Jamison’s insistence that we choose our players carefully and not invite folk who don’t fit the culture of our gaming table was originally deeply jarring to me. It is, of course, eminently sensible in an ideal world but it also seems to ignore the realities of the real world.
The Gamemaster is the glue that holds the game together but the players are going to have the largest impact on the fun of the game. A GM should choose his players carefully.
Jamison, B (2011) “Gamemastering”, Rampant Platypus Press, page 15
After this, Jamison launches into presenting his own Player Typology, caveated with the insistence that, “exceptions abound”. He presents three areas to consider:
- Ideological Camps: Chaos and Balance (e.g. rebels or cops?)
- Style Camps: Acting and Action
- Rule Camps: Storytellers and Realists
Jamison then warns us away from the “Wargamer” (because they are competitive) and asks us to be upfront about the time commitments we expect for the game. In short, any player that doesn’t fit the majority of the group should be avoided.
This jarred with me back when I first read the book because, frankly, when playing face-to-face in my home group the reality was that excluding a player would make it very unlikely I would get a game. The idea of excluding friends was also uncomfortable.
Looking at it again now, I feel differently. I don’t think Jamison is saying, “only play with X type of player”; he is saying we should be aware of potential conflicts in ideology, style, and rule camps and avoid mixing opposites. If my players are (say) Action Camp then an Acting Camp player will enjoy the game less.
Of especial interest as I re-read the book is the size of the group Jamison recommends:
New Gamemasters should consider limiting the player group to two or three. The rule is: the more players the less fun for the players.
He also recommends pitching a game to novice players and seeking out new faces from a variety of locations, including non-gaming volunteer organisations. It’s curious to me that I have discounted this advice in the past as being too scary or improbable: do non-gamers really want to try an RPG?
As mentioned in the earlier post, once the players are gathered then the setting is pitched and discussed. Only once the whole group has clarity about the World and the potential character activities within it are the rules themselves chosen… by the GM.
It’s a good idea to get the buy-in of your players on the game system if they’re experienced roleplayers, but the GM should make the final decision on the game system. After all, the GM is going to be doing most of the work and the judging.
To round it all out, Jamison’s last piece of advice around setting up the group is to be prepared to change (or even axe stuff from) the chosen set of rules to better suit the tastes of the players. Just don’t forget to tell them of those changes.
All in all, I think Jamison is right about choosing the players and the World before you choose the rules. I think it’s vital to make sure a group of players are likely to gel and have similar desires from the game. I just find myself reading this advice through the lens of the MDA Theory of player engagement given how old the text is.
For my part, I recognise that I have a personal preference towards Balance, Action, and Realism. In fact, I am not sure I’ve ever really come across an Acting Camp player more than a couple of times in all my years of play. That is well balanced by the similar experience of feeling surrounded by Storyteller Camp folk as regards the rules.
Game on!
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I understand what Jamison is doing, but I’ve never had a person in a group that way far into one way or the other. I appreciate his encouraging our awareness of those traits though.
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Also, yeah, group size. I have found 3-4 is my optimal group size. My games in that range have been much better in every way.
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Crikey, yes, nobody should play with wargamers using Rules for Fantastic Medieval Wargames Campaigns Playable with Paper and Pencil and Miniature Figures or anything inspired by those Rules. Wargamers have cooties.
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Yeah, sarcasm aside, I did a whole episode recently stridently disagreeing with the point about Wargamers. Not least, my first reason is that I am a wargamer who also roleplays and can play in different styles for each. My second was that the original game (as you point out) is a wargame. 😉
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Sorry, I default to sarcasm when I see things I disagree with like that. I suppose it was necessary in the ’90s, when people were just starting to expand what could be done with the ideas behind these games, to distance themselves from the roots like that but that doesn’t mean I have to like it. You get it, clearly.
Anyway, all of this reminds me a bit of Robin’s Laws of Good Gamemastering, though I recall that latter book as trying to find a way to integrate all of the various gaming “types”, or “agendas” or whatever other term Laws used for them, into one gaming table, which strikes me as a more fruitful approach.
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Yeah, Robin’s Laws were the earliest well-known such attempt. Jamison’s only point of exclusion is on ‘Wargamers’ but his definition is clumsy and, well… I think he had bad experiences of competitive players. 😉
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Another interesting read Che, and I’m following all your other posts on Jamison’s book. But, I’m confused about these ‘camps’ categories and I don’t think I understand how they relate to each other. Like what is ‘action’ camp, and how is it opposed to ‘acting’ camp. I’m also unsure about what I have assumed the other ‘camps’ are. Like, is the ideology style whether players like to be heroes or villains; edge-lords or goodie-two-shoes? Is the ‘rules’ style a difference between light and crunchy rules or is it the difference between simulationist and narrativist? I too am confused by which lens I am looking at these terms through, but I fear that whatever lens I am using probably has an astigmatism!!? Cheers.
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Good questions… and I am hesitant to re-print Jamison’s descriptions of those typological categories in more detail because it’s a goodly chunk of his chapter on the topic of pulling a group together. Here are some short quotations:
“The Chaos-oriented player will tend towards a rebel, outcast, pirate, lawbreaker, or similar character while the Balance player will choose a cop, bounty hunter, secret agent, or soldier character.”
“When given the choice, some players prefer talking and others prefer fighting. I call these two sides Acting and Action.”
“Storytellers want the minimum rule-set possible and generally view rules as getting in the way of the story or action. Storytellers frequently come from an acting or creative background. Realists prefer a system with harder, sharper lines, the better to un-derstand and manipulate the game world. They prefer written rules that cover most or all actions.”
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Thanks for the reply Che. That has helped clear things up. As a gamer who likes to float between engagements and likes to sample ‘the full buffet’ of RPG’s, I can appreciate the categorisations of concepts in gaming to help aid discussion, but I dislike and I’m perplexed by the notion of ‘opposed’ categories. I mean I like ‘acting’ my character in first person but give me a choice of negotiation or conflict, then as a player I will probably choose ‘action’ over talking. I also like to play grey characters that sometimes are nice and sometimes are nasty!…and as I get older and my mental faculties decline I prefer simpler rules systems, but I loved runequest II, and if I still had the brain for it I would probably enjoy that too…perhaps what I’m trying to say…it seems to me that the whole business of breaking down our hobby into categories seems to go hand in hand with a tendency to try and pit gamers against each other and I wish we could do less of that and just try to find ways to accommodate each other and just…play !…thanks, man!
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Sure – typologies are by their nature about dividing into categories. This has some value but it also breaks apart the reality that humans are more complex than any category. Jamison states this, as I noted above in the blog. As for pitting gamers against one-another, that is not my intent and I don’t think it was his either. People are quite good enough at doing that themselves with little need of encouragement.
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