Fan Club Video #2: On letting PLAYERS create

Hell yeah Quinns. Love that I feel getting the Patreon was 1,000% worth it

DuneArchitect

This is pretty much how this industry started. Players and GMs just throwing out the rules because they found a more fun and/or intuitive alternative to them. Really hope I find a playgroup who gets this one day.

Stuart Stone

YES! As a player this is my favorite part of roll playing games. I really wish more games were less afraid of allowing this within the core rules. It is something that any system can add to itself, but systems are at their best when they are rooted at the core of the systems development.

chronicDreamer

I'm a bit late to this conversation, but I wanted to share an example of this from my favorite Vampire actual play series, Not a Drop to Drink. As a way of handling negative consequences (Messy Criticals) in interesting ways, DM Jacob Burgess asks the rest of the players to each suggest a consequence idea, and then they all decide together which one they think is the most interesting. It then happens.

Toni DoVale

The BEST example of this I have seen is the NeoScum actual play.

Timothy Carter

Letting players create is something that I find really sets people apart in RPGs. I love player input, in games I run the players help write the scenes, but when I try to describe this to people who've always played or run games where player input isn't allowed they say I'm "roleplaying wrong." An example I use often is that in my games if the characters encounter a locked hatch a player can say "I used to work on a ship similar to this one, there should be a maintenance crawlspace entrance a few halls back." With none of that being established before that moment except maybe a vague background that the character did work on a ship. It makes sense, it doesn't contradict their backstory, it's creative, and it moves the story forward, and it makes sense within the logic of the world. So now it's established fact in the world that that crawlspace exists. At most I might have the player roll to see how long it takes them to find the crawlspace entrance because his memory might not be exact or it might not be the exact same model of space ship. Where as at a lot of tables the expectation is that the player can't simply just make up that the maintenance crawlspace exists, the GM didn't explicitly say it did. I've done things like this at tables where they all looked at me like I was an alien. Then the GM checks their notes to see if said feature exists on the ship and if that's one of the ways they wrote down for the players to get past the locked hatch and if it is they proceed and if it's not they say "no, that doesn't work." I vastly prefer the first style over the second.

daniel schmitt

Just saw your post. I don't know of any specific resources persay, but I did want to share what I'll be doing in my own Shadowdark game. I've sent my players an unlabeled map of the next region. At the end of next session, I'll have the players take turns answering three questions: what is a rumor you have heard about one of these locations, describe someone who can be found in this region, and what is the most magnificent treasure you'll find? I hope that helps! I'd love to hear what you tried and how it went.

John Vanore

One of my favorite aspects of Burning Wheel are the -wise skills because they actively empower players to add to the shared fiction. They add a lot of color to PCs by showing the table what they know and it’s so much fun when a -wise roll fails because the GM gets to do a great “yes, and” or “no, but” to the player’s fiction. In a recent game, I tried to use Gods-Wise to establish Hecate, my PC’s patron, does not simply play with humans like Zeus or Hera. I failed the roll, and my witch went from self-assured anarchist to deluded hex-monger in a second. Heartbreaking but it created such an explosive narrative potential that I knew this secret that she did not.

Barca206

We played Masks before Brindlewood Bay. I think if run Masks again I'd definitely use it there too.

Leigh Dodds

Absolutely love 'cut to commercial'. Could very easily work in other genres inspired by fiction - "what's on the next page of the comic", "what are the coming attractions", "what's the 'next week on' trailer got in it". Even "what's this week's moral lesson delivered straight to camera by one of your characters in a weird 4th wall break" :)

Stephen Reid

Love this. And the timing's good; I'm about to do a session zero for a Shadowdark game and was planning similar stuff. Does anyone know of any good session zero 'guides' or resources? About to go on a Google/Reddit search but maybe the QQers can point me to an excellent starting point.

Stephen Reid

you sneaky wizard... you got in indie game reviews after telling me that I'd have to go without in your first blog! I hope that eventually you put these out there for everyone but I think its a good patreon strategy to keep them limited for a bit.

gm_naahz

Spoken like a game designer. 🫵

P0rthos

Quinns, please do a review of bicycle pumps. Just one. For excrement and amusement.

redddfer44

Now I really wanna see Quinns photographed like General Jack D. Ripper from Dr. Strangelove, ranting about ludic fascists. "I can no longer sit back and allow ludic fascist infiltration, ludic fascist indoctrination, ludic fascist subversion and the international ludic fascist conspiracy to sap and impurify all of our precious creative juices."

redddfer44

This is a great bit of advice. I've used it quite heavily in, e.g. Masks, to set up potential dangers, e.g. asking the players who they know in a crowd that might be put in harms way by a super-villain. Or which nemesis of theirs might also be hanging around whilst they were investigating. The latter question resulted in a super-powered dance off which I wasn't expecting but the players loved. Asking the players for input allows the GM to "Yes, and..." those suggestions. Brindlewood Bay has prompts for questions to ask players to add colour to a scene. But one additional change I made was to adjust the "Cut to Commercial" mechanic. Usually this allows a player to recover from a bad roll by cutting to commercial and asking them to narrate a commercial (Brindlewood Bay is insprired by Murder She Wrote and other TV shows) in exchange for a success roll. I introduced "Cut to Commercial" at the end of completing a Mystery (because the episode had finished) and asked them to narrate commercials for stores or organisations local to Brindlewood Bay. This allowed them to start injecting new locations and characters which added colour to the setting. These later got woven into the action elsewhere. No other benefits but helped to round out the setting which was needed as otherwise BB can leave you focused on isolated locations

Leigh Dodds

I'm convinced that dungeons and daddies is the best actual play around. Great DM and the players get what makes an entertaining story.

Sean Rankin

Love The Between, very much looking forward to finding a chance to play Public Access and Silt Verses. I also want to highlight the "Paint the Scene" technique that's a part of locations and Unscenes. Before those were carved from Brindlewood, Jason Cordova wrote a post for the Gauntlet blog describing "Paint the Scene" as a standalone technique he uses across all sorts of games (https://www.brindlewoodbay.com/blog/paint-the-scene , G+ comments archived at https://gauntlet.gplusarchive.online/2018/07/25/paint-the-scene/ ), and it, along with other advice picked up through the Gauntlet community, changed the way I run and play games so much for the better.

Chet Gray

Another bit of the Bluebeards Bride design I really love is the way the players describe the keys. It's such a little thing, but can really help spark ideas when describing the room it opens. And the Unscenes in The Between were the thing that made me fall in love with the game, and to see how they've evolved through Public Access and the Silt Verses is really awesome. (I actually wrote some of the Unscenes in The Between, and was never expecting to see my words in a Quinns video!)

David Morrison

The video asked towards the end if I would be more comfortable if Quinns stopped saying creative juices? I would actually be more comfortable if he called them moist creative juices. But there was so many great tips in this video. I try to let my players create with me. I always say this is “our story” not “my story”. In D&D that’s a little bit harder to achieve but in Vampire the Masquerade it’s a lot easier to bring them in creatively. Giving ideas agency and making them mean something is always fun. Plus, anything that makes our jobs easier as DMs is okay by me! I have a community of friends and we play a lot of games together. I run 3-4 a week, plus our Discord games. So many PbPs 😂 So I don’t always have the most time to prepare but I guess I never thought HOW involved I can make my players in scenes. I feel silly because I’ve been forever DMing since 2004 and this really has passed me by. Something I will 100% include in games in the future. Those days where I worked all day, had to feed these children and then realized I only have an hour to plan. One of my plans could be to let them plan what is in their scenes! Brilliant!

William Rigby

The greater level of engagement I get from these types of techniques is real. Be ready to go full improv to help push things with them or help get their wheels turning. "Yes, But" or moving to another player to add on to what the first player suggested. It is all gold.

Craig Shipman

This is something that I could not imagine playing without, and it's one of my favourite things in the actual play podcasts I follow. It's essential for Dungeons&Daddies, for example, where there's not only a lot of player involvement behind the scenes when it comes to the crucial arcs and developments around the player characters. Anthony Burch also does that small but ingenous thing when he passes the parol to the players whenever they crit fail or crit hit, asking them simply "describe just how badly you messed up / how you did that". It just makes those moments so much more memorable for the audience, but probably also for the players themselves, when they out-badass or stumble upon themselves in spectacular fashion -- of course, there's the full trust in the players not abusing that power, but even in the rare instances that it happens, the DM rolls with it. (Of course, it being a comedy podcast helps -- but it's a thing that I'll surely want to try with my players as well, should I ever get to DM...)

Mr. N. Hacksaw

A couple years back I created a Session 0 questionairre containing things such as "Who do you trust completely" or "Who wants you dead" to be filled in with various NPCs. Just the act of players filling this in with their own ideas, and taking NPCs from other players sheets and putting them down on their own sheets but in a different role, creates an entire campaign. I then just sneak in a couple relationships between all these characters we've made, and an entire campaign is sitting on the table.

Tymon Wranik-Lohrenz

I mostly run horror games and often ones that are very collaborative. I will say that I often have players contribute to the scenes and characters of the game. And then I take those ideas they have generated and form driving questions that work them into the story I am going to tell. I always try to make my stories one where something is going to happen if the players do nothing, then let them live in that world around it. It's actually something I just did a GM course on for some locals. I love letting my players make parts of the story because it gives me more to work off of, makes it so I have to think of less, and gives them genuine investment in the outcome of the story. I think the biggest part is the driving questions after.

Alex Roberts

I think it's a cool addition to play and am absolutely stealing the player NPC invention for areas they're familiar with! As a player I do appreciate having the bulk of my writers room creative input in that beginning session 0 stage or character creation, but a much reduced amount of narrative power throughout the campaign as I'm experiencing it in play. While playing through a game where we're collaboratively writing a narrative story together is awesome, I also really like a game on the other end of the spectrum where it feels like this otherworld I'm exploring which appears to have its own simulated reality for me to discover as I play in it. Giving the keys to the joys of world creation can be awesome for players (Who actually committed the murder in the sleepy town? What do you find in the splintered treasure chest?) but I also like the joy of discovery, like I'm crawling around the mind palace world sprung from someone else's skull running some kind of fleshware simulated world where there are answers to most questions in the world independent of my input. (even if it's sometimes just the GM improv-ing some detail on the fly.) It seems like both collaborative storytelling methods and defined open world methods (not that these are mutually exclusive or anything, its definitely possible and sweet to have both) are both reactions to the strictly constrained games that both seek freedom from the tyranny of a single GM's precious inviolable plot and a means of giving agency to players. One way is to share the joys of narrative creation with the players allowing them to invent the contents and reality of the world together. Another way offers players free agency of choice within a defined world and the plot existing as an emergent quality of their shenanigans and the world's reaction.

Joel Hines

Quinns! You could be reviewing bicycle-pumps or step-ladders for all I care. I would still be enjoying your take on things (as well as spend more money than planned on the product you’re gushing about). Thank you for doing this <3

Torbjörn Nyberg

Quinns

Oooh! Candles! How romantic! Also, I loved how self conscious you got at the end! I have to say it's so refreshing for someone to say, "Actually, the way you roleplay is what is best." rather than speaking from on high with a bunch of stone tablets saying, "Thou shall..." etc.

Backpack Boom Bap (Tom)

Having played The Between...now I just want to throw in an Unscene into The Wildsea.

Highflyer

I LOVE THESE VIDEOS! And maybe the best short campaign I have ever experienced was one where the session zero was 50% the players coming up with our home nation before we competed in an international bloodsport olympics. We had instant buy in and pride for our country because we were the ones that built it. 10/10

birdmilk

Every release has me foaming at the mouth. So happy to see you posting these videos!

bonk!