There’s a thread on the GMing Q&A Forum right now about social contracts in gaming groups, and it got me to thinking about roots.
Where you’re born and how you’re raised have a lot to do with how you view the world — and the same thing is true in gaming. Your early RPG experiences influence your thinking on RPGs in general, and they have an impact on your GMing.
That’s not revolutionary thinking — it’s pretty obvious, really. But it ties in with other elements of your formative gaming experiences in fascinating ways — including, of course, the assumptions you bring into your social contracts.
Let’s define an important term before we go any further: “social contract” (in the context of RPGs).
Social contract: Whenever you sit down with your gaming group, there’s a social contract at work. It’s not literally a piece of paper with “social contract” written across the top, of course — it’s the spoken and unspoken agreement about the game that everyone at the table has entered into.
For example: Agreeing that the players won’t split the party, and the GM won’t create adventures where they need to split the party, is a common element of many social contracts between gamers.
With that in mind, there are three important elements that make up any formative gaming experience:
- The RPG being played
- Your GM
- The other players
All three of those things play a role in shaping your impressions and understanding of, and assumptions about, roleplaying — and about your role as the GM. Those assumptions carry over to your social contracts, and thereby have a direct connection to the quality of your gaming — how much fun you have at every session.
Two of those elements are pretty hard to quantify, though: your first GM, and the other players. There’s just too much going on there to put it in a neat little box, despite how important they are (just look at the answers to this early TT post, How Did You Learn to GM?).
But the third element is easy to quantify: What were the first RPGs you ever played?
My first 3 RPGs were:
- Dungeons & Dragons (red box)
- Advanced Dungeons & Dragons (2nd Edition)
- Shadowrun (1st Edition)
Here are 3 assumptions that I carried with me for years, all based on my early experiences with GMing (and playing) those games:
- The GM is responsible for nearly everything.
- The rules are less important than having fun.
- RPG rules often need fixing.
These aren’t bad assumptions, but they tell you a lot about how I looked at RPGs when I first started GMing. And they still influence me now: I like tinkering with game rules, and that’s partly due to the fact that AD&D 2e’s rules were so clunky (as a kid, I thought it was Advanced because you had to figure out how to make it a better game).
I’ve got nearly 20 years of GMing between me and those early days, and all sorts of other games (and people) have influenced my thinking on RPGs, my GMing style and what should go into a social contract. The useful thing about looking back to the earliest games you played, though, is this: Everyone comes to the gaming table (and to GMing) with different assumptions, partly based on where they got their start as gamers.
Different assumptions = different expectations about the game, and different expectations lead to unsatisfying play — which is why social contracts are so important! In order put your cards on the table and come up with a good social contract, you need to know what your cards are first. This post is about identifying one set of those cards — the set that relates to your earliest gaming experiences — and it’s not hard to do.
So take a look back at the first few games you played, and see what you took away from them — the bad lessons as well as the good. You might learn some surprising things about why you GM the way that you do, or how certain elements of your GMing style came to be.
Hmmm…here are the things that I assume when starting a campaign:
1.) Thou shalt arrive on time. If you cannot, please notify the GM so that schedules can be adjusted accordingly. If you KNOW you cannot arrive to game, notify the GM IN ADVANCE.
2.) No drinking, no drugs. This will not be negotiated (especially the “No Drugs” part).
3.) Thou shalt be considerate of the other players and not be a total ass.
4.) Thou shalt be aware of the rules of the home you are in. People have graciously allowed their home to be open for you – show some appreciation for that. (I have done this by getting my hosts a nice art print, a new set of dice, helping with dinner, paying for snacks, etc. If you don’t have the finances, even a simple “Thank you” is enough.)
5.) Common sense is the ultimate rules lawyer.
6.) You are there to have fun. If you’re not, then you should consider discussing the issue with the GM or finding something different to do.
No matter what game I’ve played over the years, these were the tried & true ones.
Hmm, good thoughts… My roots were coming in from wargames. I started with Tactics II as a young lad. I distinctly remember fairly early starting to play with making my own map boards. I expanded into other Avalon Hill games, especially Africa Corps. Somewhere along the line, I started getting into miniatures. I started with Little Wars, and in junior high, discovered Donald Featherstone’s books in the library. My first TSR game was Tractics – I distinctly remember looking over both Tractics and D&D in the hobby store, and settling on Tractics because D&D seemed to be this paper and pencil thing without a board or miniatures. By this time, I had started tinkering with rules (I remember fiddling with sloped armor since Featherstone’s rules didn’t cover it – but all the military history I was reading suggested it’s importance).
I launched into RPGs when my best friend got the first D&D Basic set for his birthday (the one with the pale blue cover). The set included the dungeon geomorphs and monster & treasure assortment. Initially, I wasn’t interested in playing because still there was this paper and pencil bit and no visuals. Once they started to play, I saw the possibilities, especially of cooperative play (me and my friend often played with our 1/76 scale WW II models cooperatively, instead of playing a wargame against each other, we would fight side by side – though I don’t think we mixed our stuff much – it was more like each of us took a separate beach at Normandy).
That night, I stayed up all night absorbing the rules. And started tinkering before I ran my first game. Because the rules didn’t distinguish between weapons – they all did 1d6 damage.
I think my tinkering continued, in part because once I got home, I didn’t have the game (or dice, I played with some things to create a d20 using d6s). My horizons were expanded with my friend getting Chivalry and Sorcery for Christmas. By spring, I think I was starting to buy my own stuff.
My tinkering wasn’t because the rules were broken, but because they were too simple, or didn’t address my needs, or simply that I didn’t have the rules.
Then, when I got the AD&D Players Handbook, there was the issue of playing an incomplete game (Monster Manual, Players Handbook, and I think modules had started to come out, plus lots of Judges Guild stuff – but no Dungeon Master’s Guide, instead we had to resort to D&D).
Of course, in the early days, the game was much in transition. Even if all the original supplements to D&D were out when we started (I don’t think they all were), we bought them slowly. I was also always trying out new games. I ran a lot of Chivalry and Sorcery – in fact, I think that’s what I concentrated on until the PH came out. There was a major learning curve of just trying to figure out how to play the games. The original D&D is horrible. So was C&S. Rune Quest was a lot better.
So to boil it down:
* The GM is the arbiter of the rules – a referee
* The rules are in constant flux – still in development, and borrowing new ideas from new games is cool
* The rules should be fun, but exist for a reason, change them, don’t ignore them
* Cooperative play – the GM is not out to get the players, and the players shouldn’t be beating each other up
Very similar, but very different from Martin’s.
Frank
I would consider the “problem player” issue discussed in an earlier post to often be a social contract problem.
There are a number of unspoken assumptions that groups sometimes have. When a member is unaware of (or worse, in disagreement with) them, you will have problems. For example:
– It is a player’s responsibility to create a competent character to fulfill a given niche and to use that character’s skills to the benefit of the party.
If you consider that part of the social contract between the players, you’re going to have a hard time understanding the player who creates the fighter who refuses to use weapons and considers it his sacred duty to paint every sheep he sees purple.
Of course, that player thinks that the social contract is that it is every player’s duty to create a richly-developed unique character concept to provide and engage in roleplaying opportunities with the GM and other players. To him, it’s the other players who aren’t holding up their end of the bargain.
Here’s one that I (on the player side) have had problems with:
– It is the player’s responsibility to seek out and follow adventure hooks.
I have a dislike for the traditional “You hear a cry for help and altruistically leap into danger to rescue total strangers” adventure hooks. I’ve never quite understood the “The king wants you to go do a dangerous mission for him; in return, he’ll give you 5 gp and you can keep whatever treasure you find” hook. (Gee, thanks; if the looting of the witch-lord’s castle alone was worth the danger of going there, I think we would have done it already.)
If the GM thinks that the deal is that he presents a potential for adventure and the players follow it, and the response to a bar fight breaking out in the tavern he’s gathered us in is “It’s not my fight”, he’s going to feel that we’ve broken the agreement.
The answer, of course, is that all of the unspoken assumptions need to be spoken. If, for example, you think that characters should all be lean, mean fighting machines, or that they should be altruistic heroes ready to leap at the slightest chance of action or adventure, it helps to actually say that and make sure everyone is in agreement.
The problem, naturally, is that unspoken assumptions are unspoken because you’ve never considered that there were any other possibilities.
Sometimes players break the social contract because they’re trying to be difficult; more often, I would think the social contract is broken because the individuals didn’t know it existed, or because they thought they were signing a different one than you thought was in place.
Brian – absolutely. Actually, some of the social contract points you make should actually be part of game design. I’ve been thinking about these as I work on the introductory text and how to play text for Trollslayer/Cold Iron. The game will be up front about party play and combat focus. How the characters decide to go on an adventure is a little more open, but it’s easy enough for the GM to lay out the expectation: “If I present an adventure hook, that’s the adventure I’ve prepared. I expect you folks to go on the adventure. And if I’m missing the boat, you will tell me. And if the adventure just totally doesn’t appeal to you, we will play a board game that night.” or “I present a variety of hooks. I expect the players to jump on the ones that interest them, or to present an idea of their own. I am prepared to go with the flow, with the understanding that if you go in a direction I totally didn’t expect, things might be a tad slower this game session. If you let me know ahead of time what direction you want to go, I’ll prepare for that.”
Frank
Part of my social contract with my players is that I am NOT in competition with them. Its not my goal to slaughter them with creatures they have no hope of defeating. Although I try to keep 5% of all encounters to be almost impossible to beat, I’m more of a players advocate. There is no fun in slaughtering my players.
It’s really interesting to hear about everyone’s social contracts — sharp points all around!
# Arthur H. Johnson II Says:
There is no fun in slaughtering my players.
I wholehearedly agree. You’re the DM – you can ALWAYS win.
Slaughtering your players would likely raise a few eyebrows. So would slaughtering their characters, but that’d be a lot less likely to land you in prison. 😛
I generally agree with most points here and most of them are ‘written’ in my own game group ‘contract’.
But we do have the ‘No Drinking’ rule crossed out.
For me and the rest of my gaming group, our weekly D&D game is about getting together and have fun. Just like watching a football game, only you take much more participation in the action aspect.
We have a round or two of drinks during every session and so far, I havn’t noticed loss of fun. Of course everything must be done in the right amount, so no getting drunk during a session.