thread: 2010-06-14 : A Bit of Hardcore
On 2010-06-17, Rafael wrote:
Co-GMing means that you can participate more actively in all parts of the collaborative process, instead of limiting yourself to immersion. It's creatively satisfying[....]
Ok, now we're getting somewhere! This is exactly the "compensating advantage" I was looking for. I can understand the creative satisfaction you describe; it's the pleasure of being a GM.
So there is a "GM-joy" and a "player joy", and if the players participate in GM-ing, they can have GM-joy. To get this GM-joy, they have to sacrifice some (immersion-dependent) player-joy; whether this tradeoff is worthwhile is presumably a question of taste. Ditto for GMs sharing the burden but giving up control.
However, it seems to me that task resolution only results in "look at the cool thing we did" if (a) success or failure are both interesting or (b) you always succeed; otherwise, dice failure can result in narrative failure that is hard to work around. In bg Josh's version of safe cracking example: if you roll badly for safe cracking, questioning the partner, hacking the computers, etc. then you're just as screwed as if you had a railroading fiat GM. Since you say the game's designed so that no die result can lead to an unsatisfying story, I guess you advocate (a), which is exactly the situation in which I was advocating following the dice, so maybe we just agree... but I don't grasp yet how you accomplish (a) in a task-resolution setting.
Plus your engagment with the other player's characters is (often) more, and more active, than in a conventionally-split game.
That's an interesting claim; can you expand on it?
