Hi,
Jane, a couple of your assumptions seem to be based on your experience as a PBEM GM.
- you suggest taking "butt-kickers" and "tacticians" out of the group. That's fine if who is in the group is determined by acting skill and interest in role playing. Who's in our group, on the other hand is determined by things like friendships dating back 20 years, etc. For me as a GM it is more a matter of knowing what my players want, and making sure they get enough of it to be happy, or at least not too unhappy, with the game than of compliance with any theoretical model of RP gaming. Also, for an F2F game. i'm not sure I could find 5 pure storytelling players, or 5 pure method actors, if I wanted to.
- GM's often have at least some butt-kicker or tactician in them. The other GM in my game used to be the WRG 6th ancients wargame champion in our city; both he and I used to play Empires in Arms and World In Flames It won't surprise you that he was better than I was. As a GM, he's basically a storytelling kind of guy. On the other hand, when our tactics are too bad, he lets us lose, because he can only lean so far in our favor before losing belief in the reality of his own game.
- the point of the healer example was not to argue that the problem is insoluble for healers, but to point up a simple version of the problem nearly everyone will have encountered. A game does not have to go very far into storytelling to face the "extended game balance" issue. In our game, the group is lunar and the healer is a Deezolan with some generally useful abilities as well. I run the healer. As you might guess, I'm also the talkative sort, so as player of a healer I am rarely totally marginalized. But I've seen it happen,
- by people who don't care how big their parts are, I'm referring to players whose interest in the game is not primarily storytelling. I've run into players who cared deeply about how strong their character is relative to other characters in the group, and whose character could kill the most monsters; who did not care whether or not they said a word about which city to go to next. They did care that the debate about what to do next not prevent them from having a fight that session.
In general, useful rules and useful RPG concepts need to address how to deal with a fairly wide variety of players. This means a wide varieties of styles, motivations,goals, role playing abilities, etc. To be honest, Jane, I don't think you need rules much. You recruit players who like your style; even if there are only ten of them in all Glorantha fandom they will probably find you; and you could probably get away with just rolling a D100, noticing that it looked like a fumble, and describing the character losing control of his sword, grabbing for it, and impaling himself on the sword of his startled enemy. So your games are fun, probably a lot of fun for your group(s). Not knocking them, but it is not clear how close the problems you face in GMing them are to the problems the rest of us face in GMing our gamse.
Ray,
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