Fate chat and game room

11:01 AM

@kviiri Hmm. It'd be good to have some techniques, but in my experience new players are the absolute best at just... talking about these things and working them out, because they don't have the bad habits which usually lead to such problems.

11:23 AM

@BESW Yea, that's actually true to my experiences as well.

In particular, just make sure that the group is comfortable with speaking up and saying "Hey, um... that doesn't make sense to me" as appropriate.

Yea

One of the players has a particularly good habit of discussing his expectations and giving feedback.

Awesome.

My games became 157% better when I started asking for feedback at the end of most sessions: "Does anybody have anything they'd like to say about the session? Things they really liked and want to see more of, things they'd like to change in the future, things they wished would've happened but didn't? Questions, comments, complaints, compliments, concerns?"

After a bit of that, we also started being open to speaking up during the session if something didn't seem like it should wait 'til the end.

I've grown a bit too wary to give feedback, lest I be seen as a party pooper. I have quite a lot of different experiences and expectations about RPGs compared to my usual party

Yeah, sometimes there's just a disconnect. Not every group meshes really well.

(Trogdor and I work great as part of a larger game, but in twosies we tend to sorta stare at each other blankly.)

11:37 AM

I've usually pinned the disconnect on paradigm differences in GM'ing that I thought would be resolved if we played a published adventure. We're one session down in Curse of Strahd, and while I like several things about it and am proud of how well we created our character backstories, the playstyle will be absolutely unpalatable to me if it continues like this.

Ah, yeah.

It's easy to underestimate how much variation even the most detailed and controlling of published adventures can undergo based on the GM's style.

So I guess I'm actually averse to something these guys like or think they like. There's always the possibility that the whole campaign becomes a massive Abilene roadtrip, after all.

I'm still trying to figure out how to answer Greener's question about how I ran Honey Heist.

@kviiri I think I've been on a few of those.

11:58 AM

the reason i asked is unlike, say, lasers & feelings, there's no GM guidance, so the GM role is basically 100% one's own creation

It was pretty much my homebrew mix of GM Techniques BESW Likes From Other Games.

ok! :D

that is a satisfactory answer to me

Asking the player to narrate the outcome, especially if I can't think of a good outcome or it's a bad one.

Bouncing between split-up scenes at tense moments.

Letting results ride unless the situation changes.

Keeping details sparse and listening to the players' assumptions about what I haven't said, then rolling with that.

Making sure there's at least one NPC with a funny voice.

@BESW cliffhangers!!

@doppelgreener Or vent-falling-out-ofs.

Asking leading questions.

It probably felt like Great Ork Gods because that game doesn't have a lot of GM guidance either, so it gets the BESW treatment pretty heavily too.

A lot of my default technique, I've found, comes from Lady Blackbird.

Just codifying the "ask leading questions and lean into the answers" paradigm made so much sense to me.

12:13 PM

@BESW On reflection that's actually an incredibly good way to handle tense moments. If you cut to another player or another part of the scene, something they do will often contribute an in-fiction way the tense situation can be resolved, or if they don't, will guide how and where the tense situation should wind up.

[grin]

No in-fiction tools, but get a good handle of where the tense situation ends up: My bear winds up in the boat shed, so naturally my bear partner-in-crime should fall out of the event specifically *in the next room.*

In-fiction way to handle the tension: "Eve, you've successfully gotten the nuke away from the terrorists and behind that pillar. They've got you pinned down with gunfire. ..... Flynn, which weird spot do you suddenly fall out of, and how do you look doing it?"

[Flynn and Eve go on to resolve the nuke and the whole terrorist situation together, Flynn specifically helping by leaving the terrorists gobsmacked]

Even more practically, it's a good way to keep people from getting bored when you have to split time between players who aren't sharing a scene.

You don't play a scene to its conclusion if someone else is waiting for their turn.

You play the scene until it's exciting, and then you switch. It's a table-level pacing technique that works wonders.

But yes, it's also a good way to get everyone involved in the meta-narrative work of "where are these scenes going and how do they relate to each other?"

@BESW I'm gonna try embed this how I operate as a GM.

As a GM, when the party splits up I feel like I need to start playing tennis. The spotlight is the ball and the two scenes are the two sides of the court.

It can be tiring if there's a lot to keep track of in each scene, but it's usually a lot of fun.

And, like with a lot of GMing, there's a good bit of body-language reading in knowing when to switch, which is a LOT harder when some of your group isn't physically there.

But the scene-switching technique is just an extreme form of the principle that you should almost never let a scene run to its logical conclusion: you only let it run so long as it's still interesting or uncertain.

As soon as it's obvious where everything is going, you should cut and start a new scene unless the conclusion is actually going to be fun and interesting despite being obvious or inevitable.

I gleaned that from a lot of places, but I think it was most explicit in Microscope: when you roleplay a scene in Microscope you start by posing a question that the scene is being played out to answer. As soon as the question is answered, the scene ends.

12:28 PM

@BESW I gotta play that game.

Maybe we can figure out something.

I'd definitely enjoy playing it with you & @trogdor.

@kviiri I find giving controversial feedback can be useful. In once instance BESW brought a character I wasn't comfortable with to the game and I spoke up about it after the game (I think). It was sort of party pooping but it also lead to other conversations which were very constructive. So party pooping didn't make it stop being actively good and helpful.

(It was not "I don't quite like that character", but instead "that character is based around doing creepy unsettling stuff which I don't think is good for the game's tone")

trogdor

1:32 PM

@doppelgreener playing what?

@trogdor microscope

trogdor

1:44 PM

ahh ok

or more accurately ᵐᶦᶜʳᵒˢᶜᵒᵖᵉ

trogdor

lol

4 hours later…