It’s actually very hard to find an image to illustrate ‘Show, Don’t Tell’. I found dramatic images, and poetically-beautiful images, but neither seemed all that quintessentially visual in nature. But then I found this image of a motorcross rider emerging from the waves, by Sarah Richter from Pixabay… I’ve cropped it slightly.

“Show, don’t tell” is a common maxim when it comes to literary entertainments, and something that has been gleefully expropriated as good advice for other media.

That includes TV, Movies, and, of course, Roleplaying Games.

I was thinking about that during the last week, and noting how much easier it was for the other two modern media that I mentioned.

After all, they can proceed from the premise that there is no one-to-one identification between star characters and the audience, permitting producers to put audiences in a privileged position with a flashback sequence, or a prologue sequence.

In the past, I have stolen this leaf out of the TV/Movie playbook to great effect, and have recommended the same to readers here at Campaign Mastery.

I’ve also built entire campaign infrastructures around the concept of “Show, don’t tell”, going so far as to give villains an initial appearance in-campaign purely to establish who they are and what they can do, and discussing the impact on campaign pacing at length.

Today, I’d like to take a fresh look at the whole question of “Show, don’t tell,” offering up some alternative techniques that may not be quite as obvious, and even showing that following the maxim is something that a GM can occasionally get away with not doing – if it’s done properly.

Buckle up, it might be a bumpy ride.

Flashback From Tomorrow

Imagine a crystal ball, a magic item that does nothing but show PCs what the GM wants them to see. What it shows has to be accurate and truthful, mind, but illusions and deceptions are capable of deceiving it, and so are player misinterpretations.

Or perhaps, it’s a one-off – a magic pool or portal that reveals “the past”.

There are two approaches to this technique: the first is to make it an intentional and recurring part of the plot structure within your campaign, and perhaps an entire phase of the campaign might be dedicated to obtaining the item.

The second is to have it be only intermittently available, or available regularly but with a severe cost attached (name me a mage who is prepared to sacrifice a point of INT to power the device, even occasionally), or as a singular one-off. Heck, you could even have a Deity drop by just to show the PCs what they need to know (for plot purposes), so long as you can provide a reasonable in-game justification for them doing so (“I’ve a substantial bet riding on this…”)

I actually got this idea from a Superman comic that I must have read back in the 60s or 70s – Supes heads back in time because, while their game rules won’t permit him to change history, they will permit him to observe it.

Narrative shifts to third person

So you have an eyewitness, or someone who has been able to reconstruct the events (even if only theoretically) who is an excellent storyteller, start to relate the story, but after an introductory paragraph or two, you throw in, “so clearly does [X] describe the scene that you can almost imagine you are there…”.

You then shift to a third person narrative, and start off by mentioning a sensory impression or two that are clearly not visual, but are more visceral, just to lend truth and gravitas to that statement, and describe the past events (complete with errors and distortions) as though the PCs were actually there – even to the point of permitting them to ask questions. They can interact with you, as GM, but not with any participants in the scene.

For fun, there have been a time or two in which a delusional or paranoid NPC has used this technique to give the PCs a front-row seat to moonbeams. Once, the players were not fooled, on a second time, they were completely taken in.

The Prologue Encounter

Once again, this comes in two flavors, the major and the minor.

The minor variant is an encounter added to the plot simply to give a critical character (probably but not necessarily the villain) a foundation.

The major variant is an entire adventure whose sole campaign-level function is to achieve that same end, of providing a foundation for the character in preparation for their role in the ‘main’ adventure.

In terms of building a consistent and comprehensive campaign, this often seems like the perfect solution – you create and display the building blocks and then start assembling them into structures and plotlines. But there are potential drawbacks that have to be considered.

First. the prologue encounter may not unfold as expected, or may go further than expected. This is what happened when I introduced Mortus in my superhero campaign – I had planned a short-term solution that would leave him around as a building block, but the players rejected that because it was only a short-term solution and found a more difficult solution that actually resolved the character’s main driving plotline. The resulting character is still floating around out there, and will still be able to participate in the main plot when it comes around, but in a significantly-different role – essentially, as an ally, and not an enemy. As explained at the time, I could have blocked their solution, but had no good reasons to do so, and realized (before it was too late) that the main plotline could survive the change – and so accepted the change in campaign plan.

But that was all fortuitous – it could just as easily have meant that the character could not play his part in the big picture that I intended to paint, and that would have placed the campaign in a far more precarious position. It would have left me with a difficult choice: block PC agency in an unreasonable way, or find a replacement for that building block, one that was inevitably going to be second-rate because this character had been deliberately designed to tick all the right boxes.

Second, the prologue may go beyond foreshadowing into ‘giving the game away’. Surprises and plot twists are an integral part of any campaign, and the suspense from not knowing what is going to happen is essential. The better a prologue establishes a character, the more that suspense can be undermined, especially once imaginative players start speculating. You can evade that problem by having the PCs present for only part of the ‘origin story’ of the building block, with a key transformative experience taking place behind the curtain in between character appearances – but you can pull that trick only so often before it becomes predictable and boring, and starts to undermine your credibility, and the credibility of the prologue, defeating the entire point of its existence.

Third, there is a pronounced impact on campaign pacing. Creating building blocks takes time, and its time in which the players can feel that they are simply treading water and not getting anywhere. If you need a slowdown in the pacing, that can be fine – for a little while. But it does need to be counterbalanced by definite and visible progress in other areas, and that won’t happen by accident. It can even reach the point where you need to introduce problems for the PCs to solve that are intended to play no part in the main campaign plotline, simply so that they have a sense of achieving something along the way. But that stretches a campaign out, too.

Finally, what do you do if the prologue adventure, and the character at its heart, falls flat? It’s happened to all of us from time to time. If their one-and-only appearance were to be in the main plotline which justifies their existence within the campaign, you can get away with this, though the results will be less than optimal; if it happens in a prologue, you may be forewarned in time to do something about the problem, but if your solution fails, the ultimate plotline – the important bit – will suffer.

So this is far from an absolute solution.

Tell without Show

Until this week, I never considered this a viable option. But here’s the thing: an RPG is not a TV show or a Movie or a book; it’s a medium that in some respects resembles those, but in other ways, is absolutely unique.

The players are used to information coming from the GM. Whether he puts that information into an interactive format like an encounter, or pretends to be someone else providing the information in a dialogue, or simple narrates the relevant backstory (assuming one of the PCs knows it), it still boils down to the GM talking and the PCs listening – at a metagame level.

As much as that can be seen as a handicap, a barrier to immersion, it can also be a liberating realization.

Simple Foreshadowing

Another technique that can be used is to foreshadow without demonstration.

The PCs come across a village whose central shrine or temple has exploded. No explanation given. No backstory, no warnings, no prophecies, nothing. They are asked to help out in relief efforts, they rescue a trapped NPC and make a quick side-trip to a neighboring hamlet to buy supplies, they maybe beat off an attack by bandits who want to take advantage of the situation, and they are on their way.

In the next major town, the same thing has happened, but relief efforts are well in hand. They haven’t heard about the first incident though, and think this is purely a local problem.

This primes the PCs for an encounter / adventure that confronts the agency responsible,and introduces that agency through its handiwork,without it ever making a direct appearance until the Main Event. It’s very old-school in a number of ways.

This approach definitely has it’s virtues, but it also comes with significant shortcomings. It’s relatively superficial, and that can be at odds with the importance to the campaign that the GM attaches to the villain. It can undermine verisimilitude. It applies a blowtorch to campaign pacing, turning it up to 11. And it bets the farm on the integrity of concept and the excellence of realization of the villain in question.

While it’s undoubtedly the easiest technique to employ, it’s quite possibly the hardest technique to do well.

Techniques in context

How does one select amongst the different techniques? Well, my general philosophy is always to base the decision on the pacing desired, but to mix it up. It’s better, in terms of realism, to slow the campaign a little and then have it lurch forward, only to slow again. All possible techniques are on the table, and the decision should be based on whatever is best for the campaign at that point in time.

Always take into account the player response – if they are expecting to make a big step forward in terms of the overall plotline, any slowing will only frustrate them. It’s better in this situation to give them a step forward and then a more significant slowdown – achieving the same overall pacing while giving them time to come to terms with the changes in circumstances.

The way you handle any given encounter will therefore vary significantly depending on when in the campaign it takes place – your pacing needs will be different in the start than in the middle, or the end.

Some plotlines / encounters / building blocks lend themselves more strongly to one particular technique than another, and that forces a choice on the GM: tolerate or integrate the incompatible pacing element, schedule the encounter for a time when the pacing element is compatible with the overall plan, or force the introduction into a non-optimal pattern that fits the overall campaign better at that time.

I’ve often said that there is an artistry to campaign planning that is poorly understood and under-appreciated, especially by those who do little or no planning. When you have multiple options, the choice between them can be sometimes made on logical grounds, but sometimes it will come down to instinct; put hundreds or thousands of such decisions together and you end up with a distinctly different ‘picture’. What is highlighted and what is hidden in shadows?

It Doesn’t End There: Elements Of Mysteries

Initially, that’s where I intended to end this article – a nice, snappy couple of thousand words, done and dusted. But then I happened to watch an episode of a TV Crime procedural (which one doesn’t matter), and was struck by the similarity between the problems faced by the RPG GM and those of the director of such a TV episode.

They often don’t have the luxury of lengthy prologues – indeed, some formats stipulate no prologues at all (and others stipulate no flashbacks, which are essentially ‘a prologue shifted to later in time’ in this context). They have critical information being delivered by a character telling, not showing. Those may not be the only similarities, but they are enough to be going on with, for now, because it means that the solutions employed by the TV shows may have validity when applied to an RPG.

Anatomy Of A Mystery Plot

Before getting into that, though, I think that a little homework is in order – a different way of looking at the components of a mystery plot that might be useful both to readers and to the analysis of the TV Detective solutions.

Above, we have a quick infographic that I threw together this morning that – properly analyzed – tells you almost everything you need to know about the successful execution of a mystery plot in an RPG.

Solution Layer

We start on the left-hand side, where layers of content are described. The second layer is the primary plot – it could be called the “Mystery Layer” but the mystery itself is frequently less important than the solution, so I chose “Solution Layer” instead.

Action Layer

On top of that, there is the “Action Layer”. Characters need to “do” something in the course of the plot, in fact, every PC should have some active role to play in addition to contributions to the solution of the mystery.

Personality Layer

On the other side is the Personality Layer, which comprises both reactions by the characters participating to events and circumstances (and the opportunity to express same), and personality / character -driven content that is completely unrelated to the mystery.

Note that this content often cherry-picks aspects of the personality of the character, and that’s fine; no-one expects the entire personality to be on-show.

Background Layer

At the bottom, appropriately, is the most fundamental layer of them all – the background layer, which consists of any layers of the game world or its past (including past events surrounding the PCs) that other layers reference. As with the personality layer, content from this layer referenced during the adventure is heavily cherry-picked, and should only contain material that is, or appears, relevant to the plot or the character aspects on display.

Connective Sub-layers

These layers are all bound together by a web of connective sub-layers, usually implied rather than stated outright (usually because the connections are obvious at the time). If a character is distrustful of charity (personality layer) and this drives his behavior in the plot (solution layer), the association – the relevance – between the two is self-evident. And any history that explains that character trait is similarly bound to the other two datums by obvious connections.

The Solution Layer is dissected to the right.

Conundrum

Starting from the bottom, we have the initial conundrum – the puzzle or mystery that is to drive the plotline. There is usually only one of these, but there can be exceptions to that rule. As soon as you introduce a second one, though, the players will immediately suspect a hidden connection between the two, and will strive mightily to force the solution into a mold that creates such a connection, even if none actually exists.

Leads and Investigations

That initial mystery leads to some preliminary leads, and the investigation of same. These, in turn, lead to more substantial leads, the investigation of which leads to actual pieces of the solution. In most Detective shows, these have to be provable in court; and there can be no illegalities along the way; these constraints are an opposition force as significant as the actual target of the investigation.

Solution Pieces

These are the provable facts that bind one solution to the initial conundrum together, and only one solution. Any facts that dispute that solution have been explained away, leaving a proven solution, however unlikely that solution may have initially appeared.

Outlining a Mystery

There’s a reason Detective TV shows are called “Police Procedurals” – they are as much or more about the process of following a lead to a piece of the solution as about anything else.

The trick is making those procedures and processes interesting, even if they lead to dead ends, despite their being repeated every – single – time in every – single – episode.

There are four components to such investigations – there’s the starting point, the circumstances, the technique, and the outcome.

The Starting Point

NCIS is great for starting points that are unusual or distinctive enough to create interest that can be sustained through the course of an investigation. The more unusual or impossible the starting point, the more interesting the mystery. That’s the whole reason that locked room mysteries are an ongoing sub-genre of mystery!

The Circumstances

No investigation takes place in isolation – they all happen somewhere, and often involve interactions with the people who populate that somewhere. On top of that, the method of investigation can often be dictated by the circumstances, and may involve the potential for random encounters with the public, and those can be made more ‘entertaining’ at the GM’s whim.

I love dropping localities into my campaigns where (by the standards of the campaign) everyone is a ‘weirdo’ in some way or another. Whenever a plotline or an investigation leads into that locality, it’s an open license to have fun with it.

And sometimes, those plot threads can be significant, too.

The Technique

I commented above that the nature of the circumstances can often dictate the investigative technique, and that’s true, up to a point. Beyond that point, the entire choice of technique belongs to the PCs; the GM has no say in it.

This can pose a problem insofar as the PCs choose a technique that doesn’t lead to the desired (from a plot perspective) outcome. The GM has two basic options when this happens – he can compound up some plot thread that takes the PCs to the outcome desired by some indirect route; or he can use die rolls to lead the PCs to an alternate technique.

The latter is rarely, if ever, the best choice. Sometimes it’s unavoidable, though.

This problem usually results from the players either having some fixed notion of what they ultimate solution is going to be and shaping their investigation to suit, or from the players failing to think of the more appropriate technique (or dismissing the appropriate technique when they shouldn’t).

Recognizing the cause is important; if the first, confirmation bias can set in if the GM goes along with the ‘preliminary theory’ of the players. If the latter, then this isn’t an issue, but time pressure can be (under some circumstances). The decision of what to do about this choice of technique has to derive from the cause, and the urgency of implementing that decision is also dictated by its origins.

The Outcome

Finally, even a straightforward procedural step (perhaps dressed up by interactions with an interesting and colorful NPC – “circumstances” again) is forgiven if the outcome of the investigation is interesting enough.

As a general rule of thumb, the more boring the outcome is going to be, the more effort I put into dressing up the circumstances or injecting something “fun” into the mix – just to sustain interest in the plot.

Ideally, the outcome will be the most significant element, followed by the investigative process, followed by either of the other elements.

Preliminary Step

In creating a mystery plotline, the GM usually has the initial conundrum and the solution, and needs to plot a pathway that leads from start to finish in an interesting way. The fact that you don’t need to lead to the final answer all in one hit, just to a piece of that solution makes things easier.

That solution must include any attempt to cover-up their guilt or the crime by the guilty party or by a third party (and why, in that case) and how that obstruction can be overcome.

The first step is to spell out these key pieces of the solution, and the initial conundrum.

Investigation Structure

I next list the preliminary leads – the things that the characters will know they can investigate purely from the initial conundrum and any relevant background.

I order these in the sequence that they seem most likely to be followed up on by the PCs, allowing for the possibility of them splitting up to tackle the problem in multiple directions at once.

I then list, separately, the pieces of the final solution – who did what, to whom, when, how, and why, and why this wasn’t obvious from the start.

This permits me to construct sequences – a preliminary lead to a substantial lead to a piece of the solution. I continue until either every piece of the solution has been achieved, or I run out of preliminary leads.

Those sequences are often someone telling a PC something, and that means that “Show, Don’t Tell” is engaged as an operative principle. So now is the time to select an appropriate technique to impart the information.

There’s a song from the 1970s that just came up on my playlist that’s relevant: The Kursaal Flyers Little Does She Know, the chorus of which goes:

“Little does she know
That I know
That she knows
That she’s cheating on me.”

Think about that for a moment. There’s an action (cheating) with a reaction (she knows) that the singer has observed. That reaction is a mystery, one that he has solved by deducing the cause, and observing the behavior of the cheating partner. It’s not big enough or complicated enough to be an RPG plotline on its own, but as a connection from preliminary lead through investigation to solution, it’s a valid example of the sort of plot thread that binds the elements of investigating a mystery together.

If I have solution pieces left over

If this happens, then I need more leads. There are three possible sources: spin-offs from other leads, unrelated sources coming forward, or active developments.

Spin-offs from other leads

This is often the best source to employ, because it creates a plausible coincidence. Too often, coincidence is not plausible in an RPG or literary construct, however realistic it might be.

As a consequence, there is often a fatalistic element to RPGs in which everyone and everything has a purpose or a destiny.

Once the players decide that’s the case, it doesn’t matter what the GM does, he will be perceived as running a plot train in service of that purpose or destiny (I know, I’ve been there).

So the injection of a little obvious coincidence like this helps balance the ‘books’ and avoid that problem.

Unrelated Sources coming forward

Someone goes to the media or the police or whoever and makes a statement that deepens the mystery or complicates the circumstances, but inherently creates new preliminary leads for the investigators to follow.

This is the other side of ‘plausible coincidence’ – a coincidence of timing that (at least initially) can be viewed as working against the investigators but which ultimately leads to the solution to the mystery.

One such preliminary lead is always “How do they know what they claim to know?” and another is “Is what they claim to know accurate?” Those two are always part of such package deals. “How do they know [the victim] / [the accused]” is often a third – and those are all on top of anything they actually have to say.

Active Developments

Finally, it’s all too common to have criminals who just sit pat during an investigation and wait to get caught.

No, no, no! The environment and investigation should be dynamic and changing as the plot unfolds. At the very least, the criminals should try to keep tabs on the status of the investigation (‘Columbo’ uses this all the time – the ‘most helpful’ person is usually the criminal, being helpful so as to keep themselves close to the investigation).

But they should also undertake a clean-up of loose ends, and take advantage of any opportunity to obscure their involvement.

All of these activities have the potential to open up new leads for the investigators to follow. The most likely suspects after the most helpful NPCs are always those doing the most to obstruct the investigation, or someone connected to them.

By the time I have gone through the leads that I already have listed and added any secondary ones that seem interesting or reasonable, the mystery can often swing from having insufficient leads to having too many!

If I have preliminary leads left over

There are two courses of action to take with respect to excess preliminary leads: first, have them be dead ends, or second, use them as alternate paths to substantial leads or even other preliminary leads.

I always prefer the latter, because it means that there’s an alternative set of pathways for the PCs to follow without my resorting to “Make an INT Roll” (or, in the Heroes system, a “Deduction” roll) in order to get a clue that the PC should be able to see, but that the player can’t.

An alternative to that “Make A Roll” is to have an NPC associated with the PCs make a suggestion, or puncture an invalid assumption that is blocking the solution path from the player’s vision. But I’m also careful to have some of these lead to dead ends, so that the players never treat NPC pronouncements as “Ex Cathedra” pronouncements.

Action Sequences

Next, I go through the investigation and look for action sequences that I can insert. Most of these don’t have to happen; some of them can provide the link between ‘preliminary leads’ and ‘substantial leads’. I make sure that every PC has some occasion when they have to either do something or make some important decision, and the ramifications.

Personality Layer

There are two different aspects of the personality layer of plot to take into account. The first is personal plotlines, and the second is personality reactions.

Personal Plotlines

These are less common in fantasy campaigns, but not unheard of even there. If you have PC plotlines that are entirely separate from those of the collective group, then you should look to advance one for each PC in the course of the adventure. That frequently means that the start or finish of the adventure, but I look hard for opportunities to break out of that restriction.

A status check for the PCs in the Adventurer’s Club is illustrative:

• Dr Hawke: is renovating a disused hospital in New York into a Sanatorium, while dodging attempts by the City’s Coroner to appoint Hawke as his successor, and managing his relationship with Honeydew Halliday, an NPC.
• Steffan Bednarczic: raising his daughter, Anya, trying to keep her out of trouble, while navigating his relationship with Melanie Chen (an NPC) and her family while keeping a low profile. Other members of the Club have ‘adopted’ Anya and are training her in various disciplines, and one is pushing her to try out for the Olympic Pistol team, she’s so good a shot.
• Fr O’Malley: Beset by impending changes in his circumstances as the New York archbishop hands the diocese formerly serviced by O’Malley and his recently-deceased friend Fr Donelly over to a new priest, a firebrand named Fr Alvarez, while engaging in the lives of his regular parishioners and supporting the charities that help them.

There’s one other, but the player hasn’t been in contact for a year now, so we’re preparing to write them out of the ongoing campaign.

Personality Reactions

It’s so much easier with the Hero System because the things that a character cares about are spelled out by the owner during character construction. But, even without that, a GM can learn a lot by observation of the PCs and listening to the players talk about them.

There are always going to be plot developments and circumstances and interactions that a character cares more about than others – things that will push one or more of their ‘buttons’, causing them to become more engaged and enmeshed in the plot.

I go over everything that I have in the plot so far and look for such triggers, and what impact they might have. I also look for circumstances that might frustrate the player (more than the character) and give them an opportunity to vent or calm down, as necessary.

Background Layer

Most of the background should already be available but there’s always something that needs more detail because it’s appearing for the first time in this adventure and is relevant to one of the cast of NPCs involved in the mystery.

Often, the biggest problem is distilling everything that you could talk about into just those background elements that you need to impart, or to remind the players of. Hint: You can almost always be more ruthless than your first instincts when culling irrelevancies.

A logical topology

The results are a logical topology, a view of the structure of the adventure. There’s always a temptation to translate that into a sequential structure, which is easier to play because it simply runs from A to B to C, but your players will often void any such script.

Thus, while you can and should package isolated elements together so that you can run them efficiently, with sufficient color and personality, but let the players decide how they are going to navigate the maze.

Wrap-up

It seems that I’ve imparted most of the tips that I’ve gleaned from Police Procedurals as I’ve traveled through this topological perspective on mysteries. That’s fine, and a consequence of the relatively unstructured approach taken to this article.

A mystery adventure is like a campaign in miniature; all the elements of a campaign are present, like timing, and sequence, and player agency, and an awareness of pacing and how to manipulate it.

That means that campaigns are good for practicing the structural processes that you need to employ for the creation of a satisfying mystery, and a mystery plotline can be a useful small-scale rehearsal for the processes that you need to construct a successful campaign.

So pay particular attention to the problems and solutions that you encounter in running mystery plotlines, and in particular to how the different techniques of “Show, Don’t Tell” impact the pace, and you’ll get better at creating (and running) both adventures of this type and campaigns overall!