Pull the trigger, coward

Getting comfy with threats and following through.

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For me, the most important part of game world immersion is cause and effect. Sometimes people believe the hurdle to achieving this is detail, that GMs need to consider more chains of effect.

I think the biggest immersion hurdle is often GMs making threats and then not following through. There’s nothing worse than being told “if you don’t rush to help the wizard, they’ll die”, but after three side quests you turn up and can still save them.

Knowing how and when to follow through on threats is tricky, but GMs, don’t point a gun at your players if you’re not willing to pull the trigger.

How to get comfy with threat follow-through? You agree on how threats will work at your table. Go through the topics below and agree on how you want your game to run. This kind of table discussion was pioneered in games like Apocalypse World and remains just as relevant today.

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Communication

Discuss what level of communication your table wants regarding threats.

If the players annoy a scary witch, should the GM announce that it could be a problem for them? And should they be told before annoying the witch?

Do players want to know if a threat is progressing and what the outcome will be if the players don’t stop it? Or do you want communication to only come from what the characters are experiencing in the fictional world?

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Pacing

Discuss how threats should progress at your table.

How quick can threats escalate? Can this threat escalation vary? Do players get to know how quickly things could go south? Do they need a kind of tracker so they understand how much time they have?

Blades in the Dark keeps things in the open by using clocks, but some find that immersion breaking. Work out what suits your table.

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Stakes

What can be on the line? e.g. don’t play a game where PCs can die if your table doesn’t want that. How often can these things be on the line? Is death only on the line now and then, or a constant risk? Discuss what stakes your table is comfortable with.

Understanding stakes also helps you know when a roll is needed. Check out this article where I talk about ways of figuring out if dice should be rolled.

Spread too thin

Decide if your table is ok with the idea that they can’t address all threats e.g. if they recover the data cache, a rival gang will smash up one of their storage units because they won’t be there to guard it. For some tables, these kind of choices are fun, to others they are miserable. ~if you haven’t tried this, try it, it makes THE BEST games~

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That’s it?

Yes! GMs and players are more comfortable with trigger pulling if they are on the same page about how they get there. Agree on how threats work in your game. Then you don’t need to worry because you’ve already agreed on it as a table!

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Recommendations

Book: My copy of Tephrotic Nightmares, the Mork Borg ash crawl campaign, has arrived. I’m smitten and will be running it for my players once I wrap up my Death in Space campaign. This is a must buy for Mork Borg fans, get physical if you can because it’s gorgeous: EU/UK or US.

Blog: I caught up on Luke Gearing’s blog, his article on modules not needing hooks snared my curiosity. He talks about how a module’s content alone should have interesting things to hook your players in, how to draw them in shouldn’t need a set of instructions. His idea that a module should be an interesting piece of writing on its own has got me mulling.