If there's one phrase the will immediately turn me off from a game it's "you can be anything." It's not that a game may not offer tools to gesture towards that freedom. It's that in attempting to offer such a broad range of stories, you wind up offering less specific options, and everything feels flat.
My favorite game for specificity is SPIRE. There's no fighter, rogue, or mage here- every class is tied to the fiction and deeply strange. They all feel like characters who could only exist in this world. More than that, the game informs you that you are all drow, you all belong to revolutionary group, and then goes into detail on what both those facts mean in this world.
This has led to my disinterest in a lot of FitD games where the playbooks are simply Cutter, Hound, Whisper, etc but the names have been changed- its the same burger but in a different wrapper. This isn't to disparage Blades, I think those playbooks do suit Duskvol's setting, and it was setting up a whole new system. But then you can open up a new book with its own setting to find your options for making a character in that world the same.
When it comes to Heroes by Hearthlight, I wanted to adapt the classes from D&D as a joke before growing to care too much about the project and make it something real. If I was making that game as its own thing, divorced from its heritage, I probably wouldn't have made twice the number of playbooks. Instead, my time would have been better spent focusing in on making a smaller group of specific playbooks.
Something I've talked about with friends is that one of the functions of the rules is to say NO to players without making the GM into the badguy. We have been taught to keep saying "yes and/but/etc" to players, even if it is contrary to the goals of the story we are wanting to tell. Which is the issue with a game about "anything" you can't say the game is about something specific, or if it is then its something of the GM's design and they will then have to enforce the hard lines they create. But having a game provide the prompt, the call to adventure, for the party means that everyone is on the same page and is aware of the constraints being placed. (There is a very funny aside I could lead into here about mutual consent and restraints. But I don't want to lose my train of thought- feel free to be impressed by my maturity in this situation.) Personally, I love a good prompt. Tell a group of four different players they are drow insurrectionists and they will each come back with a different character with a shared goal, but with different motives and means to attain that goal. Not only that but those means and motives can put you into conflict, coalition building is fucking exhausting. My point being that there is so much room to roam, to discover character, to be completely unique from your fellows, while still having your playspace reduced from "you can do anything".
To finish this off I wanna go through the W's and throw out some examples about how these can be answered for the players to provide specificity and structure.
Who: This might seem like a sacred cow, obviously a player should get to decide who they play. But pre-made characters are actually one of my favorite things a game can provide. Recently I ran a really excellent session of EAT THE REICH which gives some amazing premade vampires to kill nazis with. This is the tradition of theatre in me but I don't always need to be the actor and writer as a player. Particularly because if you let yourself try this then you can play characters you normally never would and can have conversations later about how you played it different from someone else. Something I constantly threaten/tease/taunt my players with is the idea that one day I'll have them make characters they think are interesting and then have them all pass their sheets to the left.
What: Motivation, goal. I think this is one of the reason why things like Paizo's adventure paths are so popular, because you are being provided a story and everyone knows what they are signing up for. There was an evil campaign I played once that made us sign the social contract that we wouldn't backstab each other until the final act and to make characters who would say yes to a particular story choice that kicked things off. I've known some people who can find this chaffing but being upfront about what is expected will keep things from breaking down later. Again, Spire is a great example here where it makes it clear you will be doing revolutionary violence and won't be thanked by the populace for it. I think setting a clear goal/direction for the group is the constraint most players agree to the most often, i.e. you are accepting to take part in this story. But I think a lot of tables could do better by setting even firmer guidelines in place about what is and isn't going to work for this adventure in order to make things feel correct in setting and tone.
Where & When: Questions of setting. Nowadays, most of the games I play in focus on collaborative storytelling. I personally felt my mind expand when I first listened to Friends at the Table and Austin asked "What is an elf?" and realized they were just going to let a player paint that into the world. Leaving blank spaces for players to fill in as they play is one of the core tenets to my philosophy of play- but that doesn't mean you need to leave everything blank or that you can't veto a player's suggestion. Again, this feels fucking harsh because we are playing with friends- we don't wanna say no or harsh the vibe of the table. If something doesn't work in the setting because it's too anachronistic, i.e. "one of your players is trying to introduce socialism into your feudal setting AGAIN" or just doesn't fit what is being built- send it back. Most of the times this can be a situation where you can workshop that idea to better fit, but sometimes it is alright to say "I like that idea, but I don't think it works for this world/story. Can we hold onto it for something down the line?" Don't be an asshole. Don't demean your player. But be firm. In the same way you the GM has the power to say no you can't do that action, it won't be effective, you also need to arbitrate what does and doesn't fit. This is the social power your friends have granted you by letting you be the GM and you have to use it even when it seems like a harsh thing to do, because that's your role. It's what the table entrusted you to do... you are the one who plays the bad guy.
Finally, we've got two questions that I think should not be touched by others. These are the players' specific levers for interacting with the world and I think they must be respected.
Why: This relates to a player's motive, and as such is the engine for narrative play. To cut off semantics, yes there are times when you infringe on this with mind control and similar effects, but those are the exception. If you take away the why from your players, you aren't letting them play their character, and at that point why are they even there? I can tell you that you are all rebels but if one of my players comes back with "okay but I'm rebelling because I want to seize power after", then I'm just going to smile because that shit is juicy. I don't need them to have their heart in the right place, I just them to be headed in the same direction as the others. We can solve the eventual conflict when we get to it. Like an engine, sometime this can get gunked up. I wind up talking to players pretty often about their characters and helping them re-align with their characters and how to find them again. This isn't control, that's maintenance. And it's something that can be done between any two players, not just the GM and another. Hell, I see these kind of scenes in play a lot of the time where one PC feels lost and is able to explore that in play and find a path forward after talking to another. But that's the player's journey, imagine how demoralized they would be if they felt lost and you told them "you gotta do x because y".
How: The actions a character takes, the engine for mechanical play. I had said earlier that sometimes the GM has to arbitrate that you can't do certain things due to effect. But this is an extension of where/when. If you are playing a superhero setting then you can probably say "I jump off the roof and fly." If you try that in non-magical setting then you can't. Its not them saying no because they want to take away your agency. It's them enforcing the setting and tone. But beyond that- you gotta let your players fucking express themselves. You are playing a game and this is how they interact with it. This is also why Quarterbacking is reviled. That term originates from board games for me, for the uninitiated, quarterbacking is a backseat gamer, someone who is trying to take your turn for you. "Well the best thing for you to do is use fireball, then step up here so that the enemy can't move past you and we are all protected-". Anytime a player starts doing this it's like someone drags ice across my spine. The frustrating thing is that often they are giving good advice, sometime they really do not what is the best move. But again if you play that way then why even have this other player at the table? Do you just want their character sheet and you can control them both? The best way I've found to combat this is to change how players can talk about this. Instead players can only make requests. "Hey, if you are going after the Boss, could you move to that square instead so I can flank with you?", "I really need healing.", etc. Then when a player is able to provide for someone, they feel great. Like they helped out. When they aren't able to, its because the situation is tense and frantic. The other time I tend to see this come up is the moment where someone attempts to "tell you the odds". Hey, you shouldn't do that, if you do this instead then you are more likely to succeed, etc. This one drives me nuts. Because sometimes you will see players come up with the most audacious idea, only for someone to pipe in that they could get the same result from a different course of action. Any why would you do the first thing if you are gonna be at risk? It's not logical, you are playing the character stupid. Again, they are probably right. But you aren't going to get an achievement at the end of the campaign for never making the incorrect choice. Let your players do the things things they want to do and then reap the results, whether good or ill.
Anyway, while cohost doesn't really give a damn about engagement, I really do enjoy it when people comment and share their stories. So let me know about a time you really enjoyed a limit that was imposed in one of your games.
and like, a setting, motivations, and game mechanics that are closely intertwined really helps with that, it makes the "why are these 3 to 6 characters working together?" wrangling so much easier, it makes selling the feeling that they're a person in a world easier when there's culture, slang, assumptions to pull on, it just helps people come up with interesting ideas and characters who're more complex than their archetype when the game can give you details to expect from them to play around with rather than just tropes of the genre like you'd fall back on trying to make the whole thing up yourself.
