Unhallowed Rites, Part 4: Speak Now
Another wedding arc? Didn’t we just do that? No wonder Wizard is so upset by these nefarious nuptials! As a mage specializing in the School of Dramaturgy, she demands more originality from her Handbook storylines. Plus, ya know… Thief is already taken. And Sorcerer is her cousin. And it’s not as if Sorcerer and Wizard are on the best of terms in the first place.
While Wizard and Paladin see about rescuing their respective partymates, what do you say the rest of us talk about dramatic speeches? We’ve already discussed how monologuing ought to happen outside of initiative, but let’s push it one step further. Let’s consider those moments when you get cued for the big speech. After all, there are few moments better suited to speechifying than the phrase, “Speak now or forever hold your peace.” In my experience, however, the problem is that these moments are just a little too tempting.
Consider an obnoxious Perception check. You know that kind. “Crap! That’s only a 12.” And immediately the next dude pipes up: “I look at the thing as well! That’s a 17!” And so the potentially dramatic moment is drowned in an impromptu auction: I got a 23! I rolled a 19! Eleven! Three! Sold to the near-sighted gnome! These moments elicit GM face-palm, but not just because they flirt with the metagame. They also run roughshod over narrative momentum, drawing a group out of the scene as everyone gets their say.
Now let’s bring it back to today’s Unhallowed Rite and Wizard’s speech. If she were to deliver a cool one-liner (“She’s taken.”) and then roll initiative, everything is groovy. If she were to drop a few well-chosen lines on the crowd (“Stop this farce! There are coercive magics at work here, and no ceremony so misbegotten could hold against the countercharm. I cast love as a free action! And then I cast fireball as my actual action!”) then we’re still operating in dramatically-appropriate territory. If Paladin pipes up however (“And you, Sorcerer! I Thought you had a thing for Barbarian!”), followed by Fighter from the peanut gallery (“Plus goblins can’t be witnesses. They aren’t real people.”), followed by commentary from every other member of the Heroes and Anti-Party parties, we’ve descended into the Realm of Farce.
Don’t get me wrong here: Farce can be a nice place to visit. Chances are that a literally-everyone-in-the-party-objects scenario would be a lot of fun at the right table. But when you turn a “speak now” moment into a minutes-long affair, you lose that sense of urgency that accompanies an imminent demon-summoning. The same holds true for unnecessarily long solo speeches, sucking all the air out of a pregnant moment. My point is that, when it’s time to take the spotlight, you should absolutely step up and say your piece. Just remember that it’s possible to have too much of a good thing, and that you aren’t saving anybody if you’re still talking when Devil’s Night rolls around.
Question of the day! Have you ever encountered overlong dialogue in your gaming career? Is it worth it to try and rein that mess in, bringing the scene to a swifter close? Or should a GM just shut up and be happy if their players are trying to RP at all? Sound off with your own finest action movie one-liners and after battle toasts down in the comments!
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Augh, I knew it! >_<
Wizard! Get over your love of drama and focus on love of your wife right the *BLEEP* now!
As for long monologuing, I try to follow the advice of the 3e Ravenloft DMG: don’t. Make sure you sprinkle your exposition out during the campaign, leave clues and written confessions or journals lying around. ‘Cause when the players see the BBEG, they’re not going to give them time to wax eloquent. They roll for initiative.
+2,265 XP for paying attention.
Well now I’m intrigued. I don’t suppose I could get a quote or two from the relevant passages?
War for the Crown is full of „dramatic speech“ diplomacy check opportunities.
Thy do happen out of initiative and the DM asks for one player to make the check. The other players get a moment to whisper keywords to the designated diplomat.
Not sure I understand. What does that look like in practice?
The most common scenario I’ve seen is, “I roll to assist.”
“What do you say?”
“You should listen to the first guy!”
“OK, take a +2 to you check, first guy.”
Is that the sort of interaction you’re describing?
In practice everyone just starts rambling about that the diplomacy person should mention in the speech.
Is it all “table talk,” or are the suggestions in-character? And if they’re in-character, how do you justify the weirdly disjointed speeches?
it‘s a bit like a brainstorming session, in character but sort of outside initiative. When the babbling has slowed down the DM calls for a choice of who rolls, we do approximately one round of summarizing the points everyone remembers and one player can support for +2.
Success is still determined by roll:
player knowledge and skill =/= character knowledge and skill
The closest example I can think of is when one of the other players fired a crossbow in the middle of the BBEG’s speech. This was the DM’s first session as a DM, so he hadn’t really appreciated how scripted events don’t work outside of video games. (See also picking the lock that he imported from a Zelda dungeon.)
Aside from that, the players in my latest campaign do tend to get lost in the weeds with one another in terms of bickering back and forth and forgetting about the NPCs boggling vacantly at their shenanigans. Fortunately, most of those NPCs are now convinced the party is a bunch of harmless yet useful catspaws for their own nefarious deeds. And, well, they aren’t exactly wrong…
Intraparty bickering is the worst offender for this trope. When you state your character’s motivation, the other guy states their motivation, and then they restate your positions at one another for 15 minutes without making progress, the scene has stopped being dramatic.
My Devotion Paladin actually ended up speechifying a lot. He always felt like he was giving a Ms. Adbar speech, so he felt the need to lampshade himself by ending with “World peace. Now for the swimsuit contest!”
Since they tend to have lots of dots in Conviction, paladins are the poster boys for this kind of thing. It honestly makes me wonder if there’s a way to formalize the process? Maybe rather than taking the time to explain why [evil thing] is bad, you get a deity-specific one liner.
“You’re in a clear (paladin’s) code violation. Repent or receive Mercy.”
On a related note, I have been getting pretty darn tired of Paladins being the one class that MUST be shoehorned into a role. 5e did some work on fixing that, PF 2e did more, and I am working on my own fixes for my system.
Read the following in a ~~cartoonishly thick New York~~ Dwarven accent:
“We make them see reason, or we make them see stars.”
Simple enough. If I’m concerned that the party is going to take too long with their rebuttal, as soon as I finish my NPC speech I look at the party face and smile, saying “You have ten seconds.” Even if they run a bit over, it gets them moving and moving quickly.
Ooh… I like this. It’s power move villainy, and it reminds the party to keep it short and sweet.
Exactly! I don’t want to steal their thunder but I also don’t want the party to get sidetracked at this moment. Only downside is that it can put players on the spot, which only some are comfortable with.
I love RP. I didn’t used to. I was just into the min maxing and the combat in ye olden days of yore, but my tastes changed as I aged and the game system altered itself to suit my new tastes (I think 5e is probably one of the best games for a nice balance of both, but perhaps I am biased).
That being said, even the best of intentions can lead to boring a-f moments in a session. Fortunately, I don’t think the group I am involved in has had any of those moments, and our DM is pretty good at not monologuing the villains.
In fact, this comic comes in at a perfect moment as last session our DM “talked about” a character spouting off and monologuing as his minions were trying to kill us (and everyone else around us… woops, we are getting innocents killed now O.O). I say “talked about”, because he said this guy was doing the classic villain monologuing, but the DM was not actually giving us the speechifying, and just gave the main talking points that were plot relevant (the things that we would want to hear to further said plot) and left the rest to our imaginations. He included the phrase “Blah blah blah” and left it at that.
It lightened the mood of the scene (which we appreciated, because as noted, we were getting an entire inn of people killed just by having stayed the night there, and we were glad to not have total sorrow in the moment… that would come later as we ruminated on what we had done by staying in a public place with a price on our heads.)
I think it is fine to actually monologue if you have good dialogue written, but also, no more than a few minutes. If it goes into the double digits, I think anyone would be excused for not listening any more.
“You’re boring! Stop being boring, boring!”
You know me. I like my in-character dialogue:
https://www.handbookofheroes.com/archives/comic/strong-silent-type
But especially when you’ve got a Snidely Whiplash type, a set of Cliffs Notes is a fine addition to your GM toolbox.
Comic relief. Cartoon villainy. Using GM technique to achieve a desired tone. These are all good things. It’s what comes of genre awareness and strong tropesmanship. Good on your GM!
Not a monologue, but a tense scene with a lot of dialogue. My party of heroic players had convinced two different factions of holy warriors to team up and help them take down a boss monster. Thanks to the help, the fight went well, but then the party found the powerful artifact the boss had been searching for and all three sides wanted to take it for themselves. Tensions were high. Weapons were drawn. And just as everyone seemed ready to come to blows, it somehow came out that one of the PCs had slept with the golden knight’s NPC bard, and…
“You SLEPT with him? Did he take anything? By the gods, tell me you at least told him about your disease!”
There was no disease. The bard was bamboozled. The tone of the encounter was suddenly altered. And, although we later agreed that in retrospect that line was totally out of place with the rest of the scene, I think in a small way it helped to ease player tensions and contributed to resolving things peacefully.
This is an interesting note. When you break the tension of a scene for a specific purpose (in this case, comic relief in the name of peace-making), it becomes a useful shift rather than a distracting one.
As I argue back here though…
https://www.handbookofheroes.com/archives/comic/dignity
…You’ve got to be careful about reading the room.
So, if I remember correctly, Thief and Sorcerer both have the same fiendish ancestor. So would this be rather…Hapsburgian?
Yes. It would. But there’s another aspect as well: ritual.
A mystic union would reinforce – maybe even square – the power of the fiendish bloodline Thief and Sorcerer share, which could give Demon Queen an edge in making her way out of the Abyss and into Handbookworld.
I kept trying to write a script to make that connection explicit, but I never quite got it right. Here’s the draft from the “rejected” bin:
Ugh. Bad dialogue is bad.
Still, you can see how this one lead to two different comics eventually:
https://www.handbookofheroes.com/archives/comic/unequal-treatment
https://www.handbookofheroes.com/archives/comic/the-outer-planes-part-4-family-reunion
Oh hey, looks like I even tried a second version of that one:
Getting jokes right is a process sometimes. :/
As someone who is patently unfunny, I get it.
Maybe depict the familial connection with Sorcerer and/or Thief trying to explain to their party the clusterfuck that is their respective bloodlines. Possibly as a split-screen shot of their respective genealogy / conspiracy string boards.
No dialogue needed as it’s a visual gag and allows for mini-gags via party members individual reactions (boredom, confusion, disgust…).
https://m.media-amazon.com/images/M/MV5BOTY2NDY4OGUtYWE0Ni00NWZiLWI3NDktYmE2YWM3Njc3YmRkXkEyXkFqcGdeQXVyMTIxOTU1MjQ3._V1_.jpg
I go back and forth, I generally aim for pithy, get the word in quick, the attacks in quicker. But sometimes, the Character just has pedantic needs… Thankfully I restrain tose to mostly PbP games these days, so the Character has the space in which to expound at length and I have the off-screen freedom to research all the gobbledy-gok the the pedant Character is spouting.
Not that I haven’t belted out some infamously long-winded diatribes in person, my old LARP groups know what I’m talkin ’bout, but it’s just so much easier in PbP.
Always refreshing to hear about PBP gaming. The underlying assumptions are so much different there! You’re absolutely right: It’s a stronger venue for exposition and speechifying.
I generally follow the Harry Dresden guidelines to talking to the bad guys. I make a quick quip and then fire off an attack roll while they’re still trying to figure out what the fuck I’m talking about.
That’s… a really strong role model actually. Nicely put.
You can tell BBEG is Evil since his plot requires a Married Woman to be married to her Cousin.
Also the fact he is a skeleton in a dark robe covered in green fire named Big bad Evil Guy
I think that’s why he goes by “Beebs.” Much friendlier sounding. That’s how you get them to lower their guard….
Why not let the speechifier ramble on as a distraction, while the rest of you get to work?
Brilliant!
I have actually got this to work.
My character encouraged the head ritualist to talk, asking him what he was trying to achieve and why. Really getting to the bottom of it.
Behind me, three other party members started a counter-ritual. The baddie got so wrapped up in arguing with me, that he didn’t notice the counter-ritual until it went off and ruined his whole plan.
Always a good option. Bards and paladins are the usual candidates… they both tend to be bad at not attracting attention, so you might as well make it work for you.
I’ve been thinking about how to work in a speech-heavy character, because a game of Scion I’m the Storyteller for will soon feature a showdown with the literal incarnation of Pride. There are a lot of ways that fight can go (he’s been magically bound and compelled to fight the heroes, and they can try to take him down nonlethally, just kill him, go around him somehow, or something I haven’t anticipated), but most of them will feature him talking his mouth off, at first in an attempt to subtly sabotage his own efforts by distracting himself and cluing the heroes in to the limits of his powers… and then if he realizes that the heroes are trying to kill him instead of save him, absolutely cutting loose and chewing the scenery all the way down to his death or theirs.
I think my best bet is to have him deliver a quick line of dialogue every time he acts (which with Scion’s action economy should be less disjointed than the same thing would be with D&D’s 6-second rounds). But for one or two bits I’ll probably just have to invoke narrative convention and say “Fate won’t let you interrupt this speech” on the grounds that a) Fate is a literal force in Scion and b) the same thing will benefit them when the bad guys can’t just shoot them halfway through their dramatic speeches/one-liners. …Alternatively, IIRC there’s a Charisma Knack that also makes you un-interruptable and compels the audience to pay attention; perhaps I’ll just give him that.
If it’s a one-time thing, you might write out the speech ahead of time. You could even break it down to bullet points so that you can deliver them one at a time during his turn and the PCs’. You could also break down those bullet points according to probable events (e.g. when he gets hit, when someone fails at an action, etc.).
I go for one-liners, wham lines and reveals 😀
By the way enjoying the plot quite much so far 😀
Me too. This is a joke-a-day comic, but it’s nice to get to play with these character relationships every once in a while.
This is the reverse Order of the Stick 🙂
They make plotline with some joke-a-day, you make joke-a-day with some plotline 🙂
One of my players once gave a 10 minute allegorical about the similarities between running a bakery and maintaining a county (talking about the work that needs to go into each, how every person’s job needs to be working with the others, not against them, etc) speech to justify using Profession: Cook in a political debate.
Obviously I allowed it.
See also the serrated arrow of the beaver:
https://www.handbookofheroes.com/archives/comic/utility-shot
I’ve only had situations where I feel like the players COULD talk, but chose to get right into the action instead. 😛
The first time this happened caught me off-guard, but the second time I just rolled with it and let the party nearly alpha strike one of the unarmed BBEGs (he had been using magic to grant his partner lair actions in 5e, and was in no condition to actually try to fight the party alone).
All told? I kinda WISH my PCs would take a little more time to chew the scenery on occasion. : P
I think the other comic with BBEG and speechifying is relevant:
https://www.handbookofheroes.com/archives/comic/villainous-monologue
One possible solution is to make it clear that you don’t get mechanical advantages for skipping the talking bits. That might take you literally saying, “You guys have put yourself in an advantageous position. You still get surprise even if you talk to the villain first.” It might cause a bit of ludonarrative dissonance, but it’s still better than ignoring all the best RP.
“I object!”
Come on, Wizard, it’s a WEDDING! This is one of the classics!
Seriously, dude! Get your poop in a group.
Who was in charge of the unholy ritual wedding suit and dress? Also, have we seen that dress before?
I think it’s Thief’s wedding dress from when she married Wizard. It’s just all mussed up from the rope.
I believe that Demon Queen picked out Sorcerer’s formal garb.
As for Thief’s dress, I’m pretty sure Necromancer borrowed it from a local corpse bride.