This past Christmas I happened to hear Dean Martin’s version of “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer.” Ughhh. Martin’s snarky, “cooler than you” style completely drowned out whatever simple charm the song holds. So what does this have to do with gaming?
As a GM, we have to be very careful when using cool, clever ideas. Otherwise we risk overriding the PC’s choices and roleplaying opportunities. Now, of course we need to be clever and occasionally ham up the NPC’s. That helps us put our personal stamp on the campaign, makes it more memorable for the players.
But you’ll know when you’re going too far. You’ll know when you’re Dean Martin trampling on poor Rudolph.
Let’s look at some areas to be careful with.
NPC’s
One area that can get you into Dean Martin territory are clever NPC concepts. There is nothing wrong with making an NPC quirky and memorable, but not at the expense of the adventure. I’ve done this one. I remember an NPC doctor who was interesting, quirky, and had some great lines. And so what? I wrote him in for color and there wasn’t much for the PC’s to get out of him. I was being Dean Martin.
So be careful with those pet NPC’s. Let them say crazy things if you like, but be sure to have them shut up so the PC’s can talk. And be sure that they have useful information to help keep the adventure moving. While they may still be annoying, at least they’ll have some point.
“HIGH-CONCEPT” ADVENTURES
“High Concept” movies mix two genres. Think Cowboys and Aliens. (Even the Smurfs Movie beat out that one). For example, once I ran an adventure based on Spongebob. We had an Eye of the Deep as Mr. Krabs, fighting squidpeople, and starfish who dropped over their faces. While it was a fun adventure, it risked going into Dean Martin territory. Too much nonsense, and it’ll be hard for PC’s to take your games seriously.
That’s not to say every adventure has to be a death march. However, if you are blending ideas from other media, try to bury the concept as deeply as you can. For example, suppose you really want to use the Daleks, but you aren’t running Doctor Who. Can you make them some kind of organic being? Or transfer their hatred of all other life to a different race? You are trying to keep the essence of the concept without descending into goofiness.
GM STYLE
We all have our own unique personalities and can’t help but bring that to the table, but it is good to avoid any tone that suggests you are smarter or better than the players. Yes, it can creep in for both players and GM’s. It doesn’t matter if you’ve been playing since the 70’s. It doesn’t matter if you’ve played every system imaginable. Everyone at the table needs to be an equal participant, first game or 500th. Please don’t take my tone as lecturing. I know this isn’t a problem for most folks, but let’s face it, there are those people in this hobby. Don’t be Dean Martin telling us how cool you are.
Filling every moment moving towards your “cool” pre-written conclusion can be another trap. Don’t be afraid of dead air. Obviously if no one is talking or making a decision, you may need to move things along, but don’t feel like you have to talk (read “railroad”) all the time. Ask that quiet player what they think, or simply ask the group in general “So what do you guys think?” This gently helps move things along without requiring you to take total control. No need to be the main crooner.
CONCLUDING THOUGHTS
Let’s not be too hard on old Dean. In an effort to escape his comic persona, he did a number of serious movie roles in the late 50’s and early 60’s. Even he realized that he wanted to avoid falling into the rut of self-satisfaction. As GM’s, we need to avoid that same rut. Odds are you are a clever, talented individual. We need to use that in our games, absolutely. We just have to be careful that our NPC’s, clever scenarios, and GM styles don’t drown out the players. It’s an art more than a science, but we can all work towards mastering it.
And lay off the martinis before your sessions. Just saying.
How about your thoughts? Any other ways we GM’s have to be careful? Let us know below.
Uh. I’m gonna be honest, I’m not old enough for this metaphor. 😛
And I suspect that a game based on Spongebob Squarepants is actually the OPPOSITE of a “high concept” game. 😉
Good article concept, but spent a bit too much time on the metaphor and not enough time on examples. B-
;P
The GM STYLE paragraph definitely resonates with me as a result my most recent gaming group; one that included two people who were completely new to tabletop roleplaying. One of them did not even have a foundational knowledge of fantasy tropes or even of the vast majority of pop culture.
In the second session I could see frustration with this player creeping into the game. This player was an incredibly intelligent, award winning scientist and yet we were spending a lot of time explaining what seemed obvious to us. I nipped the tension at the table in the bud by reminding players that the answers to these questions were essential to playing the game.
For example, many of her confusions stemmed from the usage of a vernacular she wasn’t privy to, assumptions we were making about the world we were in based on existing fantasy tropes she wasn’t privy to, etc.
In the end, this player’s extremely insightful questions criticizing the logical inconsistencies of our actions and worldbuilding actually made for a much more interesting world to play in, not to mention game.
She is now my favourite player because she brings a freshness to old tropes.
I really enjoy playing with new players for the same reason. It’s also a call to push myself; sure, I can short hand “it’s a goblin” to my players who’ve seen them by the dozens… but for a new player, can I picture, describe and make the goblin come alive?
Exactly! Sometimes, articulating the ethereal idea of a “goblin” makes it more real for even yourself and the other old hands. For example, when I imagined describing a goblin, it quickly went from a “goblin” to a “pig-headed dwarf, three feet tall and all it’s froggy skin covered in a slimy sheen of of sweat. It’s needle teeth gnashed inside its overlarge mouth, glowing like fishbone in the moonlight.”
Thanks Swanthony, glad that the article had something for you.
I’ve played with guys (mostly it’s guys) who go through every game they’ve played, they know every ruleset inside and out, criticize the GM’s calls (which are their’s to make anyway).
It gets really old fast.
Thanks for sharing your story, that’s great to bring new people in. We need more of it.
I’m a pretty newgen player myself – I only got into it about ten years ago, but if it hadn’t been for an extremely welcoming GM and group I would have been lost in the crunch.
Everyone gets something different out of gaming, but everyone can get SOMETHING out of it. I think that’s the crux of your “Dean Martin” issue – one person assuming or dictating what the others want.
Thanks for the article.
This is definitely something I need to consider if I ever GM (I’ve been avoiding it for a long time because I wield power poorly). I have had GMs complain when you, as a party, do not plan how they think you should have, and thus a simple encounter became quite difficult (like not having cold iron weapons when fighting a ton of Fey). Then, when we do go out of our plan to fully plan out something, they turn around and screw us over anyways. It becomes very frustrating and not fun when no matter what you do, the GM decides your damned if you do damned if you don’t.
But, this also applies to players too. I have played in a couple campaigns where one player decides they are going to do everything, literally. They are going to be the scout, the healer, the tank, and the “face” of the party (the point person who does all the talking). This is incredibly frustrating when that player’s character is a druid who has lived their entire life, before the party, being a hermit and avoiding people. It goes completely against their character to try to interact with people, but they do it anyways instead of letting the person best qualified do it. Ironically, this player makes one hell of a GM.
Great point. Good players don’t suck up all the oxygen in the room either!
And sounds like you are ready to step into those GMing shoes. If you’ve seen some things you’d like to do differently, then you are developing that kind of gaming self-awareness that can make for a great GM.
Oh gawd yes. The last time I came up against this was in a game of the Savage World of Solomon Kane. The mission was to find out why a distant village had gone silent.
I was, for once, playing and had built a character that I felt fit into the late-1600s protestant colonial model the GM had us working with (game set in America natch). A lawyer with a halfway decent sword arm. I indulged in a teeny bit of munchkinism by giving him a rapier which upped his parry to 7 – making him very hard to hit in close combat.
Another player built a blacksmith and we had fun chewing the scenery in a few scenes as a steady enmity built between the lawyer, a reserved man and the blacksmith, an unreserved and brash braggart. Nothing game-breaking. Much fun.
The annoying player, let’s call him Buzz Kill, took the character of a priest because they can use magic (a rare and dangerous commodity in Solly Kane). A catholic priest. Okay, we have to work in an unlikely religious tolerance, but that’s only a small stretch. Then he minmaxed the hand-wave the GM had made with respect to Indian languages so that his priest could speak to any Indian fluently. The sound of the fabric of the universe tearing began.
The player than proceeded to second-guess every move I made, bringing all his years of D&D metagame wisdom to bear on the actions I wished to take. I hopped off our wagon to investigate a suspiciously quiet farm. “Split the party, why doncha?” howled Buzz Kill.
Stay in the Wagon. Watch and learn I told him.
I got jumped by Bad Things. Big surprise, but just because I knew that the farm would of course be an encounter shouldn’t mean that the Lawyer, by definition unexposed to the dangers of the wild would ignore such an eerie and unnatural thing as an abandoned farm. I explained this to Buzz.
The bad things got a round of subsonic improvised munitions from mi’ trusty fowling piece and then I drew my rapier.
More complaints from Buzz Kill who hadn’t latched onto the essential nature of the flintlock short barrel blunderbuss and thought I should have retained it as a club.
Dice were rolled and I announced my parry as the GM tried to have his werethings bite me. Buzz Kill became almost incandescent with rage when I said it was such a high number and loudly demanded we stop the game so he could check my math. He was extremely happy to calculate it at one less than my total, but rather less so when I pointed out the rapier bonus.
This nonsense went on all day, but reached my personal breaking point when he decided to have his priest start medical treatments for some tribal chief’s daughter. I wandered over to the opposite side of the village and discovered something interesting. Immediately, Buzz teleports to my position and attempted to take control of the scene.
When I say teleport, I don’t mean some sort of spell, just that his character was suddenly hundreds of feet from where he last said he was. Buzz had just pressed my Big Red Button, and things went downhill from there, ending in a stand-up screaming match in which no-one present was acting over the age of three.
I quit the game and now refuse to be in the same room as Buzz.
I’ll offer another reason not to over-invest in designing and playing your NPCs: The players may not care anywhere near as much as you do!
Years ago I was building an adventure in a long-running game where the PCs pursued a side quest in a foreign land in exchange for a favor from a powerful patron. Because the area was foreign to the PCs, and moreover was a relative backwater, it had customs, history, and of course, recent events that none of them were familiar with. I decided the most enjoyable way to handle exposition about the new setting would be to narrate it through the eyes of a colorful local character. So I created “Malvern”, a talkative and well informed everyman.
I put a lot of effort into developing Malvern. His family backstory illustrated important cultural facets. The waxing and waning of his fortunes over the past few years provided an alternate view on regional trends that counterpointed the official story the party had gotten from the political elites. His understanding of recent local events was second to none, aided by his age and intelligence. I structured his personality to answer to the question, “Why is this old guy telling us so much?” And because I was having so much fun creating Malvern, I gave him a humorously strange accent and set of mannerisms, and practiced voice-acting them before the gaming session.
Now guess what happened in the game session after I ran through a nearly 15 minute dialogue in character as Malvern…. The players discussed it and the spokesperson said to me, “Okay, that’s nice, but we’d like to ask the same set questions of at least 3 other locals before we decide what to do.”
I was floored. I’d put all that effort into Malvern, and the players treated him like a “Local Rumors: Roll d8” table from a pregen adventure.
Sorry poor Malvern didn’t get more game time. I’ve had it happen too. The NPC just wasn’t working for them, and time to move on.
In fact, I’m writing something now, and you may have helped me out a bit. Thanks much!!!! This advice thing goes both ways.
I find that if the players have options, they never stop gaming. It’s when they don’t feel like they can do anything, that play grinds to a halt. If all else fails, that’s when the bad guys bust in with violence. However, providing options to the players can also overwhelm. Make sure the players know what each choice entails specifically! Specificity is your friend! I have discovered that offering options that make your players pause and discuss is usually the goal. Then even the quiet ones are participating. Also, interjecting with non-apparent options is the job of the GM, period. The fact that they are non-apparent is the GM’s fault/responsibility. Solving it is similarly in the domain of the GM (unless you have a player who is an investigator type – and even then it’s a type, not the player). Give them the non-obvious stuff on a delay, but give it to them.
Great points Frankie. Give them some options, and don’t be afraid to list them. But let them make the call.
Good for even us old GM’s to be reminded of.
I agree with you about giving players options. As a GM I try to frame the group’s options for them when they are spinning their wheels. I don’t see much of a connection between this and my example with Malvern, though, which is where you threaded your comment. Did I overlook something?
Devotion to one option isn’t as interesting as developing a series of options. Sounds like you were devoted to your NPC being an information source. Sometimes you can create more options around an NPC other than simply conversation.
You said that you had developed the NPC, but did the NPC take any revealing actions? Actions speak louder than words. If the NPC has goals, try having the NPC acting on them in opposition to the PC’s. The PC’s will undoubtedly push back (and if they don’t, then you’ve still established the NPC as more than just a terminal), …and if you design the NPC as a pushover, then perhaps you get their attention with conflict not exposition.
Oh, Malvern got plenty of game time. My frustration was that the players didn’t seem to recognize how valuable he was to them or how much effort I put into developing him. They expected to find at least 3 more NPCs just as richly detailed as him, ready to appear upon request.
I dunno, I think if they’re going to treat NPCs as interchangeable objects (“We ask three other NPCs!”) then the correct answer is “You get pretty much the same information.” or “They corroborate what you’ve already heard.”
I use that answer fairly often. In the specific adventure with Malvern, though, I went one better. I made the next two NPCs belligerent wastes of time and slight setbacks story-wise. 😉
Of course, that was all true to the scene because the locals had reasons to be distrustful of outsiders. Malvern even cautioned the party about that as he explained why it was.
Dean Martin is an immortal badass. That is all.