Player Responsibility in Moving Scenes · Game Master's Laboratory

Player Responsibility in Moving Scenes

Ask your players, above table, to help by signalling or providing cues for when their RP moments are ready to move to the next scene.

The last Stars and Wishes (feedback) discussion in my Beyond the Wall campaign was all positive and I specifically asked for negative or things I can work on. One player commented that once or twice I cut short RP a little bit to move scenes. We play online and I generally use the second pause/lull (4-5 seconds wait time) to move dicussion but in these cases it was a pause due to intensity that I did not correctly recognize. The player understood my motivation to move scenes and make sure everyone was involved. After some talks we settled in on cues being the problem and decided I should just ask for help.

In the next session when the cue came up to change scenes I queitly asked "ready to move on?" and the player in a relieved voice said yes. I then mentioned that I sometimes struggle with recognizing and told the players they could help me with some form of verbal cue like "I look up to see if Snixx is back" or just breaking character voice and saying "ok". We then moved on to the next scene. It made an immediate difference and shared the table with the players in another way.

I suspect that this is particularly important in our online games as so many of our societal norms for this are non-verbal. I suspect I will refine this with this group and then figure out how to write it out as one of our table norms.

An aside on "Wait Time", for the non-teachers, we are really bad at this. If a teacher asks a question the students need some time to formulate the answer before responding (particularly if they couldn't anticipate the question such as what they do on their turn in combat). In general, this is a minimum of 3-5 seconds. This is a excrutiatingly long time for the teacher sitting there knowing the answer. To train teachers to leave the uncomfortable silence I have a simple exercise. Have someone with a stopwatch ask you what your name is and time how long it takes you to answer. You try to wait silently five seconds before answering without counting in your head. Most semesters in teacher training people manage to last about 2 seconds. Learning to be comfortable with the silence is really hard.

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