Maybe this an interesting topic to start my first RPG blog, but I thought to maybe start small with a post!
In my last game DMing, this thought/insecurity came up in my head: Did I communicate all the information to my players they needed? Did I forget something to make the situation clear to them?
I have read the adventure module and know everything and all “the secrets”, so situations can be kind of clear to me but what of their perspective?
So this whole meta level of “sending” and “recieving” information in communication came up. I remember some texts from university describing similiar psychological communication problems with all kinds of models.
I don’t want to go into to them in detail at this point (maybe in consequent posts), but just straight away ask you what your experiences have been?
RPGs are played in a conversation, so naturally all the baggage and problems of conversations get thrown into RPGs all the time.
Creating understanding needs to be the goal of everyone in a conversation. In RPGs, this means players and referees need to be clear speakers and attentive listeners. If there’s a lack of clarity, everyone needs permission to ask “the dumb questions.”
I’ve gamed with a lot of IT nerds, so the technical communication theory (Shannon etc.) entered the room pretty early. For the mercifully ignorant, that’s mainly concerned with the amount of communication you have to provide to get the necessary information to your recipient, if the communication channel has some distorting “noise”. With a bit of handwaving, that can be applied to both rules-text and on-table communication, but in general overextending technical terms as too-general metaphors is one of the biggest bugs of IT people…
But still, you can use that as a framework to explain some concepts in gaming. For example, “communicating” a dungeon room, where between the description, the map and possibly the read-aloud text, the GM has a good idea of what’s going on. The players might be less lucky…
Now, we’re probably more talking about Watzlawick and other, “proper” human-focused theories, right?
For a change, I wouldn’t mind some actual scientific theories to be applied in gaming discussions, so please go ahead
I think it’s a common element of some theories that every communication isn’t just about the factual information, but also about the relationship. The rules often take part of the former, the latter is an art of interaction where we could improve upon. It’s just not clear where this is put: Non-rules advice is often much stronger in the GM section of books, and even then quite focused on the prep-procedural. “Player types” is still as far as we get, even 20+ years after the booklet that introduced them to the wider community.
Exactly this! You “hit the nail on its head” and the transfer of information was sucessful in our conversation
Yes of course one could start with the basics, the ground level with the more “technical” Shannon-Waver model and apply it to Tabletop Roleplaying Games:
The model consists of five components: a source, a transmitter, a channel, a receiver, and a destination (see link above).
Correct me if my thoughts are wrong: In RPG terms the source could be either the adventure (be it a module or selfwritten) or the rules, but it has to be something the GM draws from.
The transmitter is the GM and the mouth/language/etc.
The channel could be again the physical aspects but could it also be the dice? A channel through wich different kinds of outcomes are transfered?
The reciever is of course the players, the destination could be the imagination of the players as well as the map and/or character sheet.
Of course RPG’s and its accompanying conversations have a lot of loops and intertwined communications and is not as basic as a transfer from A to B. There is a lot of back and forth with influences that can change the original conversation.
But for the sake of simplicity and to get back to my first question “How to communicate what’s in your head to the players” we can look at the basic transfer without loops (eventhough as mentioned by @Hilander above, questions are important when things are unclear).
Or to even simplify and formulate another question (to have more purpose and direction): How can we actually improve this information transfer from GM to Players? The theory above has an element described as noise. What would be the noise in RPG’s? Dice? New Players not knowing the rules? Different views and experiences of fantasy/sci-fi/setting?
And yes I think it gets even more interesting when we dive into Watzlawick and other more human theorists… and I think we should, to get closer to the question.
Anyway, I was just riffing of what I remember and wikipedia, psychology/communication theory was never my main studies so please correct me for the sake of scientific accuracy
I think this is a great topic worthy of discussion since communication is absolutely central and essential in a (non-solo) TTRPG. Setting aside the psychology of communication theory for a moment, one of the things that I find most interesting about communication in TTRPGs is that you’re creating a shared imaginary fiction in your heads. The goal in most communication is to clearly express an idea, a belief, or a fact. But in TTRPGs, the goal is to transmit enough information to create a shared imaginative space that the players and GM can co-exist in. But of course everyone’s imagination is going to look different, just like when two people read a novel, they imagine the details differently. I think the goal in TTRPGs is to communicate enough that our imaginations of the scene are consistent enough that we can make meaningful decisions about what is happening in the scene. Probably the most common miscommunication at the table is when there is a misalignment in the imagined details of the scene that is meaningfully impactful in how the players engage with the scene.
The onus is on the GM to establish the initial frame of the scene but the onus needs to be shared with the players as well to ask clarifying questions, something that too few games talk about in terms of play procedures (Mothership being a notable exception).
