“What would you like to do?”
The crumbling passages of an ancient temple split right and left. What do you do? The journey across the ocean takes days of sailing. What do you do? A kobold lunges at you with a rusty knife. What do you do?
What do you do? This is one of the most important sentences in role-playing. It’s what divides role-playing games from board and video games. In some instances, this is all about free will — what do the players want to do with the choice the Storyteller has presented them with?
But it’s also about pacing. If the party returns to their guildhall and finds their recurring nemesis seated behind the desk, what will the characters do? That’s the essence of role-playing and playing off of the plot the Storyteller is running. But it’s just as important when the Storyteller isn’t running the scene, when the party returns to their guildhall to find it safe and sound. Nothing going on there right now.
But what do they want to do? Maybe the party just kicks back and gets a rest before running off to the next adventure, following the Storyteller’s plot. But it’s also an opportunity for the players to pursue their own side-plots and develop character arcs.
If a character’s ambition is to develop their own spell, for example, but they never have downtime to do it, or if two characters are developing a relationship — romantic, platonic, or competitive — they need time to talk together.
One member of our current gaming group is an on-again, off-again Storyteller and he’s sometimes struggled to lead us through a coherent story, to give us opportunities to develop our characters. We have other posts on the quicksand that he managed to make out of his sandbox games, but even those plot quagmires would have been more palatable if the players just had chances to role-play. He often rushed us through the game so fast we never got the chance to even build our own stories.
Case in point, he ran a one-shot game for me and his kids. Our characters crossed paths at a town festival and we described ourselves to one another. But before we could do any more role-playing, a thief snatched a purse and we ran off in pursuit. We caught the thief, returned the purse, then an elf popped up to plead for someone’s help when kobolds attacked his home. Off we went — again!
We didn’t even have the chance to ask each other’s names.
My buddy expanded his little one-shot out into a full campaign, and now he’s running it with me and the rest of our adult gaming group. It’s a rough draft before he runs it for the kids so that we can make sure it’s awesome, that they get well and truly hooked on role-playing.
So the one-shot became chapter one of the full RPG campaign and he ran the new players through it… And once again rushed us into the adventure before we could do much role-playing. We got our names out, at least.
Now, my friend has been gaming with me for twenty years and he’s no novice. He is an expert number-cruncher and a brilliant tactician. Even if he’s a bit more about the dice and combat than social role-playing, I figured that he had to be doing this for a reason. He put a whole previous campaign on a ticking clock so that we stumbled all the way to the end with barely any interpersonal scenes or even finding out what the hell was going on.
So, before we could go to chapter two of this campaign, I sat down and asked him. Why rush us? He knows that some of the best sessions are when the Storyteller sits back all night while the players role-play amongst themselves. So what happened?
It turned out, interrupting us was by design. To create a sense of urgency, our Storyteller wanted events to spool out by themselves and make us react to them, ready or not. He wanted drama to erupt and force us into action!
That can be exciting! But it’s not sustainable. The players are going to get worn out — and their characters will be run ragged. Constant stress loses its impact, until the drama’s all gone. And if the players enjoy role-playing amongst themselves, developing personal side-plots and character arcs, they’re going to get frustrated if they never get to work on them.
My buddy said that he aims to let us get about ninety percent through a conversation and then interrupt right at the end. He wants us to feel cut off, but that he hasn’t shut down the scene.
In theory, that’s not bad. But what I had to point out to him was that what he thinks is ninety percent done almost never is. Maybe we’re really only halfway finished, but he doesn’t realize we have another point to discuss or bit of backstory we want to reveal. What if we’re almost done talking about the thieves we defeated, but we also want to have a second conversation about the strange dream that we had? And a third one about the town politics? Ninety percent through that first topic is cutting off most of our scene.
Since his last sandbox game turned into mud, my friend was already working hard not to make this game time-sensitive. The purse could have gotten snatched at any time, so he could spring it whenever it fit best. But he chose to spring it while we were role-playing, cutting off our scene.
Erica was already feeling uncertain about this game, since things went so sideways last time. I didn’t enjoy getting ramrodded from one event to the next without any time to even understand the scenes, let alone make our own, either.
So here was my advice to him. Instead of interrupting the players, interrupt yourself.
Having done the one-shot version of this chapter before, I knew an elf was going to come beg for help. It wasn’t time-sensitive — the elf’s village could get attacked whenever the story needed it. I suggested that the Storyteller let us role-play, talk in character, and make sure that we got to enjoy anything on our to-do list. When the answer to “What would you like to do?” is “Nothing, that’s all I had,” then it’s the time.
The players are done, and it’s the Storyteller’s turn again. Set the scene, describe the town at breakfast the next day, cleaning up from the festival, people nursing hangovers, and then… and elf barges in!
Instead of jumping on our conversation, the Storyteller could narrate and then interrupt that. In fact, since he’s the one narrating or role-playing an NPC, he has total control over the timing and making sure that he builds up the tension.
So that’s what he tried out the next session — and it went over great! Our party got to go shopping, talk about the thieves that we took down, discuss the foreshadowing that we had noticed, and then share a little surface-level backstory. When the Storyteller asked what we wanted to do, it was just that our characters needed to turn in for the night.
And then, once we were trying to figure out our next steps in the morning, the injured elf arrived in a panic, begging for help and suddenly we had direction! That’s our next step.
I like to give my group a lot of downtime when I’m Storytelling. A few hours for their characters to do whatever they want and sometimes days at a time; as long as they’re in a safe town or their home base. When they’re out chasing monsters — or being chased — things are fast-paced and the action is heavy. But (almost) no one’s trying to flirt with a romantic interest in the middle of a crisis scene.
When the action’s over and they get to settle down, though, it always comes back to “What do you want to do?” And we don’t move on until everyone gets to do the role-playing that they want.
