What tips do you have to improve tabletop communication?

Turning RPG playing into a science.... Good work.

"setup is the real building block of play" This a an amazing insight into RPGs.

The secret door in the hallway example has me thinking that secret doors just shouldn't be placed in otherwise unmarked sections of hallway. It doesn't take much; a line of pillars might be a weak soft-sell of a setup, but the DM is at least describing objects immediately in front of the PCs and thus the players have an opportunity to respond with an immediate action.

Same goes for traps and ambushes, probably.

Getting some fundamentals of good Gaming 12 minutes, thank you.

This is a well-made video! The clarity of your model is served well by your format and presentation.

My view is that the goal is for the players to have sufficient situational awareness at any given time to make meaningful choices. For my campaigns, that means making sure the players know what their characters would know, as if they were really there.

The basic structure I use is:

1) Describe the circumstances or roleplay the NPCs.
2) The players describe what they do as their characters or roleplay their characters.
3) I adjudicate the result.

Then I repeat that throughout the session and the campaign.

Where I differ from your setup model is that I tend to use a looser family of techniques rather than one formal structure. Different circumstances and spans of time require different handling: moving through a city, exploring a dungeon, crossing the wilderness, talking in court, managing a battle, or dealing with faction consequences all create different presentations of the player's situational awareness, organizing what they do as their characters, and adjudicating what happens.

I am still cataloging these techniques as part of writing my Majestic Fantasy RPG, but I think the common ground between our approaches is the importance of giving the players good situational awareness, or what you call good packages of immediate information.

I feel like you could stretch this out into an hour of anecdotes and examples, would love to more on this topic. Great video and framework.

Interesting way of presenting this. Thanks !

Very practical guidance, thanks!

I gained so many bad habits from reading adventures published by WotC and FFG... I still feel tempted to add the description blocks!

another great video. Loving your analysis.

1. I start each town/ location/ dungeon with an overall description. "Ancient stone masonry, with blocks that are appx. 1ft. by 2ft., worn with time, mortar crumbling in places, bits of water and mold damage here and there. The doors are large stone doors, appx. 8 ft tall. Ceilings are typically 20ft high. There are periodic oil sconces on the walls providing dim light." Enough to give an overall vibe of the location. Players are to assume all rooms in this area/ section/ floor of the location look generally like this unless described otherwise. Now you only have to explain the exceptions that stand out.
2. As the players proceed through rooms, describe the size of the room, anything notable other than sight of the 5 senses, then what they see. Typically at least 3 interesting things in each room that are "points of interest". Not specifics yet. "The room is appx. 20 x 30 square. There is an odor of recently burned pipe tobacco. It has an old desk with books and papers on it on the north wall, a large pair of book cases on the east wall with old tomes, several books scattered about the floor, a weird metallic ball with strange symbols and shapes on it, about 3ft across hangs from the ceiling in the center of the room, appx. 9ft high from the floor. There are no other visible entrances or exits". Just enough for the players to know what to investigate or interact with further. Additional detail provided as appropriate.
3. I always ask players to tell me what they would like to do with natural language each round. Not game mechanics, unless the system requires it.
4. In combats, I ask players to briefly describe their intention with natural language, roll dice, resolve the game mechanics (hp, saves, etc.) and then narrate the fiction. I usually narrate the fiction, but try to incorporate players ideas, etc. "I'm going to sneak up and stab this guy in the back." Resolve stealth, resolve the attack and damage, determine the consequence, and narrate, "You creep up behind him and slide your dagger in between his armor plates, piercing his right lung. He collapses with a quiet whisper, as blood begins seeping from the wound onto the floor."

If it's more important or a higher stakes situation, I'll ask the player for more input on their intention, or narrating the fiction as appropriate. I also ask how does the player imagine a spell looks when they cast it the first time.

It's always a challenge to determine how much information is sufficient to encourage PC action. As a GM, I strive to spend most of my time reacting to PCs. I want to respect their agency and not railroad them. But practically speaking, even in a sandbox, there will be elements that I'm more mentally prepared for than others. I will have thought about some NPC motivations more than others. I will have thought about detailed descriptions of some locations more than others. Might I be steering them subconsciously in directions that don't require as much on-the-fly improvisation? Maybe so. But being aware of that fact and imposing some procedural framework like Setups and Barriers seems to be a sensible approach. I've lately been conceptualizing my games as a sort of finite state machine, but I'll definitely think more about your suggestions. As always, great post!

I like that you mentioned the walking dead rpg, because it helped me to take the model as an abstraction and step back from the direct room-to-room mindset of a dungeon (which i rarely use)

Im actually going to try applying this in broader strokes for an investigation game, and poi by poi navigation in an urban horror setting. I think mapping the events as a dungeon esque flow chart would actually really help organize my planning!

The only regret I have about leaving Saturday was missing your Shadowcity game. Maybe another time.

My methods/ conception of this is very similar but I use different terminology. I break down a session or adventure into encounters.  My definition of encounter: A moment when player characters encounter a Obstacle when in pursuit of an Objective.  That could be when they randomly meet 1d8 goblins in the woods, surprise attack a sleeping dragon, or attempt to get through a stuck door in the dungeon.  Sometimes the Objective is obvious (survive the goblin encounter, get past the door)  Sometimes the Objective is not obvious, (find the secret door to the villains lair).  Either way, the basic elements of an encounter is the PCs want something (Objective) and something preventing them from getting it (Obstacle).  This can apply to any kind of encounter including social encounters (the PCs want something from an NPC and have to over come the NPC's resistance or give the NPC something in exchange)  or an exploration encounter  (Looking for a hidden treasure or secret door).

An adventure is made up connected encounters. A campaign is made up of connected adventures. It's a fractal.

Anytime PCs are able to move freely without difficulty or a decision required I call this a Transition.  (You leave the tavern and go to the library, it takes you 3 turns.)  

Anytime PCs are given information simply by telling me they look at a thing I call that Exposition (You look at the glowing pillar, it has elvish writing that warns of terrible magical pollution that can't be removed) I prefer to keep Exposition brief and limited to actionable information.

My play method is cyclic: I describe the current state of the game world in the place and time the characters exist (Game State)  the players make choices (Take Action)  I apply rules and procedures or make a ruling in edge cases (The Simulation or Model), the rules produce an outcome  and I describe the new Game State to the players.  


I've found this framework helpful for campaign and adventure design as well as improvising encounters. I ask myself (or the game) questions and use the answers to create encounters or cities or dungeons a piece at a time rather than trying to be overwhelmed by looking at it as a whole.

It's interesting how rules that get created for GM description sometimes resemble the rules of detective fiction. I guess it's convergent evolution?
One of my personal pet GM description peeves is when the GM starts making jokes about things happening that don't actually happen. It's stupid, but it genuinely gets confusing when the GM starts joking around about the table having eyes and biting you, haha just kidding, and twenty minutes later another player asks if you are missing any HP from the mimic attack.

This is a great video on communication, storage of information, and game loop development!

Great distillation of something I'd started noticing a few months ago. (Coincedentally, probably around when I ran a couple Citadel of the Scarlet Minotaur sessions lol.) When I started running more dungeons, I definitely twigged to how rooms are great describe and present that initial "here is what you see"... along with how, often, if I'm running published modules my prep primarily consists of me reviewing the key and identifying what is Actually First Seen (the setup). Kind of gratifying to hear you point out that hallways/passages often DO need setup but keys do not customarily provide them and the GM has to provide them.

(When keying my own dungeons, I tend to actually treat passageways as a "room" for key purposes... primarily to give myself some way of noting setup details, I am realizing!)