The Widowed
10-28-2007, 05:20 PM
In real-life tabletop games, players always have a chance to interrupt the game master midway through the game master's monologues and expositions. This is as simple as speaking up as the game master pauses between sentences. For example, in real life a game master might have prepared an exposition which goes something like this:
Dungeon Master: "Your party descends into the subterranean passage and finds the lost temple of Iuz. Passing between the two great black statues of nalfeshnee demons which rise to support the vaulted ceiling of the outer sanctum, you pass through the great bronze double doors at the far reach of the chamber. The great altar of Iuz rises within the sanctuary, reeking of old blood and brimstone."
...but sometimes, the players interrupt and take the game in another direction.
Dungeon Master: "Your party descends into the subterranean passage and finds the lost temple of Iuz. Passing between the two great black statues of nalfeshnee demons which rise to support the vaulted ceiling of the outer sanctum...."
Paladin player: "Whoa, whoa, whoa...statues of nalfeshnee demons? I think we'd better see if they mean anything, guys."
Cleric player: "I agree. I cast Detect Evil and investigate the statues."
Rogue player: "And I want to search the statues for gems and precious metals. They could have rubies for eyes or something. How tall are the statues?"
Of course there's nothing wrong with this; Usually it's a handy test of the game master's ability to improvise and detail an adventure on the fly, and sometimes the game master does indeed gloss over details so that something crucial appears to be something minor or insignificant, and only an interrupting player's scrutiny can reveal such veiled findings.
Yes, there is the other side of the coin: Players will interrupt games over the stupidest little minutiae which may be quite possibly priceless in the player's eyes yet which the game master actually threw in as nothing more than dungeon dressing. ("The path is littered with cobblestones...." "What kind of cobblestones?" "Ordinary river rock, mostly limestone and shale, maybe a little granite...." "I grab a cobblestone. Does it look unusual in any way?" "No." "I grab another stone. Anything weird?" "No!" "I go down the entire path, looking over every last cobblestone....") And yes, game masters do get annoyed over this. Remember the tale of Eric and the Dread Gazebo? >:]
But overall, interrupting isn't all that bad of a thing. Forum text is indeed a different medium than spoken speech, and if I type out five paragraphs of exposition and you want to take an action related to something which was passed up in the third paragraph, you may see that wall of text and feel that the moment to interact with that thingie in Paragraph 3 has already passed, but remember: I have an Edit button and I'm not afraid to use it. Simply ask me to rewind to the part I breezed over--quoting the part where you want to step in with your action helps--and take your action accordingly. I'll Edit the exposition and adjust from there.
As always, however, the great divide between player knowledge and character knowledge still stands. If Malfeus the Malevolent is revealing his master plan and decrying the player-characters' apparent failure to thwart him in Exposition Paragraphs 2 through 4, then he whips out the Infernal Brass Handcannon of Doom in Paragraph 5, you would be committing a foul if you interrupted to rebut a detail that Malfeus was crowing about in Paragraph 3 while readying your scroll of Mordenkainen's Swift Destruction of Infernal Handcannons of Doom at the same time. Rebutting his boastful speech would be okay, but preparing to counter a handcannon of which you had no prior knowledge would be a rather yucky metagame thing for you to do. :p
And, of course, you can only interrupt something in my most recent post. For example, Maz could interrupt me now if he wanted Corwin to ask one last question of Ruprecht before leaving the alchemist shop (but I wouldn't be rerolling the Search result when we came back to that point, of course). But rewinding to tell Gwenlyn off back in my second post in Corwin's prologue? Yes, I'm afraid that time has passed.
Questions? Ask away. :)
Dungeon Master: "Your party descends into the subterranean passage and finds the lost temple of Iuz. Passing between the two great black statues of nalfeshnee demons which rise to support the vaulted ceiling of the outer sanctum, you pass through the great bronze double doors at the far reach of the chamber. The great altar of Iuz rises within the sanctuary, reeking of old blood and brimstone."
...but sometimes, the players interrupt and take the game in another direction.
Dungeon Master: "Your party descends into the subterranean passage and finds the lost temple of Iuz. Passing between the two great black statues of nalfeshnee demons which rise to support the vaulted ceiling of the outer sanctum...."
Paladin player: "Whoa, whoa, whoa...statues of nalfeshnee demons? I think we'd better see if they mean anything, guys."
Cleric player: "I agree. I cast Detect Evil and investigate the statues."
Rogue player: "And I want to search the statues for gems and precious metals. They could have rubies for eyes or something. How tall are the statues?"
Of course there's nothing wrong with this; Usually it's a handy test of the game master's ability to improvise and detail an adventure on the fly, and sometimes the game master does indeed gloss over details so that something crucial appears to be something minor or insignificant, and only an interrupting player's scrutiny can reveal such veiled findings.
Yes, there is the other side of the coin: Players will interrupt games over the stupidest little minutiae which may be quite possibly priceless in the player's eyes yet which the game master actually threw in as nothing more than dungeon dressing. ("The path is littered with cobblestones...." "What kind of cobblestones?" "Ordinary river rock, mostly limestone and shale, maybe a little granite...." "I grab a cobblestone. Does it look unusual in any way?" "No." "I grab another stone. Anything weird?" "No!" "I go down the entire path, looking over every last cobblestone....") And yes, game masters do get annoyed over this. Remember the tale of Eric and the Dread Gazebo? >:]
But overall, interrupting isn't all that bad of a thing. Forum text is indeed a different medium than spoken speech, and if I type out five paragraphs of exposition and you want to take an action related to something which was passed up in the third paragraph, you may see that wall of text and feel that the moment to interact with that thingie in Paragraph 3 has already passed, but remember: I have an Edit button and I'm not afraid to use it. Simply ask me to rewind to the part I breezed over--quoting the part where you want to step in with your action helps--and take your action accordingly. I'll Edit the exposition and adjust from there.
As always, however, the great divide between player knowledge and character knowledge still stands. If Malfeus the Malevolent is revealing his master plan and decrying the player-characters' apparent failure to thwart him in Exposition Paragraphs 2 through 4, then he whips out the Infernal Brass Handcannon of Doom in Paragraph 5, you would be committing a foul if you interrupted to rebut a detail that Malfeus was crowing about in Paragraph 3 while readying your scroll of Mordenkainen's Swift Destruction of Infernal Handcannons of Doom at the same time. Rebutting his boastful speech would be okay, but preparing to counter a handcannon of which you had no prior knowledge would be a rather yucky metagame thing for you to do. :p
And, of course, you can only interrupt something in my most recent post. For example, Maz could interrupt me now if he wanted Corwin to ask one last question of Ruprecht before leaving the alchemist shop (but I wouldn't be rerolling the Search result when we came back to that point, of course). But rewinding to tell Gwenlyn off back in my second post in Corwin's prologue? Yes, I'm afraid that time has passed.
Questions? Ask away. :)