Lawful GM

A few days ago, I ran a King Arthur Pendragon session with 12 players that was high political drama. Everyone was a lord or lady, each with their own agenda. They spent four hours negotiating, plotting, and executing machinations against one another. It was far closer to a LARP than a tabletop session and it went quite well.

In a previous session, a group of PC nobles killed their liege and her family to take over a county. This required killing off a few PCs as well. High drama all driven by the players, I basically sat back and let them do their thing. In our last session there were more PCs added and I set up three factions in the county, each hostile to the others. The stage was set! Then it went differently than expected, and afterwards several players said it was one of my best sessions ever.

The last part was a little depressing. During the session I didn't do much of anything except answer questions and run a few NPCs in the background. Here was my best session ever, at least to some, and I wasn't doing much of anything as a GM. I wasn't creating dynamic scenes, weaving eloquent flavor text or roleplaying brilliantly, I was mostly quiet and out of sight. That's the secret - players want to roleplay and be in control, when you give them that it has more appeal than whatever tricks, voices, and scenes you can conjure up. The Lawful GM has to be able to do both, yet there's a lot to be said for setting up a good scenario and then stepping back.

So what specifically worked? That's a nice question. Far better than why did my adventure crash, burn, and then explode? Both are good questions for GMs to ask themselves, though it is a lot more fun to answer positive ones. Though in this case, it seems me shutting up and becoming almost invisible was a major reason for the session's success. I can accept that, a win is a win. Good GMs in my opinion need to work their magic with as little ego as possible. So says the man who writes columns about GMing.

Anyway, beyond me disappearing there are several reasons the scenario worked, and they are why I structured it as I did.

First, I turned over control of the session to the players. They had power and could use it. When doing any type of law and politics scenario you need to do this to some degree. You have to have faith in your players or more accurately accept that the fate of the scenario should rest in their hands not yours. I stepped back and let them decide how things would turn out. It was interesting for me and empowering for them.

Second, they had the opportunity to shape the session's outcome with roleplaying instead of dice rolls and they took advantage of this opportunity. The county was on the verge of civil war, where there would be winners and losers. Why risk an outcome to random dice rolls when you could win, in a fashion, by making a deal instead? That's a fantastic dynamic and produced a tremendous amount of drama purely from roleplaying. Yeah, there were some dice rolls and all that, but the major outcomes of the adventure were determined by roleplaying, specifically negotiations. Third, the scenario was set up for drama. I laid the ground work for three factions who each had good reasons to not work with one another. In the end, two of the factions united and brokered a truce with the third faction. This was unexpected but it worked and felt very organic. The essence of everyone's strategy was to make a deal to buy time in the hope that next year they would be in a stronger position. Everyone accomplished that with very little put at risk, yet there was still plenty of tension on their way there.

Here is a piece of advice: if you surrender control to your players the results will be better. GMs are often too regimented and scripted in their approach. If you can be freer and looser, giving and taking with your players the outcomes of scenarios will be more interesting for everyone. This is key with politics - you have to let the PCs have the keys to the kingdom or barony or ... a small rundown hamlet, whatever fits for the campaign you are running.

Fourth, I had other players running key NPCs. This is an invaluable technique.

Consider the classic courtroom scene, the PCs have been brought to trial for some reason. Everyone says their spiel, most might try just making dice rolls, and then the GM makes a decision, perhaps based on another dice roll. Imagine instead you talk someone else to roleplay the judge, perhaps your roommate, and announce that no dice rolls but role-playing will determine the outcome. This is drama and you turn a potentially boring scenario into something surprising and more exciting.

In our Pendragon session I had players who didn't have PCs and a few who did who all ran some NPCs. Those with PCs did fantastic in keeping character knowledge and all that separate, because if your treat your players like adults then they will be adults.

Another advantage to this technique is that you are further removing yourself from making key decisions about the setting. There's nothing stopping you from asking friends from the RPGNet forums to serve as perhaps the kings of neighboring kingdoms. Give them some information, frame their characters, and then ask them how will they respond to the last adventure where the PCs 'accidentally' opened a hell gate on the border of their kingdom. You are going to get real responses that are different from what you might have decided. This is great and will add a dimension to the campaign that will make it richer. It will also be all kinds of fun to your friends from the forums or wherever you recruit them from.

Fifth, and this recaps previous points, I let the setting evolve in response to the actions of the PCs. I just stepped back and let them have control. Then, and this is key, followed through by changing the setting in response to their decisions.

That's enough for this installment, hopefully, it has given you something to think about.