Hey all, welcome back to another GMTT!
Ever feel like your game is stalling out? Or maybe you built up a plot point for months and months, only to see the game abandoned before it could ever come to light? Hopefully not, but if that sounds familiar, today I’ll be sharing a great tool to help out. Pacing takes top priority in Tabletop, and today we’re talking about a metaphor I use to help pace my games (all while only making the bare minimum number of references to MTG).
This might not apply as much to those of you who tend to run modules or other pre-built adventures - unless you’re like me and enjoy going wildly off the rails with those - but for the rest of you, this should give you some tricks to keep your plot humming at a good pace throughout.
The Metaphor
Imagine you’re playing a card game. Maybe it’s P&A, maybe it’s MTG, maybe it’s Yugioh. Doesn’t really matter.
You hold some cards in your hand - some good, some bad - and you play these cards over time.
For our purposes, these cards represent your plot threads - Your big moments, your flashy surprises, your jarring plot twists. They haven’t happened yet- you still hold them in your hand, you know what they do, but the big moment remains a mystery to the players. In the meantime, you’ll spend time developing them, hinting at them, foreshadowing them. The party might catch bare hints of what your planning, or you might straightforwardly lead them to a dungeon in order to further develop the plot. In either case, when the moment is right, the iron is hot, and stars align - you slam the card on the table: Pyrrah’s hometown gets hit by a meteor, the party faces their grand climactic battle against the Lich Zoltan, Charra the childhood-friend type stabs Vernah the Ranger in her sleep! Those cards might originally enter your hand during your planning, or even at the very start of the campaign - but now that they hit the table, they produce big moments for your players!
These cards form the basis of your plot. They act as the engine moving things forward - laying them down fundamentally changes the state of the game, in the same way laying down anything from a bear to Emrakul fundamentally changes state of the game. When and how you play them matters too - pick a good moment that jives well with your card, and the context might bring the moment a whole new life. Pick a bad moment, though and the card might fall flat or even hurt your game in the long run.
Of course when you play a card, it leaves your hand - you can’t play it again, even if it stays on the table for a while causing havoc for the players. But, on the flip side, you can always draw new cards! Sure, after revealing Allistair the Fouled King enslaved Teedleburg, hometown to Jorgg the Barbarian, you can’t do that again or something. But, you can reveal Jorgg’s mother, Lyrra, founded a resistance! Or you could introduce zombie-fied Teedleburgians in combat, implying necromancy most foul. You might even work with your players to create more cards - perhaps starting a side plot with Jorgg, where he works with Allistair in a desperate attempt to save his family.
I’m not saying I’m definitely doing the zombie thing in a game, I’m just saying I regretted putting it in a blog post as soon as I finished typing
Using the Framework
Ok, you get it - cards represent plot points. They start in your deck until you draw them. Then they sit in your hand, allowing things to develop and progress until the time is right - when you play them in a big, state-changing moment. So what?
Well, like in most games, holding cards come with a few implications:
You must play your cards, or risk ending the game with them still in your hand
You need a good balance of big, strong, powerful cards and weaker, cheaper, lighter cards
If you set yourself up to draw cards, you can easily justify playing the ones in your hand
Memory and time-constraints impose some maximum hand size, so you should play your cards before you reach it.
Let’s break those down:
1. Playing Your Cards
Back when I started playing Magic, I made a lot of mistakes. One of the big ones, though, was stuffing my deck with stuff that would never happen. Spending my card quota with huge, 10 mana cards that land like a sledge hammer if you manage to get them on the field before you hit 0HP, but you never make it that long. Building around cards combos that require a laundry list of separate, extremely specific things to happen - like, sure it’d be so cool if you get Time Warp, Meloku, and Mystic Sanctuary in your hand all at the same time, and you hold the mana to cast them all, and also your enemy lacks the cards or mana to interrupt - but of course that won’t ever happen since you’ll only play 3 games with this deck before moving on.
Later, I’d stuff my deck full of cards I wouldn’t end up playing - way too many intensely-situational counters, traps, and tricks, or only-so-so buffs and spells or whatever. They might seem helpful when thinking about the abstract, amorphous concept of a “game” in a vacuum - but if I lose the game with them in my hand, then really I might as well write it off as a wasted draw.
Point being: you should focus on filling your metaphorical plot-deck with cards you know will see the light of day, and which don’t require an insanely unlikely set of specific circumstances to fire[1]. Don't spend your time writing at length about the war raging three countries over, or the loot in the vault requiring 35 perception at level 3 to find, because the players won't ever see that.
Likewise, don't spend your time jealously gardening one or two cards for an entire campaign - careful to avoid shedding too much light on them or let your players get too close in combat lest your players spoil your schemes. Instead, make sure you hold a healthy number of cards meant to hit the table soon! Instead of teasing the players with a level 26 God they won't fight for 4 years out-of-game, maybe focus on the loutish lieutenant devotee causing problems for Loxenburg, who they have a reasonable chance of touching any time this century.
2. Balance Your Cards
Going back to "mistakes Ian made playing MTG"[2] - those sledge hammer cards I mentioned above were fun. Too fun. Who can say they never ill advisedly stuffed their deck with absolutely ridiculous 5+ mana cards that you spend your first 6 turns waiting to play, only to hit 0 the turn after you get your first real card out?
Well, like Magic, pacing your plot over the course of your campaign requires a hand full of big cards and little cards. Not every session can end with you a player meeting a god or finding out someone is really their own grandma. That's called a soap opera[3], and I'm assuming you're trying to run a straight campaign. No, instead, you should vary your pacing and mix in some little hits in with the big ones. Maybe the party doesn't get the big long plot dump about body snatchers replacing the town populace, but instead Torgg sees Zeek and Charles talking to each other in alien clicks and hisses behind the bar - playing the much smaller "Something body-snatched Zeek and Charles" card before the much bigger, town-wide card. Maybe you don't let the party fight the Big Bad Mindflayer terrorizing the populace of Littleton, but you reveal Jorgg's sister Emelia wandered into the Grove of Nightmares and never came back, playing the "Emelia is gone" card ahead of the "Mindflayer fight" this sets up.
My point is - you can't land with a big huge moment every session (because then they stop feeling like big, huge moments) but something needs to happen. You need to figure out ways to pad the big moments out and spruce them up - giving players something to keep them going and let the plot feel like it's moving forward even as you work toward your larger reveals.
3. Draw More Cards
One of the other big takeaways from our metaphor is that the number of cards we have or play is not fixed.
In order to build a plot for the long haul, you need to change stuff up a lot - move things around, come up with entirely new ideas, and throw old ideas in the garbage bin of history. So, even though you start with a fixed hand of cards in the beginning, as time goes on and your hand reduces in size, you pick up new cards and refresh your hand.
I find this thought comforting. I often fight the idea that I should let certain plot points come to light - some cards strongly appeal to my narrative tastes, and I find myself thinking “nah, it’s way too soon to let the players see that card - what will I do once it’s gone?” It’s like I enjoy the idea of keeping that card in my hand more than I like actually playing it. And in my formative days, I gave into that voice - letting the card sit there for ages, rotting in my hand, barely even hinting at it lest my players discover what I’m up to. As often as not, I’d forget about the card or end the campaign with it still in my hand because I never got around to actually pulling the trigger.
Now, though, I remind myself: I have more cards in my deck, and this card is meant to be played. If the players discover it - great, I’ll come up with more! If not, that only magnifies the impact it lands with when I finally let the card drop!
Dear cast members of HNEW: Don’t read too much into that trickster god thing…. or this caption.
I don’t mean to say you should never hold on to cards - my favorite twists only came after teasing players with it for several months of out-of-game time. What I mean to say is: Treat your cards as if you will play them sooner than later - your party will find out Esmeralda’s grand deception, your party will deal with the zombie uprising (hopefully successfully) and your party will find out the trickster god’s been fucking with them this whole time - and once that happens, you’ll find yourself with more space to work with, and new threads to pick up and start playing with.
4. You Have a Maximum Hand Size
The final point to draw from our metaphor[5] is that you have a maximum hand size - as you do in most games. Unlike those games, though, we determine our maximum hand size through the number of plot threads we and our players can keep in mind at the same time, rather than some artificial limit imposed by the game.
This acts as a counter point to point #3. That is: you know that you shouldn’t draw cards too quickly, even as you try and get cards into and out of your hand as quickly as possible.
This provides incentive to avoid viewing cards or plot threads as sacred. You can’t hold onto it forever - after all, how will you keep track of it if you lost it in the 50 other threads running along side it? So, better to exercise judiciousness when deciding how long to hold onto it and whether or not to finally lay that card down in order to pick up another one.
This does beg the question - what is the maximum hand size? Well, it’ll be different for everyone, and largely come down to how you organize yourself. For my part, I keep an “ongoing developments” doc which I update regularly, providing short updates to each of my different plot threads after each session so I can keep track of what NPCs are doing off screen and so on. I’ll consider a card fully “played” and off the field once I close out a thread from that doc, clearing up brain space and planning time for a new thread to make a home. I can probably keep 15 plot threads going like this, but probably not 150.
Anyway, that’s all the insight I’m wringing out this week. We spent a lot of time looking at the various implications of our metaphor, and only torturing it just a little. Hopefully it helps give you a new lens through which you can view your planning - while I’d never call any metaphor “Absolute Truth”, metaphors do help us understand systems and structures, and might provide insight into whatever they try and explain. In our case, I hope this encourages you to:
Think less about holding your plot threads to your chest
Keep in mind that the big moments really only land when you have the little moments to help them stand out, and
Remind you that you can pick up more plot threads if you need to - even if everyone has practical limits to the number of threads they can keep going at once
In the meantime, join us next Wednesday for the second part of our World Lore Wednesday mini-series of the gods of the Sigil of Dusk. And of course, HNEW continues tomorrow (Wednesday), starting with a bang as the party might at last figure out how fish people, blood oceans, doomsday cults, and unnamable horrors all fit together - be sure to catch it at 5:30PST!
[1] I’m looking at you, room in RotR that requires a ridiculous perception score and pressing a specific thing on a specific wall to meet an entire other boss, who explains ~30% of the entire first book
[2] To be clear: I never said I was good at MTG, just that I liked playing it.
[3] Which, admittedly, are hella fun to run as long as that's not all you're doing...
[4] source
[5] and it is our metaphor now - you’ve spent enough time immersed that you don’t get to claim innocence anymore~