A Pulitzer Prize winning writer helps you with your make-believe elf games. Also: Penguins.
The name Davd Mammet may or may not be familiar to you. You’ve probably seen at least one of his works. He’s been a playwright and a screenwriter since the ‘70’s, he’s won a Pulitzer, and arguably his most mainstream success was The Untouchables, back in 1987. He’s a good writer, an adept craftsman of drama and tension on the screen.
He also created a TV show: The Unit. But he had a team of writers working underneath him. As you might imagine, he had high standards. And the writing on his own show did not impress him. At. All.
(A little heads-up: Davie uses some saucy language there. Nothing too elaborately profane, but perhaps not great for the young ‘uns. He also uses PRACTICALLY ALL CAPS, so it’s perhaps not great for reading, either. And there’s penguins. Anyway.)
What's key here is that this advice isn't just good for someone trying to meet David Mamet's writing standards. It's really good advice for anyone wanting to help create more compelling, dramatic, interesting stories. Turns out, that's RPG players and, primarily, Game Masters.
The Audience Will Not Watch Information
The penguins want you to be clear. They want understanding. They want you to be obvious, to state precisely what is happening simply.
But the penguins don't know what makes for interesting screenwriting. Because they're not screenwriters. And if you follow their advice, says Mamet, you're not going to get anything out of the audience.
Do not follow the penguins. They are adorable, but make poor GMs and smell of fish and poo on things. But...d'aaaw....
Information isn't drama. It’s boring, about as compelling as reading the dictionary. Information, by itself, is dull: it doesn’t create anticipation or raise the stakes or keep anyone interested.
I bet you've got lots of information you're hoping to put in your players' hands. You know where the Duchy of the Flamingo is in relationship to the Dire Swamp of the Xvarts. You know what the motives of the Black Prince of Bhardabad. You know exactly why the Bandersnatch needs the Tome of L’bropp. Heck, depending on your reading habits, your might know the name of every minor noble in Faerun or the mating habits of triaphegs. Or both.
But when we follow our inner penguins, and we make the mistake of just telling the other players that information, it dies. I'm sure every DM has had that experience:
“Um. Wait. Was that the dude who made the goblins attack us three weeks ago? Or was that the guy with the vampire thing? I thought his name was Tim. What city is he the prince of? The one with the dude with the thing? Okay, whatever.”
The audience doesn’t care about raw information. The people playing your game aren't any different. Information doesn’t make them interested in what will happen next, and doesn’t, in and of itself, empower them to do anything. The penguins in your head want to tell them everything, but telling them doesn’t make them care about it.
Drama makes them care. Empowerment makes them care. Anticipation and dread make them care. That’s the hard core at the heart of any enjoyable experience: you care what happens. They’re not going to read your handout, they’re not going to listen much while you infodump, and they won’t remember the name of your important NPC. Not unless you make them care.
A Need Which Impels
Rather than being concerned with informing your players, then, you should primarily be concerned with keeping them interested.
And how do you keep an audience interested? Well, I’ll tell you in the next section.
Before we get to that, we need to ask a more fundamental question: Why should the player care about your adventure? There’s usually a sort of agreement between the players and the GM’s that the players will play through what the GM constructs, but that doesn’t really mean they care. Do they get invested? Do they get excited? Are you hearing joyous laughter and witnessing abject (if entertaining) defeat? Are they on the edge of their seats, or asleep in them? The game is already active – you actually need to give input into your actions to play an RPG. But it’s sometimes all too easy to disengage from what’s happening at the table.
Which is where Mamet’s advice comes in to play for you. Your players already have characters – characters that, because they built them, they can’t help but empathize with and want to succeed. They’re ready to care and root for their PC. And so they’ll sit up and pay attention when something is at risk for them.
Mamet says that drama comes from the heroes overcoming things that prevent them from achieving a specific, acute goal. We’ve looked a bit at how goals are something that can structure a PC, and some work is done there in making them more severe and central with the origin being tied to the goal, with specificity coming into play with the precise rewards the DM keys to each adventure. And that helps. But even if you’re not using a system like that, a lot can be gained from having your players make characters that want things very much. The desires might be for a vorpal sword or a legendary gem or to kill a beast or to extract vengeance or to serve a king or whatever, the important thing is that they want it, and that they want it bad. Badly enough to risk the death, damage, and dismemberment common in RPG’s. Bad enough, in other words, to be a little unbalanced.
This should happen on a moment to moment basis. Even in a more hands-off style of DMing, in a more sandbox-like environment, your PC’s should hit the ground running, with fierce and deliberate intention, driving themselves from scene to scene. In order to drive the action forward, they need to be thinking about what’s going to happen next, all the time, which means there must be some carrot out there they want to pursue. A PC who has no great desires – or who is generally apathetic about achieving them – isn’t going to be a compelling character for anyone else at the table.
Mamet’s “litmus test” itemized list is a good way of asking yourself if your planned adventure or encounter is actually compelling, or just filler. Who Wants What? helps define the goal and the necessary characters (the PC’s, and their antagonists): if the Leucrotta has no reason to be in the ruin, and the PC’s have no reason to fight it, there’s not going to be much interesting happening there. Why Now? helps make the adventure or encounter immediate. If there’s no pressing reason to thwart the Necromancer-King, there’s nothing to anticipate with dread or fear, nothing happening if the PC’s don’t do anything themselves. What Happens If They Don’t Get It helps define how the scene is going to play out, because, as Mamet notes, the hero in this encounter or in this adventure is going to either fail entirely, or find a new way. That is, the hero won’t accomplish their goal here.
That last bit is worth diving into a little bit more, because it’s a little counter-intuitive. A character does not get what they want until the end of their career, until the end of the campaign, so each scene, each encounter, needs to be them failing to get what they want. Even if the party emerges from the combat intact, they do not have what they seek, their needs are not fulfilled, and they probably just wasted a few minutes and a lot of blood on something that is at best a stop on the road to what they actually desire. This is why the goals in that previous article are staged: you are not meant to get what you want, because once you get what you want, all the tension and anticipation goes out of the thing.
The Audience Will Be Interested In What Happens Next
So, how do you keep an audience interested?
One of the things that humans do very well is to imagine the future, to think about what might happen, and to try and use whatever skills they have to figure it out. It's what makes musing interesting. It’s what makes horror horrifying. It’s what makes drama satisfying. It’s even what makes us enjoy gaining levels and improving characters.
There is one thing at the core of all of these experiences.
Anticipation.
The realization of anticipation is what causes that physical reaction known as catharsis, and that heady drug knows few equals. So of course it is at the core of what Mamet advises makes for good DRAMA.
Anticipation can be absent from our RPG’s for all sorts of reasons. Maybe the game isn’t swingy enough. Maybe there’s not enough chaos. Maybe there’s too much control. Maybe the next 20 levels are all spelled out in advance. Maybe we know the battle will be won, or we know that our characters will succeed. Any time that we know what the result is going to be, all the air goes out of the tires.
The job of the GM, to keep the players interested, and to keep them coming back, is to slick the wheels on their train of anticipation, to keep them wondering about the future.
Any level-based system already has this, to a certain degree, built in. An HP-like system of diminishing points also agitates this predictive mechanism. As a GM, you can leverage either of these, or both, to build anticipation in your games. Magic items and other rewards are also good sources of anticipation.
Regardless of your system, anticipation requires ambiguity and chaos: you cannot know for sure what hit will drop you to 0 HP. You cannot know for sure what you’re going to be able to do when you gain a level. You cannot know for sure what capabilities your magic items have. If all these things are nebulous and unknown, but important to your character’s goals (and those goals are, as noted above, acute and demanding), you create a circumstance where you need to pay attention to see if everything falls apart, or not. Abandon the precise math, the wishlists, the recommended wealth-by-level, the guaranteed powers from these specific lists each time you get X amount of XP, and embrace more chaos, more unknowns, and more mystery.
The more your players are wondering about what happens AFTER this encounter or this adventure, the more you’ve made your material compelling and interesting.
And once you’ve got THAT, they’ll seek out information, without needing you to dump it into their brains.
Answer Truthfully
The letter is good advice. It telegraphs key principles that should help anyone, from David Mamet’s writing team to you in your own home games, to ratchet up the dramatic tension of their creative medium. There’s enough meat here for 10 articles (like: try writing a D&D adventure where you don’t actually have NPC’s who TALK!). But for now, I’m interested in you: How are you going to add more DRAMA into your next game?.
The name Davd Mammet may or may not be familiar to you. You’ve probably seen at least one of his works. He’s been a playwright and a screenwriter since the ‘70’s, he’s won a Pulitzer, and arguably his most mainstream success was The Untouchables, back in 1987. He’s a good writer, an adept craftsman of drama and tension on the screen.
He also created a TV show: The Unit. But he had a team of writers working underneath him. As you might imagine, he had high standards. And the writing on his own show did not impress him. At. All.
(A little heads-up: Davie uses some saucy language there. Nothing too elaborately profane, but perhaps not great for the young ‘uns. He also uses PRACTICALLY ALL CAPS, so it’s perhaps not great for reading, either. And there’s penguins. Anyway.)
What's key here is that this advice isn't just good for someone trying to meet David Mamet's writing standards. It's really good advice for anyone wanting to help create more compelling, dramatic, interesting stories. Turns out, that's RPG players and, primarily, Game Masters.
The Audience Will Not Watch Information
The penguins want you to be clear. They want understanding. They want you to be obvious, to state precisely what is happening simply.
But the penguins don't know what makes for interesting screenwriting. Because they're not screenwriters. And if you follow their advice, says Mamet, you're not going to get anything out of the audience.
Do not follow the penguins. They are adorable, but make poor GMs and smell of fish and poo on things. But...d'aaaw....
Information isn't drama. It’s boring, about as compelling as reading the dictionary. Information, by itself, is dull: it doesn’t create anticipation or raise the stakes or keep anyone interested.
I bet you've got lots of information you're hoping to put in your players' hands. You know where the Duchy of the Flamingo is in relationship to the Dire Swamp of the Xvarts. You know what the motives of the Black Prince of Bhardabad. You know exactly why the Bandersnatch needs the Tome of L’bropp. Heck, depending on your reading habits, your might know the name of every minor noble in Faerun or the mating habits of triaphegs. Or both.
But when we follow our inner penguins, and we make the mistake of just telling the other players that information, it dies. I'm sure every DM has had that experience:
“Um. Wait. Was that the dude who made the goblins attack us three weeks ago? Or was that the guy with the vampire thing? I thought his name was Tim. What city is he the prince of? The one with the dude with the thing? Okay, whatever.”
The audience doesn’t care about raw information. The people playing your game aren't any different. Information doesn’t make them interested in what will happen next, and doesn’t, in and of itself, empower them to do anything. The penguins in your head want to tell them everything, but telling them doesn’t make them care about it.
Drama makes them care. Empowerment makes them care. Anticipation and dread make them care. That’s the hard core at the heart of any enjoyable experience: you care what happens. They’re not going to read your handout, they’re not going to listen much while you infodump, and they won’t remember the name of your important NPC. Not unless you make them care.
A Need Which Impels
Rather than being concerned with informing your players, then, you should primarily be concerned with keeping them interested.
And how do you keep an audience interested? Well, I’ll tell you in the next section.
Before we get to that, we need to ask a more fundamental question: Why should the player care about your adventure? There’s usually a sort of agreement between the players and the GM’s that the players will play through what the GM constructs, but that doesn’t really mean they care. Do they get invested? Do they get excited? Are you hearing joyous laughter and witnessing abject (if entertaining) defeat? Are they on the edge of their seats, or asleep in them? The game is already active – you actually need to give input into your actions to play an RPG. But it’s sometimes all too easy to disengage from what’s happening at the table.
Which is where Mamet’s advice comes in to play for you. Your players already have characters – characters that, because they built them, they can’t help but empathize with and want to succeed. They’re ready to care and root for their PC. And so they’ll sit up and pay attention when something is at risk for them.
Mamet says that drama comes from the heroes overcoming things that prevent them from achieving a specific, acute goal. We’ve looked a bit at how goals are something that can structure a PC, and some work is done there in making them more severe and central with the origin being tied to the goal, with specificity coming into play with the precise rewards the DM keys to each adventure. And that helps. But even if you’re not using a system like that, a lot can be gained from having your players make characters that want things very much. The desires might be for a vorpal sword or a legendary gem or to kill a beast or to extract vengeance or to serve a king or whatever, the important thing is that they want it, and that they want it bad. Badly enough to risk the death, damage, and dismemberment common in RPG’s. Bad enough, in other words, to be a little unbalanced.
This should happen on a moment to moment basis. Even in a more hands-off style of DMing, in a more sandbox-like environment, your PC’s should hit the ground running, with fierce and deliberate intention, driving themselves from scene to scene. In order to drive the action forward, they need to be thinking about what’s going to happen next, all the time, which means there must be some carrot out there they want to pursue. A PC who has no great desires – or who is generally apathetic about achieving them – isn’t going to be a compelling character for anyone else at the table.
Mamet’s “litmus test” itemized list is a good way of asking yourself if your planned adventure or encounter is actually compelling, or just filler. Who Wants What? helps define the goal and the necessary characters (the PC’s, and their antagonists): if the Leucrotta has no reason to be in the ruin, and the PC’s have no reason to fight it, there’s not going to be much interesting happening there. Why Now? helps make the adventure or encounter immediate. If there’s no pressing reason to thwart the Necromancer-King, there’s nothing to anticipate with dread or fear, nothing happening if the PC’s don’t do anything themselves. What Happens If They Don’t Get It helps define how the scene is going to play out, because, as Mamet notes, the hero in this encounter or in this adventure is going to either fail entirely, or find a new way. That is, the hero won’t accomplish their goal here.
That last bit is worth diving into a little bit more, because it’s a little counter-intuitive. A character does not get what they want until the end of their career, until the end of the campaign, so each scene, each encounter, needs to be them failing to get what they want. Even if the party emerges from the combat intact, they do not have what they seek, their needs are not fulfilled, and they probably just wasted a few minutes and a lot of blood on something that is at best a stop on the road to what they actually desire. This is why the goals in that previous article are staged: you are not meant to get what you want, because once you get what you want, all the tension and anticipation goes out of the thing.
The Audience Will Be Interested In What Happens Next
So, how do you keep an audience interested?
One of the things that humans do very well is to imagine the future, to think about what might happen, and to try and use whatever skills they have to figure it out. It's what makes musing interesting. It’s what makes horror horrifying. It’s what makes drama satisfying. It’s even what makes us enjoy gaining levels and improving characters.
There is one thing at the core of all of these experiences.
Anticipation.
The realization of anticipation is what causes that physical reaction known as catharsis, and that heady drug knows few equals. So of course it is at the core of what Mamet advises makes for good DRAMA.
Anticipation can be absent from our RPG’s for all sorts of reasons. Maybe the game isn’t swingy enough. Maybe there’s not enough chaos. Maybe there’s too much control. Maybe the next 20 levels are all spelled out in advance. Maybe we know the battle will be won, or we know that our characters will succeed. Any time that we know what the result is going to be, all the air goes out of the tires.
The job of the GM, to keep the players interested, and to keep them coming back, is to slick the wheels on their train of anticipation, to keep them wondering about the future.
Any level-based system already has this, to a certain degree, built in. An HP-like system of diminishing points also agitates this predictive mechanism. As a GM, you can leverage either of these, or both, to build anticipation in your games. Magic items and other rewards are also good sources of anticipation.
Regardless of your system, anticipation requires ambiguity and chaos: you cannot know for sure what hit will drop you to 0 HP. You cannot know for sure what you’re going to be able to do when you gain a level. You cannot know for sure what capabilities your magic items have. If all these things are nebulous and unknown, but important to your character’s goals (and those goals are, as noted above, acute and demanding), you create a circumstance where you need to pay attention to see if everything falls apart, or not. Abandon the precise math, the wishlists, the recommended wealth-by-level, the guaranteed powers from these specific lists each time you get X amount of XP, and embrace more chaos, more unknowns, and more mystery.
The more your players are wondering about what happens AFTER this encounter or this adventure, the more you’ve made your material compelling and interesting.
And once you’ve got THAT, they’ll seek out information, without needing you to dump it into their brains.
Answer Truthfully
The letter is good advice. It telegraphs key principles that should help anyone, from David Mamet’s writing team to you in your own home games, to ratchet up the dramatic tension of their creative medium. There’s enough meat here for 10 articles (like: try writing a D&D adventure where you don’t actually have NPC’s who TALK!). But for now, I’m interested in you: How are you going to add more DRAMA into your next game?.
