I know I left you hanging last time, and I’m sorry about that.

It is finally time for the real, actual, last lesson in my Stupid Narration Tricks miniseries. Rather, it’s time for the second, and final, half of the truly last lesson.

Unless I come up with more Stupid Narration Tricks someday. Which I probably will. Being an endless font of gaming brilliance is just my cross to bear.

Do you remember the first half of the lesson? It was all about cleverly hiding details in your narration by disguising them as innocuous throwaway remarks, thus giving your players a chance to spot clues with their own brains. If you don’t remember that, or you somehow missed it, now’s the time to fix that. That trick was just the first-level unlock that gets you into the talent tree. Today is the rest of the tree: repetition, patterns, and the breaking thereof of the repeated patterns.

But before I get into all that, let me take a stab at clarifying the point of hiding key details in plain narrative sight. I don’t think I was entirely clear last time, and it also plays into this other miniseries I’m one idea deep into.

The Three Gameplay Heats

So what’s the point of this skill? How do I mean for you to use these powers for Game Mastering good instead of Game Mastering evil?

Do you remember my saying, “Given that narration is spotlighting blah, blah, blah, how do you hide a key in a room for the players to find?” Let me ask you the same question from the other side. Suppose you’re a player. Gross, right? I know. But it’s just a thought experiment. As a player, if you suspect a key might be hidden in a room, how do you find it?

The answer’s easy, right? You say, “My character searches the room for the key he and I suspect is hidden therein,” and then you wait for the Game Master to respond.

The problem is the response is probably going to sound something like, “Roll an Awareness (Search) check and if you get umpteen or better, let me know.” And do keep in mind, by the way, that this isn’t just about keys and locks. We can have the same discussion about finding clues at a crime scene, or seeing through a con artist’s scheme or a doppelganger’s impostering or whatever. Also keep in mind that you are meant to notice how this dovetails nicely with my recent analysis of open-ended creativity challenges.

Anyway…

Rolling to search, solve, insight, or whatever isn’t really gameplay. It’s just pressing a button on a controller and then flipping a coin to determine the outcome. That can be fixed with better mechanics, and I will be offering those soon, but the issue that is the player’s brain isn’t really involved beyond thinking, “Hidden thing might be hidden; roll Search to locate.”

Think about video games in which you, the player, get to use your own perceptive attentiveness to find secrets. You do most of the searching with your own eyeballs. In a game like Hollow Knight or The Legend of Zelda, you need to notice the subtle graphical cues that a breakable wall is nigh. Even in games that give your character an in-game sensory skill, you need to use it in the right place, you need to interpret the different highlights, and there’s often a trade-off to using the skill like a narrowed field of awareness or slower movement.

The point is, your eyes and your brain are doing at least some of the work. It isn’t just about pressing a button to call a random number generator. Actually, the real point is that the game designer can actually adjust the gameplay experience. Cracked walls in Zelda games are notoriously easy to spot, but in some areas of Hollow Knight, the lighting and foreground obstructions can make them much harder to notice. A Tracker Vision button can make things super-obvious or add a subtle glow, and the gameplay trade-offs can make it really painful to use on the move, so you have to be pretty close to where the thing you’re looking for already is. The game designer can also add other clues and hints to point you toward secrets so you aren’t relying on spotting alone to help you find stuff you missed on a first pass.

Now, players can brute force this crap if they’re willing to take the time and bore themselves. You can just bomb or slash every wall. You can plod around slowly examining every pixel with the Tracker Vision button held down. But alert, attentive players who learn the signs and listen to the clues don’t have to pixel hunt like that.

And that is the point of all this hide details in the narration thing. It gives savvy, attentive players an alternative to rolling constant Search and Insight checks. Except that’s only the first point. Because there’s a second point. The second point is that it gives savvy, attentive players a chance to respond to surprises. With good narration and proper scenario design, smart players can see traps, ambushes, and betrayals coming without asking for constant die rolls or even if the plastic math rocks are unkind to them. Even if they don’t foresee a surprise development, they can at least reflect on how they should have seen it when they down a potion of restoration to recover their hit points or soothe their bruised egos.

Now, I’ll have a lot more to say about this in the coming weeks and months. For now, I just want you to understand that these skills aren’t there to replace the gameplay, but rather to supplement it. To give the players’ actual brains a way to get involved in fair, non-brittle ways.

Moving on…

The Mysterious Pink Letter Mystery… Again

This whole hide key details in the superfluous fluff started with me glazing G.R.R. Martin for his word choice when describing a couple of inter-character memos featured in the fifth book of the Song of Ice and Fire series, A Dance with Dragons. Remember? I made a big deal about how, because two letters were sealed with hard buttons of pink wax while a third was sealed with a smear of pink wax, it proved the CIA shot Khal Drogo or whatever.

Now, it’s true that Martin was using his careful word choice to plant ideas, clues, and connections in his prose there. He does that everywhere. It’s one of the hallmarks of his technical wordsmithing artistry. Whether you like what he does with his craft, you can’t deny that he’s an amazing master of the technical craft of writing. At least, you can’t without making yourself look like a clueless asshat with an ax to grind.

But that’s not all Martin was doing there. You see, there’s more to building a mystery than just knowing how to plant clues for people to find, no matter what most mystery adventure writers and game designers seem to think. Martin wasn’t just planting clues in his prose. Martin broke a pattern. And he couldn’t break that pattern without first establishing it.

So, let’s talk repetition…

Repetitive Narration is Repetitive

Given that this isn’t a Remedial Game Mastering for Total Dummies 101 kind of lesson, I don’t think I have to explain how important repetition is. I shouldn’t have to remind any of you that players usually need to hear a key detail three times before you can be absolutely certain someone’s going to catch it. And you should all know that if there’s something important the players absolutely must notice, you should repeat it three times. And I’m pretty sure everyone reading this knows that three is the number of times a key detail has to be repeated to ensure it’s lodged in at least a few player noggins.

Hopefully, you all also know that there’s no such thing as being too repetitive. You never sound as repetitive to the players as you sound to yourself.

Suppose you used your newfound ability to hide details in plain narrative sight to hide the same detail in plain narrative sight across several scenes, encounters, or rooms. At the very least, that would make it much more likely for the players to notice or remember that detail later, wouldn’t it?

Imagine, for instance, that you’ve got an adventure in a temple dedicated to a bunch of animal spirits. You’re building up to this puzzle in which the players have to identify the most revered spirit. The spirit king. Being a good scenario designer, you, of course, make this whole clue progression or come up with some other way for the players to, through gameplay, determine the solution. But then, because you want to be a great scenario designer like your angry Game Mastering hero from the internet, you want to provide a shortcut so clever, attentive players can skip right to the solution once they find the puzzle. Or maybe so they don’t have to jump through as many gameplay hoops to get there.

So, you decorate a bunch of rooms with animal images and, in your narrative scene-setting, you rattle off lists of example animals. Maybe the first room has all these reliefs of different animals carved into the wall, and you say, “You spot all sorts of animals. A few bears, a snake, a pair of eagles, all kinds of beasts.” In another room, the players find these icons on the shelf and identify such things as a snarling wolf, a sinuous snake, and a prowling puma. In yet another, there are animal masks covered with fur, feathers, and the like. Maybe among the masks are one covered in a brown beaver pelt, another decorated with red feathers, and a third covered in a silvery, scaly snakeskin.

You see what I did there?

Now, with careful examination and dice rolls and other such crap, the players might get clues that the snake is always prominent somehow. It’s centrally located, it’s unique, whatever. But before the players know the puzzle exists, they’re unlikely to do such an examination of the flavor text. Some will; many won’t. Once they do find the puzzle, the players will go back and check all the animal decorations for clues, but one might say, “You know what? We keep seeing snakes over and over. There’s lots of different animals, but there’s always snakes. I bet snake is the answer.” Maybe they try it. Or maybe the party heads to the closest room, examines the masks, notes the snake in the center of all the masks, and they consider that confirmation enough.

Yeah, as an off-hand bonus, I just showed you how to build a puzzle that can be beaten more efficiently with player skill but doesn’t solely rely on player skill. You’re welcome.

I should also note that you don’t have to be literal about this. You can use repeated words, phrases, and concepts to connect ideas across different bits of prose. Actual snake carvings work, but so do snakeskin garments. Or a scepter that’s twisted like a snake. Or a jade pendant whose chain is snaked around a peg on the wall. Or a monster with slitted eyes “like a snake’s.” Or a gemstone the party identifies as serpentine, which you casually exposit is “so called because of its mottled-green, snake-like coloration.”

Remember, when you’re to plant an idea, every word you speak, every simile, every metaphor, and every odd expositional fact is an opportunity to reinforce the idea. That’s the real trick here.

Speaking of tricks, let me offer a little bonus way to use repetition. It’s to do with recurring non-player characters.

The Repeated Signature Detail

I’m not sure if I ever mentioned this trick before. It’s something I like to do whenever a non-player character becomes a recurring character in my campaign. I pick one trait — physical, behavioral, tonal, whatever — and mention it at least once whenever the character is on-screen. And I try to use the same, or very similar, wording every time.

For example, the players in my Chain of Stars campaign befriended this mountaineer whose father was eviscerated by a demon they failed to catch. Long story. Doesn’t matter. What matters is she has long, auburn hair and she always keeps it tied in a thick, tight braid that hangs to her waist. I usually compare it to a rope because she’s a mountaineer. That’s just vivid, life-giving characterization. But the detail is now so strongly tied to Varanna Algar of Ironwall in my own head that I can’t mention her without thinking about the braid and then everything else I know about her. See, it’s a memory trick. Tying memories to vivid sensory details helps strengthen the memories.

Remember that. It’s a useful, fun fact about human memory.

But I don’t do it just as a memory trick. Remember how Batman was always ready to neutralize any member of the Justice League if he ever had to? He always had some kryptonite in his pocket in case Superman went berserk and some super slippery grease on hand to trip up the Flash and a sexy cheetah costume in his trunk to deal with Wonder Woman? Well, that’s why I have repeated signature character details for all my recurring non-player characters.

Let’s say, for example, that Varanna disappears at some point in the story. Maybe she leaves the party after a falling out. Months later, the party’s being shadowed by a mysterious, bitter, angry figure cloaked in shadows. Then, at one point, the party catches sight of a long, waist-length, ropy braid. Aha.

Or what if she’s away from the party for a few days and when they return, her hair is disheveled and hanging loose and unkempt. Or she’s cut it off. Or she disappears, and then the party receives a ransom note tied with the end of a thick, braided rope of auburn hair.

Or what if she’s replaced by a doppelganger and I suddenly start describing her braid as loosely tied or hasty or something?

You never know what you’re going to need to set up. Which brings me neatly to the last skill in this little talent tree. The one which, by now, barely needs any explanation at all. You’ve probably already figured it out.

Breaking Patterns for Gaming Fun

Do I even seriously need to explain this? Can I just let you finish this up in your head? If you’ve been paying attention, you know exactly what I’m going to say now, and if you haven’t been paying attention, then my finishing doesn’t matter. You’re not going to start paying attention now.

Repetition is a great way to get the players to pick up on a hidden clue. But it’s also a great way to establish a pattern. That’s important because breaking a pattern is also a great way to get the players to pick up on a clue. See, brains are pattern-spotting machines. They’re always looking for patterns, and they’re sensitive to broken patterns. Even when a brain’s not consciously aware a pattern’s been set up and broken, they still deliver an unconscious feeling of something offness.

If I suddenly described Varanna’s braid differently, the players might not pick up on the actionable signal, but interactions might start to feel off. Which is precisely what you’re going for when you’re, say, going for a Doppelganger Gambit. Even if they don’t see the betrayal coming, at the very least, afterwards, they’ll admit to feeling like something was off about Varanna for a while. Which, remember, is the difference between gameplay and screwjob.

My point is that by hiding a repeated detail in plain narrative sight over and over in an adventure, arc, or campaign, you establish a pattern. If you then break the pattern, that’s something the players can notice with their own brains instead of with die rolls.

If the break is big and obvious, the players probably won’t miss it. You won’t even have to call attention to the change but rather, just describe things as they are. If Varanna cuts off her braid off-screen in a fit of character development, I won’t have to say, “You notice her braid is missing.” I won’t have to acknowledge the change at all. I can just suddenly describe her as having roughly-cropped auburn hair and let the players ask the question or draw whatever conclusions they will.

Meanwhile, more subtle pattern breaks are more difficult to spot, but they work well as foreshadowing, setup, or as part of a progression of escalating clues. Even if the players don’t notice or act on the break, you’re still setting yourself up for a delicious, post-reversal, “We should have seen that coming; something’s been off for a while,” moment.

Really, the whole pattern-breaking thing is the easiest of the three skills to grasp, apply, and master. The hardest part of this whole thing is just mastering your narration to such a degree that your word choice is always deliberate. Or, at least, always deliberate when you need it to be.

Which brings this whole Stupid Narration Tricks miniseries full circle. It ends where it began. With me telling you that extemporaneous speaking and awareness of your own word choice is just something you have to git gud at.

That’s just how it be.