Handwaving can be a very useful GMing tool, although if you do it too often, there’s not much point in playing an RPG at all.
I’ve handwaved chunks of past sessions for a range of reasons: time constraints, because my players were (or seemed) bored, because I made a mistake, and needed to ensure an encounter went a certain way, because I realized something wasn’t going to be fun to play through, etc.
There have also been times when I should have handwaved something, but didn’t — and that’s the sort of judgment call where it’s very useful to hear how other GMs approach the same kinds of situations.
So how about it: Do you have a hard and fast rule about handwaving? What kinds of things have you handwaved? What handwaving opportunities have you missed?
I don’t have a hard and fast rule, but I tend to handwave if players are doing something for the second (or more) time.
The first time they enter a town, I might play out their interactions with the shopkeep, haggle, and add color to the world via description and dialog. When they later say, “I swing by Svens and sell off the weapons and armor,” I’ll keep the interaction short– or just say, “Sven has a 100 GP on hand and will give 30% for the armor and weapons. Let me know what you sell and if there’s anything special you want to buy.”
Combat, depending on the system, is something I rarely handwave. On the other hand, it can be fun– and an opportunity to make a lop sided contest interesting to the players. If their victory won’t even cost them significant resources, it can be fun to let them describe the “highlight reel” of their fight. Keeping those trivial encounters around– a tribe of kobolds against high level characters– can help keep the verisimilitude. After all, it isn’t that low CR encounters just disappear from the world when PCs are powerful… they’re just not worth wasting time dicing through.
Handwave that which does not contribute to the enjoyment or advancement of the game. Yes, this is very subjective, but the GM’s job requirements include common sense, and the willingness to use it.
Things which may not contribute:
– Repeated trips to any store
– Round-by-round combats with mooks
– Travel
– Information-gathering
– Training
– Setting up/tearing down camp, etc.
– Research
– Briefings
ScottM: Never underestimate Kobolds. A well-run clan can make even the most hard-core adventurer swear off dungeoneering for the rest of his life (short as it may be).
I handwave combat between high-level characters and low-level mobs. I just ask the players if they have any combat highlight reel move they want to show off.
Last session the party split and half of them travelled two days back with the monk to her monastery, spent a few days there, and returned in another two day trip. I handwaved the trips, telling them that the managed to avoid some camping orcs and shot down a few stirges that were after them. So basically: No random encounters to stretch the party split, since that no matter how interesting combat is, the other half of the table is going to be idly waiting.
I usually handwave if the party will not get a lot of enjoyment out of doing it, if success is virtually guaranteed, or if we have time constraints but we want to get past things quickly. In our game last night we handwaved the party stealthing up on sleeping bad guys and eliminating them before they had a chance to act. I had them make one roll that covered all the sneaking, and then another roll that covered delivering the first and final blow. Since one guy screwed up on it I played out that part in detail, but everyone else I had them do two rolls to make it happen.
I usually don’t hand wave heroes against mook mob enemies, but instead I use mass combat rules for heroes against a mob. Each success that a hero gets counts as one of the enemy. Each squad of the enemy counts as one person. It allows for huge “heroes cutting through a swath of people” battles.
I suppose it depends on the definition of a “handwave.”
I have one group that thrives on social interaction. Using a dice roll to substitute for the conversation is “handwaving” to them.
Even with this group, I’ll often handwave the rest of a conversation once goals have been attained or rebuffed.
With another group, I’ll often use the “one hit, one kill” handwave if they’re mowing through faceless mooks. (For this group, a dice roll is social interaction).
(And it goes without saying that sexual encounters are always handwaved).
Opportunities lost: The first time I ran “Beyond the Mountains of Madness” I made the PCs actually play out discovering the discrepancies on the ship manifest. It was a tediously boring exercise.
I handwaved most of the ship voyage, except for one “cross the equator” encounter that I should have handwaved, but didn’t. Not only was it a tedious diversion, but aspects of the encounter didn’t make sense considering our party make-up.
I also handwaved the final encounter of the adventure, as half the party had died in a climactic encounter and it didn’t make sense to stat up new characters for one scene.
Walt
“Every moment of play, roll dice or say yes.” from Vincent Baker’s Dogs in the Vinyard is a good guideline for when to handwave. He goes on to say: “If nothing’s at stake, say yes to the players, whatever they’re doing. Just plain go along with them.”
Taking this statement from the context of DitV, a narativist supporting game, and applying it to other games (narativist or not) simply suggests considering the relevance of any particular action the players propose.
From my own experiences in combat heavy gamist games, things to consider handwaving:
– Yes, talking with the innkeeper has value. But allowing a single player to monopolize the game for half an hour over something like this is not role playing.
– If a combat has gone such that only NPCs are active anymore, look for ways to handwave the rest of the combat.
– When the outcome of a combat is clear, and the opponents are weak and insignificant resources would be spent by the PCs to finish the combat, consider handwaving the end.
It’s also key to ask players (and as you get to know your players, the asking need not be explicit) if they want something handwaved. Perhaps in the combat where only NPCs remain, a PC is within rounds of bleeding to death, and while the NPC allies may be able to win the combat, it may not be clear they will be able to do so in time. The player may thus prefer the whole thing be rolled out, or the player may be satisfied with the GM assigning an arbitrary chance to the combat resolving quickly enough the save the PC. In the case of the weak opponents, the players may feel that they have had a lot of high pressure combats recently, and may relish the thought of spending a relaxing half hour rolling dice and totally steamrolling their opponents.
Frank
Reading this and Johnn Four’s reference to it in the latest Tips email… I’m wondering if there’s a larger question here.
I.e., why are all of these moments the group feels are unimportant in the game in the first place? Is it the ruleset, is it the GM, or something else?
Of course there will be moments in the game that are unimportant. Clearly we do not say every word our characters say. We don’t state every action they take. There is way more that the characters do that is not gamed out than is.
The question is how the important and unimportant events are dealt with. Now the rules text or the play group’s individual procedures might direct the group to play out events that are not in fact important. Many game texts do have overly detailed rules that just don’t matter. Some (many) play groups go into detail that probably actually doesn’t matter. Or maybe it does.
In the end, only the individual play groups can decide what is right for them, but game texts can help things by explaining not just the rules, but how to use the rules. Dogs in the Vinyard’s rules could be explained in a few pages (and are pretty well summarized on the character sheet), but the 160 page book is choc full of explanation of HOW and WHEN to use the rules.
Handwaving of unimportant events is as old as story telling.
Frank
I guess what I’m getting at is, assuming you’re not using published material, why are you putting things that are unimportant in front of your players? Not to mention, why should it be any mystery when something is unimportant?
I guess my confusion stems from the idea that one would otherwise be playing out scenes that it was agreed were unimportant.
Granted, I’ve played with enough people that wanted to narrate every dang bit of their shopping trip to the armorer, so I understand where this is coming from. Nonetheless, something just seemed odd to me about the topic.
If anything, I’d think that excessive handwaving would mean thai either the game is demanding you focus on stuff the group doesn’t care about, or else someone in the group is. To me, the solutions, respectively, are to ditch the current RPG for another, or to talk to that person and try to figure out where your priorities are diverging.
Buzz,
By excessive handwaving, are you talking about situations where a player is asking for something to be played out and the GM handwaves it against the player’s wishes?
Certainly in that case, it would be good for the player and GM to have a chat about expectations.
But if it’s just a case of perhaps the player being a bit more descriptive than the game strictly requires and the GM handwaving (or saying “yes”), then there may not really be a problem. In this case, the player may just want to inject some color. I’ve definitely had GMing sitations where I am flexible on the amount of color injected.
On the flip side, if scenes are being played out that really aren’t important, then something may be wrong. It may still be that all involved are happy to play it out. Or it may be that someone is chafing because time is being wasted. Or it may be that the group isn’t seeing the irrelevance, either because the game is complex enough that it isn’t obvious, or worse, because the players are willfully blinding themselves to the irrelevance.
Frank
Thanks, Martin. 🙂
Just a point, the players might want stuff hand-waved that they don’t see the significance of at this point in the game. It’s like ignoring the scene in which Checkov’s gun is shown…
Regarding why there might be scenes in a game that are unimportant, roleplaying games tend to be fluid. I have often found that a scene that I regarded as critical during my planning stages was rendered irrelevant by the PCs’ actions.
There is also the matter of events that obviously happen but don’t necessarily need to be played out. Long journeys, for instance; we know the PCs need to get from A to B, and many games include rules for random encounters, travel times, weather, and what-have-you. So the journey *could* be played, or it can be handwaved away. “Time passes, and you arrive in the Imperial City.”
Telas, your link wasn’t really a link — can you link it up again?