Early morning, between breakfast and home office…
This one is about running the game, or maybe: phrases to use that improve your game.
@SymbolicCity said:
One thing I need to work on, I think, is being explicit about presenting choices as choices. Not just “The doorway opens on a blackness rife with a musty, ancient smell” but also, more to the point, “Do you enter?” Sometimes, leaving the prompts more open ended just seems to slow the pace.
@Sahh said:
Way too often I’ll just taper my sentences towards the end to kinda indicate that the players should cut in but it’s probably around 50/50 of them sitting there for the awkward ten or so seconds before somebody realises I am waiting to hear what they want to do. On the other hand ending everything you say with “… now what do you do?” starts to feel like a broken record even though it might carry the scenes forwards a bit more.
I know the feeling! 😆
After “fade out phase” and “what do you do forever phase” I’m currently in “repeat the menu phase”. To take the example above: “The doorway opens on a blackness rife with a musty, ancient smell… Does the thief go and take a look, do you all go in, or do you close the door?”
I’m trying to speed things along by being explicit. There’s also an element of not want to punish players for thoughtlessness. I don’t like traps going off with me saying, “you didn’t say you were checking the ceiling!” Although the solution to traps is probably not adding “do you check the ceiling?” to the menu – better to say: “the first two feet after the doorway is full of small white crystal balls, or maybe chalk, it’s hard to tell.” And that’s the hint they get to warn them about the presence of the giant spider waiting for them above the door. This is spider poop.
Anyway, I want to prevent discussions that go like this: something bad happens, players complain and say they would have never done this or that, or they always do this or that, and me saying “but you weren’t *explicitly saying* it” because the end result of that is players explicitly enumerating all the boring things they do, or joke formulas like “standard door opening procedure” and the like.
I prefer to assume that players are always doing their best, and if there are things they need to pay attention to, I mention them. I’d rather have players realize that the white chalk balls on the floor are definitely a warning but they can’t figure it out, step inside, get attacked by the spider, and then saying to each other: “Ah! This is spider poop! Gross!” And then I can bring it two or three more times and they’ll always know what to look out for and feel smart about it, and if new players join the game they’ll get to see the experienced players react to chalk pebbles and be impressed. 😄
In a way, the explicit menu is the menu of the safe options, as far as I can tell.
Another thing explicitly giving options in the game does for me is that it takes character experience into account because I can give some options and add a little extra information while I do that. Let’s keep using that example: “The doorway opens on a blackness rife with a musty, ancient smell. If you’re OK with standing out in the corridor, you can carefully scan the room with your lanterns from where you are. Do you want to do that, or do you want to go in and close the door, preventing any light from spilling out?” It sort of announces my intention to roll a random encounter check if they want to play it safe while also announcing that there’s a certain carelessness if they enter right now. That is, there is no easy and safe option, here.
The explicit menu also implicitly carries warnings when options aren’t safe.
With a little bit of thought there are other ways to approach the situation beyond the options I provided, of course. This endless negotiation of freedom is what makes role-playing games so great. Maybe the players say: “OK, let’s close the blinds of our lanterns and then the two dwarves can move in slowly while we wait outside, listening for danger.” I’ll roll for random encounters, all the players outside can make listen checks and the dwarves can make their trap finding rolls.
That would be an interesting little section to add to a book for referees. How to phrase things so that players get just the right mix of warning, just the right sense for the mechanics underlying current events. A list of phrases, as a starting point. Now that I try to think of such a list the phrases don’t come easily. This is probably harder than I thought.
#RPG
(Please contact me if you want to remove your comment.)
⁂
Aaaah ninja’d! I had a post in my drafts with this exact same title and a similar topic 🤦🏻♀️
– Sandra 2022-11-23 16:21 UTC
---
I want to read it! 😄
– Alex 2022-11-23 16:23 UTC