Finding YOUR Keeper Style | Chaosium Interview

[Music] hi i'm james from chaosium in this video i talk with mike mason creative director of call of cthulhu about keeper styles there are a lot of different ways you can approach running a tabletop role-playing game and mike shares his perspective and experience on the best ways to do so for caller cthulhu i'll jump across to that interview in just a moment but first remember to subscribe to the chaosium youtube channel and thanks for watching so keepering styles i mean there's there's three ways or three elements to that kind of concept the style of keeper in terms of how you interact with the players you know your whether you're their friend their enemy you're neutral there's the kind of the way that you impart information how do you portray the npcs or the monsters and so forth you know whether do you act or not and then they kind of the third component i guess is the how do you get good at it how do you how do you know when you found your style and how do you develop into that and and develop further from that so let's go into some of these different aspects in a little bit more detail can you talk to us about the relationship that a keeper has with their players there's a number of ways you can break it down but here's one way okay so role playing started out with the idea somehow that the keeper or the gm or dungeon master was your enemy and it was you versus the players so you were the person personification of the dungeon or the adventure out to get the players the you know the investigators the characters to the engineers whatever you want to call them very early role-playing there's a lot of that because it was came out of war games which were me against you on the battlefield we've moved on a bit and you know there are still games that do that very well and they can be a lot of fun so it's not a criticism of that but george styles have moved on so there's the opposite to being the player's enemy is to be their friend well what you're trying to do is you know work with the players to get them through now this can work quite well in call of cthulhu because you know players being players forget clues or they go off the wrong track and so yeah a helpful bit of advice to push them in the right direction or a helpful gentle reminder with some npc that turns up saying hey guys do you remember do you remember i told you about the strange noises coming out of the well in the far field that you've completely forgotten about hey they were doing it again last night what we should maybe check out that well what do you think now in a game like called cthulhu being their friend may actually work against you as well it's kind of like you know as often in life one extreme to the other extreme isn't always the ideal situation you want to find that kind of healthy balanced middle ground sometimes the style you know i would call it kind of neutral facilitator style which for me i think is personally the kind of ideal because i'm in the middle of the scale i'm not the player's friends but i'm not their enemy either i'm here to facilitate the game and at times i'm going to have a joke with the players and we're going to have a laugh and at other times i am going to be the personification of neil athertep and i'm going to want to destroy them because that's the other flip side we're only talking about really you know the interaction between the keeper and the players at the moment they also the other you know partly a key role of the keeper but it's shared with the players no not to forget is about being the arbiter of the rules you are there to be the impartial fair-minded referee of the game you can't be that if you are too down the scale of being the enemy or the friend and um you've also got to make judgment calls sometimes you've got to say you don't need a role for this guys you can just do that other times you're going to be no i'm afraid it is an extreme role you know you've said you want to climb up the mountain one-handed with a broken arm balancing you know six eggs on your head and fighting a shock with at the same time i think that's going to be an extreme difficulty i think we can all agree that's a fair call so enemy friend neutral facilitator i guess if you think about that as a starting point in terms of developing your style you know you you know it gives you it gives you a place to start from so what about flavor and tone what are some of the considerations in terms of how you present information what do you think of when you're trying to evoke your personal keeper style my style of being a games master being a keeper is very much draws on my background of being a theater actor um because that's what i started out doing many many years ago and so if you want to be a modern day investigator if you can track out which films i've been an extra in you get a gold star and i might buy you a pint but i'm not going to give you any more information than that when i was you know running whatever game it was i would put on you know a character when i was playing a goblin or was playing you know the bank manager in the call of cthulhu game or the the cocky space pilot in a game like traveler or something like that back in the day so my thoughts on this do are kind of influenced by that and obviously why i like being the keeper in the game's master because i like taking on lots of different roles you know i'm not stuck to just my player character in most of the time because i'm the keeper i i could everybody do the entire world and so i do that you know by you know mannerisms the style of talking the speed pace of talking and particularly the volume of talking getting quieter as you go around the table it helps to kind of set the atmosphere and mood and so forth and so on that's all you know with voice but obviously i'm talking acting so that's not just voice that's my face and hands and how expressive i am trying to characterize the the npc you know um non-verbally is um you know it's a useful trick um and those are the kind of things you just you just learn you just kind of and you don't have to go overboard and you don't have to go overboard with accents and things like that but you don't need to use accents at all i i i often find myself hardly using accents these days i used to do them more but i find i just end up being a you know a south country hobbit when whatever whatever country i'm in it's all mr proto but it's it's more how you do it rather than the way you do it if that makes any sense and and that's the that's the kind of style in terms of imparting information because that helps to lock it in the players heads because you're not just getting to remember the information you're getting them to remember the information source and if you're playing a campaign that can be a very useful little trick performance and an acting background is a great way to approach games but i know that there are some people who don't necessarily have that skill set or aren't interested in leaning on that skill set and want to explore running their games in a different way this is a topic that i've seen discussed a little bit online especially in reference to a lot of the modern live plays and actual plays that you can see out there do you have anything to mention for people who maybe don't want to use that performance style within their games so back when i started there was no internet and there is no way to learn how to role play right because it was just me and my friends role playing and we didn't know any other role players so all we had was what was in the books and our sense about does this feel right and it kind of felt right but often we would we'd have a conversation post game about are we doing it right do you reckon we're doing it right it's phil you know we kind of like couldn't answer it so we just gave up asking the question and just assumed we were role-playing right um it wasn't until later that you know we started to see conventions and and you could go to a convention and play not only play with you know people you'd never met before you could observe you could watch other people running games you know watch them running the same game you run and very quickly you understood that actually no we're all doing the same thing we're all doing it right and yeah there are variations but they're very minor now of course flip forward whatever it is you know number of years and we have the internet and we can instantly the day we learn about role-playing that is there's a thing called role-playing games table talk we can go online and we can watch people doing it which you know i didn't see anyone do it for 10 years you know but i can do it like that before or before i've even looked at the role playing book or play the game that you know in one sense is really good because we get to see how accessible how easy it is how fun it is and and so you know that's a really really cool thing you know it can't you know can't be uh you know denied in any way however the converse of that is it it can set people up and set an expectation that people need to be this brilliant you know multimedia keeper gm able to put on characters and voices at the drop of a hat understand the plot completely in their head know all their characters names know all the backgrounds of their characters and their what the what's on their character sheets and what equipment they got and when they got it and what magical items they've got and what the secret curse of magic all these things in their head and of course none of that is true because all we're seeing is the video like me and you know you don't see all my notes in front of me here you don't see all my little reminders about say oh you know james must remember to tell james that you know he's you know needs a new t-shirt or whatever there's you don't see that because you're just seeing it's like watching a tv program we don't see the director we don't see the camera operators and the grips and the sound engineers the makeup artists the wardrobe that what's going on just off screen is complete chaos probably you know making what works on screen perfect and that's the same for online you know live role playing in a sense is you know so don't don't feel you have to emulate anyone um yeah you can watch them you can enjoy them you can maybe you know learn a few things maybe learn a few tricks and tips or see what they did but you're never going to see the full picture because you're only seeing that much of their game i'm saying all this to say don't feel you know underconfident about this don't feel you can't be as good as these people on screen because you are already as good as the people on screen because you know why because they're just players like you finding your keeper style obviously isn't just something that appears immediately it's something you need to grow into can you talk about how to improve as a keeper in general how do you get better at being a being a keeper being a gm there's no there's no easy answer and there's no one answer to it i mean well the simplest single answer i would say is just by doing it you know the more more you do inevitably in theory inevitably the better you'll get there are some exceptions you know i've played with them and you know we won't say anymore but 99.9 of people um you know as with many things in life the more you do them the better you get it's the same with being a good keeper particularly in a game like call of cthulhu because you are dealing with more moving parts than some other role-playing games you are dealing with plots you are dealing with characters with with distinct motivations that actually interlock in some sort of spider's web of relationships of information and character and you have got these layers in your head you've got your notes you've got your wrist scenario and so on to help you guide you through that but you know your job is to navigate not just you through that but you've got to navigate the players through that and that is uh an experiential thing it's a facilitation the more you do the more kind of tips and tricks you will personally develop for doing it that's number one number two is you know watching other people yeah observing them yeah while you are a player in somebody else's game watch what they do now you won't always agree with what they do or find that it's suitable for you but you can always learn something most of the time from other people running games how do they organize their gaming space in front of them how do they use the keeper screen or the game screen how do they use dice do they roll them hidden do they roll them open do they do a bit of both when do they do it differently all these things will coalesce in your head over time to develop your style because everyone's got their own style um and you develop your style by stealing everyone else's good ideas it's like it's like most creative processes you know you look at what's good and you know you are influenced by what's good and that helps you to outpour your own creativity in a way so yeah those those are a few tips obviously the clearly the the obvious one which i've not mentioned is to buy the call of cthulhu keepers tips book which you know clearly is full of all amazing kind of advice that you know me and some other you know experienced people have put together clearly you would want to start with that but um other than that there's a lot to go over here and we could talk about this for a long time i'm sure we'll come back to it at some point but in the meantime is there a final just quick piece of advice you'd like to throw out to people always have a notebook always carry a notebook always have a pen ideally a fountain pen because you should do it right and make notes wherever you are i mean when it's when you're driving it's much harder so try you know get somebody else to write their notes you shout them out but other than that when the note when the idea for a scenario or how to solve next next session's game you know when you've you've set it up and you're like not quite sure how i'm gonna make this happen now they've all they've all arrived here like a session early and i wasn't expecting it how do i solve it make notes and that process will help you to work things out

Channel: Chaosium

Views: 11,539

Keywords: ttrpg, rpg, cthulhu, call of cthulhu, chaosium, RuneQuest, Glorantha, game, roleplaying, tabletop, mike mason, mike, mason, keeper tips, keeper style, advice

Id: TFrNg0SgPU8

Length: 15min 32sec (932 seconds)

Published: Mon May 23 2022