As much as gaming is a great social activity there comes a point where social chatter ruins the flow of the game, the immersion, and ends up with a lot less getting done during a session. In a sense it’s like watching American football where the action seems to stop every two minutes so the players can huddle and chat. It’s not very exciting to watch, and it is less exciting in a game the action lives in the players’ imaginations.
You see Timmy talking through a movie is not only rude to the people around you but it could in some cases lead to half sucked jaffas being thrown at the back of your head.
While forbidding social talking during games is a tempting idea it often doesn’t work, players either forget, or things become really quiet and to be honest sometimes a little dull.
In Smack we came up with a simpler solution. First, we asked the players to keep social talk to a minimum the best way to do this was ask them to only communicate with each other in character. This turned out to be a really good idea for a couple of reasons. Firstly, it had the intended effect of reducing out of game chatter interrupting the game.
Secondly, and more importantly players had to learn to work together as characters, not as players. Strategies during fight scenes, tactics for political negotiations had to happen in character. It really made the characters develop and helped them form in character opinions of each other, rather than just develop player opinions of characters. Suddenly characters had a life of their own outside of just their players.
You see Timmy shows would be incredibly boring if all the dialogue was removed and all we got was endless voice over.
In any serious story driven game, if you want you characters to come alive, you have to make sure your players give a voice to them. If Yeti and I hadn’t implemented and encouraged this rule we would never have had the amazing characters we had, never learned of the love hate relationship between Horus and Kryllin. Kryllin genuinely disliked and envied Horus, it was unfair he lived his life as safely (and as neutrally) as possible yet kept had terrible unspeakable things happen to him. All he could see was Horus taking stupid risks and walking away with barely a scratch most of the time. Horus on the other hand genuinely felt for Kryllin and felt a strong brotherly bond to him. He felt terrible that so many terrible things could happen to someone who was so neutral.
This also encouraged players to talk in character with NPCs and even shop keeps which at time lead to interesting scenes, a chance to disseminate information about the world and bring different towns to life. It made the world more real, they remembered the tavern with the dodgy bar keep, they felt bad when they heard Sally the barmaid died a horrible death for being caught in the crossfire for a mistake they made.
Talking in character doesn’t happen naturally for many players and GMs, but I highly recommend that rather than forbidding talk during games, get your players to react socially in character. It helps if you allow 20 minutes to half an hour for players to catch up with each other about what they had been up to since last game before the game begins.
You see Timmy characters are much more fun to play than stats on a page, in order for them to come alive you need to give them a voice.
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