Lost Player Skills: Calling

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December 2, 2019

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

Click the Goblin’s Jar to Leave a Tip

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?


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41 thoughts on “Lost Player Skills: Calling

  1. Some time ago, on some forgettable forum, I asked if anyone ever used a caller. Crickets. Now, when I was first playing Basic D&D back in the early 80’s, there was just me an my best friend and we’d swap roles, so there really was no need for a Caller. By the time I started playing with larger groups in college, the Caller was passe’.

    I think I read in a history of D&D (Of Dice & Men?) Gygax would six behind open file cabinets and be a disembodied voice, so a Caller was needed.

  2. I’m glad you brought this up last week, because I’ve used a caller before (though it was a while back and I think I called him either the party leader or the chairman, so your point about the name ‘caller’ struck me) but I haven’t done it lately and I think it might be a good solution to my current group, which has been a little rough so far.
    I’ve had the party elect their caller before, but it sounds like you assign them. My worry is that the group would take umbrage at that, but that’s probably unfounded. Has anyone tried a rotating caller, and how did it go?

  3. Okay, this is pretty much perfectly timed. Have a session tomorrow for a group with some issues around acting as such, rather than multiple individuals, so let’s see how this works.
    I predict opposition from the players… no doubt citing the exact reasons of imposing structure.
    Running an intrigue campaign, so also curious if this may help the couple of players less confident with that kind of approach to get more involved?

    • Okay, so first prediction was wrong. Of course soon as I posted that 2 people got sick.
      But a week later, they were surprisingly open to the idea (Well, one had some major doubts, but the rest were intrigued by it).
      As to how it played out.
      Definitely gonna help to train it as a habit, get used to the flow it creates. But in the major moment where it came up, dealing with the aftermath of an assassination attempt, it definitely seemed to help promote a group outlook, and got decisions made quicker. Interestingly (the campaign being very intriguey), it seemed to have the players thinking about one anothers abilities both in mechanics, and contacts (One of the other players suggested someone approach a particular individual to help based upon built relations, before that player did so).
      Feels like with a couple of sessions, as it gets more habitual, this is gonna be a good addition to both my campaigns.
      Thanks Angry.

  4. Definitely saw a use for this in my session yesterday. We were exploring an abandoned laboratory and everyone kept shouting out what they did next and eventually had no clue where anyone was or what they were doing. DM does a good job rotating around the table but still think a caller would have made things clearer.

  5. I think there are three main functions players need to be on top of for the sanity of the DM. Caller, Cartographer and marching order. Without how does anyone manage the chaos of the player party?!?

    • With regards to marching order, while sometimes I ask for a general marching order, if something happens that affects, say, the first two people in order, I just tell people dictator-style that they were first or second and they get a trap in the face. I usually choose the toughest/melee characters unless they are particularly wounded and it’d make sense for them to more cautiously be at the back.

      Don’t be afraid to be a dictator, I’m sure your players will appreciate the expediency more than the random die of damage they may take.

  6. I’m 29 but I’ve played and read some 1e and Basic. I remember seeing the caller in Basic and trying it once or twice in groups, but I found that it slowed the game down. I was hoping your article today was going to be “Angry’s Modern Take on Calling that Fixes the Problems that Led to it Being Abandoned in the Past.” I’ll give it another whirl, though.

    • I haven’t tried out calling yet but I imagine the slow-down is a learning curve. When I GM, when the group starts over-deliberating or going around in circles, I feel like I screwed up with how I’m pacing things, or that I misrepresented the situation; worse, I can’t fix it because just making a decision would remove their agency. But I can see that with a caller, that responsibility is shifted to a player who, when the pressure’s on to get the game moving, is capable of doing so.

  7. I too am curious about how the rotating caller situation has gone IRL for someone.

    I’m also curious what drawbacks there would be to doing this for combat as well? I suppose it would affect the game balance but seems more realistic to me. For example, it has always struck me as weird that a fighter would attack, wait to see if it kills the enemy before deciding to use movement and use 2nd (or 3rd, etc.) attack against a different enemy. All in just six seconds. Same thing about the last person in initiative waiting to decide on a target until everyone else has resolved actions before deciding who to attack and how. I can think of other ways to manage “simultaneous” combat but anyone want to weigh in on why this would be doubleplusbad first?

    • Be wary of game design choices because “they feel more realistic”. Try it out for the sake of the game. See how it plays on its own merits.

      The games I’ve run with simultaneous combat resolution have had mixed results. Fine-grain, detailed combat has run horribly. The deliberation is slow, and there are lots of wasted actions on contingencies. There’s a lot of overkill. Battles take longer. On the other hand, broad-stroke combat has run well. If the rules support combat being resolved in less rolls, more akin to ability checks in D&D, then there can be a lot of interesting results, but these systems can be difficult to run effectively without some practice. It’s easy to hamstring yourself and end up describing, then resolving, split-second actions even when you’re trying to settle on broader strokes.

    • In early editions, all characters declared their actions at the start of the round, then both sides moved simultaneously, then all attacks and spells executed. Quite different!

    • It is incredibly difficult to implement simultaneous combat in 5e because it sin’t really built for it. For example, Hold Person is balanced around them being paralyzed for precisely one round. Not to mention that if you don’t have turns, it can be hard to adjudicate whether the monster is first paralyzed by Hold Person or gets attacked by the fighter. Nonetheless, if it could be made to work, it would have a load of advantages over the current turn-based system such as speed and immersion, so there are a couple of different approaches to this, such as Greyhawk initiative (https://media.wizards.com/2017/dnd/downloads/UAGreyhawkInitiative.pdf) as well as my personal variant, Maelstrom Initiative (reddit.com/r/mattcolville/comments/a394b0/maelstrom_initiative_a_matt_colville_inspired/). If you’re interested in the concept, I suggest you check them out!

    • Angry kind of glosses over this in the Speed Factor initiative article he did a while back. Everybody decides what they do before anything happens. He narrates a bit of how it plays out. It might help give some sort of insight? Just an idea

    • I don’t think a caller works well in the standard F20 individual initiative system;
      the mechanics so heavily spotlight player’s turns that things like lowering your own initiative feel like a punishment, no matter how helpful it actually is. Any caller rules would probably run into the same problems.

      On the other hands, the systems we’ve played where actions were innately a group decision (Ironclaw/Urban Jungle’s One side acts, then other side acts; Lancer’s players activate a turn, GM activates back and forth; amd especially Labryinth Lord’s everyone declares at once, resolve actions by type) we always ended up with a caller, or just shy of such.

      Most balance issues would come from how you resolve, more than how you declare. If I was going to implement this in D&D, I would opt for something like how Gloomhaven works, where everyone declares actions at the start of the turn, and chooses how to resolve those actions on their initiative. It strikes a good balance between party-planning and flexibilty to changes in board state. Plus, they model the same sort of experience, so mixing the two together wouldn’t take too much extra processing.

  8. Wow, Angry. You just saved me from DMing less on the way to quitting.

    I go back to AD&D 1980. I forgot all about using a caller. I used an out of combat initiative list to poll the party. for their actions, then resolved them. I was acting as the caller. I should not ever be the caller as DM.

    I found what you did, and would describe it as you did, an engine at too low an rpm lugging. And this was tolerable to me because I was so happy to be DMing again at all.

    Now, four years on, it bugs me. I am running groups mostly of vets with some novices, but it lugs. I was thinking about cutting back on DMing, trying to find something else to make running the game appeal to me again.

    You just named it. My parties need a caller.

  9. I think this actually does apply to combat, as well, despite it being a situation in which coordinated operations are not practically possible.

    I have long remembered the excitement of 2e combat, wherein the players’ and monsters’ actions would be determined before initiative was rolled. It was awesome.

    I hadn’t put my finger on it, but it appears that a big part of the problem of turn-based combat is that players often hesitate to do what they would normally do only because it could mess up the next players’ turns.

    Having a caller in combat could actually also be good.

  10. In general, messing with combat procedure (beyond variants of how initiative order is determined) is pulling on threads that will end up with you reknitting the sweater. In particular, it sounds like you are suggesting having all players declare their actions before resolving, but then resolving them sequentially in initiative order. Is that right? Because if so, then at the least you will have to deal with declared actions that turn out to be impossible. And likely your players will not be entertained by actions that turn out to be useless, such as attacking a dead orc. And your players will want to know how you are going to handle those things before declaring their actions.

    I’m not a big fan of D&D’s i-go-you-go combat process, but coming up with an alternative that meshes nicely with the rest of the rules is, IMX, challenging; I haven’t seen a suggestion from others that seems attractive enough to try, and the one I created myself is something I am ready to ditch after imposing it on my players for a time. (And I’ll add they have been very forgiving about enduring the experiment.)

    • I’m not so sure that useless actions are something players will balk at. Some will, but as is, D&D is both simple enough that people can see when they are acting suboptimally, but also complicated enough that thinking about how to best manipulate your turn to get the most out of it can be very time consuming. It can be at least equally frustrating to be placed in a situation where you are knowingly contributing less than you could’ve for the sake of pace.

      If a player has two options: Attack the same weakened enemy an ally is also targeting, or target a different opponent, that comes down to a simple choice. Either you fight conservatively (making sure there is one less opponent next round) or you fight aggressively (making sure you optimize damage output). Those are clear choices and the narrative will generally determine which one to opt for. Sometimes less certainty means you have to act on limited knowledge, making choosing easier.

      D&D relies on players being able to do their entire turn in one continuous string, but it does not rely on turn order. Calling general actions before resolving individual turns is a proper alternative way to play.

      If I read Angry’s post correctly, the Caller is not necessarily role for a player character, but more for a player at the table. It is harder to separate the mapper from their character because someone in the world has to map things out. Their disappearance means the map disappears, their knowledge limits what can be on the map etc.

      But with calling you’re not so much barking orders at characters as you are telling the DM what everyone decided on. While in game there is probably a face/planner who goes through the plan for the characters, there is no need for those to fall on the same shoulders. A handy side effect of this is that players whose characters would make for a poor face or strategist would still be an effective caller.

    • The obvious negative side affects of spells or abilities not working are what I’m most concerned with. Without play testing, it will be hard to know for sure how rough it would go. I read the two supplemental systems and the Maelstrom version looks to do a nice job of balancing a caller-style action economy with turn-based initiative.

      One thought I had for avoiding hurt feelings at the table would be to record damage behind the screen but not to declare death until the end of the round. Both players would act and resolve actions/damage without gaining feedback until the end of everyone’s turn. If the first player’s damage output “killed” the orc, I wouldn’t announce that. My thoughts are operating under Angry’s managing-combat-like-a-dolphin principle. Use the caller and initiative order to resolve the MECHANICS of the combat and then flip to narrative descriptions of how those mechanics played out and set up the next round. Rinse and repeat.

      Very rarely does a killing blow cause the target to instantly fall down and obviously be dead in the exact same microsecond the sword/arrow/spell pierces its side anyway. Death (saving) throws aren’t just the cool name for dice rolls you make on your character sheet. The “throes of death” are very real and I’ve seen them take over a minute before stilling.

      In my mind’s eye, the six seconds per round need to feel frantic and sub-optimal at the table. What we do with the standard 5e ruleset is more akin to chess or as Angry has hinted at, Final-Fantasy. The problem is, we have multiple players, so the Final-Fantasy combat style doesn’t work. It’s great if you’re solo. As a player, you’re engaged and interested 100% of the time. You have to be. In 5e it can suck waiting for your turn. You also have to wait to see what resolves from the previous players before picking the “best” option from your abilities list to use once your turn finally does come around.

      We have 5 to 6 players at my regular game, which I admit is larger than optimal but it’s what our game is. So I’m looking for anything that can speed up combat, avoid the “…uhhhhms…”, and keep everyone interested.

    • Actually, declaring the actions at the start of the round was play-tested for a long time, and still is by some 🙂 As BurgerBeast mentioned, it is the norm in AD&D 2nd edition, and with the optional but widely used weapon and spell modifiers to initiative, the declarations determine when the players would act. When the situation changes, a prepared spell can be cast at another suitable target, a meele attack could be directed to another enemy in range, or an arrow can be shot at another foe that can be targeted. Of course occasionally a spell or attack has to be held, but this was never such a big deal.

      Actually, the 2e way is much more suitable to run the combat like a dolphin. If actions are declared at the initiative order, players naturally delay thinking what they will do until their turn. But if they declare their actions beforehand, all they must do is roll two dice, perhaps at the same time, and the narration is not broken by mmm’s and shuffling spellbook pages.

      • Not sure if anyone is still reading comments this far after posting, but I ran a modified initiative play-test this month and it went fantastic. We tried calling during combat and I can confirm (at least for my N=1 sample) that it didn’t work. Calling out of combat worked only so-so. As the DM, the mind-shift of getting a response from everyone 1st before resolving anything was the big game changer. Once the players realized I was doing this, they naturally adapted and things flowed smoothly. The game is much improved whether you “officially” appoint a caller or just adjust the game flow and execute the same play structure.

        During combat, I ran a modified version of “Speed Factor” initiative that uses creature size, base movement, and attack type. Each round of combat initiative is re-rolled. My players reported that while combat wasn’t necessarily -faster- it was FAR more interesting and engaging. One benefit is it gives a lot more value to the tactical choices made for weapon selection, player build, and attacks. The dynamic nature of a changing initiative order really helps add tension and interest during long battles as well. I highly recommend trying it out.

  11. I am using this survey now and 2 of my players have approached me, laughing, because they know there is no way they can answer most of it.But they say this as a sign to get to know the others better. Success

  12. Maybe if more GM’s did this, they’d stop complaining about being overwhelmed and resorting to stupid corner cutting like milestone leveling. Definitely starting this, and I’m glad it got brought up, or I might never have known.

  13. Why is everyone trying to shoehorn the caller into combat? Angry states in the article quite clearly that the purpose of the caller is to consolidate the actions a party takes in situations the granularity of combat isn’t required for. It is meant for doing things like “Legolas is keeping watch, while Frodo checks the treasure chest for traps, Pippin searches for hidden doors and Gandalf checks the Bookshelf for anything useful”.

  14. I find “leader” to be better description, since ultimately the caller pretty much makes the final decision, what he says goes. So he’s kind of like a leader of the group, and honestly players tend to need leadership. Otherwise the PCs just go in circles if nobody has the power to make final decisions for the group.

    • While the caller could also be the leader, I’m guessing it works better if they’re not the same person. Angry’s referring to the caller as a “foreman” is exactly correct. The caller isn’t in charge of anything except applying structure to the discussion and transferring the verdict. I feel a leader is very much an in-game position, while the caller is out-of-game.

    • While the role of caller can entail dictating decisions, it doesn’t have to. The goal as Angry describes it is to shunt any responsibility for structuring group decisions and tallying everyone’s action away from the GM to someone else, who then “packages” the result for GM consumption.

      Presumably if a player disputes some aspect the caller’s translation they’ll say so, and that can be rectified without the GM having to step in.

  15. Hooly crap, we really need a Caller in Starfinder Society (aka Starfinder’s Adventurers League).

    4 to 6 random guys who don’t know eachother at all, planning together? It’s the worst. I suffer a lot since I have attention issues and I’m playing a Fighter, so in any roleplay situations I tend to zone out (I swear I try to pay attention, but things are just too slow). More than once I’ve found myself at the end of a group plan where everyone has a role but I don’t know mine. It just sucks. They just assume I’ve heard the one moment they adressed to me. It’s a mix of problems that together become horrendous.

    The worst of all is in Starship combat, however. Specially at the start, when everyone is assigning themselves a role. It’s basically a bunch of kids fighting over what seat to take:
    “I’ll be engineer!”
    “Wait I have a bigger skill bonus, I’ll be THE engineer!”
    “I’m the party damage dealer so gunner is mine, always. You know that.”
    “Geez I wanted to be captain but if NOONE is going to pick pilot, we’re getting nowhere!”

    I’ve also been thinking about a ‘tactician’ role, who coordinates the players in middle of combat. It has its roots on this; players not knowing eachother (I play a Tank Support-Controller and people expect me to dish out damage cause Fighter) However, I believe that having someone determine everyone’s actions pretty much removes them of agency. Maybe we should instead get the Caller to round up a few plans before we get into fights.

  16. “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.” I personally feel the constraint of meta gaming in this one. The round is supposed to be 6 seconds, so when the bard asks me what he should do on his turn- I say “You don’t have time to think about it, you only have 6 seconds. And you certainly don’t have time to ask my character.” I have only played a year or so, and 5e only at that. But I think this is why people don’t communicate during combat- because it’s essentially in the game system for them not to.

  17. In trying to think of a way to update this concept, I think I realized what the obstacles might be.

    Sure, I imagine that most of the aversion to this concept comes from a general rejection of explicit hierarchy. You could (as Angry does) argue that this enables a more tacit and predatory kind of hierarchy in the form of Tiduses prioritizing their individual goals and reducing the other characters to sidekicks. You could chalk both these things up “kids these days” or “selfish Millennials”. I think think there are more valid reasons behind the resistance, both general and specific.

    Generally, roleplaying games are meant to be collaborative and the notion of a single referee superficially seems to jettison that. It may not be that on paper, but the GM’s word carries implicit weight and social capital. Anyone with a special line on that gains a certain prophetic quality.

    Specifically, the premise of TTRPG’s have broadened beyond that of the adventuring professionals questing for a (usually noble) common goal. After D&D there was Call of Cthulhu and the mystery genre, with a mix of private detectives and ordinary people who get reluctantly dragged into impossible situations. You have games where everyone is a villain or an outlaw. Games were everyone plays a magical rabbit in a slice-of-life anime. Games like Blades in the Dark, where everyone is part of a criminal crew that will murder everyone else for a bigger slice of the score.

    Sure, you could have done that way back at the beginning, but the archetypal D&D setting was a bunch of randos hanging off the Paladin or whoever the Lawful-Good person was. If there wasn’t a noble goal, there was still somebody who self-conceived as doing what they did for principle. If there wasn’t one of those, you still heard a voice in your head saying “. . . but you’re playing a game in which for which that is the Archetype, so bowing to the Archetypal Form is the price you pay for being oddballs.”

    The role of caller fit, because there implicitly was a Common Thing to be Called. The metagame activity was associated with an in-game premise. The caller didn’t just serve a mechanical function, it also reminded people of the premise in a way that enhanced immersion.

    So the question becomes: What if that premise just doesn’t exist? What if they are supposed to be predatory Tiduses that do see everyone as a sidekick?

  18. Glad I got back before the comments closed.

    I’ve now run three sessions with a caller. The sessions were with two different groups. Here’s what I can report. Bottom line, I’m much more relaxed and able to do a better job at every other aspect of the game.

    Why? I wasn’t exhausted from mentally hanging on to every thing that came from their 14-17 year old mouths. My older group of 30-50 yr olds likewise didn’t wear me out like they usually do in the four hour session. The caller had to synthesize the player’s actions, and I did not accept, “OK, we do that.” I say, “Sorry, what do you do?” to the caller.

    Yes, the callers all thought having a caller didn’t work. They didn’t like it because they had to do WORK in the game. That WORK was stuff I was doing. Turns out, I don’t need to do it, and the game got better for me and the players.

  19. I think this could be particularly useful for online games, especially ones that are run with voice chat only. I’ve been in one such campaign for the past year or so, and maybe the most difficult adjustment has been the inability to see other players’ body language. You can’t just, like, raise an eyebrow or shrug to express your opinion of something; everything has to be done in words now. And if the other players are silent, you can’t tell why.

    Being the first to speak up is somehow more intimidating than it is in person (that’s how it feels to me, at any rate), so giving someone that feeling of “but I have the *right* to do that, I’m the caller!” in any given session might help.

  20. “…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.”

    Such article would be EXTREMELY welcome, and it can’t come soon enough, in fact. I remember you’ve touched on this previously, and I too think this is one of the biggest culprits in diminished team bonding in the current edition.

  21. I feel like if you just used the magical words of “OK, so describe what you are doing” after you were caught not listening this whole article could be skipped.

    (I generally support lazy players discussing stuff between themselves and not staring at me to handle PC interaction for them, like I’m some Game God who can sit on both sides of the table. But not on this one. I feel like you’re the one being lazy here. No, I don’t want players to hand their individual decisions to me by committee. If you need time to prep for an encounter and pull up the owlbear stats or whatever, need I remind you of all people that asking for prep time is always an option? You’re not supposed to log off from interaction with players because you imagine you need to pretend to be a GM crazy prepared for every possibility. You actually distrupt the flow more that way, instead of, as you imagine, helping it.)

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