Chapter 4 - Part 1 - Update

Okay, now that the playbooks have been looked at, it's time to go through and work on the hardest chapter I have which is the whole "How on Earth do I play this?"

The first substantial change made is that I'm adding a whole quick section on some tips on how to play collaborative games. A lot of it is being aware of what's going on around you, and how vastly different it is playing vs a directed game. Here's an "unedited" section about Active and Passive states.

Passive vs Active States

Playing a game has its own flow, and when you get comfortable with a certain style of game you know what kind of ‘state’ you need to be in for certain situations. Is your character taking an action? You’ll be in one type of state. Are you listening in to the director talk to another character, or to provide some general information about the setting you’ll be in a different state. This is where there is a major difference between a collaborative game and a directed game, you’ll find that you spend a lot more time leaning more towards an active mode than a passive mode.

When I talk about states, I’m not talking as if it’s an all or nothing situation. It’s more of a spectrum and fully active is on one side and fully passive is on the other. Frequently you’ll find yourself somewhere between the two. Your character may not be immediately involved, but you know that their skills are going to be called on and you’ll find yourself in a more active state than if you were just listening to an NPC talk to another character in a space your character isn’t. Of course, the Director is usually in an Active State. She must pay attention to what’s going on so she can adapt the story to what the players are doing, as well as notice moments where missed story beats or new story beats could fit. If the Director is passive it leads to a bad game where the players are left wondering what’s going on, or what’s going to happen next.

The major difference between a collaborative and a directed game, is that for the game to succeed everyone at the table needs to be in a more Active State when playing the game. There isn’t a Director who is going to be in that constant Active State for you, which means you can take less time being passive at the table. You need to be aware of what’s going on and preparing to participate in what’s happening even if your character isn’t in the scene.

As a note, being Active is far more exhausting than being Passive. It’s why Directing is a challenging task, you must constantly be in that Active State unless the group is taking a break. Feel free to remember to take breaks, you’ll see in the structure of We Used To Be Friends that breaks are built into the framework of the scenes because it’s important to give yourself time to recover.

The next element that got added was how to facilitate the game. Something someone said stuck to me because they complained that you still have a GM in games that aren't supposed to have one because someone knows the rules better than other people. At first that irked me, because the ideal state is that everyone has a similar grasp of the rules and a similar interest in participating. Collaborative games thrive on that and become more entertaining the more people give. That said, this is a fantasy. There is never going to be a similar interest, a similar level of investment, and a similar level of knowledge for anything let alone an RPG. Directed games just hide it by requiring that uneven level of investment in the structure of the game (Note, this isn't a good or bad thing, it's just a thing). With that in mind, there shouldn't be a problem if someone is going to facilitate because the goal of the facilitator isn't to tell people what is happening in the story but to help empower them to get engaged more.

That's what's been added to the first part of this setion.