One thing I’ve realized about my own games is that my ability to daydream, think of cool stuff, embody NPCs and have fun playing the game is closely tied to how frequently the responsibility to come up with something new shifts to the me.
The purpose of these set pieces is to reduce my cognitive load trying to figure out “what happens next” and allow me to spend more time asking the characters questions, considering the desires of the NPCs, and in general playing the game rather than trying to guide it.
Here’s an example of high cognitive load (again, speaking only for myself):
- GM: Here’s the situation, what do you do?
- Player: I take XYZ action that changes the situation dramatically (move to another location where other things are happening, seek out a new NPC that didn’t exist until now)
- GM: <thinks furiously about what would happen, or what they would find>. Okay, you’ve done that, here’s the new situation, what do you do?
- Player: <takes another action that demands on the fly world building>
- GM: <struggles more to think of more cool stuff, starts to fall back on old habits (for good or bad) and once again describes the consequence of their action and the new situation>
I didn’t give specific examples here, but you can imagine lots of situation where every action the player takes leads them to a new node in the game: following a series of clues to the next clues, performing a score to break into a place and get the thing and get out, etc. This is why as much as I FUCKING LOVE Blades in the Dark (and Blades ’68) sometimes I get overwhelmed trying to think of what happens next, because the players are always moving the story forward at breakneck speeds.
Compare this to a game with set pieces that invite exploration and aren’t “solved” (read moved on from) in a single action.
- GM: Here’s the situation. There’s ABC threat, CDE opportunity, and XYZ question lingering in the air.
- Players (note, I’m talking plural here because while the formal model can exhaust me even with a single player advancing from scene to scene quickly, this model gives room for not just one, but all of the players to do exploration): I want to investigate XYZ. I try to stop ABC. I sneaking along to grab CDE.
- GM: <Describes results of those actions, calls for rolls if applicable, and starts unveiling more about the situation. Also plays out the world responding including threats increasing in danger, opportunities fleeting, and answers to questions prompting more questions.
This model means the GM can really live in the world. The players aren’t immediately skipping to the next scene, and there is more to explore and reveal in the world. Outcomes are less likely to straightforward (we move on from A to B) and more likely to get entangled with the world (I care about person X, I’m working to understand Y, I am now dealing with consequence Z).
I saw some cool stuff about this here, though while Chubby Funster focuses mostly on game mechanics, the biggest cognitive load for me, is always answering “what happens next”.
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I think about this a lot, especially in how it relates to prep work (and especially-especially when it comes to low- or no-prep games and GMing philosophies).
This may have something to do with the sorts of games I’ve been running lately, but the things that require the most cognitive load for me are the things that happen “off screen.” The party accidentally gives some information to an NPC that that NPC didn’t have before, then takes a long rest. How has the world state changed as a result of that action. The party trips an alarm during a heist. How quickly and in what manner do the guards respond? Hell, even: the party successfully flees from a monster. What does that monster proceed to do next?
I want my worlds to feel like living, breathing places, where everything the PCs do have consequences, but it’s hard to play out those consequences mentally while also… running a game in real time. And I always feel like I’ve dropped the ball if I let the players get away with something scot-free: if they’ve burned down a building, *someone* should come looking for them.
The solution for me is always “prep work,” which is to say, shifting that cognitive load to a different moment—before the session begins. If I can hammer out really strong motivations, patterns, or mechanics around which NPCs or the world can respond to various categories of PC action, I can spend much less time worrying about it in the moment.
(It’s in roughly that order of preference, too. “Motivations”—what an NPC or NPC faction *wants*—let me ground world-responses in the fictional reality in a very organic way. “Patterns” is a good fallback position: the guards check in every 10 minutes creates a good framework even if the guards then become cardboard cutout characters. And, of all else fails, “mechanics”—roll a d6, on a 5 or a 6, a guard shows up—at least create the facsimile of a pattern, in a sort of kluge way that most gamers more or less accept as kosher. That’s maybe the reverse-order of easiest to bluff: I can make up a dice-roll mechanic on the spot—hopefully I write it down for later—but coming up with a consistent motivation while keeping a game moving is going to require serious cognitive action.)
I’ve never run Blades proper (or really any Blades derivative outside of the occasional one-shot), in part because I’m so leery of the cognitive work that would seem to be involved. The open-endedness seems to require not only the work of building a heist as it goes—and to me, one of the cool elements of heists is exploiting consistencies like guard patterns and motivations that would be hard to come up with on the spot—BUT ALSO holding the entire exquisitely detailed fictional setting in one’s head. I hear players talking about their favorite canonical factions and NPCs and think “well, I can’t run this game for them unless I somehow manage to have at least that much lore information on standby.” Prep-work could get me over both of those hurdles, but it would require a lot of pre-game cognitive load.
What I really want to be doing at the table as a GM is using my half my attention for listening and responding while the other half is on spotlight and pacing—playing scenes and framing them, essentially. *As much else* as I can put into prep, I can. That’s building out dungeons and if-then trees and stat blocks and random name lists, but also, like, practicing NPC voices in the car so I don’t have to pull a new vocal pattern out of mid-air. I’ve taken to color-coding my notes—purple for NPC names, green for locations, orange for treasures and things—to reduce even the cognitive load of *finding* a piece of info I’ve written. If something’s gone awry, like you’ve said, I tend to fall back on old habits to fill in the gaps: I’ll still be living in the scenes and queueing up the next ones, but colorful descriptions and logical behind-the-scene happenings might get a little spottier. An NPC might do something (or *be able* to do something, using information I’m not sure how they got) that I’ll have to retroactively justify later.
The best cognitive load hack I’ve found beyond scrupulous prep-work is to outsource. Put information on cards or maps or scratch paper so everyone can look at it: rather than a player asking “are there any doors?” and I have to imagine the room anew, look around it, and provide an answer, the player already knows by looking at the floorplan. Allow players to be experts in the ruler that affect their characters specifically. It’s that latter point that I was thinking of when I watched Chubby Funster’s video: if your players aren’t excited to have some ownership over the rules for “pack animal care” or whatever, it’s probably not worth including that in your game. When I’m running a half-dozen and change weekly games for kids, I have them create the setting together: then worldbuilding and even setting the scene can be shared cognitive load instead of just falling to me.
I could go on about *player* cognitive load as well—some players don’t *want* to devote brainspace to holding onto a convoluted plot between sessions—but I’ve probably ranted for long enough. Thank you for getting my mind spinning on this. I really do think effective GMing is based in divvying up cognitive load so that one never feels truly overwhelmed in the middle of a session, and no GMing book that I’ve read really talks about the problem or provides guidance in avoiding it. One of the best pieces of GMing advice I ever read was (in a book on running “Blood on the Clocktower” of all places): “Treat yourself like you are less smart than you really are,” which I take to mean “Don’t allow yourself to get into a position where you think you can cognitively handle everything you need to at the table, but you can’t.”
So much good stuff here Sam. Thanks for sharing it!
Some of my thoughts on your thoughts
– Color coding is super smart. I’ve relied on bookmarking pages, underlining things in my notes, and having physical props for NPCs (images or table stands) but they still get cluttered. I’m going to try color coding, most likely with highlighters in my journal (my primary location for prep work and campaign notes).
– Ironically when I was running a long Blades game (3 years, 100+ sessions) the thing that got me in trouble with my players was focusing too much on the faction game and the fallout of their actions. They made moves that had major effects on the world but really didn’t want to play at the movers-and-shakers level. I kept presenting score opportunities and signs of the world getting MORE apocalyptic and they told me emphatically that they didn’t care about those things. It took me a while to figure out how to pull it all back. Now, running my Blades ‘68 game (for the same group) I focus heavily just on the factions nearest to them (the ones they engage with directly) and try to keep the game very focused on whatever they do. Sometimes it means I just let threads drop (The Tomorrow Project hates you for stealing their stuff, but you haven’t engaged with them in 10 sessions so I’m just going to ignore that for now). I’ve also been told they care a lot less about factions as they do individuals. So now I’m typically only thinking about 2-3 factions actions between sessions and even more so usually only thinking about what 1-2 members of the faction are up to. Not to pressure you to run Blades or anything 🙂
– My favorite prep work is almost always what I call “shower thoughts”. When I’m driving or walking or washing the dishes (or showering) and my brain isn’t focused on a task, I start daydreaming about games and all these “what ifs” pop in my head. If I can remember to write them down, they often become a grounding rod for a session, anchoring the start on this one weird or dramatic thing. My guess is that running 6+ games a week doesn’t give you a lot of opportunity to wait for inspiration to strike and you’ve got to be a lot more disciplined than I do!
God, shower thoughts are so important. I try to build unstructured, distraction-free time into as many of my days as possible—usually justified as a walk down to the local cafe—to be able to generate that good creative mindset.