Exchange of Realities

Crowd scenes—whether they’re at a marketplace, at a sporting event, in a high-class party, or much of anywhere else—are pretty much inevitable, both for the GM and for the writer. They’re excellent sources of world-color, after all, and just a fact about humanity: Where there are people, there will be large groups eventually. The problem is that they’re hard to do right: often the attention will be so focused that the audience—or the players—might well forget that there’s a mass of people milling around, and the atmosphere is lost.

Fortunately, there are workarounds to that. Even better, those workarounds can be used to seed yet more local color and potential exposition. Think about the last time you were in a crowd. Along with the jostling and the people-dodging, you probably remember catching bits and pieces of sound over the buzz of garbled voices: a rustling here, a bit of conversation there, someone calling to a friend….

Yeah. Like that. Wouldn’t being able to fake that be good for the feeling of people?

In a live game, of course, this is difficult. You’ve only got one voice, after all, and it’s hard to run whatever the focus event is and simulate a hundred people babbling at the same time. At least, if you’re only using one source of sound. But if you’ve got an audio device and a source of sound effects—recording your own, or going to any of the handful of professional studios you can find by sticking “RPG sound effects” into a search engine—you can just switch on the crowd at an appropriate moment and have at it. It doesn’t even matter if it loops!

The writer or chat-GM has to resort to typed words, which can be both a blessing and a curse. The advantage is the ability to more reliably drop snippets of potentially interesting exposition and have them stick, since the words stay visible instead of going in one ear and out the other. The disadvantage is that it’s harder to get such a snippet to pass by unnoticed, and it can be difficult to figure out where and how to insert the crowdspeak.

If you’re going to try to exposit through the crowd, or if you’re writing or text-GMing in general, you’re going to want to plan your dialogue carefully. I personally recommend no more than 20% necessary plot information, with the rest going towards local color, characterization, optional plot hooks, and/or random details that sounded amusing. Start by writing down the plot-pieces, since these are your center. Then branch out to the other pieces, in order of relevance. Once it’s all written down, take a step back and look at it. If there are points in your event that certain bits of dialogue would be best suited to, try to time those pieces for those points. If not—or if you’re pre-recording and looping your crowd-sounds—find a way to assign what you’ve got a random order. I recommend using either paper in your hat or your dice.

Once you’ve got an order, use it. In the case of a pre-recorded crowdsound, get it recorded ahead of time—this, of course, comes out more authentic if you can get help. (I like using younger siblings, personally.) If you’re writing or texting, figure out how you’re going to distribute your lines: every set number of posts or paragraphs? When a certain thing happens in character? On a text-game, where it’s more plausible, I recommend finding a way to set the crowdnoise apart from the dialogue, particularly if you have an active NPC; style, size, or color of text can all be ways of doing this. While distracting and confusing the players can fit the atmosphere and be mildly amusing, that only goes to a certain point. In a purely written piece, you can get a similar effect by assiduously dialogue-tagging your focus characters, but not applying dialogue tags to anyone else unless they’ve acquired said characters’ attention.

It can be overwhelming, but when this kind of strategy works, it works well.