GM as God, Part Two: Information and Revelations

One of the most difficult tasks for any GM is to fully integrate the players’ character portrayals with the world. This can be a deeply hidden problem because groups tend to get right to how everyone gets along instead of exploring root issues. It might generate animosity. We might end up talking about “dysfunctional relationships” or even abandoning the unique virtues of tabletop gaming when we can just sit back, look at the techniques driving the game and refine them.

Poor integration causes a lot of frustration – so much that groups could fall apart without ever understanding why. The stereotypical antisocial character is often born of a player with so little trust in the world that deviant, amoral behaviour is the rational fall back. Being a bastard elicits information, because everybody has to deal with the bastard and reveal their tactics and resources thereby.

(This works both ways. Bastard GMs are often this way because they don’t know the players’ interests, so they poke, prod and slap to get that information.)

In a traditional RPG the goal is an immediate, deep experience, akin to actually being there. Literary critic Roland Barthes described a state he called punctum (with connotations of puncturing – wounding) in his book Camera Lucida, where the barriers between a sign and what it signifies (in Barthes case, photographs and their subjects) break down, so that (for example) you see a picture as a person. Game procedures tend to be very good at creating a sense of being in the world, but portraying the world on the fly is a challenge. If we had a real “picture” we’d get right to punctum, but RPGs give us ethereal worlds in our heads.

It doesn’t matter whether the game world is very much like our own or an odd fantasy setting. The critical difficulty is that it’s incomplete. There are plenty of commonsense things about the world that don’t come into focus until somebody asks. Look out the window and you know who’s walking down your block now; you don’t always know that in the game without the cumbersome process of “declaring” that you’re looking.

Think of heist scenarios. These involve milking setting information for advantages. The guards will be here. The festival crowd will move down the avenue there. They sound cool in theory but in practice, in-character heist plans often lead to confused, circular discussions. Players just don’t have enough information to take confident ownership of the scheme. They don’t know if they can get lost in the crowd of the festival. They don’t have an accurate picture of the rooftops they want to leap over.

“You know” is a powerful pair of words. Be prepared to fill in gaps in player knowledge by telling them what you consider to be common knowledge and common sense. Don’t both with game systems on anything the players need to know to authentically function in the world. By the way, this is why licenses and genres are so popular. They provide big, ready made sets of signs and assumptions: basic “navigation tools.”

“What do you need to know?” is this technique’s companion. Step in and ask a version of this question whenever players reach an implausible in-character sticking point (plausible sticking points are another matter – it’s not your job to constantly undermine tension). But don’t rely on the players asking common knowledge questions and don’t treat common knowledge like an asset to bargain for. You should use multiple methods to volunteer information about both the particular scene and the world as a whole.

Barthes talked about punctum, but also studium, which is a more analytical relationship. Punctum relies on not only a global perception of the sign, but a detail that’s placed in a powerful enough context to hit hard. A great GM loads the players with information to permit analysis, but in such a way that the action of the scene resolves it all into those telling details – “punctures” between the player/character divide. When you do it right, you can drive an emotional, memorable experience.