GM Style vs. Campaign Styles - show vs. tell and how it changes in RPGs

 Saturday we tried out an initial session of Old-School Essentials. This was due to the Call of Cthulhu campaign hitting a dramatic climax, reaching a point where plenty of PCs needed to go into psych wards, some players needed to roll replacement characters, and the rest of the Delta Green team needed to do some new recruiting. While the GM concocts the next story arc I suggested OSE as a filler between sessions until I was ready for whatever I come up with next.

To get this out of the way: Roll20 has a nice Necrotic Gnome branded character sheet which made playing OSE in VTT easy, and it was a fun session. My son has joined the Saturday group and his presence was critical, I feel, to helping me better understand both the baseline appreciation for the game in general, and also helped me to realize why I often have a sort of "GM crisis" where I find myself feeling extremely dissatisfied with the games I have been running. 

Part of the issue, I now realize, is that the VTT format really leans heavily on the "show, don't tell" methodology, and by virtue of the tools at hand that means its easy and almost feels necessary to throw out battlemaps of everything, along with minis. If you have a dungeon map, after all, why wouldn't you use it? But this is actually rather contrary to the way dungeon delving actually worked back in the Old Days. In 1981 when I ran the Caves of Chaos I actually did put down the dungeon map, and we actually used push-pins on the map which I put a foam backing behind to track movement of the group (the horror!) It was a glorious mess, but quickly afterwards I realized several things:

1. Don't do something to the map which makes it non-reusable/messes it up.

2. Describing things to the players and letting them map it out is both what the game expects you to do and also kind of more fun (but not these days; I think around 1990ish is when I believe players stopped wanting to do their own mapping, I noticed).

3. Tell don't show was the norm back then because describing something gave it much more detail than you could get unless you were a proficient illustrator. Today, google searches make it trivial to find some artwork to do the same, but in truth it's also a placebo effect, a prop might lock you in to something not quite in alignment with your vision for the module.

From pretty much 1981 until around 2002-2003 I was a "describe the thing" kind of GM, telling players what was going on, where they were, and so forth with occasional illustrations in play. I had dungeon, city and overland maps but their purpose was for me to keep track of things, and the players needed to assess where they were from my descriptions. When we had complex battles a sheet of scratch paper was usually deployed to provide a rough sketch of what was going on. That was it.

2002 was notable because I got in to a group where I rotated GM duties and gamed at a house with a friend with an enormously complete collection of maps and minis, and even props. This scenario would repeat again with another friend who had even more maps, minis and props in 2008ish. By then, I had acquired lots of maps and minis myself....D&D 3rd edition, particularly 3.5, leaned heavily on the implied expectation that these were advisable to have, and it was a norm that I had to get used to. In truth, I never did; the only reason I can enjoy D&D 3.5 today is because its no longer played much, and I can set the game table expectations back to my own preferences, leaning less on maps and minis. 

In film, there is a general notion that showing the audience something is better than telling them. If you have to convey information that cannot be shown, it may be necessary to rethink your approach a bit. I can think of no better illustration of how this works in cinema than the 1980's era director's cut of Dune vs. the 2021 Dune chapter I. Both films are telling the same story from the same book, but one does a borderline maddening level of "telling" to get the audience up to speed and the other leans 100% into the "show the audience" side of the process. 

Likewise, a concept like this can apply (and often does) to novel writing. In writing, it is often (not always, but often) better to have someone within the story convey information in a meaningful manner. If you have to exposition dump in a novel to get the reader informed, and that exposition is not conveyed in the course of the plot or through the voices/sight of a protagonist or other character, you risk losing some audience when they feel like the author is maybe just sharing their notes to get everyone on the same page.

But in GMing, the concept of show vs. tell is different. There are elements of the two concepts from above which do apply: a GM who can show an illustration of a trap room might find it evades confusion in explaining what things look like, for example. Old modules did this, a lot. Look at Tomb of Horrors, for example! The idea of providing illustrations of complex or interesting rooms from the perspective of the players is a great idea.

Likewise, it is much better to have a character within the game (or a good skill roll) tell players some useful information or backstory....and to write the module to include said backstory as a findable easter egg, if you will. Often many modules include pages of explanation for what brought the situation or location to its current state, enveloping the GM reading it in lore, then fail to provide any mechanism by which that lore can be meaningfully imparted to the players. Some GMs just infodump, but that is a terrible idea. There is such a thing as too much information (for some players) and a GM should know where that threshold lies with their players.

But when it comes to the show vs. tell concept in VTT and specifically the use of maps and minis, this concept changes....at least for me. The difference for me between RPGs as a strength and RPGs as combat miniatures games boils down to whether the use of maps and minis hinders or enhances the flow of the narrative. If you like the combat, if you enjoy the tactical elements, the maps and minis are useful tools, obviously. But if you are like me, and you never even considered maps and minis to be necessary or even helpful for the first 21 years of playing the hobby, they are a bit of an anathema to the tale-telling you are actually aiming for.

In the old days, I called this the "swing from the chandelier" scenario, with the implication that players might try to do something like that if the location of a fight is fluid and descriptive, with the players asking questions about the environment to see if there's something they can exploit. This means you could have possibilities to consider in battle that simply don't exist until you bring them up....but once asked, make sense, and so become available. To contrast, a map lays it all out clearly, and also cannot adequately convey three dimensions....and 3D scenery can do that, but at the expense of a heavy cost in cash and time, plus of course being actually good at making 3D scenery and props is a skill unto itself, and if that were the initial barrier to entry for this hobby then I simply would not be in the hobby.

All of this is a long way toward me realizing that one of the reasons I have been less satisified at times when running games in VTT recently, while at other times I have been having a blast, is because I have fallen in to the trap of what I call the VTT Hammer. When your tool is a hammer, everything looks like a nail, of course. In VTT, when your tool is designed from the ground up for you to use virtual maps and minis, then everything revolves around that. But it doesn't need to be so; I never use maps/minis as such when running Call of Cthulhu, for example. And in my Mothership games the maps as such are point-locational, by design, which means that you are using them merely to keep general track of where people are at, not as battle maps. Either way....my Mothership and Call of Cthulhu games have been amazing, whereas my recent D&D, Pathfinder and OSE games have been utterly m'eh.

I'm looking at how to handle this for Pathfinder 2E tomorrow. Thankfully it really is possible to run PF2E, D&D 5E and OSE without the conventional maps and minis....go back to the descriptive theater of the mind approach, as the appellation eventually came to be. One huge advantage to this approach is that it tends to force the GM to think more about what you want to present in a scenario, rather than doing it procedurally. As an example: there are four interesting encounters I want to get to in the dungeon crawl in OSE, but the rest of the dungeon is just obstructive and boring chafe....so why am I slogging everyone (and myself) through the procedural of dungeon crawling when the old players in the group are, as veterans, going through the motions just because, and the new player in the group, who is having fun with all of it, will also happen to find the actual fun stuff just as fun, if not more so, and never know the difference? 

For me, it is reconciling the notion that "just because VTT expects me to stick a map and minis out doesn't mean its a good idea." Of course, that doesn't mean it isn't always a bad idea, but a friend of mine read an article on this, and I wish I knew the source of this rough paraphrased quote, that boils down to, "never hide your good ideas." And in truth, I think a lot of scenarios in gaming do exactly that: hide the good ideas.

Okay, enough rambling! More on OSE later.....I have a lot of thoughts about the game now that I've run it a bit, more about the general nature of classic retro gaming in and of itself. Likewise, more on the conundrum of being an old veteran player and the idea that young, new players are actually a great way to invigorate your own interest once more.