Did you bring a player-wrangler?

Just a brief one today. I've been noticing in my Wave Rats game (piratey, open world open table using Into the Odd, hence the punny name) that we're blazing through content super fast. Like, hyperspeed. Honestly, it's good for me as a GM because it's forced me to strip back my prep, making it more fluid and flexible. My prep now looks less like lashing together a maze of different paths and decision points, and more like throwing a handful of interestingly shaped objects into a bag, and handing that to players to poke at them, and watch them interact. Okay, weird metaphor - I'm prepping situation, not stories, is what I'm saying. Making a systemic game rather than a Telltale choose-your-own-adventure (or >shiver< an on-rails shooter). But I've been trying to figure out why everything's been running so fast.

Part of it is to do with the open table concept. I'm taking my cues from the "West Marches" model, and having a session be going to an adventure site of the players' choosing, having an adventure, and coming home (islands make brilliant discreet adventure sites). This structure necessitates fast, compact play. But that's not the whole reason (and we haven't uniformly stuck to it).

Part of it is the rules. ItO resolves combat very fast, so there's no chance to get bogged down in big battle scenes. But I've never really gone in for super long combats anyway - for me, a lightning-fast, unpredictable style of play does as much to convey the feel of a deadly, swirling melee as complex to-hit rules and lavish descriptions, with the added benefit that you get to do more stuff in the session. So the rules don't account for the x2 or x3 speed with which we get through content.

The real reason, the one I want to highlight, is my partner. We play online, with me GMing and my partner sitting next to me on the sofa playing. Her character isn't particularly a leader in the group, but she does act as something altogether more useful - a caller. Older editions of D&D used to have the concept of a player who had the job, basically put, of wrangling the players into some semblance of order. You may have heard the adage that a TTRPG consists of a conversation, blah blah, players declare actions, GM resolves, blah. Well the reason for this slightly plodding formulation, which makes dungeon-crawling look more boardgamey than the actual experience, is that keeping to the structure of party declares action(s) -> GM describes results helps keep a handle on the game. Note the phrasing there: The party declares actions. As in, all at once. The caller's job is to take all the discussing and planning and joking around and condense it, handing the GM "theplan.rar", so the GM can then resolve each action in turn, as best suits them, and without follow-ups from players until all the actions are done. And that speeds things up immeasurably. Like, ridiculously loads. As in, I'm having to reformat my campaign because I can't prep twice as much content, only for the players to get through it in half the time.

Here's the thing. When the players are having fun discussing different approaches, you don't want to cut them off. I think of a large proportion of the fun of an RPG as coming up with hare-brained schemes. But when the discussion starts looping, or the prospective plans start getting less and less plausible, or the time spent discussing plans outweighs the importance of the scene they're planning for, you want someone there to push them to a decision. It's not about cutting off the players' fun, it's about enabling more fun by moving on once the fun of the planning stage has hit diminishing returns. The GM can try to do this by asking "What's the plan guys?" every five seconds when they judge that point's been reached. But unless the players have a plan, and someone's willing to step up and declare it, you as the GM can't take an executive decision for them. The caller, as a player, can, or can at least set the parameters for a vote.

Another benefit: Simultaneous action. I've started doing group initiative, where everyone on a side or in a group declares actions simultaneously in combat, as a way of emphasizing teamwork. A problem modern D&D has is that it's difficult, or at least extremely fiddly, to enact any sort of simultaneous plan as a team when in the initiative order, beyond "You hit them, and on my turn I'll shoot them." And honestly, mostly people don't seem to bother with that level of coordination - everyone's fighting their own solo battle, until and unless someone goes out of action. (That's not a dig against D&D players, it's just an unfortunate quirk of the system.)

But this also creeps into other situations; even when exploring and investigating, people tend to focus on their own individual actions, and don't spare a glance for the others unless they're doing something recklessly stupid that might endanger them, or stealing treasure. And I think this has to do with taking actions one at a time. As in, a player declares they want to examine the tombstone, and the GM follows up their subsequent interactions there while the rest of the party waits in the doorway, patiently filing in one by one as they find openings to declare actions themselves.

This is where the formulaic, "blah blah" summary of the gameplay structure can help. This is why I said in the previous post that it should be included and discussed in detail in all rulesets. See, if you grab a player and make them tell you what the whole party's going to be doing, you can resolve everyone's actions at the same time. And that, like in combat, allows them to work systematically as a team, rather than just doing their own thing, engaging with the scene piecemeal. And that means you don't get led down rabbit holes of following up player actions while they poke around in the dark, and everyone else waits for a turn at their own fumblings. The caller increases the efficiency of the party by helping them act as a team.

Again, because I can imagine the seeds of objections starting to sprout, this isn't about stepping on the fun the party has messing around by cutting them off; it's about actually getting them to engage with the content you've prepped. And that's why you prepped content - so the party could interact with it and puzzle it out, not so they could shamble around haphazardly without a clue what they're doing, and not get to half your prep because of the wasted time. The goofing around is fun, but only up to a certain point, after which it's just putting off getting to the actual game. And you presumably prepped the game content because you thought it would be fun.

I mentioned before that I think a lot of GMs glance over the game structure - the pedestrian one that seems written with a caller in mind - and never think about it again. I think it tends to read like something you'd present a complete novitiate, someone who didn't even have a concept of what an RPG was, so you can get to what actually running the game is like. Experienced GMs won't need it. New GMs who've been players, or seen the game played, will think it's an overly-rigid summary of the intuitive, flexible back and forth they've witnessed going on between an experienced GM and their players.

But I think this is an oversight. That back and forth appears intuitive, like no-one's needing to take turns or summarise a plan for the whole party, because the GM has these basics down. That structure still exists there, hidden underneath the interruptions and reactions and quipping. It looks like a casual conversation, but the GM is still keeping a firm hand on the reins, not just letting the party roam free willy-nilly. And the caller means you don't have to have the walls start closing in to jog your party into action (which would stomp on their ability to relax and have fun in the planning stage). Their existence props up the game structure that keeps the adventure ticking over, and keeps the game from stalling.

And keeps you from getting a week off, because the party chews through your prep like a hot chainsaw through butter.