New blogpost: Sharing the Spotlight is Insufficient
A simple GM tip that may actually be pretty common, but I’ve always done somewhat automatically without a lot of conscious thought put into it: sharing a small bit of narrative control with your players in certain circumstances
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Nice post! I’ve been doing the “how do you take out this (creature, monster, person, name, etc.)” but I haven’t applied it to other successful checks. I will try that out next session!
Thanks
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I think I don’t do this enough right now! One corollary to this I’d offer based on my experience as a player and as a GM is that once the player has described what happens, the GM does not need to repeat it–too much of that can really slow the game down IMO.
Yeah it definitely is more for when you’ve at least accomplished something of significance. Like if you’re fighting a hoard of mooks, it’s gonna get old describing how you bash your 4th mook to death
It’s a relief when the player wants to hide, and I don’t have to come up with a hiding spot but instead can ask the player where it may be.
This, of course, requires that the player understand and are familiar with making things up in the environment, instead of always asking the game master. If the players ask me “Is there a chair?”, I always respond with “Yes, is there a chair?” until the players grasp the concept of having an extended narrative control beyond only their character.
What I think is a bit weird in the article is the comment about having the players describe their actions before rolling. I never play like that. Instead, they should tell their intention: what they want to achieve with the roll, and afterward they “tie” the result of the successful roll to the world by narrating it. If they fail, I as a game master describe why. “Your roll failed because guards arrived”. It’s a “Yes, because” - a variant of the “Yes, but” principle from improv.
If looking at making your players more inclined to describe their actions, it helps if the skill name isn’t obvious. “Lockpick? Well, I guess I pick the lock of the door”, where “Intrusion” leaves more to the imagination. It’s like I said, “Let the narration tie the mechanic to the world”.
A huge advantage by playing like this (and where the skill names are “obfuscated”) is that every single roll will describe the character, from how they go about to solve issues.
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I think it’s the game master’s duty to always put the character on the spot, seeing each round as an opportunity to set the players up to solve a new challenge. That’s how really good fighting scenes in movies are played out, and that’s how I create action in roleplaying games. One situation releases another situation, where the protagonist constantly need to solve these situations. In Feng Shui, you should write a couple of things that the mooks can use during the fight, like burying the characters under a bookshelf.
For the last few years, I realized that shared spotlight is nothing I want. If someone has several goods ideas, they should instead take the initiative and let things happen (but involve others while they do it). You shouldn’t muffle someone energetic. Embrace it instead.
People will self-regulate anyways, based on previously learned social hierarchy and rules. I think in only 1% of the cases, there is a problem player that takes up all the time, but in other cases: some people are more quiet, others are possibly tired … and putting them on the spot isn’t great either.
For the last year, I even experimented with removing rounds from combat and let player go whenever they want to. Works great, but it works if you run combat as “one group against another”, having character taking actions for the entire group, instead of taking individual actions parallel to each other. It’s not parallel anyway - you need to play turns out in a synchronous way, which ruins the kind of flow I want from a fight.