Yeah, I think it's tough to examine our games and realize this, but like you, I know I did my fair share of this earlier on. Even when I started running D&D in a more neo-trad style (before I knew what that was, or before it was even labeled as such), it still involved a lot of GM authority.
Very much this. But man oh man, was I extrapolating to keep the "living world" alive and running. I was a darn good extrapolator. I could extrapolate upon extrapolated extrapolations, then extrapolate some more on the extrapolated extrapolated extrapolations.
And for a long while -- well over a year -- everything just sort of hummed along in my homebrew
Savage Worlds fantasy campaign setting, people were having fun, I was having fun, the world felt "alive" and "vigorous" and "full of mystery and enchantment."
And then somewhere around month 14 or 15, it changed. The extrapolations were no longer maintaining full fidelity to previous events, because, how could they? Unless I was willing to record in odious detail every possible thing that transpired during play, of course gaps in the details would appear. Suddenly an NPC may have been in one place instead of another, because "Otherwise, how did he/she manage to steer events in a city 400 miles away?" I had to suddenly invent new NPCs retroactively, because there's no way the main "baddie" could be orchestrating absolutely everything.
And then the question began to arise, "How is this all going to end? What's the real end-game?"
Do we just keep running this forever with different villains and quests? Is there supposed to be "an ending to the story," or is that something I'm not supposed to impose? How do I keep events moving forward as if they are a "living world," but now I'm facing immense pressure to bring about a "satisfying conclusion" to the PCs efforts, to move toward a "story ending." And because of that, I was then flooded with all these ideas of how things could/would/should end, but if I implemented any of them or enforced any of them as "hidden backstory," would it have changed player perceptions of the outcome and campaign as a whole?
And then the cognitive dissonance started setting in---this isn't a "living world." It's a mish-mash of stuff I made up 2-5 years ago, extrapolated stuff I made up based on what we did during play, stuff I'm making up now out of whole cloth (with additional extrapolated made up stuff), and stuff that I may or may not be making up in play tomorrow when we get together again.
I think the thing about games that are more story now in implementation is that it structures things for the GM and also for the players. I mean, when a player shows up with a 32 page backstory, I don't blame a GM for rolling their eyes and discarding the vast majority of it. But when there's a structure in place... a process the GM and players follow... a lot can be accomplished with minimal effort. And as
@Campbell pointed out... it's not just the details, but how they inform play. These are actionable things that are determined.
I look at the game of Stonetop that I'm running and so much of what is going on in that game came from our character creation session. The Ranger had to come up with a threat he'd encountered in the forest. The Seeker came up with a strange man who gifted an artifact to him. The Blessed had vanished when he was young, and lived with wolves walking the spirit roads and only recently returned, much older than he should be.
All of this stuff has directly influenced much of our play. These things are central to it... what's the nature of the beast in the forest? What's happening to the forest? How does it connect to the spirit realm? Who was the gaunt stranger who gave the Seeker her artifact? Did he also give an artifact to a Manmarch warlord? What about the artifact held by the vizier in Marshedge? These are all questions that have come up as a result, and still matter to the game many sessions later.
If I sat down ahead of time and tried to craft all this in a more trad approach to play, I'd never have come up with these different elements, and never seen how they could connect in interesting ways that challenge the PCs and the players. It's not just about collaboration, it's about that collaboration driving play.
Very true, and I really appreciate what
Ironsworn and
Starforged have unlocked for me as a GM. So much more freedom to play and GM in a different way.
But I'm also very much encouraged by some things I read recently from Eero Tuovinen, which is that it's okay to embrace the GM role as "Story Hour" provider for trad play, as long as you as GM are doing the work to create a "story" structure worth playing through.
www.arkenstonepublishing.net
If it's agreed upon with you and your players that you're largely going to be playing through elements of a "structured story" together---and what else is module and/or adventure path play than this?---that you and your players are along for the ride together, and largely understand the structures and limits of what the entails.
And this all made sense. When I created story structures worth playing, the game was great. The best, most functional parts of my trad
Savage Worlds GM-ing were the parts where I had very carefully aligned NPCs, "fronts", factions, geography, and current PC objectives to come together.
And the parts where I was mostly "slumming it," playing ad hoc, lesser preparation segments inevitably came across as bland and relatively tensionless.
For a long time after that
Savage Worlds campaign finished, I felt like I never wanted to run a "trad" campaign again, because I felt like I would GM-ing under false pretense. But Eero's essay has just recently given me a renewed sense of appreciation for trad GM-ing. Like, I wasn't doing anything
wrong, I was simply playing the game as largely enforced by the boundaries of "traditional" RPG game style, and that the pursuit of "worthy storytelling" through "living world extrapolation" isn't a bad thing. It's just not going to lead to other specific gameplay "happenings" (read: strong character-driven intent, protagonism, and stakes becoming a broader part of play). As long as I'm good with that tradeoff, all is well.