There is one final element of the GM-narrator role I want to discuss. One of the most critical resources at a game table is time. Whether your group meets every week, bi-weekly, once a month, or once every six months, you have a limited supply of minutes in which to play. No matter how much in-game time may pass during those minutes, this places a limit on how much can be done at the table during a single session, and therefore how much plot can occur.
In addition to this basic time constraint, the pace of the game is further limited because the game master can only pay attention to one thing at a time, and the game moves at the pace of the GM’s attention. The GM’s focus acts as a bottleneck on the game because his or her authorization is needed to make things “real” within the game-world.
As I mentioned previously, an RPG world is like a Schrödinger’s Universe. It exists in an ephemeral and shifting state, where things may be simultaneously true and untrue. A thing only becomes fixed in a single state when the players observe it. The players can only observe things through the lens of the GM’s narration.
The GM granting narrative focus to a scene is, in effect, not unlike a scientist collapsing the wave function by observing a sub-atomic particle. I like to think of it as shining a “spotlight of attention” on different parts of the game world. Anything under the spotlight is real, fixed, and solid. Anything outside of the light is in a state of superposition; every possible condition is simultaneously true.
An NPC in the room with the PCs is in a fixed state. As soon as he leaves the room—that is, leaves the spotlight of attention—anything is possible. He may be downstairs, he may be kidnapped by a wizard, he may be plotting with the villain. For the GM’s purposes, every case can be assumed to be potentially true until the NPC re-enters the spotlight of attention.
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The way this connects to the issue of time is that as long as the PCs are together under the light, they’re all real and able to act, sharing the GM’s attention-minutes. When the party splits, however, so does the GM’s attention. The action for one group is completely halted while the other group acts.
The narrative of a book or movie can get away with this because it’s essentially pre-rendered.
The author has already determined what happens, and so the characters can move and act even while the plot-light isn’t on them, showing up in a totally different situation whenever they next appear on-screen.
An RPG, however, is rendered in realtime. Any PC not under the plot-light is in that same state of quantum superposition. They may be taking actions, or they may not; it’s impossible to tell until the GM turns their attention back to the character. What wecan be certain of is that as long as a character is kicking their heels backstage, that character’s player isn’t getting to do anything either; and we all know an action-less player quickly becomes a bored player, and then all too frequently a disruptive player. That’s bad for the game, and no fun for the players.
The situation becomes even worse when none of the players is in the plot-light. It is traditional for a work of fiction to include dramatic interludes that cut away from the protagonists to examine either the antagonists or perhaps just some random bit characters with a small piece to add to the story. However, as I discussed before, when this happens in an RPG it isNPC Theater, where the players sit around and do nothing while the GM gives long soliloquies about characters that aren’t the PCs. Anything not about the PCs is tedious and boring, by definition.
I once ran a campaign in which the players chose to release a captive enemy NPC. Following that session, I charted the actions of that NPC traveling back to base and coordinating with her faction. This set actions into motion which resulted in other NPCs being at certain locations and events transpiring which directly and dramatically influenced the future events of the game, but which the players had no knowledge of—because nobody told them and they never asked.
That one action had a measurable effect over the entire course of the campaign, but when that NPC finally showed up again six months later and half a world away, the players’ response was roughly, “Oh yeah, her. How the hell did she get here?”
While this happens to illustrate the unnecessarily obsessive level to which I have taken my plotting at times, it also shows how the storytelling format necessarily limits the ability to foreshadow or use other forms of dramatic interlude. The reality of the game exists only within a little circle cast by the plot-light—which itself must necessarily contain as many of the PCs as possible and whatever thing they are directly confronting right now. Anything outside of this player sphere of perception might as well not exist—because the players have no way of observing it—and any attempt to move away from the PCs to explore other areas of the game-world de facto shuts down all of the game’s momentum.
To put it another way, the TV showLOST is largely defined by frequent flashbacks and quick cuts between various groups acting simultaneously in different locations. In the traditional RPG format you would need to ditch the flashbacks entirely and focus on the perspective of a single group of the castaways which never splits up. It would make absolutelyno sense (well, less sense thanLOST already doesn’t make).
Without significant effort, any narrative that consists of a single camera that follows one group of people and never cuts away is necessarily going to be both limited and disjointed. For examples, you need look no further than movies likeCloverfield or The Blair Witch Project—each
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panned in its time for precisely those flaws.
Breaking out of this limited zone of perception is a difficult task, because it requires reexamining and revising fundamental aspects of the traditional roleplaying game experience.
But it can also dramatically improve a campaign, and open up new avenues for storytelling and new ways for the players to experience the game.
All of the GMs I’ve played with have tried to break out of the sphere at one point or another—
whether they consciously recognized that as their goal or not. In each case the GM proposed one of two solutions to the problem: some arrangement of multiple GMs running a single group in tandem, or a single GM running multiple groups in sequence. In my experience neither method produces satisfactory results.
In the former case you run the risk of overlapping yet mutually exclusive stories, GMs making conflicting rulings and/or mischaracterizing NPCs, and general miscommunication between game masters as the players move from one to the other.
In the latter case you risk that same overlap, should two characters arrive in the same place at the same time, but the players of those characters are in different game sessions when one or the other is not at the table. But there’s also questions about what to do if the groups fall out of synchronization.
For example, in the same real-life week one group might spend several in-game weeks traveling to another location, while the other covers only a few hours of game-time. Then the next week that second group uses some sort of fast travel (such as a teleport) to arrive at the same destination as the first group, except several weeks in the past. They would then be able to retroactively alter the situation which the first group encountered in the previous session. While not impossible to pull off, it’s a likely recipe for difficulty, if not disaster.
Breaking out of the sphere of perception is a worthy goal, but you need to take care not to damage the narrative clarity of the campaign in the process. I have experimented with several other methods, each with their own merits and flaws.