Troubles With Tone

Some People Don't Listen 

Years ago Paul ran a fairly hardcore game of Shadowrun that needed a couple more people to round out the team, so he stopped into his local game shop to recruit. He picked up a couple of older guys who seemed easy to get along with. We had a cybered up Troll Sam, a femme fatale who was great at blades and shooting, and had a ridiculous skillwire library for anything else, and a studious hermetic mage; we added a physical adept and a pretty competent shaman. We were set.

The mission had the team sneaking into a small Balkan country where a powerful spirit had set up his own little domain. The team posed as travelling merchants. Not perfect, but it was good enough...until the shaman stopped the game to record how many sticks of which flavor gum he had handed out to some kids. Dude, doesn't matter... but no, he ground the game to a halt and made sure everyone STOPPED for him to make sure he had recorded proof of an exact count - for something no one else at the table gave a damn about.

This was the same guy we had to wake up every time it was his turn. It's not like he was listening anyway.

I tried to tell him we didn't want to play Merchants and Bankers, but he was as oblivious about it as he was about everything else we asked, and eventually an otherwise awesome game was abandoned because of it.

It's a Common Problem.

In college in the 80's Paul had a friend of a friend come to town for a weekend. His regular gaming bud was stoked because this visitor was the guy who had taught him to play and he wanted a game together. Paul agreed to run it, and they threw together characters.

Stormrider the Crazed promptly walked into town and fired an arrow straight up into the sky.

/blinkblink...

I couldn't wrap my head around why he thought the guards of a populated town would put up with that silliness. When Paul asked him about it, his response was "I'm chaotic neutral." We all somehow managed to resist the urge to ask but are you stupid?

We were so dumbfounded by this pointless behavior that again, the game sort of stumbled and sputtered and died. Since then Paul has said what he should have done was use a Blue Bolt From Heaven response: "Ok, the arrow comes back down on your unarmored head and the gods arbitrarily roll a crit. You die. Wanna roll up a character that is NOT chaotic dumbass?" In the very least he should have had the city guard throw the idiot in the clink for public endangerment, but he really didn't want to crush the hopes of his regular gaming friend. 

Lack of Communication

Don't get me wrong - these behaviors are not without merit in the right time and place. Counting every copper is appropriate for some games. Randomly stirring the pot is entirely correct for certain tables. The trick is that the GM and the players need to all get on the same page. They need to have discussions about Tone, among other things.

If you want to play a game where one of the characters is permanently polymorphed into a mule named Donkey, have at it! Just make sure everyone in the group knows the game is going to be full of silly hijinks in advance. If that's what everyone shows up for, to do anything else would be asinine. (See what I did there?)

If you're playing a serious survival horror game and one player keeps going for slapstick, the other players aren't getting what they signed up for, which isn't fair. The reverse is as true; if one player in a game of PARANOIA keeps trying to min/max everything and stop the other players from doing silly things, they are a buzzkill and need to be promptly run over by Santa's sleigh. Don't be the guy with a stick up your ass...but it's just as important not to be the only guy telling everyone else to take the stick out of their ass. 

Differences of Vision

Sometimes even that isn't enough. 

Paul ran another game just a few years back where the players were the crew of a smuggler/merchanter. Hideo the cyberninja was decidedly a badass, and had arranged animé-style sticky-paper bombs like a super high-tech miko tossing written blessings to obliterate oni, on which he could set the fuse by tracing a quick glyph on the surface with a finger before a throw.

We discussed that paper doesn't fly but he really wanted that motif, so we handwaved that it was nano-explosive laden and had different properties of weight and stiffness, etc. I have to admit, I loved the creativity, even if Paul's ADHD stickler tendencies were twitching. 

Then they got into a firefight. They successfully took down the super-fast cybered up girl in the front, but the big guy in the back was about to use his heavy gun so Hideo explained his plan - he wanted to toss the paper-bomb mined corpse at the guy before he could shoot.

Paul blinked and went 404 for a minute. Hideo wanted to catch the girl who had just been shot dead as she was falling limp, before she hit the ground, and THROW her at the other goon. Paul got all tangled up in the physics of trying to throw a ragdoll-limp human body that weighs over a hundred pounds, which is nigh impossible without a LOT of raw ability, some careful choreography, and a good bit of luck.

On top of that he wanted to stick one of his explosive paper tags on her so that she would blow up when she hit the other goon, which by his own design meant he had to overwrite the default timer by drawing a glyph on the paper with his finger, which he wanted to do as he stuck it to her, which he meant to do as he grabbed her, and then he wanted all that as part of the single action to throw her.

We pointed out that he could just throw one of the papers. Even that was a little crazy, but Paul was willing to look away for a moment and just roll the dice. No, he wanted to throw the body.

Paul wrangled it around for a minute and said he could maybe do a fancy standing version of a monkey throw and get the body moving that way without the tag. No, he wanted the explosive attached.

Paul managed to still his twitching eye and say maybe he could stick the tag on her as he did the throw, and just let the default timer blow her up after the other goon was tangled up on the ground under her limp corpse. No, he wanted it to blow up exactly as it got there. 

Paul explained that setting the timer, sticking it to her, and throwing her were three separate actions even if he allowed the ragdoll body to be thrown as a projectile at all, never mind successfully grabbing her and preventing her from puddling dead on the pavement. No, Hideo insisted, he just wanted to do them all at once, and was getting upset that Paul might start splitting his roll or adding modifiers to the difficulty. 

Understand that this is a good player. Paul just couldn't seem to get through that he was trying to run a serious game of hard sci-fi (for some definition of "hard") and not an animé space opera, at least for this game. They'd had the discussion and everyone had agreed, but they just couldn't come to a meeting of minds on what was possible in that context.

Understand that Paul has written four unpublished but roughly completed novels in this particular setting, and had tried to be pretty clear he intended to use hard, realistic physics as much as possible. 

Sometimes the GM just has to read the room and see that the other players don't really care, they just want to get to their turn and have their moment in the spotlight to be cool, too. You roll the dice, apply the results, look the other way while you handwave the events of the story, and try to get past it to pick up the momentum again. As Stephen King said, kill your darlings. Switch to a space-manga and roll on.

So how do we avoid these problems?

CATS. (https://proleary.com/games/the-cats-method/)

Ok, it's not perfect, but it's a very good start. Check it out.

Concept - What's the game about? Is everyone enthusiastic about the pitch?

Aim - What are the goals? The Stakes? Are we trying to tell a certain kind of story?

Tone - What's the intended Tone? Is it slapstick? Grimdark? Swashbuckling?

Safety - Talk about Safety Tools! Lines & Veils, X Cards, Content Warnings. 

GMs, take a little time before the game to address these things. Be clear in advance, be understanding, but try to be firm on what the group agrees unless they all agree to change it later. 

Players, be flexible, and for all that's holy, read the room. RPG groups are collective endeavors, and a good group is golden. Be a team player.

Don't be Tone deaf.