How to Not Freeze Up
Another Prismatic Wasteland blogwagon has dragged me out of blog purgatory. It turns out community accountability is good? Whaaaat? This time, we're giving out some player advice, and what better contribution could I make then rewriting and redistributing some advice I actually did give to a new player about a year ago.
A friend of mine was a relatively new player, and wanted to play the fantasy of being the smooth, charismatic party face1. In an early investigation scenario, an NPC was playing coy refusing to give us some information, so I shifted the spotlight over to them to let them shine.
They had no fucking clue what to do. I also took this time to use the restroom, and I genuinely have no clue what our third player was doing but they didn't step up either, so the game just went into awkward silence for a good minute there until I came back and offered to take over. My bad.
Every time I get the chance to play a game, I remember it's actually kind of hard. You're seeing the world through the tiniest pinhole filtered through a game of telephone and you're supposed to make decisions for a fake guy? I thought about this moment for a bit, and decided to type up some advice for them. It went something like this, but with much sloppier grammar (but equally sloppy composition):
Method 1: Establish an M.O.
Okay, this wasn't the first one initially, but since this is the only one that comes with homework, it requires first-place urgency. If you've picked up playing naturally over time, you probably already do this subconsciously, but if you struggle with answering "what would Mr. Pawn do here?" quickly, try writing down how your character prefers to approach situations.
"Jane plays innocent to trick people into saying more than they would." "Raymond throws his weight around with threats if he can't get what he wants." "Ursula tries to deescalate situations with appeals to rationality." Write as few or as many as you need to feel comfortable. And don't get too wrapped up in making these the most sensible/predictable actions for the character you've envisioned: make sure you'll actually have fun playing these out.
Method 2: Get more information.
Never undervalue the follow-up question. "Does this suspect we're interrogating seem nervous at all?" "Is there anything on the floor or walls of this hallway, or is it completely empty?" "Does anyone here look like they recognize me?"
The worst this can do is buy you some more time to think, and fill out the word picture; lack of information is still actionable information, even if said action is "let's just get out of here for now". Often, the answer might spark something for you: "This suspect isn't nervous, like, at all? Let's try and find out why that is." If you're really lucky, this might spark the GM's memory for a detail they forgot to mention (this happens to me as a GM with embarrassing frequency): "Oh shit, I actually forgot to mention this is the hallway with the spike trap; you're not sure that the goblins are aware of it."
Method 3: Pointed designation.
This is not just asking "Can someone else do this?", though that is a valuable lifeline and perfectly fine to do when needed. A pointed designation is a knowledgeable shift of spotlight to take advantage of another player character's skills. This often takes the form of a good-cop-bad-cop routine, but could also be an appeal to character backstory or player knowledge: "Your character would be more familiar with dwarves, living by the mountains and all, do you know how we can earn his respect?" and "I wasn't here when we went down to floor 3, do you remember the safer way through here?" as examples, respectively.
This is the end of the blog post.
Can we get a blogger advice blogwagon next? I still need to learn how to end one of these things.
We were playing Cyberpunk RED and they picked a Rockerboy, if anyone is itching for context.↩