thread: 2009-06-15 : GM Agenda
On 2009-06-19, Josh W wrote:
Is it possible for more than one player to assume this role? I mean your basically putting someone on the spot to react to your cool thing, which is something that people can take turns to do in any improv situation.
There is a danger there, which might be called "what if" tennis, that would be that players are so into creating stuff for people to interact with that they don't bother to properly respond to what they were just given. This is so common if you see certain types of clever people in conversation:
They both are trying to make the other pause in thought as they get their subtle puzzle, but they get into a sort of "but this is cooler" battle, which will never succeed, because however cool the stuff being made is, no one is spending the time to give each other what they really want!
The requirements for someone's answer to your situation are in this case not very high, they pretty much just have to engage with it and twist it how they like. Now in some situations that can allow players to flip a question straight back to the GM: How would your npc deal with this! Whereas in storming the wizards tower I'm not sure that back and forth is as strong; as far as I know, the players don't have as strong an ability to "change the game" for the GM.
Actually, scrap that, DITV works the same way; low level responsive back and forth on a character to character basis, the tactical level, where everyone has pretty equal power to re-contextualise someone???s character and see how they deal with it. This contrasts with the bigger scale, where the dogs are strategically a form of answer to a question. For it to be true back and forth the GM could have one of his NPCs join the dogs, and another player take on producing the town, or some other equally strange dynamics. The problem with such a situation is that characters designed as NPCs have a different purpose, particularly in that game, so I think it would only be an occasional thing that a character embodies enough of what the GM would be interested in as a player to form a PC.
