Keeper Advice: Talk Less, Smile More

Keepers often over-indulge, and forget Strunk's ageless wisdom: omit needless words.

Worse, needed words are misplaced.

Consider: It's the start of the session and you, the Keeper, are trying to set a scene. You talk about the weather, the countryside, its geography, even its history. You talk about the city and its streets, the mist that seeps out of manhole covers, rising from some forgotten, dark hole below. You might spend ten minutes expounding, because you see all this as important, even vital. How will the players know what's going on, if you don't tell them?

All this is Exposition.

Hitchcock's 100% gold. Exposition cannot be the spotlight moment, especially not at the beginning of the story. Never start a session with a ten-minute spiel about the weather, the setting, or, God forbid, the geopolitical situation. Or even the local political situation. Devote, at most, one sentence to the start - or as I'd describe it, the starting gun - and then get out of the way.

Night's Black Agents, and the agent is tasked with surveilling a suspicious character. The larger story can be about anything up to and including an apocalyptic death ray, but that's not how you start. You start with the agent, in the moment, doing a thing.

'Pretending to window-shop on a street full of holiday-happy people, you see your target slip into an upmarket coffee shop.'

That's all you need. Don't worry about anything else; the player takes it from there. It doesn't matter whether it's Halloween or Christmas. It doesn't matter whether it's the high street of some regional town, or London. Or Paris. You can define all that in play. Hell, you can even define the target in play - male, female, dressed how, ethnicity? After all, if there's one thing disguise expert Jonna Mendez teaches us, it's that the person who seems to be a young Asian female might be a white European male. If you as Keeper want a particular NPC in the scene, and the player describes a different person, no problem! Your NPC was in disguise all along.

Bear in mind what Hitchcock says about North by Northwest, because that illustrates my other point: needed words are misplaced. You can have exposition. You'll need lots of it later on, when the player wants to know important details about the geopolitical situation, or whatever it may be. Just don't have it right at the beginning of the session. That's when everyone's at the starting gate, eager to get on with it. Don't bore the group with ten minutes of blah when what they want is five minutes of action. Exposition is for explaining what has happened, not what is going to happen.

Going back to omit needless words, I'm also going to draw on the wisdom of M.R. James. I've been re-reading his short stories, and two things struck me.

First, like James Herbert, he goes there, sets it on fire, and sells hot dogs. In a much more genteel Victorian way - James would probably prefer roasting chestnuts. Yet James knows horror is best when the reader, the ordinary person, can picture themselves in the scene. "If I am not careful, something like this might happen to me …" That's why most of James' protagonists are young, professional people, perhaps in their late twenties or early thirties. Too old, or too young, wouldn't work as well. Professional people, well-to-do, thoroughly upper middle class, because James knows (or thinks he knows) his audience shares those traits. Their lives are fairly ordinary; some hold important jobs, or academic positions, but you could pass by them in the street and not immediately know them for who they are. One even rides the Clapham omnibus, the legal definition of the ordinary man.

So James takes the ordinary man off in a dark corner and threatens his life - or, in some cases, plain old kills him. Or kills his children. It's remarkable how often dead children appear in James' stories; I can't think of another author quite so keen to deliver pre-teens to the slaughter. I remember James Herbert had a baby eaten by rats, and Stephen King pulled off something similar in Salem's Lot, but neither of them made a habit of it. Whereas James pulls this chilling swerve all the time.

 ... the baby, I am sure, was alive. Punch [Punch and Judy] wrung its neck, and if the choke or squeak it gave were not real, I know nothing of reality ... [The Story of a Disappearance, and a Reappearance.]

Second, James doesn't bother with things that aren't important, and that includes characters, even those that have narrative impact.

"I suppose you will be getting away pretty soon, now Full term is over, Professor," said a person not in the story to the Professor of Ontography, soon after they had sat down next to each other at a feast in the hospitable hall of St. James' College.

The Professor was young, neat, and precise in speech.

"Yes," he said; "My friends have been making me take up golf this term, and I mean to go to the East Coast - in point of fact to Burnstow (I dare say you know it) for a week or ten days, to improve my game. I hope to get off to-morrow."

"Oh, Parkins," said his neighbor on the other side, "If you are going to Burnstow, I wish you would look at the site of the Templar's preceptory, and let me know if you think if it would be any good to have a dig there in the summer."

It was, as you might suppose, a person of antiquarian pursuits who said this, but since he merely appears in this prologue, there is no need to give his entitlements.

Some of you may recognize this as the start of James' most famous story, Oh Whistle, And I'll Come To You, My Lad. It's been reprinted countless times in any number of anthologies, and filmed at least twice, probably more often. Also a song by Robbie Burns, and I don't doubt James got a laugh out of that.

Look at what James is doing. He sets up the moment in one sentence, which tells you everything you need to know about the moment and the people in it. More importantly, he has a dialogue with three people, in which only one, Parkins, is important to the story - so he does not bother to name the other two. He doesn't even name Parkins until the third paragraph; before that he is merely a young, neat, precise Professor of Ontography.

Think! How often have you been asked, 'who is this NPC? What's their name?' How often have you had the courage to reply, 'as (s)he's not relevant to the narrative going forward, I shall not name him/her.'

If the player wants that NPC to become relevant, then by all means let the player name them. Grow fond of them. Even shoehorn them into the story somehow.

That's when you, as Keeper, murder that NPC in the most gruesome way possible. Harden your heart. If James can shove pre-teens into the sausage mincer, you can feed so-and-so into the ghoul pit. If nothing else, it alerts the agents to vital information - that there is a ghoul pit, and it should be avoided if they want to live.  

So! Omit needless words. Exposition explains what has happened, not what is going to happen. If it is not necessary, ignore it - don't even name it, if you don't have to.

Get on with the story. That's the important thing.

Enjoy!

New Gamemaster Month - Trail of Cthulhu

I'm not directly involved with the New Gamemaster Month program, but I thought it'd be fun to kibbitz and offer a little extra advice. The system is Trail of Cthulhu, and the sample adventure on offer is Midnight Sub Rosa, in which a group of investigators are sent to Rosa, Alabama to recover a diary written by necromancer Ezekiel de la Poer. If you want to download the scenario, I recommend you wander over to the New Gamemaster Month website where there is a download link.

I'm going to start the discussion with a note on historical accuracy. Thursday's New Gamemaster post says that you "don't have to have every nook and cranny of the setting committed to memory, either - in fact, the setting is yours to craft, and elements you interpret differently than what's in print (on purpose or by accident) make the setting your own. That's a feature, not a bug." This is absolutely true, but some people may find it difficult to believe, because of the historical accuracy problem.

Trail, like Call of Cthulhu and many similar titles, is set in a particular time period. This can cause novice Keepers, and players, concern. Sometimes this is because certain aspects of history are, at best, unsavory. The example scenario spends some time talking about race, a topic that's bound to come up in 1930s Alabama. However it just as often causes problems because people don't know enough history, and feel the lack. They get nervous that they're "doing it wrong," or worry that a particular technology might not have been available at the time. What does it mean for the scenario when a player says, "I turn on my flashlight," and someone else at the table says, "did they have flashlights back then?"

First thing: don't panic. Confidence, as the Thursday update says, is the only secret sauce. If you, as Keeper, choose to rule thus-and-so, it doesn't matter if history contradicts you.

Second thing: a little history can be very useful, and history's easily had.

You don't have to bury yourself in textbooks. The game manual is your first stop, but there are other sources. Writer's Guides for pretty much every period you care to name are available at very reasonable rates, and because they're pitched to people in exactly your position - creators seeking background knowledge - they're very readable. I have a copy of the Writer's Guide to Everyday Life from Prohibition to World War II, which I see is going for silly money on Amazon, and while I wouldn't base my PhD on McCutcheon's work, it's certainly good enough for game night. It doesn't just give you timelines and dry facts; it has a list of slang terms, an essay on crime and a selection of cop slang, bits on transport, clothing, radio, music, dance, what people were reading, watching, talking about. If ever you want to add color to a scene, this is the kind of detail you need.

For example: Death Valley Days is a radio show that started in 1930 and went on, in one form or another, until 1975. Some episodes are available online. Nothing could be easier than to have that playing in the background; there are many apps that play old time radio, most of them for cheap or for nothing. Heck, even if you don't use these old shows as background noise, it's still worth listening to a couple, if only to steal characters to use as NPCs.

However there's another way history can help: it can give the Keeper ideas. Lots and lots of juicy ideas, many of which can be data mined from Wikipedia.

Consider the telephone. By the 1930s they were common; Rosa, Alabama has a party line, according to the scene Exploring Rosa. The scenario notes that the house where most of the action takes place doesn't have much use for electricity, but there are telephone poles. The characters are presumably staying at the lodging house, which definitely has a telephone.

Let's take a step back. What exactly is a telephone exchange? Well, when telephones were first used, they were single-function devices. You had a phone, it was connected by wire to another phone, and that was that. You could only call that one phone. If you wanted to make calls to other people, you had to install new telephones. This wasn't particularly useful, so someone came up with the idea of the exchange. Everyone's phone was connected to the exchange, and when you wanted to call someone you contacted the exchange and told them which telephone you wanted to connect to. The operator then physically connected you with that phone. This system continued, in one form or another, until the 1960s, when automation replaced human operators. If you read old authors, like Agatha Christie, Dashiell Hammett, or Dorothy Sayers, you'll notice that whenever a character picks up a phone they talk to the operator first, and say "connect me to [letter code] [number]," and after maybe a few seconds, there's a connection. The letter code identifies the exchange, the number, the telephone. Usually the number is anywhere from three to five digits long, depending on the likely number of subscribers. The smaller the catchment area, the smaller the number. The letter code is often turned into a word for easy memorization, as for example with Susquehanna 4 7568.

That tells you, as Keeper, three things. First, that connecting with another phone is a lengthy process. You might have to wait a long time, perhaps several minutes, before you finally got to speak with the person on the other end. Second, that there is a human being, the exchange operator, between you and the other person - and the exchange operator can hear everything you say.

Third, that the number of numbers is limited. Take a look at Susquehanna 4 7568, an episode of The Naked City, a TV show that aired in the 1950s and early 1960s. The story kicks off when a young woman, new to NYC, gets a phone installed at her flat, only to discover that her number used to belong to someone else and she's getting his calls. Exchanges can only accommodate so many subscribers; eventually they have to re-use numbers. In The Naked City, the woman overhears a murder. In Cthulhu, the investigator might overhear almost anything.

The Keeper can complicate this further. As Rosa is a rural community, it has a party line. These are cheaper to run, and don't need an operator. In broad terms, everyone is connected to everyone else, on a loop system. The obvious problem being that there is no privacy on the party line; everyone gets to listen in, not just one operator. Moreover a user can monopolize the line, preventing anyone else from making calls, and this can happen by accident, when someone doesn't properly disconnect after a call. Party lines were still a thing even as late as the 1980s; it wasn't until people started using phone lines for other things, like answering machines and computer modems, that they finally died out. Stephen King, for example, references party lines in his fiction more than once.

The scenario says that the party line only connects three locations, but as Keeper you should feel free to modify a scenario to suit your needs. Remember, it's a feature, not a bug. If you want that party line to connect to other places, you can. Probably not very many other places, since, as written, Rosa is dirt poor. However a couple of the outlying farms could also have telephones, and there's no reason the Derby House shouldn't also be on the party line. It may even be that someone's illicitly connected; after all, it's not as if anyone's marching up and down the line looking for extra connections. This may come in handy if the Keeper intends to run any of the additional material provided with the scenario.

There are two plot-related points to make here.

First, the party line is an excellent way to provide clues, particularly via Oral History. People talk. Often they can't help themselves; they give away secrets and gossip in equal measures. Just listening in can provide an investigator with all kinds of dirt. Imagine what might happen if the investigators catch Sheriff Barnes on the line, discussing the situation with the state police, or listen to some of the citizens of Rosa dishing dirt on people's families and less-than-reputable pasts. "Of course, nothing good ever came from that side of the family. Why, my dear, didn't you know ..."

Second, if the investigators use the telephone, they have no way to ensure their conversation is confidential. It's wiser to assume someone's listening. Or something. After all, there's that o-so-intriguing section about Ghoul Changelings; imagine what might happen if one of those was listening in on an investigator's call for help.

But perhaps the most significant non-plot-related point to make is that a party line can add a lot of color to an otherwise drab setting. Gizmodo makes a similar point, when talking about barbed wire lines. People used to live their lives on these connections. They'd play music, talk about local politics or sports, read newspapers to each other, recite the weather report, pass on important news or alerts to the group. In many ways the phone lines acted in the same way a forum post does today; it passes on group messages, and alerts the group to important information. It adds that extra bit of vibrancy to a location if the Keeper bothers to add a few bits on non-plot related bits to a party line call. "Missus Sullivan's dog's missing? Better let the boys know, they might see 'er out in the long pasture. Gantry's sow dropped a litter of six last night, says he'll be selling off the weaners in a week or so, you want in on this you better go see old man Gantry afore they all leave the nest..."

So, going back to the original point: just by knowing a bit of history, in this case about the telephone, the Keeper can insert clues, link to scenes (even Antagonist reaction scenes), and provide enough color to make the setting come alive. None of this requires specialist knowledge; you can data mine from Wikipedia and similar sources to get everything you need.

So why the telephone? Why not? Everything has a history. Cars, nightclubs, public transport, trains, newspapers, factories and diners and a thousand things besides. You don't need to be an expert. You just need to ask yourself, "is there anything useful here?" Nine times out of ten, the answer's yes. Seek it out, and use it.

To all new Keepers and Game Masters, welcome to the hobby! I hope you enjoy yourselves.



             

Total Party Kill (Escapist)

I no longer write for the Escapist. Until recently I had a regular column, and as I completed several pieces which now will not be published there, I thought I'd make use of the material here. Thus the first in a short series of unpublished stuff, this one about the notorious Total Party Kill.

Enjoy!

**

The Total Party Kill is the one thing players, and usually Game Masters, want to avoid, yet it happens so often you’d think people actually enjoyed getting fried by dragons. Usually it’s a very sudden event, and almost completely unexpected. Someone tanks a save, or whatever it may be, and before you know it, six stalwart heroes are being mashed into jam for the next orcs’ tea party. What went wrong?

Dave Noonan, back in the days of 3.5 Dungeons and Dragons, suggested that lack of communication between players is one of the big issues. “When times get tough at the game table,’ Noonan said, “It’s easy to stay focused on your character and lose awareness of what your comrades are doing.”

Noonan noticed that players, when faced with a significant threat, stopped thinking like a team and started reacting like individuals. As a team, a group might realize that a fight’s too tough, and decide to withdraw. But each of those individuals has a character sheet, with a long list of combat abilities and spells. It proved too tempting to study that character sheet, looking for a way out that wasn’t there. Players would say they wanted the group to retreat, then engage in combat themselves, or start spellcasting, hoping for a good roll.

Funny thing: every single player I’ve ever met has worked out, in advance, how fantastically awesome their character will be, if they roll a critical success. That’s partly because every player thinks they’ll be the one to roll that critical success, right when they need it the most. Just like diehard gamblers, they think critical failure is something that happens to other people, not to them.

In a TPK situation, the chance to retreat is usually a fleeting thing. Before too many rounds go by, the enemy might have blocked the escape route, or knocked out one too many important characters; the cleric, say, with all the healing magic.  Then it’s too late. All that’s left is to order the pizza and start the post-game argument.

On the other hand, if the players – or even just one player – step up and devise a plan for getting the whole group out, the TPK problem might never come up. Assign one player the task of picking up the unconscious or critically wounded, assign a couple others the task of securing the exit, and then tactically retrograde as fast as your feet will let you. Job done!

That’s in situations where the combat system is crunchy, with lots of add-ons and modifiers. Call of Cthulhu used to be famous for its TPK situations, and its mechanics about as crunch-free as can be, while still using dice. There’s no leveling system, so the 10 to 15 hit points you start the game with are the only ones you will ever have. There’s a percentage chance to hit, a chance to critical succeed or fail, and a damage roll, but the system lacks many significant combat modifiers and situational adjustments that Dungeons and Dragons players would be familiar with. What counts as a TPK situation in that system?

Let me just give you the brief low-down on one such situation, from the Masks of Nyarlathotep campaign. Very mild spoiler warning, but really, we aren’t talking plot here. The situation is described as:

Present at the ritual will be twelve priests, including [powerful and important NPC] and [equally powerful and important NPC], nearly 800 cultists … and 100 [powerful monsters]. The rest of the [friendly NPCs the group will have encountered previously] will be there, as sacrifices. The din and screams will be loud and sustained. Eventually, at the height of the ceremony, the enemy will summon up a godlike creature capable of demolishing a city.

Now, if your first thought is, ‘Attack! ATTACK! ATTACK!’ there’s clearly a disconnect going on here. If ever there is a moment for stealth and caution, it’s when you’re facing off against a battalion strength group of dangerous people backed up by another small army of monsters. Yet I have seen otherwise rational players, without any special equipment beyond a few sticks of dynamite and a couple rifles, happily charge in without a moment’s thought. Tell you what I rarely see: I’ve rarely seen those same rational players get together, as a group, and plan out what the group was going to do about the problem.

I get that everybody wants to be the hero. I really, really do, but there is such a thing as overwhelming odds. Bilbo Baggins, when meeting Smaug for the first time, doesn’t rush up and try to kick the old wyrm in whatever passes for its genitals, hoping for a critical success. Maybe that’s one of the bonus scenes on the DVD; I’m not in a hurry to watch it. In the book, Bilbo’s more sensible than that. He hides, and schemes, and bluffs, because he knows that, if he puts even one foot wrong, there isn’t a Reflex save high enough to save him from becoming a charcoal briquette.

So far I’ve been talking about the player’s side of the equation. What about that sinister fiend behind the screen? How much responsibility does the Game Master have for the TPK?

As Wizards of the Coast designer Andy Collins once pointed out, “It's no challenge for the DM to kill off the whole party; the challenge is in creating encounters that are just tough enough to put a scare into the PCs without actually killing them all off.” Sometimes, particularly for novices, finding that balance is a tricky business, and it doesn’t help that some monsters are well over the top to begin with. However there’s no advice anyone can give to help you there, beyond ‘be careful’; finding that balance is a skill that only comes with time and practice.

That said, there is one way that better communication between GM and player can help avoid a TPK. The players don’t always know when a monster is going to test their limits, and that’s sometimes because the description the GM’s given so far is insufficient. If the group’s about to march into a boss encounter, the group needs to be aware of that fact, and that means clearly signposting the threat. It might be plenty of corpses lying around, or scorch marks where the deadly trap’s exploded several times before. Maybe the Doppleganger’s impersonation of an ally is just a little bit off, or that doorway just radiates evil. But there has to be that one clue, or warning sign, that things are about to get very nasty, to put the group on alert.

This goes back to something I’ve said before: the GM should always be open in all of her dealings with the group, because even perceived unfairness can ruin the session, if not the campaign. This doesn’t mean the GM can’t be clever; it means the GM has to always be seen as a fair arbiter. Therefore the group gets one warning, whether it’s as cheesy as a talking skull on a stick, or as menacing as a fresh bloodstain on the dungeon floor.  What the group does with that warning is out of the GM’s hands. The heroes want to be mashed into jam? Fine. Let ‘em get squished, and maybe next time they’ll be more careful.

This isn’t a time to get hung up on ability checks either. Just give out the necessary information; don’t make them roll for it. A failed Spot check might put the group on alert, but it lacks drama. Suddenly realizing that all the birds and wildlife in the forest have gone quiet, fearful of some large predator, is drama personified. 

So next time you and your buddies are down in the dungeon, wandering around without a care in the world, remember: you get one warning, sunshine. Just one, and if you march headlong into trouble regardless, you’d better be ready, and willing, to run. None of this hero nonsense. The orcs already have a jar picked out, just for you!