Dialogue: Essential Techniques

There are three basic approaches to writing dialogue.

    1. Canned Dialogue

    This involves writing the central dialogue in advance, making assumptions about the conversational cues that the players will provide.

    There are obvious advantages to this approach; you can take as much time as you need to polish and nuance the words, building in layers of depth and meaning, incorporating technical accuracy where it is appropriate, and generally making it possible for the conversation to be more immersive.

    The primary price is interactivity; what you prepare are really a series of monologues that will only deliver the full impact desired if your assumptions are correct. As soon as the players go off your pre-determined script, you have to scramble to rewrite on the fly or extemporize to steer the conversation back to the course you have engineered.

    This immediately detracts from that sense of immersion.

    Ultimately, canned dialogue can be easier on the GM in many respects, and that’s why it’s a common first resort.

    2. Extemporized Dialogue

    The most commonly considered alternative is the exact opposite and involves the GM making up the NPCs dialogue on the spot, something that is called extemporizing. This is a LOT harder than simply reading prepared dialogue, even when the course of the planned dialogue goes off the rails.

    Quite often, technical accuracy and nuance and even characterization is sacrificed to the god of Interactivity, and it’s at least twice as likely that the plot will go off the rails in the course of the dialogue.

    To extemporize properly, the GM has to keep several factors in mind at the same time, a juggling act that is never simple.

    □ The Personality of the speaker;
    □ How to manifest that personality in expressions and figures of speech;
    □ Giving each character a distinctive ‘voice’ and being consistent in doing so;
    □ Making the character’s communication clear and comprehensible;
    □ The ambitions, motives, and desires of the speaker;
    □ … and how those will influence what they say and how they will say it;
    □ The relationship (if any) between the speaker and the PC;
    □ … and how that will impact on the conversational content and delivery;
    □ The technical information to be imparted (if any);
    □ The big picture, i.e. how this conversation relates to the adventure as a whole;
    □ The local picture, i.e. how this conversation connects to and propels forward the immediate plot;
    □ How to manipulate the content of the conversation to achieve those purposes both local ad big-picture;
    □ The pacing and desired drama of the dialogue.

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    That’s a lot of balls to keep in the air at once. any GM who can manage it regularly and reliably is entitled to feel at the top of their game. More frequently, some form of compromise is needed – something has to be sacrificed.

    The big picture is usually the first to go, followed by pacing considerations, then the interpersonal dynamics and finally either technical accuracy or compromised individuality.

    And any GM who doesn’t think the players pick up on the cues and clues that these compromises produce, and use to assess the reliability of the information imparted, has rocks in their head. A better way to think of it is that you have only one thing that you can impart clearly – personality or technical accuracy – and players WILL judge which one they can rely based on your manner of presentation.

    Even attempting this technique can be incredibly hard work and extremely stressful. Many GMs try it once and immediately retreat to canned dialogue.

    3. The Hybrid Model

    Quite often, GMs will not retreat all the way from full Extemporization, instead adopting some form of hybrid model. Prepared paragraphs containing just the technical information, for example, letting the GM read the important bits while giving them freedom of expression outside of the technical dialogue.

    This will frequently result in having a half-dozen or more prepared responses to anticipated comments and questions, and that introduces a new problem: the GM has to be able to find, almost instantly, the correct response, and also has to make sure that any critical information gets imparted even if the players don’t steer the conversation in the right direction.

    I’ve often found it useful to summarize the plot purposes of any conversation as GM reference at the start of any planned dialogue, especially if that dialogue is to be extemporized in part or whole.

    It can also be useful to list pertinent personality and relationship details and how they might impact on the style or demonstrated attitude of the character prior to the conversation.

    The danger here is that the GM needs time to read and digest these notes without interrupting his gameplay to any noticeable degree. That means that they have to be specific, very brief, and easy to use.

    The mixed mode

    My approach is to employ a different compromise each and every time – if there is minimal backstory, full extemporization with a couple of brief notes on plot and personality; if there is more complex history, a hybrid model; and if there is considerable technical detail or sufficient plot importance to justify it, something more fully approaching the ‘canned dialogue’ technique.

    In particular, interactions with any NPC who is unlikely to ever appear in-game again tends to favor the extemporized approach; the more likely it is that the NPC will appear again, the more important consistency becomes, and that is built on notes that can be referenced on the occasion of future appearances.

    In general, the more you can adopt the principle of only doing work once, the better off you will be in the long run..

    This ‘mixed mode’ approach lets me decide which set of compromises is better suited to a specific conversation, and which set of strengths will be more important to that particular interaction between PCs and NPC.

    This is not a different approach to the other three (which is why it is not numbered ‘4’); it’s picking and choosing between the techniques to suit the needs of the moment, as much as available prep time will allow.

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Dialogue Considerations

Dialogue has to carry a lot of baggage in both fiction and RPGs. There are only two real sources of information about what is occurring in an adventure – what the character observes and what they are told in conversations. Characters have to digest the information they acquire from these sources, develop theories as to what is taking place, and try to devise ways of testing and verifying those theories. They may have to make decisions based on the assumption that the theories are correct, or may have the luxury of deferring those decisions until after the theories are verified.

Everything that a character (and their player) learns during play that is not directly observed should come from conversations. In real life, there are no omniscient voice-overs, and because they can undercut PC agency within a campaign, I discourage their use in RPGs.

That said, in real life you can have multiple conversations with multiple people and progress can be nine parts tedium to one part interesting. That won’t work in fiction, and it won’t wash at the game table, either. Some means of compression is therefore necessary to get the tedium down to an irreducible minimum, and then to make the communication more interesting.

One technique for doing so is the omniscient narrator. Another is to coalesce many conversations into one, and to composite many sources into a single character. This sort of thing goes on in films, TV shows, and even documentaries all the time.

This solves one problem, only by increasing the importance and workload of the dialogue that remains.

I have assembled a list of no less than nine critical tasks that dialogue must (ideally) achieve.

    1. Natural Speech

    It’s vital that what an NPC says sounds natural, as though the character would say it, and say it that way, if they really existed. The more you can achieve this, the more immersive and believable the game world will be.

    2. Lecturing

    The dominant aspect of lectures that every GM should take away from this article and take into account forevermore is that they are inherently boring. This is because they are almost completely non-interactive monologues, of necessity. Some GMs avoid lectures by always extemporizing, but I think that is throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

    There are times when it is necessary that an NPC deliver a briefing or a lecture. Recognize the inevitability and actively work on developing techniques to combat the liability of boredom that comes with the territory.

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    Subdivide and Conquer

    There are three techniques to handling this problem that I particularly want to call to reader’s attention.

    Illustrations and Presentations

    Of course, lecturers have known of this problem for decades if not longer. For a long time, there wasn’t much that they could do about it – but then PowerPoint came along and livened things up. I stole that basic idea and used it to prepare a couple of ‘illustrated lectures’ in my Zenith-3 campaign – it was a while back, now, but it still seems fresh and clear to me as a result.

    I detailed the first of these in a dedicated post at Campaign Mastery because I thought it might be useful / interesting to readers and GMs in its own right – The Meta-Physics Of Magic.

    The second was less likely to be of universal interest and dealt with some of the nuances and complications of time travel within the campaign, presented at a point where that was about to become important to the PCs. This was embedded in part three of another series here at Campaign mastery, “A Long Road”. I’ve linked below to both the series as a whole and to the specific post concerned.

    □ A Long Road – Zenith-3 Synopsis & Notes
    □ A Long Road – Zenith-3 Notes for all Pt 3

    As noted in the latter, both of these were sprinkled liberally with what were supposed to be snapshots excerpted from a dynamic display supposedly being generated interactively within the game as illusions by a skilled mage.

    Key to the success was providing a copy of the illustrations to a player with another PC so that the illustrations could be seen at the same time as I was reading aloud the carefully-prepped canned dialogue. At the end of the adventure, I also provided the player with an excerpted copy of the ‘lecture’ to accompany the diagrams for their future reference.

    The key to the success of this technique is making the illustrations compelling enough to hold attention. Plain text on a screen – frequently seen in PowerPoint presentations – won’t cut it. Not unless it tells a joke, and a good one, anyway.

    The next time I need this technique, I intend to try and make the ‘lecture’ even more interactive by presenting the illustration and getting the PCs to interpret it before the lecturer expands on their understanding. When that will happen, I have no idea…

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    Illustrated Documents provided in advance

    The final technique is one that I have employed both in the Zenith=3 and Adventurer’s Club campaigns. It basically involves preparing documents and giving them to players in advance of their characters acquiring them, relying on them to read them and then not to use knowledge that their characters don’t have yet. My players are pretty good at the second, and (in some cases) not quite so good at the first, but still better than average.

    The Adventurer’s Club examples came from the “Prison Of Jade” adventure, and were provided in-game as handouts, rather than in advance. This is not necessarily the best approach, especially to anything longer than, say, 4 pages or so. These were excerpted and incorporated into the text of Pieces Of Creation: Lon Than, Kalika, and the Prison Of Jade – the first starts with “The Mystic Properties Of Jade” and the second, “Kali and Kalika”. Both are without the illustrations that accompanied them when provided to the players, unfortunately, as explained in the ‘behind the curtain’ notes that are interspersed within the article.

    Since the subject has come up, there are a couple of other posts here at Campaign Mastery that specifically address Handouts and the problems that can come with them that I should bring to the attention of readers.

    □ Beyond the Game I: Handouts and Props

    □ A Helping Handout

    □ Ask The GMs: The Great Handouts Question

    □ The latter parts of the ‘New Beginnings’ series also discuss handouts for campaign background and rules extensively.

    The other major example that I can point to is the background for the current Zenith-3 campaign – much of which was presented here at Campaign Mastery in the 12-part ‘Imperial History Of Earth-Regency’ series – noting that when the original version was provided through my campaign newsletter, it was even more lavishly illustrated because I was not concerned with the image source. The Campaign Mastery version does contain corrections, expansions, revisions, and additional details than the original, however.

    3. Interactivity

    When a PC says something to an NPC, that NPC should be able to respond to what is said in a natural and normal way. The dialogue content is thus an interaction between the player and GM as much as between the characters that they then embody.

    Sounds simple, doesn’t it? At the heart of it lies a very straightforward proposition: How would this character respond to what they have just heard? – but in practice, it’s not that easy.

    Achieving interaction requires Extemporization, i.e. inventing dialogue off the cuff, and that requires that long list of considerations that I discussed earlier. On top of that, there are those who will take the ‘plot function’ of dialogue too far and turn the discussion into railroad tracks on which the plot rolls along. This is, pretty much by definition, the exact opposite of genuine interactivity.

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    4. Informative

    Often, the primary purpose of dialogue is to impart information to the PC or PCs who are present. Such information has to be both clear and concise, and yet has to reflect the persona of the NPC delivering it – and those requirements are frequently incompatible if not completely contradictory.

    5. Big-Picture

    It’s never helpful to lose touch with the big picture. Some of my most creative work was the result of doing so and then having to rescue the adventure or even the whole campaign from my own creative instincts.

    6. Motivation & Purpose

    These don’t refer to your intentions and desires for the conversation, but to the NPC’s motivations and what purpose they want the conversation to achieve.

    One of the most fun things that you can do is to have an NPC react to whatever the PC says as though it was the greatest reward they can imagine – or a declaration of a blood feud – even though what the PC said was neither.

         [NPC]: “Good afternoon, Sir Gently.”
         [PC]: “Chancellor Extrak. Enjoying the festivities?”
         [NPC]: “Quite a distinctive visual display. Quite skilled, I suppose. But I haven’t been able to pay them enough attention to really appreciate them. Busy, busy, busy.”
         [PC]: “I watched some of them from the balcony, earlier. An excellent vantage point, i thought.”
         [NPC]: So long as the weather stays fair. But I must be going, now.
          “Thank you for the… conversation.”

    That last statement is critical – depending on how it is phrased and delivered, the interpretation of the conversation from the NPCs point of view is delivered. Smug and condescending, or casual and friendly, or with barely-controlled fury, or the icy manner of someone forced to be polite despite taking extreme offense. Only the “casual and friendly” response is in any way reasonable, given the content of the small talk.

    Which means that if the tone indicates one of the other reactions, the PC (and player) should be left scratching their head and asking “what just happened?” – it is clear that the NPC got far more from the conversation than met the eye.

    The GM’s fun can last all the way up to the point where they have to provide some sensible explanation for the reaction. If you didn’t have a strong reason at the time, though, that can be when the fun stops and the scrambling starts.

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    7. Omissions, Errors, Blind Spots, Prejudices and Malice

    Given that ‘errors’ are listed explicitly, the implication is that ‘omissions’ are deliberate acts on the part of the NPC. It’s my experience that most GMs don’t spend enough time thinking about these five items that should contaminate most conversations in some way.

    □ What will the NPC deliberately avoid mentioning, and why?

    □ What does the NPC misunderstand about the situation? What is the source of that misunderstanding? And what is the NPCs inaccurate understanding?

    □ What is the NPC unable to see about the situation?

    □ What prejudices on the part of the NPC will color his or her interpretation of events and actions – past, present, and future?

    □ Does the NPC have some reason to deliberately lie to the PC?

    All too often, unless they are known to be the villain or in service to the villain, the GM will ignore these questions; if an NPC is asked a question, or given some information (by a PC or another NPC), it will be honest, open, and reliable. That’s not the case in real life, so why should it be the case in an RPG?

    There can be exceptions – in a Pulp campaign, morality is far more binary, more black-and-white, and that means that NPCs will not overtly lie and mislead (unless they are villains, of course, and usually not even then). Bur in general, the truth is that most NPCs are unreasonably honest.

    8. Plot Impetus & Direction

    There are two basic approaches to populating an adventure with NPCs. The first is to roleplay every encounter, because the players should not know which ones are important; the second is to only roleplay those conversations that are significant to the plot. Conversations that are not important get described in passing by omniscient narration or completely ignored.

    [GM]: “You quickly arrange lodgings and a meal with the tavern-keeper, who shows you to your rooms, advising that a bell will sound when the evening meal is ready to be served in the common room.”

Actually playing through introductions, negotiations, etc, could easily take five or ten minutes. If the NPC is to be important to the plot in some way, is to provide some crucial information or something, by all means, take that time; but, if nor, a GM should at least consider not doing so, under the precepts of the second approach.

If I were playing the one campaign weekly or even fortnightly, I would tend to incline toward the first approach, because it gives the game world greater verisimilitude; if play is less frequent, or constrained in hours in some other respect, I incline towards hand-waving trivial encounters.

Note also that ‘imparting verisimilitude’ is an entirely reasonable plot function for an NPC or an encounter to have, one that on its own is sufficient to justify playing it out – if that sense of believability, of suspension of disbelief, needs some reinforcement at that point in the adventure.

The final factor that plays into this type of decision is the desired pacing of the adventure. If the big climax is approaching, hand-waving this sort of empty dialogue is far more desirable than is the case early in an adventure.

If, however, I wanted to deflate the pace of the adventure – to get a climax to coincide with the end of play for the day, for example, or because I wanted time to ratchet the tension up a notch or two higher, empty conversations like this one are a great way of doing so.

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9. Characterization

The last critical ingredient is characterization of the NPC.

You can deliver some of it through descriptions of them and of their workplace (assuming that they have some measure of control over it) or home (same assumption).

You can even prepare the ground by having others express an opinion of the NPC in advance of the meeting.

But the real meat of the characterization comes from what they say and how they say it.

Focusing on the holes

This article was actually inspired by some TV advertising for British-made crime dramas on one of the television networks here in Australia, and by some additional thoughts that the advertising triggered.

In a nutshell:

  • Everybody Lies
  • Everybody makes untested and unverified assumptions without stating them directly
  • Everybody has prejudices and opinions that leak into their observations and interpretations.

It is well known that eyewitness testimony is unreliable. First, if people are distracted, they can miss the blindingly obvious, something that I have described a number of times.

Second, humans are hardwired mentally to ‘fill in the blanks’, something that optical illusions are known to exploit. I discussed this in Blind Spots and False Illusions: How much can you really see? (again), in the section, “The Relevance Of Illusion”.

If you put a bunch of eyewitness together, an opinion expressed forcibly enough can actually overwrite witness memories, changing what someone was wearing or what they looked like. It’s called witness contamination. I describe it in The Other Side Of The Camera: Depth in RPGs, in the section “The Camera Of Implication: A witness statement” (it’s early in the post).

Eyewitness Testimony and Memory Biases, from theNOBA Project, explores the subject in more detail.

Finally, in the post The Jar Of Jam and The Wounded Monarch: Two Mystery Examples, in the section “6. Eyewitnesses & Confusion”, I discuss the unreliability of eyewitness testimony in a more general way, with links to a couple of specific articles on the subject.

I know I have recommend it to readers before, but I can’t not mention Wikipedia’s page on Eyewitness Testimony, which makes fascinating reading. They also have an even longer page on Eyewitness Memory which is worth reader’s time.

    There is a personal anecdote that I should mention at this point. At one point, one of the duties required by my employer of the time was to assist in the counting of takings from another of the employer’s businesses, completion of deposit information, and walking the takings (all bundled into individual days’ takings) to the bank. On one occasion, it became clear that others had observed the routine; I got robbed at knife-point. Simply by refusing to let go of the plastic bag containing the bundles, and using them as a shield against the guy with the knife, I was able to save two days’ takings from the long weekend that had just passed.

    Although the weapon clearly held some of my attention, and the struggle some more of it, I can still clearly remember the shirt that the offender was wearing – blue and white horizontal stripes about an inch-and-a-half wide. I had a clear memory of the faces of the perpetrator and his knife-wielding compatriot. As a result, I was taken to the police station to look at mug books – and that was where the investigation went off the rails, because they had not obtained a full description before this process commenced. About half and hour later, after looking at more than 500 mugshots, I could not have picked the criminals our of a lineup if my life depended on it; my memory had been contaminated. The bigger guy was about 6 inches taller than me, and grabbed the bag; the smaller one was about 5’8” and waved the knife around, but that’s all the description that I can give of them.

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Anyway, the advertisement goes on to suggest that it takes a trained investigator to separate fact from fancy and truth from fiction.

But, what I really took away from this advert was the principle of leaving stuff out, and that was because it connected with another thought that was already at the back of my mind.

Many Turns Of Expression

When it comes to technical information, there may be only one clear way of expressing it. Should the topic of conversation be anything else, however, there may be dozens of choices if not more.

When it comes to literary writers, the usual advice is to keep it succinct – cut out any waffle, any unnecessary words, and get on with the story. But people don’t usually speak in bullet-points. So I started to wonder how valid that advice, that general principle, really was – at least when it came to RPGs.

That was what led me to the analysis of conversational content that comprises the bulk of this article, in an attempt to derive a truism that could be applied. To my surprise, my answer seems to me to apply to fiction, too – completely replacing the ‘usual advice’ listed above so far as I’m concerned:

The best way of phrasing any statement within a conversation, or characterizing a conversation in general terms, is Whatever best expresses the personality of the speaker and is compatible with all other indicated purposes of the conversation.

In other words,.if there are multiple possible ways of phrasing something that are of equal value in all other respects, you should choose the alternative that most clearly expresses the personality of the character speaking.

Of course, it’s rarely that simple. Different modes of expression can rarely be characterized as absolutes in any respect, only as effective or ineffective given the context. Beyond that, you’re into gray fuzziness.

One option may better impart technical information at the expense of characterization. Another may make the choice of action clearer to those hearing it than either – but that’s not necessarily a good thing. While the GM, through NPCs, can advise, the players should make the decisions for their characters. Expression of personality is one component of a complex evaluation with many criteria.

What the general statement makes clearer is that within each of these subgroups, the option that should float to the surface is the one that most clearly expresses the speaker’s personality.

A methodology

This in turn is suggestive of a method of approaching the whole question, one that works almost as well when extemporizing as it does when utilizing a canned dialogue or hybrid approach.

  1. Select the most important function of the conversation other than expression of personality.
  2. Draft a response that addresses that need.
  3. Assess that draft response with respect to all the other functions and criteria except (again) expression of personality. If it’s adequate, proceed, otherwise, modify the draft to be at least acceptable in that metric, then proceed.
  4. Rephrase the draft to embed as much expression of personality as possible without compromising the primary function chosen in step 1.

This brings three important considerations to the fore.

  • It means that instead of having to keep the whole list of considerations in mind all the time, they can be treated as either background information for the GM or as a checklist of qualities that need to be rated as ‘satisfactory’, lightening the GM’s workload massively.
  • It subordinates everything other than the one most important consideration to the expression of personality while mandating that any given expression must achieve a minimum standard of success in all other considerations.
  • It’s not quite as fast as saying the first thing that comes into your head, but it’s not all that much slower – snap decisions make the selection of phrases quick and relatively easy.

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Of course, having prep time dedicated to polish and nuance is always going to deliver a better result when precision is necessary. But, most of the time, you can simply list what the substance and purpose of the communication is going to be, and the personality of the speaker, and extemporize from that foundation.

A little context on the tail

It has been said that it’s easy to catch a bird – you just need to get close enough to sprinkle a little salt onto its tail.

Meaningful phrasing and rhetoric in an RPG are exactly the same – getting close enough is the tricky part, once you are in the vicinity of ‘good enough’, that’s all you need – move on.

It can actually get easier to create that meaningful phrasing and rhetoric, because statements do not have to be definitive; each creates a context for the next things to be said, and those ‘next things’ can refine and modify the interpretation of the first statement.

This means that ‘close enough’ is not a fixed standard – it can start fairly lax and be refined as you ‘get down to business’. The implication is that initial statements and social niceties can actually be used to set the stage for the meaningful dialogue. And, since these have virtually no semantic content within the conversation, you can dedicate them entirely to an initial expression of personality.

Flawless technical language can be bracketed by expressive non-technical foundations that provide context and shape to the whole communication.

You can offer the best of advice to a PC while ensuring that they are unlikely to take it simply by implying that this is what someone they don’t like or trust would want them to do.

Nuance and depth get created as ‘illusions’ – just as a couple of lines can become a railroad track, or an empty space can become a white triangle (see some of the linked articles listed earlier if you don’t know what I’m talking about).

Conversations don’t have to be hard. Good conversations are not much harder than Bad dialogue. The secret is to choose an approach that suits the needs of the conversation and its purpose within the game, then apply a methodology that takes most of the work and stress out of the task.

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One final piece of advice

It’s almost impossible to overact when GMing an RPG (but don’t take that as a challenge). Chew the furniture, inhabit the role as though it were one that you were born to play – you will not only be more expressive, and more on-point, but you will have more fun, and make the game more fun for your players.

It can be hard to let yourself go when you have so much on your mind – that doesn’t mean it’s not worth the attempt.

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