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Here’s my random tip for using Idea rolls as a GM:

Don’t.

Let me start by explaining what I’m talking about: In Call of Cthulhu, an Idea roll “represents hunches and the ability to interpret the obvious.” In some of the older scenarios published for the game, this roll would actually be used to prevent players from having their characters take certain courses of action because the character wouldn’t know to do them — sort of aggressively preventing player expertise form trumping character expertise.

There are some obvious problems with that, too, but what I’m interested in right now is the far more common technique of using the Idea roll to tell players what they “should” be doing. For example, if the players are talking about how they can get an audience with a casino owner, the GM might call for an Idea roll and say, “You could disguise yourselves as high rollers.” Or when the PCs stumble onto a bloodstained altar in the center of a stone circle, the GM might call for an Idea roll and then say, “You could try putting that idol you found earlier on the altar!”

Even in games that lack a specific mechanic like this, you may see similar techniques improvised (usually with some form of Intelligence check).

GM-INITIATED IDEA ROLLS

The basic function of the Idea roll is essentially like using a walkthrough in a video game: You don’t know what to do, so you have to consult a guide that can get you past the point where you’re stuck. A GM-initiated Idea roll, though, is often more like having an obnoxious friend sitting with you who’s played the game before and simply WILL NOT shut up and let you play the game for yourself.

If you’re a GM prepping a scenario and you come to a place where you think an Idea roll will be necessary, that’s a really clear sign that you need to DO BETTER. Saying, “I need an Idea roll here,” is basically saying, “I have designed a scenario where the players are going to get stuck here.” Instead of prepping an Idea roll, figure out some way to redesign the scenario so that the players won’t get stuck there. (The Three Clue Rule will often help.)

What about run-time Idea rolls? In other words, you’re currently running the session, you can see that the players are irreparably stuck, and you need to fix the problem. Well, there are two possibilities:

First, they’re not actually stuck, in which case you don’t need to use an Idea roll.

Second, they ARE stuck and definitely need help to get unstuck. In which case, you shouldn’t be rolling the dice because failure is not actually an option: You need to give them information. Therefore you should not be rolling to see whether or not they get it.

PLAYER-INITIATED IDEA ROLLS

On the other side of the screen, a player-initiated Idea roll is generally more viable: This is basically the players sending up an emergency flare and saying, “We’re lost! Please send help!” To return to our analogy of the video game walkthrough, this is the player who has been stymied to the point where they’re no longer having fun and just want to be able to move on in the game.

In my experience, it should be noted, what such players are looking for is often not the solution; what they are looking for is an action. They feel stuck because they don’t know what they should be doing. A Matryoshka search technique, therefore, is often a great way to respond to this.

Something else to look for is the clue that they’ve overlooked. Not necessarily a clue they haven’t found, but one which they don’t realize is actually a clue, which they’ve radically misinterpreted, or which they’ve completely forgotten they have. For example:

• “You realize that patent leather can also be used for furniture, not just shoes.”
• “While S.O.S. could be a cry for help, couldn’t it also be someone’s initials?”
• “You suddenly remember that you still have Suzy’s diary in the pocket of your trench coat. Didn’t she mention something about the color purple, too?”

Trail of Cthulhu innovated a cool mechanic along these lines for its Cthulhu Mythos skill: You can use this skill to “put together the pieces and draw upon the terrible knowledge that you have been subconsciously suppressing, achieving a horrific epiphany. The Keeper provides you with the result of your intuition, sketching out the Mythos implications of the events you have uncovered.”

There are two important features to this mechanic: First, it doesn’t require a roll. (Again, if the players need help, then denying it to them on the basis of a dice roll doesn’t make sense.)

Second, it has a cost: The sudden insight into the terrible realities of the universe will cost you Stability and, quite possibly, Sanity. Importantly, this cost is NOT exacted “if the player deduces the horrible truth without actually using [the] Cthulhu Mythos ability.” The cost, in my experience, not only dissuades players from relying on the mechanic instead of their own ingenuity, it also enhances the sense of accomplishment they feel when they solve the mystery or gain the insight without using the mechanic.

The 7^th Edition of Call of Cthulhu has similarly modernized the Idea roll, using a fail forward technique where a failure still gets the PCs the necessary clue/course of action, but also results in some sort of negative consequence: Getting the clue might bring you to the attention of the bad guys; or you might waste weeks of time digging through a library before finally stumbling across the right reference; or, like Trail of Cthulhu, the insight might force a Sanity check.

Another cool technique it suggests, particularly in the case of failing forward, is to aggressively reframe the scene: Jump directly to the point where the PCs have followed the lead and gotten themselves into trouble as a result.

A final interesting variant here is to make the Idea roll concept diegetic instead of non-diegetic; i.e., to make it a decision the character makes instead of the player. In a fantasy setting, for example, the character might literally make a sacrifice to the Goddess of Knowledge in order to receive a divine vision.

GM DON’T LIST #10.1: TELLING PLAYERS THE PLAN

Like an aggressive Idea roll on steroids, some GMs will go so far as to just literally tell the players what their characters will be doing for the entire scenario.

For example, I was playing in a convention one-shot where we were street samurai who got hired to be ringers on a Blood Bowl team in order to rig a high-stakes game. This was a really cool premise, turning the usual expectations of the game on its head and giving us an opportunity to explore how the PCs’ heist-oriented abilities could be used in a completely novel environment.

Unfortunately, the session quickly went completely off the rails. Rather than letting the players make any meaningful decisions, the GM had pre-scripted every play of the game: We were reduced to simply rolling whatever skill had been scripted for us. (It didn’t help that the rolls themselves were essentially pointless since the outcome of every drive and most of the plays had ALSO been planned ahead of time.)

This was an extreme example of something closely related to GM Don’t List #7: Preempting Investigation, but I bring it up here mostly because I’ve seen several GMs who use Idea rolls to similar (albeit usually less absurd) ends. These game are characterized by the players making an endless stream of Idea rolls, with the GM constantly saying things like, “Pierre [your character] thinks he should come back and check out the Le Petit Pont after dark.” Or, “You could probably get a pretty good view from the top of Notre Dame. You’ll need to figure out some way to get up to the top of the towers.” Or even, as literally happened in one game, “Rebecca thinks she should stab the Archbishop in the chest.” (“No, really, she thinks this is really important.”)

Basically: Don’t do this. Present your players with problems, not solutions. Give them the space to mull over a situation and figure out what they want to do (or what they think they need to do) in response to that situation.

Go to Part 11: Description-on-Demand

Go to Part 1

No.

Bad GM.

No cookie.

Okay, we’ve been talking about things GM’s shouldn’t do for awhile now. So let’s talk about the elephant in the room: Fudging.

The most common form of fudging, and that from which the technique takes its name, is changing the outcome of a die roll: You fudge the result. If the die roll is done in secret, then you can just ignore it. If it’s done in the open, then you can invert the result by tweaking the modifiers involved. More advanced fudging methods can include stuff like adding extra hit points to a monster’s total in order to keep them alive.

But, regardless of the specifics, fudging is when a mechanical resolution tells you one thing and the GM chooses to ignore the rules and declare a different outcome.

JUSTIFICATIONS FOR FUDGING

Okay, let’s talk about the reasons GMs do this. All of these, of course, ultimately boil down to the GM not liking something that the resolution mechanics are telling them. The question is why the GM is unhappy with it.

#1 – Railroading. This one is pretty straightforward: Railroading happens when the GM negates a player’s choice in order to enforce a preconceived outcome. Enforcing failure (so that the PC can’t do what the player wants) is a really common way of railroading the game, and fudging is a really easy way to enforce failure.

See The Railroading Manifesto for a lengthy discussion of this topic and all the reasons why railroading is terrible and you should never do it.

#2 – To prevent a player character’s death. Or, in some cases, GMs will only fudge if it’s to prevent a total party kill — the death of ALL player characters. TPKs tend to kill campaigns (at least those not built around open tables), and lots of people would prefer to fudge the outcome of a fight (particularly if they feel that it’s just due to “bad luck” or whatever).

See The TPK Gamble for a specific discussion of this.

#3 – To make the story “better.” The most infamous version of this is, “But they can’t kill the Big Bad Guy now! He’s supposed to survive to Act III!”

I say infamous for good reason here: Players hate this shit with the fiery passion of a thousand burning suns. And you basically can’t throw a stone in RPG circles without hitting someone who has a story about the time their GM pissed them off by doing it. Check out The Principles of RPG Villainy for a better alternative.

#4 – To correct a mistake you’ve made. Maybe you’ve been screwing up a mechanic for the whole fight and it’s made things much harder for the PCs than it should have been. Or you accidentally doubled the number of guards when the fight started. Or, going even further back, maybe you just screwed up the encounter design and something that should have been easy for the PCs is actually incredibly difficult. So you fudge something to bring it back in line with what it was supposed to be or should have been.

This is actually pretty understandable, and I discuss the difference between openly retconning a mistake and silently retconning a mistake in Whoops, Forgot the Wolf. But you can easily find yourself slipping from “fixing a screw-up” to “enforcing a preconceived outcome” here and end up back in railroading. So use caution.

DON’T FUDGE

In the end, all fudging is the GM overriding a mechanical outcome and creating a different outcome which they believe to be preferable (for whatever reason).

Over the thirty years I’ve been doing this, however, I’ve learned that many of the most memorable experiences at the table are the result of the dice taking you places that you never could have anticipated going. Fudging kills those experiences.

But what if the mechanical outcome really is terrible and would make both you and your players miserable?

If you and/or your players truly can’t live with the outcome of a dice roll, then you made a mistake by rolling the dice in the first place. You need to focus on fixing that problem.

This applies beyond individual dice rolls, too. If you don’t want the PCs to die, for example, why are you framing scenes in which death is what’s at stake? (This is a rhetorical question: GMs do this because D&D teaches them to (a) frame lots of combat scenes and (b) make the default stakes of any combat scene death.)

The Art of Pacing talks about the scene’s agenda being the question which the scene is designed to answer. (For example, “Can Donna convince Danny to go into rehab?”) If the question is, “Will the PCs die?” and the answer is always, “Absolutely not.” then the scene is drained of meaning and becomes a boring exercise.

This is why, when the players figure out that the GM is fudging (and they will), it deflates tension and robs them of a legitimate sense of accomplishment. What was once meaningful is suddenly revealed to be meaningless. And this is the biggest problem with fudging: It may fix an immediate problem, but it will inflict permanent damage on everything.

In a very real sense, fudging is a betrayal of trust. And once you, as the GM, lose the players’ trust, it becomes virtually impossible to regain it. Fudging ends up tainting everything you do: It removes the real magic of an RPG campaign and turns it into a cheap magic trick. Once the players spot the trick (and, again, they will), the magic vanishes entirely and you’re left with a hollow experience.

Regaining their trust and making them believe in the magic again is really difficult.

TRIAGE AT THE TABLE

Here’s my controversial rule of thumb:

The more you fudge, the shittier you are as a GM – either because you are fudging or because you need to.

If you’re not just fudging to be an asshole and screw over your players, then you’re ultimately fudging in order to fix something that has gone wrong:

• You adjudicated the resolution poorly.
• You designed the scenario badly.
• You screwed something up and need to correct it.
• You’re using a set of rules which creates results you and/or your players aren’t happy with.

And so forth.

This is not to say that you should never fudge. Mistakes happen and we don’t need to live with those mistakes in the pursuit of some unrealistic ideal. But every time you do fudge, you should view that as a failure and try to figure out how you can fix the underlying problem instead of just continuing to suck in perpetuity:

• Don’t roll the dice if you can’t live with the outcome. (And, ideally, learn how to still create meaningful stakes instead of just skipping the resolution entirely.)
• Figure out how to design robust scenarios that don’t break while you’re running them.
• Create house rules to permanently fix mechanics that are creating undesired results. Or, if the system is completely out of line with what you and your players want, swap to a different system.

And so forth.

Next time you find yourself in a position during the game where you feel it’s necessary to fudge, I want you to do a couple of things.

First, ask yourself: Is it truly necessary to fudge in this moment? Is it necessary to reject the improvisation prompt of the mechanical resolution’s outcome, or can you find a way to work with that outcome to create something interesting and enjoyable? At the stage in the resolution process where you’re narrating outcome, you usually still have a lot of power as the GM. An easy example of this is failing forward: Instead of the PC failing in what they wanted to do, they succeed with a negative twist or consequence.

But also, to a certain extent, just take a moment to second guess yourself: The outcome which you initially think cannot possibly happen, often can happen. It’s just not what you expected or would have done of your own volition. Try to push back that initial moment of rejection and really, truly think about what the outcome would be and whether there’s interesting and cool stuff that lies beyond that outcome.

Second, ask yourself: Can I just be open and honest with my players in this moment? Instead of secretly fudging the outcome, could you just explain to the players that, for example, you screwed up the encounter and things need to be retconned a bit?

And maybe you can’t! There are circumstances where you’re better off plastering over the cracks of your mistake with a cheap magic trick instead of damaging the players’ immediate immersion and engagement with the game world. It’s not ideal, but sometimes that’s the best you can do for right now. You’ll just have to learn from your mistakes and do better next time.

CODA

If you’re still a proponent of fudging, let me ask you a final question: Would you be okay with your players fudging their die rolls and stats and hit point totals?

If not, why not?

If you truly believe that fudging is necessary in order for you to preserve the enjoyment of the entire table, why do you feel you know better than the other people at the table what they would enjoy?

Think about it.

The Fudging Corollary: Not All Dice Rolls Are Mechanics

Go to Part 10: Idea Rolls

Go to Part 1

As I mentioned way back in GM Don’t List #1, I am generally anonymizing the examples I give in these essays. I’m not looking to shame specific Game Masters, and I’m not interested in punching down. My goal is not to initiate some sort of witch hunt; it’s to educate and discuss.

This essay, however, is an exception. The problems I had this time ultimately originated with a published product, and a published product is fair game.

The book in question is Strange Revelations, an adventure supplement for The Strange. When I reviewed Strange Revelations, I mentioned that I would be using at least 8-9 of the ten scenarios in the book at my gaming table.

The tenth scenario was “Venom Rising”.

SPOILERS AHEAD FOR VENOM RISING

“Venom Rising” is a hot mess of a scenario.

The premise is that an NPC has been framed for blowing up several industrial facilities and the PCs need to clear her name. So why is everyone convinced she did it? What’s the evidence that she’s guilty?

There isn’t any.

So right there you have a broken premise, right? It’s the equivalent of a D&D adventure where you’re supposed to kill the ogre that’s been harassing the village and, when you ask where he is, the mayor says, “That’s his corpse in the corner there.”

Which brings us to the scenario itself, which consists of the PCs visiting the suspect’s living quarters and each of the industrial sites that were blown up. These scenes play out in one of two ways:

• The PCs show up, fight 4-5 bad guys, search the location, and find no clues.
• The PCs show up, search the location, find no clues, and then fight 4-5 bad guys.

And here’s how the scenario premise is supposed to resolve itself:

• The PCs see a picture of the suspect and realize that she has a third arm.
• They do the equivalent of an internet search, find the publicly broadcast video feed from one of the attacks, and note that the masked terrorist who blew up the facility doesn’t have three arms.

So when I said that there wasn’t any evidence incriminating the suspect, that was inaccurate: It’s not just that there’s no evidence incriminating her; it’s that the evidence which is publicly available before the PCs begin their investigation indicates that someone else did the crime.

Except it’s even worse than that because the suspect’s robotic third arm is pictured as detachable. Which means that the evidence which is supposed to be “exculpatory” isn’t actually exculpatory.

Ultimately, the module tells the GM to resolve the situation by having the person actually responsible for the bombings simply show up and do something egregiously guilty-looking directly in front of the PCs for no particular reason.

Simply reading through the scenario it was obvious how it would play out at the table: The PCs would go from one location to the next. They would never be able to accomplish anything (because there was nothing to accomplish), and would thus grow slowly more and more aggravated with their frustrated investigations. Then the bad guy would arbitrarily show up and the scenario would end with a final, relieved whimper.

In short, the scenario was completely unsalvageable. I metaphorically tossed it to one side, focused my attention elsewhere, and basically never thought about it again.

… which proved to be a mistake. Because when Gen Con rolled around last month, I wanted to play The Strange. Because I had literally forgotten all about “Venom Rising”, I didn’t recognize the title and, therefore, didn’t realize that Monte Cook Games was running a scenario from Strange Revelations. In fact, I was over an hour into the session before I realized what was happening.

And the scenario did, in fact, play out exactly the way I thought it would: In frustrating irrelevance with an unsatisfying whimper.

(Although to the credit of both creative play and the actual GM who was running the session, it wrapped up in a memorable fashion with the PCs ultimately sympathizing with the “bad” guy’s political manifesto and making arrangements to hook him up with freedom fighters who could help him achieve his political goals. As one of the players put it: “It was the first time in a decade of roleplaying that convincing the villain to use better PR has solved the problem!”)

TRIAGE AT THE TABLE

Such a result (usually minus the memorable moment) is, in fact, inevitable when the GM creates a mystery with no clues.

You wouldn’t expect this to be a particularly common phenomena, but I’ve encountered it with a surprising regularity over the thirty years I’ve been gaming. It usually doesn’t manifest itself with the utter purity demonstrated by “Venom Rising”, but it often crops up in less severe forms or within certain sections of a large scenario.

I suspect the problem is born from a fundamentally inverted understanding of how mystery scenarios are structured: We think of mystery stories as being defined by the lack of information (because they are stories of finding something which is unknown), which erroneously leads us to design scenarios which lack information.

The primary solution, of course, is understanding that mystery scenarios are actually structured on acquiring information and liberally applying the Three Clue Rule during scenario design. That’s a topic, of course, which is thoroughly covered in the Three Clue Rule essay, and I don’t think I need to further belabor the subject here.

What I will note, however, is that sometimes you can unintentionally find yourself in this scenario during actual play: You prepped clues, but the PCs missed them. Or you simply made a mistake and the PCs have ended up in an investigatory cul-de-sac where they’re unable to make any progress.

Triaging this situation at the table involves accurately maintaining and monitoring your Revelation List:

• Make a list of all the conclusions the PCs need to make in the course of their investigation.
• List all of the clues that exist for each of those conclusions.
• Use the list during actual play to track which clues the PCs have received and – importantly! – which clues they appear to have missed.

(In some cases they’ll double back and find clues they initially seemed to miss, but you can’t count on that happening.)

What you need to be keeping an eye out for are the revelations for which the PCs have missed all of the necessary clues. (In practice, you really want to start paying attention at the point where they’ve missed all but one of the possible clues. Don’t let yourself get completely backed into a corner before working to get yourself out.)

Some revelations may be nonessential. (Redundancy, particularly once you start working with full-fledged node-based design, is not unusual.) Regardless, a missing revelation should be like an alarm bell going off behind your screen. Or maybe a Check Engine light would be the better analogy: The scenario may not be immediately bursting into flames and crashing, but you do need to get it into the shop ASAP for some tender love and care.

One of the best tools to have in your arsenal is a proactive element in the scenario which you can use to deliver new clues. (There’s more discussion of this in the Three Clue Rule, but you can never go too far wrong having some thugs kick down the PCs’ door.)

If everything has gone completely to hell, this proactive element can – as in “Venom Rising” – simply be the bad guy showing up for his final confrontation. This technique, however, is incredibly dissatisfying for the players. You’re better off having the proactive element be at least one step removed so that the players can actually make the final conclusion for themselves (this is similar to Matryoshka search techniques).

On the other hand, you should also consider just letting the investigation fail sometimes. As GMs we’re often terribly hesitant to do so, but if player choices are going to be meaningful (and they should be), then sometimes the consequences of those choices will be failure. Clinging to that moment – forcing the PCs to wallow in the failure – can often be more frustrating and harmful than simply allowing the failure to happen: The cultists complete their ritual and Innsmouth slides in the sea. The bank robbers escape with the cash. Doctor Nefaria successfully travels back in time and takes over Yugoslavia in 1982.

The good news is that the consequences of failure usually beget even more interest than success: The disappearance of Innsmouth brings Mythos cults into the national headlines, leading to a burst in youth Cthulhu gangs and Nyarlathotep-inspired rebellion. The bank robbers use the cash to fund an arms deal with Mexican drug lords. The once two-bit villain Doctor Nefaria has suddenly become your campaigns’ Doctor Doom and the PCs have no one to blame but themselves.

Of course, they can only blame themselves (instead of blaming you) if you’ve designed the original mystery with the necessary clues.

Go to Part 9

Go to Part 1

GM: It’s a pretty cheap lock, so it only takes you about fifteen seconds to pick it. You hear the satisfying click.

Rachael: Great. I’ll slide my picks back into the hidden lining on my belt before opening the door and slipping through.

GM: You find yourself in the office of Sir Sebastian. An imposing, mahogany desk with a flared plinth dominates the center of the room. Heavy, velvet curtains with gold appliqué seem to swallow the light from the windows. Vivid, arsenic-green wallpaper render kaleidoscopic patterns on the walls. Give me a Search check.

Rachael: 25.

GM: Okay, you find a hidden compartment on the wall, which you open by tracing the patterns in the wallpaper. Inside you find a small, metal ball with black, acid-etched symbols covering its surface. Give me a Spot check.

Rachael: 18.

GM: You notice that there’s a thin seam running around the center of the ball. Give me an Idea roll.

Rachael: 16.

GM: Okay, that just good enough. You realize that the ball can be rotated to form different patterns with the symbols. You experiment for a minute, and find a sequence that causes the ball to pop open. Inside you find Marie Artaud’s ring.

Rachael: Great. I’ll take the ring, close the ball, and get back to the party before I’m missed, making sure to lock the door behind me.

Hopefully the problem here is immediately apparent to you: The GM is cutting off the player’s investigation of the scene by preemptively calling for skill checks. The PC effectively ends up in a kind of “autopilot mode” during which the game ceases to be truly interactive and the player is rendered into a passive audience that can only watch the character’s actions playing out.

It’s rare (although, unfortunately, not unheard of) for this error to be carried out in quite so egregious a fashion, but I’ve found that its less pronounced variants are shockingly common.

THREE-TIERED PERCEPTION

Probably the most common version of this problem that I’ve seen is when the GM preemptively calls for a Search check or similar mechanic. At a minimum, however, a good GM needs to be able to distinguish between three different levels of character perception:

1. Automatic Perception
2. Spot-type Perception
3. Search-type Perception

I’m using skill names from 3rd Edition D&D, but this remains true even in games which don’t mechanically distinguish between these categories. (Pathfinder, for example, is 3rd Edition’s kissing cousin, but lumps both Spot-type and Search-type perception into a single skill.)

If you’re familiar with the Art of Rulings, you may notice how these fall into its three core principles:

1. Passive Observation is automatically triggered
2. Player Expertise activates Character Expertise
3. Player Expertise can trump Character Expertise

Automatic Perception and Spot-type Perception both fall into the category of Passive Observation: Automatic Perception is the stuff that literally anyone standing there will observe. (If you want to think about it in purely mechanical terms, it’s the stuff that requires a DC 0 Spot check to notice.) Spot-type Perception is the stuff that people can notice while just standing there, but might not. (Spot checks are an example of this, but so are Knowledge checks: Anyone can see the large flag hanging on the wall, but only some people will recognize what nation the flag belongs to.)

Search-type Perception falls into the second category, being an example of Player Expertise activating Character Expertise: This is the stuff you can’t see by just standing there. You need to go do something in order to see it / learn it.

Beyond this basic core, there are a few advanced techniques to consider.

Matryoshka Search Technique: This is something I’ve discussed in a dedicated post as a Random GM Tip, but beyond the threshold of the basic Search-type Perception, you can begin to see the game space as nested layers of interaction.

You can actually see this in the example above: Rachael needs to search the room to find the hidden panel. She needs to figure out how to open it. Then she needs to examine the ball inside and figure out how to open that. There’s not one threshold of interactivity; there are many, each nested inside the other.

Superman’s X-Ray Vision: Special abilities (particularly always-on special abilities) can cause some items to swap between the different perception type categories for specific characters. This can result in Rachael and Teresa having different perceptual relationships with a given game space.

I’m Just That Good: What if you’re really, really, really good at spotting stuff? So good, for example, that you might be able to notice the hidden panel in the wall from across the room whereas other characters would need to physically interact with the wall to notice it.

In some ways, you can actually think of this as a variant of the character possessing a particular special ability (it’s just that their “special ability” in this case is being really, really good at noticing hidden things).

I actually mechanically instantiated this into 3rd Edition: In my house rules, if you beat the Search DC by +20 while making a Spot check, you’ll notice the hidden feature as if you had actively searched for it (either directly, if possible, or through some form of tertiary indication if not; you may note that the latter is effectively introducing a Matryoshka technique). You can do similar stuff with, for example, exceptional successes in Eclipse Phase or point spends in Trail of Cthulhu.

You might be wondering why this is “okay”. Why is this any better than the example of the GM preempting them? Aren’t you still skipping interactive steps?

You are, in fact, still “skipping” steps. But you’re doing so as a reward for character ability. It’s similar to a wizard “skipping” sections of the dungeon by using a passwall spell: Yes, you’re bypassing the “intended” or “natural” path of progress, and there are things you’re losing or missing out on as a result. But you’re gaining a different (and important!) benefit.

That’s why this is an advanced technique: You need to understand the rule in order to know when you can (and should!) break it.

ASSUMING ACTION

The preemptive Search check, however, is just one specific example of the GM making an anticipatory ruling; a ruling in which they assume that the player will make a particular choice and, therefore, skip past the step where the player actually makes that choice.

In this context, you can actually interpret the problem as a scene-framing issue. As described in the Art of Pacing, the GM needs to identify empty time – i.e., time in which the player is neither making interesting choices nor experiencing the consequences of those choices – and frame past that empty time to the next meaningful choice. What’s happening here is that the GM is incorrectly skipping past meaningful choices.

The problems with this are manifold:

• It hurts immersion as the player loses control of their character.
• It prevents the player from actually playing the game as the loss of control results in a loss of interactivity. In this it’s similar to alpha-quarterbacking in co-op board games.
• It prevents the player from making a different and unanticipated choice. The GM is not omniscient, so even when they assume that there’s only one “good” choice to be made, it doesn’t follow that this is the choice which will be made.
• On the other hand, the GM is a little too omniscient. They are biased by their design of the encounter and the wider knowledge of the scenario, which may blind them to the actual thought process the player/character is experiencing.

In this, you can see a pattern of problems similar to run-time choose your own adventure (as seen in GM Don’t List #6).

It is, perhaps, unsurprising that so many errors in GMing technique share common roots. And, conversely, that the solution to those errors are all rooted in a similar ideology.

Go to Part 8

Go to Part 1

There are two different GMing techniques that can be referred to as “choose your own adventure”.

(If you’re on the younger side and have no idea what I’m talking about, the Choose Your Own Adventure Books, which have recently been brought back into print, were a really big thing in the ‘80s and ‘90s. They created the gamebook genre, which generally had the reader make a choice every 1-3 pages about what the main character — often presented as the reader themselves in the second person — should do next, and then instructing them about which page to turn to continue the story as if that choice had been made.)

(For those on the older side: Yes, I really did need to include that explanation.)

The first technique happens during scenario prep. The GM looks at a given situation and says, “The players could do A or B, so I’ll specifically prep what happens if they make either choice.” And then they say, “If they choose A, then C or D happens. So I’ll prep C and D. And if they choose B, then E or F could happen, so I’ll prep E and F.”

And what they end up with looks like this:

This is a bad technique. First, because it wastes a ton of prep. (As soon as the players choose Option A, everything the GM preps down the path of Option B becomes irrelevant.) Second, because the players can render it ALL irrelevant the minute they think of something the GM hasn’t anticipated and go with Option X instead. (Which, in turn, encourages the GM to railroad them in order to avoid throwing away their prep.)

The problem is that the GM is trying to pre-run the material. This is inherently a waste of time, because the best time to actually run the material is at the table with your players.

But I’ve written multiple articles about this (most notably Don’t Prep Plots and Node-Based Scenario Design), and it’s also somewhat outside the scope of this series.

What I’m interested in talking about today is the second variety of Choose Your Own Adventure technique, which I suppose we could call:

RUN-TIME CHOOSE YOUR OWN ADVENTURE

GM: You see that the wolf’s fur is matted and mangy, clinging to ribs which jut out through scrawny skin. There’s a nasty cut along its flank. It snarls menacingly at you. Do you want to attack it? You could also try offering it some food.

With run-time choose your own adventure, in addition to describing a particular situation, the GM will also offer up a menu of options for how the players can respond to it. In milder versions, the GM will wait a bit (allowing players to talk through a few options on their own) before throwing in his two cents. In the cancerous version, the GM will wait until a player has actually declared a course of action and then offer them a list of other alternatives (as if to say, “It’s cute that you thought you had autonomy here, but that’s a terrible idea. Here are some other options you would have come up with if you didn’t suck.”).

It can be an easy trap for a GM to fall into because, when you set a challenge for the PCs, you should be giving some thought to whether or not it’s soluble, and that inherently means thinking through possible solutions. It’s often very easy to just burble those thoughts out as they occur to you.

It’s also an easy trap to fall into during planning sessions. Everyone at the table is collaborating and brainstorming, and you instinctively want to jump into that maelstrom of ideas. “Oh! You know what you could do that would be really cool?”

But you have to recognize your privileged (and empowered) position as the GM. You are not an equal participant in that brainstorming:

• As an arbiter of whether or not the chosen action will succeed, you speak with an inherent (and, in many cases, overwhelming) bias.
• You’ve usually had a lot more time to think about the situation that’s being presented (or at least the elements that make up that situation), which gives you an unfair advantage.
• You often have access to information about the scenario that the players do not, warping your perception of their decision-making process.

The players, through their characters, are actually present in the moment and the ideas they present are being presented in that moment. The ideas that you present are interjections from the metagame and disrupt the narrative flow of the game.

Because of all of this, when preemptively suggesting courses of action, you are shutting down the natural brainstorming process rather than enabling it (and, in the process, killing potentially brilliant ideas before they’re ever given birth). And if you attempt to supplement the options generated by the players, you are inherently suggesting that the options they’ve come up with aren’t good enough and that they need to do something else.

So, at the end of the day, you have to muzzle yourself: Your role as the GM is to present the situation/challenge. You have to let the players be free to fulfill their role, which is to come up with the responses and solutions to what you’ve created.

As the Czege Principle states, “When one person is the author of both the character’s adversity and its resolution, play isn’t fun.”

But more than that, when you liberate the players to freely respond to the situations you create, you’ll discover that they’ll create new situations for you to respond to (either directly or through the personas of your NPCs). And that’s when you’ll have the opportunity to engage in the same exhilarating process of problem-solving and roleplaying, discovering that the synergy between your liberated creativity and their liberated creativity is greater than anything you could have created separately.

WITH NEW PLAYERS

This technique appears to be particularly appealing to GMs who are interacting with players new to roleplaying games. The thought process seems to be that, because they’re new to RPGs, they need a “helping hand” to figure out what they should be doing.

In my experience, this is generally the wrong approach. It’s like trying to introduce new players to a cooperative board game by alpha-quarterbacking them. The problem is that you’re introducing them to a version of a “roleplaying game” which features the same preprogrammed constraints of a board game or a computer game, rather than exposing them to the element which makes a roleplaying game utterly unique — the ability to do anything.

What you actually need to do, in my general experience, is to sit back even farther and give the new players plenty of time to think things through on their own; and explicitly empower them to come up with their own ideas instead of presenting them with a menu of options.

This does not, of course, mean that you should leave them stymied in confusion or frustration. There is a very fine line that needs to be navigated, however, between instruction and prescription. You can stay on the right side of that line, generally speaking, by framing conversations through Socratic questioning rather than declarative statements: Ask them what they want to do and then discuss ways that they can do that, rather than leading with a list of things you think they might be interested in doing.

WITH EXPERIENCED PLAYERS

You can, of course, run into similar situations with experienced players, where the group has stymied itself and can’t figure out what to do next. When you’re confronted with this, however, the same general type of solution applies:

A few things you can do instead of pushing your own agenda:

• Ask the players to summarize what they feel their options are.
• In mystery scenarios, encourage the players to review the evidence that they have. (Although you have to be careful here; you can fall into a similar trap by preferentially focusing their attention on certain pieces of information. It’s really important, in my experience, for players in mystery scenarios to draw their own conclusions instead of feeling as if solutions are being handed to them.)
• If they’ve completely run out of ideas, bring in a proactive scenario element to give them new leads or new scenario hooks to follow up on.

Also: This sort of thing should be a rare occurrence. If it’s happening frequently, you should check your scenario design. Insufficient clues in mystery scenarios and insufficient scenario hooks in sandbox set-ups seem to be the most common failure points here.

This problem can also be easily mistaken for the closely related situation where the group has too many options and they’ve gotten themselves locked into analysis paralysis. When this happens, it should be fairly obvious that tossing even more options into the mix isn’t going to solve the problem. A couple things you can do here (in addition to the techniques above, which also frequently work):

• Simply set a metagame time limit for making a decision. (Err on the side of caution with this, however, as it can be very heavy-handed.)
• Offer the suggestion that they could split up and deal with multiple problems / accomplish multiple things at the same time.

The latter would seem to cross over into the territory of the GM suggesting a particular course of action. And that’s fair. But I find this is often necessary because a great many players have been trained to consider “Don’t Split the Party” as an unspoken rule, due to either abusive experiences with previous GMs or more explicitly from previous GMs who don’t want to deal with a split party. That unspoken rule is biasing their decision making process in a manner very similar to the GM suggesting courses of action, and the limitations it imposes often result in these “analysis paralysis” situations where they want to deal with multiple problems at the same time, but feel that they can’t. Explicitly removing this bias, therefore, solves the problem.

You can actually encounter a similar form of analysis paralysis where the players feel that the GM is saying “you should do X”, but they really don’t want to. Or they’d much rather be doing Y. And so they lock up on the decision point instead of moving past.

Which, of course, circles us back to the central point here: Don’t put your players in that situation to begin with.

Go to Part 7