This article is part of my year-long True Game Mastery series. You don’t have to read the lessons in order, but it’s best if you do. So, if you’re new to this site, check out the series roadmap and start at the start.
Click here for The True Game Mastery Series index.
Welcome back, True Game Master Trainee. Unless you’re exceptionally dim — in which case, get lost; this series is for Game Masters, not players — unless you’re dumb, you’ve probably noticed all the True Game Mastery lessons to this point are about learning new habits and zealously, hard-headedly implementing them until they become rote.
The zealous hard-headedness is particularly important because that’s what makes new habits stick. Once you’ve ingrained the habits so you follow them even when you don’t, you can lighten up.
Fortunately, there’s more to this series than habit-building through hard-headed repetition. Unfortunately, there isn’t today. So settle in for more hard-headed, rigorous habit-building.
Enjoy.
Maintaining Flow Through Adjudication
So far, I’ve focused a lot on your game’s pace and flow. And that’s because True Game Masters — like me — know that pace and flow are everything. Pacing is the single, biggest thing that keeps players engaged, involved, and — above all — Invested.
Seriously.
Now that you know how to keep your players from breaking your game’s pace the minute you hand off control — by properly Inviting the Principal Player to Act — I’m going to show you how to keep that pace up while you’re forced to work with your players — or, sometimes, if you’re lucky, without them — to figure out how their actions play out.
Action Adjudication — as you should know — is the Game Mastering Art of determining the outcomes of the players’ characters’ actions. Everything you do that ain’t Narrating is Adjudicating. And that’s a problem. Because Action Adjudication is basically pulling a frigging drag chute. It’ll bleed off all the pace, flow, and momentum you build through Narration.
Game Rules: Necessary Speed Bumps
Gamespeak and Worldspeak
True Game Masters understand that TTRPGs play out in two different languages.
Worldspeak is Narrative language. It describes the world and the characters and everything happening. Everything you’d see on the screen if the game were a movie.
Gamespeak is the Gameplay language. It’s all about dice and Standard Actions and Skill Checks and Attribute Modifiers and Advantage and all that other crap defined in the rulebooks.
The rules are necessary and so is Gamespeak, but Gamespeak is terrible for pace, flow, immersion, and Investment. You can’t avoid Gamespeak completely, but that’s the ideal. More importantly, though, you should never tolerate any Naked Gamespeak outside the Chinese Room the rules are locked in.
What’s Naked Gamespeak? It’s Gamespeak that isn’t paired with Worldspeak. “You need to succeed at a DC 15 Athletics check” is Naked Gamespeak. Instead, say, “the masonry wall doesn’t have a lot of handholds; it’s a difficult climb and the DC is 15.”
A few terms exist in both languages. Spell names, for example. Fireball is a Gamespeak term for a spell effect but it’s also a Worldspeak name for a magical in-world thing wizards can talk about. Context is everything.
Roleplaying games need rules. Notice I said rules where I’d usually say mechanics. That’s important. There’s this finger-and-thumb issue here where all rules are mechanics but not all mechanics are rules and GMs always bork that up and that causes problems. But that ain’t the topic of today’s lesson so don’t think too hard about it.
Games need rules. Without them, they’re not games. They’re activities. Or experiences. Or collaborative storytelling bullshit. And if that’s what you’re after, fine, go do that. But you ain’t a Game Master if you ain’t mastering a game and this site is for Game Masters, not collaborative storytelling bullshit artists.
Anyway…
Gamefeel’s everything right? The game’s got to feel right. Combat’s got to feel fast, exciting, and chaotic. Interactions have got to feel smooth and natural. Well, every time you break out the dice, you’re hitting a big ole pause button on the game’s action — the Narrative action — to do a bunch of math and paperwork. Piss and moan all you want about how the rules demand you run combat as a slow-ass chess game, but if your combat feels that way, that’s on you.
My combats feel fast and exciting and I run freaking D&D 3.5!
The point is, TTRPGs are half Narrative and half Gameplay. When it comes to Narrative, pacing is what separates good Narratives from crappy ones. But mechanical Gameplay — using the rules — is to pacing what a crowbar is to a kneecap.
Thus, your job as a True Game Master is to keep the mechanical Gameplay to a minimum so it doesn’t wreck your Gamefeel.
I warned you these lessons would have a bunch of paradoxical, backward-sounding crap, didn’t I? Yes, Gameplay ruins Gamefeel.
The Translator Game Master
True Game Masters keep the game’s rules locked up in a Chinese Room where they can’t ruin the game. Which leads to the Game Master acting as something like a translator.
It’s like this…
Your job — when it comes to Action Adjudication — is to translate the players’ characters’ actions into Game Mechanics. Then, you feed that translation into the Game’s Rules — if necessary — and get a Game Mechanical Outcome. Finally, you translate that Game Mechanical Outcome into Narrative Narration.
Declare-Determine-Describe
First- and Third-Person
There’s a lot of online yammering about players speaking in-character versus speaking about-character. Especially in the talky-talky bits of the game. True Game Masters know it doesn’t matter for crap whether players speak in the first- or third-person. Even in social interaction scenes.
And True Game Masters never reward — or require — one over the other.
A player’s only job is to tell you what their character’s trying to do and how. Any action — even an inspiring speech — can be declared with a couple of third-person sentences and there are zero good reasons to expect a player to improvise the entire speech.
Speaking in-character is the equivalent of describing an attack in excessive, flowery detail. There’s no more reason to describe every single word of speech than there is to describe every feint, jab, and lunge that constitutes an attack.
And one of the reasons I told you to speak TO the players ABOUT their characters is to show your players they don’t have to speak AS their characters. Which is something a great many players find hard to grok and see as an obstacle to participating in social interaction scenes.
So, for the sake of comfort and inclusion, drop any dumb-ass bias you’ve got toward in-character speech.
So, how do you keep Action Adjudication from wrecking your Narrative pace? How do you do that translator crap and keep the rules locked in a Chinese Room? What even is a Chinese Room?
You do it by building good, methodical habits and rigorously applying them. This shouldn’t be a surprise because that’s my answer to everything lately.
And don’t worry about the Chinese Room thing.
I call this methodical habit the Declare-Determine-Describe Cycle. And I fully admit this one’s gonna slow your game down for a while. But remember, speed and pacing ain’t the same thing, and a smooth flow is better than a fast flow. And eventually, the speed will pick up.
The DDD Cycle starts when you’re done Inviting the Principal Player to Act and they’ve taken the invitation. In other words, it starts with a player Declaring an Action. That’s what the first D is all about.
After the player’s properly Declared an Action — and getting there is the hardest part of all this crap — you, the True Game Master, Determine the Outcome. Then, you Describe the Outcome. And once you get these habits down cold, you’ll seamlessly move from Describing the Outcome to Inviting the Principal Player to Act in response.
Do this right — and I’ll show you how — and you’ll minimize contact with your game’s rules and keep your momentum through Action Adjudication. To use a totally dumbass, contrived metaphor, you’ll be a dolphin. You’ll arrow majestically through the water at breakneck speed, then leap — briefly — into the air for a big gulp of oxygen, and then lance back into the water perfectly and keep on swimming.
Yeah, I know how stupid that sounds. But people love a good analogy.
Declaring Actions
The Declare-Determine-Describe Cycle starts when the Principal Player Declares an Action. That is, a player tells you what their character is trying to accomplish and how. And, unfortunately, players are idiots and they’ll mess up the whole DDD Cycle before it even starts by doing this wrong every single time.
How? They’ll break one or all of the Three Rules of Action Declaration.
Rule #1: Be Complete
When Declaring Actions, players must tell you what their character is trying to accomplish and how they’re trying to accomplish it. And they’ve got to tell you anything and everything relevant to that action. What tools they’re using, what resources they’re spending, and so on. If the action is an attack, the player must tell you what weapon they’re using. If the action is a negotiation, the player must tell you their character’s tone of voice and what facts and evidence they’re using to make their case.
Players leave a lot of crap out. And crappy Game Executors — and complacent True Game Masters — let them get away with it. But not you. Not anymore.
Rule #2: Be Concise
While players often drop important details from their Action Declarations — like weapons and tone — they sure as hell love to include lots of flowery prose. And they love to jump ahead to describing the outcome.
Blame Mike Mercer all you want kids, but this ain’t new. We were making fun of True Thespians in the pages of Dragon Magazine before anyone had ever heard of Mike Mercer or YouTube.
A little description is a perfectly fine thing. I ain’t knocking it. But Declaring an Action is about stating an Intent to Attempt. It can’t be described until it’s resolved. Characters don’t stab ogres or convince guards, they attack ogres and appeal to guards.
More importantly, Ture Game Masters use everything the players say to determine their actions’ outcomes. Attacking an orc with a longsword is different from stabbing an orc in the head. When a player says, “I stab the orc in the head,” they’re telling me they’re deliberately aiming for a headshot instead of taking a center-of-mass attack to an undefended line which is far more likely to hit. And I — as the Truest of True Game Masters — resolve those actions differently.
Your job’s to translate actions into Game Mechanics. When players bog their actions down with flowery prose and extraneous crap, it screws up the translation.
Rule #3: Don’t Cite Rules
It’s a player’s job to tell you what their character is trying to do and how. Characters — and the things they do — are part of the game’s world. Thus players should not — and cannot be allowed to — Declare Actions in Game Mechanical Terms. It ain’t just wrong, it’s limiting. And letting players do it teaches them the rules are more than just tools the GM uses to resolve certain actions.
Lots of modern games make it nigh impossible for players to Declare Actions without invoking rules — and that really frosts my ass — but you can’t stop chasing an ideal just because it’s unattainable. True Game Masters work to ensure no Game Mechanical term ever crosses the players’ lips. And they get as close as they can.
Running the Error Checker
Players suck at Declaring Actions. Partly because they’re dumb as rocks and partly because they’ve been trained by other idiotic Game Executors or Online Personalities. The problem is your doctrine of Personal Game Ownership prevents you from handing your players a memo. As if they’d read it anyway.
What good are rules you can’t show the players? Well, they’re there so you can train your players. And this is the first part of your methodical Declare-Determine-Describe habit. When a player violates a rule, force them to fix the problem before you go any further.
“You’re attacking? With what? Your teeth? Your bare fists?”
“When you said you ‘stab the orc in the head,’ were you asking for a called-shot penalty or were you just being overly prosaic?”
“Arcana is a skill, not an action. I’ll decide what skills to roll when. Tell me what information you’re after so I can decide what rolls are needed.”
You need to be a hard-ass here. Every time. I know it’ll slow your game down to train your players. And you’ll get a lot of backtalk and a lot of pissing and moaning. True Game Masters take a lot of crap, but that’s the price of running great games.
Speaking of True Game Mastery…
Posting Warnings
As a Game Master, it’s your job to tell the players everything their characters see, hear, perceive, and know about the game’s world. So if a player Declares an Action that’s impossible or ludicrously dangerous or risks some cost or consequence, it’s your duty — not job, duty — to make sure the player knows that.
Just to choose one totally random example that pisses me off to no end every time I see a GM bork this up, if a player Declares an Action that will provoke an Opportunity Attack — like moving through a threatened area — it’s a True Game Master’s duty to warn that player. Every time.
True GMs never spring surprises on players that reasonable characters should have foreseen.
Confirming Actions
After a player’s Declared an Action — and after you’ve Error Checked and Posted Warnings — it’s your duty as a True Game Master to repeat back the Action as you’ve understood it and ask the player to confirm you’ve got it right. Until you do so, you cannot — and must not — proceed.
Simply put, if you can’t restate an Action such that the player agrees to it, you don’t understand the Action they’ve declared. And you can’t resolve what you don’t understand.
Fortunately, this is simple to do. Just start with, “so, your character intends…” and then finish with the Action, following all the rules yourself.
“So, Ardrick intends to run forward and attack the orc with his longsword even though it will expose him to attack from the ogre with the spear?”
“So, Berylla intends to step forward and cast burning hands such that it envelops these two goblins?”
“So, Cabe intends to beg the guard to let him go, using the guard’s sick daughter and a lie about Cabe’s sick mother to play for sympathy?”
“So, Danae intends to apply first aid to stop the unconscious Cabe from dying of his injuries using the supplies in her Healer’s Kit?”
It’s that simple. Well, it’s simple when you practice it enough to internalize it as a habit. This is what I always mean when I say, “it’s that simple.”
Anyway…
Determining Outcomes
Active Reflective Listening
If you’ve ever taken a course in communication or conflict resolution, worked on communication with a therapist, read The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, listened to one of Jordan Peterson’s talks on effective communication, or watched certain Charisma on Command videos, you probably recognize the “repeat back the action for assent” thing as a form of Active Listening known as Reflective Listening.
I ain’t going to explain Active or Reflective Listening today — you can and should research it on your own — but I am going to revisit it in the Fall when I tell you how to resolve conflicts at the table as part of Managing an Ongoing Campaign. Active Listening is an essential conflict-resolution tool. Hell, it’s a vital communication skill. To keep campaigns going with actual, social humans, True Game Masters must master human communication and conflict resolution instead of relying on the delusional belief that bullshit feel-good techniques like X-Cards, Trigger Warnings, and Session Zero Limit-Setting actually do any good.
So, look forward to that, and meanwhile dump that useless crap where it belongs.
I’ll bet that seemed like a hell of a lot to take in. It was. But don’t worry. That was pretty much the meat of the lesson. Determining the Outcome is way less involved.
That ain’t to say it’s easy. Determining Outcomes is what separates True Game Masters from Crappy Game Executors. But it’s more down to mentality than any particular habit or technique. Crappy Game Executors follow the pre-programmed game code in the rulebooks. And when they run into trouble, they go crying to Jeremy Crawford on Twitter.
True Game Masters, meanwhile, remember the game’s rules are tools they can use to resolve in-game actions, but that they’re not required to use anything other than their own brains. And they must use their brains first and the rules second.
This is where the basic rules of Action Adjudication I taught you years ago — and republished in my book — come in. With a Declared Action in hand — or in brain — you decide whether it can succeed, whether it can fail, what success and failure mean, and whether there’s a risk or cost or consequence to consider. Then, you decide if you need the rules to pick between the outcomes.
If you’re here, you can handle this part.
That said, the next lesson in this course is all about using the game’s rules — and the game’s dice — like a True Game Master.
Describing the Outcome
With a Game Mechanical Outcome in hand — in brain — all you have to do to finish out the Declare-Determine-Describe Cycle is to Describe the Outcome. Obviously. Declare-Determine-Describe Cycle is the most obvious name I’ve ever given anything.
Describing the Outcome’s simply a matter of translating the Game Mechanical Outcome into Narration. And you already know how to do it. Because it’s as simple — with practice — as repeating back the action you already repeated as if it happened as intended. Or didn’t.
“Ardrick runs forward, avoiding the ogre’s spear thrust, and wounds the orc with his longsword, dealing seven points of damage.”
“Cabe begs the guard for mercy, spinning a sob story about his sick mother, but the guard sees through the lie and cracks Cabe on the head with his cudgel for eight damage, knocking him out. He’s dying.”
Sure, you can dress that crap up with flowery flourishes and descriptive prose — and you should once you’re used to the process — but most players won’t blink if you don’t.
The fact is, most GMs don’t mess this crap up by Narrating badly, they mess it up by skipping it entirely.
This…
“Okay, that’s a hit for… seven damage.”
… is not Description. That’s crap.
If you want to be a True Game Master, build the habit of translating Outcomes into Narration even if only by rote repetition of the action as an outcome instead of an attempt.
Practicing Your Rhythm Game
When You Must Use the Rules, Use them Raw
True Game Masters rely on their brains first and use the rules as tools as needed. But True Game Masters also know it’s important to use the rules often. And to use them as written. Even if they’re shitty rules.
How’s that for a hot take?
The game’s rules — as they’re written where the players can see them — create a sense of a consistent, fair-feeling game. And dice rolling gives players a feeling of agency and self-determination. Even control. Yeah, it’s an illusion, but the whole game’s an illusion. Meanwhile, a True Game Master can run a great game with any shitty system. So the illusion the rules present is way more important than the rules themselves.
True Game Masters don’t use rules when they aren’t needed, but they do hew as close as possible to the Rules as Written when they do use them. And if a True Game Master truly thinks the rules are too shitty to use, they change game systems. That’s a way better use of a True Game Master’s time than hacking a system.
I hate D&D 5E. It’s full of shitty rules. But when I run D&D 5E, I run it mostly by the book.
The crap I’ve been teaching you — Narrating by Visualizing, Inviting the Principle Player to Act, and now following the Declare-Determine-Describe Cycle — it’s all about rhythm.
Narrate, Invite, Declare, Determine, Describe, Invite, Declare, Determine, Describe, Invite, Declare, Determine, Describe, Transition, Narrate, Invite, Declare, Determine, Describe…
Each of those things is a verse in a song. Or a musical chord. Get each one down cold and you can play them in any order and create amazing music. The habits I’ve taught you — Breathing before Speaking, Speaking to Players about Characters, Error Checking Actions, and all the rest — that’s me teaching you the right finger placement to play the chords.
While you’re focusing on your finger placement, your songs will be slow and methodical. To you, they’ll sound clumsy, forced, and stilted. But your players will still think they sound better than whatever crap you’ve been playing so far. I promise.
The point is to focus on your fundamentals. Don’t try to dress up your games with flowery prose and descriptive flair. Instead, go through the steps. Every time. In order. Correctly.
- Narrate
- Breathe, Then Speak
- Invite the Principal Player to Act
- Speak to Players about Characters
- Always Speak Directly to the Principal Player
- Declare-Determine-Describe
- Error Check Actions for Completeness, Conciseness, and Rules-Not-Mentioning-Ness
- Post Warnings
- Repeat Back the Action for Assent
- Use Your Brain to Determine the Outcome or Determine to Use the Rules
- Repeat Back the Action as an Outcome
Make a damned checklist on a sticky note and keep it in your eye line as you run games if you have to. And work through the checklist every time. It’ll all feel natural sooner than you think. And then you can add style and flair.
In short: practice your fundamentals before you start showing off.
That outline (in what, four succinct lessons?) is one of the best things to exist for ttrpgs short of ttrpgs themselves. On a note card! Yes sir! Done.
I like to think that outline was the reason Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson nvented roleplaying games.
This article reminded me I need to get better at speaking to players about characters. I’m so used to saying “you’re attack succeeds.” or “here what you find in the chest.”
“As a Game Master, it’s your job to tell the players everything their characters see, hear, perceive, and know about the game’s world. ”
As a side not here: It’s also important to keep the “noise” down, especially if you want players to gain specific information.
Players can often latch on to information that might not be relevant, that is maybe just there as world building etc.
I think a lot of derailing of adventures happens because the players didn’t pick up the right information, or made the wrong conclusions based on it.
I often wonder how important is it for us GMs to “keep our cards close to the chest,” my conclusion so far is that it’s not important, unless you want the players to get stuck.
Mysteries, puzzles and so on is fun, only until the point where the lack of information is stopping the players from proceeding.
It is VERY important. See next week, for example. And beyond.
There’s a fine line between giving players info and playing the game for them. Decisions, deductions, and discoveries are pretty much the only challenges you’ve got and games need challenge or they’re not games. So don’t be too transparent.
The very difficult part here is that what seems like giving away the answer is often entirely opaque unless you already know what the answer is, and as the only person with an accurate model of the world you can’t see the other mistaken interpretations because you know the conflicting details which players forgot or never discovered.
The active listening approach goes both ways here, players need to voice their reasoning so you can see what is going wrong. Maybe the problem is that they haven’t expended the resources to discover something, and you need to figure out how to say “you don’t know this part” if a reasonable person in that world would notice the jump in logic.
To avoid de-railment, and simultaneously to reduce the tempation to over-explain to your players, it really helps to use something like the Three Clue Rule (h/t The Alexandrian).
Which reads as follows:
“For any conclusion you want the PCs to make, include at least three clues.”
I won’t attempt to explain the idea more thoroughly here: but suffice to say if you employ enough redundancy in your ‘clue-layer’, you can afford to set up some pretty subtle clues and let the players bounce off them with impunity.
This is terrific Angry. Another model of clarity.
I’m going to try an experiment. I record my GM sessions. I’m going to re-listen to a recent game, and I’ll practice my parts of the loop (and also my ‘short-desking’) – over the top of the audio.
Obviously iDDD and SD must be used in a live-fire environment, but I hope to get a headstart on the necessary mental habits before gameday.
You might try a tool like otter.ai to transcribe the recording too. Has been very helpful to me. Especially good to scan the game quickly and find areas to focus on, to build specific skills. Free version gives you 10 hours/month I think.
Thank you for the tip, TD!
I’ve carved off a 3-hr piece of audio for otter to chew on. I will review the results when I try my iDDD exercise!
The otter transcription gives unexpectedly hilarious and opaque results for an RPG session, e.g. “firing an orc arrow at you ” literally became “environmental parrot unit”(!) – but as you say it could be very helpful for navigation.
Talking of AI, I’m finding ChatGPT very helpful for getting a start on prepping room/scene descriptions, generating sample NPC names, writing snippets of poetry for the players to find etc.
You always have to adapt what it gives you of course – its results are generally far too stilted to use ‘raw’.
But it’s a huge help for tasks that I find tedious to begin, such as ‘Describe an evil shrine to Hextor, the six-armed God of War ‘
As a public statement on a sidebar. It’s imperative to remember that various rpg safety tools were designed for, and work perfectly fine, for DM’s PLAYING R-RATED ONESHOTS WITH STRANGERS UNDER A CONSTRAINED TIME LIMIT. And that while outside of this specific environment they often seem to be an unnecessarily formal and complex aide to the process, a two hour Call of Cthulu timeslot simply does not have the time to allow for the interpersonal boundary setting you do with people you have cultivated and will ever see again.
Secondarily, a bit of the terminology confusion I think you’d say persists in the commentary on role playing games versus story entertainments or whatever is that an rpg campaign isn’t a game, but an organization tool of games. In the same way that a game of baseball is winnable, and a baseball league tournament is winnable, but there’s no such things as winning major league baseball (you can’t win one game of baseball so hard that baseball is over and you’re it’s permanent victor). So there are quests, and arcs, and dungeons that you can win- because they’re rule-constrained goal-oriented activities- but you can’t win Eberron. And people look back on campaigns that stretched out over a year, as a series of different games that didn’t add up to a singular judgement, and think “Oh, you can’t win dungeons and dragons.” Overlooking so to speak that if they didn’t have some sense of continuity of the individual quests and instead considered each of them individually then they would think of the game as winnable.
Heh, yeah, different stakes may require different tools. Pushing the limits of pre-established parameters in some settings may indeed require an advanced layer of warnings and language to be in place. There are many different ways to play pretend orcs and elves… Of course mastering actual human communication and conflict resolution is essential either way.
Interesting take on the game aspect of RPG’s. Yes they are games, but as you say, the overall “game” is not winnable. The scoring system becomes rewards and XP, but even the goals of the players/characters are flexible. The structure uses game rules which must be considered as part of adjudication, they are known to everyone so as to temper expectations, and therefore agency. Actions are winnable, certain outcomes can be expected, but the overall complexity exceeds a typical “game”
The reason I’m drawn to TTRPG’s is because computer games can’t seem to get the near infinite context of multiple situations, in a very particular setting, just right, but my brain can seemingly do so rather easily. My issue is that continually doing so, while trying to maintain verisimilitude at the detail I hope for is exhausting (and not engaging for people I’ve played with, at least not at a pace I’m capable of maintaining) I think I have to create a game for playing with others at a decent pace, and a game I play for myself at whatever pace I want at the time, and keep both games separate.
“When you said you ‘stab the orc in the head,’ were you asking for a called-shot penalty or were you just being overly prosaic?”
Ain’t ‘called-shot penalty’ gamespeak? And, if it is, ain’t asking such a question inviting the player to specify gamespeak, contra rule 3?
I’m not _just_ being pedantical here – this ties in to another question: when actions have some variations which would only be slightly different in worldspeak (so that trying to put them out entirely in worldspeak would near-necessarily violate rule 2 _hard_), which would be the lesser evil: to allow the player to comment in gamespeak something like “and I intend it to be a Telegraphic Attack” after the worldspeak description or to wax poetic about how they move slowly and theatrically, “just like the simulation”, to let the GM infer that it was supposed to be a Telegraphic Attack? (And I understand that the answer may be different “ideally” and “in practice” and also that it varies, because near-everything varies.)
To be fair, this is an issue. And every game has a few of those sorts of “different in gamespeak” things that are just unavoidable. Smart designers minimize them and call them out clearly to the players and GMs. And that’s why the “never let players utter gamespeak” is an ideal to aim for, but an unattainable one.
Yay, I wasn’t immediately derided as stupid mouthbreather! (How has that become an insult, I wonder? I could swear I breathe through my mouth more often than not because my nose is stuck or something…)
A follow-up then (hopefully not too much more stupid): when game designers call out for something to be needed to be stated explicitly by the player, is there anything that can help distinguish their being smart and this actually being a not-really-minimizable-without-overhauling-the-whole-thing thing vs. their being stupid mouthbreathers and game masters needing to override that statement?
I have no idea what you’re asking. But I’ll give you a perfect example of things that have to explained in gamespeak because worldspeak alone is insufficient. Pretty much all magic. Unless you literally want to write an entire Sandersonian treatise on how, exactly, magic works and force everyone to memorize it — which is a BAD idea — you have to accept people are going to talk about magic in terms of spending slots and mana points or whatever.
Frankly, absence of such a treatise for D&D (or me being unable to get my hands on one) may be a huge contributor to why I don’t understand D&D’s magic – which means not understanding nearly all D&D because nearly all D&D is magical…
What I’m asking is this. Let’s assume I have a rulebook of a system and it says something like “players should clearly and explicitly claim which maneuver (from the limited list) they use”. Should I trust it? Or should I try to ask my players not to declare the maneuvers and deduce them from their worldspeak, see how that goes, and then understand whether I made a mistake?
I absolutely do think that D&D would benefit from some amount of Worldspeak explanation of magic. Hell, any sign that there was some kind of consistent aspect of the world underlying the magic mechanics. That definitely helps. But it would still be quite difficult to explain something wholly unrealistic like magic purely in worldspeak terms to such a degree that a person could use it reasonably as an open-ended tool without also having a sense of the mechanics.
I know what a hammer is because I’ve seen one and have a personal experience in the world with one. Which means I can not only use it for what it’s designed to do, but I can also use it creatively to, say, weigh down a pressure plate or as a source of iron or wood or whatever. I can imagine all the ways I could manipulate and misuse a hammer because of my intuitive and experiential understanding of a hammer. While a very apt person could come up with some creative uses for a hammer if all they had to go on was a narrative description, their creativity will still be limited by their lack of experience.
Magic is like that, to some extent. Ironically, players will never be able to use magic in the same open-ended and creative way that they could use a common object because there’s no intuitive or experiential understanding of magic. And in fact, the most creative uses of magic are usually about the products of magic. For instance, I can use a fire spell more creatively than some pure magical effect because I know what fire is and how it works experientially and intuitively.
Though I realize I’m getting really deep in the weeds now.
In this case I think the GM is training the players to use WorldSpeak terms that make their Gamespeak intentions clear, without them making declarations in raw Gamespeak.
So – in reply – the player would ideally clarify his declaration to something like “Ardrick attacks with his vornblade, focussing on the orcs’ ugly face’
(sorry, this was meant as a reply to DZ’s post, I am bad at this)
So, like an agreement on what worldspeak means what gamespeak? I do feel like this could just make one’s “worldspeak” in this case another layer of gamespeak that will get detached from the world and cease being actual worldspeak.
Gotta say, this article went on the head of the worst problem I’m having when game mastering recently. I think i’m getting better in a lot of GM skills, but I still find a I’m too slow in action adjudication and can’t find a way to improve. I Know it’s probably not possible, since you said you already have mapped out these lessons, but I would like to see other articles about this topic in the future (maybe a random BS). For now, i’m gonna trust the method and use the outline until it gets smooth. But I still find I’m a little stuck in the Determine part.
Great article, but could do with more dolphins. B+
But seriously, this series of articles is really off to a great start. I’m particularly enjoying the formatting and structure in which this is all being presented, and look forward to this year’s future articles.
So far I’ve already realised value in speaking TO players ABOUT their characters, and also having a Principal Player. A few times already I’ve fallen into old habbits of finishing narration and then saying “so what to you all do?” but I’ve been able to quickly catch the ball, nominate a Principal Player, and invite them to act. It’s absolutely working great. No more awkward silences or players talking over each other.
Angry, what do you think about sometimes asking players to describe the result? Of course, only after the DM determined it.
For example, on a killing blow to boss monster. Are there any downside to letting a player to show off in this case?
In the general case, assuming the average table of any-players, it’s all downside. And most average players don’t consider it the reward some GMs inexplicably think it is. Honestly, if your goal is to run the best game possible for everyone at the table, don’t outsource your job or pacing control to your players. But I know some GMs insist that “at their table” and “with their players” blahdy blah blah.
My question though is this: what’s the UPSIDE? Why is this a thing you’d want to do?
I’ll admit I just assumed players want to describe their actions, so it would be kind to sometimes give it to them. I’ll try to observe more sceptically whether this is the case at my table.
When I play (which I admit it’s not very frequently) I like when the master let me describe killing blows or other “epic moments”. Could be the GM side in me who likes to describe. But I genuinely think that this is a moment that I feel I can fully create the fantasy of my character.
Nonetheless, I can fully confirm that this is not something every player feels. There are a lot of people who only feel the pressure and don’t enjoy it
As-is it sounds like “showing off” I would figure that once the fundamentals are mastered and you have developed trust with your player to not F up the pacing it could be allowed.
Personally I might telegraph that an opponent is on the verge of death and invite a player to declare any “killing blow flourish” as part of their character’s intended action, and/or as part of my confirm the action step. “So, seeing that the zombie is mangled and broken, Aidrick intends to swing a savage blow to it’s neck with his axe, severing it’s head from it’s body?”
Conveniently, though: it’s *not* their actions. That “killing blow to the boss monster” isn’t a player character’s action — it’s the *result* of the player character’s action.
Unless you’re going all “shared narrative storytelling-y” with your game, then there’s nothing there that needs their narration. It’s a part of *your* world (as the GM) reacting to the actions your players took.
And imagine if a player starts describing the earth cracking beneath the big bad guy, magma shooting out, hellish tentacles wrapping around the dude’s neck to drag him to hell…I mean, if *you* describe it that way, that’s cool, it fits *your* world and makes sense in context, and you know why it happened, whether and why it could happen again, and what it implies about the larger world. But if the player just starts throwing in stuff like that…? What are you s’posed to do? Adapt it into how your game world works and add whole new entities and details and places and powers and…? Or tell them: “No, that didn’t happen, [try again/forget it I’ll just describe it]”?
An easier comparison: if the player were playing some MMORPG or other first-person action/combat game, and they hit their combo keys *just* right…would you expect the game to pause, say “You nailed this boss monster, so now you will custom-design an animation to show how it went down”?
Or would you expect the game to show them some Awesome Badass Deathblow Animation™©® that they could get all giddy and crow about and feel like some massive damn hero for a moment?
If you’re the GM: you’re the computer. *Maybe* disadvantaged in terms of audiovisual stuff and Determine-stage speed (your mileage — and velocity — may vary), but way, way more advantaged in terms of all the possibilities you can provide for that huge satisfying moment. Personally, I don’t really get why players would want to take over that moment, when they could “watch” it cinematically unfold and know that this incredibly cool bit is all about them and their character’s amazing feat, for at least that one shining moment.
This is a really great point:
Very few people recognize the distinction. Good on you.
Got to love fundamentals distilled down into simple procedures. I am very interested in this series. I intuitively feel like this is exactly what I have somehow lost over the years, and just what I need to potentially reinvigorate my love of actually playing (as opposed to just tinkering with systems and dreaming of playing).
Actually implementing any of this advice will be a future endeavor if/when I decide to get a group together, but I am grateful for knowing where to go when the time comes, and maybe getting some habit-building practice in beforehand as a matter of principal.
In any case, thank you Angry!
On the subject of rolling to stab the Orc in the head, let’s say the player does intend to land a ‘called shot’, so to speak. I have him roll with disadvantage, he hits, and now the Orc is missing one eye and will end up blinded if the other eye is taken out, which isn’t hard to do even with disadvantage thanks to bounded accuracy.
The thing is, what happens when the DM starts landing called shots on the players? That’s a lot of PCs getting blinded and crippled by what should’ve been a medium encounter.
So don’t do that.
I wouldn’t, that’s why I don’t use called shots. If HP are stuff like luck and stamina, then players can only receive a real injury when they’re at 0 HP. At that point they’re unconscious anyway.
I mean, let the players take called shots. That’s just better for the game. But don’t you use them against the players.
So, I think you are doing two things that lead to that unwanted outcome.
First, you’re missing a few steps in the Describe phase. Even if the player was going for a headshot or eye-stab or something, “I stab the orc in the head” is not a complete action declaration. You need both the Desired Outcome and the Approach. If a player says “I attack the orc with my sword”, what they are declaring is “I want to kill the orc by attacking the orc with my longsword”. The Desired Outcome of a dead orc is sort of implicit in the word “attack”.
But, if the player says “I stab the orc in the head”, you have to dig for a Desired Outcome. Concluding that the player means “I want to blind the orc by stabbing it in the eye with my sword” is a bit of a leap, and has to be confirmed with the player.
Second, once you have confirmed that the player wants to blind the orc, the Determine phase offers a simple solution. If a foe is actively engaged with you in combat, dodging your attacks and actively looking for an opening in your defence, hitting them in the eye is next to impossible, unless they are a cyclops or something. Just say “no, there is no way you can hit the orc in the eye in a heated battle”
Isn’t it technically possible, though? You CAN stab someone in the eye, medieval swordfighting manuals even had it illustrated. Called shots aren’t impossible on medium creatures IRL. For a master archer it would probably be even easier.
First, caveats: I don’t have any experience in fighting, archery or medival combat, so I might be talking out of my ass. Also, Angry came with a good answer above.
Second, if you have decided that poking someones eye out in a heated battle is something that can succeed, can fail and carries a risk or consequence, go for it. Your game, your rulings. If you have decided using your brain that this is the way your game world works, then that is the correct ruling for your game. But don’t think that the “called shot rules” (which aren’t actually rules in the game) forces your hand. The rules are a tool that you can choose to use after you have engaged your brain.
Third, my ruling at my table would still be that the eye-shot is a no go, for several reasons.
Of course it is technically possible, but that doesn’t impress me. Any GM worth their screen can argue that anything is possible. It is technically possible to fall out of your bed and break you leg in the morning, but you don’t require a Dex save every time the adventurers sleep.
Besides, for me, called shots are supposed to be about the adventurers discovering an oppertunity in the world, and then exploiting that. Like trying to hit a cyclop’s eye, or hitting a guard in their glass jaw. “My opponent has eyes” is not really anything special, and thus going for the eyes should be the worse strategy, all things being equal.
Lastly, the numbers just doesn’t make any sense to me. With a +5 to hit, which most lvl1 characters have, hitting an orc with disadvantage has a 42 % chance of succeeding. That’s a 42% chance every 6 seconds to hit someones eye – that seems way to high for me.
So I’m fine with just saying that it’s impossible. Obviously, if a player does something that should give them a reasonable chance of hitting an eye, I will adjucate that action fairly. But that’s up to the players to figure out.
The thing about real combat manuals is that you don’t actually have to put your weapon through the surface of someone’s pupil to blind them: hitting basically anywhere that chemistry safety goggles covers up on the face is a blinding blow if you break the bones around the eyesocket.
A ‘realistic’ rpg combat system would mean missing almost all the time, then flipping a coin on a hit and if it comes up heads you just die.
I mean, hitting a Cyclops in the eye is about as if not more obvious and unimpressive as hitting anyone else there.
I agree that disadvantage is not the right mechanic for this, but not for the reasons you mentioned. How hard it is to hit anybody in any given place is first and foremost a matter of skill. Not merely one’s own skill, but also that of your opponent. An orc with a greataxe wearing hide armor isn’t a difficult target to a trained fighter, lvl 1 or otherwise.
The real issue is that disadvantage doesn’t stack, so if there’s is already a source of it, it magically becomes just as easy to stab a guy in the eye as to stabbing him anwhere else in the body.
It seems that you have become less swearing and more respectful of your audience. Thanks.
This is something I’ve been doing for years, without even thinking about it. Nearly all my players don’t read or know the rules, so mentioning it is useless. They are dumb as a stack of bricks and try to gain (in their mind) advantage however they can, which is why I always repeat their action back to them (usually a little more flowery and descriptive), and if they don’t object that is what will happen.
Warnings are part of that advantage thinking (you sure you want to use Intimidate on that guard, because the moment you are gone, your leverage (ie weapons) is gone too. This is what persuasion is for even if the + is smaller…).
As for the rules? If I don’t remember them I will look ’em up later when I need to fall asleep, and hopefully remember them better next time. I will also adjust whatever I feel is right to keep the flow going, following this I am trying to learn to use more failing forward.
Question about not letting players use gamespeak: do you let players decide which abilities their character is trying to use to accomplish their intended action? If not, could you explain why? If so, how do you teach players to do that without using gamespeak?
For illustration, the easiest example might be Athletics and Acrobatics in 5e. Lots of intended actions could be resolved with either ability. But if the players can’t say, “Juss wants to use his Acrobatics to flip past the orc,” how would the player make that selection? Is a narrative “code” sufficient (e.g., “Juss wants to nimbly flip over the orc trying to block the passage”)?
Oh that narration afterwards. When I do it, it goes great, but it’s so easy to forget. Making a post-it for my session tonight.
I do, however, declare actions the way you tell us to accept them in the game I play in. And boy do I notice a difference in how the DM responds to me vs the other players. And I notice when he doesn’t narrate back, just gives results.
I wonder why the social protection devices seem to make you so mad.
Anyways, great article. I especially liked the short recap at the end: I had resolved to do something similar after the article on narration, but you saved me the effort.
Do your regular players consciously know the rules you have for action declaration or do you have to teach them again every time you haven’t seen each other for a while?
Regarding using rules RAW – I hide behind rules. They are my shield. I have never killed a player’s character, that character had to die by the hand of those soulless, ruthless rules.
And I am not being smug here. Losing a character can hurt. It can feel bad when everything one does fails and all that’s left is being helpless (I believe that a part of fun in RPGs is about pretending to have control over your fate, I think we desire agency and everyday life tends to take a lot of it away from us). Dying can get immersive. Sad. At least I have seen it happen like that.
I don’t think that I would feel ok with doing something like that to people I care about (of course I care about them, I spend so much time in their company, even if I pretend to consider them a bunch of chimps who happen to have weapon-grade plutonium).
But the game has to feel fair. If they cannot die, then there has never been any danger, and there will not be any excitement. And if they suddenly can die again, I am a hypocritical, lying bastard who changes already established rules on a whim.
So I hide behind rules and when the rules say that someone dies, they die. Even if the death is meaningless.
I would like to share one more thing: that dying itself does not seem to be a problem. Hell, suffering itself is not a problem (like real-life suffering) as much as when it’s pointless dying or suffering.
If a player gets to sacrifice their beloved character for something meaningful that death seems acceptable.
But if a noble fighter dies due to a combo of party’s miscommunication, dumb decisions and dice rolls, with nothing to show for that loss… that smarts. This is where I have my doubts. And this is where I truly need my Shield of Rules. Because I am the guy pulling the trigger, executing a meaningless death, a waste. And inflicting suffering on my friends.