This week’s WISH Question for RPGs:
How do you keep the mood? And once lost, how do you try to bring everyone back? Can you? Is it even possible?
Yeah, that is a problem.
In college, and even in the post-college games I played (and played in), the game mood was something that was easily slipped into and out of. Something serious would start to happen, and folks would snap back to attention.
Now … it seems like the laughing and joking and jocularity start as soon as everyone arrives, and go on through the end of the game. It’s difficult for the GM to get more than a sentence out of his/her mouth without someone cutting wise, making a pun, offering a side comment, or just generally distracting.
Not only does this make things gooo mmuuuuccchhh lloooonnnnnggggeeerrrr than they might otherwise, but it really sabotages the drama. As well, it sabotages any characterization — because if the narration can’t set the mood, then the characters can’t play into it.
I am not guiltless in this, either as player or GM. As a player, I crack wise, too — though I’m at least sometimes the person to first try to snap back to attention and prompt the GM to go on. And as a GM, I will often break up at others’ jokes, throw in a few of my own, and go from there.
But as a GM, there have been times when it’s been intensely annoying, as some particularly meaningful bit of prose falls prey to jokes, distractions, or just folks wandering off into side conversations. That may say something, of course, about my GMing …
I don’t have a good answer. There are times, especially when I get seriously irked, when I’ll just stop, silent and deadpan, and let whoever it is finish whatever jibe they wanted to throw out. (I think I do this most with Margie, largely because when she does it, it irks me the most, since I expect her to automatically read my mind and know when I’m getting irked — which is, of course, unfair of me, but you know how that goes.)
Doyce has tried some systematized experience point rules — dings to the party for digressions, bonuses to the party if he’s the one that digresses. That’s had mixed success.
And one reason for that mixed success is that everyone’s having fun (well, with the occasional exception of the GM). This isn’t school. We don’t have to pay rapt attention to everything that’s going on, sitting up straight, taking copious notes. This is social time. If everyone is enjoying themselves, then that’s the point, isn’t it?
(Some years ago, Margie’s Mom’s bridge club realized that bridge was actually becoming a distraction to their socializing, so they just stopped playing.)
I don’t think that’s the full answer, though. I hope it isn’t, because while everyone having fun is part of the reason we gather to game, it’s also in part of game. To immerse ourselves in something different, to role-play, to participate in dramas and adventures.
I wish I had a good answer for this — both for my own discipline and for my games. As an actor and writer, it does sometimes bug the heck out of me.