Tell, Don't Show

[DRD1812]

I like explaining my characters' thought processes aloud. It's a technique I've noticed on The Glass Cannon Podcast: GM Troy Lavallee will occasionally pause to ask his players, “What is your character feeling right now? What do you think is going on with the plot? How does your character’s backstory apply to this situation?” Players are forced to blink, step out of their characters for a moment, and consciously consider what a PC’s internal monologue might look like. Even more importantly, they’ve got to communicate that otherwise-invisible information to the rest of the table.

This can break immersion, but it may be the only way to effectively communicate your motivations to the rest of the table.

Do any of the rest of you guys do anything similar as GMs? As players? Is it a useful technique, or is the tradeoff in narrative flow to high?

(Comic for illustrative purposes.)

[Deriven Firelion]

The most I do is stop the game to engage a player if I feel their character is being too passive or not acting in a way congruent with their background and chosen alignment. I like players to think about how they see the world and how that affects their actions. Too many players get caught up in the "kill everything" mentality. It makes me wonder if they would be as murderous as they are if given similar power as their characters have in real life. Would their solution to almost every combat situation be to murder everyone? That seems unrealistic. I like to encourage the players to think about their characters as living, breathing individuals and would they be that callous in dealing with a defeated enemy.

It's hard to get players, especially long-term jaded players mostly interested in the combat aspect of the game, to act like real living characters.

I could the above technique getting players to at least think some about who they are as characters in the game story.

[Zergor]

It depends on what you want to achieve I guess.

Personally in most of my game it's Show don't tell and many players don't like that players justify their character actions by their state of mind because knowing their state of mind is meta information and they prefer to try to decipher the actions and guess what the character meant by them.

Also indeed breaking immersion is often seen as a bad thing in my tables.

What we do though is to talk about those after the game so that we can better understand why things happened that way and also to help the GM know what is indeed on the characters mind for future scenarios.

Sometimes I really want to stop to explain the motivations behind some actions that seem counterproductives, detrimental or flat ou pvp and sometimes I do but I learned that sometimes the RP behind tring to understand a character and their actions without any meta information to orient the discussion can be quite fun and interesting.

On the other hand if I played with people that posess character without any evident motivations maybe I would indeed try to push them to talk about them. Strong BGs help avoiding that most of the time though.

[Mathmuse]

In my game, the player characters Sam and Zinfandel always express their feelings and reactions. Their players are in the game for the roleplaying, despite being excellent at tactics, too.

Stormdancer's player has been developing her personality from a blank slate. Alas, starting as a blank made her reclusive and private. That became a permanent part of her character. She occasionally reveals a new side, such as an obsession with magic, but part of her nature is that she does not usually reveal her feelings. I don't want to work against that.

Binny currently suffers from the problem that the game moved online to Roll20 and Discord. Her player types into Discord to speak via Talkbot rather than using a microphone. And I think she is typing onto a tablet rather than with a keyboard. This greatly restricts her speech.

Tikti suffers from being played by my daughter, and the acorn did not fall far from the tree. My daughter is a weird person playing a weirder character. Tikti is a tailed goblin liberator champion with a velociraptor animal companion. She was raised in a library and chose to worship and dedicate herself to a foreign god, Grandmother Spider, whom she read about in a book. Her refocus activity is sitting down to read a book. Tikti's off-the-wall view on life is disconcerting rather than enlightening.

[LBHills]

DRD1812 wrote:

I like explaining my characters' thought processes aloud... it may be the only way to effectively communicate your motivations to the rest of the table.

Do any of the rest of you guys do anything similar as GMs? As players?...

I've had some characters who would express their views to the other party members out loud, but I've never just volunteered what the character is thinking - how would they know, unless they've got detect thoughts running? I've also run characters who were much more private by nature, to whom it wouldn't ever occur to share their motivations.

I have asked a few such questions as a GM, but only when it was relevant - again, detect thoughts can bring on questions like that. I did once have a brief quiz about the characters' states of mind, when the upcoming adventure was in a dream realm and the characters' personalities were going to physically alter how they appeared there. But I don't ordinarily request that info for no reason.

Obviously, mileage may vary. Some GMs run games driven heavily by the emotions and ambitions of their PCs: others tend toward plots that almost any PC would be motivated by, and simply trust their players to take an interest. ("He can't be allowed to blow up the world. That's where I keep all my stuff!")

[DRD1812]

LBHills wrote:

I've had some characters who would express their views to the other party members out loud, but I've never just volunteered what the character is thinking - how would they know, unless they've got detect thoughts running?

That's the thing. The technique requires a break from thinking in in-game terms. It's for the benefit of meta-knowledge rather than character knowledge, and relies on players keeping the two separate. It breaks the illusion, but it does help you to behave appropriately in response, generating dramatic irony in the process.

[Odraude]

I do something similar to this, but generally it's when things have 'gotten real' in the game (things have escalated, players have failed, a terrible revelation, etc) and the players themselves need a bit to really process what is going on. It's especially useful for helping players cope with a major misfortune (or string of minor ones), or maybe an upsetting revelation. Once people settle down, I find that my players are actually pretty quick to re-immerse themselves into the moment.

[Watery Soup]

I think the Glass Cannon Podcast does some stuff that works better for an all-audio format than it does for other games.

I don't know if this is one of them, but I don't think "it worked on GCP" is necessarily an argument that it will work for another game.

I think the pros of this approach have been well laid out. In general, people underthink their characters, and drawing out a thought process is good.

However, being forced to explain something can be a negative if there are things that people do that they don't really know why they do it.
Ideally, players are surprised by their own characters every once in a while, and sometimes that's hard to put a finger on at first.

Being forced to explain something often means simplifying it. The danger is a reduction of a complex character to a one-dimensional, one-motivation line that can be trotted out easily.

Think about your own life or the lives of people around you. In general, communication is good. But sometimes, you don't know why you're mad. Or it's hard to explain why you want that new car so much. And it's fine to give it some space to crystallize.

[kpulv]

Similarly to how GCP presents their play, my games have benefited from treating everyone at the table as both a player and an audience member.

We often will describe our characters internal thought process or how a character is feeling from the lens of what would be visible to someone watching the game as if it were a show or film. Either by just plainly saying what the feelings are, or by describing the physical manifestations of those feelings in facial expressions or body language.

It's been absolutely crucial in exploring relationships between the characters. When players dive into what their characters are thinking or feeling by thinking as the other players as audience members, another player can ask if it's okay for their character to pick up on it, and then engage in a scene focused on it.

Over the past couple years I'd say my groups went from a play style of "everyone in character at all times, complete separation of character and player knowledge, maintain immersion at all costs" to a style more about how we want the narrative to play out in our collective imaginations. With hindsight we realized is that the in character immersion focused style was creating a lot of friction and frustrating situations that were difficult to navigate.

It's not for everyone, but for me it's been way more fun to move toward a style of play that almost has my tables pretending that we are playing out a podcast or netflix series and watching it at the same time. It can be pretty goofy, but a lot of fun.

[DRD1812]

Watery Soup wrote:

I think the Glass Cannon Podcast does some stuff that works better for an all-audio format than it does for other games.

I don't know if this is one of them, but I don't think "it worked on GCP" is necessarily an argument that it will work for another game.

I've got a general interest in the notion that podcasts/actual plays are a different kind of gaming than you or I experience in our home campaigns.

This business with explaining your internal monologue can definitely be construed as an "audience facing" technique, where the listener gets to look inside the player's head so that they can follow the story. Even so, I think it has benefits for the other players at the table just as much as the home audience. We play to entertain each other after all, so "audience facing techniques" have a good shot at improving a home game as well.

I agree that it's not ideal to say "GCP did it so ima do it," but I do think it's worth exploring these ideas to see what works.

[Iff]

It's interesting that no one's mentioned so far a type of play where this is commonly seen: PbP. It's the medium where you can always add inner monologue, both for your own sense of character and to create a better narrative for the other players. The good part about doing this in PbP is that it doesn't really break immersion at all, in my opinion. It feels really natural to interleave it with actions and conversation.

[AnimatedPaper]

Watery Soup wrote:

Think about your own life or the lives of people around you. In general, communication is good. But sometimes, you don't know why you're mad. Or it's hard to explain why you want that new car so much. And it's fine to give it some space to crystallize.

Why wouldn't you just say that? "My character is pissed off and she couldn't tell you why if you held a wand to her forehead" sounds like an interesting story to me.

[rainzax]

DRD1812 wrote:

“What is your character feeling right now? What do you think is going on with the plot? How does your character’s backstory apply to this situation?”

Yoink

[CrystalSeas]

AnimatedPaper wrote:

Watery Soup wrote:

Think about your own life or the lives of people around you. In general, communication is good. But sometimes, you don't know why you're mad. Or it's hard to explain why you want that new car so much. And it's fine to give it some space to crystallize.

Why wouldn't you just say that? "My character is pissed off and she couldn't tell you why if you held a wand to her forehead" sounds like an interesting story to me.

Often you don't even know how to label the feeling until you sit with it a while. "I'm upset, and I don't know what caused it or what the feeling actually is", doesn't lead to very interesting table discussions.

And forcing someone to explain themselves to others is pretty uncomfortable when they don't even have the words to explain it to themselves.

[Watery Soup]

CrystalSeas wrote:

Often you don't even know how to label the feeling until you sit with it a while. "I'm upset, and I don't know what caused it or what the feeling actually is", doesn't lead to very interesting table discussions.

And forcing someone to explain themselves to others is pretty uncomfortable when they don't even have the words to explain it to themselves.

I would also add that sometimes explaining something too quickly doesn't let it develop more.

In the cinematic sense, it's about timing. Going back to the GCP, there are times where characters keep secrets from each other - not something to be done lightly, for sure. And the reveal of that secret at the perfect time can yield more than laying out all a character's motivations in Session 1.

[DRD1812]

Iff wrote:

It's interesting that no one's mentioned so far a type of play where this is commonly seen: PbP. It's the medium where you can always add inner monologue, both for your own sense of character and to create a better narrative for the other players. The good part about doing this in PbP is that it doesn't really break immersion at all, in my opinion. It feels really natural to interleave it with actions and conversation.

Is there a good way for a GM to prompt this sort of thing in pbp? Or do you find it tends to happen naturally? (I'm just starting my first PBP on this forum, and I'm not too sure of best practices in the genre.)

[CrystalSeas]

DRD1812 wrote:

Is there a good way for a GM to prompt this sort of thing in pbp? Or do you find it tends to happen naturally? (I'm just starting my first PBP on this forum, and I'm not too sure of best practices in the genre.)

One convention I've seen/used is to have the "out loud" dialogue in bold, and the "interior monologue" in italics.

Here's a recent post in a gameplay thread:
Dialogue

[TheRabidOgre]

It definitely depends on the sort of players you have and what everyone wants out of it, but this seems like a sort of "reality is unrealistic" situation to me.

As someone who very much values roleplaying and immersion, but is fairly quiet and passive by nature, I'm barely going to say anything at the table except what's necessary for my actions unless prompted.

Forcing me to actually consider what the character is thinking and voicing that out loud actually gets me to imagine the scenario more fully, and gives everyone else at the table some context for my character at all (my characters aren't usually supposed to be as quiet as me, but they will be if I'm not prompted to do otherwise, which skews the perception), than not doing so.