Origins Experiences

So, while I had some good experiences at Origins, I did have some experiences that didn't sit well with me. I'm principally ranting here, so if you don't want to listen to a rant, ignore this. Because it's a rant, I'm not naming participants, though if you have enough knowledge of the community, you'll probably be able to piece this together. Aside from the rant, for me this wound up being a case study in "this is exactly why I hate some trendy modern advice for how to run RPGs".

And I'm principally ranting because at Origins I play with a younger daughter and as such I tend to be picky about the GMs and games I sign up with because well, both her age and her gender sometimes make her the target of casual dismissal or condescending attitudes despite the fact that she's been playing since she could read and do basic math in systems from WEG D6, to D&D, to Blades in the Dark, to Ten Candles both at my table and at the tables of peer GMs. As such, I tend to favor female GMs and story lines that aren't likely to be problematic in certain ways. And the reason that I'm annoyed is she reported this as a worse RPing experience than playing at tables with male chauvinists that didn't seem to think girls should participate, or toxic groups of teenagers with horrible social dynamics. This was literally her worst RPing experience of her life. I didn't hate it that bad, but I did find it false advertising and a really bizarre experience.

I want to emphasis that the quality of all RPing sessions is subjective because all art is to some extent subjective and that there were aspects of this particular GMs game that were highly laudatory and represented high skill. There were some participants at the same table that enjoyed the experience quite a lot. I can understand why this GM has fans. If you came in with the right expectations about what the game would be like and wanted that experience, I can fully understand why you might enjoy it.

We signed up for two sessions of 7e Call of Cthulhu based on apparently interesting premises. And well, the interesting premise part is true. Among the laudable skills shown by the GM was:

a) Extremely good premises and settings with a lot of interesting world building based on deep research into real world settings.
b) Extremely good characterization and roleplaying ability in bringing characters to life.
c) Generous use of props and illustrations to make the setting evocative.
d) Good oral story telling ability.

So if you like that sort of thing and you come into the session with the understanding that you are to participate in a oral story telling tradition as a character within that short story primarily to witness the story teller's aesthetic skills ("Sensation" aesthetic of play) then you'll probably be pretty happy. If on the other hand you were expecting an RPG to be run, you'll be very disappointed.

The problems with this GMs approach at least from my perspective:

a) Directorial stance. The GM creates all the PCs as pregenerated characters with their own expected emotions and motivations and primarily expects the players to play out her vision of the character. The characters are usually fine as literary devices and believable characters but they aren't given opportunity to actually do anything. Worse, because you are meant to hide the secrets of the characters you aren't given free choice of characters and play what you take blind. More on this later.
b) Board the Choo Choo Train. These are the most linear adventures with the hardest use of stage management and the least actual player agency I have ever seen in 40 years of gaming. Generally speaking in a four-hour session the first two hours of play involve no choices at all but are simply guided tours of the setting given in great detail where the character is given no in character motive but to go along with the guided tour. I wrote an essay once in how to railroad successfully, and virtually every aspect of that essay was on full display. The second two hours generally are simply the GM narrating the deadly results of arriving at the destination the players have been steered to by their guide usually with the guide making all the important decisions and discoveries. This takes two hours not because of any meaningful choices by the players, but because each choice results in elaborate literary narration where one fortune check results in a ten-minute monologue.
c) Not actually an RPG. Not only where we not playing 7e CoC by any stretch of those words, but we weren't even playing an RPG. Rather, what we were playing was a proto-RPG Braunstein without rules where all player propositions were resolved by fiat without recourse to the rules in any meaningful way. Some dice where thrown, but these could easily have been replaced by coin flips and more importantly the dice were unconnected to any sort of stakes.
d) Cloud Cuckooland. The central reasons that players had no agency in the game is that no action has discernable stakes. Players never know what they are risking or attempting really, because any result is possible for any throw of the dice. So for example, failed SAN checks can summon monsters that successfully attack as result of the SAN failing. Thus the result of failing a SAN check is not madness but physical impalement - dodge checks do not exist - or really anything else from any declared check or skill use. Essentially there are no skills or abilities but only a generic flipped coin 'saving throw'.
e) Complete lack of self-awareness by the GM. The GM prides themselves on their lethality announcing for example that of 64 participants they had killed 45 and driven 10 permanently insane with only 9 survivors. But I survived this GM not once but twice by the expediency of avoiding declaring propositions that involved rolling dice (1e AD&D thief that knows not to check for traps by using my thief skills), being lucky enough to be near the end of the initiative order and so repeatedly got away with being ignored and being able to respond after other events by pointing out that several turns had passed without me being called on (like Btech, moving first is a drawback not a benefit), and by generally trying to stay off the railroad. Yet despite the choo choo train, the GM repeatedly announced many times how they were not a linear GM. As my daughter put it, "[They] wouldn't recognize a non-linear game if it bit [them]". After all being steered by DM PC's into the situation, you don't even really have the choice in how you'd prefer to die. As hard as I am to kill (I've never died in a con game and survived ToH on my first try), I only really survived because I was lucky enough to twice pull the character that was last in the initiative order (which you could probably do for most of her games by picking aging academics, not that I'm recommending you waste your gaming slots doing so).

f) What made the experience particularly bad for my daughter was randomly choosing a female character that lacked an active motive to be in the scenario or to engage with it and whose motivations and feelings were described in the character background as "flirting with the hot guys", something by no means my 18 year old daughter wanted to play out with middle aged strangers. As such, not only was she left with zero agency in the story because of the mechanics, she was basically left with no way to play her character "correctly" as she understood what she was supposed to do and as she noted, any attempt by her to ever get off the rails was met by various versions of "you wouldn't want to do that" or "the fairies arrive to tell you that you are going the wrong way".

So let's make this clear, while I would have given this a 4/10 experience simply because the oral storytelling was interesting in a "you are attending a lecture" sort of way, for my daughter this was less enjoyable than being condescendingly talked down to by a sexist GM the whole session on account of her age and gender, because at least that aside she was allowed to actually play an RPG. This was less fun for her than four hours of enduring socially dysfunctional autism spectrum peers screaming at each other and trying to gain control of the game and control the actions of other players. And she really had a point.

My point is that had this probably been advertised as "attend a three hour lecture in folk lore by local storyteller and short story writer" I would have said, "Sounds interesting but not my cup of tea."

Rant off. I don't really want to discuss the virtues of this particular GM. As I said, they have their fans for reasonable reasons. But if anyone wants to discuss my thoughts on GM theory and how to run an RPG and maybe more importantly, how to correctly write for one using this bad experience as a launching point, I'm game for that.

If nothing else, from your write-up it sounds like the GM simply had too much material prepped to reasonably expect to fit into a 4-hour session. The 2-hour setting exposition is proof enough of that.

Lanefan said:

If nothing else, from your write-up it sounds like the GM simply had too much material prepped to reasonably expect to fit into a 4-hour session. The 2-hour setting exposition is proof enough of that.

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Not really. Because the 2 hour setting exposition is the ONLY material they prep. The game ends when the setting exposition is over and then you are in the trap and the GM kills you "creatively" (having played two sessions, it's not really creative at all, as they have certain rehearsed speeches they use regardless of whether it suits the scenario or not). The GM thinks they are non-linear because they don't prep an ending of any sort but make it up on the fly. But as I've said before, if you prep material you might run a railroad. But if you don't prep material, you do run a railroad.

Yeah, my experience at Origins was pretty meh.

I had one very good GM from a rules standpoint, who was flabbergasted that we managed to mess up the delicate railroad plot simply by succeeding at a couple skill chedown. This was an organized play 7th Sea 1E game.

Then there was the decent GM who had obviously never read the scenario prior to sitting down. This was an organized play Shadowrun 6E game.

The (paid) Dragonbane GM was poor to middling AND decided to change up the adventure from the one we signed up for (paying extra) for the Free RPG Day intro adventure.

Our "learn to play" WH40K GM was skilled but the game was just tutorials (as expected). The Catalyst Battletech Grinder was huge fun and convinced me to buy the game.

Battlestations was a huge mess,with a dozen players of whom only 3 knew the rules with minimal GM introduction or oversight.

Reynard said:

Then there was the decent GM who had obviously never read the scenario prior to sitting down. This was an organized play Shadowrun 6E game.

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They were probably filling in for a slot with an absent GM. That kind of thing can happen a lot with organized play at conventions. I usually avoided volunteering to do that fill-in with AL at Gamehole Con because I don't like to run scenarios I've never read before.
Fortunately, this is less of an issue with AL at Gamehole now since they now get GM time slot commitments first before scheduling AL time slots. And I endorse that change.

Just addressing a couple of the points--pregens and simple railroads are pretty common as convention one-shots because that GM will be running the same game multiple times, doesn't know the players, certainly doesn't have a spare hour for character building, and has a time limit to hit certain beats and finish the adventure. I rarely run convention games, because it's hard. Much harder than running a home game. The rare times I do run at conventions I have pregens, and simple linear plots with 3-4 beats I can hit in the 3-hour slot and resolve the story with some kind of climax. Even with those tools in place, it can be tough as you don't know the players or what to expect from them.

Also, the GM-ing-as-a-service dynamic makes this insanely impossible. How do you possibly satisfy dozens of disparate players over 4 days with different expectations and backgrounds and gaming styles, who you have never met? Were this a home game there wouldn't be a thread chastising the GM.

Maybe it should be like Uber, where the GMs can rate the players, too. The convention experience very much subverts the 'GM is a player too' dynamic and turns it into 'the GM is a service provider'--which is why I rarely run games in that environment. I'm not up for being reviewed on my ability to play my hobby in public.

Morrus said:

I rarely run convention games, because it's hard. Much harder than running a home game.

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I love running con games and don't find it particularly more difficult than running home games. Yes, with home games you know the players better, but with con games you usually have players excited and eager to be there and try this thing.

Morrus said:

Were this a home game there wouldn't be a thread chastising the GM.

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I'm not chastising the GMs, except the guy who made a point about he was a pro GM who also arbitrarily changed the adventure I paid extra to play. If you charge for services, you agree to responsibilities on your end.

Morrus said:

Maybe it should be like Uber, where the GMs can rate the players, too.

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This is a good idea. There is a certain uncommon but not nonexistent player that plays at cons because no one in the real world will take them.

This might have been the year that Organized Play expanded from the 'old days'. Before it was Paizo, Shadowrun, Arcanis, and Dnd, but this year at Origins alone there was Paizo, Adventurer's League, Marvel had multiple tables of modules, Everyday Heroes released their Org Play program, Shadowrun, Arcanis, the Paizo knockoff, and probably a couple of others that I forget about. And most of the Org Play was pretty disappointing, so it wasn't you. My problems this year with Org Play were around lengths of time, one 4-hour slot was 2 hours, and the other 4-hour slot was 3 hours. The Everday Heroes heist module had a lot of promise, the GM had lots of great ideas, but he just needed to link the ideas together into a coherent story (which the module didn't do for him).

I'm usually good for one bad game at a Con a year(let me tell you about my bad zombie RPG games and the QAGS GM that didn't improv), but for the last two years at Origins, I've somehow skipped them.

Most of the sessions I raved about this year were not Organized Play,

I used to play a ton of Org Play at cons, and the big programs tend to have players that are less interested in RP and more interested in getting those sweet sweet XP, and the modules have tended to go that route because the ambitious Org Play modules tend to get swept aside by GMs to get the 'easy' ones that can be finished in a few hours (since they got the sweet, sweet XP for running too).

I know Lurking Fears and Everyday Heroes had a sheet to give feedback to GMs, which I appreciated.

Reynard said:

. If you charge for services, you agree to responsibilities on your end.

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Well (a) yes, I rest my case. The game wasn’t designed with the GM as a service provider. The GM is supposed to be a player too.

And (b) did the GM charge or did the convention? I don’t know, but I’ve never been paid to run a convention game. Sometimes conventions charge a nominal amount to discourage no-shows. I’ve certainly been sitting at an empty table at a convention with no players despite a fully booked table as many times as I’ve actually run a game.

Morrus said:

Just addressing a couple of the points--pregens and simple railroads are pretty common as convention one-shots

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It's not my first con experience or the only game I played this year.

Also, I spent a summer running one shots every Wednesday night at the local gaming shop, with an open table of up to 12 strangers every week - some of whom were driving in 90 miles to get a seat. I understand a little bit of how to run a game and I understand a little bit of the additional difficulties that come from running a game for strangers, and the sheer chaos of having large tables that don't know each other and hard time constraints.

I'm saying this goes well beyond the normal range of simple linear adventures with just 1-5 meaningful encounter areas.

Maybe it should be like Uber, where the GMs can rate the players, too.

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I have played games with players that deserve downvoting because they want to make the whole experience about them and literally rules lawyer and argue with the rules in events other people paid to be in. So sure, I'm down with that.

But I'm telling you, this was well beyond the normal range of convention experiences.

And again, I'm not saying this person is a bad GM or bad person for running games to a particular aesthetic, but I am saying I felt the victim of false advertising on the claim this was "7e Call of Cthulhu". Despite the character sheets, this wasn't even 1e CoC.