A good GM’s comfort zone (green) covers most of the territory and his Range (green + yellow) is growing with only a few problem areas (red). This article simplifies this into a ‘Yes – within Range’ / ‘No – out of Range’ question, but the reality is a little more complex and nuanced, and I thought it important to acknowledge that.

For the last two days, what was an intermittent telephone and internet problem caused by excessive line noise has become no telephone and internet service at all. So I will be posting this via an Internet Cafe, but it will be the last post published until this mess is sorted out. Hopefully, that means that there will be a new post Monday and aside from this note, you’ll never know there was a disruption.

What is the difference between a good actor and a great actor? And what do those questions have to do with roleplaying?

Tell you what, let’s come back to those questions in a moment.

Shoes That Fit

To really succeed in playing a role, whoever is doing so – player or GM – needs to be able to immerse themselves in that role. You need to understand how that character thinks, which is often facilitated by understanding why the character thinks that way.

But that’s often not enough to give more than a wooden, superficial performance as the character. To really get under the character’s skin in a way that is manifestly obvious to everyone else at the table, the character has to be playable. That is achieved when the person controlling the character has a strong – even complete – understanding of the way the character’s abilities and attributes work, and how the character’s personality is expressed through them.

It is sometimes possible to achieve something close to roleplaying when only one of these requirements is achieved. Dragon’s Claw from my first Zenith-3 campaign illustrates and explains that point far more clearly than I could achieve without such an example.

Dragon’s Claw

Dragon’s Claw was a non-Asian martial artist who was raised in a Japanese temple by monks who believed that he was destined to become a great and enlightened warrior. The concept was something of a cross between “Remo: Unarmed and Dangerous” (which is known by a different title in the US, but I don’t have access to the internet to get the correct reference) and The Shadow. Because of this destiny, he was bequeathed and trained in the use of a Mystic Katana which granted him the ability to use his martial arts at a distance, amongst other things. This was to be a character steeped in Eastern Philosophy and Mysticism, according to the creator and player.

He wasn’t played that way. Instead, he was fiercely independent of the team, behaving as an overt vigilante from day one. No sooner had the team spent 30 minutes planning their approach to the problems at hand and agreeing to maintain a low profile than he was out trolling for muggers on Boston Common, and using his full intimidatory abilities to make himself memorable.

What’s more, the rules in use at the time favored item-based powers excessively, while under-rewarding martial arts abilities, so the former was where the player sunk his experience points, becoming known within the team as both a loose cannon and a “sword delivery system” – the other players’ choice of phrase, not mine.

At no point did the character enunciate a single example of Eastern Philosophy. The gulf between what the character was supposed (on paper) to be and what he actually was provided ongoing difficulties for both myself as GM and for the other players, who could never tell exactly what he would do in any given situation – only that he would think of himself first and the team a distant second.

It wasn’t that the character didn’t understand the concepts involved, or did not have numerous role models to draw on from his own television and filmic experiences – he possessed both. But in the heat of play, he struggled to apply that knowledge to his character in any manifest or meaningful way except when it came to set pieces prepared in advance, with my connivance. On such occasions, he was a completely different character.

The character was simply outside the player’s range – the character’s shoes didn’t fit the player.

This wasn’t the only occasion when that happened, even within that campaign. At one point, we had a mage who was reluctant to use magic (because there was a 1-10% chance, depending on the spell, of a miscast producing undesirable side effects), and a precognitive who didn’t understand how his character’s powers worked or could be used to achieve anything practical.

Both the former, and Dragon’s Claw, eventually dropped out of the campaign, replaced by other characters, while the player of the latter revealed that as much as he enjoyed the stories of Sherlock Holmes and various detective shows on TV, he himself struggled as a detective, and dropped out. For a while, the character became an NPC before being taken over by a different player – but that’s a whole different story.

In a completely different campaign – D&D this time – I had a player who wanted to play a Warlock. I struggled at the time (and still struggle to this day) to understand what makes this a viable character class, what separates them from a Mage with inbuilt system rorts that bypass some of the key limitations on the latter class, and – most importantly – how such a character thinks. That made it extremely difficult to prepare game content to focus on the character.

Before the player can walk a mile in their character’s shoes, those shoes have to fit both player and GM.

The Convention Connection

This becomes especially significant when it comes to convention gaming (not that I’ve done very much of it, but I have talked to GMs who have). GMing at a convention is done in one of two ways – either using pre-generated PCs created by the GM, enabling him to frame the adventure to suit those roles and personalities, or by having the Players bring in their own characters which the GM either approves or rejects based on his knowledge of, and the player’s adherence to, the guidelines layed down in advance by that GM.

The latter exposes the convention adventure to the headaches of players who simply can’t stretch their experience and mindset to encompass the perspective of the characters they are being asked to play, while the latter avoids those options, but limits the depth of integration between characters and adventure – making it harder, for example, to ensure that everyone gets equal screen time, and can make contributions of equal significance..

The ideal solution – characters that the players are familiar with sent to the GM in advance with personality profiles, etc – is usually impractical.

The aspects of Acting

This article actually started with a stray thought regarding acting, and especially the so-called “Range” of an actor.

For an actor to succeed in a role, three things have to happen. First, the actor must be able to put himself into the role he is portraying; Second, the actor must be able to express that character with nuance and plausibility; and third, the audience has to accept the actor in that role as though he were the character.

If the first two don’t happen, the chances of the last are greatly diminished.

Great actors are those with sufficient capability in the first two that they can inhabit a variety of roles with complete conviction and acceptance by the audience. Some actors can only manage roles within a particularly narrow scope; outside of that narrow range, they either fail the first, being unable to put themselves in the shoes of their character, or they fail the second, being able to sufficiently capture the character enough for a suspension of disbelief on the part of the audience. And, admittedly, some roles are easier than others.

A really great actor will get so deeply under the skin of his character that he is able to enlarge upon the role in some substantial way; this famously happened with Spock in the original Star Trek, for example, and many of the actors and actresses on Babylon 5 enlarged their roles, bringing additional definition to the races their characters represented in the process.

Some actors proved themselves excellent within a narrow window – Keanu Reeves, for example, in Speed and in the Matrix trilogy – but struggled when asked to step beyond that role. In many cases, the actor is able to talk a good game, displaying a deep understanding of the character in interviews, and yet somehow failing to deliver that understanding to an audience’s perceptions when actually performing on-screen.

It’s also fair to state that sometimes it’s not the actors’ fault; the director has to not only draw out the performance required, but has to capture it for others to see. It’s also fair to state that actors learn from their efforts, and grow into a role that they were unable to capture initially. (I’ve recently been re-watching early episodes of Marvel’s Agents Of S.H.I.E.L.D. and you can see that happen very quickly with the actor who plays Grant Ward, and a little more slowly with the actor who plays Fitz – compare the latter with his performances in seasons 3 and 4 and the contrast is very noticeable. But I’m wandering off point).

The actor’s job is clearly similar to that of the Player (or the GM when roleplaying an NPC) and the GM’s job similar to that of the Director.

A Player’s “Range”

I have known players who were great at playing “themselves plus ability X”, but who struggled to go beyond that. I have known players who were great at getting under a character’s skin, but who were utterly incapable of transforming that understanding into a performance that went beyond “themselves
plus ability X” when the time came. I have known players who found a role with which they were comfortable and who forever after played variations on that role regardless of the game system and genre in which any given game was taking place.

And I have known players who seemed to be able to cloak themselves in the mantle of a completely different, completely original, character, seemingly effortlessly.

I’m certainly not going to name names. Every player must be assumed to be doing his best to succeed in all three aspects of bringing to life the character they are playing. And sometimes, a player won’t realize that something is out of their “range” until they are committed to the role. Everyone has strengths and weaknesses, and instinctively tries to play to what they perceive as their strengths (which might be a third thing entirely).

Through The Looking Glass

So, what do you do when it becomes clear that a player is struggling to master a role that they have shouldered?

You have a number of options, not all of them desirable as outcomes.

• Lose the campaign
• Lose the player
• Give the player time
• Discover a touchstone
• Transform the character
• Amend the game mechanics
• Transfer the character
• Retire the character

As you might have guessed, I’m now going to examine each of these options.

Lose the campaign

The worst-case outcome, this is the result of forcing a player to continue in a role with which they are not succeeding, when that player (for some reason) does not want to drop out of the campaign or has no opportunity to do so. If you do nothing, this is one of the two possible default outcomes, and definitely rates as an undesirable. This is especially unlikely if a particular misfitting role is ruining everyone else’s fun at the table – and yes, I’ve seen that happen, too.

Lose the player

The more likely default is that the player will simply drop out of the campaign, and possibly out of roleplaying games altogether. I don;t consider this to be a particularly desirable result, either. These first two options are what we are trying to avoid. And it’s worth noting that it may take months or even years before accumulated distress yields one of these results, and that other problems can yield the same result – be sure that you’re fixing the real problem and not wasting time knocking down a straw man.

Give The Player Time

Discussing the character with the player can yield insights on both sides of the gaming table. That, plus time to either evolve the character, or the player’s familiarity with the game mechanics, or simply to come to grips with the character, may be all that’s required. The first thing to do is to talk to the player and tell him or her that you get the impression that he/she is finding it a difficult character to roleplay. Where the problem is in stage 2 of the acting process, the player can be unaware that there even is a problem – or it might be the GMs’ problem and he hasn’t realized it.

The player has four possible responses: “Yes”, “No”, “Sometimes”, or “What makes you think that?” Regardless of the answer, this is the starting point for a conversation that should prove enlightening for one or both participants, and may indicate one of the solutions below as appropriate.

Discover a touchstone

I have learned that there are often key words or phrases or concepts that can capture the essence of a character, and that reciting these to yourself at appropriate times can catapult your mindset into the one that’s required to get into the character. These are different for every player and every character, and sometimes there might not be one – the variables are so great that it can be almost impossible to discover one except by accident.

And certainly, this concept may not be a universal panacea;

The best technique that I have found is to sum up the character in a single phrase. If that phrase isn’t the touchstone (and it probably won’t be), look for other ways to express it, more abstractly, or from different perspectives, or by analogy, or symbolically. If that doesn’t work, identify the character’s strongest personality trait or outlook and run that through the same process.

I have two NPCs (neither in play at the moment, and neither of whom might show up in-game at all) for whom the touchstone is “Emotionally Volatile”. In one case, it represents a character who flies off the handle at each and every perceived setback and who is always ready to perceive a setback even when there isn’t one; in the other, it represents a character who has extreme emotional mood swings, lurching from extreme happiness to extreme anger to extreme fear to extreme depression to… well, you get the idea. Any sort of mood change in this individual is immediately carried to extremes. To get into character, I simply have to recite the touchstone to myself (remaining aware of the context). How well I then convey the resulting portrayal remains to be seen.

I have another NPC whose touchstone is “pragmatically obsessive”. That doesn’t mean that he is obsessed with being pragmatic, it means that he is an obsessive who will always be pragmatic when necessary, and who will continue to pursue his goals obsessively to the fullest extent of what it possible, regardless of the cost.

Transform the character

To whatever extent the game system allows, I have learned to incorporate a “looking glass” somewhere in a character’s early appearances – whether it’s a PC or an NPC – that lets me perform radical surgery on the character if it becomes necessary. This surgery can be conceptual, or it can be in the ways that the concept manifests itself.

When it becomes clear that it isn’t required for that purpose, I can re-task that :looking glass” to give the player the chance to walk down “Might-have-been” street with a temporary transformation. These serve as a change of pace and can be great fun for all involved.

In one of my campaigns, I included the house rule that characters could morph from one class to another and/or one race or another at any point in the first three game sessions – but that once a class or race were abandoned, the character could not go back to it. That worked fairly well, especially since I had a three-session adventure in mind to let the players “try out” their characters.

Amend the game mechanics

This might seem a radical suggestion, but if there’s a particular set of sub-rules that aren’t “working” for a player (or for yourself), you have to consider changing them.

That doesn’t mean that the rules aren’t functional; they might work perfectly (in theory) or even work perfectly for every other participant at the table.

Such changes can be temporary (spreading balm on the problem before it becomes inflamed), or indefinite, or even deliberately permanent.

I once knew a (novice) player who couldn’t wrap his head around the concept of “THAC0”. He was perfectly capable of doing the maths, he understood the theory, but given any practical occurrence of a need to work out what he needed to hit, and what impact that should have on his tactical decisions, his head yielded “error”, usually followed by “tilt”. So I adjusted the game system (AD&D) for him only,. restating the number as “To Hit Me” – i,e, what he needed to roll in order to hit a character with the same AC as he had, and revising it whenever necessary. Result: no more problems. Estimating an enemy’s AC relative to his own became a point of his roleplaying when entering a combat situation and told him immediately whether to run, look for a way to avoid combat, look for a way to gain an advantage (or nullify an advantage enjoyed by the enemy), or attack.

And, of course, there were times when it was appropriate to be a little vague about the result, or when it was appropriate that the character over- or under-estimate the opposition. The player knew that, and fed that into his roleplaying as well. That one slight change to the game mechanics (which didn’t really change the way that they worked at all) overcame his conceptual roadblock, transforming him from a tactical liability to the best tactician in that group of players!

Transfer The Character

A more extreme response is to give that PC to another player (who may or may not already have a character in the game) and let the player with the problem create a new and different PC – one that doesn’t suffer from the same problem.

Retire The Character

Or perhaps you might make the old PC an NPC until you can write them out of the campaign. A more extreme variation on this is to “retire” the character while the original player is still handling it, usually by deliberately orchestrating a personal calamity of some sort. Still another variation has the character remaining a permanent NPC who is reduced to a non-combat role, or who only shows up occasionally.

The latter works especially well in a superhero campaign, where it’s the norm for no-one to die forever (not even Bucky).

The GM’s “Range”

I make no bones about my problems with the Warlock character class. Others have no problem with it whatsoever, and even look at you funny if you mention it as a problem. The warlock simply lies outside my “range” as a GM.

When this happens, you have the solutions listed above, but you also have a couple of additional choices that might help.

• Run A Solo Example
• Alter the Class/Race
• Restrict or Remove the Class/Race

Run A Solo Example

Sometimes, running a solo game in which you are both player and GM helps you come to grips with a problem. You aren’t restricted by normal campaign etiquette when you do this; you can make assumptions, have them blow up in your face, and
change those assumptions – if necessary, in mid-combat. And because there’s no one to wait for, no explanations or descriptions to others required, this testing can proceed at lightning speed.

What should you be looking for? It depends on the specific issue that you are experiencing. If a conceptual issue, like my problem with Warlocks in D&D, the key question is “why?” Why is the class the way it is? Why is this ability the way it is? – And you aren’t looking for metagame answers, you are looking for answers that work in an in-game context, i.e. from the point of view of the character that you are playing. Quite often, such problems will come from an assumption that you have made that is unwarranted and having a detrimental effect, and they key to solving your mental blocks is to identify that assumption and change it. Sometimes that means amending the campaign background that is built on that assumption, or amending the class to avoid the clash that has produced the problem; but whatever the conflict is, before you can solve it you have to identify it.

Sometimes it’s helpful to compare the way the class or race (or whatever) plays in the basic rules relative to under your house rules. That’s also often a good place to start.

I have also experienced cases where there was nothing inherently wrong with the character affected, it was simply a matter of requiring the owner to juggle more things mentally than other classes; in this circumstance, the player may be able to cope (though it does raise the question of whether or not they are having to work harder for their fun – and some would say they enjoy the challenge); but you, as GM, are having difficulty keeping the character in focus with everything else that you have to keep track of. That’s a specific type of overload that can often be managed once you know the source of the problem.

Finally, double check everything, at least at first; what you understand from the descriptions and what those descriptions are actually saying can sometimes be two wildly different things. Make sure that you haven’t been you own worst enemy.

Alter the Class/Race

As the GM, and hopefully guided by the playtesting described above, you may find that you need to make alterations to the class or race to integrate them into the game world because there is a conflict between the two concepts, or to because you need to make the change to bring such characters into your “range” as a GM. If you go down this path, you will need to have a plan in place for dealing with characters of the affected type who may already be in-game, one that can be applied retroactively. This may be as simple as giving the character’s owner the opportunity to switch N levels of Warlock to N levels of Mage, plus (perhaps) a sweetener to the deal, or it may be something more complex. Remember that by changing the class/race, you are changing what they thought they were getting when they chose that trait of the character, inconveniencing them for your own benefit; the fact that solving the problem will also benefit everyone at the table in terms of fun should not be a factor, only a motivation.

Restrict or Remove the Class/Race

A more severe solution to be used only when the playtesting described doesn’t deliver an answer, or is impractical for some reason (which will usually involve the “real world”). Again, you will need a plan for addressing character classes already dedicated to the class/race and other choices that may have been made – if a character has been working toward a particular variant or subclass, or a particular race/class combination, this may nullify all their character choices from level 1 of the character.

The rule of thumb is to stay as true as possible to the personality of the character as it has been expressed in play; everything else can be changed to fit.

This is definitely not an option to consider lightly; it’s a last resort before you end up at one of the two deadly-ends listed under the “player-problem” options. It’s certainly not a step to be undertaken without serious discussion with any players affected.

Final Words

We’re all human, and we all have our limitations. In no two cases will those limitations be equal. Part of the technique for lasting at the game table is identifying your “Range” and working within it, with the occasional push to extend it just a little (without doing so explosively!) In particular, you need to focus on areas in which you and your players are equally within your working/’acting’ limits; it does no good for one of the two to be within their range while the other is way out of their depth.

If you’re exceptionally lucky, and exceptionally versatile, these problems will never be an issue at your game table. For most of us, that isn’t the case. You don’t become the best GM that you can possibly be by accident; you need to work at it, crawling beyond your limits until you can take baby steps towards the edges of a new limit. Some of this development comes naturally, just by doing; it’s not uncommon to look at something you’ve just created or played out and realize that X months or years before, it would have been utterly beyond you.

Being successful as a GM entails embracing the art of the practical, whether it’s the limits placed on the amount of prep that can practicably be completed prior to play, or the limits placed on you by your personal flaws and limitations. Own the space that you can reach, and cast a greedy eye on those that are beyond you, but don’t throw away what you have in an attempt to own even more of the creative potential within a game system. Know and own your range and the ranges of your players, and go beyond those limits only judiciously.

Beginners

Beginners, this advice doesn’t necessarily apply to you – not 100%, anyway. For the first few months or even years after you start, a lot of things will be outside your comfort zone. Set realistic goals and targets for self-improvement in the GMing art, and be prepared to make a lot of mistakes.

Some beginner GMs make the huge mistake of setting their first campaign in the game world or gaming space that they have always wanted to play in. They may have an idea for a particular fantasy world that consumes and fascinates them, into which they have poured all their creative energies for months or years.

While that level of enthusiasm can be an undeniable asset, your skills and abilities as a GM are almost certainly not up to the job of implementing your dream campaign right off the bat. Save it and polish it for later use, when you can do it justice; start with something smaller and let it – and your skills – grow organically until you’re ready.

The same is true for beginner players. Your dream class might be a spell-caster, capable of reshaping reality with but a word, a gesture, and the force of your will. But Mages are complex character classes to run; get your fundamentals down pat, first, with something simpler. I started with a rogue (who didn’t survive for very long), and my focus was immediately on discovering and conveying the personality of that individual. I was acutely aware that I had just scratched the surface of what looked like being a fun character to play when he was killed. The resulting frustration could have poisoned me on the hobby; instead, it lit a fire that has lasted for more than thirty years, because he survived as a character just long enough to give me that glimpse of the possibilities.

And never forget that the game should be fun for everyone – players and GM alike.