{"id":23436,"date":"2019-02-05T00:03:21","date_gmt":"2019-02-04T13:03:21","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.campaignmastery.com\/blog\/?p=23436"},"modified":"2019-02-05T00:03:21","modified_gmt":"2019-02-04T13:03:21","slug":"speaking-in-tongues","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.campaignmastery.com\/blog\/speaking-in-tongues\/","title":{"rendered":"Speaking In Tongues: Writing Dialogue & Oratory"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Image courtesy pixabay.com\/GregReese<\/p><\/div>\n

In the course of compiling the Blogdex – an ongoing task at this point! – I became aware of a category that had never<\/em> been dealt with properly at Campaign Mastery at any point of our ten-year history, that is at the same time, a vital skill for a GM to have up his sleeve.<\/p>\n

I am, of course, referring to Writing Dialogue and Oratory.<\/p>\n

Dialogue Vs Oratory: The Difference<\/h3>\n

Dialogue is an exchange between the speaker and the target or targets, generally with back and forth. between the two. When one of the two is a PC, which is most of the time, you need to be flexible and responsive to whatever the player inputs into the conversation; but it’s still helpful to pre-script your side of things for reasons that will become apparent as we go along.<\/p>\n

Oratory is a prepared speech; while a PC may interrupt it, the speaker can choose whether or not to ignore the interruption. Generally, you are simulating the combination of an expert speaker and a professional speechwriter, while being neither of these things yourself.<\/p>\n

In general, though, the process of writing the two is the same; the differences are of objective and degree, not of kind.<\/p>\n

The Mutual Objective<\/h3>\n

From a meta perspective, from the GM’s point-of-view in other words, both have a single objective that must be achieved and several secondary objectives that are nice to achieve – and these priorities are the same in both cases.<\/p>\n

I’ll get specific in terms of what those objectives are a little later. Right now, they would be an unnecessary distraction.<\/p>\n

The Process In Common<\/h3>\n

What’s more important is that this commonality means that the writing process can be the same for both.<\/p>\n

As usual, I have broken the process down as precisely as possible. In most real-world usage, many of these steps would be paid little more than lip service, and a scant minimum of that; I often blow through these steps in a mere second or two. In particular, steps 3-5 frequently get blown aside, and steps 7-10 can often be compressed into a single treatment.<\/p>\n

But there are exceptions; sometimes, one of steps 3-5 will be rather more important than is usually the case, and require a considerable effort and time investment; and the depth of engagement in steps 7-10 depends entirely on the importance, from a plot\/game point of view, of the content to be conveyed.<\/p>\n

Significantly, this means that the process when improvising is the same, if even more abbreviated and truncated and run on instinct. I might only spend a few seconds doing so before the character I’m playing starts to speak, but I’ll cover essentially the same mental territory in this period, however superficially.<\/p>\n