Players must understand your universe

by Alan De Smet

More GM tips

Ultimately your game takes place in your universe. You may seek to accurately simulate "reality" in your game, but ultimately your beliefs about the world become the actual reality of your game. The players will often have slightly different beliefs. The game rules and setting often help coordinate these world views, but it's only a beginning. Players will always have an incomplete and inaccurate view of your game world. When the player's assumptions and your assumptions conflict you'll have problems and usually angry players.

To take an example that happened to me, a few years ago at a convention I was playing in a game in which our characters are a SWAT team, or something similar. A yacht full of VIPs has been taken over by terrorists. We're told to go save the day. We spend about an hour in real life carefully planning out sneaky assault. We'll wear all black commando uniforms, quietly paddle up in a black rubber raft, climb up the side, and strike with speed and stealth! The GM was clearly paying attention. We say we're ready to execute the plan, and he announces that a terrorist lookout easily spots us, no roll necessary, and raises the alarm. We're a bit surprised, and ask how he spotted us so easily. "Oh," he tells us, "your all black outfits are pretty easy to see against the blue water in the bright sunny day." Pretty obviously every single player thought it was night. The GM understood our plan, but not our assumptions. From his point of view, he saw us doing something insane, but never bothered to check why we thought it was a good idea. Worse, he declared that we were committed and pushed us through. There was a lot of anger about that game.

That is the biggest warning sign: the characters are doing something insane. When the players try to do something seemingly irrational, double check what they're thinking. "Why are you planning on wearing all black?" "Because we're sneaky!" "But won't the black stand out against the blue water?" "Water's basically black at night, duh!" "Erm, it's not night. It's noon. And sunny. You might want to rethink that."

If things look weird, jump in as early as possible. You don't want players to spend lots of time building a plan on a faulty assumption, only to have to start over. If a player makes a clear misstatement of fact that the character should obviously know, correct it immediately. "No need to worry about it, there are lots of superheroes in the city!" "Ummm, no, it's just you guys. You're not aware of any other superheroes in the city."

If you ever think "Wow, they totally forgot to do something obvious; now I've got them!" you've probably got a communications problem. A few friends told me a story about their doomed warhorses in a D&D campaign. They entered a dungeon with the expectation of being in for several days. They tied up their warhorses outside. The returned a few days later to find that the horses had starved to death. They complained; they believed they tied up the horses with enough rope to be able to graze for a few days. The GM yielded and announced that the horses were still dead but for a new reason; based on marks they had been killed by wolves. "Wolves?" the players complained. "These were expensive trained warhorses, hardly easy prey for wolves." Punishing the players for having an inaccurate model of your universe isn't clever, it feels like you're being petty to the players.

Martin Ralya had a good analogy: being a player is like using a flashlight and being a GM is like using a 150 watt bulb. Your light of knowledge drowns out everything, making it hard to see where the player's flashlights are aiming. The players are stuck with a very small view of the world and easily overlook "obvious" things.