Campaign Style Analysis

         This is a discussion of the style behind my 'Worlds in Collision' campaign. I would like to avoid using any sort of jargon, but instead talk in plain English about my thought processes, intentions, and reactions as GM. The campaign was run in early 1989, during my sophmore year in college at U of Chicago. The campaign was on the extreme side in a particular style of GM-ing, where I as GM designed lots of background and then gave the PCs pretty free reign to do whatever they liked in it. The players were pro-active in seeking out and confronting parts of the background which they were interested in.

• Conception
  How I came up with and prepared for the campaign.
• Player Characters
  The PCs that were created and how they fit in.
• Game Play
  Overview of how the campaign went.

Original Discussion

The following are some excerpts from discussion about the Worlds-In-Collision campaign which I have done in two forums, rec.games.frp.advocacy (early on) and much later in The Forge. Much of the text of these were excerpted for my analysis above -- but of interest might be the reactions of two of the players. The discussions particularly emphasize how the players controlled the plot, and what their feeling was about this.

• Re: Simulationist Theory (March 21, 1996)
  This was my first post on rgfa describing the Worlds-In-Collision game (aka "Modern Paranormals") in detail.
• Re: Simulationist Theory (March 22, 1996)
  This was a reply by Craig Neumeier, one of the players in the campaign -- expressing his view of how the campaign worked.
• Re: Genre and Believability (November 6, 1996)
  This was a later discussion of the game on rgfa, as part of a dicussion of the place of genre in game play.
• Plotless but Background-based Games (April 22, 2003)
  This was a thread on the Forge where I described in more general terms the types of techniques which I would use for my more rgfa-Simulationist campaigns. Of particular note is the reaction of Chris Lehrich, who was another player in the campaign.
• Oh. That game. (April 23, 2003)
  This was Chris' reply on the thread when he realized which game I was talking about. He was quite surprised, as he saw the game as almost railroaded, when in fact I was completely following what the players did.
• Really!?! That's fascinating. (April 23, 2003)
  This was my response back to Chris, which answered as best I could his questions about how I made the plot seem inevitable when it was completely improvised in reaction to the players.