You have succeeded as a GM when all of your players are role-playing with one another while engaged in problem solving some challenge. These situations do not just spontaneously occur; the GM has to set them up and then facilitate the players in grappling with them. This is especially true of political challenges, which will be the focus of this article.

Goals

Like everything in life, you need to know your goals so you can accomplish them. As a GM, you need to know what you are trying to accomplish. You can’t get by with just ‘have fun’ as that’s a fairly pointless statement. What’s ‘fun’ for a Call of Cthulhu game and what’s ‘fun’ for a Icons superhero game is very different. Like most GMs, I don’t always consciously think about my goals for a game; I know in the back of my mind what’s needed for the genre and style of the adventure being run. Sometimes however it’s really useful to articulate your goals as doing so can really sharpen your abilities.

For purposes of this article, let’s say we want in the next adventure a political challenge that will involve all the PCs and get the players roleplaying.

The Plan

Once you have a goal, then you need to develop the strategies and techniques you will use to accomplish this goal. You should begin by recognizing the limitations on you, which can be boiled down to this: keep the players in control.

GMs need to be subtle. You set up the pieces and then step back to let the players decide which pieces they pick up, knock down, or ignore. You have to be very careful about what you say. Almost all GMs talk too much. When GMs provide background information, they often in the process lay out what they believe is the correct response. They often give advice when none is desired, thus signaling to the players the path the GM wants them to take. Sure the GM means well in these situations but these are lazy habits that undermine the game.

As GM, you should never have a goal, or a strategy to accomplish a goal, that requires infringing on the autonomy of the players. Yes, this means you are reliant on your players for the success or failure of your game. That’s as it should be. Sometimes your players will step up, sometimes they will step down, and sometimes they will do something crazy and completely step out of the scenario you set up. You need to accept that and go where they go. Afterwards you can examine what happened to determine what went wrong.

Now we've established that we want a political challenge to engage all the players and get them roleplaying. Here are a few suggestions:

1. Define the challenge through the PCs, not the players. This is important. If you have an esoteric political situation then the players might just discuss it philosophically as players. If you have a political situation that impacts the PCs themselves, then they will be more likely to discuss it through their characters.

2. Set up the PCs to have different opinions on the situation. Players instinctively try to make their PCs different. Everyone wants their character to be unique. There may be commonalities to the PCs but there also will be clear differences. As a GM you need to listen to your players and pick up the signals they are giving you about the differences of their PCs. Work this into your political challenge.

3. Provide ‘enough’ information. This is perhaps the most difficult part of the process. As discussed before, too much information will result in the GM influencing the decision while too little will stifle the discussion and not draw in the players. The best advice I can give on this is that you should answer the questions of your players as precisely as possible. If you must add information then always do so to muddy the waters by giving conflicting perspectives on the situation.

4. Ask questions. Avoid leading questions, yet use the Socratic Method to force your players to examine the situation thoroughly. You are the facilitator. You are not there to lead them to an answer but to help them make a decision that they can feel confident addresses the situation as they want to.

5. Accept that their answer will be different from whatever you may have imagined when you designed the challenge. Treat their answer fairly. I believe GMs should always give deference to a well-reasoned argument or plan of the PCs. If you don’t do this then why should they put any effort into their plans?

An Example

This upcoming weekend I’m running a small political/intrigue LARP with 10-12 players. My goal is to get people engaged with the scenario and one another. What’s my plan? I can't be too specific as a few of my players do read this column, but the trick is to set up characters with clear goals driven by strong motivations that conflict with other characters and then to provide a structure for them to work out these conflicts.

This last point is important. You need to always give your PCs room to maneuver; you need to give them enough space to think. Don’t automatically take away options. If your players toss out the idea of assassinating the Queen, give them an idea of the difficulties therein but don’t dismiss the idea out of hand. Encourage them to have the freedom to consider a wide range of solutions and present any pitfalls they might encounter but let them explore their options. The truth is that if the situation is set up for the players to make a joint decision the more extreme ideas will be moderated. Not always but usually.

Okay next month I’ll probably go over the LARP I'm running, from how I set it up to how it went. This will provide a more detailed and concrete example of what I've been discussing here.