Speaker 1: Hello and welcome to another session of How To Be Master Of The Game. A interesting question was posed to me by one of you wonderful subscribers. Michael McCully asked me, how do you determine pace in your game? Now, setting the pace is a very difficult concept because there are two factors involved in pace setting. You the game master, and you are obviously setting the pace because you're telling the story, but also the players. And the players can really slow that pace down if they choose to basically lag over some kind of small issue, such as going shopping. That can really slow down the pace of your game. Or players who don't necessarily know their characters very well, so they just take longer to respond. There are a couple things that you can do as a game master to make sure that your pace remains as fast as possible, or as slow as needed, in order to make your game just that much better. And what we start with is we start with how to tell a story. Again, it just keeps coming back, how to tell a story. But this time, it's how to tell a story, one in which you are in control. So as the game master, you have worked out what your villain wants. He wants something, and is having difficulty getting it, remember? So he has a plan. Now how do you get your characters involved with that plan? Well, it might be at the very beginning, it might be later on in his plan, wherever the case might be, that's for you to choose. However, how you tell the story of the character's involvement with that plan is critical. And in any good story, we have three components. We have an introduction, a middle, and we have a conclusion. You need to have exactly the same things in your game. For every adventure that you've decided to run, you should have a very definitive, very clearly marked introduction, a, generally speaking, two-part middle, and then a great conclusion. Bearing in mind your middle and your conclusion may change as the players have their characters interact with your introduction. Every introduction then needs to be broken down into exactly the same thing, or every component within that story needs to be broken down again into its own mini-story. So you would take introduction, and you would break that down into its own little introduction, a little middle, and a little conclusion. So what this does is it creates a very interesting narrative for the players to engage in. As an example, you might decide that the story you want to tell is a Star Trek story. I'll tell you why we've got Star Trek as a theme today a little bit later. But let's say you have a Star Trek story, and you've worked out that the evil Borg are trying to assimilate a planet because there's a particular telepath on the planet that's of value to them. They've identified that as a particular biological distinctiveness that they want to add to the collective. So your introduction would be the characters on board, let's say, the USS Braxia, has detected some unusual readings from a nearby system. That is what you would call your introduction. The middle part would be their journey to the system, their encounter with the Borg in the system, and perhaps them trying to save the telepath, because somehow they've got to figure out that that's what the Borg are after. Finally, you have your conclusion, which, if we're going to follow any kind of narrative imperative, is a showdown with the Borg, where the telepath that they have either rescued or have consigned to her fate of assimilation is pivotal in the battle. That's our three big chunks. Now we break it down even further. Let's take that introduction where the crew discovers this strange signal. That's not a particularly interesting means of opening an adventure. It certainly worked 400 times for Star Trek, but for you as a master game master, you want something a little bit different. So in your introduction, you need an introduction to your introduction, you need a middle to your introduction, and you need a conclusion to that introduction. The conclusion is fairly obvious. The players have to make their characters decide to go and investigate the strange signal. But perhaps it's more about how you introduce that signal that keeps the players interested. And one of the six tips on how to start your game from one of my previous sessions was to start with a battle. So why not have the crew of the USS Braxia engaged in a battle with somebody who happens to let slip halfway through the battle that they were tracking a particularly powerful telepath to a nearby planet. Now when the opening battle is concluded, your introduction has effectively been set. The players now know that there is an alien telepath in the nearby system that's particularly sought after. In your middle, you now have the, we're receiving a strange transmission from the same planet that the bad guys were after. Should we play it on screen or however you want to bring it in. Once they've played it, give them a non-combat challenge to do, and then of course it will lure them, hopefully, to the planet. They might turn around and fly in the opposite direction. That's fine because guess what? The telepath did the same thing just yesterday. Gosh dag nabbit, she simply decided she was going to leave too, and she flies to wherever it is that your wonderful players have decided to head to. And the entire scenario now takes place in that new location, because remember, you're master of the GM, you are in control of that story. Once they get to the planet, you then have the middle section. The middle section, again, needs an introduction, a middle, and an end. So your introduction might be that they detect a Borg cube that is completely dormant in orbit over the planet. This will inspire players to go off on different tangents and do all sorts of weird and wonderful things. That's fine. The reason why it's fine is because you as the GM have worked out a fairly formulaic approach to your pacing, and that is a 1-2-1 strategy. If you think your players are having a lot of fun, it can be a 1-2-2 strategy, and here's what I mean by that. A 1-2-1 strategy means that you have one session as an introductory session. If your sessions are three hours long, three hours should be more than enough time for you to have an hour of combat with the other aliens who are going to drop the hint about the telepath. You have an hour of deciphering the telepath's cryptic message that's beamed onto the ship, and then you have an hour of getting to said planet, which you could fill with debris of other ships to build up the tension, or whatever you want to do. But it allows you to go, okay, I need to fill this for an hour, I need to fill this for an hour, and I need to fill this for an hour. The two is the two-part middle piece of your grand story. It should take you two full sessions to get the players from arriving at the location to having the big showdown with the bad guy. Two sessions allows you to, again, break it down into sessions of one hour each, working an intro, a middle, and an end. The end of the middle, if you can follow me, is really where the players have to make a decision. Do they escape the system quietly and try and avoid conflict, or do they go into the conflict? And of course, that is then your one-session conclusion. If they're really having fun, and they're really invested in the story, and they want to explore a whole lot of other options as well, then you go to the one-to-two, and that means you have a two-part conclusion. Two sessions dedicated to the conclusion, but you stick to the rule of having an introduction to that conclusion, a middle to that conclusion, and then a conclusion to the conclusion. And let me tell you, something that a lot of young GMs do is that they think they're smart by having the main villain escape from the final combat dramatically, because the players are about to win. You don't want your favorite villain to die, and so they have him sneaking out the back door. That was a lesson I learned very early on when someone said to me, I don't want to play in your games because we never win. Give your characters, and the players that are playing them, a reward for following your story. Give them that solid conclusion. And that brings me to a reason why I really like this particular role-playing system. It is the Star Trek Coda role-playing system. And like many of the role-playing games out there, there are a whole bunch of books that kind of came out with it. I don't have all of them, unfortunately. But the system itself is a little bit complicated. The narrator's guide is effectively 101 for script writing. It literally shows you exactly how to lay out your story, and it takes you step by step. Do this, do this, do this. They even talk about the three-act model where you have your introduction, you have your middle section, they call it the concentration, and then you have your resolution. Now, this for me is a really, really well thought out book for new players, as well as for older players who maybe need a way of telling their story. Now, just before we finish up, there are a few things that will help you to determine your pace and to see whether your pace is right or not. And the first one is not, are your players looking at their cell phones? That is called modern day life. People are engaged with cell phones. You might want to ban cell phones from your game, that's fine, but you are throwing your game back into the 80s. People have cell phones, they check WhatsApp, they check all of their other bits and pieces. Don't let it throw you off. That doesn't show disinterest in the game. That simply shows that your players are trying to connect with the outside world, which for a lot of them is probably a good thing. What shows disinterest is when players are no longer engaging with your game, where they aren't following the trail, where they're sitting back going, yeah, I just go with whatever, I go with the flow. That is deadly. Immediately, have someone shoot at the character or have something blow up or do anything you can to try and bring that character back. If they're not coming back, well, you tried, it's probably something with them. So look at your players, read your players. Are they engaged? Are they sitting forward? Are they watching with intent or are they very kind of disinterested? And sometimes it's worth just saying, guys, I think you guys are no longer having fun. Let's stop. Let's try a different system. Maybe you should GM, maybe you should just go and die in a ditch, whatever the case might be. So read your players. That's point number one. Point number two is have a watch or a clock that you can discreetly look at. It allows you to really control your game and I'm not saying that every single session should be at hour one, the introduction to the introduction is done. At hour two, the middle to the introduction is done. Use it as a guide. If you've spent three hours on the introduction and your players are still engaged, keep going. You are doing it right. If however, after 10 minutes, your players have got to your middle section, you might be running out of story content. So just use time to help you guide yourself. And then finally, and this is a trick that I literally have people remembering sessions for, not because of the GMing, but because I use soundtracks to movies and I use soundtracks to movies, particularly from the 1980s and the 1990s. And there are a couple of very good reasons for that. One is that the music from that time period in feature films was highly thematic. So the composers would write the introduction to the movie music, the love music, the battle music, the climatic finale music. And because CDs at the time were, could only hold an hour, well, it can still only hold an hour, but no one uses them anymore. You had an hour's worth of music, which literally gave you your intro, your middle and your conclusion beautifully played out as a rousing score. Nowadays filmmakers are trying to shy away from being very clear cut in their filmmaking. They still are, by the way, it's just a lot more subtle, but their music is not necessarily as definitive. So go out to those secondhand shops and buy every single soundtrack that you can find that had a nice orchestral score. Don't put lyrics in, it is very distracting, but there are literally hundreds and hundreds of films out there that have got nice big orchestral scores that will fit any genre of game. If you're obviously playing Star Trek or Star Wars or any other kind of game based on a movie, grab that soundtrack. It will instantly transport your players into that realm and it will help you to keep pace going. And if you find that you're sitting around and you're listening to the music, it means your pace has ground to a halt. No one is listening to you. So suddenly throw in that giant banana, change things up. You've got a plan, use it. So that's it on pacing. That's the tricks that I use to try and keep my players awake, keep them alive and keep them going. If you watch BaconRPG.com, that's a live session that I'm busy running with my players, you will see in episode one I've used all of those tricks. When things start to slow down, I throw in undead crows. When things start to slow down, I throw a boulder at the party. Whatever the case might be, it's easy to keep pace going. Your players can be a problem, so learn how to manage them, learn how to read them and you'll never go wrong. So I hope you took something away from this session and I hope your pace may improve in your games and your players walk away going, wow, that was, I've just watched a movie. I've just had fun and it was three hours that just zipped by. I hope it works out for you. Write your comments below. I love reading what people are doing with this information, mostly ignoring it. But also I have to do this, please go and check out Geekstable.com, links are below. Geekstable.com is an umbrella for all of the things that I'm involved with that are very much geek orientated. So if you kind of like these tips and tricks on how to GM, you might like the other stuff. There's a session that I'm rolling. Usually I'll do a breakdown after that session so that you can have a look. This is the mistakes he made because I certainly made mistakes, let me tell you. There's board games, a lounge where we kind of do reviews of board games and stuff. It's really, really fun. And there's just a whole bunch of other stuff out there that is really orientated around the world that we kind of play in. So until next time, happy gaming.