The “letting go” part is mostly efforts to be opened to subtle suggestions from the players.

Like riding the giant eagle over the volcano and dropping the ring from on high…

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With a clear climax, you don’t have an aimless bumbling-about campaign, but leaving all the details and implications open, you give the players some narrative opportunity.

I hope it works for me!

We had our own world which was a collective effort from the ground up. We were also very respectful of each other’s ideas – even when throwing curveballs at one another.

One unspoken rule we had is that a GM can use as many sessions as he wanted before relinquishing control to the next GM.

We also split the campaign in various GM-specific subplots.

I don’t think I remember another GM actually using my most notable NPCs. I remember using the other GMs and I remember them correcting me if I was playing them out of character.

Another thing that helped is that we had different areas of interrest. I loved character building, another GM loved building rules, etc.

Your sharing narrative experience with your player is interesting… so your player ended up being GM by proxy, then!

It probably would have been simpler if he had been the GM and you supported him with the rules/world stuff he wasn’t comfortable with.

@ChattyDM:
Most good DMs I’ve played with were rather good at improv. I get your point, though: improv is not everyone’s cup of tea.

Not sure 100% improv all the time would make for good campaigns either…

@Psygnnosed:
Wow! That’s must’ve been a great session! Feels kind of one of those ‘murder mystery’ party rpg

I love that idea!

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I believe I have an interesting experience to share with you about sharing the narrative. At a certain point in “my” campaign the players arrived at a city which had been experiencing some confrontations between treants and the people of the city. It started with some fights between the treants and some woodcuters, but an “evildoer” from the city captured a sort of “sacred shrubbery”, and the confrontations were rising in intensity. War was about to start…

When the group arrived at the city, there were only some rumours about this. I stopped the narrative and said that a gathering of the City Council was taking place. I assigend each one them the role of one councilor, and passed a note to each one saying who the councilor was, and what was its position towards the whole matter.
Some wanted to keep the peace at all costs, while others thought it more wise to attack the treants before they had time to make a full attack on the city walls, thus endangering the citizens.
We roleplayed the entire Council Meeting. It was a very interesting experience, and in the end “the Council” decided for a diplomatic approach.
So, not only did I allow the group to decide if there was going to be a war or not, but also the diplomatic solution they came up with allowed for a new plot hook later developed.

I’s advise you to give it a try.

As for the improv skills; I also agree, not everyone likes improvising or is as good at it as they’d want. To me, a GM must be able to improvise a little bit every once in a while, or else the campaign would be kind of static.
But that’s my view, everyone should play the game as they like it. That’s why its a game

When you let go of your defined scenes and resolutions and open up to the possibility of players having a deep impact on where the story can go the GM has to develop the necessary skills and the associated comfort level of pulling it off.

This is no easy task for many.

I must say though that having a core game with multiple GMs is one hell of a way of sharing!

We did try the following experiment. I took one player aside, provided him with a plan to a rather large dungeon and a list of minions, and let him play the dungeon’s big bad villain. Really, the only thing I did as a DM was roll the dice for minions and direct their battles, as the other player kept handing me notes on how he positioned his troops, what traps he set, and other actions, like calling in reinforcements from his portal to some evil plane.

The great thing about this was that I shared narrative control to the extent that I almost fully let go of it, and players wrought their own story. The bad thing is that, by letting go of control, I lost the ability to improvise. I couldn’t alter anything during the game, unless I consulted the player playing the villain first. After all, it would be unfair to have his minions suddenly become less strong, simply because the players couldn’t handle them. Or have a secret door with something special behind it suddenly appeat, because one player suggested the possibility and I thought it would be cool. At the end, during the great battle between villain and PC’s, they nearly got into a real fight and there was way too much rules advocating going on, which is not unusual when you pit players against each other.
It was a fun experiment, but it didn’t work out as I had planned.

I made some suggestions on your website on how I try to get players involved. But the start would certainly be the having vocal and storytelling players. I think you really need to stimulate the players in motivating their decisions and discussing with each other, so you can pick up on their expectations and dynamics, as well as pick out the cool ideas and use them, if not today, then tomorrow.

It’s true there always is some sharing if you allow your players to play

Most GMs (maybe I’ll get used to that?) I’ve ever played with are either storytellers or rules freaks (me included). So its usually following a tight script, with very few options to branch the storyline. There are options and branching… but we always went from point “A” to point “B”.

The only time I played where this wasn’t true is when my other players were GMs as well and we were taking turns about every session as the GM. I could start a session at point “A” and aim the players to point “B”. GM #2 didn’t really know about point “B”, so when he took over, he brought us to point “C”.

I’d love to find a way to do this without necessarily swap GMs every session… and to preserve the surprise of “what’ll happen next” for the players.

I guess you need vocal and storytelling players to achieve that?

Eric Maziades last blog post..DM vs Player

To me, the question I really need to ask myself is not “whether or not I share narrative control” but “to what degree do I share it”. When you look at it theoretically, every time a GM (what the kids call ‘m today) allows a player to describe her actions, he shares control.

But where do you stop… I, and I’m guessing I’m not alone, have a lot of difficulties with letting go of the “scripted movie”-concept of the campaign. Nowadays, I try to make the first few sessions of every new campaign free-flow. I offer players some adventure hooks, they pick what they like and we go from there. It is difficult for control freaks. And I think control freaks (to a certain extent) are much more likely to pursue the GM-role in RPG’s.

But again, nice article, very discussion-stimulating!

Eric Maziades last blog post..DM vs Player

So in that sense they are intrinsically related.

I’m especially more glad that it looks like it makes sense to at least one person outside of my head.

What you’re doing with your children sounds like a pretty good “letting go of narrative control” exercise.

I think this kind of DMing is closer to improv than it is to storytelling.

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Sharing narrative control is the one set of DMIng skills I want to develop more in the coming year. I feel that if I become able to “let go” more easily, the games will be more enjoyable for all.

I’ll get there, I know!

Thanks for writing this Eric.