Time and Sand

I found this on the web and have no idea what it is from

​Sample Chapter from, The Essential Blackmoor
by Griffith Mon Morgan III Copyright 2023

Time and Sand - how and why to streamline your game

As a referee you have to contend with the desire players have for more powerful weapons and spells, and even more so, for rules systems that give them abilities that border on magical super power.

In order to operate the Blackmoor World setting I always will advocate for games with simpler mechanics and faster abstract combat because it allows for more exploration in a smaller amount of game time. Yet, there are issues that arise which are endemic to the role play format which I want to discuss.

A dilemma that will confront you as a game referee is that you must avoid granular play. By granular, I mean that time has slowed down and hardly anything is getting accomplished.

It is easy to get players to explore your game world in more detail and this takes more time to play through. When you want to give your players something to focus on, all you need to do is slow the game down by giving players information such as this:

“The elf feels a draft coming through cracks in the wall…”

“You can see some kind of writing on the floor…”

“You find a wooden chest hidden under a flag stone…”

Yes, players should be examining their surroundings closely for clues. And these clues become keys to guide them into exploring objects and places in more detail. The problem is - it can backfire!

Time is a problem when running a game; both in-game passage of time and real world time for a play session. Game referees always want to embellish setting with details. Often what happens is that something a referee is putting into a description in order to add more flavor becomes too interesting for some of the players. What was meant to add mood and ambience becomes a focus element and the players become obsessed with exploring it.

It can be almost anything. A small container that is one of many food jars, or a random non combat encounter with a person. What you as game referee wanted to skim over is now going to become the major focus of play for the next half an hour. What is worse, it has nothing to do with advancing the players through the real story of exploring and discovery. It is a dead end and a time waster.

The granules of sand are slipping through the hour glass and not a lot is actually happening despite a great deal of player chit chat and referee improvisation. 

Many will argue that a good game referee should be willing to take this small and innocuous story element and weave it into an actual in-game element. I agree, it is a tough call as to when to expand on something and begin to invent an unplanned situation, and when to minimize the attention to detail the players can fall into.

​The greater question is that you must weigh is the enjoyment your players get from such an event vs. the rewards they will get from the event.

Searching for Gold

For players, all rewards are gold. Whether it’s locating a secret door, beating some monsters in a battle, or actually finding make believe gold. All of this gives them feelings of accomplishment.

Motives for seeking rewards in a dungeon adventure are fairly straight forward. Players go to dungeons to find treasure and magic items. They may also be on a quest to solve some kind of problem. Wilderness and world exploration will likely have some purpose as well. Players need to travel to another town, or they want to get to the location of an old ruin. Yet, the reward, or goal, in either of these situations is a prize that has been placed in advance by you the referee, thus the purpose of the game is to reach an objective. This is true even if the players are merely exploring. The true objectives are the placed encounters in your adventure. These are the really shiny gold that may have all three elements of exploration and discovery, victory in battle, and magical treasure.

Of course, you also have to have time for unplanned random encounters and those must feel as ‘real’ as any of your placed encounters. Referee work can be hard.

It really comes down to whether there is more gold to be extracted from this mine, and I am being a bit prosaic here, yet the investment of time vs. returns has to be considered in every encounter. Players will want to dig deeper into a situation thinking they can get more proverbial gold out of it. They are having fun doing this, or at least that one player is having fun while the rest of the party is twiddling fingers. What if a situation is already mined for all the gold it can provide? What then?

The most painful aspect to these kinds of expansive non quests is that as the game referee you’ve spent hours preparing yourself to present a world to your players and they’ve somehow decided to do the equivalent of parking themselves somewhere in order to examine their own belly buttons.

​As the game referee you know what is gold, and what isn’t, that’s the easy part. The hard part is how to guide players away from distraction so they can continue the quest.

This is true in my own game as well. A recent adventure to the Forest of Forgetfulness had the players entering a strange dimensional rift. They were literally exploring a soviet era secret military installation that they had gotten transported into. My players wanted to look in every nook and cranny in every place and thing they found. I had not planned for all of this and I was having to think fast about every little detail. Fortunately, I have explored many actual abandoned places and I could close my eyes and image what my players would be discovering.

The perfect memory for recall came from when Chris and I explored an entire derelict mining town in the mountains west of Denver and it didn't take much to see this in my mind for what I needed to describe to my players.

Some Tools You Can Use in Your Own Game Sessions

In a game, you really can’t break immersion with, “That’s not what I had planned for during this adventure, so you’re not going to get anything worthwhile out of doing that.”

We can all agree this is bad referee technique.

What referees need to do is develop tools for managing time granularity in their game.

Referees often use simple phrases such as “It looks harmless.” This is a short-cut when you want players to know they have to actually do something to find out what is going happen.

The same can be done to speed play. You can tell your players, “There doesn’t seem to be anything of value here.”

This only works some of the time.

Some of my players can be really tenacious and despite my signals stating that they are wasting time they will continue to persue worthless avenues of play. If you have a similar kind of player, it is at this point that you may need to teach them, or remind them, of how you run your game with, “I will let you know if you find anything that is relevant to your quest.”

Ok, this is not as bad as. “Stop doing that, I want you to go over here…” The experienced referees reading this may be squirming at this advice, because they feel that even random details are important to an adventure.

Allow me to add some context. My players are exploring a massive military research facility that takes up hundreds of square miles of land. They really can’t get granular with every single building they encounter. I will role play one building to get the feel of the place, but all the rest needs to be skimmed and time needs to dilate and move more quickly. In this situation, the players are examining the contents of old office desks that have already been broken and rifled through over decades of abandonment. They don’t need me to describe every address in an old rolodex they find lying on the floor. Time is going to go fast and in 15 minutes of real time 4 hours will have passed in the game world.

Step three in reducing granular play is to ask the players if they are looking for anything specific? Turn the game on the players and make them declare themselves!

Everyone twigged to what was going on as soon as I described the setting. The buildings weren’t medieval and certainly the garage full of work trucks was a good giveaway they weren’t in Blackmoor anymore. They were good about it and played along as if they had no idea what these things were. Even when they found the box full of live ammo they played along by saying, "These little metal sticks may be worth something."

Lots of knowing winks were also exchanged. 

Obviously, they knew what kinds of things one might find there and they could avoid entirely ‘Metagaming’ by saying something like, “I am looking for anything I could use to do X thing”

To which I was able to respond, “Ok, if you see anything like that here, I will let you know.”

Lastly, you need a couple experienced players that are willing to help you out in keeping things on track.

It’s likely an experienced player has been a game referee themselves. And they can spot when players get too granular and detail focused as well as you can. They know exactly the kind of hell that players can put you into when all you want to do is get them to move to something more interesting to explore on a much larger scale.

Instead of talking to the player who is engaged in minutiae, you can turn to your helper player and say, “You don't sense there is more of interest to be found here.”

Your helper player will then interject and address the other players by suggesting to move along.

So far so good.

The other problem is when you are dealing with an encounter where players are speaking to a non player character. You really gotta cut these short sometimes. I will even go as far as suggesting that you need to railroad the encounter a little bit to keep things on track.

The encounter needs to let the players know whatever information they need for their adventure, but you must avoid chit chat.

Thus a NPC will provide this to players:

• NAME: This is who I am (or who I want you to think I am.) 
• MOTIVE: This is why I am talking to you. (or what I want you to think my motive is.) 
• INFORMATION: This is what I can tell you. (Yes, I may be lying.) 
• OBJECTS: This is what I can give you in order to aid your quest. (Is this a gift or manipulation?) 
• CONCLUSION: I need to get going, I have to meet someone, are there any questions?

Don’t misunderstand me in wanting to speed play. This kind of encounter is generally meant to guide players forward, but they often get wrapped up in chit chat and wanting to know more than they need to know. So, yes, enjoy running the situation, and do not go too fast with it. Yet, the real goal is to advance the players along their way of seeing your world. If your players spend an hour here, then you may not have enough time left on game night to explore the places they are meant to find.

Referee skills are something that take time to develop. There are no hard rules for how to deal with every situation that will occur during a game. Over time one learns a greater ability to read players and know how to use what tools when.

I hope this sparks some new ideas for running your own games.

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