Okay, you know the drill. This is the party where I drone on about something someone said or how I’ve been thinking about some problem or about a movie I watched or whatever while I dance around stating the actual topic of this article. I call it the Long, Rambling Introduction™. The thing is, though, that my last article – Lost Player Skills: Mapping – had an extra super long Long, Rambling Introduction™ that was all about how the two articles I was going to post about lost player skills joined up with other articles I’d posted and how it was all inspired by a number of bitchfests I’d had with other GMs at conventions and s$&%.

Well, I gotta be honest, that one kinda tapped me out. I mean it. I really have nothing to lead into this one with. And, honestly, if I didn’t try to keep these things to around 5,000 words a pop and I thought people would read it, I would have combined these two articles together. Hell, they were written together. They even refer to each other. That’s why they’re coming out so close to each other. That and the fact that I fell behind by two weeks in November and I’m trying desperately to catch up so my articles all come out on time in December.

Anyway… the point is, this is all you’re going to get for a Long, Rambling Introduction™. Just me explaining why there really isn’t one and then jumping straight into the article. On the bright side, I did manage to stretch even that out into 300 words. That’s something at least. Right?

We Do That…

A few weeks ago, I talked about how group decision making at the RPG table is an absolute f$&%ing disaster these days. How the players get lost in deliberation forever, discussing to death choices that actually don’t matter a whole hell of a lot, and beating good ideas to death because they aren’t perfect and then discovering they have no ideas left to consider. Remember that?

I want to add another problem to that mix. The problem I like to call the “we do that” problem.

Imagine this: the PCs have come upon the goblin’s camp. There’s a dozen goblins, a few tents, and the item that the party needs to retrieve. They don’t want to – or can’t – fight all the goblins at once. So, they need a plan. And they’ve been sitting there in their hidden vantage point in the underbrush atop a nearby hill discussing the plan. Alice could sneak in and try to steal it. We could make a distraction. What if we lead that owlbear here; the one we left in that cave. What if we set fire to the tents? We’d need to funnel the goblins away from the treasure. And on and on and on. You’ve heard this crap before a thousand times.

Now, you’re listening. Mostly. You need to be prepared. But you’re listening from a GMing perspective. So, as soon as you hear something like “lead the owlbear here,” you find yourself shuffling papers to make sure you have the owlbear’s stats handy. And when it comes to setting fire to the camp, you start thinking about how the goblins will react and trying to remember if there are rules for how fire spreads and what you said about the weather. You’re listening. But you’re evaluating.

On top of all that GMing evaluation, you’re also standing by to jump in if the players say something that indicates they are missing some crucial information they should know. Like, if you mentioned that it’s raining and everything is soaked and the players forgot that. You want to remind of that the moment one of them mentions trying to set fire to the camp. Tell them it probably won’t work. And you need to be ready to answer questions.

So, this is going on. And I’m sure you can picture this exchange because you’re a GM and you’ve been through before. Whenever you give the players a chance to plan anything, this is how it plays out. Right?

And then, suddenly, while you’re reviewing the owlbear stats, suddenly, one of the players turns to you and says, “okay, we do that.”

Well, what the f$&% is THAT?

Right?

It’s not that you haven’t been listening. You were mostly listening. But you’ve got a lot going on. And, meanwhile, the players have been raising and discarding all of the different components of different plans for the better part of a quarter-hour. Which particular list of components and individual actions is it that the players have actually settled on as the ones to Frankenstein together into some kind of master plan? What, in short, is THAT?

That’s the “we do that” problem. It happens when the players have spent a long time deliberating a series of different actions and they think they’ve arrived at some sort of consensus and now want you to describe the outcome based on whatever the last several things they said were. They are relying on you to have listened to and remembered the entire deliberation they just had, to separate out the parts that actually constitute action declarations, to fill in whatever blanks they have left in their action declarations, and then to just tell them how it worked. And no matter how attentive you are – and, by the way, you shouldn’t have to be THAT attentive – no matter how attentive you are, you’re eventually going to f$&% something up. Or miss something. Or the players will miss something.

What generally follows, if you’re a smart GM, is that you now review all of the actions as you understand them and repeat them all back to the individual players as firm, well-stated declarations of action, and make each player confirm what they are trying to do. And often, what happens is that you and the players all understand that not only have you – the GM – missed a crucial detail or forgotten something or misunderstood something, some of the players have as well. Often, you find the players aren’t as clear on the plan as they think they are.

Now, I want to add this problem to the general pile of problems involved in collaborative group decision making at the RPG table. I want to add it to the fact that players tend to over-discuss and tend to discard good plans in the pursuit of a nonexistent perfect plan. And that they tend to go in circles seeking information they don’t have instead of just picking a plan and going with it. And to all of that, I want to add an observation:

A Team is Not a Group of Individuals

I want you to try something for me. I want you to have a private conversation with each of your players. And in that conversation, I want you to ask them some things. I want you to ask them if they can state the race, class, and background of each of the other characters at the table. I want you to ask them if they can state what class build each of the other characters has gone with. Assuming your game has class builds. I want you to ask them if they can state two combat abilities that each other character has that are unique to that character. I want you to ask them if they can name two skill proficiencies each other character has. And I want you to ask them what each character’s top two best and one worst ability scores are. And I want you to ask them if they can describe the personality and goals of each other character at the table in one sentence each. One sentence personality. Once sentence goal. Oh, and ask about backstory too. Ask for one solid backstory detail about each other character.

Oh, and if YOU can’t answer those questions yourself about every character at your table, you’ve got a problem. And you SHOULD be able to do it from memory.

Now, pay careful attention as they answer those questions. I want you to basically score each answer, not just on how right it is but also how detailed it is and how likely it is someone guessed. Because you can tell when someone is guessing and when someone is remembering. And you can also tell the difference between easy remembering and frantic remembering. And you can also tell when someone is just extrapolating based on other answers. For example, if Alice remembers that Bob is playing a rogue and the only unique combat ability she can cite is “sneak attack,” she’s probably just saying that because she knows rogues have sneak attack. But if she says, “oh, he has that one ability where if he and an enemy are both isolated in their own little duel, he can sneak attack even without advantage,” that’s a good, solid remembering. Five out of five.

Why do I raise this point? Because I’ve noticed a trend at a lot of tables – BUT NOT ALL TABLES – of players basically acting as a group of individuals instead of as an actual team. Oh, sure, they all try to win together and they all try to come up with plans together, but most of the players seem to view the rest of the party as their sidekicks. They’re along for the ride. It’s hard to explain. But it’s visible in certain interactions. And it affects how the group works together.

Now, before I go any further, I have to say a few things about that test. First, it’s not the sort of thing anyone is going to get a perfect score on. Hell, even the GM usually can’t get a perfect score on it. I can answer MOST of those questions about my current group from memory, but I gotta be honest, I have to check my notes to figure out what second ability score everyone is good at. And, these days in D&D, there’s a lot working against anyone being able to do particularly well on that test. Because characters have a LOT of abilities and many of those abilities are really esoteric. Between class abilities, spells, feats, and magical items, players can do a hell of a lot. They can do so much, in fact, that most players can’t actually list everything their characters can do in a turn. And that is a GIANT problem. But that’s not today’s problem.

Second, there’s two different halves to that test really. One is about remembering mechanics, one is about remembering backstory and personality. My current players, for example, would actually do pretty well on that test. I’d give them high marks all around. I know it. But most of them would score well on only half the test. You know how I know they would? Because I have one player who frequently reminds the others about the mechanics of their own abilities, which means he knows what the other players can do. And I have two other players who have taken actions in the last two sessions of my game to help two other, different players advance their personal character goals. Completely unprompted. Two sessions ago, one of them recruited someone for someone else’s church. Last session, one of them made sure that the swashbuckler’s name got connected to some prisoners that got rescued.

The point of the test is not to see who gets a perfect score and knows everything. The point of the test is to gauge the general level of interest each player has in the other players at the table. The point is to see who notices that there are other players at the table and who genuinely wants to be a part of their stories and to see who is there for their own story and sees the other players as there for the ride.

Because, I gotta be honest, I’ve seen a lot of Tiduses crossing a lot of tables lately. Tidus. You know. Final Fantasy X? The least interesting character in that story? The one who literally didn’t even exist. And his backstory was “he basically hated his dad for Oedipal reasons”? Remember how he kept saying “this is MY story?” Even in that fight where the real main character who’d been raised to go on a suicide mission by her phony church had learned everything she believed was a lie and had to kill basically the prophet of her religion?

Okay, most players aren’t that bad. But there is a general – and palpable – shift in player mindset in this edition. And I think a part of it comes from the increased focus – again – on detailed character creation where the character is basically defined by their character generation choices and abilities from the get-go and everything is pre-decided by the players away from the table before the game even starts. But that’s probably an article for another time.

There’s a subtle difference between thinking of yourself as a member of a group and thinking of yourself as part of a team. And that plays heavily in the way collaborative decision making plays out. I could go on and on about the difference, but I just want to note the issue now. I just want to add it to the pile of things that used to be a lot easier to deal with thanks to a forgotten player skill that used to be spelled out in the rules.

It’s Your Call

Remember a few days ago when I talked about how the rules used to strongly suggest that every party should appoint a mapper and how players drawing their own map used to be a vital skill and what it added to the game? Well, there was another job that the rules used to suggest you appoint. And used to refer to throughout the GMing instructions? And that job was “caller.” Though, in AD&D 1E, the position was sometimes referred to as “leader.”

The caller wasn’t really a leader, though. Instead, the caller was the player who was allowed to talk to the GM. No. Really. The idea was that outside of combat and direct interaction – parts of the game in which people take individual actions from moment to moment and can’t really collaborate – outside of combat and direct social interaction, the party would talk amongst themselves and decide what they were going to do and then the caller would turn to the GM once the discussion was over and say, “okay, Alice is going to keep lookout, Bob is going to search that treasure chest for traps, and Carol and I are going to look through the bookshelf for anything interesting.” Or say, “Alice and Bob are going to go over to the blacksmith that sold us that cursed sword and confront him, Carol is going to get a bead on the local rumor mill and see if anyone is talking about those weird soldiers, and I’ll find us an inn and stables where we can stay.” Or say, “we’re going to try to cross the courtyard quietly without attracting attention. Bob will go first and he’ll signal each of us to move when the way is clear.”

The caller was basically just the person who would give the GM the final plan. He’d give the GM a summary of the actions the party was going to take as a whole. Obviously, during combat or when the party was spread out or when a conversation broke out or when resolving the individual actions, the GM would interact directly with the active player. But outside of those situations, the caller and the rest of the party would collaborate and then the caller would convey the final answer to the GM.

On the surface, the idea of a caller doesn’t really seem to do much. Really, what’s the difference between the caller doing that and the GM saying “Alice, what are you doing? Okay, Bob, what are you doing? Okay, Carol…” and so on? In point of fact, after a while, most GMs I knew stopped relying on the caller and did start doing just that. And… well… here we are. And looking back on it, I’m starting to recognize there were some brilliant subtleties in the idea of a party caller that I was too stupid and short-sighted to appreciate. And solving the “we try that” problem is just ONE of the benefits. And even that benefit is loaded with subtleties.

Deliberate Amongst Yourselves and Leave Me Out of It

Obviously, after dealing more and more with the “we try that” problem which has become so infuriating that it makes me want to strangle myself with the drawstrings of my dice bag… no, strike that. It makes me want to strangle my PLAYERS with the drawstrings of THEIR dice bags. Anyway, “we try that” has become increasingly infuriating in the games I’ve been running over the last five years. That alone makes me long for the days when I had one player who could hand me a summary of the actual decision the players made.

See, under the caller system, the players don’t assume the GM is listening while they are talking. That doesn’t mean the GM isn’t listening. And that the GM isn’t ready to volunteer information. And it doesn’t mean the individual players can’t ask the GM a question when they need information about the world. But it does mean that the players don’t assume the GM knows anything about their plans at all. The idea that the party makes decisions by themselves and hands a final decision via foreman to the GM implies the GM isn’t really involved until the caller involves them or until someone has a question creates a rather specific sort of gameplay dynamic and reinforces it throughout the game. And there’s a lot to unpack about that dynamic.

Essentially, a role-playing game is about being presented with a situation, deciding how to act, taking said action, and then seeing how it comes out, right? There’s a back and forth. A give and take. The GM sets the scene. The players decide how to act. The GM describes the results. Conversational tennis. The caller system reinforces that structure by creating a clear separation between the GM and the players during the decision phase when the party is taking collective actions. It reinforces the sovereignty and agency of the players over not just their own characters, but over the party as a whole.

But structurally, it also does something else for the game in terms of group decisions. It makes simultaneous actions the norm while making timekeeping easier for the GM.

See, a lot of GMs I’ve watched these days fall into a trap of resolving one action at a time even when there’s no reason to take turns. Take, for example, the standard situation where the players have entered a new room in the dungeon where there’s several thingies to interact with and the players start tripping over each to interact with the things. So, the GM describes the room with the treasure chest and the bookshelf and suddenly, one player blurts out “I’ll go open the chest.” And the GM resolves it. And then another player says, “I want to go check the bookshelf.” And the GM resolves it. Or worse. There’s the situation where one player suddenly blurts out “I’ll go open the chest” and the GM starts to respond and then another player says, “wait, I’ll go check it for traps” and then a third says, “and I should be the one to open it because I have the best saving throws and the most hit points” or something like that.

With a caller in place, the party can’t trip over themselves like that. They just can’t. Because everything has to be finalized and everyone’s time needs to be accounted for before the GM resolves anything. The party has to decide amongst themselves that Alice is going to search for traps and Bob will then open the chest and meanwhile, Carol will check the bookshelf. And the GM can also do a quick check to make sure nothing is forgotten. Like, for example, asking what Dave is doing while the rest of the party is ransacking the room. Only when everything is settled does the GM resolve things. And the GM can resolve things in whatever order is easiest and make sure the passage of timelines up. Searching for traps takes ten minutes. So does searching the bookshelf. Opening the chest is pretty trivial. So all of those actions happen in one ten-minute span of time. And the GM is also clear about where everyone in the room is before the chest is opened. That avoids questions like, “okay, before I tell Bob what’s in the chest, I need to know where everyone is in the room when he opens it. No reason. I just like to know these things.” Yeah, that GM is definitely not up to something.

Not only does that give the parts of the game outside of turn-taking scenes some structure and prevent scrums and make them easier to manage, but it also tells the players that they can split the party and do things all at the same time. The party that has gotten used to that general structure of “fanning out to search a room and everyone doing a thing” is more likely to take the same approach when the adventure takes them into town. Different party members can spread out around town and pursue different tasks and then meet back at the inn to share the results of their actions. The party can get more done with less time.

Moreover, when you’ve got a situation where everyone is tripping over each other to do stuff, it tends to be the most dominant players who participate the most. If everything gets resolved at the speed that anyone can blurt out what they want to do, more thoughtful or quieter players tend to get left out. But if the table falls into a dynamic of “okay, everyone does something unless we have to take turns,” the quiet players will have more of a chance to be involved. Even if all they do is keep a lookout or help someone else, at least they’re choosing that.

Now, most of this s$&% can also be accomplished with proper GMing techniques. For example, whenever one player moves into a room or into a town to do a thing, I poll all the other players before I resolve anything about what they all are doing. But I also have to scribble notes to do it that way because, by the time I’ve gotten a firm declaration from everyone, details about what the first player said might slip my mind. I am only f$&%ing human, after all.

Besides, the best GMing techniques in the world still don’t add the subtle dynamic that the GM doesn’t get involved in the deliberation and the GM isn’t listening until you present a final answer. The GM is not a collaborator. He’s not at the table with you. The GM is the narrator and referee. And if he is in the game, he’s the extras and the villains. He’s not the heroes of the story. He’s not making the decisions.

And there’s another reason to foist off the responsibility of deciding what everyone does on a player.

United You Act, Divided You Suck

The idea that the party will reach a consensus on everyone’s actions and only when that consensus is reached does that information get passed to the GM has a very important impact on the sense of collaboration and teamwork. It tells the players that each of their characters is not an individual who takes individual actions, but rather a cog in the machine, a part of the team. Nobody acts until everyone acts is a very powerful way of reinforcing the teamwork dynamic that has been crushed under the weight of over-designed, over-planned, and over-abilitied individual player characters who are each just there to show off the character they made. And it even gets in the way of highly individualistic players while also preventing in-game conflicts.

Let me use an extreme case as an example: consider the rogue who always wants to be the one to open the treasure chest and who likes to skim some treasure off the top. Without a caller, when the GM just resolves actions as they come, the rogue’s player is usually the first to say, “I check the treasure chest,” or “I search the body.” Basically, they call dibs. And the GM facilitates that by resolving those actions immediately.

But consider what that behavior looks like to the rest of the heroes in the world. What has to happen in the fiction of the universe to make that sort of dibs-calling work. The rogue has to shoulder his way past the party and race to every treasure chest or every downed corpse without waiting for his allies to say or do anything. Even if the party never spots the rogue skimming off the top, doesn’t that behavior seem a little overeager? Greedy? Assholish? Would the heroes ever stand for it? Probably not. And eventually, one of them might get annoyed enough to intervene. And then you have one of those wonderful situations where the rogue says, “I go open the treasure chest” and the paladin says, “no, I step in front of him,” and then the rogue says, “I dodge around him.” All before the GM can say anything.

See, with the caller system, the rogue can still try to be the one to open every chest – to skim off the top – but the party doesn’t have to sit idly by and accept that behavior just because the player talked first and the GM resolved it before moving on. In fact, the conflict has to be resolved before anything else happens. No one can trump everyone just by ringing in first. So the situation is less likely to explode. And the rogue who wants to skim off the top has to be more subtle. More clever. He has to actively con his allies. He can’t rely on the fact that time freezes for everyone else if his brain is the first one to talk to the god of the world.

But that’s the extreme situation. It’s nice to know a caller can solve that problem, but most tables don’t have that problem. Instead, the individualism is more subtle. It isn’t really selfishness. It’s just a general sense of how the game works. When you use a caller, everyone starts to understand that the party acts as a unit except when acting as a unit is impossible. Like during combat or during social interaction. This means that they start to think of themselves as a unit even when they aren’t a unit. Like during combat or during social interactions. They are more likely to view themselves as parts of a team with jobs to do and less likely to concern themselves only with their own strategies and actions.

One of the biggest things that having a caller does for the group is to get the players talking to each other more. See, when you run your game using the “whoever talks first acts” method or even the “I’ll poll you one at a time and then resolve everything” method, the players each spend most of their time talking to you. Which implies that the game is five separate conversations that take turns playing out. When the party talks through a caller, the game is one conversation between the party and the GM and the normal mode of play is that the party talks to each other. I’ve noticed that players have a hard time communicating with each other during stressful situations like combat. And I wonder if part of that comes from this fact.

So, the caller makes the party feel like more a team because they literally can’t play the game until they reach a consensus. But, strange as it may sound, it also makes group decision making easier because it singles someone out.

With Great Responsibility Comes No Power

Let’s talk about one of the things that makes group decision making so hard. It’s called the diffusion of responsibility. And it has to do with how humans are wired. Basically, when humans are part of a crowd, they tend to all merge into an amorphous blob of not being responsible for anything. Basically, people don’t feel responsible or accountable once they are sharing responsibility with other people. Now, there are all sorts of example, like how dozens of people can drive past a car crash before one of them thinks to call emergency services or how business managers use the passive voice when drafting decisions that came out of meetings or how when you need someone in a group of people to do something, the worst way to get it done is to say “can someone do this?”

See, making decisions is hard even when you’re the only one making a decision. Especially if there’s no one correct answer. And especially when there’s consequences for making the wrong decision. But when you’re doing it on your own, you will eventually make a decision. When you’re in a group, well, whoever is the one who says, “okay, this is the decision we should go with” or even the person who says, “okay, we talked enough, let’s vote between these three options,” that person becomes responsible for the decision. At least, they become more responsible than everyone else. Yeah. Even if the decision ultimately comes down to a vote, the person calling for the vote is responsible. Because if the decision goes bad, there’s the feeling that if the discussion had just gone on a little longer, the group might have made the right decision instead.

The single, most important thing every group of decision-makers needs is someone to stand up and take responsibility for making the decision happen. Someone to keep the collaborators focused. And some to recognize when the group is talking in circles and no more information is forthcoming. But because of the diffusion of responsibility, very few human beings will actually voluntarily stand up and appoint that person.

Do you see where this is going?

Yeah. The caller’s job is not just to make sure that the GM gets the information they need and to foster a sense of teamwork, the caller’s job is to be responsible for getting a decision out of the group. Except it isn’t. That’s not really part of the caller’s job. And that’s really the magic of using the word “caller” instead of “party leader.”

See, the caller’s explicit duty is just to pass along the results of group decisions to the GM so the GM just has one voice to listen to and so that everything is settled about who’s doing what BEFORE the GM starts resolving s$&%. That’s all. That’s the only thing the caller is expected to do. And that’s the only thing they are responsible for.

But…

There’s a well-known way to short-circuit the diffusion of responsibility and the related problem of the bystander effect. And that is to pull someone – anyone – out of the amorphous blob of the group. When you need someone to act, you don’t ask everyone to act, you ask a specific someone. “You, in the blue jacket, call emergency services! We need help!” “Ted, grab the menus and write down the names of the first four restaurants on the pile so we can vote on where to get lunch.” As soon as someone is singled out, they can’t be part of the amorphous blob anymore.

So, when the party appoints a caller, even though the caller is just an intermediary, they will make themselves responsible for getting the party to reach a consensus. After all, the GM will be asking them what the party is going to do. And if the GM has to wait, it’s the caller who keeps the GM waiting. So, the caller will start imposing more structure on group decisions. They will summarize the choices and call for a vote. Or they will propose the compromise. And they will keep the party on task until a decision is reached. And while they may not be good at it at first, they will get better the more practice they have.

Now, responsibility means accountability. And some players might be afraid of that. The reason diffusion of responsibility exists is because responsibility sucks. When a decision goes bad, even one that was the result of a democratic vote, the person who called for the vote can feel responsible. But here’s the dirty little secret: when something goes wrong at the game table, everyone feels responsible. Well, at least everyone who isn’t a selfish Tidus. Well-adjusted, well-socialized, normal people feel responsible. When someone’s PC dies, the fighter might feel responsible for not tying up the monster that killed the PC. The healer might feel responsible for not managing resources better. And so on. That’s par for the course. It’s part of the game.

But you know what helps with that? When you know you succeed or fail as a team. When everyone is right there alongside you saying, “look, this was something we did together; we live or die as a team.” The more a party feels like a team, the better equipped they are to handle and recover from failure.

Remember all that stuff I said about how the caller fosters teamwork and creates a sense that the party is a unified team first and a bunch of individuals second? Yeah. It’s actually pretty amazing how appointing a caller – not a leader, a caller – short-circuits the diffusion of responsibility for group decisions while also strengthening the team against the feel of individual accountability for group decisions. As I said, there are subtle layers to this s$&% that I didn’t appreciate when I was fourteen years old and started to reject the idea of a caller as useless bulls$&% and an attempt to impose too much structure on a party. Now, after years and years and years of observing groups of PCs struggling to make group decisions and utterly failing to convey said decisions to me clearly and unambiguously, I have to admit I might have been wrong.

I mean, it had to happen once, right?