Does Anyone Know What To Do With Their Hands When Refereeing A Game? (#NED 8: Present)

I don’t spend enough time thinking about the presentation of my games. By which I mean the way I manage myself at the table, the patterns of speech and body language I use, that sorta thing. Even today, after deciding explicitly to think about this topic, my brain keeps sliding off it. I caught myself again and again having wandered off on some unrelated chain of ideas. I lack knowledge of the core concepts that would give my brain something to grip as I turn these ideas over. I would probably benefit greatly from taking some sort of debate course, or public speaking, improv, or theater. Really anything that teaches how to manage the impact of your words and actions. I probably will never do that, but if I did It’d be good for me.

This isn’t to say I want my sessions to be more intense and focused experiences. I definitely, One-Hundred Percent (100%) do not want that. I value conversational tangents. Games where everyone stays strictly focused on play the entire time make me uncomfortable. But I do want to be better at reigning those conversations in when they’ve gone on for too long. I want to be better at not starting them myself when we’ve already had enough of them for one night. I want to recognize when I’m in a giddy/chatty frame of mind, and be mindful enough to control myself.

Maybe it’ll help clarify what I’m talking about if I list some of the strategies I already use to help with my game’s presentation?

• If the players seem uncertain of what to do, or if I need to make clear that I’m done talking, I’ll suggest a set of boring options to them. For example: “Do you want to attack the dragon, try to steal its gold without waking it, or sneak past it to the next room?” They never actually choose the options I lay out. The point is to let them know it’s ‘their turn.’ Giving them explicit prompts helps to prevent analysis paralysis, which can be created with more open-ended questions like “what do you do?”

• Calling on players directly, rather than the group in general. Often this is just for incidental stuff like rolling encounter checks. It doesn’t matter who rolls it, but if I didn’t specify an individual everyone would quietly wait for someone else to do it. And since I’m calling on individuals anyway I may as well rotate who I call around the table. Keep everyone engaged with the game in small ways as well as big ones.

• Balancing the time between split parties so nobody feels too disconnected from the action. (Prismatic Wasteland wrote on this subject, and goes into more and better detail than I could.)

• Asking a few meaningless clarifying questions in order to obscure important clarifying questions which might give the players undue warning. For example, I might ask “Which order did you put your boots on this morning? Right first, or Left first? And did you wear your wet socks, or go sockless?” The answer to the first question doesn’t matter, but by asking it I make the second question seem less consequential, and the player is less likely to pick up on what sort of unknown danger is prompting me to ask these questions.

Having thus gestured towards some aspects of game presentation I manage well, what are some I wish I managed better?

• Keeping everyone at the table invested in the game. I can’t claim sole responsibility for this. As someone who frequently loses track of the action when I’m a player, I know that players need to be responsible for their own engagement. But when a player’s attention wanders, they can quickly fall so far behind that they don’t know how to start participating again. I want to get better at looping players back into the action, and doing so without embarrassing them, or burdening them.

• Enforcing limitations on the players. I’m really bad at saying “No” consistently enough. I enjoy being a player in games with strict referees, and I want to run the style of game that I enjoy playing in, but I am a softhearted boy. I recall Ava saying something insightful about this once. About how she writes very strict rules for her game explicitly so the rulebook can be the ‘tough parent,’ and the referee can be the ‘fun parent.’

• Inquiring about player actions during Exploration Turns and Travel Watches. I always make a point of finding out what each individual player is doing when the game’s action is in Initiative Turns, and I do the same thing during Haven Turns, but I rarely think to do it during Exploration and Travel. It’s sensible in a way, because Exploration and Travel are the two modes of play in which the group is most likely to move and act as a single unit. I don’t want to go around the table just to hear everyone say “I walk next to everyone else.” At the same time, this is a mode of play where less outspoken players frequently get lost.

With a little more time and effort (two things explicitly banned during No Effort Dicember!) I’m sure I could come up with even more aspects of presentation that frequently cause me to stumble, but I’ll be curious to hear if anybody has coping strategies for the ones listed here?

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