>>5887990>CONSENT>SAY YES or ROLLextract from Dogs In The Vineyard, Mormon / western lawgiver rpg by Vincent Baker:
How To GM
Play The Town
You made a town, right, you’ve got some NPCs, and each and every one of them wants something from the PCs. Right? So play them!
Don’t play the PCs. Present the PCs with choices— by which I mean,
have your NPCs come to them and ask them to do things, fix things, take
care of things, make it right, make it better, tell them it’s not their fault, tell them they’re in the right, tell them not to worry— then back waaay off.
“Sister Abigail comes to you and asks you to marry her to her lover, Brother
Ezekiel. Yes, they’ve been having an illicit affair and he’s already married.
What do you do?”
Provoke the players to have their characters take action, then: react!
Whatever the PCs do, your NPCs have to adjust to it. Figure out what they want now— it should be easy, they want what they always wanted— and have ’em work toward it.
Don’t play “the story.” The choices you present to the PCs have to be real choices, which means that you can’t possibly know already which way they’ll choose. You can’t have plot points in mind beforehand, things like “gotta get the PCs up to that old cabin so they can witness Brother Ezekiel murdering Sister Abigail...” No. What if the PCs reconcile Brother Ezekiel and Sister Abigail? You’ve wasted your time. Worse, what if, because you’ve invested your time, you don’t let the PCs reconcile them?
You’ve robbed the players of the game.
You can’t have a hero and a villain among your NPCs. It’s the PCs’
choices that make them so. The PCs are empowered to turn sin into goodness sake doctrine if they think it’s the right thing to do. How are you gonna decide up front who comes out on top?
All I’m saying is, the PCs’ stories aren’t yours to write and they aren’t
yours to plan. If you’ve GMed many other roleplaying games, this’ll be the hardest part of all: let go of “what’s going to happen”. Play the town. Play your NPCs. Leave “what’s going to happen” to what happens.
How, though? Here’s how:
Drive Play Toward Conflict
Every moment of play, roll dice or say yes.
If nothing’s at stake, say yes to the players, whatever they’re doing. Just plain go along with them. If they ask for information, give it to them. If they have their characters go somewhere, they’re there. If they want it, it’s theirs.
Sooner or later— sooner, because your town’s pregnant with crisis—
they’ll have their characters do something that someone else won’t like.
Actively Reveal The Town In Play
The town you’ve made has secrets. It has, quite likely, terrible secrets—
blood and sex and murder and damnation.
But you the GM, you don’t have secrets at all. Instead, you have cool
things— bloody, sexy, murderous, damned cool things— that you can’t wait to share.
