The tags used with this image describe the emotion expressed by these eyes as ‘fear’, but lowering your head and looking straight at someone from lowered eyebrows can convey several alternative emotions – anger and determination, for example. Image by JD from Pixabay

Welcome to 2023: A status update

So here we are in 2023! Funny, but it feels a lot like 2022 to me. I hope everyone had a great Christmas and New Year and are all revved up for the year to come.

My holiday period was great, meeting new relatives and catching up with others that I haven’t seen in too long. The only dampener was an unwanted groin strain which has made mobility difficult from midway between the two festive occasions. But I am recovering from that, doing a little better each day, so I don’t expect it to hold me back for very long.

It was great to actually take a break from CM for a couple of weeks – I don’t take many days off from writing this blog, as long-time readers know, and that gets wearing after a while, no matter how much you enjoy doing something.

Today’s subject is intended to be a gentle reintroduction to the routine, normally something that I would not consider big enough to justify a standalone article. Nevertheless, I hope it’s thought-provoking and beneficial.

The Eyes Of A Player

Something that occasionally bugs me is a player focusing more on their laptop or phone or an unrelated sourcebook than on the game. I have one player who regularly uses his laptop in-game, but I don’t have a problem with that, because that’s where he keeps his character. It’s even been something that I can take advantage of, from time to time – showing his character a different vision (via a USB) than that displayed to the other PCs, for example.

I have another player who is also a GM, and who sometimes has to do last-minute game prep at the same time as playing in my games. While I’m not happy with that situation when it happens, I understand and try to make allowances. But there are other times when he’s clearly not paying attention and distracted by his device or whatever he’s doing, and I have to pause the game and wait for him to lift his head, and that’s when the behavior grates just a bit. Sooner or later, on a bad day, that might lead to a snapped temper, but so far it hasn’t come to that.

I was musing on my recollections of this behavior over the Christmas break, for no particular reason, and a number of thoughts seemed pertinent to other GMs.

A question of relevance?

First, the obvious point to make in this player’s defense is that the focus of attention was on other PCs at the time, at least most of the time. His character wasn’t directly involved, so he felt safe to focus his attention elsewhere.

But that’s not necessarily the case; I think very carefully about narrative structure when designing my adventures, and if I think it important that a player not know about what’s happening to another PC, I will take somebody aside for a brief period of private GMing. If I don’t do that, it means that I expect the not-involved PCs to learn of what’s happening eventually and trust the players not to use knowledge their character’s don’t have in the meantime.

This means that a story can unfold in a far more natural progression, focusing on what matters rather than being interrupted by recapitulations that are often inaccurate or incomplete. It means that I can play one narrative thread off of another to amplify and add nuance and depth to both. One day, perhaps, a distracted player will miss the key narrative points and not understand what is going on in the adventure, and all this will come to a head – but so far, it hasn’t happened, mostly because when I am embodying the plot and addressing it to the players, I make sure they each make that connection.

So it matters when a player isn’t paying attention, even if their character isn’t directly involved – at least sometimes. And the primary tool that I use when that’s the case is the eyes of the player.

Look at their eyes

What is the player looking at? Do they have a problem making eye contact (indicative of a guilty conscience, even when the person has only been a ‘little bit naughty’)? I don’t expect them to look at me when they are rolling dice, or consulting their character sheets; but when I’m talking to them, that’s a different story.

If they aren’t engaging at such times, it can only mean that the plot isn’t engaging enough for them or that they are distracted by something more vital – like their own game prep. The latter I understand and tolerate, as I explained earlier; and sometimes, the former is something that I can anticipate and even tolerate because that particular player (and/or his character) isn’t the intended focus of the adventure.

For example, another of my players isn’t a fan of universe-bending high-concept cosmic adventures. But others in my group do enjoy them, myself included – so I try to balance both competing perspectives, and even occasionally use that player to bridge the gap between high-concept and practical application in the “real world” of the PCs.

The eyes of the players at your table are sending you all sorts of messages as you play. Try to reserve a skerrick of your attention to pick up on them. You may not be able to change course within the current adventure; you may be willing to tolerate certain forms of behavior, even if they irritate; but in the long run, it will pay you to be aware of the subliminal messages that your players may not say out loud. Especially if such communications are telling you something that you’re not expecting.

The Eyes Of The GM

Such communications can, of course, be a two-way street, but the GM has a much harder job communicating in this way. First, you often have to direct your eyes to reference material or adventure notes or whatever, and that has to take priority. The few times I’ve tried to do things without looking at what I was doing have all been disasters.

Second, you have to split your attention between several different players. You may need to keep your attention on a battlemap much of the time, as well.

Third, you already have several layers of communications to manage. There’s the in-game plot narrative, there’s the activity and personality of any NPCs and anything that they have to say (I’ll have more on that in a future article, maybe next week), and there are the interactions with the game mechanics to manage. Adding a fifth layer to this melange can be beyond the capacities of some; no shame should accrue from that limitation, it’s just a reality that those GMs have to accommodate and work around.

The fifth channel

Some, however, have at least a partial ability to handle that fifth channel, using their eyes and eye movements to convey subliminal impressions to the players, even if only for the occasional overt statement (and it should be noted that these messages are rarely as obvious as the GM thinks they are).

For example, rapid eye movement from side to side when an NPC is speaking can be suggestive of fear, paranoia, or deceptiveness. Forcing yourself to stare without blinking can hint at obsession, or other intense feelings. Usually the combination of what the NPC is actually saying and the context will make it clear which of these interpretations is correct.

Using contradiction

If your dialogue communicates the same thing effectively, then this becomes reinforcement that elevates your performance as a GM; but if your dialogue is saying one thing, you can also use this technique (sparingly) to communicate an entirely different subtext or context.

The key is to try to think of how a great actor would convey everything without explanation to the audience, then try to ‘be’ that actor for long enough to do likewise.

‘Casting’ NPCs

One trick that I have found helpful is to try ‘casting’ the ‘movie’ with different actors in the specific roles. Applied consistently over multiple game sessions, these can help you distinguish one NPC from another in the eyes of the players, without them even being aware of what you are doing.

Is Tom Cruise the perfect actor to cast as Nathaniel West? Is Vincent Price the very embodiment of the impression you want Inspector Raschuas to convey? Do you want Laura Whiste to be more like Sarah Michelle Geller or Halley Berry?

Sometimes, a performance by such an actor can be so iconic that it stands apart from the remainder of their body of work, leading you to prefer to associate that role with the NPC rather than the character in question. “Doctor Phibes” is quite different from Vincent Price’s performance as the hero in “The Bat”.

Casting a broader net

Don’t neglect the possibility of casting people beyond actors if that’s appropriate – I’ve used everything from animated characters to newsreaders to sportsmen as ‘subjects’, with variable success – but enough success to establish that the failures were shortcomings of applied technique and not flaws in the concept itself.

I try to make these associations in advance, as part of my adventure writing / game prep, because sometimes it can be hard to capture the right flavor within the dialogue. Saying that you want an NPC to recall Tommy Lee Jones in The Fugitive is one thing; actually channeling the ‘outhouse, hen-house, dog house’ speech can be quite another.

Once I have made the ‘casting direction’, therefore, I review and revise the dialogue to assist me in conveying that personality.

Deceptive Measures

A couple of tricks that you can occasionally use to up the ante in this regard are channeling a player and channeling yourself.

Channeling a player

Channeling a player is the equivalent of mirroring a person’s actions, sitting the way they do, and so on. This conveys a sense of trust at a subliminal level, but it’s also fairly overt – and doesn’t have immediate effect (you can tell you have achieved such a ‘bond’ when you do something – reach for a die or a pen – and the person you are targeting mirrors your action. You started off by mirroring them, then usurp control over the link between you). Using speech patterns alone is more subtle.

But it also permits more complex characterization. If an NPC is interacting with the PC controlled by Player 1, and I ‘mimic’ the way that I think Player 2 would ‘play’ that NPC if it were their character, any established relationship between the in-game characters of Players 1 and 2 will ‘color’ player 2’s perception of the NPC usually without them even noticing it.

Channeling yourself

By the same token, consciously attempting to mimic the way you would play a character conveys a sense of falsity, of a character attempting to pretend to be something he’s not. This can be really difficult to achieve convincingly in any other way, so it’s worth adding to your repertoire.

Compounding these impressions with a minor mannerism can convey volumes. Deliberately winking quickly with one eye, for example, carries an Anthony Zerbe ‘crazy’ impression. Wringing your hands whenever a particular NPC is speaking suggests timidity and fear, no matter how confident their dialogue might be. Mixed signals of this type are always suggestive of duplicity. (Note that a GM screen can get in the way – one of the reasons I rarely use one).

You don’t have to be a great actor (it helps if you are, I guess – but I’m not one, so ‘guess’ all I can do). But if you pay attention to performances you see on your TV / movie screens, even those you come across accidentally or in passing, you’ll be astonished at how much it will help you to GM.

The Eyes Have It

Ultimately, GMing is as much about communications as it is anything else. The more aware of communications and communication techniques, the better a GM you will be. Hopefully, some of these techniques will enhance your abilities, or at least give you awareness of some that you didn’t have previously.

The allied subjects of Kinesthetics (‘body language’), Acting, and Speech-writing are far too complex to summarize in any single article, and I’m not an expert in any of them. But they are all worthy of your study as a GM. And a lot of it can be done simply by paying attention to the sounds and images that waft across your television screen – enough to get you started, at least!

If this subject has intrigued you, you might also find this article to be of value: The Heirarchy Of Deceipt: How and when to lie to your players.