Nov 20 2009
Wait for the Right Moment? I’ll Pass.
Usually, I love it when people in my games work with the Laws of Dramatics. They’ll kindly let the villain monologue at them, they’ll suggest awesome plot complications… you get the idea. Heck, every now and then someone will suggest and then facilitate something that scuttles his own plan because the alternative is just that much cooler.
But there’s one Law of Dramatics that just doesn’t work with a gaming situation, and that one’s the law of timing. You know, that one that says that a really nifty action or the like is best done when played off of something that sets it up. Writers rarely have problems with this, as they can set up their own cues. It’s not so easy with gamers.
First off, working off of timing assumes that someone is going to provide the cue, and that’s difficult at best. Let’s face it, even players who want to cooperate with the GM have an uncanny ability to find the one thing that would break the plan and then do it. Now imagine you’re in the game—as a GM or a player, it really doesn’t matter—and you’re just waiting for someone else in the group to do that one thing that would set you up perfectly. Ideally, they’ll get the idea and do it immediately. Realistically, it might never happen, or (usually in the case of epic scenery that people have to look in a direction to see) it happens in pieces rather than all at once.
Second, there’s the balance between sharing one’s plans and maintaining surprise. On the one hand, you’ve got the fact that people react more strongly to things they aren’t expecting, so you don’t want to give your entire game away. On the other hand, if the people around you don’t know what kind of cue to give you, how the heck are they going to provide it? Most people either go to one extreme or the other, sharing everything and losing the fun or sharing nothing and making it near-impossible to set them up. There are no mind readers here.
Third, there’s the fact that there are multiple minds on this, and they’re all thinking differently. The issue here is magnified when you’ve got a situation where people aren’t taking neat and even turns, like most problem-solving situations or an initiativeless battle; while you’re refining your grand, shiny idea, other people are trying to get to the end of the scene. If you’re lucky, they’re just going to do something that requires a rapid rewrite, and you’ll still get the gist of your idea through. But more likely, somebody is going to take down that enemy you were about to hit, or find some other solution to the problem, or otherwise find some way to render an otherwise lovely idea completely irrelevant. Most people who wait for the proper moment find it, all right—or rather, find that it was five minutes ago.
In a story, dramatic timing is easy. In a play, it’s part of the script. But in a game, sometimes it’s just better to get what you’re doing out there rather than wait for the scene to give you your setup. Why wait for a moment that won’t do you the same courtesy?
There is always the method of tricking people into setting you up. I’ve done it before. It gets a surprisingly good reaction.
Still, when your gaming table is like most gaming tables, AKA, people constantly vying to get their own thing done with a steady stream of chatter, trying to do something that stands out is a lot like swimming up a waterfall in a showoffy way. You usually have to wait for the other salmon to get done, and secretly hope one or two of them get eaten by bears. Believe me, in NO format can you get gamers to stop interrupting you without large blunt objects unless you’ve got a really decent Charisma. It’s one thing that’s remained constant over my years of gaming (even in my one stint as “guy who always saves the day”).
I now laugh at the image of Legolas in the middle of surfing down the staircase, when all of a sudden, Aragorn leans over the crenellations and shouts “Dude, what the hell? Seriously?”