Player-GM interaction

[FeiLin]

I have issues when interacting with players and how the table talk goes.

In the middle of a scene of preparing for a mission, I rolled Per to let the players spot a couple of import NPCs in the middle of a crowded scene. I wanted to emphasise the importance of the mission and provide evocative descriptions of the world. The players reaction was to drop what they were doing and follow the NPCs to follow and interact with them. I considered this quite inappropriate in the context (the difference in Status was 5 and it’s in general a lot of other things going on), and I considered having them roll IQ or just straight up tell them, but that would go against my philosophy of not railroading players. Instead I let them have a window of opportunity, but when they started to ask nosy questions, they were met with brief dismissal. The players seemed to think this was strange, so I contemplated it afterwards. Does it indicate there is a lack of content or engagement? Should I take a discussion with the players outside the game to explain my effort?

In another context, in a temperate climate fantasy setting: “You exit the forest and come to a river, and you can see your quarry on the other side.” “Great, I jump in to start following!” (Player doesn’t realise the water might be quite cold)
Really bad example but something similar to this might happen, where I describe the world, but the player instinct doesn’t go the way I expect/predict. Would you constantly bombard the player with rolls to see if you should say what they think in character? Would you just tell the player in this case “well, you might wanna reconsider this given the temperature “? Should I take this out of the game and ask the players to query me for descriptions or probe for chance of success?

In general, my goal is to provide a vibrant world where a lot is going on but not all is pertinent to the players direct storyline all the time (although they can certainly use it to create an understanding of how the works works). At the same time, I don’t want them to be afraid to interact. A lot of the time, I find it difficult to balance elaborating on the world and not railroading them (or worse: boring them!). How to decide what level of initial (or “free”) description is enough without having to amend my descriptions to fit what’s in my mind and convey that?

[Anders]

If the players do something stupid, I try to give them hints that it's a bad idea. Sometimes it requires taking out the clue-bat and hitting them over the head.

[RyanW]

"Given fact X, that would run a risk of consequence Y. Are you sure you want to try that?"

If the characters are familiar with the social order or the climate (and aren't impulsive), I wouldn't require any sort of rolls for that kind of thing. It's probably just something the player didn't think about. Personally, I'd find having details like that brought up much less fun-killing than losing a character to some detail I didn't put together from description but that character would have known about.

[Turhan's Bey Company]

Originally Posted by FeiLin

I considered having them roll IQ or just straight up tell them, but that would go against my philosophy of not railroading players.

This is a textbook example of letting the perfect be an enemy of the good.

Letting players know that what they're doing is inadvisable, particularly when their characters would be perfectly aware that it's inadvisable, is not railroading. Railroading is not giving them a choice. Railroading is having everything they attempt come out the same way. That's not what's going on here.

While your desire is to, as you say, "provide a vibrant world where a lot is going on but not all is pertinent to the players direct storyline all the time," what you and every other GM is actually limited to doing is providing a narrow, imperfect window onto your game world, through the limited, imperfect medium of speech and the occasional map, picture, prop, or illustrative waving of hands. This input is then interpreted by your players, each with their own personal perspective. It is absolutely inevitable that communication will fail in various ways (for example there's an often-observed phenomenon that players will regard the things the GM describes as significant, whether or not they actually are). What you mean to communicate is not the whole of what the characters perceive and frequently not what your players will apprehend.

So, then, sometimes you're just going to have to be explicit not just about surface impressions, but about the natural conclusions their characters would draw based on what they perceive. In the case of the cold river, for example, if the character should know that the water is dangerously cold, then don't be coy about it with die rolls and leading questions. Just give them that information. In the case of those high status people, be clear to them that there's nothing about them which would lead their characters to believe that they've got anything to do with their mission. They're still free to jump in the river or chase the aristocracy, but they'd be choosing to do so with the more complete information the players deserve.

[Anaraxes]

What was the purpose of including the important NPCs in the scene?

Anything mentioned by a GM instantly has a disproportionate amount of focus put on it, just because it was mentioned. There's a lot of detail in the world, and the GM doesn't mention it all (even with the best, or even overdone, attempts at scene description). So, players learn that the things the GM mentions are just the ones that are particularly unusual or interesting, and are naturally going to think the mentions are worth pursuing. If they weren't, then why mention them at all?

Good players learn to pick up on GM hints, because that's how you keep the story going. If a game is so utterly sandbox that the GM literally doesn't care what you do, IMO it's going to be less interesting because the GM literally doesn't care what you do. But on the bright side (for purposes of this discussion), that GM also isn't going to mind if you drop what you were doing and go chase those NPCs.

So on the flip side, a good GM has to acquire skill in exactly how they mention or describe things that are meant to be flavor of the setting, or perhaps foreshadowing, but not yet plot hooks. You have to de-emphasize some things to counter that naturally high level of importance they got from being chosen for mention.

Saying something like "You see a couple of men ride in on horseback, high status from the look of their dress. What do you do?" is much more of a PC invitation to interact than something like "Amid all the chaos that you're dealing with, you catch a glimpse of a pair nobles observing the scene, with a contingent of guards warding off anyone that comes near." The latter is less of an invitation and more in the way of letting the players know that there are some nobles in town that at least care enough to check out the scene in person. If you really want to make the point not to mess with them yet while they're still busy, you might add a sentence like "...warding off anyone that comes near. The cry for help you heard from the burning building in front of you is repeated." (Anything much stronger than that, and it's really starting to get into railroad territory -- particularly if you pause and ask for player actions right after introducing a detail. "Some nobles ride up. What do you do? Nobles, eh? Let's go talk to them and find out how this all started... A girl covered in smudges and soot stumbles out of the building and grabs your arm. 'Please, sir, don't leave! My grandmother's trapped under a beam inside. You have to help her!")

So, step one is to consider why you want to mention a detail in a scene. What role does that detail have in the scene? What are the top two or three ways you expect players might react when you do mention it? Does that detail really need to be there right now, or if it's distracting, can it serve its purpose later? Does the scene lose its purpose if I leave that detail out, and if I did, can I still reintroduce it later on?

Yes, it's hard to do that on the fly. That's why really good GMs are hard to find. There's a lot more to storytelling than just flatly stating what's in the world and asking players to act. It's interactive storytelling, too, so the good roleplayers are actively trying to work with you to generate that story -- which means they're always on the lookout for hints to follow up to help move that story along. The GM is usually the central guide in that process (though players can sometimes act in that role when their character is really driving the action).

You've heard of the improv rule, "Yes, and...". Ignoring details the GM pointedly mentions is like saying no to them. If the GM doesn't actually mind that, or even prefers the players not to follow up on a new detail immediately, they need to work in a bit of signal that "this isn't something you need to immediately agree to".

[ericthered]

I'm curious as to which of the two interactions you thought went wrong.



Was the problem that they were able to walk up to the duke and his friends, or was the problem that they asked nosy questions? and where the questions actually offensive or were they just intrusive?


I'm also curious how you presented the situation: did they have a retinue? had they intentionally exposed themselves to the public? Usually high status people have gatekeeper that prevent you from just walking up to someone and talking to them... unless its a format designed to let people do just that, in which case they'll be on their guard for nosy questions.

[Gigermann]

I started learning this lesson a long time ago: the players are going to assume any information you give them is important. Sometimes I have to re-learn it.

In situations like the "crowd" scene described in the OP, I started implementing "retroactive" Perception(/etc) checks—instead of rolling it immediately, I wait until the information is important, and roll it then, like a flashback.

In situations like the "river" scene, if you give them an IQ roll or whatever, there's a chance they will fail it—this isn't helpful. What I've been doing lately is say that if they have an appropriately-high skill or trait (12+ mostly), I'll just go ahead and tell them "As a survival expert, you know that…" It's good for the power-fantasy as well to remind them of their expertise. Only make them roll if it's "dramatically appropriate" and possible failure has real consequences.

As a side note: If you read off something as "flavor text" the players may recognize it as less-important—but only if you get into the habit of doing this regularly; if you only do it once, it may trigger their curiosity. Human cognition is attracted to contrast.
(Of course, it's just as easy to use this against them ;) )

[ravenfish]

I'm big on giving players a warning when they are doing something that their characters would recognize as manifestly stupid but the players may not recognize as such. In our world, we've all had years and decades to learn (from teaching or from experience) that liquids marked with a skull and crossbones aren't potions of enhanced piracy, that a collision with an oncoming car will hurt the pedestrian a lot more than it hurts the car, that taking even one shot from a gun is very bad news, that the fact that policemen are sworn to uphold the law doesn't keep them from being very nasty if you take liberties with them, and thousands of other such lessons. Our characters, especially in settings dissimilar to our own, have presumably learned thousands of equivalent lessons that the players have not learned in the same way. Thus, when the player is making a decision which the character's experience would reveal as a bad one, it falls upon the GM to make this fact explicit. Of course, the players are then free to ignore to ignore this advice if they want to do something crazy.

[madickey]

In the first scenario, I agree 100% with what’s been said, and have nothing to add.

In the second, this seems like an opportunity to add additional detail to your description. Something along the lines of “you approach the bank of the river, prepared to cross. It’s raging water sends cold spray onto your face, giving you a chill” or whatever. This, hopefully, will click in the player’s mind that either
A - the water’s cold. How cold? How fast is it moving to be “raging?”
or
B - the GM paused to add more info, maybe I need to get even more detail before rushing in.

Yeah, probably not B, but...

Edit: oh, and if they still want to go, I would let them. As they enter the water, continue the description of goosebumps, shivering, FP loss. They will (probably) get the point before going to far.

[RogerBW]

Originally Posted by Gigermann

I started learning this lesson a long time ago: the players are going to assume any information you give them is important.

Except when it really is important, at which point they will decide something else is much more interesting.