+Alex Schroeder had an interesting post in response to another’s blog article.

I commented in this G+ thread, and he asked if I had an article. I did not, but it got me to thinking and I quickly knew the answer, and decided to write my own post.

The biggest issue I have found is that I am not good at having the bad guys do certain things in game. It is probably not obvious to the players, but if they thought about it, they would wonder about the absence of some things.

Having monsters do what monsters do is not hard. Having the evil humans and demi-humans screw over the players is hard to do and make it seem natural to the game. At least from my perspective.

It’s not that I am personally incapable of doing bad things. I have done things I am not proud of, but I have lived and live a mostly boring and virtuous life. I know many would describe it that way.

In some ways, I think I have a natural aversion to cheating and hurting others, because of how much I don’t like when it happens to me. I have a philosophical/ethical/moral/religious point of view that informs my actions. I won’t go into specifics here, as that is not the purpose of this blog.

I replied to Alex’s thread: “I don’t think a GM can help but reflect part of themselves and their beliefs into a world.
If they try to avoid putting their way of viewing the world into their game world, it could still be evident from the lack of certain things.”

I think this is borne out in some things in my game.

My players like and enjoy playing in my campaign, so they are not missing what has or has not happened. They have been mangled, and a couple of them have come very close to death. I allow -10 HP before death, in AD&D.

I believe in following the rules, fair play, etc. If I get called out for breaking a rule, I expect the same level of enforcement on all breaking a rule/social convention/law.

However, the challenge of RPG’s is to be someone different than we are in real life. I have played characters that are mean and cruel. It is not quite the same for me somehow when running a whole world. I have plots and things of the big bad the player’s don’t know about. There are kidnappings, murders, raids, and other violence and mischief perpetrated by the monsters and NPC’s in my game, some of it is just not as blatant or over the top, as some DM’s might present it.

When I was young – a boy up into my late teens, I had a temper. I never inflicted it on strangers or friends, but I did get in fights with my brothers. It is only OK for us to fight each other. If someone else wants to fight one of us, they have to deal with all of us. That was very true when we were little.

Now, I have a long fuse, and if I do lose my temper, it is a verbal volcano of emotion that makes its recipients sink into their chair sort of thing. I have to be very tired and under a lot of stress for that to happen. The last time that happened was about 5 years ago when my father died and my marriage dissolved at the same time.

We all have a dark side, for most of us, it is in our thoughts, and never or rarely mentioned aloud. I don’t think we need to let the darkness out to play, in all its gory details. We can indicate that the orcs did not nice things to the women of a village, i.e. rape, without going into explicit detail about it.

A prime example of implied actions are the episode of Star Trek where KIrk is in his quarters and pulling on his boot while sitting on his bunk with a woman in his room.  As an adolescent male watching that episode, I KNEW what happened. You don’t need to have a intricately choreographed sex scene. You can let the audience know there was sex and have more time to flesh out and advance the story. I don’t mind looking at boobs, but sometimes there is so much on screen “sex” that the rest of the TV Show or movie seems rushed, flat, or missing something. [I think some might mention Game of Thrones. I have never watched it or read the books, but I know the meme.]

I like what Alfred Hitchcock did in Psycho, in the shower scene. He did not show anything directly, and had people convinced they saw a woman actually get stabbed in the shower. A good storyteller can make people see things without saying, you see a nipple, or a penis.

RPG’s are theater of the mind. The collaborative effort to tell the story/play the game does not require dwelling on minutia of details on every single action, item, location, etc. The DM has to find the right details to mention, so that special things are obvious when they need to be, and red herrings are obvious when they need to be. The challenge is in making all descriptions seem equally important or unimportant. Just like the way we go through life. If we aren’t focused on the task at hand, like watching where we’re going, we can step on a nail.