Let’s keep it simple today, guys. I almost said, “Let’s keep it brief,” but you and I both know that would be a load of bullshit.
So, what’s simple? Simple is nice, standalone Game Mastering advice useful for any idiot of any skill level — from novice idiot all the way up to paid-and-professional idiot — running any kind of game. Of course, I will be focusing on a specific flavor of fantasy adventure roleplaying gaming. You know the one I mean. It’s the one the vast majority of my readers are still running despite what a screaming minority keeps trying to tell me.
Don’t worry, guys; I got you.
Like all my Classic Angry Game Mastering Advice for Everyone Features™, this one’s based on a common theme I’ve spotted across a bunch of interactions I’ve had recently and chats I’ve seen in various dark and dingy corners of the virtual gamer space. I can sum up the theme thus…
When Do You Stop Narrating?
“When do you stop narrating?” is not a question sane people ask. At least, they don’t ask it that way. But, they do ask it. If you listen. In Classic Angry fashion, I’m recognizing the real question underlying a whole bunch of questions like, “What do I do when my players want their characters to spend hours exploring a town or gathering rumors,” or, “When the players are traveling, do I have to describe every hour of travel,” or, “Tracking; how the hell do I tracking? Like, actually at the table.”
There are a couple of common threads in those — and other — questions. First, they’re to do with actions that eat up a lot of game time but not necessarily a lot of play time. That is, the act of traveling, tracking, or exploring fills hours or days of actual time in the game world but rarely needs more than a few brief interactions at the table to iron out. Second, those actions don’t involve a lot of significant, meaningful decisions. Traveling and tracking are just plodding along and looking at the ground. There’s nothing the players have to decide once they start walking. Unless, of course, trouble brews. Meanwhile, exploring and rumormongering do involve a lot of little decisions — “Should, I turn down this street or head off in that direction,” or “Should I greet this person or that person and should I say ‘Good morrow,’ or ”ow’s it goin’, guv’nah?'” or whatever — meanwhile exploring and rumormongering involve lots of little decisions, but none of them are meaningful or affect the outcome and most are the sorts of things that, in real life, we just kind of let happen. The decisions aren’t impactful, strategic, or revelatory.
Of course, such actions may require several die rolls to resolve them and, despite what you or anyone else says — or what you incorrectly think I once said — there are many good reasons to use multiple die rolls to resolve some of these protracted actions, but the die rolls represent the character’s ongoing work on a task they’ve already made all the relevant decisions about.
Third and lastly, the outcomes of these actions can be completely and totally described in summary form — “After three days of painfully, scratchily forcing yourself through Tanglethorn Forest, you emerge…” — or with a single highlighted even that happens somewhere in the middle of doing the thing — “While you’re at the fountain where the village goodwives are gathering water for their households’ needs, you overhear several of them gossiping about…”
Few roleplaying games handle these sorts of protracted tasks well. Many don’t handle them at all. Worse, because modern gaming has become acting out every single damned spoken word and moment of activity, however small and useless, because dumbass players have become convinced — not by Critical Role; don’t even start that shit here — that roleplaying games are about putting on a show with their dumbass author-insert fanfic Mary Sue fursona original character recolors do not steal…
Sorry…
Worse, because many gamers think that proper roleplaying means acting out every single spoken word and moment of activity, however small and useless, most Game Masters don’t handle protracted tasks well either. That’s a big part of why so many Game Masters struggle with modes of play like wilderness travel and town mode.
Honestly, I, myself, am part of the problem. In teaching all y’all how to narrate good — you’re welcome — I inadvertently also failed to teach you when and how to stop narrating. Fortunately, it ain’t hard to fix this. You just need to learn one, simple idea. Well, actually, there’s a bunch of different ideas wrapped up in everything I said above, but I doubt anyone wants a full and updated and streamlined re-examination of how to adjudicate wilderness travel or a structure for town-based activities. So we’ll just stick with this idea I’ve chosen to call Tab Stop Narration.
Blobby Narration
Over the years, I’ve taught y’all that there’s this whole checklisty procedure-thing underlying good narration, right? First, you set the scene, then invite a player to act, then describe the actions’ outcome, then invite a player to act again. You go around like that a bunch of times until something’s done, and then you transition to some new encounter or event or whatever. Set the scene again, and away you go.
Remember that shit? Of course you do. It’s an absolutely brilliantly useful and functional way to break down Game Mastering narration, and I’d be saying that even if I weren’t the one who came up with it. Which I was. That brilliance? All me, baby. You’re welcome.
By breaking it down, I divided narration into four elements — four skills — you could practice and learn and master separately….
- Set the Scene
- Invite a Player to Act
- Describe the Outcomes
- Transition
But let’s look at narration differently today. Those steps aren’t really steps at all. They don’t come out as separate, distinct chunks of narration. I mean, I know they do for some of y’all, but I’m saying they shouldn’t. Narration should come out of your facehole in a giant blob of words with all those components worked in naturally. Thus, during a combat, I might deliver this blob of narration…
Ardrick’s slash opens a wound across the ogre’s bare stomach. It howls in pain, flailing its fists and its club wildly. Cabe — let me consult my dice here — Cabe takes a blow to the head that leaves his vision blurred and his head ringing — that’s six points of bludgeoning damage, Chris — and leaves him trying to clear his head while the ogre’s wound sprays blood everywhere. Before Ardrick can press his advantage, however, Danae, standing just outside the engagement… does what? Danielle, it’s your turn.
So my narration isn’t just, “Ardrick hits and hurts the ogre. The ogre attacks. Cabe takes damage. Danielle, what does Danae do?” It’s not just me working through the steps. Instead, it’s a delicious soup I’ve woven from the different threads that represent the elements of narration. Because good narration is like a soup made out of thread. Remember that.
Narration isn’t a step-by-step process. That kind of thinking leads to disjointed, bullet-point narration, and it’s also what tricks you into trying to do everything in that moment-by-moment-where-every-last-action-must-be-described style.
The truth is, running a roleplaying game is more like running a text-based adventure game. Some player types in some input, you parse it, and then you spit out all the text you need to spit out until it’s time for the player to provide input again. Each wall of text may set scenes, provide transitions, describe outcomes, and all that other shit, but those are just the rules for what the text must contain. Actually playing the game is just typing actions and receiving blobs of text.
That, by the way, is why people think Grok and ChatGPT can run — or worse, design — roleplaying game adventures. They can’t. And if you ask them the right way, they’ll even tell you exactly why they can’t and shouldn’t.
The point is that narration isn’t a step-by-step thing. Rather, it’s responding to the players’ inputs with a wall of text that has certain elements in it. I know I’m going to get a lot of shit for saying this, but it’s like telling a story and pausing only when you need the players to give input. Now, before you get your panties in a jimmy, that’s just an analogy. I’m not literally saying the Game Master tells the story and just invites the players to press a few choose-your-own-adventure…
Actually, screw it. A bunch of assclowns are going to scream at me no matter how I explain it because they’d much rather intentionally misunderstand me and fight about how much smarter they are than actually listen and risk being less shit at running games. I really don’t understand why people who think I’m the worst thing to happen to roleplaying gaming show up to intentionally read my twenty thousand words every month in the most uncharitable, incorrect, and infuriating way possible, but that’s on them. I’m sure they’ll forgive me for ignoring their verbal diarrhea, though.
Anyway…
Tab stops.
Tab Stop Narration
Let’s explore another batshit insane analogy I pulled out of my ass. Let’s compare narration to tab stops. What are they? Well, you know how, when you’re entering information in an online form or fillable PDF, pressing Tab will instantly take you to the next place where you’re allowed to type? Unless, of course, it’s an official D&D character sheet distributed by Wizards of the Coast themselves because those fuckwits let an official, fillable PDF character sheet sit on their site for years that had absolutely insane tab stops set. Like, seriously, how do you fuck up, moving to the next field?
Anyway… those are tab stops. It doesn’t matter how far in the document or form the next input box is, pressing tab will get you there. It’ll zip you through pages and pages of documents if it has to. That’s narration. That’s Tab Stop Narration.
In theory — for now, anyway; I’m gonna change the rules below — in theory, if your players say they want to walk the two-hundred mile road between Bungusville and Castle Frazzledazzle and the weather’s fine and there are no encounters on the road and nothing weird to see, your next line of narration should summarize nine days of road travel and end with the players approaching the castle gates. There’s really no reason to break up the travel. The characters are going to travel during the day, camp at night, keep reasonable watch rotations, stay alert, eat when they’re hungry, drink when they’re thirsty, and follow the road.
Thus, once my players declare their intention to travel, I need to gather all the information I need to cover all the action up to the next moment they will have something interesting and useful and meaningful to decide. If I think shit like watch rotations are important, I’ll ask, “Are you going to camp at night? Will you set a watch? Who takes what shift?” I only have to ask that shit one time because, unless there’s a compelling reason to change it up, the players aren’t going to, and anything that would cause a compelling reason to change watch rotations is probably going to need a tab stop anyway. Which is something I also determine before I start talking. I ask the questions I need to ask, I make notes, I compute the trek and check my map for planned encounters, I roll for random encounters, and all of that tells me when my next tab stop is. If I discover there’s a random encounter on the fourth day, that’s my next tab stop. If absolutely nothing happens, my next tab stop is at the destination.
Let’s say I did a bunch of rolls and discovered there is, indeed, an encounter on the fourth day. I might do this…
You leave Bungusville and follow the dusty Castle Road east. Within a few hours, you’ve left the village and the farms behind and find yourselves surrounded by gently rolling grass and scrubland. The road dwindles to a pair of deep-worn cart ruts winding through the ankle-high growth. You travel for days, the scene much the same, day after day — mark off three days of rations, please — until midafternoon on the fourth day. That’s when you find yourselves…
See? Tab stops.
A Game Does Not Live on Input Alone
Why AI Can’t Game Master
Lots of folks — including a few publishers who really should know better — have worked themselves into a frothing frenzy of excitement over the idea of using large-language-model-based generative artificial intelligence models like ChatGPT and Grok to replace Game Masters and adventure writers. Some absolute insane dumbasses are even using AI to replace players so they can run games for their robot buddy, and what the motherloving fuck is that about? What even is the point?
I’m not going to pretend I haven’t tested Skynet’s ability to write and run games myself and, you know what, I ain’t worried I’m gonna lose my job. In fact, I kinda hope everyone else starts using ChatGPT to write all their content. That’ll leave me as the only person in the entire community who’s not publishing utter and complete crap and the only Game Master left who can run an actually good game.
At the same time, I’m not a Luddite. I am not saying this because I hate AI. I’ve started using LLM-based generative AI tools in my workflow. Not to write content — never to write content; I don’t even trust it to proofread my work — because I would never pass off a robot’s output as my own work and because I care about actual quality, but it is a useful tool for a small business owner and content creator to have. Hating AI ain’t gonna get you anywhere. That’s like hating search engines or refusing to use a smartphone. All it does is put you behind the curve. But there are dangers in overusing AI, using it badly, using it for the wrong reasons, or using it in ways it can’t be used, just like there are dangers in using Wikipedia for all your research or banging screws in with a hammer.
If you want to have some quirky fun and kill a couple of hours, by all means, ask the Grok to run a game for you. It’s kind of fun for a diversion and, contrary to popular belief, I don’t hate fus. But understand that AI has specific, defined limitations that make it an absolutely terrible Game Master and adventure designer. Context drift and semantic drift lead to inconsistencies as the interaction goes on and consistency is one of those things a roleplaying absolutely must have. LLM-based AI models also don’t technically have memories. They remember only chunks of summary information and, when they forget a detail, they don’t know they’ve forgotten it and they fill in the gaps with default behavior. They also don’t know when they don’t know things and won’t go digging for information if they think they know it. Kind of. This often leads to so-called creative hallucinations. Moreover, AI doesn’t have an internal model for the game’s system or its world like human brains do, so they struggle to enforce the rules properly and maintain world details across long interactions. Even if you train a model using the entire core rulebook for your game of choice, it can’t use its judgment to apply the rules and often has to be reminded to invoke specific rules at specific times. AI has no sense of authorial or design intent. They can’t keep things like themes, tone, vision, or design concepts like progression or setup-and-callback in their heads and so can’t engage in any kind of top-down approach to design. They can only run and then… style games because that’s how they generate their outputs. And because each output becomes part of the context for the next, all of the problems I’ve highlighted above get worse with each interaction. The longer the game goes on, the more bonkers the AI gets, which is why those drift problems happen. It’s also why AI struggles with iterative and bulk tasks — like generating fifty NPCs to populate a town — and gets stuck in repetitive patterns or outputs crazier results the longer the list or just loses count and stops at 27, thinking it’s done.
So, yeah, my job is safe. Hell, the more people use AI wrong for the wrong things, the safer it gets, so please, all of you, try to replace me with a robot. I support that idea fully.
If you were paying attention, you probably noticed my careful use of the phrase in theory prefacing all the shit I said above. In theory, once the players give you the input you need, you can narrate and narrate and narrate until the game hits a point where you need more input. In practice, though, there are some reasons to stop narrating before you need input. Or, rather, to pause your narration until the players tell you it’s okay to keep going.
A lot of this shit is going to separate the Mere Game Executors from the True Game Masters among you. But don’t sweat that. Just use the parts that suit your level of skill and investment.
The problem with narrating over huge swaths of time and distance is that it utterly fails to convey any actual sense of time and distance. If you cover a month of travel with a few sentences of narration, your players are going to start to feel like they’re just clicking on a fast travel option. Of course, you could prevent that by forcing a bunch of encounters and random bullshit into every trek or trip to the marketplace, but you shouldn’t have to do that. And you don’t. It should be entirely possible for the players to hike long distances on safe roads, totally unmolested, or relax as passengers on a ship for a month’s voyage along a safe trade route.
For long tasks and long periods of uneventful travel, you should insert a few narrative pauses. These aren’t real tab stops per se. They’re more like stopping the narration and saying, Press X to Continue, which, yeah, I said you shouldn’t ever do that, but that was in the context of adjudicating actions. Narration and pacing are different. Besides, we’re getting into advanced skills here, so all bets are off.
What’s this look like in practice? Well, for a long travel trip, I might describe the first day of travel and then describe the act of camping the first night. I’ll ask everyone to mark off a day of rations, confirm the watch rotation, tell everyone to apply a long rest, talk about the uneventful night, and then say, “If there’s nothing else to do before you break camp…? Okay, you break camp and continue on your way.” I’ll then carry on to the next tab stop or, if the trip’s really long, insert another little pause like that a few days later. Maybe that’ll be a midday break by a stream to rest, eat, and refresh the mounts or some shit like that.
These sorts of pauses are more about pacing than inviting action. You have to understand that and adjust your expectations accordingly. Don’t invite the players to act, just ask them to confirm decisions they’ve already made, give them a little bookkeeping, give them some space to act if they want to, and then move on. Pauses like these shouldn’t take but a moment. They just exist to make the trip or task seem as long as it is and to give the players a chance to act if they want to.
See, those little pauses are great for giving the players space to interact with each other or stay in their characters’ headspaces. They don’t force the players to act or even invite it; they give the players permission to interact if they want to.
Another thing these pauses do is break up the bookkeeping. There is technically nothing wrong with asking the players to mark off ten days of rations at the end of a long trip — you absolutely do not have to balance the books every day and you shouldn’t — but, well, players are fuckups. They misjudge their resources, they forget to buy supplies, they mismanage them. Besides, players can’t know for sure how long any trip is going to take. But that’s down to adjudicating travel better, which I ain’t talking about today. The point is, breaking up the resource bookkeeping a bit gives the players a chance to spot a supply crunch coming before it’s a crisis.
For this reason, True Game Masters actually always have a rough idea of how long the party’s supplies will carry them. You don’t need an exact number, just a general idea of how many days the party can go before they hit an emergency. Then, True Game Masters start inserting pauses for regular bookkeeping to give the players a chance to see the emergency coming. It is on the players to spot the emergency — “Uh, guys, how much longer is this trip because I forgot to buy food and I’ve only got a couple days worth left” — but if you cover two weeks of travel with narration when the party only had eight days of food to begin with, you didn’t give them the chance to see the issue coming.
That’s why Mere Game Executors do day-by-day bookkeeping, and there’s nothing wrong with that. It’s just not ideal if you can avoid it. It chews up game time doing paperwork instead of playing the game. It’s better if you can do all the resolution before the trip starts and all the bookkeeping after it. Even though it takes a little extra time at the start of the trip — or any protracted task — the actual narration is smoother. It does require you to know when to give the players space to play the push-your-luck game or to see a problem coming.
Everything I’ve said about food and travel supplies also counts for materials in protracted crafting tasks, medical supplies when administering long-term care, money when carousing or networking, and all other costs of continuing protracted tasks.
Pause for the Players, Not for the Dice
Before I wrap up, I want to point out that, while pauses are great for conveying a proper sense of pacing and giving the players space to interact in the dead time during long, boring tasks and to keep the players aware of the bookkeeping without it breaking up the action too much, pauses ain’t for die rolling. Pauses are for pacing and player brains. Either you pause between tab stops to convey a sense of time, distance, or scene or you pause to give the players space to think and act. You don’t pause if all you need are some dice rolled.
Obviously, this goes for shit like random event checks. I already told you to get them out of the way at the start of the trip because they help you set the tab stops. But it also goes for any ongoing checks the players might need to make to resolve an ongoing action. Depending on your system due the jury, you might need to make periodic checks for tracking, navigation, crafting, foraging, or whatever. That’s fine. Do what the rules tell you to do. But don’t take that to mean you have to roll the checks as they come. Nor do you have to let the players roll their own checks. Just as you can pre-roll random event checks to determine when the next tab stop happens, you can also pre-roll tracking checks and navigation checks and crafting checks until you hit a failure or the next tab stop.
The key here is to resolve the entire action before narrating anything, and use that resolution to decide how to narrate what. If you know the party’s lost on day three, you slow down the narration at that point and start going day-by-day so the party can watch their supplies dwindle and start to wonder if they really shouldn’t have arrived already. If you know the crafter blows his third day of work and ruins a bunch of supplies, that’s a tab stop, because the crafter might want to cut his losses or buy more supplies before he continues.
And That’s Tab Stop Narration
Round by Round Initiative
Interestingly, a lot of the shit I’m saying about proper pacing, tracking, and bookkeeping when it comes to protracted tasks also applies to rounds of combat, though the issues are a little different. With each edition published over the last quarter-century, D&D has shifted a little more from round-by-round combat to continuous, cyclical combat. In fact, at this point, the rules don’t even need to refer to rounds at all. That time unit is entirely vestigial.
But the flow of combat has actually lost a few things by not having an in-built pause at the top of each combat round. Honestly, I’d call it one of several major weaknesses in modern D&D initiative, and, if you’re really good, I’ll talk more about that and how to fix it in the future.
There you have it: a nice, simple way to handle protracted game actions that chew up a lot of fictional, fantasy hours but don’t entail a lot of meaningful, impactful decisions at the table and thus absolutely don’t deserve playing round-by-round or minute-by-minute or even day-by-day.
When you recognize the players have undertaken such a task — since you know what to look for now — don’t just grab some dice and start talking. Stop, instead, and think about how much gameplay the players’ choice of action covers. Think about the next time you’re going to need them to make a useful, meaningful decision. When’s the next time the characters will be at a point where they’re waiting for their brains to decide what they do next?
Now, ask yourself what you need to know to get the game to that point? If you don’t know when that point even is, figure it out. If you need dice to tell you, roll them. Now. Roll all the dice you need to know to get that next point of player input. Ask the players for any information you need to get to that point, too. Ask right now. Take a minute. Take five. It’s fine. Tell the players to give you a minute to do your thing. They’ll wait.
Do not let the players take a break every time you have to do this shit, by the way. That’ll be a disaster.
While you’re doing this, consider the action from the players’ side of the screen. Is there anything they need to see coming? Is there anything that might give them pause in the middle of the task? Anything that might make them think about changing their plans? If so, build pauses into the action before that point. Or you can make the choice to resolve things day-by-day, hour-by-hour, or segment-by-segment if you think that’s best. If you think the players need a lot of chances to spot a disaster coming or if the challenge you’re building is a push-your-luck kind of thing, that might be best.
Remember, the goal is to skip the moment-by-moment gameplay whenever the game’s action doesn’t demand or deserve it. That’s just smart, efficient Game Mastering. But you don’t want to hurt the gameplay experience for the sake of good, efficient pacing.
On that note, by the way, considering working in an early pause or some periodic pauses so the players can feel like their characters are putting in a lot of time or covering a lot of distance or doing something tediously, repetitively dull for minutes or hours or days.
Once you’ve worked all that shit out in your head — once you’ve resolved the whole action and decided how you’re going to narrate the whole outcome — only then do you open your gob and let your narrative soup spill forth all over the table. Narrative soup that is full of scene setting and transitional yarn.
Because, if you remember nothing else of what I’ve taught you today, you must remember this…
Delivering good Game Mastering narration is like puking a soup made of yarn onto your game table.
That’s the real takeaway.
Would this work as well to cut between a character who’s doing a lengthy task and one that’s doing several small ones? Just check in with the crafter making a magic sword in between the rogue finding out rumours and selling loot?
“three days have passed and Aldwin spent about half your budget for materials. All is going to schedule, mark off 400 gold. Back to Baldwin, who’s gone to the marketplace..”
Well I’m no sexy gaming genius, but to me that sounds like an ideal way to handle it. Transitioning between different tasks will likely add to the sense of time spent for each task, and also give the opportunity to build tension where needed.
Thank you for the article Angry! I would absolutely read and appreciate an updated and streamlined re-examination of how to adjudicate wilderness travel, but I do think you’ve already covered it pretty in-depth imo. I would be even more excited for the hinted-at revisit to Town Mode! Glad you are feeling better lately
I also feel like this article here rounds up some issues I’ve hit with wilderness travel. If you read it along with ‘How to Wilderness Right’ (https://theangrygm.com/how-to-wilderness-right/) it really is pretty complete thing.
But having a similar guide for prolonged town exploration/social actions would be great! There I hit moment-by-moment narration more often than I’d like to.
Sure, I’ll be the first in the conga dance line for your full and updated and streamlined re-examination of how to adjudicate wilderness travel or a structure for town-based activities. Stand behind me, guys. One, two, three, four…
Yeah and we’re dancing for the initiative article too
Let the dance begin!
We can dance for multiple topics?!
What if instead of being really good, I’ve only been moderately good? I’m curious about the several major weaknesses in modern initiative.
Behold, my dance.
I’d love to see and updated and streamlined look at both travel and town adjudication and narration.
One problem with tab stop narration might be that it always puts the players on high alert. How woukd you go about setting up a sudden ambush during hours or days of travel?
I’d take a guess and say that you figure out if the PCs detect the ambush or not (probably with some dice involved) before you start narrating, since that will become a tab stop one way or another. If the PCs fail to notice anything, the tab stop is them getting an arrow to the knee. If the PCs notice something, the tab stop is you tell the players whatever the PCs have noticed and ask them what they’ll do next. Putting the players on high alert makes only sense if the PCs have noticed signs of a potential inminent ambush!
Thanks. The second scenario (characters noting something, like a shadow in a brush near the road) was what I was thinking about. Realistically this will be more often just an oddly shaped tree stump or so than an actual ambush, but players will suspect that you don’t tab stop to something trivial and be more on alert than actual characters would.
So sometimes I do tab stop to something that is completely trivial (like a noisy hedgehog at night heard by the guard), but I was wondering how others deal with this.
Why are you tab stopping for a noisy hedgehog or a harmless, totally normal shadow under a bush?
Some playgroups might enjoy that kind of faff, but it’s the kind of stuff that really drove me nuts as a player. That junk could easily cost 15-20 minutes of a 4 hour session with certain people in the group, and for what?
If there *is* an orc ambush, roll the stealth check for the orcs, and compare with the PCs passive perception. Go from there.
If there *isn’t* an orc ambush, don’t pointlessly stop in the middle of a journey to say “You see a weird shadow under a bush” while waggling your eyebrows at the players and smirking internally as they start drawing weapons or asking to roll spot checks.
Just say “You sit on the cart slowly watching the cabbage fields roll past, getting out to walk occasionally when your posterior gets too numb from the wooden boards. In the afternoon, you spot a single cow in a field and you watch it until it’s out of sight.” and get on with the actual adventure when they arrive wherever they’re going.
Don’t get me wrong, you can tab-stop to things other than combat, but they should involve meaningful decisions that have actual consequences or relationship development like “The cart wheel breaks, you’re miles from anywhere, and the baroness is only 24 hours from betraying the king, what do you do?” or “Bob, you start to suspect your guide is cheating at the nightly poker game, how do you want to handle that?” or whatever.
By starting the ambush at the moment when the ambush starts.
“It’s midday on the third day when, suddenly, screaming orc savages leap out of the bushes. Roll initiative, dingdongs, it’s slaughtering time.”
Regarding people who think an LLM can be a GM, some people were fooled by ELIZA back in the ’60s, despite its simple and laughably obvious rhetorical technique. When Turing proposed his eponymous test, he didn’t have such gullible laymen in mind.
I’m very much anticipating the fix to Initiative!
Also, very useful article here. I’m definitely complicit in Narrating too much, Stopping narration to invite meaningless actions, and Playing out everything moment-by-moment. This will need to stew and see more practice.
I’m curious about the value of pausing at the top of each round. If done intentionally, whether built into the system or not, I could see it as an opportunity to pull back and give a quick update on the state of the battlefield: reminding players of key terrain, the overall morale/health of the enemy forces, drawing attention to the state of any key objectives, and just generally reminding players of the wider world beyond their character. It’s maybe also a time to check in on basic bookkeeping (player ammo, health status, status effects, etc)? But I’m sure there is something I’m not thinking of, or at least more nuance. I hope we get an article on this!
Yeah, but you’re off to a really good start and very smart to see the value in that. I award you an Angry Cookie.
Well, fuck… where did the alpha transparency bullshit go. I’ll add “fix your cookie” to the list.
Years ago Angry belched out an article that exactly described this… I’ve been using it ever since.
One idea I had for combat was to pause at the top of the round (“there’s a pause in the conflict as you and the orcs catch your breath, eyeing each other for openings”) and then give the players 10-15 seconds to discuss their strategy for the next round (since they’re not allowed to discuss during the round).
This gives them a chance to work as a team while keeping pressure up, and even overhear the monster’s plans. Of course if the monsters understand the language the players are using they can overhear as well, rewarding players who figure that out and switch to another language they all speak.
My brain yelling “Stop on a… WHAMMY!?” when you mentioned a ‘push your luck’ type situation……. (sounds like a random encounter to me)
The issue comes in when the players – as you so ingeniously point out – get wrapped up in their own “narrative soup”, having to describe every meal they cook right down to what recipe they’re using and where they got the eggs.
This is what happens in my games far too often, the players bogging down in minutia of their own making. When I try to rein it in, I get push-back that I’m “ruining their character development”. (as though whether the soup has onions in it or not is crucial to their growth as a person)
When I try and wrap up long periods of time in a short narrative blob, invariably SOMEONE at the table will bog it all down in exactly what their character is doing in the mean time, which spurs everyone else to describe in excruciating detail how they pass the days, weeks, or months. Forget 20 minutes… these brainstorming sessions can last HOURS!
In a way, it’s almost flattering, since it means my players are wrapped up in the setting and seeing their characters as real people with wants, desires, hobbies, etc., but it REALLY slows down the game. I don’t want to be a witch about it, so I’ll just let them run with it until they decide they’re done, but I just wish there was a better happy middle-ground between “Stop dropping a boat anchor on the story, guys!” and wasting hours of precious session time on irrelevant minutia.
Oh well.
Harsh, nasty truth time…
This isn’t flattering. The players aren’t wrapped up in the setting, or even each other, and the fact that they view your attempts to get them back to the game at hand as an intrusion is kind of the tell. Another tell is how often the players involve each other or interact with each other versus how often they react to one player going off on their spiel by going off their own. Such as when one player describes weeks of personal activity which prompts the other players to do the same with their own personal activities. The players are more invested in their own performances then they are with the game or even with each other. This is what I’ve called, in the past, performance-based play. The players want to create their personal avatar and then put on a little creative show for everyone else. You, the Game Master, provide them a stage and the other players are a captive audience.
Thank you. I needed to hear that.
Yes, some of the players at my table are performance-based players. (in particular, two that goad the rest into doing the same) They like to show off. They use the game to make themselves feel better. I need to have a polite chat with the worst offender and explain to him that what he’s doing isn’t fun for anyone else and he’s making the rest of the players sit through his narrative instead of the one everyone else is there to play.
It’s actually been easier this last month because the other player that does this a lot has been absent due to work and the worst one has toned it down in her absence, but It’s still my fault for letting it happen at all.
You sir, are a steely-eyed missile man! Thank you again.
You have my sympathies. It sucks having to reign in one player’s “fun” for the sake of the group, especially when the player isn’t technically doing anything wrong, but is just taking up a little too much “space” and crowding out others. But nothing makes it clearer that you’re making the right call than a string of absences that drastically improves your game’s pace and flow.
Suckiest part of the job.