Jeff Rients has some great advice on the topic of making PC actions explicit:
Don’t make the enigmatic figure behind the screen guess what you are trying to accomplish. Sometimes the GM is mentally juggling more stuff than is immediately obvious. Do yourself a favor and connect the dots for whoever is wearing the viking hat.
That’s something that’s well worth bringing up with your group, and it’s an easy way for your players to give you a hand with the often complex art of running the game.
As a GM, I don’t mind when players “spoil” this kind of surprise — for me, the surprise comes when they describe the idea, or it works really well, and not from being in the dark.
I tend to agree with one of the comments left over at the original blog: if the GM isn’t clear why a PC is doing something, ask.
This is actually very sound advice for avoiding a lot of potentially trouble-causing situations. It’s fairly common-sense, but it bears repeating: a lot of time the players are acting irrationally only because they have incomplete information. Attacking a yacht by tooling up in a motorized raft? Oh! You didn’t realize it was DAYtime! etc.
Total agreement with this one. I hate when the player is trying to “spring” something on me. Tell me what goal you’re trying to accomplish, and what steps you’re taking to do so. If I think you’re doing something stupid or missing some information, I’ll drop a hint.
And dear sweet lord, please do not ask a bazillion questions about the situation so you can guess whether or not you can do whatever it is you’re trying to do. Just ask if you can do it.
I think bad DMs (who do everything in their power to crush PCs) are one reason for this behavior.
I agree with both your phrasing and brcarls– everyone involved should try to be clear about what’s going on, so that everyone can work together on describing the awesome outcome.
I agree, but I think this kind of behavior can also spring more positively from players acting as GMs–whether imitation or something deeper. After all, the GM has to keep such things suprising and mysterious at times. In any case, I’ve noticed such activity more from players with GM experience than those without. (It’s something that I’m also prone to, those handful of times I play, and I’ve never been treated poorly by a GM on such things. Treated poorly in other ways, yes, but not this. But then, I know I’m not that great a player due to relative inexperience, and tend to watch out for such.)
I hadn’t thought about this in relation to groups with GMs as players, but now that you mention it I guess I’ve noticed that with my group. Out of the four of us, three are GMs — and all four of us (including the one non-GM) are pretty good about keeping the GM informed when we do things like this.
I completely agree with Telas. I have had countless experiences of players asking a ‘bazillion questions’ just so they can then justify how they can do what they want to do later…. thankfully all in the past.
I still get the first couple of questions now occasionally, but a quick ‘what are you getting at?’ usually does the trick… and when I give them a straight answer they usually get the message.
One thing that has caught my interest is relationship between spelling it out and roleplaying. I’ve been noticing interesting side effect of my “stop asking questions and tell me what you’re trying”. That is, instead of going “Sire, May we request funds from your greatness..” it is turning into “We persuade the king to give us money so he’ll look like a fool.. rolls dice“.
Anyone else noticed that as side effect?
Absolutely, Discordian. I didn’t want to suggest replacing roleplaying with rollplaying, but when I have to bring my breakneck combat pacing to a screeching halt, just so one player can try to talk his way into (for instance) getting multiple actions in one round, I get frustrated.
I had both ends of this problem in the same game last night.
One player kept giving me to much detail and wouldn’t tell me what his goal was. I had to stop him nearly every time and ask “Ok, what are you trying to do and we’ll figure out if you can do it.”
On the other end, another player started telling the me the details of a plan they worked out while I was out of the room. I knew the goal and the rough idea of how they wanted to get there. I told him to stop telling me the plan and just start doing it!
–Victor