I Want to Go Home (Part 2)
Started at Caribou Coffee in White Bear Lake, Minnesota. Finished at Home, Woodbury, Minnesota.
Some Gamemasters are really good at running games freestyle. These parkour GMs free-run through the collective consciousness of the gaming group, reacting to Player actions and re-directs like so many obstacles among the ruins, without any visible display of sweat, stress or pain. I admire them – even envy them; they can be really fun to game with as long as you are okay with episodic, Player-driven storytelling where campaign continuity and consistency take a back seat to expediency and The Moment. They flow. It is not that you can’t have consistency and continuity with a free-running GM; it is just not a natural fit for that style1. You see, the problem with a Player-driven storytelling approach is: what does everyone else do while the Player driving the story, drives the story?
[1] Except, of course, in *your* game, dear Reader. Truly. There are some great free-runner GMs who are also gifted story-tellers who are able to weave exceptional stories from one Player-provided thread after another. I would be surprised if they are anything but rare, very experienced GMs with a wealth of background material at the ready. In other words, these GMs have already done the hard work, already know their world and the characters in it and are able to weave fantastic stories because they are starting with whole cloth and not single threads of varying colors, textures and strengths. ↩
