This here’s part of my year-long course in True Game Mastery. You don’t have to read the lessons in order, but that’s how they work best. So, if you’re new here, check out the series index and start at the beginning.
Click here for the True Game Mastery series index.
I’m back; I didn’t die in a fiery plane crash. Once again, I am denied the peaceful embrace of death and so remain trapped on this mortal coil as both a Forever Game Master and a Teacher of Forever Game Masters. And if you thought being a Forever Game Master was a thankless job, let me tell you what it’s like to teach you dumbasses.
Anyway…
The good news — for you, anyway — is that I’m obligated to help you Master the Thousand Cuts like I promised last week. So this here’s a deep dive into the Art of the Cutaway, which I introduced briefly last week on my way to the airport and out of state to deal with some family shit. If you missed that introduction, remedy that before proceeding.
Cool? Let’s do this…
Mastering the Art of the Cutaway
Last week, thanks to True Game Master in Training Sloth, I spewed forth three thousand words on the Art of the Cutaway. But when I hit the end of that rambling spiel, I realized I could probably churn out a practical, practicable lesson on the topic. I can’t make any of you a Master of a Thousand Cuts — it’s on you to master the skill — but I can tell you how True Game Masters — like myself — approach the whole Cutaway thing.
At least, I can attempt to explain logically and rationally what we True Game Masters learn to do intuitively.
Cutaways, remember, are how you — the Game Master — shift your focus — and your game’s camera — from one chunk of action to another. When Ardrick’s in a bar fight at the Lusty Lizard and Beryllia’s digging through dusty tomes in the basement of Warthog’s School of Thaumaturgical Arts, you Cut from one scene to the other by saying something like, “The half-orc hits the ground like a sack of potatoes. Unfortunately, his bigger, stronger brothers are none too pleased and they begin advancing on Ardrick. But… let’s see what Beryllia’s up to in the archives.”
But also remember that Cutaways are… nothing. There’s no such thing as a Cutaway. All you’re doing when you Cutaway — when you think you’re Cutting Away — is just switching between characters or actions the same as you would when you work through the turn order in combat. It’s just that sometimes the characters or actions are in different rooms. Or different scenes. Or in different temporal realities.
So mastering the Art of the Cutaway is really just knowing which Game Mastering Move to make next.
Your Three Moves
When you’re running a game, you’ve actually got just three moves available to you as a Game Master. You can Queue an Action, you can Resolve an Action, or you can Take a World Action.
To Queue an Action, you Invite the Principal Character’s Player to Act and add their Declared Action to the Action Queue. Or you put it on the Action Clock.
Adam, what does Ardrick do? Beth, while Ardrick gets ready to act, what is Beryllia doing? Chris? What about Cabe?
To Resolve an Action, you pick an Action from the Queue, Determine the Outcome — by brain or by math rock — and Describe the Result.
Adam, roll Ardrick’s attack. Nice! Solid hit! How much damage? Wow. The orc’s hurt.
When some non-player something acts or when something happens in the world, you Take a World Action.
Now it’s the orc’s turn! Crit! He hits Ardrick in the kidney-spleen for a whopping 17 piercy-type damage. Suck that, sucker!
Or…
As you approach the chest, a gout of flame explodes forth from the mouth of the dragon statue! Make a savey throw!
And that’s your complete list of Game Mastering Moves. All your narrational tricks just make those moves happen. A Transition like, “You travel for three days. Just before noon on the 29th of Frobuary, you see Port Foozle ahead,” is just you Resolving an Action that sounded something like, “We travel on the road to Port Foozle.” Likewise, Scene Setting is just a prelude to either Queuing an Action or Taking a World Action.
The Right Move at the Right Time
Pacing your game — the most important thing you can do to run a good game — is about picking good Game Mastering Moves and picking good targets. And when I say targets here, I’m talking players and actions and scenes. When you’re done resolving Danae’s ritual of consecration, what do you do next? Do you resolve Cabe’s Queued Action to examine the chest or do you Take a World Action by dropping a darkmantle on Beryllia or do you ask Danielle what Danae does for an encore and Queue her next Action?
Sometimes it’s easy to pick your next move. In combat, for example, the Turn Order tells you what to do next. When Cabe’s turn is over and the orc’s up, you Take a World Action, right? The orc goes. After that, on Danae’s turn, you Queue an Action and immediately Resolve that Action.
Outside of fights, I advised you — back in Everyone Doing Everything All At Once — to always have an Action Queued for every character. So if someone’s got nothing in the Queue, get a Declaration from that. And that’s good, general advice, but it ain’t always the best answer…
Suddenly, a shadow falls over Beryllia. Darkness envelopes her as if someone snuffed out her torch, though she can still hear it crackling and feel its heat. And then something thick and rubbery closes around her head and shoulders. Tentacles flail about and a cartilaginous snaps at her. As her muffled cry draws Ardrick’s attention… let’s see what Cabe’s doing scouting down the hall.
The Game Master there Took a World Action against Beryllia and Ardrick, but instead of Queuing their Actions, he Resolved Cabe’s Action in the Queue.
That’s the Art of the Cutaway. Masters of the Thousand Cuts use their three Game Mastering Moves to build well-paced, tense, dynamic, engaging games. And there are a million great ways to pull that off. This ain’t one of those things with one right answer. Or even several right answers. It’s part of the Art of Showmanship.
Thus, I can’t give you any hard-and-fast-rules for making which Game Mastering Move when — and if you’re still expecting hard-and-fast rules in this series, you’re a moron — but I can tell you what True Game Masters are thinking when they pick their moves. Or what they’re intuitively feeling, anyway.
Making Cuts
On Style
Running tabletop roleplaying games is a performance art. And no two performers perform the same way. Two equally great performers can make completely different choices about what to say and when to say it and how. That’s style.
Style emerges as you master an art. When you start out — when you’re building proficiency — you focus mostly on getting the technical points right. As you grow more comfortable, your style starts to show itself. At first, it’s usually a close imitation of the styles of those who taught you. But as you continue to hone your craft — and as you experiment and take risks — you develop a unique, personal style.
The Art of the Cutaway — knowing when to make what Game Mastering Moves — is one of those so-subtle-it’s-invisible aspects of Game Mastering Style. No one would mention it as part of a Game Master’s signature style — not even the Game Master — but it nonetheless influences a lot of how that Game Master’s games feel.
They say a film is written three times: once by the scriptwriter, once by the director, and once by the editor. The Art of the Cutaway is how you edit the film of your game. As such, it’s how you leave your last and biggest mark on your game.
Cutaways aren’t real. Mastering the Art of the Cutaway comes from understanding that you can target anyone with your next Game Mastering Move. It does not matter whether your next target is in the same room or the same scene or the same temporal plane of reality. A Master of a Thousand Cuts is just a Game Master whose Moves transcend time and space.
But…
You must be careful when flinging your game’s camera willy-nilly about the multiverse. From a purely technical Game Mastering standpoint, Cutaways aren’t a thing. But when you make a Deep Cut — when you make your next Game Mastering Move in some distant locale or temporal reality — you’re teleporting yourself and everyone else across your game’s ‘verse. And you’ve got to make sure you don’t leave any people — or bits — behind.
Keeping Track of Reality
At all times, you absolutely must know where — and when — every player-character is in your game’s universe. And you must know what they’re doing. And for reasons I’ll make clear in a moment, you must also know the last thing they did. You absolutely cannot lose track of that shit. And keeping track of it can’t slow you down.
If you aren’t running a game with a piece of physical paper and a pen or pencil at hand, start now. No matter how fast a typist you think you are, you ain’t fast enough. No one is. And no matter how good you think your memory is, it ain’t good enough. Not for this shit. Trust me.
I end every game I run — meatspace and cyberspace, computer-aided and analog — with a piece of scratch paper covered with notes like…
A inn landlord
B [[STRIKE]]shopping rumors 4 hr
C t gild
That’s my Action Queue. That’s me keeping track of who’s doing what while everyone’s doing whatever else.
Mastering the Thousand Cuts is, first and foremost, about mastering the art of tracking everything everyone’s doing and where and when they’re doing it.
Scene Setting and Re-Setting
Every time you Cutaway, you must Set the Scene. The Deeper the Cut, the Richer the Scene Setting. And I shouldn’t have to say this shit. You know it already. Whenever you Transition from one scene or encounter or locale to the next, you know you’ve got to Set the Scene before you Invite Players to Act. And if you only Cutaway at the ends of encounters and scenes, you don’t have to do more than that.
But if you Cutaway in the middle of an encounter and then Cut Back, you must Re-Set the Scene when you return.
As I said, Cutaways teleport you and your players around your game’s multiverse. Every time your players arrive somewhere, you’ve got to orient them in the new reality. And you can’t count on them to remember where they came from or what was happening when they teleport back.
Scene Re-Sets need not be deep or detailed. You can get away with something like…
Meanwhile, back in the common room of the Lusty Lizard, Ardrick and Danae are confronting Duke Dunderfloss about his evil plans. The room is empty; the only sound comes from the crackling hearth fire.
That’s just enough to remind the players who’s involved, where they are, who’s present, what’s going on, and to re-set the scene’s tone. And that tone thing is super-important and oft-forgotten. But do remember that the farther the teleportation and the longer you’ve been away, the more detailed your Scene Re-Set must be.
And when you Cutaway from a series of Threaded Actions — more on that below — you absolutely must remind the players of the last action they took. Or the last thing that happened.
Duke Dunderfloss has just revealed that Lady Ostentatia had been feeding him information on your activities the whole time. He sneered, “So you see, I’ve been one step ahead of you lummoxes this entire time.” Adam, how does Ardrick respond?
And then there’s the time travel issue…
Temporal Back-and-Forth
As I’ve described this Cutaway shit, I’ve brought up Time Travel a few times. You’ve probably assumed I was talking about things like flashbacks running alongside the current narrative or split parties exploring a dungeon in two different historical ages. That’s all totally doable, but it’s not what I mean by Time Travel.
I’m talking about the casual, necessary sort of Time Travel that keeps your game’s clock in sync.
Say Beryllia and Cabe head to the town’s waterfront to grind the old rumor mill or chase down some leads or whatever. It’s gonna take them hours. Meanwhile, Danae heads to the Temple to conduct a complex ritual for an hour. Meanwhile, meanwhile, Ardrick is in a match and the local fighting pit that’ll take fifteen minutes tops.
When you cut from action to action, you’ve got to keep track of when everything’s happening. Moreover, you have to help the players keep track of it. After resolving Beryllia and Cabe’s four hours of rumormongering, when you switch to Danae for the start of her ritual, you’ve got to remind Danielle — and everyone — you just turned the clock back four hours.
At noon, Beryllia and Cabe return to the inn, ready to share what they’ve learned. Hours prior, though, as the sun just started its morning climb and the temple’s bell was calling the morning prayer, Danae entered the Temple of Saint Sebastianna.
Shameless Opportunism
Once your party splits, you know you’ll have to Cut Across Time and Space eventually. That means you’ve got to keep your eye out for the next good opportunity to Cut. I’ll tell you below how to spot those opportunities. But accept that, if you know a Cutaway’s coming, you must keep a figurative eye out for the next good opportunity to make it.
Moreover, this Cutaway crap elevates any game. Masters of the Thousand Cuts run absolutely dramatic, dynamic, engaging games. So True Game Masters are always looking for the next chance to Cutaway. They’re looking even when the party’s on opposite sides of the same room.
That’s why I started with that three Game Mastering Moves crap. Really, Mastering the Thousand Cuts is simply a matter of deliberately choosing what moves to make and who to target every time you’ve got to make a move. Every time a character finishes a task or declares an action or speaks a single line of dialogue, the True Game Master asks, “Do I stick with this character and Invite them to Act again? Do I stick with this Scene and Resolve some other character’s Queued Action? Do I Resolve some other Action in some other Scene?”
Except they aren’t thinking it. They’re just listening for their gut to tell them what moves to make.
Why Cutaway
How, then, does a True Game Master’s gut know when the time is right to Cut? How should you decide whether to stick with the same Scene or voip the action to a different one? And when should you cut a series of actions in the middle — or leave an action undeclared — to Cut Across Time and Space instead?
There’s no firm, clear rules here. It’s all down to style and intuition and sense of theatrics. And that takes experimentation, practice, and failure. But there are a few things to keep in mind as you walk the path of the Master of the Thousand Cuts.
Cognitive Load
The biggest thing that tells you whether to Cut Across Time and Space or not is whether or not you can actually run a game like that. Seriously. You’ve got to know your limits. You’ve got to know whether you are capable of interweaving two, three, or four actions at a time. You’ve got to know whether you can Cutaway from a conversation in the middle and seamlessly Cut Back again after a twenty-minute infiltration encounter without missing a beat. And if you can’t, don’t.
Re-Setting the Scene, by the way, helps you as much as it helps your players.
And speaking of your players, you’ve also got to know what they can handle. Many players just aren’t up for a Nolan-esque nonlinear spaghetti story with a plot noodle for every character stretching forward and back in time. Even if you can totally handle running four plots on four different clocks, that doesn’t mean your players can — or want to — keep up. And it’s way harder for them than it is for you.
When you start Cutting Across Time and Space, take it slow. So limit yourself to two threads, avoid Deep Cuts, limit Temporal Teleportation, and don’t cut Threaded Actions, which I’ll describe below. Test your limits, get comfortable with them, then gradually push past them.
This shit’s harder than it looks.
Pacing and Engagement
As Aspiring True Game Masters, you know pacing is everything. Your game can’t run too hot and heavy for too long and it can’t plod along for too long either. You’ve got to vary the speed, tension, tone, and excitement. Hell, even Mere Game Executors know enough about this shit that they’ll break up a dragging game with a surprise action sequence or insert some downtime between the high-octane and high-drama scenes.
Well, guess what? Cutting Across Time and Space lets you do the same thing without having to insert extra scenes or encounters. If one character’s doing some action shit, another’s steeped in heavy character drama, and a third’s carousing around town for funsies, you can pump the pacing gas or ride the brakes with strategic Cutaways.
And if you notice some of your players checking out — if they’re bored or distracted and they’ve been sitting out too long — a strategic Cutaway can bring them back. Easy peasy.
But remember the inverse is true too. If everyone’s enraptured by whatever’s going on, you probably don’t want to Cutaway, even if you think someone’s been sitting out too long or hasn’t had enough effing spotlight time. Too many Game Masters forget that spotlight time ain’t a thing until a player says it is. And even then, it might not be.
Of course, sometimes you do want to Cutaway even when everyone’s enraptured. But I’ll get to that.
Threaded Actions
I’ve mentioned Threaded Actions several times now. I’ve also called them Complex Tasks. These are just strings of actions that naturally flow together. The most common Threaded Action is social interaction. A conversation comprises a series of social actions — and non-action lines of dialogue — that lead into one another. Another example is the series of actions that comprises approaching, examining, opening, and searching a treasure chest.
In general, you don’t want to Cutaway from Threaded Actions. Think about how hard it would be to carry on — and stay engaged in — a conversation that gets interrupted for ten minutes every time someone speaks. Honestly, that’s why most Game Masters — even Mere Game Executors — don’t Cutaway from social interactions.
But you can cut Threaded Actions. Even conversations. I do. For Engagement and Synchronicity and Drama, I do it all the time. It’s all down to how you do it.
First, you’ve got to Cutaway at a place where you can Cut Back easily. Second, you have to Re-Set the Scene thoroughly, which includes re-establishing the tone, the mood of any non-player characters involved, and the last thing anyone said or did.
Duke Dunderfloss has just revealed that Lady Ostentatia had been feeding him information on your activities the whole time. He sneered, “So you see, I’ve been one step ahead of you lummoxes this entire time.” Adam, how does Ardrick respond?
Syncrhonicity
Reading the Room
“But Angry,” people constantly whine at me, “I’m not good at reading people!”
Get good, scrub.
I’m sorry. True Game Masters must learn to gauge their players’ engagement and overall mood with no more than a sweeping gaze. Reading the room is a core performance skill. You can’t be a weightlifter without strength. If you don’t have the muscles and you want to lift, you’ve got to build your strength. And if you’ve got a disability or condition that makes it extra hard, you’re in for extra hard work if you want to call yourself a weightlifter. That’s life.
Live performance is a dynamic art. You must be able to read and respond to your audience. Which is another reason why online games suck.
That said, True Game Masters must recognize that however well you can read people, they’re still just guessing. You never know what’s actually happening in someone’s head. Game Masters think they know what their players are thinking and feeling and why they’re doing what they’re doing. They don’t.
If a player looks disengaged, try to invite them in. If they don’t respond, drop it. Don’t assume it’s anything to do with you. Maybe they’re just tired. Maybe they’re having a crappy nice. Maybe they just don’t engage as much as others.
Sometimes, when your party splits, you’ll have characters doing things at different Temporal Resolutions. Maybe Ardrick’s in a fight that’ll take minutes to play out while Danae’s conducting an hour-long ritual and Beryllia and Cabe are gonna be out and about in town for hours upon hours. Fortunately, you can spin the hands on the clock back and forth and Resolve Actions in any order you want.
Until you create a Time Paradox, that is.
When the split characters are close enough to affect each other — or when their actions might affect their allies — you can’t let things get too out of sync. If Danae’s distracting the Duke outside the door of the room Cabe’s searching — or if she’s distracting the shopkeeper while Cabe burgles the shop they’re all in — you have to cut back and forth frequently just to keep them on the same clock. When Danae’s conversation ends, Cabe’s felonious activities are done, and Cabe can hear what Danae’s saying.
Fortunately, roleplaying game actions are all wibbly-wobbly in the timey-wimeys. And you can take advantage of that. Picking a lock doesn’t take ten minutes, it takes a few minutes. Add in the time it takes to cross town, ask for directions, wait your turn, browse a few different shops or stalls, and chat with the vendor, and a shopping trip can easily take a few hours.
It’s good to keep a few standard Temporal Resolutions in your head and fit everyone’s action to them. Quick actions take a few seconds to a minute. Slower actions take a few minutes to a quarter-hour. Long actions take a few hours, up to an entire working day. Once every character’s filled up a standard chunk of time, leave them in place while you catch everyone else up.
Drama
That’s all pretty standard, pretty obvious shit to consider when Cutting Across Time and Space. Don’t Cutaway if you can’t keep track of things, don’t Cutaway if you can’t Cut Back, don’t Cutaway if it’ll break the flow of actions, and use Cutaways to manage pacing, and engagement, and keep everyone on the same clock.
None of that shit’s what I’d call Art. It’s just basic Game Mastering.
But now, I’m talking Art. And some of you are going to hate what I’m about to say. It’s the story equivalent of metagaming.
Masters of the Thousand Cuts use the Art of the Cutaway to build investment in the same way film editors use edits to keep the audience engaged. They — the Game Masters — capitalize on the fact that, even though the characters don’t know what’s happening when they’re not on camera, their players do.
Dramatic Tension and Dramatic Irony
Threading Versus Engagement
I keep telling you I can’t give you objective criteria and firm rules in this series. I appeal to your gut instinct and intuitive judgment. The conflicts that can arise when deciding whether to Cutaway are a great example of why I keep saying that. Consider, for example, a conflict between Threaded Actions and Engagement.
Imagine, on the one hand, you’ve got a player buried deep in a highly charged character-driven social interaction. It’s getting emotional and you know that, if you Cutaway, you’re going to lose a lot of the emotional momentum no matter how well you Re-Set the Scene later. On the other hand, you’ve got a player pulling a burglary across across town and they’ve been out of the action for 25 minutes and you can see they’re getting antsy.
What do you? Cutaway or don’t?
There’s no right answer. There’s no way to debate it even, though I know some dumbass is going to try in the comment section. In the end, it’s a choice you — the Game Master — must make. It’s subjective and it’s contextual. A thousand personal factors figure in. Like whether you’ve got the chops to get some of the drama back if you Cut, how often that particular player gets left out, how every player at the table handles this kind of thing, and what you can do later to make it up to them.
That’s why I can only tell you what to consider; I can’t tell you what calls to make. And you’ll never know whether you made a good call or a bad one. Or even if there was a good call to make instead of just a bunch of less bad ones. That’s Game Mastering. That’s life. If you can’t handle it, pass your screen to someone else and grab a character sheet because you ain’t cut out to run games.
Dramatic Tension refers to the audience’s uncertainty about what will happen next. Or how it will happen. Dramatic Irony refers to situations in which the audience knows things the characters in the story don’t. Dramatic Tension — and Dramatic Irony — are the primary drivers of emotional engagement.
You can Cut Across Time and Space to create or relieve Dramatic Tension. You can Cutaway from a conversation just before something’s revealed or just after something’s revealed or just as something terrible happens but before anyone has a chance to react to draw the Tension out or give it a chance to bleed off.
The most common example of a Dramatic Tension Cutaway is the Cliffhanger. That’s when you reveal a conflict, obstacle, or problem and then Cutaway before you Invite the involved Players to Act. They’ve got to sit and stew and worry while they wait for the action to come back.
Similarly, you can Cutaway just before you reveal what’s in the chest or what a character encounters to similar effect.
Revelation and Reversals
Game Masters love Cutting Across Time and Space to build Dramatic Tension, but rarely do they do so to relieve Dramatic Tension. And that’s a shame because it’s equally important. Sometimes, big shit needs time to breathe.
Thus, it’s useful to Cutaway after you drop a major bomb on some of the players. I’m talking big plot revelations, sudden reversals, major setbacks, and even major advances. That shit needs time to breathe. So after the Duke reveals he’s had a mole spying on the party — or after the assassin reveals he means to help the party instead of killing them — a Cutaway gives the involved players a chance to process what just happened.
Metanarrative Chicanery
You’re really gonna hate this part and I ain’t gonna apologize. Because this shit is gold.
You can use the dissonance between what the players know and what the characters know to really fuck with the players’ engagement.
Imagine, for example, Danae is downstairs distracting the Duke while Cabe is upstairs, searching his study. The longer Danae keeps the Duke talking, the more time Cabe has to search.
The obvious way to handle that is to run the bit where Cabe sneaks upstairs, evades the guard, and clambers along the window ledge to enter the study from another room, then Cutaway to Danae. Now, you cut back and forth between Danae’s cat-and-mouse conversation and Cabe’s ransacking. That’s pretty good, right? Tense and exciting.
But once Cabe’s in the room, you can run the entire conversation for fifteen or twenty minutes and leave Chriss waiting. When Danae finally blows it and the Duke dismisses her, you can cut to Cabe. Chirs knows the Duke’s coming back, but he can’t be clear just how long he’s actually got. He knows there’s a ticking clock, but he can’t see the clock because time in roleplaying games is so fuzzy.
Or, you can do the same thing, but when the Duke excuses himself, you can say, outright, “Meanwhile, an hour ago, Cabe entered the study.” Now, Chris knows exactly how long he’s got, but that’s still not useful because he’s got no way of knowing how long his search will take, so he can’t do anything strategically useful with that information. But you, as the Game Master, can then say shit, “Okay, searching the desk took ten minutes… now what?” and watch Chris shit bricks as he does the math and keeps the clock in his head.
Or you can do this…
Game Master: The Duke chuckles at Danae’s joke. Meanwhile, Cabe has just found the Duke’s hidden chest behind the secret panel. Unfortunately, a good-quality, iron padlock secures the lid. What does Cabe do, Chris?
Chris: I pick the lock.
Game Master: Roll it. Sixteen? The shackle pops open and Cabe lifts the lid of the chest. As he peers inside… the Duke meanwhile fixes Danae with a smile. ‘A clever remark,’ he says. ‘But I tell you, my dear, that is precisely why I don’t trust anything truly valuable to locks and chests; I keep my valuables on my person.’ He stands, ‘At any rate, I must not detain you. I expect you have a very disappointed little burglar to catch up with in my garden. Be well.’
Chris: I hate you.
Game Master: I know.
Now, that is art.
If you want to see some absolutely awesome metanarrative chicanery of this sort, watch Luc Besson’s trippy 1997 sci-fi flick The Fifth Element. The way that film’s edited is, as far as I’m concerned, the gold standard a Master of a Thousand Cuts should strive to imitate at their game table.
Meanwhile… Back in the Classroom
Recontextulation
Often, with a major reversal comes a re-examination of everything that came before. When you discover the Duke’s had a spy in the party, you see everything that’s happened in a new light. Things click into place. And sometimes, new questions are raised. That’s called Recontextualization and it’s one of the most intrinsically rewarding feelings a revelation can offer. It hits people hard. In a good way.
Certain kinds of players can’t get enough Recontextualization. It’s like a drug to them. And certain kinds of games and stories — like exploration-and-discovery games and mystery-and-investigation stories — thrive on Recontextualization. That feeling you get when you find a new move and you’re trying to remember all the places open to you now? That aha feeling when the mystery becomes clear and you flash back to all the scenes in the movie that suddenly make total sense? That’s Recontextualization.
A good Cutaway can give involved players time to savor the hit.
So that’s it: a full-on Art of the Cutaway tutorial. And you know what I’m gonna say next, right? Practice.
If you’re not already used to Cutting Away, start slow. Limit yourself to two threads, avoid Deep Cuts, limit Temporal Teleportation, and don’t cut Threaded Actions, which I’ll describe below. Test your limits, get comfortable with them, then gradually push past them.
Also, practice Re-Setting the Scene. Make yourself do it even when you’re not Cutting Across Time and Space. There’s no harm in reorienting your players — and yourself — periodically. So do it after potty breaks. Or do it after a painfully long mechanical resolution stalls a scene. Or do it after you break the action by looking something up in a rulebook. Or just do it in the middle of a long Encounter to bring everyone back. Re-Setting the Scene is the lynchpin skill; it’ll empower you to Cutaway from Threaded Actions and Cut Back again without splinching yourself.
And make sure you get your note-taking game up to snuff. You can’t run a game otherwise.
Meanwhile… I’ve got the final Social Interaction lesson to prepare for next time. So maybe stop bothering me with questions for a week.
I’m talking to you, Sloth.
After such a fantastic pair of articles, I know I certainly have no more questions! Now I just wanna go practice Mastering the Thousand Cuts on my players and see how long it takes before fingers, tongues, and other extremities start flying off. …Figuratively, of course. Thank you, Angry.
Thanks for teaching us how to become True Game Masters. Additionally, thanks for pointing out when something is just a part of life. Somehow your making me a more considerate human and a better game facilitator.
This leads me to a question.
When the party is split, is it important to have every character doing *something* so that you can meaningfully cut to them? Sometimes players will make plans that require one character to do nothing, for example leaving the clumsy fighter behind in a stealth mission because he’d just “get in the way.”
Cutting to him sitting in camp doesn’t really accomplish much if he has no choices to make, but if something always happens to PCs who are doing nothing, it feels contrived.
No. Especially not if the player’s okay taking the sideline. But if the player’s starting to feel left out and if it’s starts to be a pattern, it’s best to take the player aside and say, “Hey, you ended up on the sideline for a good while tonight. While everyone else was exploring the town, you hung out in the Inn. How do you feel about that?”
You can’t make players do things. If they give you no actions to work with, you’ve got nothing. And you also can’t keep dropping surprise events every time a player sits around on their butt. That leads to a sort of learned helplessness where the player never takes a proactive approach to participating because you’ll always drop an ambush or wandering NPC on them if they just sit still long enough.
Amazing article Angry!
This reminds me of when a chess master takes on a dozen less skilled players at once. As they physically roam around the room, they process a move at each table and make a move of their own. They manage to keep up the pace for all dozen players so that no one is really waiting that long. Each table is its own little world, and wherever the chess master focuses their attention is where the metaphorical ‘camera’ is focused. Moving to a new table is like cutting to a different place.
Talk of splitting the party brings Pikmin to mind. Starting with the second game, you have multiple captains who can divide the available squad of Pikmin to do tasks in different parts of the map – not actually at the same time since you can only control one at a time, but you can send them walking to a location and do stuff while waiting for the other group to travel.
The thing is, you generally want Pikmin in one spot. Shortcuts and treasures have a hard required amount, but enemies counterattack after a fixed span of time, so with fewer Pikmin your fights not only take longer but are more damaging. You can just use one massive army and steamroll encounters with no risk of retaliation, but then you spend more time waiting on travel, and you can be stuck waiting with nothing else to do while all the Pikmin are tearing down a wall. (Even this isn’t too inefficient; leaving a captain at base lets them immediately use the Pikmin which brought treasures back to base.)
Really clear and useful article! You touched on players gaining info their characters wouldn’t have a couple of times and particularly in asynchronous cutaways: “Meanwhile, an hour ago, Cabe entered the study.” Now, Chris knows exactly how long he’s got, but that’s still not useful.
How do you handle a character learning a piece of information that would be useful to another character that cannot be passed on til they meet in-game, but both players know? I feel like this situation is best avoided where possible, but can be unavoidable if things just play out.
Do you sacrifice verisimilitude for temporary telepathy? Do you forbid a player from acting on information their character couldn’t know experiencing time linearly? A third answer my mere executor brain cannot conceive?
As I heavily implied, I don’t sweat it any more than I sweat metagaming. It’s impossible to avoid. And, as I also noted, if the information’s unlikely to be strategically useful or actionable for the problem at hand, it really doesn’t matter.
I think that just depends on the actions going on. In this case, cabe would already know he’s short on time. Yes, now he knows exactly how much time, but that adds tension, especially given that he doesn’t know exactly how long each action will take. I think, considering the dramatic irony mentioned, consider the option that adds the most tension felt by the player (not the character). At times, when tension has been building up, you can use it to release it. The players are actors, but also the audience. So they are going to know things their characters don’t or shouldn’t know. The trick would be to use it to increase tension and engagement, in general. It’s a balancing act.