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Today, as I waited for the bus, I contemplated the relationship between the 80s/90s concept of “Personal Space” and the Mid-Pandemic concept of “Social Distancing”.

After all, the two mean much the same thing – ‘don’t get too close’, ‘give me enough room’.

Invading someone’s personal space was as perceived as threatening as invading someone’s social distance is now, though the threat implied was often more inchoate, abstract, and nebulous, and is now implicit.

It struck me that the world of difference between how the two are perceived related directly to the framework through which the phenomena were perceived – a filter that changed the context from one of personal comfort and security to one of health and well-being.

That led to thoughts about other things changing in the way they were perceived due to a change in context.

This is Campaign Mastery’s contribution to the March 2021 Blog Carnival, hosted by Roll4.

When Players Ask A Question

It’s usually pretty obvious from context, but there are two major issues that the GM needs to resolve every time a player asks the question:

1. Who’s Asking?
2. Who’s The Question Addressed To?

If you can’t answer these, you don’t know how to properly answer the question being put to you. Getting one of these wrong is where a great many player-GM interactions go off the rails.

Who’s Asking?

Is it the player asking, or are they functioning as a mouthpiece for their character asking an NPC?

An NPC can prevaricate, lie, or evade the question. The GM should do none of these – at least in theory. In practice, telling the absolute whole truth can be destructive to the adventure and the fun, so there will be times when the GM has to prevaricate, lie, or evade the question – without seeming to do so. That’s a side-issue to today’s subject – I refer the interested reader to The Heirarchy Of Deceipt: How and when to lie to your players, my article on that specific topic.

There are three potential targets for a question. An PC can address two of these – there is no mechanism for a PC to address the GM except through the agency of an intermediary NPC or player. Similarly, a Player can’t question an NPC, only a PC or another NPC can do that.

Who’s the Question Addressed To?

Is the question being asked addressed to an NPC, The GM, or even another PC? Another pivotal question in terms of what is, or is not, off-limits within the answer.

Quite obviously, an NPC is perfectly entitled to answer “No”, and so is a PC. But things aren’t quite that simple. So let’s look at the three options in greater detail, very briefly.

An NPC

If a PC asks an NPC a question, the GM should answer with the truth as the NPC sees it – unless they would lie. So that has to be the next question in such cases – one of character and morals, of circumstances and how the NPC would react to them.

Another PC

If the player is actually asking a question of another PC, using the voice of his own character, it’s not the GM’s place to involve himself in the answer, though he may need to ensure that the PC being questioned was in a position to answer – in-game environmental questions may prevent the question being clearly heard, for example. Things become more problematic if the PC being questioned responds with a mistruth or error of some kind.

The GM can correct the misinformation immediately, choose to let the error be corrected later, or decide that the PC is deliberately lying to the second PC for whatever reason (his prerogative).

Once upon a time, I would have said that it was not the GM’s place to be the arbiter of truth in such situations – but I’ve seen adventures ruined by inadvertent lapses of memory and have consequently changed my position.

First, the GM has to determine whether or not the PC in question is deliberately lying or not. If there is any doubt of it, he may need to take the player responsible aside and have him or her make some sort of roll to be convincing. But it’s really difficult to do this without tipping of the player whose character is being lied to. It’s often easier to let the player know that his character is being lied to, trusting in his ability to separate player knowledge from character knowledge. It’s then up to the GM to enforce what the character believes and what choices that permits, like a good editor or director.

Once this has been eliminated as a possibility, it becomes clear that the error is an inadvertent one, and that the ‘record’ will eventually need to be corrected. The next question is whether or not the PC in error is answering the question to the best of his ability, but reporting a personal theory as fact, or it’s simply the player having a memory failure. In the former case, it’s entirely reasonable to let the misinformation stand for a while, leading the players down a garden path of their own devising – so long as it doesn’t harm the ultimate story. Either way, I will generally make a secret roll on behalf of the PC or PCs hearing the answer, giving the characters a chance (however slim) to notice the defects (if any) in the mistaken beliefs of the PC – eventually.

Generally, the better a detective/investigator the character(s) hearing the misinformation are, the more likely they are to identify any flaws in the story being presented, either immediately, or as soon as contradictory evidence comes to hand. Characters who have neither skill would default to their Intelligence, probably applied in an unskilled manner – those are questions for the particular game system. I avoid having such die rolls function as a warning by occasionally making them anyway – and a failure can lead the character to find spurious holes in the logic.

All this is very delicate ground for the GM – he is representing the history of the world and functioning as the interface between the game system and the players, exactly as he should, and should (generally) be open and honest when functioning in that capacity – but doing so may require dishonesty on his part, especially if there are parts of the ‘official story’ that the players don’t know! Above all, he needs to retain the trust of the players, or the game is doomed.

It has been necessary, from time to time, to forestall suggestions of retroactively rewriting history to foil or frustrate the players, to pen a quick note, date it, seal it in an envelope, and give it to a third player (if there is one) and have HIM (or her) write the date on the envelope across the sealed flap, to hole unopened until the GM needs to re-establish his credibility. Such measures may be rarely required, but you don’t know whether or not they will be until the day of revelation arrives; the time to prepare for this contingency is immediately.

But it’s not even this simple (and I think we’re a long way from ‘simple’ at this point) – a mistruth can only divert the players from the true path for so long before it needs to be corrected or the frustration they will feel over wasting their time will outweigh the fun of playing the game. The magnitude of the error or deception is a primary factor – having their real enemy turn out to be someone who has been hiding in plain sight is a big enough secret to last until the final adventure of a campaign, smaller errors and deceptions have a shorter shelf-life.

As an example, a misinterpretation led a player in one of my campaigns to assume that a certain group of Aliens were going to invade the solar system. He began drawing up elaborate plans to prepare the world for fighting off this invasion – plans that would have totally dominated the next year of game play (real time). These would all have been revealed as wasted time when the purported ‘invasion’ didn’t happen, so I made the judgment call on behalf of the campaign that another PC would raise doubts about the assumptions and interpretations of the first PC before things went too far. As a result, the ‘defense net’ went from being a crash-priority project to a ‘nice to have’ long-term project, and the campaign stayed on track, enabling the PCs to be effective at least some of the time. Some years later, when a for-real attempted alien invasion took place, the defenses planned by the PCs were only partially complete, adding to the drama of the situation. It may have been more ‘correct’ to let the players wander off down their chosen garden path, but in my judgment the campaign was going to be more fun for everyone to participate in without that distraction.

On another occasion, a different player added 2 and 2 and came up with 6, in the form of another putative invasion. He (and his character) didn’t tell anyone else at the time, but began quietly investigating and making plans on his own. Confirmation bias soon set in, and the player began to rationalize away the hints and clues that his interpretation was incorrect. Because this was very much a background project, not the driving force of the gameplay at the time, I decided to let things play out in-game. In time, the truth was revealed as a plot twist on the putative ‘invasion’, catching the players off-guard. It worked well, but required constant vigilance in game prep from me – I didn’t want to put myself in a position of explicitly stating that ‘the invasion’ was going to happen when I knew it wasn’t.

It’s worth briefly examining the differences between these two cases.

★ — different characters — The first was a character who should have known better from the information provided, to reach the incorrect conclusion that he did, he had to ignore half of the evidence given to him. I gave the player the choice (by raising doubts) – to stick with the character’s mistaken belief or realize that his case was shaky and make it the player’s mistake but not the character’s (which accurately describes the real situation). He didn’t take the hint. The second took circumstantial evidence and built a house of cards from it, but made allowances for that.

★ — different players — The first was a player who leapt to conclusions and could get petty about things if he thought the GM was wasting his character’s time; the second was a player who was more cautious about leaping to conclusions (but did so on this occasion anyway) and didn’t regard any situation in which he was actually playing as a waste of his time as a player. I knew they would react differently.

★ — different game impact — The first would have seriously derailed everyone else’s fun at the game table; the second would not. More to the point, the first would have hijacked the entire campaign to no good end, while the second would not. These were major factors in my decisions.

★ — different GM experience — I had 20 years more experience and expertise under my belt in between the two events. If the first had arisen at the time of the second, it’s just possible that I would have handled it differently. I still think I handled both correctly, given the differences outlined above, but I might have handled the first situation differently if I’d had that expertise at the time. Particularly relevant to the handling of the second event was having handled the first one, so who knows?

An NPC, Redux

A more subtle correction is to use an NPC to ask questions of the PC that illuminate errors in their thinking. This can only happen if you have an NPC in a position to ask such questions, and the GM has to rigorously stay within the NPCs character. In the first example offered above, I had this option, but didn’t think to employ it (and should have); in the second, I didn’t but could have engineered it over time. Why didn’t I? Because I made a second judgment call, one stemming from the difference in game impact, that the campaign would actually be enhanced with the eventual plot twist revelation.

The GM

And so, having considered all the alternatives, the only case remaining is that the player is asking a question of the GM, and that’s what the bulk of this article is about.

Three types of questions to the GM

When this happens, the player wants one of three things: Information, Confirmation or Permission. And, in all three cases, Johnn’s Rule Of Thumb – Say ‘Yes’ But Get There Quick – has to be considered. I would also draw attention to the comments, which add considerable rounding to the principle. But each is just a little different.

Information

Can the character reasonably get an answer – or should the answer be “you don’t know”? I earlier suggested that a character couldn’t communicate directly with the GM – but this is clearly a case where that is what is happening, using the player as a proxy. An example might be a question about game history, or in-game history, or the in-game world. What the player asking the question is really asking is, “what does my character know about [subject].” Which means there can be few blanket answers to the question. This can also be a circumstance in which the GM has to lie to the player – not about what his character knows, but about how accurate “what he knows” is.

Is it reasonable for the GM to give an answer, with the full authority of his position? The other acceptable type of information query is a rules-related issue. These can then be subdivided into those requiring an immediate answer, and those that can be deferred. Always defer if you can, because it lets you look up rule books and give an authoritative answer; if you can’t defer, you may be able to answer immediately, or you may have an existing house rule that covers the answer, or you may need to formulate an ad-hoc ruling on the spot, all of which are way beyond the scope of this article. But I do want to take the opportunity to suggest that you give a preliminary assumption that the players can use as a basis for their decisions – “there is probably a way [for your character] to do that, but I’m not sure and need time to give a definitive answer,” or “that seems unlikely to work, but I’ll have to check the rules to be sure.”.

The “Yes” process in either case is to provide the information requested, at least in part, of whatever the appropriate level of reliability is, with appropriate caveats.

The “No” process focuses on what has to change before the information requested can be provided, in other words, under what conditions you can say “Yes”. That might be “give me time to look into it” in the case of a rules question that can be deferred, or it might be “You will need to find and consult an expert” or “…a native” or (in general) “…someone who knows”.

Confirmation

Confirmations are more problematic, because many different things can offered up for consideration.

An understanding of game history? – could be right or wrong, and the character might or might not know the answer, anyway. An impression of the game world, or the way it works – could be right or wrong or partially correct, could be comprehensive or limited or even too narrowly-drawn, and there’s all sorts of scope for misinformation, to boot. A novel use of the game rules? – getting more problematic, treat as a request for information. A theory of some sort? – even more nuanced and difficult, with questions of characterization, background, prejudice and predisposition, assumptions and logic and philosophy and belief – on the part of both the character AND the GM!

It’s really hard to be an expert in everything but sometimes you have to be, or at least be able to fake it.

I generally treat any non-rules request for confirmation in two parts. First, I have to treat the question as a request for information – what does the character know about the subject? I then have to map that knowledge onto the picture that the player wants to have confirmed. The result is undoubtedly more nuanced than simply providing information, because it enters the realm of interpretation of that information. In effect, the player is asking for assistance in running his character, and that enters delicate territory.

A definitive declaration is extremely dangerous, because it will be taken as gospel by both character AND player. In general, a softer confirmation is preferable – “That seems reasonable from your character’s point of view”, or “You seem to be overlooking something that your character would not,” followed by the specifics, or something of the sort. Again, your answer might be “You can’t be sure of your reasoning/interpretation until you consult…”

This should be treated as an in-character dialogue, or should steer the character in the direction of such an in-character dialogue, with all the caveats that get attached to such dialogues.

Be especially wary if a player ever asks, “All I want is a simple yes or no,” – while you may be able to provide such a clear answer, or may be able to offer a “yes, and”, “yes, but”, or “no, but”, it’s at least as likely that you have to answer “That’s an oversimplification” or “The question can’t be answered in those terms”.

Permission

The most difficult type of question is a request for Permission. This takes the form of “Can we do [X]?” or “Why don’t we…” or some similar construct. Once again, having addressed all the alternative interpretations of the question, we are now in a position to narrow the focus of this article. The most dangerous format of this is when the player assumes that the answer will be a “yes” and simply declares what his action will be.

We are now solidly into the territory in which Johnn’s advice is directly relevant, and for all but the most experienced GMs, it’s a good guideline, as the comments on his article make clear. This article will explore some of the nuances involved, and how to approach them.

Saying Yes

So, the general principle is to say ‘yes’ in some form to any serious player proposition. As usual, it’s not that simple.

Saying Yes When you want to say Yes

Sounds easy enough, right? It’s not, because you don’t want it to stand out from the alternatives too much. So that means toning down the affirmation. “That sounds as though it might work” or “You can’t think of anything better” or even “That might be worth a try” are much better choices – not ringing endorsements. This has the side-benefit of keeping the players uncertain as to whether or not a plan will work, and hence attentive to the game play. Throw in a couple of obstacles for the players / PCs to overcome on the way, and the somewhat mild approval is amply justified – and reflected in something more than a straightforward Linear Plot.

Saying Yes When you are unsure

The best approach in this circumstance is to take a “No” and apply a similar watering-down to it. “You have your doubts”, or “You could try that if you want” or something along those lines. This gives you cover to take your time on a final decision while throwing challenges and difficulties at the players. If you ultimately decide “no”, all you need is a challenge that is going to be tougher than the players think they can cope with; this replaces the original problem with a new one, that of getting past this Significant Problem. On the other hand, it the player’s plan seems to come together, even if it wasn’t what the GM expected, he can pretend to have been saying “yes” all along – but making it difficult enough to keep the players guessing.

Saying Yes When you want to say No

This is the hardest one of the lot. So much so that, once more having dealt with the alternatives, it’s time to drill deeper into the subject and refocus on this most difficult of propositions – because I have five ways to say “yes” when you mean “no”.

5 Ways to Say Yes and mean No

As a general rule, what you want to do in this circumstance is to say ‘yes’ in such a way that the players decide to make a different choice. This is a more traditional type of Magician’s Force, in other words – linguistic judo, oratorical manipulation. These are not easy techniques to master, I’ll be the first to admit, though, that some are easier than others. Start with those and pull out the others on occasions when you are unsure of a ‘yes’ or ‘no’ – get it right, and the players will read it as a ‘no’, don’t and they will read it as a ‘yes’. Otherwise, proceed as described above; this gives you the practice that you need to master the others and add them to your repertoire.

1. Enthusiasm / ‘That Sounds Too Easy’

Technique number 1 is to Oversell your response – not by too much, mind. Excessive enthusiasm on the part of the GM touches a psychological chord in the players that makes them hesitant and uncertain, resonating with the dim but glowing embers of antagonism that always exist between players and GM. Sometimes, all it takes is a smug grin, and a deliberately shifty look in the eyes. If those aren’t enough, you can offer another PC a skill or stat roll (ignoring the result) to get the impression that “That sounds too easy” – or even put those exact words into the mouth of an NPC. But, if you do this, be sure to have identified some fatal flaw that you can then proffer to complete the hatchet job, no matter how improbable – a “but, what if…”

You are frequently aided in this by the players themselves, who will respond by poking around the plan looking for weaknesses. You can stimulate such discussions with cues such as telling a player, “You” [meaning their PC] “idly ponder the possibility that this is…” – possible conclusions include “a Trap”, “a Conspiracy”, “a Trick”, “a Con Job”, “exactly what they want you to do”, and so on. They will generally interpret this as the GM giving them a hint, which is enough to engage that mild paranoia.

Note that this technique can fall completely flat if there is a general impression that the GM is the player’s enemy. If that’s the case, their paranoid-radar will already be at full-strength, and the proposal will generally have had all it’s tender spots probed before it gets presented to the GM, or the other players. It can also fail if over-used..

2. Potential Consequences

Fortunately, it’s not the only way to skin this particular cat. Another choice – when the reason you want to say ‘no’ is because of the possible consequences or complications – is to say “That will work just fine if everything goes according to plan – but here’s what might happen if it doesn’t….”

Once again, the player’s natural mild paranoia about the GM’s intentions will usually come to the fore, unless they (correctly) interpret this as an attempt to manipulate them. And, if they turn out to have an answer to every objection that you raise, then they might end up convincing you to take your understated “no” and turn it into an equally-mild “yes” in your own mind. Sometimes, you have no choice but to go with the players’ plans, even when those aren’t what you wanted to happen.

3. Lobster In The Pot

Sometimes, you want to say ‘no’ because you legitimately don’t think it will work, perhaps because of something you know but the players don’t – yet. The key to such situations is staying flexible – “If that’s what you want to do, go for it – but you might want to…” Options for completing that sentence include “keep your options open”, or “have a plan ‘B’ ” or “update your last will and testament”. In effect, you are giving the players enough rope and waiting for them to hang themselves – at which point, you can have the (metaphoric) trap-door jam, giving the players the chance to change tack at the last possible moment.

A variation on this approach is for the NPC who brings the situation to the PCs attention have a plan of their own – a particularly bad one. “All you have to do is tame a Dragon and fly it fast enough to evade the all-seeing eye long enough to drop the ring into Mount Doom, nothing to it…”

4. Yes, But… There’s Something You’ve Forgotten/Overlooked

There are times when the direct approach is the best, particularly if the plan being proposed relies on the situation being unchanged by the time of the Confrontation. Feeling the need for precision and speed in order to keep the enemy on the defensive is the usual result, and those are usually mutually-incompatible goals. Adding those requirements generally raises the difficulty enough to make a ‘too easy’ plan a viable, playable, choice.

5. Yes, and here’s how

The final technique that I’m going to highlight is best used when there is a chance of success, no matter how slim it might be; you then list all the things that have to be done to maximize that chance. If they seem excessively onerous, or unlikely to succeed, the “yes” becomes a “no”. Make sure that they take notes!

A variation on this approach falls into the “enough rope” classification – by identifying the one most improbable thing that has to go right, and a way (however difficult) to ensure success in that one step right at the start, permits the players to attempt the impossible, fail, and switch to a Plan B without losing too much time.

Or you might mean this literally – describing what the PCs have to do to change a ‘No’ into a ‘Yes, if you want to’. “Okay, so what we have to do is retrieve the Golden Fleece, trade it for the Trumpet Of Doom, Rescue the Blind Trumpeter from the Annex Of Hades, and teach him to play the Ride Of The Valkyries – by this time next week. Piece of cake!” No matter what you had in mind, improvised grand quests on this scale are more than satisfying enough.

Sometimes, you have to say “yes” and mean it – even when you don’t want to.

Other ways

There are undoubtedly other approaches that didn’t come to mind when I was drafting this article. The existence of alternatives, sometimes multiple alternatives, in the above five options are proof enough of that. All you have to do is keep the alternative objectives in mind: either you want the players to be persuaded to look for an alternative despite your seeming willingness to go along with their hair-brained idea, or you want them to convince you that what they are proposing will both work and be entertaining enough for a day’s play. Either works, so if – in some particular situation – you spot another way to achieve one of these ends, go with it!

In fact, though the section below was an afterthought, prompted by item 3 (which was originally a sixth technique in this list), it will add still more techniques to this list before we’re done!

Times when you should say ‘No’?

Although it might seem to directly contradict the general principle of saying ‘yes’ in some form to any serious player proposition, there are times when you can say “No” and mean “Yes”. There are five occasions when a “No” can be used with success.

1 Rules Arbitration

The number one occasion when you HAVE to use a no is when that’s the appropriate answer to a Rules Arbitration question. “I want a spell that always hits the target and does 600d6 damage, usable at will. Can I create a spell like that?”

The answer to this question is not just a ‘no’, it’s a “hell, no” – or a “you can try, but you don’t think it likely, here’s what you need to make the attempt” (and then list several hundred thousand GP worth of magical fittings and an estimated time scale of twelve times the PCs likely life-span).

I mention this here because the latter is an adaption of a technique already described for saying ‘yes’.

2 When ‘no’ means ‘yes’

Sometimes, questions are poorly phrased, such that they contain a negative. “Is there any reason not to…” is a general form for such questions. The inclusion of the negative transforms a ‘no’ in response to an affirmation of the proposed plan. As usual, you should apply qualifiers to moderate the answer.

3 The Indirect ‘No’

There are times when the methods proposed are not uncertain enough, and what is needed is a still more indirect ‘no’. The best example that I have to offer is to list the potential worst-case consequences as outcomes that “might happen”, answering the question with a question of your own: “Are you willing to risk…”

The implication is that you are offering a ‘yes’ but warning that there may be consequences that the players haven’t taken into account. This works well when you are offered short-term solutions to problems that are intended to be long-term campaign elements.

4 Words in someone else’s mouth

Sometimes, you can use an NPC to say things that a GM would never say to a player. “You bone-head, that’s the worst example of cock-eyed optimism that it’s ever been my misfortune to encounter!” is one possibility, though something milder is probably more politic. Still, I have had at least one occasion to go that far – the PCs needed a short-term solution to a problem that didn’t easily yield to such solutions, with one obvious answer to the problem that everyone else at the table perceived. But the one PC on point had a three-part plan, no one part of which had any hope of success – it was the equivalent of ‘find a serial killer, reform him, then retrain him into an assassin that has total loyalty to me, personally, after transplanting his brain into the body of a dog’ – so wildly improbable and over the top as a solution to a minor problem that the NPC failed his ‘control your tongue’ save and let fly with what he really thought.

‘5 No’ with a qualifier

The final option is the inverse of the final option of the five ‘yes’ techniques. You say “No, because…” and then list what has to change for the No to become a yes. This is a perfectly acceptable way of saying ‘yes’ while qualifying your answer.

Never close of avenues of action

There is one phrase that a GM should never want to hear – ‘Well, I don’t know what we can do’. I’ve heard it perhaps two or three times in my GMing ‘career’ of almost 40 years. It indicates that the problem seems so insoluble that the player speaking has given up trying.

I argued in a later comment to Johnn’s article that you should never give an unqualified ‘yes’ or ‘no’ because they close off communications, blocking avenues of action. What the players choose to do is never within your control; at best, you can steer them in a particular direction by anticipating and blocking all the alternatives. How they come to discover those blockages is up to them.

There’s a (probably apocryphal) story I once read about a chimpanzee and a bunch of psychologists: “The psychologists put the chimp in a cage and carefully arranged five different ways by which it could escape, then eagerly watched to see which one would be chosen. The chip escaped a sixth way”. I’ve seen this story representing a monkey, a pig, and an octopus as the heroic creature (as well as the ‘chimp’ version synopsized). Well, it’s at least as true if you use “PCs” as the subject, or it should be.

In an ideal world, the PCs can attempt anything the players can think of, and only the probability of achieving success and the potential ramifications, side-effects, and byproducts should be considerations to discriminate between ideas that could be hair-brained or strokes of genius. In practice, there are too many possibilities implicit in this theory, and players usually require some direction or prompting. That doesn’t entitle the GM to make a decision on the part of the PCs; it does require him to provide clear avenues of action and analyze proposed courses of action on behalf of the players’ characters. What they then choose to do, once the choice is an informed one, is up to them.

Someone once said, “You can lead a PC to water, but you can’t make his player think.” It may be true – but you can encourage a better approach, just through the language that you use. A question for Permission is a PC communing with the world through the GM; the medium linking the two is conversation. Words are your tools for shaping that conversation.