GMs sometimes ask more than one question. Where these directly relate to each other, or the context is important to the answers, they are generally lumped together. When they aren’t, which is far less frequent an event, they get split up and answered separately. Which brings me to today’s topic: Writing characters out when players leave the game.

Ask the gamemasters

This question comes from Nic, who wrote (regretfully, more than 5 years ago):


Hi guys,

I have three questions which I hope you can answer (though not all at once, as they’re unrelated to each other):

1) What kind of “trapdoors” do you use to ensure characters can be written out of a campaign? Sometimes a player can’t continue to play for whatever reason, and I’m sick of the clichéd, “He got killed,” “He just left,” solutions. It’d be nice to have a story fueled reason, and one that does not preclude a character from making a return at a later point.

2) Do you utilize handouts for campaigns/adventures? More specifically, I’m about to begin a campaign in my own world setting, and I’m wondering should I provide a handout with some background reading? If yes, what should I include and how detailed should I get?

3) I often have the need to bounce my campaign ideas off others, to point out massive plot holes and the like, or just for some extra inspiration and ideas. My problem is that anyone who I could plausibly do this with is someone who I already game with. Can you recommend any decent online forums or the like where GMs congregate to help each other out? If there isn’t one in existence, are you guys in a position to begin one?

Many thanks for your time. I love your website and hope you can answer my questions and gain some interesting topics to post about. Keep up the good work!

Cheers,

Nic.

PS, Thanks for all your help with my campaign so far!

As I explained in the last ATGMs, I don’t know whether Johnn offered Nic some guidance at the time, but I dashed off a quick note in reply that – in hindsight – was barely adequate. Because these questions are completely unrelated, as Nic himself suggests, I’m answering them properly in separate ATGMs posts. A little while back, in preparation for these articles, I discussed the questions with a number of my other GMs, and between us, came up with answers of… let’s just say, “varying” depth. Their thoughts have been folded into the response presented below. Last time out, I answered the first of Nic’s Questions, so that brings us to #2 on the list…

ATGMs-Mike

The Great Handout Question: Pre-Campaign

Player pre-campaign handouts can be anything from a single A4 page to a 200-page reference book. You can pack page after page with information. The Great Handout Question is: how much is too much?

This is not as easy to answer in any specific way as you might think.

How long is a piece of string? The answer is, it’s either too short, too long, or exactly the length it needs to be.

The Tolerable Minimum

The bare minimum that you should provide is whatever the player needs to know to generate a character, and to make choices between major character options. In particular, if any choices that are usually available are off the menu, players need to know that going in – even if you don’t explain why to them.

The Acceptable Average

But that is a barely-tolerable minimum. A far better choice is to add any House Rules that the player needs to know. But that can be quite a wide range, and more than half of them might not be relevant to any given combination of race and class, if we’re talking D&D or anything resembling it. In the major series that I wrote at the start of the year, New Beginnings, I encouraged (virtually insisted, in fact) the method that I employed for Fumanor – one or two documents common to everyone and a smaller supplemental document for each race and each class – which are only handed over if appropriate to the needs of that player.

Ah, but how do they know what they want to play without reading them all?

Radical changes can be highlighted in very brief summary form (e.g. “Elves are very different, Sorcerers are completely different, Rangers are not available”) in one of the common documents in brief enough form that a player should be able to cherry-pick three or four of the many combinations (“I was thinking of running a Dwarven Bard, or maybe an Elvish Rogue.”) They can also list two or three alternatives and get the GM’s opinion.

One way to encourage diversity in characters within the group is for there to be limited numbers of each option. “Sorry, all the Dwarves are gone, and so are all the Rogues. You can be an Elvish Bard, or a Human something-else, if you like.”

Another interesting approach – and one that I have some reservations about – is to auction these documents off to the players with starting XP. “You have 2000 starting XP and have to get one race and one class package. First up, how much am I bid for the first of two possible Elvish Briefing Packs?” Setting a maximum number of options that can be bid for prevents anyone from buying them all.

An alternative to the somewhat dubious “auction” proposal is the Quiz, in which – instead of the players paying for information, they get rewarded for having read and assimilated it. A quiz or two with 10 questions worth 50 XP each can net players extra starting XP, or extra starting gold, or extra starting gold in unusual equipment like potions and minor magic items, or whatever. Sure, you have an ulterior motive for this generosity – but greater investment into the campaign should bring some reward, don’t you think? I used this approach quite successfully at the start of the Zenith-3 campaign (I still have the questions filed away somewhere).

One thing that I strongly recommend if you adopt this approach is that each briefing packet include a one-paragraph summary setting forth what the relevant race knows about the other races, or class knows about the other classes, and any noteworthy relationships between the two. “Dwarves sold the Halflings into slavery 400 years ago, and while they were liberated by the Munchkins 100 years later, the two still detest and distrust each other unreservedly. If a Dwarf told a halfling it was raining, the halfling would put his hand out the window to see if it got wet.” or “The Wizard’s Guild is resentful of the tax-exempt status of the Churches and has been teaching all apprentices that Priests are systematically destroying the economy to replace the King with a figurehead appointed by the Supreme Pontiff. The Church, in turn, believes Wizards are in league with the underworld and are to be ceremonially burned at the stake – if the King would let them, which he won’t.”

You don’t have to do this, but it makes life a lot easier in the long run.

A Serious Optimum

One step beyond the Acceptable Mark is ideal, and adds a brief summary of anything that the typical character of campaign starting age would know – depending on their race and class. If each race has a different creation myth, synopsize the appropriate one and include a one-line summary on the heathen theories held by the rest, for example.

I also like to ensure that every race knows some truth about the campaign world that the others don’t, even if they don’t know that theirs is the right story. “The other races may all know that the Elves have an elected Monarch; only the Elves know that his sole purpose is to be a figurehead to those other races, and that he has no actual authority or respect within the Elvish realm, which is secretly guided by the Conclave Of Trees.”

Most people will retain the specifics and details of only about 10% of what they read after a week, if it’s more than a handful of pages in length. Another 10% will be represented by their interpretation of what they have read. The rest? Gone, or – at best – half-remembered. And there will always be one-on-five who simply don’t read everything that you hand out.

It may be enough that they have it on hand, and can reference it and find whatever they are looking for – though you don’t want them doing so during play, you want this stuff to be directly accessible. It’s practically certain that at least one player won’t have read it and one more will have misunderstood part or all of it.

These averages go up with organization, concision, and brevity, and go way way down with additional page-count. They can be enhanced by reinforcement and cross-referencing at a rate barely faster than the page-count goes up – if you’re a good writer. Most GMs aren’t writers of that caliber. It follows that every extra page beyond the barest minimum has to be culled ruthlessly.

To some extent, this can be mitigated by spreading them out in time. These week, the character construction mechanics. Next week, the societies, The week after, the Politics. And so on.

An Extreme Excess

Campaign Briefing Documents are not the place to write your Great Fantasy Novel. There are several good reasons for this.

  • First, it takes a long time to write.
  • Second, you drown your players in artistry when what they need are just the facts, in as accessible and cross-referenced a manner as possible. Information overload is a very real threat.
  • Third, every word of representation confines their capacity for self-expression within a role in the world. The more trouble you go to in finding and expressing a unique ‘voice’ for Elves, or Dwarves, or Wizards, the more narrowly you constrict and constrain the modes of expression for the player seeking to represent one in-game, and the more you force them out of their comfort – and interest – zone. Eventually, they will be so hemmed in that they will have no interest and/or confidence in their ability to play an Elf, or a Dwarf, or a Wizard – and then you’ve lost a player.

You might think you’re helping them find the uniqueness of the archetypes. You aren’t; instead, you are signaling your distrust in their roleplaying abilities, trying to make them actors in your staged production.

There are exceptions, but they are very difficult to quantify. The basic rule of thumb is to think of every possible reason not to do it, then listen to those reasons.

One of the major exceptions is after you’ve been playing for a while, when the players are settled in on their characters, and when you are accommodating what their creativity has offered and not binding them to function within the creative space that you have provided. I’ll get back to this point in a moment, but first:

Delivering the Rest

Obviously, with so much compression, compacting, and outright redacting from your source documents to derive the essential minimum to whatever standard you choose to aim for, there’s a LOT of information that is going to be left out. That information still has to be delivered to the players eventually.

There are lots of tools and techniques available for use as the delivery mechanism for the missing information. The first is to dole it out to the players as take-home reading as they encounter racial, political, or professional archetypes within the game. This can smack of giving the players homework, but they don’t have to read it; you are simply offering something that can enhance the game for them. 90% of them will at least glance at it – eventually – though time is always limited.

You can publish it in a Wiki or a Blog, using the technique suggested in Have WordPress, will game. That lets them explore, annotate, comment, discuss, and participate in the creative process.

You can begin each day’s play with a ‘tales of’ flashback segment in which you narrate the missing campaign background – skipping around to ensure delivery of something relevant to the coming day’s play, or better yet, using some sort of color-coding to distinguish between the story that’s been shared and the story available for you to build the day’s play around. “Hmmm, I haven’t told them about the rise of the thieves’ guild yet, why not an encounter with the guild today?” This hopefully reinforces the content, cementing it in the player’s minds.

I once handed out a talking, self-writing book, the Tome Of Past Destinies. Every three hours or so, game-time, it would add another paragraph of story. Of course, it was gifted to the players by Beelzebub, so it was not only biased in subtle and manipulative ways, it wasn’t completely trusted – but that’s fine.

Those paragraphs would fade after within another three hours or so, game-time, so the players built “Book-stops” into their routine. Sometimes what they got was useful, sometimes it only hinted at something significant, and sometimes it was directly relevant to the cause of whatever situation they had gotten themselves into.

The idea was that each character present or encountered was connected to the lives of their forebears, and hence to the experiences of those ancestors, and so was the world around the PCs; as they traveled, the Tome picked up all the dangling threads of history that were left behind, wrought comprehension from the point of view of the past lives of the PCs and their ancestors, and presented what it found. So there was some degree of association from paragraph to paragraph, but bias and perspective changed without warning or clarification, and occasionally some interesting anecdote would crowd out what the PCs really wanted/needed to know (but that I wanted them to find out the hard way). As a plot device for the delivery of backstory, it worked well.

What enabled it to work even better was a function that Beelzebub didn’t mention – that every now and then, the Tome could subtly rewrite history to serve it’s master’s ends. The written word gives form and truth to history – change the word, and you change the history. The players were smart enough to figure this out, or find it out, and accepted that this would mean that every word they read enhanced Beelzebub’s power and influence over the world – but that was a price they were willing to pay, at least for now, because they had thought of something he hadn’t: They could write in the book, too.

The Backfire Effect

It might seem like the best approach is to deliver as much of the information in-game as possible. For the original Zenith-3 campaign, I had already given the players a history of the game universe and the prior campaign on which it had been built, because that was where their characters were coming from and would have experienced, directly or indirectly. Global disasters and interstellar wars were recent historical events that every character would need to integrate into their backgrounds. That alone was 155 pages of heavily compressed and summarized content.

The plan was for them to receive information about where they were going in-game, in a briefing that would also set in motion various plotlines. Sounds good in theory, doesn’t it? My good intentions backfired. You can read about the near-disaster that ensued (if you haven’t already) in My Biggest Mistakes: Information Overload in the Zenith-3 Campaign.

My conclusion was that while information overload in handouts was a genuine and dire possibility to be avoided at almost all costs, most of the alternatives were worse. ‘Give out the handouts and let the players assimilate them at their own pace’ is a much better solution!

I learned a lot from that disaster.

Currently, things have stabilized into the employment of a new in-game routine. I incorporate what the players need to know, and the opportunity to learn it, into each adventure, having at least given them a solid foundation in pre-campaign briefing material. A page or two of narrative might stall the pace of the action for a while, but because the players are involved in finding and analyzing the material, and it’s all directly or indirectly relevant to the adventure at hand, that’s an acceptable compromise, and keeps them interested. I can even use one encounter/adventure, and the information packet that comes with it, to establish things that are going to be far more important in a later adventure, making the world seem more consistent and complete, more real.

The Inclusion of Misinformation

I may have hinted at this, but wanted to bring it out into the open. There is absolutely nothing wrong with giving the players misinformation in campaign briefings. There are two sides to every conflict, and each will document and think differently about it, save in cases of total defeat. If there was a war between Elves and Dwarves, both sides will see that historical event differently. Elvish history will record their perspective and Dwarfish history, theirs. And, should those events ever become relevant in the modern-day campaign, the different narratives (each completely internally consistent) will then come out into the open. It might be that neither side knows the full, true story, and both are wrong in significant details!

A telltale giveaway that information might be unreliable is the choice of phrasing – “The Legend Of”, “The Myth Of”, “The Tale Of,” etc.

I only ever insert willful misinformation when (a) I have a plotline involved that will revolve around the misinformation to at least some extent in mind, and (b) it makes sense for the information to be recorded or documented incorrectly, from a given source’s perspective and established character traits.

The Great Handout Question: Pre-game

I’ve used Pre-game handouts from time to time, but they are always irritating to me. It ultimately means that you start by handing the stack of pages to one player, who passes on each page as he reads to the player on his left, who in turn reads and passes it on. And all the while, you’re sitting there, twiddling your thumbs, and burning game time.

I’ve had greater success delivering such handouts electronically before the game, but the 10% retention rule still applies, so that’s an imperfect solution, too.

I’ll still fall back on this as a last resort, but will look hard for a way to deliver the information in-game through roleplay before accepting it as the most viable solution to a problem.

Length is a major issue. A single page – that can be coped with. Two or three pages – less so. More is too much unless you have absolutely no choice.

The Great Handout Question: In-Game

The same length standards apply to in-game handouts. These are essentially a mechanism for providing players with a permanent record of information that is to become relevant later in the adventure; you can deliver it in-game at the time, but giving a copy that the players can re-read and digest at their leisure helps ensure that the information is on-tap when needed.

The current adventure in the Pulp Campaign, for example, has made use of two such handouts. The first is a writeup on the magical properties of jade, and most of it is cribbed from a number of resources on the web – with just a line or two inserted that supports the adventure. The second was more substantially rewritten, and reinvents Kali significantly – while staying faithful to the source material in most respects. It simply puts a new and decidedly more pulpish spin on things.

Each of these is just two pages long – and much of one is taken up with a prominent illustration. By delivering this information to a single PC in-game, he can be reading it while you are doing something else with the other PCs at the table; when he is finished, we usually call a five minute break so that we can discuss it with him in private. He then delivers a precis of the content to the other players, exactly as his character would do in any subject in which the character was an expert and the others needed a quick education.

(Eventually, I will publish these handouts – and a bunch of other stuff – here at Campaign Mastery. The illustrations I might not be able to use, however – they are probably subject to copyright.

The Great Handout Question: Post-game

For anything longer than those two or three pages, this is by far the better way to go, because it gives the players time to read and digest the information. Be aware that everyone leads a busy life, and will have limited time to devote to such activities, and that this approach may mean that you aren’t available to discuss what they have read and clarify any misunderstandings.

Where there was a lot of potential for that to be a problem, or there was a lot of material, I have occasionally arranged a private social get-together with the player concerned. We can talk about gaming, about other things of interest, maybe play a two-player game or two – and talk about the campaign briefing material, its significance, and its implications.

But don’t assume that a given player will be available without pre-arranging it – before you commit to this approach!

In conclusion

Handouts can be a great solution to the difficult problem of putting backstory into the hands of the players. They aren’t the only solution, and they have definite limitations and drawbacks to take into consideration when planning how and when to deploy them, but the bottom line is that they can be infinitely better than some of the alternatives, no matter how attractive and plausible those alternatives may have seemed at the time!

Further Reading:

This isn’t the first time that I’ve discussed handouts.

I wrote about them at length in the latter parts of the New Beginnings series, as I mentioned earlier.

They were also (quite obviously) the specific subject of discussion in A Helping Handout.

Readers who want more thoughts on the subject should check out those articles.

My Original Answer

Here’s my original answer to Nic, presented verbatim:

quote start 120quote end 120

Usually yes, sometimes no. The key is to make sure the players have everything they need in order to make character development decisions – so if you intend to radically change Elves, then any player contemplating a character that has anything to do with Elves needs to know about it prior to play. But I have used a post deus-ex-machina to totally reinvent the background that the PCs knew (justifying them starting ignorant), and have also once stated that ages 5-13 comprised a character’s first level, and then ran a number of mini-scenarios that hit the high points of history along the way, as the characters learned about their world – so, again, justifying starting them ignorant.

You can see why I described it as “barely adequate” at the start of this article!

About the contributors:

As always, I have to thank my fellow GMs for their time and their insights:

Blair-atgms

Blair:
Blair Ramage was one of the first players of D&D in Australia, using a photocopied set of the rules brought over from the US before they were on sale here in Australia. When the rulebooks finally reached these shores, he started what is officially the fourth D&D campaign to be run in this country. He dropped out of gaming for a long time before being lured back about 15 years ago, or thereabouts. For the last eight years, he has been co-GM of the Adventurer’s Club campaign with Mike.

ATGMs-Saxon

Saxon:
Saxon has been vaguely interested in gaming since the early 1980s, but only since going to university in the late 1980s has the opportunity for regular play developed into solid enthusiasm. Currently he plays in two different groups, both with alternating GMs, playing Dungeons and Dragons 4th ed., the Hero system (Pulp), a custom-rules superhero game (also based on the Hero System), Mike’s “Lovecraft’s Legacies” Dr Who campaign, WEG-era Star Wars, FASA-era Star Trek, and a Space 1889/Call of Cthulhu hybrid. When it’s his turn he runs a Dr Who campaign. He cheerfully admits to being a nerd, even if he’s not a particularly impressive specimen. He was a social acquaintance of both Mike and Blair long before he joined their games.

ATGMs-Nick

Nick:
Nick also lives in Sydney. He started roleplaying (D&D) in the mid-1980s in high school with a couple of friends. That group broke up a year later, but he was hooked. In late ’88 he found a few shops that specialized in RPGs, and a notice board advertising groups of gamers led him to his first long-term group. They started with AD&D, transferred that campaign to 2nd Ed when it came out, tinkered with various Palladium roleplaying games (Heroes Unlimited met Nick’s long-term fascination with Marvel’s X-Men, sparking his initial interest in superhero roleplaying), and eventually the Star Wars RPG by West End Games and Marvel Super Heroes Advanced Set. This also led to his first experiences with GMing – the less said about that first AD&D 2nd Ed campaign, the better (“so much railroading I should have sold tickets”).

His second time around, things went better, and his Marvel campaign turned out “halfway decent”. That group broke up in 1995 when a number of members moved interstate. Three years later, Nick heard about what is now his regular group while at a science-fiction bookstore. He showed up at one of their regular gaming Saturdays, asked around and found himself signed up for an AD&D campaign due to start the next week.

A couple of weeks later, He met Mike, and hasn’t looked back since. From ’98 he’s been a regular player in most of Mike’s campaigns. There’s also been some Traveller and the Adventurer’s Club (Pulp) campaign, amongst others. Lately he’s been dipping a tentative toe back into the GMing pool, and so far things have been going well.

ATGMs-IanG

Ian:
Ian Gray resides in Sydney Australia. He has been roleplaying for more than 25 years, usually on a weekly basis, and often in Mike Bourke’s campaigns. From time to time he GMs but is that rarest of breeds, a person who can GM but is a player at heart. He has played many systems over the years including Tales Of The Floating Vagabond, Legend Of The Five Rings, Star Wars, D&D, Hero System, Gurps, Traveller, Werewolf, Vampire, Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay, and many, many more.

Over the last couple of years he has been dirtying his hands with game design. He was a contributor to Assassin’s Amulet, the first time his name appeared in the credits of a real, live, RPG supplement. Recently he has taken to GMing more frequently, with more initial success than he was probably expecting (based on his prior experiences). Amongst the other games he now runs, Mike and Blair currently play in his Star Wars Edge Of The Empire Campaign.

ATGMs-Mike

Mike:
Mike is the owner, editor, and principle author at Campaign Mastery, responsible for most of the words of wisdom (or lack thereof) that you read here. You can find him on Twitter as gamewriterMike, and find out more about him from the “About” page above.

Next in this series: The answer to Nic’s third question, maybe inadequately: The GMs Help Network.


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