You can probably tell from the 20,000-word deluge that ended March that I’ve been in furious catchup mode. And you can guess from when you’re reading this that I’m still a little behind. Yeah. I started April with a bout of illness. Fun stuff. But I’m back and writing and I think it’s gonna be a good month.

Famous last words.

Now, that whole Character Arc-Pocalypse took a hell of a lot out of me and I’m still putting the finishing touches on the next True Campaign Managery thing. So, today I’m going to let you all tell me what to write as I can’t imagine that leading to a fortnight of infuriating disaster. That’s right, I’m popping open the Ask Angry mailbox and working through some questions. Because, even though I keep warning y’all this column’s on hiatus, questions keep appearing in the ask.angry@angry.games mailbox. Then again, I keep answering them despite swearing the column’s on hiatus, so that’s my own damned fault. At least y’all are getting a little better at keeping your shit reasonably brief even if some of you still don’t know how to give me explicit permission to publish whatever name you give me on the Internet.

Case in point…

Some dumbass asks…

Is it good for the Game Master to ask a player what their character thinks about an in-game situation, encounter, or event? Are there other ways to get the players to reflect on their character’s thoughts and feelings about game events?

First, explicit permission means explicit permission. It ain’t an introduction; it’s permission. We live in an age where every possible use of someone’s name — even a frigging Internet handle — is classified as doxxing by some jurisdiction or another and where, even if something isn’t technically doxxing, the minute you disagree with someone by name, they’ll call it doxxing anyway under the Internet legal doctrine of Disagreement is Violence and I Don’t Consent.

Second, I edited this dumbass’ question for clarity. That’s not something I normally do, but I’m not going to make any jokes about it because I suspect this correspondent is not a native English speaker. The edits were minor anyway and probably unnecessary.

Now then…

I’m handling this dumbass’ question first because it squares nicely with all that Character Arc crap I just got done spouting. Somewhere in that series — I don’t remember where; that whole three-part clusterfuck is a hazy blur in my mind — somewhere in that series, I said that part of the problem with Character Arcs is that they’re internal journeys and roleplaying games don’t let the audience see into the characters’ heads as books do.

Well, doesn’t this just seem like the obvious solution? Ask players to share their characters’ inner monologues like they’re all point-of-view characters narrating the game? That’ll let everyone see all the characters’ internal conflicts and connect more deeply with their struggles and the players will be forced to think more about their characters’ inner lives.

And that’s true except for one very minor little detail: that this is an absolutely terrible, horrible, no good, very bad idea and that you should never, ever encourage it. Or even let your players do it. Hell, I’ve said, on the record, that Game Masters should explicitly and expressly forbid players from sharing their characters’ thoughts. I’m pretty sure I’ve said that if a player ever starts a sentence with, “So, my character is thinking,…” you must lunge across the table and grab them by the throat and squeeze until they stop talking rather than letting a player finish that sentence.

Then again, my Game Mastering philosophy can best be summed up as “Violence isn’t the answer; violence is the question, and the answer is ‘Yes.'”

Why do I take this hardline stance? Well, it’s partly because I don’t give a single, solitary crap what any player’s character is thinking. And neither should you. And neither does anyone else. Don’t we have enough problems with Main Character Syndrome without encouraging our players to think of the people sharing their table as their audience instead of their teammates? This is, in fact, the primary problem with Performance-Based Play: it hinges on this inherent belief that your fellow players are your audience and that your job is to put on a show. Get mired too deep in that idea and you stop seeing the game as a game. Hell, you stop seeing it as any kind of interaction at all.

And, before you argue, there’s science behind this. But this is an Ask Angry Column and not a Feature and I’m not writing an academic treatise, so you’ll just have to trust me. Sorry.

I know y’all love to complain about the damage livestreamed games have done to tabletop roleplaying games. Well, this, right here, is the damage. It’s not that Mike Mercer and Chris Porkings have set unrealistic expectations that real Game Masters like you and me can’t live up to. It’s that streamed games treat roleplaying games as a chance for each player to put on a show for a captive audience about their favorite Mary Sue fanfic original Sonic recolor of a character.

But if you don’t buy that argument… well, you’re stupid and you’re beyond my help. But, even so, I do have another argument. How about this: when players share their characters’ inner monologues, interaction dies.

How’s that for an argument?

At the very least, if I know what you’re thinking, I never have to ask. I never have to say, “Why did you do what you did?” Asking people to explain or account for their choices — or, more generally, discussing why people make the choices they do — is pretty much the biggest driver of interaction in action-based narratives and team-based activities. And interaction is way, way, way more important in such narratives and activities than inner conflict.

Now, I know some of you are all like, “But my players’ characters never ask each other why they make the choices they do.” And that just goes to show how little your players care about the other characters’ inner monologues.

Seriously, though, interaction is ruined once everyone’s a telepath. There are no questions about motivation, there’s no misunderstanding, there’s no mystery. In real life — and in most non-book narratives — we’re forced to infer from people’s actions — and their words — what’s going on in their heads. Which is inherently more engaging — and more humanizing — than just being told the answer.

It’s also worth noting that people — again: in real life — aren’t so deliberate in their actions. People don’t make choices for well-thought-out, deliberate reasons. They think they do, but that’s a lie their brains tell them. Most human choices — yours and mine included — are impulsive. They happen before our reasoning and conscious thought even get involved. We’re often left guessing — or agonizing — over the choices we make. Or the choices we should make. Part of the human experience is learning to deal with a brain that operates more on impulse and emotion than rational thought.

Impulse control and self-reflection are skills we spend our whole lives struggling to master. And one of the ways we learn those skills is by reflecting on why other people might make the choices they do. In other words, we learn to better understand our own impulses to action by interacting with others and by sharing stories of characters whose inner lives we can only infer.

Too much rumination — reflection on thinking — actually leads to inhuman actions. You can see this shit clearly in Internet arguments all the time. How many times have you read, “If character death is a real risk, no one will get attached to their characters,” or “Logically, no one would ever become an adventurer,” or some shit like that? The arguments might be logically sound and well-reasoned, but they also describe neither actual human beings nor actual characters people play at the table. People get attached to things that might die all the time. People take insane risks for ridiculous reasons all the time. In games and in life. And that’s because we don’t run on reason.

So, no, I don’t want my players pausing the game action to give speeches about their characters’ thoughts. I don’t even want my players thinking too hard about what their characters are thinking. It’s bad for the game, it’s bad for the other players, it’s bad for each player’s own roleplaying, and it bores the shit out of me.

And everyone else.

Some other dumbass asks…

I remember you saying that you start all your games in a tavern. Does that mean you start all of your games with interaction? Also, does that mean the party’s backstory is always that they are random patrons who answer the call?

First, explicit permission means… blah blah blah… it’s been frigging years and I’ve written dozens upon dozens of these mailbag things and I’ve included the same frigging instructions in every last frigging one! Why the motherloving fuck can’t you people get this right? How can people this stupid manage to type entire e-mails without drooling all over their keyboards and shorting them out? I don’t get it.

Second, maybe I’m just biased because OP here can’t follow simple-ass directions, but this question has the stink of a trap. There are just too many oblique references to things I’ve said in the past. I’m probably being unfair, but it happens so often that I can’t help but flinch every damned time.

It’s like this: I’ll say something and someone will ask a totally innocent-sounding question and I’ll answer in good faith and then, suddenly, they’ll rip off the mask and scream, “Ha! That totally contradicts this other thing you said three years ago! So you’re wrong and I win!” And I’m like, “I’m sorry, I didn’t realize this was a fight. But I guess you win. Good for you.”

It’s like this old The Far Side comic by Gary Larson…

Now, I’d give you the benefit of the doubt, but you’re just some dumbass who can’t follow simple instructions, so I’m gonna treat you as a hostile witness and go on the defensive just in case you really do have, “But in that article about starting campaigns however long ago, you said, ‘Never start a campaign with interaction,” but now you’re contradicting yourself so I get to keep your ear as a trophy!” in your chamber.

Anyway…

You remember rightly. I start most — not quite all — my campaigns in inns. Or taverns. Or winesinks. Or bars. Or truckstop Waffle Houses. Or space cantinas. Whatever. And if I don’t quite start in such a place, I start nearby one. Or one shows up very quickly. Basically, I feature a roadside inn — or the nearest setting-appropriate equivalent — very early in the first session of almost every campaign I launch.

And I’ve bragged about that shit.

And I do it — and brag about it — for several reasons.

First, it’s a reaction to all the postmodern hipster deconstructionists that infest the online Game Mastering space like cancer and who never shut up about avoiding cliches and being original and subverting expectations and all that crap and how those are the keys to running great games. Well, I run great games — the greatest games — and I start every last one with the tropiest cliché of them all. And that gives me the giggles.

Second, this shit reminds me that how a game starts has very little bearing on its greatness and how it’s way more important to just start the game than it is to sweat over how it starts.

Third, it reminds me that I don’t need to write great games. I just need to write games. Greatness happens at the table. It’s in how you run, not what you design.

Fourth, all this makes it super easy to start a new campaign. It’s barely an inconvenience to launch a game when you know the setting for the first scene. It really counteracts Blank Page Syndrome. Whoever the characters and whatever the quest and wherever the setting, I know I’m starting in the bar in the lobby of a hotel, so I can just start writing.

Keep in mind, though, that a lot of what I do these days is just me playing with myself. It’s just me playing games with myself. This always start in an inn thing has become a little in-joke I play on myself for my own amusement. And that means I’ve got a lot of leeway. Recently, for example, I started a campaign in the burned-out husk of a roadside inn where the party killed a bunch of goblin scavengers to establish the war-ravaged nature of the setting. And long ago, the characters started in a wagon cage on their way to face judgment, Elder Scrolls-style The campaign’s first scene took place in an inn yard where the wagon was parked.

That said, I do mostly play it straight. Most of my campaigns start with the characters patronizing an inn or tavern or Quark’s bar or whatever.

If you’ve been paying careful attention — and I doubt the questioner has been given their piss-poor reading comprehension skills — you’ve probably noticed that there’s nothing about my Always Start at an Inn rule that requires the characters be strangers passing in the night who all chance on the same adventure opportunity in the same Medieval fantasy truck stop. Anything could have happened before the characters got to the inn. Anything at all. Remember, every story’s got to start somewhere. Everything before that somewhere becomes backstory and everything after becomes the game.

So maybe the characters are prisoners and the transport stopped for the night so the soldiers could get a decent meal. Or maybe the inn was a purpose-chosen destination. Maybe the characters were sent to the inn because that’s the last place their contact was seen alive. Or maybe it attracted their attention from atop the hill because it was a smoking ruin and they decided to check it out. Or maybe it really is just the place they all decided to stop for the night.

That said, my characters often start as strangers and they often do meet by chance at the Chance Meeting Inn. Inns and taverns are natural gathering places. If travelers are gonna bump into each other, that’s where they’ll be bumping. It just makes sense.

Inns — whatevers — also make for very natural frameworks for character introductions. Like, you can introduce one character at a time and give each player a chance to describe their character framed in the doorway as they enter the scene. Or you can pan across the room as it were at the start of the scene and invite each player to describe their character in the room. This is super helpful because character introductions are always awkward and clunky. Lots of players struggle with them.

But Introduction isn’t Interaction and if y’all paid careful attention — except the questioner — you’ll notice there’s nothing about what I’ve described that requires starting with any kind of interaction. Just because the scene’s set in an inn doesn’t mean the characters have to be all chatty. They could escape from a cage, kill goblin raiders, or exterminate rats in a cellar. Or maybe they’re there to get a quest or meet an informant. Because… that ain’t Interaction. It’s just interacting.

See, there’s interaction and there’s Interaction. Roleplaying games are interactive. Everything’s interaction. When the players respond to the scenes you set by taking character actions, they’re interacting. But they’re interacting with the world. The only time they’re not interacting is when you’re Monologuing or Expositioning.

Which, to be fair, I often do start with. The very first thing I always do when I start a new campaign is establish the setting and the background for the campaign and then I explain where the characters are and why they’re there and what they’re doing. Yes, even if I’ve sent a long-ass document out before the game starts, I open every campaign by drawing the players into the world and then establishing the premise and then setting the scene. That’s how you Game Master.

But when I said, all those years ago, not to start your game with Interaction, I was cautioning against a very specific kind of campaign startup that too many Game Masters and publishers absolutely fucking love. The, “You’re here. Now talk to each other until you decide what to do or until I decide it’s time to drop the plot on your heads.”

That’s an awful way to start a campaign. Unless I’m running for an established group who have all played together with each other and who have all played under me before and for no less than six months and I absolutely know they can go from zero to in-character in nothing flat, then I either give the players a goal before I let them start playing the first scene or else I drive the interaction myself with my own characters.

No matter what anyone says — because I know there’s lots of morons who’ll disagree — players don’t have the context or grounding to just start playing their characters off each other in the campaign’s first scene. And the vast majority of players aren’t comfortable trying. The point of the first scene is just to introduce the characters and get them moving in the same direction. No more; no less.

Father Phan asks…

What do you do if players plan for too long during game time? Do you avoid it and how?

Forgive me father for I am a wretched sinner. For I am totally what you might call an Interventionist Game Master. And I know that makes me Maestro non Grata in the Internet gaming space. But hell yes I avoid it. If my players get bogged down in planning at the table — or mired in trying to figure shit out — I do everything in my power to put the kibosh on that crap.

I know lots of Game Masters think their job is to let the players play the game however they want. “If my players enjoy planning and strategizing for two hours, who I am to stop them?” You’re the damned Game Master. That’s who you are. And you’re supposed to know better. Players don’t do this overplanning shit because they enjoy it. No one enjoys it. Seriously. Try suggesting to your players that the next session is going to be planning session. “No game, guys, but we’re going to sit for four hours so you can talk through the game’s plot and your plans. Don’t bring your dice; you won’t be rolling dice. Just be ready to take lots of notes and talk for four hours straight.”

Players overplan, overthink, and overtalk because they feel like they have to do it or they don’t know how not to do it, but they also don’t know how to do it. They don’t know how to plan, think, and talk properly so any amount of planning, thinking, and talking becomes overplanning, overthinking, and overtalking.

I’ve said — repeatedly and clearly — that, of all the factors that play into your player’s investment in your game, Pacing takes the prize for Most Important Thing Evar! That’s why play-by-post games are the literal worst and online games are the second worst. You, as Game Master, must seize control of the pace of your game if you want it to not suck.

Meanwhile, it’s a simple fact that the longer people spend working on a plan, the worse that plan ends up. If they end up with any plan at all. And that’s because people — especially players — don’t really plan. Instead, they take turns launching ideas like clay pigeons and then blasting them out of the frigging air. See, players spitball ideas looking for guaranteed success. So any idea that has any sort of flaw or risk or weakness or cost or consequence — real or imagined — is a reject.

You’ve heard, “The perfect is the enemy of the good,” right? This is where the phrase comes from. Players don’t plan, they brainstorm plans hoping a perfect plan is going to pop fully formed out of someone’s brain. And that’s doomed to fail. As a wise rat once said to his katana-wielding reptile ward, “A leader must learn that there is no right choice; there are only choices.”

Players tend to fall into what I call the Thinking and Talking trap. By the way, so do armchair roleplaying game hackers on the Internet. It happens when they’re trying to come up with a plan or when they’re trying to work out the answer to a mystery. They Think and they Talk and they think those are useful things to do. They seem useful. It is, after all, smart to have to plan. It is wise to organize and examine your facts from time to time and see how they fit together. But that shit only works when it’s done properly. And most groups don’t.

Proper planning, for example, isn’t about spitballing ideas rapid-fire until you find the one that’ll work. Instead, it’s about picking an idea and then refining it to maximize the odds it’ll work, minimize the odds it’ll fail catastrophically, prepare for the most likely contingencies and consequences, and leave yourself resources to respond to the situation when it goes tits up.

Does that sound like anything you’ve ever heard any group of players actually do at the table? Or do you hear something like this…

Player 1: “We could try this, guys.”
Player 2: “If we try that, they’ll do this and then we’re screwed.”
Player 3: “How about we do this?”
Player 2: “That might work, but what if this?”
Player 3: “What about that?”
Player 1: “If we do that, we have to do this too, and then this will happen, and if that other thing also happens we’ll be dead.”

So, I remain vigilant. When I see my players have fallen into the Thinking and Talking Trap — which they do all the frigging time — I extricate them post hasty.

My first move is Urgency and Impatience. And I don’t mean in-world urgency. I, personally, as a Game Master, sitting at the table, express polite impatience. I make it very obvious I’m bored and I want to move the game along. I point out the party’s been sitting in one place for a while and I ask if they’re close to a resolution or something. I call attention to the fact that we’re flinging precious game time into the furnace and I’m not okay with that.

Politely.

You see, the Thinking and Talking Trap isn’t an in-game problem. This isn’t just about the consequences of the characters’ choices to sit around planning. It’s the players themselves who are stuck in the trap. Out-of-game problems need out-of-game solutions. So my first move is just to tap my foot and cough and look meaningfully at the clock. To get the players to recognize they’re wasting time getting nowhere.

That works more often than you think. Lots of players will recognize the game’s come to a dead stop for a long time. And my saying, “Get on with it,” carries this implication that I — as the Game Master — know the players can’t solve the problem by Thinking and Talking. “You can stop Thinking and Talking, guys. I promise it’ll all be okay.”

And it really will be. No tabletop roleplaying game situation requires any sort of ridiculously complex plan. We’re playing a fucking pretend elf game, not invading Afghanistan. And the stakes couldn’t be lower. Worst case scenario, we make new characters and start a new game. There are no actual lives at stake.

If Impatience and Urgency don’t snap the players out of Thinking and Talking, or if I think the players really would benefit from a plan or they have the information they need to actually solve the mystery, my next move is to Join the Discussion. Since the Thinking and Talking Trap is an out-of-game problem, there’s no problem with my talking directly to the players about what they’re doing. I’ve got no qualms telling the players they’re sinking in quicksand and helping them find purchase to pull themselves out. Hell, as the Game Master, I represent everything the characters see, hear, perceive, and know about the world, so it’s totally in my wheelhouse to point out shit the characters might notice but the players are missing. Like the fact that they’re talking in circles and they’re no closer to a plan than they were four frigging hours ago.

Of course, I won’t give them a plan. Nor will I give information their characters couldn’t know. And I won’t evaluate their plans for them based on information they don’t have. But I will help them either refine an idea into a plan or just encourage them to act without a plan and take the direct approach they’re trying to avoid. Of course, for you to do that, you, yourself, have to know how to choose, develop, and refine strategic plans. As a sexy gaming genius, I have no problem with that, but most of you aren’t me. So you’re probably better off just prodding the players to action.

That’s usually what I do anyway.

As I said above, this planning shit ain’t really necessary in tabletop roleplaying games. And if you find your players routinely sinking in the Thinking and Talking Trap, you’re either running a game that’s too complex for the players you’ve got or you’ve somehow taught your players that the consequences of anything less than perfect success are too damned severe to risk doing anything without a plan. The problem, in short, isn’t your players, it’s the game you are running. Either you’re running a Strategy game for players who suck at Strategy or your players are too paranoid to not overthink everything.

Really, the only good time for a complex plan is when one springs forth unbidden from some player’s facehole. Like if a player says, “Hey! I just had a great idea about how we can accomplish our goals without rushing headlong into action.” Of course, usually, the other players immediately respond by explaining all the ways that plan can go wrong. Because that’s how planning works, right?

The point is, if inspiration doesn’t smack a player across the face, the direct solution is usually the best solution. Or it should be. If it isn’t, you’re running games wrong. Your players should be biased toward action. They should think the solution to their problems is always about taking action rather than sitting down and talking. If your players want to sit and talk too often, you’re running a bad game.

That said… if you are gifted with players who frequently sit and talk but always stand up after fifteen minutes and say, “Okay, we’ve got a plan. Here’s what we do,” that’s a different story.

The point is, if your players are mired in Thinking and Talking and they’ve been there for a while and you can’t nudge them out with Impatience and Urgency, throw them a rope. If you can see where they’re stuck and help them unstick themselves, great, Otherwise, the next best thing is to say, “You don’t seem to have enough information to come up with a good plan. If you really feel like you need a plan, consider gathering information, doing research, scouting, or trying to capture and question an enemy.” Thinking and Talking isn’t acting, but Gathering Intelligence is.

Failing all of that, the third move is to Nope the Hell Out. Tell the players, “If you really feel you need a good plan, that’s fine, but you don’t need me here while you work it out. I’m calling the session. You guys have a week — or whatever — to work out your plans. Next session, we’re starting at the castle gates. So be ready to go one way or the other.”

Often, that’ll break the players out of the Trap and get them moving again. And if it doesn’t, you get a night off. And that’s a hell of a win.