Do you want to Ask the Angry GM a question? It’s easy to do. Just e-mail your BRIEF question to TheAngryGameMaster@gmail.com and put ASK ANGRY in the subject. And include your name so I can use your proper appellation when making fun of your question, your inability to proofread, your poor understanding of brevity, your name, your personal habits, or your failings as a game master, be they real, imagined, or invented for the express purpose of having something to make fun of. And yes, you should consider that a warning. If you want politeness, go ask the Hippie-Dippie-Sunshine-and-Rainbows-and-Bunny-Farts-GM. If you want the best damned advice about gaming anywhere on the Internet for free, well, you’d better be able to take a few punches. Oh, and remember, this column is written at least two weeks in advance and can only address a fraction of the questions it receives. So, if you have an emergency and you’re under a time constraint, go on Twitter and ask Perkins or Crawford to s$&% something out for you. If you ain’t paying for it, you can have either quality or speed, but you can’t have both. And I only offer quality.

Now, on with this week’s question(s).

RladalFatih asks:

I had some trouble lately with a group deciding to split in order three characters go resolve alone a big infiltration encounter while the rest of the party waited for their return. How do you manage that kind of situation where party is split? Should it be avoided as much as possible? When it occurs, how do you handle it? I would like also if you could discuss a bit of how the Murky Mirror Principle apply in these cases, where characters have no conceivable means to communicate in game.

First, thanks for providing me a link to that article. I didn’t know it existed. Oh, wait, yes, I did. Because I wrote it. Did you think I wouldn’t recognize my own Murky Mirror Principle without a hyperlink? But I’ll forgive you for assuming I’m a moron because I’m happy to see there’s a GM out there who is at least smart enough to acknowledge that that bulls$%& about never, ever splitting the party is a load of crap. Parties split. There are lots of reasons to split up. Sometimes the party splits to take care of several tasks at once, sometimes it splits to allow different characters to play to their strengths in different situations, and sometimes they split because they have to solve two problems at once and it’s the only way. Hell, one of the best adventures I ever ran climaxed with a three-way party split and three simultaneous combats happening. And how the f$%& can you set up a good heist style adventure without a split.

Obviously, given that I think party splits can be a useful narrative and game tool, I do not think you should avoid party splits. If the party chooses to split, let them split. The characters have their agency after all. It’s fine. Especially when the players choose to split up. But, as a GM, you do have to keep in mind the participation level of all of the players. Which doesn’t mean every player must absolutely be involved in every scene at every second like some morons think.

Generally speaking, a player should be able to do about fifteen minutes of quietly paying attention while other characters are in the middle of doing something. And I mean quietly paying attention. Not wandering away from the table or Tweeting or reading. Because that’s childish, selfish behavior. Intentionally ignoring the game because you’re temporarily uninvolved is basically saying “if it doesn’t affect me directly, it isn’t worthy of my attention.” And that sort of antisocial crap doesn’t belong in a team sport like D&D. And if you disagree, I don’t f$&%ing care.

Given that, I like to keep party splits short. And if I can’t keep them short, I like to make sure everyone has something to do. That way, I can do the Cutaway Gambit. Which is a ton of fun. Basically, the Cutaway Gambit involves you switching back and forth between the different elements of the split party. Done artfully, it’s fun for everyone involved. The key is to make sure no one has to stay uninvolved for more than 15 minutes. Equality of screen time isn’t actually important. Some GMs claim it is, but most players don’t notice that so much as they notice inactivity that drags on too long. Beyond that, it’s always best to cutaway to the other group at tense, climactic, or cliffhanger moments. “As you open the chest, there’s an audible click and then the clang of the machinery. The northern wall of the room slides down into the floor with a grinding of stone on stone. And then something emerges from the shadowy space beyond… meanwhile, on the other side of the dungeon.”

Once you get good at the basic technique, you also want to start to juggle some synchronicity into the mix. That is, you want to keep the two parties synchronized in terms of game time. And that may mean playing some games with the passage of time. Often, when I’m dealing with a split party, it will take just as long for one party to fight a monster as it takes another party to ransack an office for clues, so that they both return to the hallway at the same time. That’s not super important, but if you can manage to keep the parties in synch, you can do really cool stuff like the Two Combats at Once Trick.

That’s when both parties end up in important, climactic battles at the same time so you just put all the combatants in both fights on the same initiative track and run the whole thing as one battle. If you can pull that off, you can have an awesome situation where a hero desperately tries to keep himself alive in a gladiatorial arena while fighting a wizard possessed by a demon while another party tries to fight their way through the demon’s guardians to reach her currently unoccupied body and kill it while a third character is chasing down the arena’s owner and manager who set up the whole plot with demon possession and stuff before he escapes.

As for the whole thing about the Murky Mirror and how to deal with the fact that the players can see what’s happening during the split even though they can’t communicate and therefore they might do something terrible like metagame? I handle it by not giving a f$%&. Seriously. Who cares? Hell, it actually saves time later when the players reconvene and don’t have to waste an hour of game time telling each other the story of what happened when they were apart. We can just take the recap as assumed. And rarely does the party’s knowledge of what’s happening to the other party actually change anyone’s behavior in any huge way. And in the rare case that it actually does, you can just do what I do and pretend it makes sense.

For example, let’s say Party A is doing the infiltration thing and someone sees them and escapes. Party B, meanwhile, is holding the exit. Because the escapee alerted his fellow guards, a search party is now heading for Party B. Party B, because they know someone escaped from Party A, gets on their guard, readies weapons, and takes up good fighting positions. They don’t technically know that someone is coming for them, but they still get prepared as if they did.

What I do in that situation is calm the f$&% down and not give a f$&%. Maybe Party B heard the search party approach? Or maybe Party B actually should have been ready to fight all along anyway considering they are covering the exit and didn’t think to say it until they knew they were in danger. Who f$%&ing cares? It’s just a game; there’s no cash prize, and it is totally unreasonable and also not a lot of fun to ask any human being to pretend they don’t know something. As I explained in that article you helpfully linked me to in case I forgot it existed.

Of course, if you use the cutaway artfully, you can avoid such issues anyway. You can actually cut from the escapee right then and there to the ambush on Party B, then cut back to Party A being ambushed themselves, then do a simultaneous fight. If you cut away at the right moments, you can control the flow of information enough to make the whole thing work for you or against you.

So, Party A just triggered the trap and the door slides open and something is coming out. Cut to Party B who is investigating the smuggling operation. Party B, shortly thereafter, finds the smuggler’s crate of goods. They open it up and it has several massive eggs. “Massive eggs,” Party A wonders aloud, “what are these for?” And you say, “… meanwhile, on the other side of the dungeon, a huge, crimson head, covered in spikes and horns emerges from the shadows on a long, serpentine neck. The red dragon dwarfs your party by an order of magnitude. It roars at the ceiling, smoke and fire leaping from its maw… let’s roll initiative, shall we?”

In short, you deal with it with theatrics or just by calming your tits and remembering it’s just a f$&%ing game and it’s supposed to be fun.

Linus asks: How can I get useful feedback from players? And Hasse the Heretic asks: How do I know if my players are having fun?

Now isn’t this f$&%ing interesting. First, I got these two questions within days of each other. And since they are related, I decided to lump them together. Second, Hasse the Heretic is none other than TheAngryGM.com’s new proofreader and assistant web designer. And that puts me in an awkward position because she’s going to be the last person to see, read, and edit this before it goes live. But, even though she is much smarter than me, I’m sure she would never use her editing power to remove my normally combative attitude which I use to satisfy my frail ego and make myself feel superior because I wasn’t hugged enough as a child. Nor would she – despite her amazing cleverness and creativity – ever misuse her power. Because she is better than me. And Fate is the best game ever and I only hate it because I can’t create actual dramatic tension unless I can just throw a monster into the game every five minutes and scream “roll initiative.”

Okay, Linus and Hasse, I hear you. The feedback thing is a giant pain in the a$&. As a GM, you need to know how you’re doing. Otherwise, you’ll never improve. And you probably need improvement. Except for Hasse who is already a great GM. Moreover, if you’re running a game and aren’t a giant jerk like me, you probably actually really do want to just give your players the best game experience possible. Hell, if you’re willing to read the thousands of words I s$&% out every day that are barely readable until Hasse fixes them, you must be pretty dedicated to running the best game you can run. I get that. Because even I want to run the best game possible. And I’d hate to think I’m boring my players.

But people are really crappy at giving any feedback at all, let alone useful feedback. So much so that it’s usually not worth asking for much. You’re better off just trying to read your players for signs of enjoyment. Or lack of enjoyment. The problem is, even that’s hard to do. People can be very hard to read if you don’t know what to look for. And, sadly, some gamers have a hard time showing their emotions. And what emotions they do show can be confusing. Because their emotional state in the game can vary pretty wildly from excitement to frustration to fear to distraction to boredom, but their satisfaction in the game can still be quite high.

Let’s address feedback for Linus first. How do you get useful feedback? Well, you have to know what feedback you can trust and what feedback you can’t trust. When it comes to leisure activities, like games, people are emotional first and rational second. Various, very primitive parts of their brain decide first how they are feeling. And then the advanced, rational parts try to explain why they are feeling how they are. So, you can trust a player to know when they are having fun and when they aren’t, but you really can’t trust them to know why.

The best questions to ask players are questions about their emotional engagement. Questions like: did you have fun? Did you enjoy the dragon fight? Are you liking the wizard class? What do you think of your new magical item? What was your favorite part of the game? You seemed distracted during the negotiation scene, did you enjoy it? Does the experience system feel satisfying? Do you think the social encounters are fun? It is also almost always best to ask specific questions. “Are you having fun” is a question that a player will usually answer reasonably truthfully, but it also doesn’t tell much more than “you’re not running the game so badly that they regret showing up.” “Did you enjoy the dragon fight,” is more telling because players will reveal more with their answer then they intend to. They might just come out and say, “it was actually really frustrating” or “it was amazing,” or they might say “it was all right.” And if all they say about your climactic dragon fight was “it was all right,” they aren’t saying what they are really thinking. Something’s wrong. Or they are having a bad night.

See, that’s the other problem with people’s emotions. Lots of things affect them. Not just the game. And you never know whether you’re getting cross-pollination from something else. On top of that, people usually game with their friends. And that means they won’t always admit their real feelings. Generally, players hate telling GMs they aren’t happy because most players recognize the GM is putting in a lot of hard work and they don’t want to be ungrateful.

The best way to solicit feedback is to solicit specific, emotional feedback a little bit at a time. To build a pattern. At the end of each session, for example, pick one situation from the game that you thought was really good or really bad or were unsure about and ask the players – just casually – how they felt about it. Listen to what they say. See if what they say jives with what you think. If you thought something was good and the players thought it was bad, that’s useful to know. What you’re really trying to do is calibrate your impressions with those of your players. So that you can start to rely on your own judgment and the feedback you seek is merely confirming that things are working the way you expected. You also want to mix it up. Obviously, if you introduce a new system or change the way you’re doing something, you want to ask about that. But if there’s nothing specific you’re seeking, ask about combat one week and social encounters next week and experience the following week and so on. But just make the request for low-level, specific, emotional feedback part of the game’s routine.

Sometimes, when you solicit feedback, you’ll get lucky and your players will get talkative. This is especially true if the players are excited or annoyed about something. The stronger the emotional response, the more analytical they are going to be. They’ll start to feed off each other and dig into the question. Let them go. Just listen to what they say. Because you got lucky. You rolled a Natural 20 on your Solicit Feedback check. But, while you want to listen to everything they say, you want to be very wary of any explanations they offer or any potential solutions they come up with. Players are bad at analysis and game design. Or else they’d be GMs. They don’t understand why they feel the way they do and they don’t know how to fix it.

For example, if the players say a particular scene was boring, that’s trustworthy. If they keep talking and agree that it dragged on too long or was too slow, that’s trustworthy too. But if they suggest that the scene probably just took too much time to play, that’s suspect. Because time is rarely the real reason something feels dull or drawn out or slow. Usually, it’s a pacing issue. Maybe all the really good die rolls happened at the beginning of the scene and the scene was mostly complete, but it took a long time to actually get to that resolution. That was a big problem in 4E combat. It didn’t take too long, it was just that the combats were mostly decided about halfway through and had a long mop-up phase that lacked excitement.

So, you want to regularly solicit small amounts of specific, emotional feedback and you want to trust the players to know how they feel but not to know why they feel that way or how to fix their feelings.

But…

And this is where we get to Hasse’s wonderful, insightful question. Because she is so smart she realized that I was going to get to this point. That’s why she’s such a great addition to the Angry team. She doesn’t want to know about Feedback at all. She just wants to know how to read her players and tell whether they are happy. Without asking.

See, the truth is, feedback of the sort Linus and most GMs are after, is actually useless garbage. It’s useful and helpful to seek feedback when you introduce a new system or rule or mechanic. Or when you run an adventure of a type you don’t normally run. Or when you’re trying to fix a problem in the game and you’re tweaking something. In short, feedback is useful after you change something. But most GMs who ask about feedback – and lots do – just want their players to reassure them that the game is going well and there are no problems. And, again, that’s totally understandable. GMs want to run good games. And they need to know the game is good.

But it’s also stupid and useless. What you’re asking for is Homer Simpson’s Everything’s Ok Alarm.

If you can’t watch the embed, he invents an alarm that emits a piercing howl every three seconds unless something – anything – is wrong. And hopefully, I don’t have to explain the stupidity behind that joke.

As a GM, you need to get over your need for feedback. You need to train yourself to assume that nothing’s wrong unless you have some specific sign that something is wrong. You don’t need your players to tell you the game is going well. No. Not even for self-improvement. You don’t need feedback for self-improvement. Self-improvement comes from a combination of practice and experimentation. Running games every week automatically makes you better at it, unless you’re doing something wrong. And experimenting and trying different things is how you learn new ways to run games well, or to run them poorly if you try the wrong things.

That means that all you really need to do is recognize when your players are not having fun. And, better yet, give them the opportunity to speak up when they don’t like things. You need a Fire Alarm, not an Everything’s Okay Alarm.

So, how do you know when your players are enjoying the game? Well, they keep showing up. That’s the biggest sign. If your players aren’t happy, they tend to stop showing up to the game. I don’t mean they necessarily drop out of the game. But one key sign is that absences increase. Players tend to stop prioritizing a game when they aren’t enjoying it. I’m watching someone very close to me go through a situation where they are not enjoying a weekly game. They don’t want to quit the game, they don’t want to offend their friends in the game, but their attendance has dropped off. And genuine scheduling conflicts are giving way to nonspecific excuses like “I’m not feeling well, it was a long day at work” and outright lies “I have to bring my cat to the vet to have its goiter removed.”

If you’ve noticed a change in attendance patterns, there’s a strong sign that you have an unhappy player. Probably one who doesn’t want to hurt your feelings by admitting they are unhappy.

But there are other ways to not show up for the game. Players might be physically at your game, but they might not be mentally at your game. They might be distracted, disinterested, or just emotionally uninvested. The classic example from the old days – before cellular phones – was building dice towers. Players occasionally fiddle with their dice when the action slows down, right? Arranging them, positioning them all on the highest or lowest number, whatever. But then there’s dice stacking. That’s when the player begins playing Dice Jenga. That’s a sign of a player that has temporarily mentally checked out of the game.

These days, though, distractions come in the form of cell phones and laptop computers. And, as an old person, I can definitively say that younger people have NO attention span anymore. So, dice towers are done and Tweeting, texting, and surfing the Interweb are the rage among the mentally disengaged players. But, just as there is a difference between arranging dice and Dice Jenga, there’s a difference between Tweeting an occasionally funny moment from a game and reading a social media feed. This is something we old fogies have to learn. If a player is Tweeting about your game, they are actually invested in it. That’s how kids these days show engagement. They want everyone to know what they are doing and how awesome it is. Though I do recommend that you actually READ their social media messages just to make sure they aren’t sending a more overt signal that they aren’t happy like “stuck at another terrible D&D game, wish I could quit.”

Those are the most overt signs that the player isn’t in the game. And really, that’s what you’re looking for. Signs that the players are in the game. Less overt signs include not paying attention, long delays after being called back to attention, and a lack of enthusiasm for the choices they make. “I guess I’ll just attack again” is a bad sign. “I’ll kill that ogre with my greataxe” is a good sign. “Crap, we’re getting our a$&es kicked and Alice is going to die and all I can do is attack. Sorry guys” is also a good sign. Believe it or not. Frustration is a good sign.

See, you’re not really looking for happiness or fun. You’re looking for emotional investment. I mean, you wouldn’t be looking for smiles and laughs at a horror movie. You’re looking for people who can’t pull their eyes away even though they might want to. If someone is frustrated, horrified, terrified, stressed, or frightened, they are in the game. More generally, if the players care about the outcome, they are in the game.

That said, if you do notice a lot of negative emotions – like stress, horror, frustration, and fear – and you’re not running Call of Cthulhu, you might want to make sure you aren’t overdoing it. Because you can exhaust your players that way. People can only take so much of that s$&%. Your game should have emotional highs and emotional lows.

It’s generally easier to see when someone isn’t emotionally invested – because they’ve checked out in various ways or there’s just a general level of dispassion in their voice, body language, and demeanor – than it is to see how emotionally invested they are. But that’s okay, because you should be assuming that the players ARE emotionally invested unless you see signs they aren’t.

Now, emotionally investment varies from moment to moment and scene to scene. What you want to do is look for signs of emotional investment whenever you think the game has hit an emotional high. Those might include climatic encounters, the moment of victory after a tense combat, a tense negotiation, after a character dies, when the party is interacting with a likable NPC, when the party acquires a neat treasure, when the party accomplishes a goal, or when the party fails at something. If you’re running a game in the real world, emotional investment shows in players’ eyes and body language. If they are sitting up or leaning forward, if their eyes are on the action on the table or on you or on whichever player is currently taking a turn, they are engaged. When you engage them, they are ready to speak immediately, even if they don’t know what to say. Yeah, that’s a tricky one. If you ask a player “what do you do” and the player responds with an immediate, “ummmm… I’ll…” that’s a pause indicator. They heard the question, they know the response is important, and they want you to know they are thinking about the answer. That’s the sound someone makes when the waiter asks them what they want in a restaurant. On the other hand, if they just stay silent for a moment or if they give a sigh or a shrug or some other sign that they aren’t really interested in giving the best answer, they aren’t engaged. It’s subtle, but you can get good at hearing the difference. Look for signs of disinterested or closed-off body language. If someone is slouching or leaning back – and it isn’t a role-playing thing – they are physically withdrawing from the game. If their eyes aren’t on the current focus of the game’s attention, they are disinterested. And if their arms or ankles are crossed, they are closing off from the game. I s$&% you not. If there’s a player with crossed arms and slouching – and that isn’t a character trait they’ve adopted – they are probably shutting off from the game. You can test the player by moving your focus somewhere else. Glance down at a miniature and touch it, for example. If the player’s gaze doesn’t follow yours, they are gone.

Online, it’s a lot harder to see the signs of emotionally engagement. That’s why running online games is terrible. You can’t see overt signs of distraction, either. Even if you use webcams, it’s hard as hell. And if you’re the sort of GM who – like me – uses all of this s$&% to pace the game, your online games are bad and you feel bad. Seriously, I am running an online game right now and I know it’s garbage compared to what I usually run. I can’t read the players. And my NPCs are cartoonish caricatures because I am having trouble getting emotionally invested.

Even things as simple as voice delays are hard to gauge because there’s always a little lag. You’re pretty much stuck with trying to listen for the emotion in someone’s voice. And no one’s voice is quite natural online because, when you’re wearing a headset or speaking over a microphone, you can’t hear your own voice as well and, as such, you don’t speak quite naturally. People don’t even use pause indicators online as much. So, you have to muddle through and assume everyone is emotionally invested until you start to hear blatant signs of disinterest. Long pauses and complete and utter lack of emotion in the voice.

But just because you notice signs of disinterest, that doesn’t mean your game is bad. Just as engagement varies from scene to scene and moment to moment, it also varies from player to player. Some players get more excited about combat than others. Some really get wound up in social interactions. On top of that, engagement also varies based on moods. A player might be disengaged because your game sucks or they might be disengaged because they had a bad day at work or they had a fight with their dog or their spouse has worms. People bring their emotional baggage to the game. So, a single sign of disengagement isn’t enough. You need to look for a systemic pattern of disengagement. That’s why you have to get into the habit of checking for it. If one player is consistently disengaged, it’s worth saying something to the player. Something like, “hey, thanks for a being a part of the game. I hope you’re enjoying it.” And that brings me around to the final part of the feedback puzzle.

You can’t really tell if players are happy. And you don’t want to anyway. You don’t need an “Everything’s Ok Alarm.” You just need to see when things are going wrong. So, assume everything is okay until you spot a consistent pattern of things not being okay. But you also want to make sure the players have an opportunity to sound an alarm when things aren’t okay. You want to give the players the opportunity to tell you they aren’t happy. Or at least, to hint at it.

At the end of every one of my games, I thank my players for attending. I assure them I had fun. And then I say, “I hope you had fun too.” And I give them the chance to confirm that they did have fun. And I do ask about something that happened in the game. I do seek regular, emotional feedback at the end of most of my sessions. Not because I need it, but because I want my players to know I am looking for it. Over time, your players will reason you’re open to feedback. That way, they know that if there ever is a problem, they can come to you. I also make sure that when I’m interacting with one of my players outside of the game, which I occasionally do, I throw out an occasional “I hope you’re enjoying the game” or “I had fun running your interaction with your old mentor; I hope you enjoyed it.” That reinforces the fact that you’re open to their feedback and that they can talk to you away from the game about the game.

And really, that’s the best you can do. Assume the players are happy, but learn to recognize the signs that they aren’t, and make sure they know that you care whether they are having fun. If you do those things, you’ll probably never get any real feedback. But you won’t need it.

Thanks, Linus and Hasse for the excellent question. And thanks Hasse for not using your editing power to keep me from treating you like everyone else. And remember, gnome bards are awesome and I wet the bed until I was 25 years old.