first channel here on YouTube
and I would really appreciate to create a whole community here! Last but not
least I want to give a big shout out to those youtubers who inspired me to move
on with this endeavor and to create my own YouTube channel. Surprisingly, they are
not tabletop role-playing channels but they
are "Dark Souls lore hunters" so maybe you know the game "Dark Souls" and "Bloodborne".
They are the lore hunters, they dissect the game and look for clues about the
hidden storyline in those games and I really enjoy watching their
channels and through they're very very very good content they inspired me
to come up with my own channel so a big shout-out to "JSF", "Sinclair Lore" and Aegon
of Astora! And I linked your channels in the comment section below. So if you are
like me and do not only enjoy talking extensively about tabletop role-playing
games but also enjoy lore-hunting in the worlds of Dark Souls and Bloodborne
please consider taking a look at the aforementioned great creators of lore
hunting videos and if you enjoyed my video please also consider visiting me again I think I will upload the next video or
next week if you want to stay tuned to what I'm doing in my free time and to
when I will upload the next video - maybe also consider visiting my Twitter page. I
also put it in the video description! Until then thanks for watching guys and
have a very great week!
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