GM Advice: Theatricality versus Transparency

Thomas Manuel

I. Dear Reader

I find that broadly there are at least two kinds of GM advice – and they have a very different philosophy underpinning them.

The first kind of advice aims at all costs to maintain verisimilitude. It’s a solution that you can implement without breaking the players’ immersion in their characters. This can just be stuff like Matt Colville explaining that if your players are taking too long discussing plans, guess what, orcs attack! We’ve all probably played a game where people were going in circles and not able to decide what to do. If it looks like we’re not able to decide, we’re probably going to be relieved if the GM makes something happen to break the deadlock and prompt us back into the action.

(Historically, this kind of thing was taken to egregious lengths like Gary Gygax saying if players start acting uppity, have a rock fall on their head. It’s mostly gone now but reddit tells me that Cyberpunk Red which came out relatively recently still says something similar.)

The second flavor of advice involves breaking character and talking to your players directly. I know “talk to your players” is a mantra repeated so often that autocorrect suggests it as soon as you type the letter t. At its worst, this advice is vague and unhelpful. We’ve all considered talking frankly to people in our lives, we just find it awkward and hard and annoying. But, but, but – at its best, just describing the problem as you see it and escalating it from a character discussion to a player discussion will make it go away instantly. Like magic. (If you’re not sure what that means: In a previous issue, I discussed Jason Tocci’s excellent advice on escalating conversation in this way.)

And since the theatrical flavour of advice has the weight of history on its side and transparent advice keeps getting boiled down to mantra form, I thought I’d write down some examples of situations and some alternative ways to handle them:

Situation 1: The players are marines discussing whether to dive into the alien lair and recover their stolen engine (their main goal) or go and see if another missing team of marines is okay. There is only 45 minutes left and this is a one shot.

Theatrical: The other marines suddenly come on the radio and say, “hey we’re okay, please complete the mission.”

Transparent: “Hey, folks. There’s 45 minutes left. If we don’t do the alien lair now, we won’t be able to do it at all. Is that fine?”

Situation 2: The players are low-level fantasy nobodies who have a famous wizard friend. They’re about to tangle with some medium-level bad guy and decide to call in their wizard friend.

Theatrical: When the players try to contact her via a telepathic phone call / spell, she sounds breathless and says she’s busy doing something way more important like fighting a dragon.

Transparent: “Hey, folks. If we get the wizard in, she’ll absolutely make this fight a cakewalk. We won’t even need to roll initiative really. Is that what you want? Or would we rather have a fun fight?”

Situation 3: The players were having fun exploring when they meet a cool NPC (an android! an elf! an android elf!) who has this interesting backstory with an urgent, earth-shattering hook. They go along with the android elf because it seems more important but immediately look like they’re having less fun.

Theatrical: Narrate how the android elf meets a group of other android elves and have the elf say, “Hey, now that I have these folks helping me, you can leave it you want!”

Transparent: “Hey, folks. Talking to you as players here, do we want to stick with this whole android elf plot here? It does mean that we won’t do any open-ended exploration. Which would you prefer?” If they want to ditch the elf plot, you could just retcon it entirely or do the theatrical solution.

All of these situations have happened at my table. They’re all relatively low stakes and I think whichever way you handle it, it’ll probably be fine. But that said, some situations absolutely work better when done transparently so if you’ve never tried the transparent way, give it a shot. If immersion matters a lot to you, try it at the end of the session.

Yours two-long-posts-in-a-row,

Thomas

PS. The theatrical options often still require the players to willingly suspend their disbelief and go with it. If a player didn’t play along, they might just say “I thought their radios weren’t working, otherwise we could’ve just contacted them before. Why can they suddenly contact us now?” or “Oh, the wizard is fighting a dragon right now. We can totally wait. There’s no reason we need to fight the bad guy right now.” And sometimes I can’t shut off that part of my brain either so I won’t judge. But if there’s a way to sidestep that situation even coming up, I’m going to take it every time.

II. Media of the Week

  • It’s an Alex Roberts double-bill today. Here she is talking about what is special about playing 2-player RPGs and recommending some:
  • And also, on the Dice Exploder podcast, she’s there talking about “pity points” from Kagematsu, a game about women in a town entreating a samurai to protect them. The game is out-of-print but the discussion on the podcast about playing with power dynamics (gender, GM-player, etc) is good listening.

III. Links of the Week

  • Old post from A Knight At The Opera about Xorvintaal or the Great Game played by dragons using the world as a board. It’s a great campaign framework and I would love to use it somewhere.
  • On tumblr, a good post about hard and soft moves and why they shouldn’t just mean “how bad is the consequence”.
  • On EnWorld, Morrus chronicles the implosion of Evil Genius Games which raised a bunch of venture capital, ran a crowdfunding campaign for games with big IPs, courted some buzzword Web3 trends, got into a legal case with Netflix, and seems to have lost most of their staff amidst a toxic work culture.
  • Space Biff writes about the importance of “repeatability” (or replayability) in boardgames and how some times, the best thing a game can be is a great (or uncomfortable) one time experience.
  • There’s A TTRPG For That recommends a list of clockpunk and dieselpunk games.
  • Dicebreaker covers the solo game, From Midgard to Eternity, about the life and death of legendary vikings and

From the archives:

IV. Small Ads

All links in the newsletter are completely based on my own interest. But to help support my work, this section contains sponsored links and advertisements. If you’d like your products to appear here, read the submission form.

  • Outliers, Samantha Leigh’s award-winning solo journaling game about trying not to lose your job as eldritch forces stymie your research, is crowdfunding now to print a quirky softcover edition!
  • Quality Assurance (QA) is a 12 page one-shot for Mothership set during a disaster on an orbital station. A very special robot accompanies the Crew as they try to recover a piece of valuable hardware before it, and everything else onboard, is lost.
  • Perfect Momentum is a new diceless bossfight TTRPG zine from Slade Stolar and Scablands Press! Four immortal heroes hunt down and destroy giant machine-monsters in a post-apocalyptic world.
  • Snake Wolf 3 : Stratosfiend Mega-Dungeon for DCC is here! Answer the psionic call—chasing a man who dared touch a God; through the Shattered Woods, Washington DC, and the FACILITY.
  • Behind the Magic, a fantasy mockumentary game, is now live on Kickstarter. Play as incompetent heroes who try to save the world (and probably fail). Check it out!
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7 responses to “GM Advice: Theatricality versus Transparency”

  1. Gerrit Avatar
    Gerrit

    One caveat on the transparent option for me is:
    Now we have a group of people who need to make a decision on what they prefer. Maybe one person prefers the android elf plot, the others not? But that person stood back in the last scene already, maybe it’s their turn now? In some situations, the GM making the decision and justifying it in-game makes everything smoother and potentially better for everyone. Then the suspension of disbelief is happily embraced on a social contract level, too.

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    1. Thomas Manuel Avatar
      Thomas Manuel

      You make a really good point about the GM still having to resd the social dynamics in the last situation. I’m can be complicated when some people seem excited about one thing and others are excited about another thing. It’s hard to discuss without specifics but yes, it’s probably easiest if the GM makes the decision for the sake of the majority of the players.

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    2. Rafael Cupiael Avatar
      Rafael Cupiael

      In my opinion, we are making the traditional assumption that the GM is responsible for calibrating the comfort level of the players, addressing situations of discomfort, and making decisions for everyone in such situations.

      Why not build such a social contract at the table where everyone has the responsibility and the right to care for their own comfort and that of the group, to address these kinds of situations, and to propose solutions?

      “Safety tools” should be expanded to simply “communication tools”. If I am a player and I feel that we are all stuck in helping a cyber-elf, which is boring, tedious, and not engaging for us, then I would say: “Hey, quick meta – it seems to me that we are having zero fun with what we are doing right now. What do you say we drop this, justify it in the fiction somehow, and focus on hunting a forest spirit, which was more exciting for us?”

      I must admit that I don’t fully grasp this traditional fear of meta 🙂 It seems to me that many people are afraid that such transparency will turn the table into a room of screenwriters, forever arguing about every element of the game, not spending even a minute in fiction during the entire session.

      On a similar dynamic, just as most of us manage to have conversations with other people without talking over each other and interrupting 10 times a minute, a given table can learn to simply make smooth use of such transparency, even if through the application of simple facilitation techniques or the sociocratic principle of consent-based decision making.

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      1. Thomas Manuel Avatar
        Thomas Manuel

        Well said!

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      2. acantigue Avatar
        acantigue

        Yes and yessss! Great things in OP and this and other replies. Especially adding communication and metagame / metaplay tools (another type bring post-game ‘What are players wishes?’). I’ve been appreciative of Jenna Moran’s 15 min. spotlight rules in Chuubo’s Marvelous Wish-granting Engine.

        And meta- and metagame has been to laser focused on verisimilitude and continuity, but has a useful much larger other part of the spectrum, too.

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      3. acantigue Avatar
        acantigue

        Yes and Yessss! The more the table shares the less energy for a GM and more likely someone can also consider and practice it. I and others are a fan of a kind of writers-room style. And like metagame, doesn’t have to be reductive. Nor does it mean analysis paralysis. But arms-raised for more communication tools for pre-, intra-, and post-game connections. I’m a recent ‘must-have’ fan of ‘Wishes’ and it’s post- and pre- game evaluation.

        And I embrace a much wider spectrum of metagaming that includes I think what we are talking about here and other really useful parts as opposed to just the focus on breaking the verisimilitude (e.g. Your character doesn’t know what you know). I have been using a term metaplay, though, to circumvent the discussions.

        And yes again to facilitating aspects. I’m imagining a spin on the old talking stick as a new form of Jenna Moran’s PC spotlight every fifteen minutes and then step back for others communicating and sharing in Chuubo’s Marvelous Wish-granting Engine. I digress down one of the wonderful rabbit holes, and appreciate the discourse.

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  2. Graham Avatar
    Graham

    I like this a lot, especially your pushback against the idea that talking out of character is always best. I often find that, especially at the start of the game, I use a theatrical solution (“The asteroid looks pretty bleak, there’s probably not much to find out there”), and reserve transparency when they do things like trying to call for help (“Honestly, they’re not going to come”).

    It’s also important that players recognise the theatrical solution as a clue they’re being subtly steered.

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