Joshua's GMing Style
===
Aka, how you can know beforehand whether you'll enjoy being at my table.

### don't roll dice if you can't accept outcomes

Before rolling dice as a player, I expect you to outline what will happen if you fail or succeed at a roll. Saying something like "I roll to convince the guard" is not ok. Saying "I attempt to intimidate the guard by screaming loudly. If I fail, he thinks I'm insane" is much better, and I can either accept that outcome or raise the stakes depending on how I see fit.

As a DM, if I am rolling dice as a character or effect (such as with an enemy or rolling for environmental damage), I will always roll dice in the open and will never fudge. If you die you die. When rolling for content (such as an NPC's disposition or a loot pile) I will roll in secret and fudge results if I feel it helps the story.

### Environmental Control rests with the GM (mostly), story is in the hands of the players

I will occasionally open up aspects of the world to the players to decide, such as in Dungeon World, but it will be uncommon and typically not game-changing. I will often offer intrusions, which are sucky situtations for you that reward you with inspiration.

There are several common paradigms of roleplaying (John Kim's ["Story and Narrative Paradigms in Role-Playing Games"](http://darkshire.net/jhkim/rpg/theory/narrative/paradigms.html) offers a good summary). I strongly lean towards the virtual experience paradigm, sometimes also called "trad" RPGs.

TLDR: you are primarily intended to play from the sole viewpoint of one or more characters. Occasional opportunities to influence the game world will appear, but will be limited by metacurrency.

### Players should play their characters to the best of their skill, but are limited to their character's abilities

You are expected to play to the best of your abilities as a player. Just because you're playing a half-wit half-orc doesn't mean you don't know how to use a rope and a ten foot pole to disable a trap.

I encourage players to try to better understand a situation to gain advantage on a check. I don't consider it weaselly to try to get advantage unless you are arguing with me over a single point.

Players are still only able to perform actions to the best of their character's abilties however. If there's a chance for failure, a roll will still be needed, though player actions can bias the roll.

- Story types and Types of Fun

I run lots of mystery campaigns and expect you to do most of the investigation work yourself. I will allow you to miss clues (unike Gumshoe or other systems). To balance this, I always have multiple paths to the end, which of course can result in the frustrating experience of discovering two clues that point to the same conclusion. Overall I find this expereince more rewarding though than other play types.

I expect players to use real world techniques and skills to investigate mysteries. Questioning suspects, staking out locations, and inference from existing clues are all expected from the players (see combat as war for the combat theory equivalent).

#### Combat is war, not sport

#### Player agency is paramount, dramatic story curve is least important
There is a well known problem in RPG design that a game cannot have player agency, player challenge, immersion, and a dramatic pacing curve all in the same game (by dramatic pacing curve I mean a traditional story, along the lines of the hero's journey with large setbacks before an epic climax). See [this reddit post]( https://old.reddit.com/r/RPGdesign/comments/fx4evj/cursed_problems_in_game_design/fmsgwid/) for a further explanation of why.

In response to this, GM's should be transparent about the tradeoffs their game makes. I play RPGs solely for enabling player agency. I don't want to know what is going to happen beforehand, and to enable that, I rely heavily on random tables, strong NPC motivations, and nebulous story structure. I never prep scenes, only situations (see The Alexandrian's [Don't prep plots, prep situations](https://thealexandrian.net/wordpress/4147/roleplaying-games/dont-prep-plots) for an explanation of what this looks like). Accordingly, it rarely means my RPGs are publishable, since people seem to want strong sense of plot and story beats.

I will try to build this sense of plot as best I can, but never at the expense of player agency. Players are always enabled to do whatever their characters can, given the limitations that:
1) players won't do thing that make other players (or me!) uncomfortable
2) players accept that if they go way outside the suggestions for play, the world will get thinner and thinner, given that I have to improv it. ("The dragon's hoard is to the north. 'We go south!'. ...There's a small mining village there, filled with stereotypical dwarves greedily pursuing gold.")