Gravitas
The plot is coming to its conclusion. The campaign has reached its highest point. You’re poised to dive into the big monologue / dramatic revelation / kickass boss fight, but then it happens. Somebody fucking farts.
“Excuse me,” says the offending gamer into the shocked silence. But it’s too late. The moment is gone, and your hard-won gravitas dissipates into a gale of laughter.
The fart is, of course, metaphorical. It could just as easily be the internet going out, the cat jumping on the table, or the pizza guy knocking at the door. The result is the same. All the (strictly metaphorical) wind has gone out of your sails. And now it’s on you to recover.
This is, I think, one of the hardest skills for a GM to pick up. Maintaining poise when you’ve lost your audience to distraction and giggles can be nearly impossible. That’s largely because of all the internal pressure. If you’re anything like me as a GM, you devote more thought than is strictly healthy into getting your big moments right. You plot and plan and and hope that it’s as memorable as you intend. But when the unexpected happens and it’s time to roll with the punches, that perfectionist mindset can undermine your performance.
My advice in these moments is to remember past campaigns. Think back to all those moments when you entered the boss arena, magic crackling and swords glinting. Surely some IRL gamer must have cracked a one liner? Someone must have had to get up to take a call or feed the meter? But for the life of me, I can’t remember it. And that helps with the nerves. Big moments, you see, tend to have their own momentum. They resist interruption, and they stick in the memory as pure motes of imagination regardless of IRL circumstances.
So for today, as BBEG prepares his rogue’s gallery for the finale, what do you say we trade tales of at-the-table interruptions? What event tends to halt play and puncture your gravitas-filled balloon? Any particular pet peeves? And how do you go about reeling ’em back in once you’ve lost your players to distraction? Let’s hear all about your own deft recoveries down in the comments!
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*raises hand*
Is it truly time for the finale? Are we on the march to the Grand Conclusion? Or can we look forward to more Handbook of Heroes before your next big project starts?
And if it is the finale, have you both given any further thought to publishing a Handbookworld Gazetteer? (I’d definitely want one.)
We’ve had this arc planned for a long time. I and we hope that there are still some surprises in store for you. 😀
No word on the gazetteer at this point.
I see the vampire nag survived her encounter with Patches the Unkicked. How unfortunate. 🙁
Annnd oh crud, I saw the Wicked Uncle-tag and realized who the ghost is! 😮
His evil endures!
I’m just reminded of the one player whose big exit was just a simple “[Name] books it, I think.” I was very disappointed.
I hope that was at least in-character. :/
My favorite is my husbands. He was TDY (temporary duty) at a base up in Michigan (Alpena). He and a bunch of the guys had planned on gaming while up there, so he took his books and dice.
They were in the middle of combat and the guy playing the mage would throw his hands in the air and yell “I AM ZOLTAN” every time he threw lightning bolt. Well, it was also storming like mad outside and the first time he did this it ended up being timed with a lightning bolt and thunder. Everyone chuckled and said “good one”. The next time he did it, a lightning bolt hit just outside the barracks and all the electricity went off.
As you can guess that was the end of playing that night and the player changed the character name. Hubby always tells it with grand gestures and player reactions 🙂
My favorites are the two times I ended up giving the group Tasha’s Uncontrollable Laughter in real life. The kind of laughter where as people calm down, someone starts chuckling again and it just keeps going. Both times we had to take a physical break and go get some snacks or just take a walk before everyone calmed down enough to pick back up. I consider those two times my pinnacle in DMing.
A healthier attitude than mine, lol.
And I do think that the “derail intermission” is a solid idea when it comes to regaining control of a game night.
Nope, don’t remember interruptions either (I remember generalized interruptions, peopel on their phones, The Spouse calling, players watching vids on laptops, etc). But I also don’t aim to make every campaign an over-the-top climactic finale event. Some games call for denouement, or slow fades, and of course some just fizzle.
If every campaign ends with a climactic End Boss fight… they lose that somethin-somethin. It’s like if every campaign is a JJAbrams affair, lens flares stop being special; if they’re Michael Bay campaigns, explosions giant fighting robots stop being exciting. You get my drift.
Also, i don;t plan out the “climax”, usually. Now sometimes the “BBEG” (whatever they have to defeat), might not be directly fightable. Like… how do you throw down with world hunger? you don’t. But in the right campaign, that could be what the PCs are fighting. So, sure, my campaigns are planned to have the potential or not for “big showdowns”, but the PCs deal with problems in their own ways, sometimes that means ‘murder-hobo’in’ and sometimes that means by delivering aid to starving peoples. I don’t rail them up to “set piece” encounters.
https://pathfinderwiki.com/wiki/Trelmarixian
Ah, ye olde “if it has stats” adage. Don’t see any stats there missy!
But there are actually //serious// problems with that plan (even if I were to stat out “Avatar of Famine”):
1 – They’re just the avatar/god of it, absent the deity, world hunger still goes on, and a new avatar/god will rise up to fill the vacant shoes. Sure, you won’t have a personified individual trying to make things worse… but “world hunger” is something that happens when others do not act to ease hunger, it doesn’t actually require a diety to cause it to happen. Or would people stop needing to eat just because the/one “god of starvation” dies?
2 – I never run games where a “god can be kileld”… and if I did it wold require a significant //reality shaking// event, like “all the gods become mortal, protect the ones you like, kill the ones hate, become a new god through violence” type of thing, we’re talking PCs are nigh unto becoming gods themselves type thing… and i begin to find those campaigns boring after a while ( I lie, I tend to fond them boring from the begining) so I am highly unlikely to run one.
So no shit there I was. Playing our pirates campaign via Roll20, it wasn’t my turn, so I picked up my laptop, went downstairs, and poured myself a glass of water. And the damn handle broke off of the faucet. “What’s the sound?” “Elliot, can you mute your mic?” “I think it’s your turn, too.” And finally, “Uh, I think I’m gonna have to rejoin in a bit.”
Water hazards are a notable element of pirate campaigns. Clever of your GM to go meta with it. O__O
By odd coincidence/your secret nefarious manipulation of my life, one of my groups is going into an arc climax tonight. I don’t think they will get through all the encounters to the final boss, but I’m hoping for epicness nonetheless (especially since the group hasn’t been able to fully assemble for a while).
Wish me crits! (How else am I going to kill those naughty PCs?)
How’d it go? Did you kill ’em real good?
Well, it was only after most of them had taken their turns in the first round that they realized that the dragonoid swooping down towards them might have a breath weapon and they should scatter (immediately before the guy riding the dragonoid revealed that he knew Fireball) and the Magus absolutely did not anticipate that the shadow giant could absorb touch spells and deliver them on its own melee attacks, so the point was made.
They did, however, foil me by deciding NOT to use their supply of plastic explosives on the door into the dungeon, despite their love of solving problems with the stuff. Curse you unpredictable vandals!
If explosives aren’t the answer then you’re not using enough.
Wasn’t a ‘ruined in the moment’ thing exactly, but there was the big session that was going to be storming a fortress, unveiling the imposter, and restoring peace to the kingdom by a tense game of cat and mouse coming up…
…that managed to get turned into a very short session because the whole table got REALLY into talking about the ins and outs of a certain fast-food chain, and this went on for TWO HOURS.
Our GM is still salty about that one.
“They’ve doubled the guard! No wait… They’ve double doubled it!”
Around the tables I played at the only thing guaranteed to ‘stop the moment’ dead in its tracks was if someone DIDN’T make a bad pun, pithy remark or a blatant inuendo.
I can’t beat the lightning bolt but one time I was teaching an electronics class and tossed off a particularly bad one-liner while I was writing a problem on the blackboard. One of the students promptly threw a pencil at me from behind as I was reaching up to scratch the back of my neck. In a coincidence I still don’t believe, it flew straight into my hand and I just turned around, tucked it into my shirt pocket and carried on as if nothing had happened 🙂
Sigh,… it’s known in my Group that every Single Campaign I try to run an absolutly Epic Final battle. And I usually, nail the Tone, the Narration the set up, an then,…. it turns into a Comedy Sketch.
Why?
Because apparently every time I have this big Bad Bossfight i am unable to roll above a 3 on a 20 Sided Die.
It is a Sight to behold when a mighty Balor suddenly turns into a fumbling Fool, who swears about the tiny Adventurers who just keep dodging. Every Attack. For 7 Turns Straight,…
At least i managed to knock one Player out with his Death Explosion.
Had a very dramatic confrontation with a party member who had betrayed the party. I was playing the part of a paladin who has not only just seen someone she trusted go to the dark side, but had her heart broken by someone she was falling in love with, and was now in a position where she would quite possibly have to kill him. Naturally, it involved some anguished “HOW COULD YOU”s and such.
My mother came into the room and reprimanded me for yelling at my friends like that. The game came screeching to a halt while I explained the concept of roleplay to her.
I guess that means my acting was good, at least.
Picture it: Barsaive, the trackless wastes near the Death Sea. The heroes discovered a ley line that allows Horrors to flourish. For weeks they have been closing nodes and defeating ever more powerful Horrors. They are nearing the Astral wellspring that powers the ley line.
A bleak valley is before them, the trees twisted from the corruption. The only sounds are crows, carrion birds that are often spies of these otherworldly terrors. The late afternoon sun is obscured by low, dark clouds, creating an eternal gloom.
[GM]: Then the crows go silent. Echoing across the valley comes a powerful sound of dominance that strikes fear into the hearts of even brave adventurers. It can only be described as a bone chilling….(dramatic pause)
malevolent…(longer dramatic pause)
….blood curdling (dramatic pause…)
..(Gm gesticulates as if warding off evil)
Horrifying….(excessively long pause as GM forgets monologue)
[Irreverent player] : Moo?
….
(Table,descends into Gail’s of laughter, the sense of Dread evaporated. The horror was immediately re-named by the PCs as Boovina)
Thus ends the tale of the Blood Curdling Moo, a warning to all GMs that dramatic pauses come with risks.
I’m going to tuck that away to use on my players some day.
The GM had a good story, they just flubbed the dramatic exposition. Three seconds is the longest you should hold a pause. At five you’ve become a straight man for whoever can interject something witty.
One of my favorite memories of that game was my Weaponsmith/Nethermancer absorbing all of a Horror’s abuse and just making it madder and madder. At the end he was bone-shattered, wreathed in hellfire and yelling out of his skinshifted ear-hole “Is that all you got?!?”
(He was riddled with penalty-inflicting Wounds but had only lost 10% of his actual hit points. Fortunately the rest of the party killed it before the DC to breathe exceeded my character’s stamina+karma pool)