Player: So in Dweredell the Guild is like a local trade organization, right?
GM: That’s right. It’s ruled by a large number of powerful merchant families and its official function is to maintain commercial standards and regulate all matters of craft or trade. But in practice it’s more like a protection racket.
Player: Great! Can you tell me every single member of the Guild and also their immediate heirs?
GM: Uh…
As a GM, it’s actually kind of surprising how often you’ll run into questions like this. In the real world this is the sort of encyclopedic data that you could pull up with a five-second search on the internet. But the game world, of course, does not actually exist, and there’s no quicker way to strip back the veneer and reveal that harsh reality than saying something like, “Tell me the names of everyone who lives on Albert Street!”
On the one hand, it’s a lovely vote of confidence: The players are so impressed by the verisimilitude and depth of your game, that they just naturally assume that the answers to these sorts of questions actually exist!
But however flattering that may be, it doesn’t really change the fact that it leaves you staring out into the vast void of the unknown that they’ve invoked, wondering how it could possibly be filled.
Other examples I’ve encountered include stuff like:
- Can you name every Imperial church and chapel in the city?
- Can we get a list of every front page headline from the Gazette for the month of March 1929?
- Before we question [fictional author], can I get a list of every single book she’s written?
- I’m going to go through the warehouse and check the label on every crate. What do they say?
Of course, sometimes you actually will have a list of every Imperial church and chapel in the city. Those moments — as you reach out, grab the information the players are asking for, and present it with a flourish — are, of course, delightful.
But it’s far more typical, of course, for you to have NOT prepped a label for every crate in the warehouse.
And staring into that void, it’s easy to become trapped in it: Maybe you try to improvise your way through it. Maybe you burble some inanities and then stammer to a halt. Maybe you bring the session to a slamming stop as you spend five or ten minutes brainstorming a bibliography for the fictional author.
Sometimes you’ll want to slam the door shut on the void, even if it doesn’t make any sense: “The identities of the Guild families are a secret!” you’ll cry. Or perhaps, “The crates are all labeled in an unbreakable code!”
Stalling for time is another option, particularly if Google, Bing, and their equivalents don’t exist in your campaign setting: “How are you going to find that information?” (The only drawback here is that the stalling tactic is often limited in its effectiveness and frequently rather boring to actually play through.)
What I usually find effective in resolving this kind of research fishing expedition, however, is a much simpler technique:
“What are you looking for?”
The players have made a very large ask and you’ve become fixated on the impossible scope of it. In actual practice, though, the players are actually interested in some very specific thing related to an unspoken plan they haven’t shared with you yet. (For example, they want to know some details about the author’s work so that they can pose as fans when they talk to her. Or they’re searching the Gazette specifically for any reports of odd occurrences in the Ravenswood neighborhood.)
If you can get them to tell you what they’re really looking for and/or what they’re hoping to do with it, then getting the information they want it or creating it or giving them an alternative option or whatever else makes the most sense is often A LOT easier than improvising entire history textbooks or Yellow Pages listings for a fictional setting.
In many ways, this is another invocation of a general principle we first explored in Random GM Tips: Are You Sure You Want To Do That?:
If you don’t understand what the players are trying to achieve with a given action, find out before adjudicating the action.
Ah, this gets into “should the players be able to make a plan without the GM knowing about it?” Which doesn’t have a clean correct answer, and might be another article entirely.
With respect to this tip, if you’re still at a loss after the players tell you what they’re looking for, roll 2d6. On a 10+, give the players exactly what they’re looking for. On a 5-9 give them a good lead or a PayPal answer, and on a 4- tell them they can’t find any useful info. Obviously substitute a skill roll or whatever your game’s luck roll is, but 2d6 works in a pinch.
What is a “PayPal answer”? You mean just, make them pay gold to get what they want?
You seem to be addressing a different question than what’s discussed above, anyway. If the problem is that the players have asked for detailed information that does not exist, rolling a 10+ that says “give them exactly what they’re looking for” doesn’t really help you.
My sincere apologies @colin r; that’s supposed to be a “partial” answer on a 5-9 (thanks aurocorrect).
My tip is for after you’ve done what the article suggests. Unless it’s immediately obvious, the GM should be asking “what do you hope to accomplish by doing XYZ” every time the players declare an action, especially when they want to roll the dice. Once you establish what the players want to accomplish, if you’re still at a loss you can use a bit of random chance to guide an improvised outcome.
Great article. Thanks for sharing.
Bruce DM