[RPG] How to help the players that are new to answering story-building questions

gm-techniquespowered-by-the-apocalypse

It's common in Powered by the Apocalypse games, as a part of the narrative flow, to ask players questions about the world to which their character would know the answer.

For example you might say:

As you browse the wares, you notice the imposing form of Tlexkirash the hunter only a few stalls away. Tik-tik the elf, why does she want your head?

These questions (when done well) are great, because they give an opportunity for players to add characterization to their characters, and having everyone at the table involved with the creation of the story just makes it richer in my experience.

However it seems that in other sorts of games it is not common for GMs to ask this sort of questions of their players. And when I GM games for beginners with experience in D&D these question are often one of the things that trips them up. With confused players I get two types of responses to this. Either they ask a question back:

Who is Tlexkirash?

or they just respond with:

I don't know.

I can't really know why players respond like this, since I am not in their head. It could be that they just don't know they have permission to have fun with the question. They might think it's some sort of cruel quiz, with right and wrong answers. Or maybe they are just not comfortable with improvisation yet and so they want me to do it for them. Sometimes it's probably a mixture of the two.

I usually respond to these with two different strategies:

  1. "Show them the ropes". In this case I stop the game and explain what I am trying to do as a GM. I tell them that they have full permission to answer the question how they want. "You may not know, but your character does! I'm asking you to come up with an answer that fits how you see your character."

  2. "Lead by example". In this case I take their words at face value. I answer their question honestly as if they were an experienced player asking it, but still giving them a hook to improvise. If they say they don't know then I assume their character doesn't know and I play with it. "Tlexkirash is out for your head and you don't even know why?!"

The first way is nice because it gets everyone on the same page. If a player is ready to answer but doesn't know that they have permission to then this works great. However it can also feel like a lecture or a scolding. I think players can interpret this as you can't ask questions back, or you need to be ready to come up with something cool at any time. And players who are just not ready to improvise something can end up feeling a lot of pressure to do something that they are not ready for or confident in.

The second way is nice because it keeps the energy of the game flowing. It also gives the players some practical experience with questions like this. Hopefully they will begin to experiment with other ways to respond and get comfortable at their own pace. The issue is that sometimes you need some nudging out of your comfort zone. I think this risks a player simply passing on all these questions because they feel like the GM would do a better job, or they are unsure what the point is.

I could cover this when we explain the rules. And that would probably be nice, but there are a lot of things being explained then, and (in my experience) players have a huge tendency to forget or ignore non-mechanical aspects of the game that are explained to them. And even if they do remember it is my experience that even when players definitely remember me explaining this to them (often from strategy 1) they will still react this way sometimes.

So my question is: What strategy can I use in this scenario? It obviously doesn't have to be one of the above – that's just to show where I am at.

Best Answer

As a player who started with D&D and didn't get into cooperative storytelling style games like PbtA and FATE until much later in my gaming experience, you should use a mix of both.

Nowadays, I've played Pigsmoke, Apocalypse World, Legacy: Life Among the Ruins, and many others, but my first interaction with PbtA was playing Blades in the Dark, and I was completely thrown for a loop when I, a mere player, was asked by the GM to tell me something about their NPC. Up until that point, the GM was always the person telling me what the NPCs were like, what they wanted, where things were in the world, in general they were the ones who determined How Things Were™. At that point, I had very little experience with improvisation and wasn't really sure what was expected of me. My GM explained what exactly was going on and what kind of different expectations there were for that style of game.

Obviously I didn't immediately become a master of improv, so even though I knew what was expected of me, I still had trouble coming up with ideas off the cuff like that, so I tried, and of course most of my initial responses tended to be short responses. If I was asked "Why is Tlexkirash after you?", I might have responded with "I don't know" more often than I would like to admit, but occasionally there would be responses of "Uuhhhh, I owe them money" or "The target from our last heist found out it was me". "Fortunately", whenever I couldn't think of something, my GM would "help" by just taking the next thing to come out of my mouth and running with it.

Now, all of this is a rather long foreword as to why you should use both. If the player obviously doesn't know what's expected of them, then just going off of what they say might confuse them even more, so a base expectation should be laid out:

Hey Tik-tik, this system is a little different from what you're probably used to with D&D. Rather than making up every little detail of the world myself, I'll be having you and the other players help here and there. I'll put you in a situation and ask you to describe some portion of that situation to me.

Then, once you present them with a situation (such as the bounty hunter scenario you presented), they'll be able to understand what's expected of them and hopefully they'll be able to come up with something. If they do come up with something, then great, your work is done! Tik-tik now has an understanding of what can be expected of them and is providing you resources to work with to enrich both your playing experiences.

Obviously, we can't expect that everyone just picks up the ability to improv changes to a situation immediately. If they can't come up with something in whatever you might feel is a reasonable amount of time, then you fall back on option 2. Use something from the next thing they say as inspiration. This will both keep the game moving, and sort of show the player how it's done. As a bonus, if the other players are already experienced with this style of game, having them around will help accelerate the "learning how it's done" process.