Taking 20 Podcast - Ep 218 - The Power of DM Words

Episode Date: April 7, 2024

within the game.  The way we describe encounters, how we interact with our players, and whether or not to offer advice can make a game session fun and engaging, combative, miserable, or boring.  In this episode I offer some tips for choosing your words carefully while running a game and helping to ensure players get the information they need without losing agency over their characters.   Resources: 20 Tips for Becoming a Better DM:  https://www.trichotome-design.com/blog/2017/4/29/20-tips-for-becoming-a-better-dm-lessons-learned-at-the-table

This week on the Taking20 Podcast. Instead of you the DM saying that direct combat would likely result in PC's death, Aunt Becky says it. Now the players can feel more free about disagreeing with the advice. They're not telling the GM that the GM is wrong. It's Aunt Becky who's wrong. Thank you for listening to the Taking 20 Podcast, Episode 218, a back to basics episode reminding you about the power of DM words. I want to thank this week's sponsor, Sweaters.

Did you know that sometimes I'll knit a sweater while I'm driving to work? I love to weave my way through traffic. Yes, yes, yes, boo me. Your hate just feeds my life force and makes the next joke even worse. Please take a moment to like, rate, and subscribe to this podcast wherever you happen to find it.

All of those quick activities help promote the podcast and help it gain visibility. I would greatly appreciate it if you could take just a few minutes out of your day and do one of those things for me. I'm a regular in a lot of DM and GM, tabletop RPG, I don't know, Discord servers, subreddits, online groups, discussion forums, etc. and I always try to answer questions and help wherever I can.

While I'm there, I keep a keen eye out for resources that other GMs reference and use. After all, I think we all get better behind the screen by learning from one another what others use, what works, what doesn't, and what advice they have or have received that could be valuable. One of the resources a fellow DM cited a few days ago was a blog post from 2017 by one Justin Larange Aloualiya. And Justin, if you ever hear this and I butchered your name, please accept my deepest heartfelt apologies. Justin is a game designer and kept a blog going until about June of 2022 as far as I

can tell. Anyway, the reference blog post is called 20 Tips for Becoming a Better DM – Lessons Learned at the table. Needless to say, the title grabbed my attention and I started reading. In the blog post are some good tried and true tips for people behind the screen, a lot of which I've posted episodes about already. Knowing your players, player agency, setting boundaries, having a session zero, and that kind of thing. I'll put a link to the blog post in the resources section of the episode description so go check that out if you'd like to read more. As I read the blog, tip number 13 jumped out of the screen at me because while I've casually understood the point that he made, I've never put a lot of

thought into it. The tip was, a DM's words are powerful, use them wisely. I digested the rest of the tips but came back to this one and began to think about what he meant by that. In the tip, he makes some good points that I'd like to discuss a little more in depth. One of the first and strongest statements he made is that DM words can make or break a situation. There are a lot of potential examples of this,

so let's start with words with the least impact, descriptions. The way we describe a location or an opponent can have a dramatic effect on player actions. I discussed this in episode 78, so go give that a listen if you want more detail. If we describe an area as open, benign, happy, and unthreatening, then the players may, depending on your table, proceed without much of a care in the universe. It's a happy sunny glade with people chatting and picnicking and relaxing. What could possibly go wrong? They may not even check for traps and may not even be on their guard and may not even have weapons drawn because who walks through

a town celebration brandishing a battle axe? Murder hobos, that's who. But if you describe an area as ominous and dark, still, with unexplained sounds or smells, then they're gonna have their hair sticking up like a cat and go in very carefully, tapping every stone with a ten-foot pole and peeking around every corner with mirrors. And this is just the way you describe areas. Extrapolate that out to monsters being fearsome or calm, actions displaying skill or not, and the way your NPCs talk, and you can see that the way we describe the world and what happens in

it has a dramatic effect on the character actions that your players declare. Again, all of that covered in episode 78, but there's another aspect to this advice I want to call your attention to. Justin's tips succinctly reminded me that the words we use when we describe the characters, the players, and their choices carry the weight of your universe behind them. Now what do I mean by that? From the player perspective, there is a risk associated with playing a tabletop RPG. The player makes choices for their character that, right or wrong, spoken or unspoken, they could be judged for. If you're

a player and playing with people that you've known for years, have inside jokes with, and you trust, you know that they love and value you. There's very little risk of being hurt by your choices. If your character does something dumb, everyone laughs, you laugh, the game moves on. Heck, there's a gaming group that I've been playing with off and on since college, and you know how old I am, so that's a long time. I was playing a rogue one time who couldn't keep his hands off things in the dungeon. He would never steal from the party, but the big bad? Yeah, he'd probably walk out with a toilet seat if it wasn't nailed down. Anyway, we were deep in the dungeon late

in the campaign standing outside of a door with no obvious handle or keyhole, but with a shimmering globe of black energy swirling beside it. My rogue, being who he was, when we were stymied by the door, immediately turned to the black, very obviously dangerous orb and tried to grab it. My DM to his credit said, so you're going to try to grab the swirling orb of dark energy his eyebrows raised in surprise and I said yes Because a if it's valuable I want to take it out of here and b I already declared with what I'm doing so I'm not changing it out of character I even said I know you're trying to warn me away from the action

But my character doesn't understand arcane natures of things and it really just could be a really valuable trinket Everyone laughed I laughed the laughed, the table laughed, we killed the table and that's how I learned mimics were real. No, we all had a good laugh about my character picking up an obviously dangerous item out of greed. My character took an insane amount of damage and two negative levels, learned his lesson and went back to trying to pick the door open like a good little rogue. I didn't fear any reprisal because I'm playing among friends. We still laugh about that shit

15 years later. However, imagine if that was a group that I didn't know, and after declaring my action the DM used words like don't be stupid or a moron or openly mocked my choice teasing me to get a laugh from the other players. That honestly probably would crush my desire to play the game. Definitely with them, maybe with anyone. I know few of you listeners would ever do that, but I've seen some stories of players being belittled because they didn't know the rules, the situation wasn't adequately described to them leading to a tactical error, or the GM just wanting to make a joke at the player's expense.

Words have weight, the amount of information we give, how we describe actions, monsters, traps, etc. and how we talk to our players. Generally I'm completely judgment free behind the screen, only stepping in to stop actions if the player is making an obvious tactical error or they've obviously forgotten something that their character would definitely know or I guess if they're trying to violate one of the table rules. Once they've declared their action and decided that's what they want to do I adjudicate it describe what happens taking care not to mock the player or make the character look stupid. For example a character rolls a natural

one on attack which is a guaranteed miss in some game systems, critical miss in others. There's a world of difference between quote, your axe swings way too high as the bandit ducks under your blade, and you feel stupid as you goofily swing your axe, it flies out of your hand and lands 20 feet away by the tree. I'm being extreme in my examples, but you can see that in the first one, it sounds like just bad luck, whereas the second one makes the player seem like the character was stupid for even trying. Moving on to the second thing from Justin's post that grabbed my eye, but I want to add

a phrase to the end of it. He said, be prepared to offer advice to a player that needs it. But and here's my corollary I'll add, Only give the advice if the player asks for it. You may have been playing a cleric for 20 years. Know the ins, outs, blesses, and bains like the back of your holy symbol. And this player may be playing his very first cleric character,

just very first sheet in front of him even. They're not sure what to do next, whereas you have a cleric decision tree in your head based on two decades of experience. Let the player play their character and don't quarterback it for them. They may play their character very differently than you would yours. Experience is the best teacher and you should give them every opportunity to make their choices for their character. If they want to take more time than you would, make decisions

differently than you would, then you should let them generally. If they're confused and obviously need help, offer help, but don't just blurt out, you cast bless here idiot. If you continually butt in, overrun them, tell them what to do all the time, then you might as well be playing the character yourself. Help should be a pool of water that you place before others and let them choose whether to dip their bucket in. Let them ask for help or advice before you pro-offer it.

If their decision making is so long it's causing problems around the table, sure, offer to help to get the game moving, but let them choose to accept it. A third phrase from tip number 13 that I latched onto was give players choices. A third phrase from tip number 13 that I latched onto was give players choices. I've talked about this as recently as episode 177 where I talked about setting up scenes and situations rather than stories. As a GM, rarely, and I mean very rarely should you give player characters a situation with only one possible choice or outcome. You're not writing a novel.

The players have control and agency over their characters, and one of the core tenets of that is the power to make choice for that character. I talked about that at length in episode 213, which wasn't that long ago. But for players to have a choice, you, my beloved DMs out there, have to give them the opportunity to make a choice. Fight or flee, intimidation or diplomacy, the swamps of

Barlow-Graw or the temple of unending buggery. I don't think I'd go to that second place. Sounds like a pain in the ass. N-nothing? Nothing? Okay, fine, moving on. Player choice is the heart of an RPG and are part of the social contract of playing around a table with each other. We GMs promise to give the players a world where their choices can make a difference between success and failure, for themselves, for the world, and for the big bad. Meanwhile, players agree to generally not make choices that are going to ruin the fun

of the game for other players in the DM. We facilitate choice and help provide the outcomes of these choices, but we don't make them for the players. Maybe we're running a pre-written adventure that says the PCs must first go to the town of Middlesbrough for heading off to the plains of Dhar Long, where they'll meet the mysterious stranger Fred, who will give them the location of the wandering city of San Francisco. Hang on. That's actually a really great name for a city in the desert. San Francisco.

Oh, and San Andreas. And we can just keep going. You know what? All right. I'm going to stop to write these down. If the adventure is written, you go from A to B and then C. If the players finish B and want to do D instead of C, unless it would completely break your game, let them do it. They decide to leave Middlesbrough and head to the Dungeon of Night Terrors instead of the Plains of Dharlong. If you have a dungeon ready, now

is the time to pull it out for your players. To get the pre-written adventure back on track, they could always find Fred being held captive in the dungeon. Voila! Problem solved. You didn't negate their choice, the adventure's back on track towards San Francisco, just like the module says it should. I'll stop here to keep from rambling any further, but I think you see my point. Allow the players to make choices generally without interfering and do what you need to do behind the screen to keep the game moving forward. The last thing I'll talk about from Justin's blog post is the advice quote, if the players need wisdom use NPCs to deliver it. In other words, don't just blurt out advice from behind the DM screen about

things happening in the world, speak through your NPCs to deliver that advice. As an example, suppose your players are stuck with what to do next. They're fugitives on the run in your campaign in their holdup in some unlucky NPC's basement, say their Aunt Becky, and are at a complete loss whether to take on the corrupt sheriff in direct combat, try to convince the town that they're innocent, or make a run for it into the wilderness to hide out Robin Hood style. You could simply say, you think direct combat would likely result in your death, so if I were you I'd run for it. While there's nothing wrong with doing that per se, it does make it look like you're quarterbacking their decisions, almost forcing them to make the one choice over another to take the story of direction you want, but not necessarily what the players want.

The players feel like they have to agree with you or run the risk of angering the GM. While you weren't trying to take away their player agency just by giving unprompted advice from behind the screen, you're tacitly doing so. However, let's make one change. Instead of you the DM saying that direct combat would likely result in PC's death. Aunt Becky says it. Now the players can feel more free about disagreeing with the advice. They're not telling the GM that the GM is wrong more free about disagreeing with the advice. They're not telling the GM that the GM is wrong, it's Aunt Becky who's wrong. What the hell does she know? We're third level characters. We're going to go kick that sheriff's ass. The DM smiles, makes a note behind the screen, and begins trying to figure out if the sheriff is fifth level or seventh level and how many deputies she has. By speaking to an NPC, in some small way, you're giving the players an out to disagree

with you without causing a conflict. After all, there's no way Aunt Becky or Billy Bop the stable hand or J. Roof the patron in the lion's bellow end knows as much as the DM knows. The information or advice the players are being given by an NPC could be flawed, untrue, or my favorite, true from a certain point of view, and with certain goals in mind. Because of that, the PCs are free to ignore the advice and make the choice they want to. I'll grant you that as a veteran player, if I'm in a non-roleplay heavy campaign and Kill Kenny the Local Butcher gives me advice about current events in the campaign, I'm

probably going to listen. All this being said one of my current DMs Tom Robinson is running a bunch of us through the Bloodlords campaign right now. We four players are grizzled RPG veterans many of us grognards have been playing the tabletop RPGs for decades. God's blessed Tom there are times he gives us hints and suggestions and speaks through NPCs and tries to help us, but we've all become oblivious through roleplaying our characters, overthinking our choices, or for whatever reason our radars aren't tuned to the right frequency at the right time.

I cannot tell you how many times he has had to patiently say, guys, the blah blah blah told you about this underground group two sessions ago, and then there's a giant chorus of oh yeah that's right, and we start the game moving in the right direction again. Sometimes all of us players are a little thick and need a bump in the right direction. In those cases, do whatever you need to do in order to keep the campaign moving forward. I'm a huge believer that iron sharpens iron. If we want to get better at what we do behind the screen, some of the best sources of information

are other DMs and GMs who are doing it. Length of time behind the screen is irrelevant because wisdom is wisdom. Justin admits that as of the time he wrote the blog post, he'd only been DMing for three years while I've been DMing since the satanic panic of the 80s. Justin's posts contained advice that made me reflect on my own DM style and how I use words at the table. Whether because you love DMing, love your players, or probably a bit of both,

always look to improve your DM style. Use your words carefully, be ready to offer advice as a GM or through an NPC, glean wisdom from wherever you find it, and I'll bet you and your players would have fun doing it. If you like this podcast, please consider donating to it at ko-fi.com taking 20 podcast. Every dime goes back into the podcast and helps keep it going, allowing me to continue to make content for you. Tune in next week when I want to give you some advice about what to do when your PCs gain those cool new abilities. But before I go, I want to thank this week's sponsor, Sweaters.

I was asked to judge an ugly sweater contest, but I couldn't decide which ones were the best. I guess I'm just not one to nitpick. This has been episode 218, a reminder of the power of DM words. My name is Jeremy Shelley, and I hope that your next game is your best game. The Taking 20 podcast is a publishing cube media production. Copyright 2024.

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