Image: FreeImages.com / Nina Briski

The Backstory

I was posting a reply to @RPGKitchen on Twitter last night (relative to commencing this article, now about 3 weeks ago) when a stray thought suggested itself.

It was recently posited that starting a campaign or adventure off with the characters engaged in activities that are relatively familiar to the players, such as gambling, is a great way to introduce new players to the art of roleplaying.

I suddenly found myself wondering if the same was true, when generalized, for more experienced players?

What would happen when a relatively expert cook played a character who was a reasonably expert cook, in an appropriate setting to display that skill – like a Kitchen?

A little thought soon made it apparent that what seemed like playing to the Players’ strengths could be a recipe for disaster!

A Question Of Catastrophe

Here’s an inescapable chain of logic to prove the point:

1. Player knows more than the GM
2. Player confers all his knowledge and skill to the PC
3. Therefore PC knows more than the GM on the subject

All that remains to be shown, then, is that a PC knowing more about a subject than the GM does can be a serious problem. What are the consequences and ramifications of this situation?

The ‘Calamity Solved’ problem

For a start, it’s hard for the GM to pose a problem related to the activity. Given the expertise that the PC has to draw upon, problems tend to be either simply solved, or impossible to solve, but the GM doesn’t know this because of his relative ignorance of the subject.

That puts him in a difficult position: any challenge he poses either stalls the game (impossible problem that the GM thought could be solved) or is solved far more easily than he thought possible (“Okay, I add a quarter-of-a-teaspoon of Cream Of Tartars” and fold it through the batter”, “I put the cake-tin in a pan of water and then return both to the oven”, “I ice the sides of the cake as well and then put the whole thing in the refrigerator for ten minutes to help it set more quickly”). This displays the problem-solving skills of the character that result from his expertise but it means that there’s no need for the running-around-town (or whatever) that the GM thought would be needed, and that was his method of transitioning from the kitchen problem to the actual adventure.

You don’t need to watch many episodes of the many cooking competitions on television to realize that such problem-solving is a key capability of any half-decent cook. (“The Lemons are too small and won’t give as much juice as you need.” “Okay, I lay each on it’s side and roll it around a couple of times to break the internal cells in the lemons and extract that little bit extra juice from them – that usually works.”)

The ‘Focal Skew’ problem

Instead of the big picture being the focus of the narrative, the expertise of the character shrinks that focus to something much smaller because that solves the immediate problem. What’s more, because he didn’t have the expertise to anticipate that, this focus is skewed onto a side-issue that the GM wasn’t expecting. He can probably improvise his way back out, but it’s never a good sign when you have to start making things up on the spot thirty seconds into a planned adventure.

The ‘Confidence Issues’ problems

This sort of thing can affect the confidence that the player has in the GM. To demonstrate this, take any subject that you know a reasonable amount about, and think back to a time when you met someone who was pretending to know that subject but who didn’t know what they were talking about. I would wager that anything else that person said was undermined in its believability as a result.

There’s a very well-known TV ad (from 2005-6) here in Australia from a couple of years ago. A father is driving his young son to school when the son asks “Dad, why did they build the Great Wall of China?”

The father, not knowing the answer, replies, “That, that was, during the time of the Emperor Nasi Goreng. And, ah, it was to keep the rabbits out. Too many rabbits, in China.”

The child looks a little uncertain at this information. But this is his father! So he doesn’t probe further.

In the next scene, the child is in school, standing in front of the class, as the teacher announces, “And now, Daniel will do his talk on China”…
Google search results obtained March 24, 2016. I’ve added smileys to indicate which results are to be taken seriously and which are tongue-in-cheek expansions of, or references to, the ‘Rabbit-proof Wall’ advert. It may help readers understand the source of the father’s idea to read about Australia’s . Click on the image to open a larger (more legible) version in a new tab. Thanks to for the smiley faces (I tweaked the colors of the serious one).

This was a TV ad for an internet provider that was so successful at demonstrating why parents (and students) needed an internet connection that it doubled the growth rate of the provider.

Even today, ten years later, the ad remains part of the popular zeitgeist Down-under, as shown by these links (both of which will let you watch the ad): link 2 (2013), link 1 (2012), or check out the Google search results to the right.

Would you ever trust anything that this parent told you ever again, if that was you?

But an even bigger issue can be the effect on the GM’s self-confidence – and sometimes, that’s all we have to fall back on. Because, like the child in the ad, it’s the GM who is potentially humiliated and exposed as ignorant and foolish.

It’s not easy being a GM, you can have to work hard for your fun. There is absolutely no good reason for making it harder for yourself than it has to be.

I have known GMs who were new to the job and who would have dropped out of the hobby completely after an experience like that.

The ‘Spotlight Lock’ Problem

And then, there is the problem of spotlight lock. Compare “I mix self-raising flour, sugar, milk, eggs, and vanilla extract to form a batter, then I add crushed walnuts which I have lightly toasted in a 400° oven, I line my cake-tin with baking paper coated with softened butter and sprinkled with a light dusting of castor sugar and walnut crumb that I’ve blitzed in a food processor, pour in the batter, and sprinkle some more of the sugar-and-walnut mixture on the top. I bake it in a 350°-oven for about 40 minutes or until a skewer comes out clean. The dusting will form a walnutty-toffee crust on the cake that should look and taste fantastic, accompanied by some whipped cream,” to “I bake a walnut-cake.”

The first clearly shows far greater expertise and has far greater verisimilitude, but for a solid four minutes or more, the ‘expert player’ has held the spotlight locked onto themselves.

What’s more, the same thing could recur every time the character gets a chance to show off their expertise.

(PS: The recipe sounds about right, but I made it up off the top of my head, so if you try it, don’t complain to me if it doesn’t work!)

Problems Galore, how about some solutions?

As you can see, there are plenty of potential problems that can arise. But all of these can be avoided, with a little care.

Be clear about the level of detail you require.
Spotlight Lock derives from confusion between the player and GM about how much detail the GM wants in response to a reasonably generalized question. The best solution is, ironically, to be more specific in the questions you ask:

     GM: “Okay, so you’re baking a cake for [NPC X], whose favorite is walnut cake. How long will making a cake like that normally take?”
     Player: “About 20 minutes to make and 40 minutes to cook.”
     GM: “Are you doing anything to fancy it up?”
     Player: “I’ll put a walnut-and-toffee crust on it.”
     GM: “Anything else?”
     Player: “I’ll top it with whipped cream and a couple of whole walnuts as decoration.”

That exchange takes almost as long as the “spotlight lock” example it refers to, but the spotlight is not locked, it is bouncing back-and-forth between the GM and the player, and that implies to the other players that it could bounce onto them at any moment. What’s more, the information density is far less than in the “spotlight lock” example; as a result, the exchange comes across not as the player showing off his expertise, but as the player interacting with the situation (most experienced players will adopt this ‘limited input’ approach automatically, one of the benefits of playing with them).

Once a standard has been set, you can ask more open-ended questions in the expectation that the same level of detail will be observed, enabling you to reserve your “specific questions” for when you genuinely need more details.

Do your homework.
If you want to present a problem for the PC to use their expertise to solve (EG: not enough lemon juice), hop onto the internet in advance and use Google to search for solutions. It only takes a few seconds to get solutions – search for “get more juice from lemons”. If the problem you want to pose is that the cake is not rising properly, try “fixing cake not rising”.

Be An “Expert In Everything”.
The advice that I offer in “The Expert In Everything” is right on-point to solving these problems.

Look for problems before they manifest.
I have to admit that I’ve never done what I’m about to propose; but, at the same time, there have been times when having done so would have saved me an awful lot of grief. Get each of your players to list all the skills their characters have on a sheet of paper, plus a couple of extras covering things that don’t get described by specific skills, such as different types of combat – archery, melee weaponry, etc – and anything else that might be relevant such as “medieval history” and “medieval society”. Then get them to rate their own knowledge in each of these areas on a 1-5 scale: 1 is “know it exists” to “know a little”, 2 is “read about it in school but don’t know much”, 3 is “spotty and variable depth of knowledge from reading one or two books or watching one or two documentaries or TV shows”, 4 is “a very good lay education in the subject”, and 5 is “could qualify as an expert” or better.

Anything rated 3 could be a problem; anything rated 4 or 5 will be a problem on occasion, if you don’t prepare accordingly.

Take advantage of player’s expertise.
If you are sufficiently well-organized, you can often take advantage of the in-house expert resource. If you need a cooking problem that’s difficult to solve but that can be managed with some effort, ask the player. Don’t tell him why, or what the context is going to be, just ask for the information you need, some time before you are going to use it.

Design your adventures with an eye toward your ignorance.
Scene 3 of your adventure opens with a PC being confronted with a problem as a result of the buildup in scenes 1 and 2. But you know very little about the subject, and your research hasn’t given you any easy answers.

As with any decision open to the PCs, plan multiple paths for the adventure to take according to how difficult a solution to the problem turns out to be. “If this problem is easily solved, go to scene 3a. If it can be solved only with a lot of fussy and difficult work, go to scene 3b. If the problem can’t be solved because of the circumstances, go to scene 3c.” This effectively divides scene three into four parts: a before, which contains the narrative outlining the problem and the complicating circumstances, and three alternative resolutions to the scene, only one of which will actually take place in the adventure. This is exactly the same as “You have a choice of three doors, which one are you picking?”

Let the expert provide part of the narrative.
There will be occasions when you can use the presence of an “expert” on any given subject to save you valuable prep time. Instead of researching and writing a narrative passage, simply toss the metaphoric “ball” to the expert – even if that player’s PC knows absolutely nothing about the subject. I’ve done this a number of times in the Zenith-3, Lovecraft’s Legacies, and Adventurer’s Club campaigns, less frequently in my Fantasy campaigns.

This has all sorts of benefits. It shares spotlight time with a player who might not be getting much at this particular point in the adventure; it compliments that player on his expertise; it saves the GM prep time; it makes the players aware that the GM is aware of them as individuals… the list goes on.

The Quite-manageable Perils Of Knowing Too Much

While the pitfalls of a player who knows too much are very real, they are not difficult to solve, and can even be transformed into genuine assets without too much effort. Expertise is always a useful resource; what you do with it is up to you.