Unlike film, where the pace is controlled by cutting material together in a carefully chosen order, roleplaying takes place “live” at the table.
Scenes of high action and excitement, scenes with loads of tension and uncertainty, demand fast pace and fast resolution. Scenes that involve exposition, drama, emotion, and emphasis require a slowing of the pace. Unfortunately, the rules of roleplaying games (particularly the rules involved in the mini-games) tend to slam the brakes on right at the point that you, as the GM, want to ramp up the speed at which things are happening. It is actually far quicker to deliver an expositional scene than it is to resolve a combat scene.
The pace in a roleplaying game is controlled by the presentation of choices. Each time the narrative stops so you can ask “what do you do?”, the flow of the narrative is interrupted and the pace is brought to a halt. This is also true of each time a dice is rolled, each time the game is halted to consult a rule-book, each time the players or GM gets distracted, and each time you break into a mini-game within the larger narrative. To keep the illusion of pace going these “breaks” must be kept to a minimum and, ideally, need to occur only at meaningful points in the game where meaningful choices are being made.
The making of meaningful choices within a world while playing a character is the heart and soul of role-playing. As such, the players’ sense of pace is directly tied to how meaningfully they are presented with choices and to what extent meaningless choices are excluded from the game.
The most obvious and easy way to keep the flow of the game going is to skip empty time. Empty time should never be experienced by the players. Choices presented in empty time are not choices at all. They are the role-playing equivalent of “hit this button to continue”. If the players, while in their hotel room, indicate they want to visit the old house at the top of the hill, you want to avoid having an exchange like the following…
GM: You walk out of your hotel room. A corridor leads to other rooms on this floor and some stairs going down. What do you do now?
Player: We take the stairs.
GM: You enter the lobby, the front door leads outside, there are doors leading to the kitchen, and an administrative office, along with a set of stairs leading up to the guest rooms. What do you do now?
Player: We go outside.
GM: The street leads north up hill towards an old mansion. To the south it leads down into the centre of town. What do you do?
Player: We head north.
GM: You come to a crossroads. The East and West branches lead over some hills to neighbouring farms. What do you do?
Player: We continue north.
Etc.
As you can see this is boring. None of the decisions are meaningful. The time spent playing this out is “dead” time. The choice to continue in the direction the players have already stated they wish to go is a non-choice.
Far better to say “You walk out of the hotel and up the hill to the mansion. It is long abandoned and surrounded by weeds and tangled shrubbery. You stand on the somewhat rotted front porch. The door appears barred and planks have been nailed over most of the first-floor windows. What do you do?”
If you wish to present a decision before the players’ reach the destination made clear by their stated goal, only do so if they are encountering a meaningful obstacle or interruption.
You could have your players walk straight into Doc Halloway’s consulting rooms if that is where they wish to go, but if the Doctor is out on a house call you might have them stall at the door to the doctor’s office. This would be a (very minor) obstacle to their intention. The road leading to the offices being washed out might be another. Stopping to overcome an obstacle is a meaningful decision point in the narrative. Likewise having Jane West run-up to the characters and beg them to come and help her husband who just broke through and fell into an underground cavern while trying to dig a new well, constitutes a meaningful interruption of the players’ intent.
Unless and obstacle or interruption get’s in the way of the players’ intent, however, the empty time before the presentation of the next meaningful decision should always be skipped.
MANAGING EXITS
We noted that, from time to time, you will need to motivate your players to seek out an exit from the current scene. The most common reason will be to keep the pacing or flow of the story moving. It is far better to provide reasons to exit that pull the characters forward rather than try to push them. Characters who are pushed tend to resist. When chased by a monster, the characters tend to want to stop and fight it. When told that the Prince has a well-guarded secret library containing all the blackmail information he uses to maintain control of his Kingdom, the players tend to want to go and find it.
TIME
There are three kinds of time in a role-playing game; slow time, real-time, and elided time. The most obvious is real time, where decisions are being made and acted upon in the present. Slow time is the time taken to play through a mini-game; the few seconds of real-time that a combat would take broken down into multiple actions and dice rolls. Elided time is time skipped to avoid “dead” time. “Three days later you arrive at…” etc.
Slow time has a very obvious impact on the pace of the game (as the action heats up, the game slows down – a far from ideal situation and one that is unique to role-playing games), but so long as the choices players make are meaningful and interesting, the impact on the pace will not be negative. This is one of the key reasons that transitions between actions in a mini-game are important.
The combat mini-game, for example, is quite dull if it is not narrated.
GM:What do you do?
Player #1: I attack the wolf.
<<Dice are rolled>>
GM: You do 3 wounds of damage. Player 2, what do you do?
Player #2: I attack the wolf as well.
<<Dice are rolled>>
GM: You do 3 wounds of damage to the wolf as well. The wolf now attacks player #1.
<<Dice are rolled>>
GM: And you take 2 wounds of damage. What do you do?
Player #1: I attack the wolf.
<<Dice are rolled>>
GM: You kill the wolf.
Narration helps make the choices in the mini-game become meaningful and therefore gives the mini-game its sense of pace. When the outcome of a mini-game has been determined (it is no longer uncertain) then feel free to end the mini-game at that point. There is never a need to play it through to the end if the outcome is no longer in question.
Real-time is the most unpredictable time in the game. It is the time characters spend taking actions to achieve their goals. This time is highly variable. Again, the time should only be spent on achieving player goals. Once it is known whether or not the players can achieve their objectives, it is time to move on.
Elided time is the mechanism by which time, that would otherwise be spent without meaningful choices arising, is skipped. It is expressed through phrases such as “Two weeks later…”, “You walk into the next room…”, “After a short half hour’s rest…” etc.
When do you pick up the story again after eliding time? Usually, this is obvious. It is always at the next point that presents the players with a meaningful decision. This point is introduced by setting (or resetting) the scene (see Narrating Situations above) and querying the players regarding the actions they wish to take next.
VARYING THE PACE
Pacing is the speed at which things happen within a scene. The GM has a great deal of control over the pace of scenes via the narration, via an appropriate focus on the most urgent and attention-grabbing elements of the scene, via management of external interruptions to the game (dice rolls, distractions, consultation of the rules, etc.), and via the control of time. But the question remains; to what end should this control be exercised?
For a story to be satisfying you will want to vary the pace. Place your fast scenes between slow scenes. Provide relief from the tension created by exciting scenes by alternating them with scenes that focus on information and scenes that focus on emotion.
A useful pattern is to alternate scenes so that an informational scene leads to an action scene that leads to an emotional (reaction scene) that leads to another informational scene and so on.
The information discovered in the first scene should lead to the action in the second. The players then react and explore the emotional consequences of the action prior to going in search of further information. Information scenes, action scenes, and emotional (reaction) scenes tend to take up about one-third of the story each.
Players will become fatigued if all they encounter are action scenes. They need to rest and think and explore and react as well. Slow scenes give them this opportunity. Most players have an intuitive grasp of this. They will themselves stop, regroup, and discuss things if they feel the need for some respite from the action. A drawn-out transition is no substitute for this and you should not try to short-circuit this process if you notice it is happening.
Likewise, if all the scenes are contemplative exploration scenes that provide no sense of jeopardy, the players will become bored and start itching for a fight (even if it’s only with one another). If the players are bogged down in an endless spiral of naval gazing inactivity, feel free to have some ninjas kick down the door in order to get things moving again.
If you are using a pre-published module, it can be hard to vary scenes on the fly. The best solution is to improvise the scenes you need in order to keep the pace varied. The section below on improvising explains how you can do this (but be aware that this is an extremely advanced skill to master and will probably require a fair bit of practice before you have it perfected).
THE IMPACT OF PACE
Fast scenes tend to invite us to disengage our brains, engage our emotions (usually just one strong emotion at a time – fear, anger, joy, etc.), raise our anxiety, excite us, and make our hearts beat faster. Slow scenes, by contrast, engage our brains and invite us to pay attention to the details.
The main way we control the pacing of the scene is through the narration and its focus. If we slow down our exposition, start to get wordy and descriptive, focus on lots of details, and a leisurely sense of urgency (wherein the players feel they have time to explore and think without pressure) we are presenting a slow scene. If our sentences are short, concise, to the point, and care little for extraneous details, with a focus on things that demand the urgent attention of the players (and we impress on the players the time critical nature of their choices such that they realise opportunities to act are slipping through their fingers) we are presenting a fast scene.
By always skipping to interesting and meaningful decisions, recognizing the purpose of the scene (information, action, emotional reaction), adapting the narration to that purpose, and by varying the type of scene that the players encounter, you will maintain an effective pace.
TONE
A game’s tone is established in terms of what does and does not “feel” right within it. It is the emotional comfort the GM (and players) have with the activity taking place in the story. A hard science fiction world has a different tone to a world in which cartoonish physics is commonplace. If you violate the tone of your game it achieves two things. Firstly it breaks your players (and your own) willing suspension of disbelief – immersion is lessened – and it makes it harder for players to predict the consequences of the actions they take within the world. Since decision making is severely impacted by this and meaningful decisions cannot occur where players are unable to predict how their choices will be handled, the second impact is by far the more serious.
The tone of a game can shift to allow comic relief or to increase the drama, but it must do so within fairly narrow limits and in a way that is consistent with the basic rules of the world. Magic must behave the same way today, tomorrow, and forever, and should not vary wildly because you found a way to milk it for a joke in one situation only to treat it like a form of rules-bound trigonometry in another. Likewise, the physics of your world must be tonally consistent. The ability to leap fifty feet into the air and balance on a twig floating on a lake may be appropriate in a Wuxia style story, but it won’t work if suddenly introduced to a gritty hard-boiled detective story. It is important, for pacing reasons, that the tone of your game shift a little from scene to scene, but wild swings in tone are always a bad idea and should not be entertained without a strong story-based justification, one that introduces a consistent change to the way the world works.
It’s part of your job to police the tone of your game. Trust your gut at those times when a player in your gritty detective-noir world decides they want to be known as Jake Poo-Poo-Splat-Bing the Third. Veto those things which mess with the tone.
Improvisation is an advanced GMing skill that you have to learn and develop from the very beginning. This is horribly unfair, but also unavoidable. Regardless of how well constructed a pre-published module (or your own game preparation) might be, at some point in the game you are going to be called on to improvise because, at some point in the game, the players are going to do something you don’t expect. They will try to perform an action that you haven’t considered before and need to figure out if it is possible, or they will go somewhere and talk to someone that the module didn’t anticipate. Sometimes you will find that, for pacing and tonal purposes, you need to insert an action, information, or an emotional (reaction) scene. In any of these cases, you are being called upon to improvise.
Why is improvisation an advanced skill? After all, the GM is just roleplaying the world. In many ways, it differs little from what the players are doing constantly, except that it involves you responding to player choices on the basis of your knowledge of the entire world rather than (as is the case for players) your knowledge of a single character you are playing. Well, while this is true, the added complexity should be obvious and, where you are called upon to create new scenes, you face the pressure of becoming a game designer (with a super-tight deadline and extremely high, in-the-moment, pressure to perform.
Don’t make the mistake of thinking improvisation is simply making things up on the fly. This is a personal observation, but as I approach nearly 40 years of sitting at tables playing in RPGs I shudder to think of how many GMs I’ve known who have taken pride in coming to the table unprepared, and of how many hours of my time have been wasted playing games that were mediocre simply because preparation wasn’t taken seriously. As I get older, time becomes much more precious to me, and the waste of time involved in sitting at the table with a lazy GM who hasn’t prepared adequately and, worse still, takes pride in their lack of preparation (“oh, I never prepare – I just improvise great games”) results in a LOT of resentment on my part – and I’m not alone in feeling that way. Playing an RPG is a time-intensive pursuit. I don’t get to game as often as I once did, and arriving at the table to find the GM hasn’t prepared and that the party spends one third or more of game time wandering around without a goal or focus because the GM “just wants to go with the flow and see what happens” is an insulting waste of my time.
Improvisation (done properly and well) requires all the planning and effort that goes into good module design, only it has to happen in-the-moment, and under great time pressure. As a result, and before we get into how you go about it, we need to talk about when it should happen and the risks that it exposes your game to.
Never improvise when you don’t have to. Snap decisions have a tendency to result in unpredictable consequences. These consequences can break the predictability of your world by accidentally introducing anachronistic and inconsistent elements to your game. The world you plan is more likely to be consistent and predictable (and players require predictability/consistency in order to make meaningful choices) than the world you construct on the fly. Anachronism has a tendency to break the willing suspension of disbelief your players bring to the table and you really don’t want the players to start questioning how much the world makes sense. You can guarantee that if they are, they have pretty much stopped having fun.
Secondly, if you do have to improvise, do so as minimally as possible. That is, do the minimum of improvisation necessary to respond to the players’ actions while continuing with the game as planned.
This volume relies heavily on the work of Scott Rehm, Justin Alexander, Brian Christopher Misiaszek, Mike Bourke, Blair Ramage, Saxon Brenton, Robin Laws, John Wick, Wolfgang Baur, Ken Hite, Monte Cooke, Kevin Crawford, Phil Vecchione, and Walt Ciechanowski.
This chapter of the Host Your Own Old Time Radio Drama RPG and all associated content (except where noted above) is © copyright weirdworldstudios.com and Philip Craig Robotham 2016 and may not be reproduced or distributed without the written permission of the author.
HYOOTRD Roleplaying Game – Game Master’s Guide – Part 1 – Running a Game
- Chapter 1: The Job of the GM (gathering a table, player types, and ensuring fun)
- Chapter 2: Preliminaries (the three fundamental skills, and your first session)
- Chapter 3: Advanced skills – Part 1 (the opening scene and narration)
- Chapter 3: Advanced skills – Part 2 (querying and adjudication)
- Chapter 3: Advanced skills – Part 3 (resolving actions, managing tropes, transitioning, concluding, and preparing future sessions)
- Chapter 4: Managing the Mini-Games (combat, chases, and social actions)
- Chapter 5: Maintaining Pace and Tone (managing time and policing the tone)
- Chapter 6: Improvising (improvising the story and the rules – for all the times the players do something unexpected)
- Chapter 7 & 8: Getting Feedback and Conclusion (improving your game)
HYOOTRD Roleplaying Game – Game Master’s Guide – Part 2 – Designing Games
- Chapter 9: Scene Design
- Chapter 10: NPC, Monster, Faction, and Villain Design
- Chapter 11: Dilemmas, Obstacles, Exits, and Clues
- Chapter 12: Plot (scenario, sandbox, critical path, and the interaction between story and choice)
- Chapter 13: Structures: The five-room dungeon (and variations)
- Chapter 14: Structures: The sandbox (the town or city)
- Chapter 15: Structures: The sandbox (the wilderness)
- Chapter 16: Structures: The Scenario
- Chapter 17: Structures: The Campaign
