One thing I’ve been thinking about, re: last reblog is where conflict is designed to come from, how that relates to GM load, and how dnd’s dominance turns people off related to these things:
DnD, especially 5e, but in general, expects conflict to come from outside the party. There are very few mechanical incentives to create characters that have depth and conflict within them, there are no mechanical levers to pull on to create conflict between PC’s (to the level that pvp feels a bit like a taboo), and only a handful of the classes have existing hooks into the world. Bonds, principles and backstories are mechanically meaningless beyond character creation, and essentially only exist to say ‘you should think about this, maybe’
This means that conflict, by and large, is mechanically supposed to be entirely GM generated. Without a mystery to solve, a place to defend, a monster to kill, there is little incentive for your average DnD party to do anything. This means that there an incredible amount of GM load, as every GM essentially has to either luck out with curious, involved players or be forced to dangle challenges in front of them to get them to do anything mechanical at all. As for support for this style of play, despite there being arguably the most possible amount of information about how to run DnD 5e out there, people consistently struggle bc of the system’s inherent lack of mechanical hooks to get the PC’s into a groove.
IMO, this is why there is an entire cottage industry built around how to create interesting (dnd) characters. The same for the endless guides for DM prep. Expecting all conflict to come from GM created challenges is a really fucking hard style of ttrpg to pull off well, especially in a game that doesnt really offer the GM many EASY ways to create that conflict beyond ‘here is bad boy, kill him take his stuff’. Of course people get bored of that, so you have an endless tension between people who get bored of that and then do all RP sessions where mechanics don’t matter, and presumably the GM who is trying to figure out how get them to the next thing to kill. You are expected to be tracking how the entire world is moving around your characters, with no real systems to help you figure out what’s happening behind the scenes, beyond the vast library of meta text that is people doing apologia on an unfriendly system.
To contrast this with a simply way better game, Girl Frame has conflict baked into every level of the game design. Every playbook has intrinsic tension, every mechanic layers contradictory goals over every character, Handler included. Sometimes the tension is as simple as I must eat people and informational objectives, to not go berserk, and obviously nobody, myself included wants me to eat people. Sometimes the tension is you are limited by your programming but you can get fucked so hard you can actively change your programs. Everything has a built in trajectory, has tension and conflict from the ground up.
This means that even though there is still expected to be conflict introduced by the Handler, the base system can be assumed to generate interesting characters and scenes even without the Handler’s involvement, which frees them up to simply add complications and push as necessary, rather than bargain and beg and cajole the players into doing literally anything to interact with the conflicts of the world.
This, along with ROBUST behind the scenes systems, push and pull the handler character and player with contradictory and hard to manage systems. You need you players to be an obedient, effective military unit, and every system all but grantees they will be dysfunctional, backstabbing, scared, and overwhelmed. You need to hurt them in specific ways to be able to progress and make ALL of your lives easier with advancements. It’s so rich and means that you as the person who wants to ‘run’ Girl Frame have maybe 15-30 minutes of prep MAYBE.
This is not to say that systems that expect conflict to come from the GM are always unwieldy and unpleasant. The Orpheus Protocol also operates from the expectation that your GM will present most of the threats and mysteries, but it has a pretty huge mechanical incentive to roleplay: namely, every roll requires you to spend from limited, not easily refreshed pools of resources. If a player can avoid rolling dice by being in the flow of roleplaying longer, they will have more to work with once the shit hits the fan. It’s also a horror game, built and specifically crafted to make you feel like every time you try something, you’re losing resources that could have been saved for later, that maybe could even save your life.
That said, the prep work for it is still intense. It still requires a GM have command of its myriad systems and be able to present interesting threats through largely improved description. It has a couple pre fab monsters in the book, a couple starter adventures, but IMO there could be more done to reduce GM. It is still one of my favorite systems and actual plays out there.
TLDR: the more a system generates conflict from as many angles as possible, the less work we have to ask the gm to do, and I think that’s wonderful.
