Hey all. Angry here…
Today marks the beginning of the end of my series of stupid narration tricks. At least for now. I’m sure I’ll come up with more eventually.
Unfortunately, though, I’ve had to split this last trick in two. I’m doing so partly because of time constraints and partly because of concerns over the length. Well, not really the length. Rather, I’m concerned about the density. I ended up expanding this into three smaller, but related tricks, plus an extra bonus thing about non-player characters. I don’t want to pack too many ideas into one feature.
Worse still, the time constraints are forcing me to make a very ugly split of it. Just kind of slice the article down the middle and say, “to be continued…” I hate doing that, but I think it’s for the best.
The Mysterious Pink Letter
There’s this great moment in the final book — so far — of the Song of Ice and Fire series, A Dance With Dragons…
Actually, hold on…
We’ve had a bit of fun throughout this Stupid Narration Tricks series taking potshots at different authors; we had one last chance to get our shots in, and we declared peace. Or, at least, we declared a truce. It’s over and done. If you have opinions about G.R.R. Martin or whether the next book is ever happening, take them anywhere else. I’m actually kind of tired of this fandom war bullshit. I was trying to satirize it by being ridiculous, though I didn’t say anything I don’t personally believe, and that didn’t work. So now I’m just putting down a minefield and declaring this a demilitarized zone. Violate it at your peril.
Also, I don’t want to hear about the HBO series. I’m talking about the books.
Anyway, there’s this great moment in the fifth book of George R. R. Martin’s Song of Ice and Fire series, A Dance with Dragons. See, there’s this dude called Jon Snow. His entire story has been about what to do when your duty, what is right, and the desperate desires of your heart all pull you in different directions. As Martin once said, the core of drama is “the human heart in conflict with itself.” Jon Snow gets this letter from a vile psychopath named Ramsay Bolton, who has become a dark, nasty reflection of Jon Snow. The letter puts Snow in a fury and, as a result, he impulsively abandons his oaths and duties to march on Ramsay Bolton.
Those are the highlights anyway.
What makes this moment great is that many readers, myself included, don’t think Ramsay Bolton sent the letter, nicknamed The Pink Letter, at all. We think it was sent by someone else who wanted to spur Jon Snow to action. Except he took the wrong action, and then he got executed for abandoning his command. It’s a whole big thing.
Now, on the surface, the text claims Ramsay Bolton sent the letter. There’s nothing explicit in the narrative to suggest otherwise. There’s no scene in which Melisandre and Stannis the Mannis say, “You know, I have a plan about how we can change Snow’s mind. Get me some parchment…” or anything like that. But there are clues. Subtle clues. Narrative clues.
Because Martin is a master of clever, careful word choice.
In A Dance with Dragons, we readers see three different examples of letters written by Ramsay Bolton. The first arrives as a “tightly rolled parchment” and is “sealed with a hard button of pink wax.” It’s “scrawled in a huge, spiky hand,” and it’s signed by Ramsay Bolton, “Lord of Winterfell,” and is witnessed by several members of his noble retinue. That’s from Chapter 26, The Wayward Bride, if you care.
In Chapter 28, we see that Ramsay sent another copy of the same letter to someone else. The details are repeated. Some verbatim. The phrase “hard button of pink wax” is repeated exactly.
That final letter, though? The Pink Letter? It’s sealed with a “smear of pink wax.”
You see it, right?
There’s actually a lot of details that are just slightly off in the third letter. The signature is different, there are some phrases and threats that don’t make sense coming from Ramsey, the letter isn’t explicitly written in flaky brown ink like dried blood, and so on. But it’s the repetition of the phrase, “hard button of pink wax” changing to “smear of pink wax” I want you to notice.
Martin chooses his words with deliberate care. He’s a true wordsmith. There are lots of examples of him using precisely repeated terms and phrases to connect different things or to reveal crucial details. He loves to foreshadow. He loves to build mysteries. He loves to mess with prophecy. So when he uses the same phrase twice and then changes it a third time, he’s not screwing up. He’s making a choice.
He’s also demonstrating three narrative tricks that, if you learn to master your own word choice and speak with care, you can use at your table to solve one of the oldest problems in Game Mastering.
Today, I want to end my Stupid Narration Trick series by discussing the art of the narrative scavenger hunt, the spotlight problem, and the making and breaking of patterns.
The Art of the Narrative Scavenger Hunt
The Pink Letter Mystery is why I started this whole dumb series. It exemplifies what I’ve been striving to accomplish for years in my own narration. Because, while I don’t run mystery games, I love to include light mystery elements in my fantasy adventures. I love to hide details in plain sight. I love when my players figure shit out either just before the reveal or just after the reveal.
Remember, the best way for a reveal, betrayal, or reversal to come out at the game table is that the players figure it out right before the climax and act on it. The second best way is for it to blindside the players and then hear them say, “We should have seen that coming. All the clues were there.”
The problem is tabletop roleplaying games, as a medium, suck for this sort of thing. It’s down to the nature of narration. The players can’t see, hear, perceive, or know anything you don’t describe, so by describing something, you call attention to it. You flag it as important. Meanwhile, if you don’t describe something, you just end up blindsiding the players. They can’t see anything coming if you don’t describe it first.
When it comes to surprises, mysteries, reversals, and reveals, you want to give smart, attentive players a chance to see what’s coming. If they put the clues together before the surprise, that’s good gameplay. That’s winning. And note that I’m not casually blurring the distinction between player and character here. When I say players, I mean players. You don’t want to reduce solving a mystery or even noticing something is amiss down to a die roll.
Characters perceive; players deduce. Deduction is the gameplay.
Let’s say you’re doing the standard Doppelganger Gambit, right? An imposter has replaced one of the party’s trusted allies. You really don’t want to say, “Make an Intuition check,” followed by, “You realize this isn’t Grifty Steve at all. It’s some kind of pod person.” Or have Fake Grifty Steve roll repeated Deception checks in every conversation. Honestly, how you want to do this is really complicated, and adjusting the difficulty for the adventure you’re running is a really tricky issue. I could probably do a whole, dedicated thing about a proper Doppelganger Gambit adventure, but this is about narration, so let me just cut to the important point.
There must come a point in the adventure when the imposter’s actions are big enough to trigger a die-roll alarm bell. Managing the escalation of the Doppelganger Gambit is key. It has to be a long con. But by the time the escalation reaches plastic math rock levels, the players should already have some seeds of doubt in their heads. They should be thinking, “What’s up with Grifty Steve?” Assuming they’re smart and attentive.
But this goes beyond the Doppelganger Gambit and into something I call the Spotlight Problem. Your narration, as a Game Master, is basically a giant spotlight that you shine on things.
Let me state the Spotlight Problem in the clearest, simplest way I can…
How do you hide a key in a room such that attentive players might notice it and inattentive players might miss it? Or, at least, how do you hide it such that an attentive player says, “I bet if I take this action, I will find the key,” whereas an inattentive player might be left to ransack the whole room or else might not even think to look for a key in the room.
It’s a tricky question, right? If you mention the key or even mention the glint of metal in the soot of the fireplace, you’re basically just saying, “and hidden over there is the key you need.” If you don’t say anything, the players can’t find the key at all. Only the characters can. The players just hit the Search button over and over. That isn’t the same as a player thinking, “I’ll bet this specific action that I have noticed is an explicit possibility will lead me to the key I need.”
How do you hide a detail for the players to discover or act on when every word you say is a giant spotlight saying, “Hey, look over here!”
Hidden In Plain Verbal Sight
Martin’s prose demonstrates how to hide verbal details in plain, narrative sight. But before I explain, you have to understand this isn’t an easy trick to pull off. It takes practice and very careful control of your speech. It also takes a keen understanding of how you narrate. You, personally. Because everyone’s a little different.
See, narration actually doesn’t shine a spotlight on everything. Mine doesn’t, yours doesn’t, and even Martin’s doesn’t. Narration is full of innocuous details. Little bits of fluff and mood-setting and point-making and showing-not-telling. A lot of narration is just about making the world more vivid.
Imagine, for instance, that I’m describing this little cottage the heroes are visiting for reasons. As they approach the door, I describe it as friendly and inviting. Clearly, I’m doing the whole mood-setting thing. Or maybe I’m characterizing the apple-cheeked halfling that lives there. It doesn’t matter. After I state that the cottage looks friendly, in a fit of show-don’t-tell, I rattle off three quick details to make the point. Maybe I say that the cobbled path is free of weeds, the porch is swept, and there’s even a mat welcoming visitors in front of the door.
Imagine now that you’re one of my hapless players. You knock; there’s no answer. You try the door; it’s locked. What next? What next if you’re not a rogue, you don’t know the knock spell, and you don’t have a battering ram in your pants?
Did you check under the mat? I’ll bet lots of you did. I know because lots of actual players actually do. I’m betting some of you didn’t, though. Lots of actual players actually don’t. Especially because it’s way less obvious when I do it at the table. Especially with my practiced delivery.
Like many Game Masters, I tend to rattle off a few innocuous supporting details to characterize scenes when I set them. I might list a few furniture items that exist to make the point that it’s a bedroom. Or maybe I’ll rattle off a few items visible in the larder. Or maybe I’ll mention a few of the many images carved on the temple’s wall. To players, it all sounds like fluffy details. They hear them, but they don’t really hear them. Often, that’s all it is. I’m just improvising. “It’s a larder, right? So there’s sacks of flour, some wheels of cheese, a couple of those garlic braids hanging from the ceiling, stuff like that. Whatever.”
But sometimes, I sneak in something important like, “a sealed clay jar behind some cabbages on a shelf.”
Of course, if the players ransack the whole room and make a whole big Search check of it, they can find the jar, but it’ll have the normal dice rolls and game costs and consequences associated with room ransacking. But attentive players who say, “Wait. What was that about a sealed jar? I want to check that out,” get to skip the mechanical rigmarole.
But the actual, proper handling of spotting, searching, and ransacking is a whole other feature for a whole other day.
My point is that, because every bit of narration is a mix of key details and innocuous, fluffy embellishment, you actually can hide things in plain, narrative sight to make actual gameplay out of spotting stuff in the environment.
But, as I said above, this takes some practice. It’s a technique you have to work on, and there are two basic ways to do it. First, you can pay careful attention to your own narration and figure out how you, personally, deliver key details and embellish with innocuous fluff. Once you learn your own natural narrative patterns, you know where the hiding places are, and you can start putting doormats and hidden potions and glints of metal in them.
Alternatively, you can purposely practice a standard narrative pattern until you have it down. For example, you can use mine. Make a statement and then provide a list of three, casual-sounding, supporting details. It’s basically just Tell then Show mixed with the Rule of Three. Mine even comes with difficulty knobs.
Want to make something more noticeable? Give it a longer name, an extra detail, or put it last in the list. Want to make something harder to spot? Shorten the name, limit the details, put it in the middle of the list, or add a fourth item to the list. I shit you not. Those are the legitimate difficulty sliders for hiding details in lists of innocuous fluff.
I also want to note that you don’t have to be perfect about this. You don’t have to obsess about it. I’m not fully on my best narrative game in every encounter, scene, and session. I race through narration sometimes, I gloss over things, I stammer and stutter, I’m a human. I narrate like a human. But I do tend to rattle off lists of innocuous supporting fluff in a lot of my scene-setting a lot of the time. My players are used to it. Unconsciously anyway. So when it is important for me to be on my game and get it right so I can hide a detail in plain narrative sight, it doesn’t sound any different. It just sounds like one of the encounters I’m a little more locked-in for.
Even the players who’ve been at my table for years don’t spot everything. That said, even newbies can pick up on my hidden details. That’s how I know I’ve nailed the technique. It works often, but not always, regardless of how long I’ve been running for a particular player.
To Be Continued…
So now you know how to overcome the Spotlight Problem and hide details in plain narrative sight. In theory, anyway. Because it’s gonna take some practice to get it right. But Hiding Details in Plain Narrative Sight is really just the first of three feats in this particular feat tree. I don’t want to pile on too much in one lesson, though. What’s say you take the week to practice your narration game and then come back so we can talk about the power of repetition and the making and breaking of patterns. Then, you’ll be able to pull off a narrative Pink Letter Mystery of your very own.
See ya.
Right I’ve had that problem one time, I was trying to hide some clues about a song with verses dispatched as visible clues in different rooms. So I made the hints a little shady because it would be obvious otherwise. Needless to say, they didn’t get it at all. Well it was optional anyway but there were pretty disappointed for not seeing it at the end. Getting a habit of describing details would have helped indeed, I’ve started to work on it before this article but I forgot, thanks for the reminder.
Just once I wish I could hear you run a game. Something I’ve always appreciated about your work is your ability to self-reflect and identify a quality you possess. Then make that practice explicit for your readers. And even throw in a practical tip!
There may be lots of talented GMs out there that probably do great things at the table. But can they name what those are and explain them to others?
I haven’t found em. The only one I know is YOU.
Thanks as always
No you don’t. I suck at this stuff.
Last session I was running a module where there was a key hidden in a hollow bed knob that could be unscrewed.
The players searched the bed very carefully, and described their search in excruciating meticulous detail, but the only part of the bed they didn’t do anything with was the bed-knobs.
I had no idea how to arbitrate this.
The allowing players to auto succeed if they describe it just right is easy enough for search checks, but it gets murky in other areas in my experience.
Especially in dialogue. If I base the difficulty on what the characters say, let alone auto fail or auto succeed on it, the players freak out and I get all sorts of weird straw-man arguments. “You are jusging my rp!” “I play a charisma 18 character because i cant speak irl!” “Stop grading me on how eloquent I am ooc!” “Stop forcing me to do silly accents!” “You don’t force me to do push ups for a strength check!” “So next time we do combat, should I hit you irl?” “What’s next, expecting us to cast real spells?” Etc.
And I am like, now, all I am doing is setting the DC based on what you are telling the NPC, which might make it so low its impossible to fail or so high its impossible to succeed, just like every other task in the whole game.
Are you adjudicating the dialogue scenes based on how the characters are interacting with the NPC’s, or based on the players specific wording and elocution? Because they can be very different.
If the player stutters and mumbles and can’t find all the right words to use, but they are clearly *trying* to have their character sweet-talk a merchant and play on their ego, then that’s the action you should be adjudicating. If the player’s know that’s how you adjudicate, then they shouldn’t have anything to grumble about.
e.g.
“Okay Simon, your character Sampson tries to negotiate a good price with the merchant by being friendly and complementing their exquisite produce. Give me a persuasion check.”
Here the player has the goal of getting a good deal, and they are trying to achieve that by flattering the merchant. The “performance” of the *player* shouldn’t matter.
The DC of the check should be based on how likely that method is to succeed. Again, the performance of the player is irrelevant.
Hope that helps.
That is exactly what I am having trouble getting across to my players.
I am trying to ask what they say to the npc, what they want from them, what approach they use, what they offer in return, etc.
The players then refuse because they insist I am somehow “grading their performance” or something.
I am not sure if they legitimately believe this (whether consciously or subconsciously) or if its just an excuse not to have to put any thought / effort into social interactions.
Huh. That sounds frustrating for sure. I guess what I might do is simply remind them that it’s important to understand that different approaches NEED to be adjudicated differently. Trying to fast-talk your way past some guards by pretending to be a tapestry inspector is different to trying to trying to get past them by confidently insisting they have an invitation from the baron to talk about the ‘bandit problem’. Both might call for deception checks, but they would have different DC’s. And importantly, neither have anything to do with the players’ “performance”.
Maybe you can phrase it like “okay, so you want to try to get past the guard by deceiving them. How would you like to attempt this? If you come up with a smart idea then the DC will be lower.” That way it sounds like they’re being rewarded for a good idea, but not punished for a bad idea.
Good luck.
Ah, did we finally circle back to R.R.R.R.R.R. Martin’s writing trick that I asked about, was starting to think I had missed it.
It’s interesting, I’m reflecting on the sealed jar, that it being singular, makes it stand out more, perhaps even a bit much, than if it had been sealed “jars”, right. There’s probably a term for that. Plus mentioning jars in a larder isn’t unexpected, but singling out a single jar, that’s out of place.
But that also introduces a bit of a dilemma, since on the one hand you have what makes for good gameplay, which is making clues findable, making the mystery solvable. And on the other hand, the characterization of the NPC in question leaving the clue. Like, would a paranoid, highly intelligent shapeshifter/person with something to hide, just leave the key underneath the rug when they go out, probably not. So that is something I’ve had trouble with, because clues, and the manner in which they’re found, might also tell us something about the culprit. And what if that culprit is supposed to be a mastermind with powers of scrying, what then? The short answer just seems to be that they’re going to have missed some detail, because that makes the game better, heck it makes the game happen at all, but it’s still a tricky thing to come up with those exceptions, especially since you realistically need to leave several clues, about three or so for every deduction you want them to make, and not just the one.
Time is also an enemy to investigations, if something happened a good while ago, would the clues still be there? Would the culprit have cleaned them up by now? And if you choose to move the event closer to the present, you’re also making it a bigger thing in people’s current everyday life. Like if their uncle died yesterday, versus if they died 3 months ago. But of course there’s also the other end of it, if it happened 3 months ago, why are we only just now investigating it? Did someone else investigate prior, if not, etc and so forth.
Plus in a medieval setting sans (or low) magic, you’re very limited to what clues are reasonably available. You can’t exactly do a DNA test or dust for fingerprints, and if the culprit wipes the blood away, no darklight to tell the tale. So it’s basically all physical objects/remnants or signs, and eye-witnesses.
—“So next time we do combat, should I hit you irl?” “What’s next, expecting us to cast real spells?” Etc. —
Those are hilarious.
For the bed post . . . I wonder if you could have used either a passive or active check to give a hint so that character can have a chance now that the pkayer’s sort of failed. And a succesful check like maybe one of the bed post knobs is shiny. Or maybe that clue is a bit on the nose . . . Maybe the floor near the one post is worn?? That way the players get their chance to solve the riddle and the characters also get their chance? Or else you roll a die frequently for checks but let the players’ declared actions heavily influence modifiers to the rolls?
There are no execution challenges in the game just, what was the term, decision challenges? And i don’t want to ignore avatar strength yet, if i lean too hard on the avatar strength and roll checks too often, i start to rake away some of the players’ decision challenges.
The example above about the hollow bed knob is interesting. We don’t know the full set-up, but it seems like the players clearly knew there was something to be found in the bed:
“The players searched the bed very carefully, and described their search in excruciating meticulous detail, but the only part of the bed they didn’t do anything with was the bed-knobs.”
So I assume the DM’s narration gave the players some clue to search the bed. If the payers have followed the clue and their characters spend the time to search the bed then I think it’s gotten to the point where they can reasonably auto-succeed, regardless of whether or not they specifically mention the bed knobs.
If the DM in this scenario were to decide that the players need to specifically search the north-west bed knob by attempting to unscrew it in a clockwise direction to successfully find the key, then I think that’s a lot to ask of most players. The DM would have to lay a lot of clues to get a player to even attempt that. The DM should also realise that the players are highly unlikely to find the key, and be prepared for that as the likely outcome. There should be a way to continue the adventure without the key.
(I’m exaggerating here just to show an extreme example)
It was from Curse of Strahd. Here is the “boxed text”:
“This room contains a four-poster bed, its headboard carved in the likeness of a giant raven. A soft black rug covers the floor between the bed and the door. In the corners
of the south wall stand two slender wardrobes with a tapestry of a church hanging on the wall between them. Beneath the tapestry sits a handsomely carved rocking cradle. To the north, under a window, is a plain desk and chair. Other furnishings include a wooden chest and a freestanding mirror in a wooden frame.”
And the instructions:
“The wooden chest is locked, and the key is hidden in a compartment in one of the bedposts. A character who searches the bed notices that a knob on one of the bedposts is loose and can be removed, revealing the compartment inside. The contents of the chest are described in the “Treasure” section below.”
In the end I just gave it to them without a roll.
Yeah okay. I think you did the right thing then. The adventure just requires a player to search the bed. I don’t see any benefit in asking for a roll in that instance, and the adventure doesn’t explicitly state a DC for perception. The text implies that the loose knob is obvious as soon as the characters get close enough to search the bed.