Control...

(This is a slightly edited reply I put up to someone asking about "what I do" and why it is different from so many others. Enjoy!)

The biggest difference between everything I have seen is that I detach myself from emotional investment in the characters. I care only that my players act...I do not care what they do. I have tools at my disposal (including the skill of improvisation I have worked very very hard to develop) to generate content at will...and I have done the work to create a world around them full of beings.

See, I don't make adventures...my players, through their characters, seek them out...and the adventures are adventures because they delve into the unknown. The truly unknown. And they face the deadly. The truly deadly.

They do not have the parachute of an assumption that they are "protagonists"...because creating a fictional construct like that actually removes their heroic qualities. Heroes are not heroes because they are main characters...heroes are heroes because they overcome REAL ODDS in the challenges they face. They take real risks. When one separates themselves from their character like a figure in a fiction, you are robbing the player of real accomplishment because you have stacked the deck in favor of the character...and because it is not the PLAYER achieving these things, it is only the character because, again, you have already assumed they will excel.

That is a real danger. People play roleplaying games to accomplish meaningful things in an environment where risk exists...studies have supported this time and time again. Agency is what matters to players...they want their decisions to matter in the context in which they are made. Undermining that is very damaging to the core of play and it is insidious to boot...it can be so hard to notice.

The biggest difference between you and I, I suspect, is that I have done the work (either currently or in the past) to support my players doing as they please WITHOUT having to rely on them to content-generate. I do not need to use collaboration as a clutch to lessen my work-load because, for me, that work-load is minimal because of the skills I have developed...skills I'd never need (and therefore not really develop) by relying on aforementioned crutch. By doing that, it lets the players play only their characters and this lets them actually achieve against the unknown. They risk in real terms and they do so without the assumption that they are heroes in some meta-sense. That concept robs them of their heroic nature. Being heroic requires struggle...and struggle requires uncertainty. That uncertainty, if it is to be meaningful beyond pleasant stories, is required to be felt BY THE PLAYER not just by the character.

Foremost though, this all requires a DM that is able to relinquish a large amount of control. The funny part is, "partial collaboration" tells me that DMs using that style probably aren't actually prepared to relinquish control. After all, partial collaboration still gives the DM more narrative input than I myself have at the table. When I DM I do not suggest things to the players and anything that pops up does so with the understanding (as I have made plain to my players) that it "is what it is"...I give up all my control to the players to do as they please. I do not ask them for buy-in because I have nothing to sell them...THEY are selling me on THEIR actions...and I am buying anything they're selling.

This is terrifying to many DMs because it relegates the DM to mere video game console...you render the graphics and process the data. And boy is that a scary notion. Having to get the hell out of the way and let players do what they want without your say-so is absolutely horrifying to many because...well surely it will be anarchy! You won't know what to do! You'll screw up! Lose track! Be bad!

It's that fear that keeps people in the little DM paradigm-box...or makes people flee it and warp it into a different form of control...which, believe me, partial collaboration is. It is a different form of control where the control is consented to but, as I said, the DM still has more control than I do at my table. So, all people can do, is assume a bad DM under my style...because, of course, if I don't want them to do something I will just make it unnecessarily hard or improbable...or make it impossible all-together by some means. This is always what they resort to claiming...they have to assume a bad DM because it is the only way they can see control in my style...and they have a deep, visceral need to feel that control...because it is what they would seek if they were in my position. So they look for an "out" to make it inevitable that bad things would happen and control would re-assert itself in the form of a DM behind the scenes. It is all they know. The alternative is...frankly, scary to them.

The same can be said for players. Players are so used to working along the old garbage paradigm of "Go here, do this/follow plot, get reward" that they've come to defend it...it is all they know. They claim to "like" it but, of course, "like" is a spectrum starting at "barely tolerate out of lack of options" all the way up to "orgasmic delight"...yet the hobby dwindles constantly. If so many  people like the paradigm, why is it such a hard sell? Why is it losing out to MORE RESTRICTIVE mediums? The answer is, of course, because those tables are just as restrictive but it is felt even more pointedly because you are supposed to be able to do anything. Imagine that. ANYTHING. When that illusion is shattered (as it is in countless groups) it is very hard to get back. Even now, as I stated, I have veterans at my tables just barely starting to grasp that they, through their characters, really can shoot for the moon...that their destiny really is in their hands...and that they will succeed or fail, not because I want them to or because they are main characters, but because they succeeded or failed.

Terrifying notion. Absolutely paralyzing in some situations.

After all, these are people used to "go here, do that"...now it is "what do you do?"...and that infinite choice potential can be horrifying...especially initially when they think it is a trap and they are still working under an illusion of "wrong & right" choices based on what the DM has prepared.

The "what do you do?" however is not asked to characters via their players...but to the players via their characters. The characters have a big wide world in front of them rife with adventure and danger...and the risks and rewards are real to them....just as they are to the players because the construct is not one that is standing on quicksand. They cannot change the reality of it at will...they cannot enforce their player-will on it EXCEPT through their avatars. Again...that can be scary. Even more so when one assumes an emotionally invested DM.

Right now in one game the players are working to convert a bunch of orcs to their side after chatting up an orc-shaman prisoner...in an effort to form a small army and re-take a captured, deserted town. And why are they doing this? Because I set it up? Hell no. They are doing it because it is what their characters want to do...and they are not doing that based on desires as a player that we made manifest in the game...no, it is based on them roleplaying within the construct. They do not know if they will succeed. All they know is that it is possible...and it is possible because it is possible and either the dice or their own cleverness has made it so.

It's a slight difference between "can do anything" and "could do anything"...and that "could" makes all the difference. It is the uncertainty of the hero and of adventure. It is the benefit of making decisions constantly as a character in a world of fantasy rather than as a guy at a table that got out of his 9-5 to play a game...the former can have meaning to it and the latter is just a diversion. I will always take the former. There are those, however, that will argue so heavily that it is "just a game"...and sadly, they're right...for themselves..because it will never be more with that attitude. Their players will wander away and interest will dry up...stories will be about funny events or what someone thought up...not about legitimate personal investment and emotion. The pain of loss, for instance, is only pain when it is actual loss...

Hell, ever get a party emotional over the death of two orc NPCs? And the emotion was because it was how things went...it was life...not something I decided...or that they decided. It was all the unexpected highs & lows of life...because that is what the game should reflect at it's best.

Like I said though, that can be really scary...but we're supposed to be sitting down to be heroic, right? So what's a little scare...?