Once upon a time, playing a roleplaying game meant getting together with friends over a table, and having a gamemaster handcraft an experience for you. There is, let me assure those of you who have not had the experience, no sort of gaming so fine as a roleplaying campaign with a first-rate gamemaster, and with friends who are genuinely committed to roleplaying. It is, in its own way, the n'est plus ultra of gaming, the sort of experience you cannot have in any other fashion, direct, and meaningful, and emotionally impactful; more fun, at times, than you can have in any other way, at least with your clothes on.
Since the inception of the digital RPG, tabletop RPGers have been rightfully suspicious of the whole genre; digital RPGs are not, in any meaningful sense, role-playing games. That is to say, you take the part of a single character in an imaginary world, as in a real RPG; but min-maxing, and winning, is your objective, and actually getting into to the role of someone unlike yourself, and acting and speaking as your character would, is way beyond the point.
MMOs get a little closer; it's at least possible to separate yourself from the level grind for a moment or two, and actually engage in repartee with others. Yet there's a big difference; a canny gamemaster rewards this, but there are no in-game rewards, in an MMO, for anything other than the level grind. An actual conversation from my EverQuest experience:
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Some Dude: Yo! Bitch! Gimme buffs.
Me: Sirrah! Dost thou address a lady thus?
Some Dude: Why you gotta talk that way?
Me: If you don't want that, why are you playing on a roleplaying server? (And unsaid but thought: Schmuck.)
Yet in another way, the difference between a tabletop GM and an MMO (or a digital RPG) is, in essence, the difference between bespoke tailoring and prêt à porter. For several thousand dollars, even today, you can have a tailor make you a suit, carefully hand-made to your dimensions. Or, for several hundred dollars, you can buy one off the rack -- in the argot of couture, prêt à porter, meaning "cash and carry," the English idiom being "ready to wear." It won't be as sleek, it won't fit you quite as well, but it will be adequate, and a whole lot cheaper.
Tabletop roleplaying is, in essence, bespoke gamemastering; a person who knows you, and your gaming group well, is carefully structuring an experience for your pleasure. Naturally, there are good and bad GMs, just as their are good and bad tailors, but an effort is being made to create an individual experience.
MMOs are, to coin a phrase, prêt à jouer (ready to play): a faceless company far away has spent a great deal of time and effort creating a scalable experience suitable for large numbers of people, and infinitely replicable, in the hope that a sufficiently large mass audience will find it sufficiently appealing to pay their ten bucks a month, or whatever. An MMO is ever and always a pretty unsatifying gamemaster, from the perspective of a tabletop player -- and yet, it's always there, and doesn't rely on you gathering a bunch of friends for a session, and even if it isn't great, it's usually -- adequate.
Of course, tabletop gamemasters, unlike bespoke tailors, have not been able to turn what they do into a profitable enterprise. With some rare exceptions (mystery party weekends, corporate roleplaying exercises), no one has been able to establish a market for bespoke GMing -- and so gamemastering remains, as it has always been, something GMs do for their own entertainment and egoboo, and for the entertainment of their friends. More's the pity; good GMs are priceless, and in a perfect world, they should be able to extract a price.
But the distinction here suggests another route: Between bespoke tailoring and prêt à porter we have something else: Designer clothing. Many people are unwilling to pay the price required for bespoke tailoring (or, on the feminine side, haute couture), and yet are willing to pay a premium over commodity clothing for the sake of a designer label. To be sure, in some cases, this is merely a matter of slapping some celebrity's label on clothing that would otherwise be considered a commodity; yet in principle, and in many cases, it's something of a compromise between individual exclusivity and mass-market dross. At least in some cases, designer clothing is an expression of individual creativity, designed to appeal to a narrower market than the mass.
Can we find a similar middle ground in gaming?
I think perhaps we can -- and I'll suggest several places where we may see it emerging.
- Some of the larger Scandinavian LARPs--while remaining non-profit entities--now employ people, part- or full-time to plan for the next major event.
- ARGs and "big urban" games like those created by area/code games are hand-crafted, short-term experiences for a limited, if still large, audience.
- Companies like GoCrossCampus are using a standard rules-set, but hand-crafting experiences for large numbers of people in environments with definable end-games.
None of this is exactly big business -- today. And yet I wonder whether there's something viable between bespoke GMing and the bland facelessness of MMOs -- the roleplaying equivalent of the Designer Label.
East Coast Efforts
Threads of Damocles, by Gordon Olmdtead-Dean, Eric Johnson, Adrienne Gammons, and John Kammer (And formerly myself,) has a unique approach to GM activity and writing. www.threadsofdamocles.org
Also Ford Ivey's Osiris Sanction http://www.osirissanction.com/osiris/ Is running a NERO like Franchise system.
Both of these are permutations on the Full Weekend Theatre Style games of the 80's and early 90's that go a long way toward gaining immersion while maintaining a decent amount of rigidity. Damocles in particular is in the middle of it's second season with decent advancements in how the logistics of the game work.
Neverwinter Nights
Well there's nothing for me to disagree with here, but I have to point out that Neverwinter Nights managed to bridge the gap between tabletop RPG's and computer RPG's by being a computer game with a game master module. My hands down best gaming experience (beating even the tabletop campaigns I played with my friends in high school) was an epic 3½ year campaign with 4-5 players that was run in NWN. It was all the roleplaying and the tailor-made story of a tabletop campaign with the evocative graphics and the automated combat of a computer game.
In case you're curious, I kept a picture chronicle of it here, though it's a bit hard to follow if you don't already know how it unfolded:
http://rooc.offtopicproductions.com/QFG
Still, it'll give you an impression of its scope : )
Anyway, good post!
If any good GMs are listening...
I'd pay. Seriously.
The only reason I don't exclusively play tabletop RPGs is because I have never once met a good game master. Even finding a bad GM has been hard for me.
Maybe you couldn't make a true business out of it, but certainly there must be enough demand to warrant some small side-business, maybe something on the level of giving piano lessons on the weekends?
Yes, but. Everyone needs to
Yes, but. Everyone needs to wear clothes, and it's reasonably simple to argue that clothing shapes the perceptions of a person by those around said person. So investment in fashion could be seen as having further benefits. Conversely, I don't think you could make the same claims about hiring a GM. There's no future value in it; it's not the same sort of investment. So by extension, there's a lot more doing in convincing yourself that a "designer game master" is worth it.
To make the comparison a little more level, you would have to gain some sort of ego boost through the role-playing experience that you can then lord over your friends and strangers. Which is why loot and stats and whatnot have the status they do: that is how you get noticed and get ranked; they are your bragging rights. And that's basically what designer clothing provides. All that other personal experience stuff is too, you know, personal.
what about online games that
what about online games that have the format of 'Zombie Master'
The ZM is ~sort of~ like a DM. With the notable exception that he's trying to kill you, not guide you.
well anyway...
I wish
Man, I wish I could get paid for GMing. :)
Seriously though, I'd be willing to hire a killer GM to come in and play for my friends. Like going with my friends to a play or concert. Hell, if I were rich, I'd be a GM patron. They could publish modules for free, but run for me and my guests. Unfortunately, we're not quite in that economic situation.
Clothing Analogy:
It's a good analogy. There are obvious problems (clothing is more popular than RPGs, investment in clothing brings other rewards, etc), but the basic idea holds. People who can afford to pay for high quality GMing, should hire high quality GMs. GMs could even establish a known style, that would appeal to different tastes. :)
As for Zombie Master:
Zombie Master is an excellent game, but isn't a good counter point here. It's merely a competitive game with unequal opponents. The titular ZM isn't crafting an experience for the players, he's competing with them in a well defined manner.
What we pay for
For-profit LARPs and ARGs do not get paid for performing GM duties. They get paid for providing venues, infrastructure, planning - and particularly, for bringing together a critical mass of gamers. I would lump game convention organizers into the same group, even though they do not themselves plan or run the games.
Compare party organizers, who do not get paid for creating the best entertainment, but for bringing together the best party people - the hippest celebs and the most happening artists - and arranging things like venues, transportation and liquor licenses.
Are there qualitative differences between GMs? Certainly, but the qualities a good GM brings to the table (pardon the pun) can just as easily be handled by a good host or an energetic player. No money changes hands.
To use an (IMO more appropriate) sports analogy, I'd gladly pay a soccer team's administration for access to the field, regular game scheduling, instruction, access to first aid equipment, change rooms and showers, and matching team uniforms. I wouldn't pay my friend, who likes to think of himself as the team captain, even though he's really good and make the game more fun.
There are plenty of people getting paid to bring tabletop gamers together, your Friendly Local Game Store being the most common. Wizards might be aiming for the middle ground you're talking about with their computer-based version of D&D4E and the associated social networking tools. But none of them get paid to entertain. That's what friends are for.
in reply to the ZM counterpoint...
in reply to the ZM counterpoint an earlier commenter made..yeah, your right.
You'd basically have to have an army of programmers who could make up worlds in more or less the blink of an eye to have an online mirror of what a (/*good*/) DM does. And you know what...I could see that happening if the tools available to computer game designers evolve far enough.
Its a long way to go b4 we get there, though.