How You Can Use Tone & Atmosphere In Your RPG - GM Tips

in the comments write down a creature that you find scary fantastical science fictiony write down a creature that you find scary in the comments hello my fellow gm's welcome to this week's episode of how to be a great gm my name is guy and today we are looking at tone tone now tone is something that i would say is definitely a finesse gm aspect it is definitely something that you need to decide to add to your game it is something that you may not even be aware that you're adding to your game and ultimately it is something that is either going to make your game super advanced and very atmospheric for your players or it's going to make your game feel a little bit more generic a little bit more like a standard role-playing game there is nothing wrong with either of them the one is just a notch above the rest and that's what we're going to be talking about in today's video but first before we do that please hit that like button hit the subscribe button let's all get in and show some love for the channel sure they're talking about showing love for the channel someone something some company that i have been working with for years is today's sponsor world anvil is today's sponsor recently added is the new whiteboards feature which i have to say i particularly love and here you go as you can see a nice white board and what it allows us to do is add in a whole bunch of ideas when we start looking at this and i do like the fact that we can move things around we can make some notes here and they've got some sticky notes as well which i think is quite fun which we can move around at our leisure and i can say right so um daughter hagather maybe she hires the pcs because she's worried that garrish is doing something odd look at how we're starting to get interesting things by being able to use these timelines and you don't have to use them this way either i've made quite a few different timelines uh which i will show you now my dragon timeline for example i needed to work out how the dragons had actually taken over the world and so i had worked out this that the next thing as well as the processes that they had gone through i really do like this feature of course you can change you can add in images you can add new shapes and you can hyperlink things as well to articles that are already in existence within your world so that's why i think that when it comes to world building world anvil really should be your one-stop shop big thank you to world anvil for sponsoring today's video i used world anvil in my dnd in a castle game that took place about a month ago now and it was super super useful to have my continent with all my pins about all the different adventures that i sort of set out in the region it was really really useful and it was really useful in terms of reminding myself about tone now tone can be called theme it could be called um your atmosphere it could be called your mood whatever you want to to label it as tone in general refers to the feeling that your players should be getting when they're playing the game if you compare for example uh the tone of the aliens movies versus the tone of a marvel series of movies for example the tones are very very different even the tones within the aliens quadrilogy or pen trilogy or step trilogy depending on what you think about the last sort of alien versus predator films even the tone in each of the different films was was quite different generally speaking though you would say that the tone within the aliens films was sort of either horror or terror or fear or something along those lines they were they were very very much about the horror element the shrieking moment the sudden alien bursting out whereas the marvel films might have a moment of that here or there but generally the tone is somewhat light-hearted somewhat optimistic and always adventurous and action-packed so the tones are quite quite different most role-playing games i would hazard a guess are more like marvel movies than aliens movies simply because the marvel movies they're successful for a reason they're big they're dramatic they contain heroes they contain villains they contain vast amounts of beautiful spirotechnics and effects that's pretty much what we want so why would we want to deviate from that tone well sometimes it's quite useful to have a little adventure within your game that has a very different tone because what it does is it allows your players to realize hey i really wish we could go back to the happy bright exploding tone rather than the horror tone or it's a case of that adventure was just ridiculously fun i laughed my ass off throughout the whole thing it was a comedic tone what are the different tones well it's up to you generally speaking we talk about grim tones where things are gritty and life is harsh and hard and you might have child labor you might have sort of more murder death things are are not happy this is not a happy place the warhammer 40k universe for example has the grim dark tone they talk about everything is moody it's generally low light it's not bright happy sunny fields of space marines gathering daisies for example it could be if you were inside some kind of warped dimension where mind controlling demons are making you think that that's what's happening but that's an example of punctuating the generally gritty dark tone with something that's very outlandish to make the grim grim ditty the grim dark tone even more grim more dark because we're comparing we are creating these opposites now the smarter ones amongst you will already start to pick up that our tone is going to give us a lot of constraints when it comes to creating our world space as well as when it comes to creating our adventures and our campaign so by understanding tone it just gives us a lot of really useful little things that we are going to add to our repertoire when you look at adult tone this is one that comes up and i have to say that adult tone i frequently get criticized for adult tone i'm not entirely sure why we are all free to play the games how we want and in truth i don't think i have ever actually played an adult themed game adult themed game generally refers to games where you're going to include a lot of sexual activities as they might put it i have certainly had characters player characters and npcs go off for a quick um something that happens off screen in a darkened room where the camera pulls back that i have done i have never done one where we've gone into graphic descriptions of things but there are people and players out there who like that kind of thing and why not but if that's your tone then you might want to break away for a moment and have something else at the same time being aware that that is an entire tone and that the notion of talking about sexual activity within a role-playing space for a lot of people is very uncomfortable or is unwanted that's important we saw several years ago what happened when a live stream went into the adult tone very much against the feelings and the wishes of the players and the viewers as a matter of fact and that caused the entire thing to collapse because everyone was left with a very very bitter taste in their mouths that this whole thing had changed so by understanding the different types of tones you can also guard yourself against making these kinds of mistakes these kind of errors or by going i'm going to include that because i wanted to make this grim dark feel even more grim more dark but i'm not going to go too far because i understand the constraints i understand the principles that i'm talking about comedic tone is very very simple it can be quite tricky sometimes it's farcical if you're going to run something along the lines of a monty python style campaign which a lot of times it does happen it definitely does happen there's definitely a meme as well you know my party starts out as lord of the rings characters and ends up as monty python characters but but that's just the way that the game kind of goes you have to be aware and this is why tone is so important is that if your tone starts to drift you have to make sure that it's drifting in the right direction that everybody wants it to drift in you might have players who really want to play a very serious lord of the rings kind of drama tone where it's dramatic and there's moments for dialogue and speeches and kings and queens and beautiful robes and flowing flowers and and halls and ceremonies and things and occasionally you just want to go and sing a lot at camelot because that's that's apparently what one does when there's a camelot and singing if your tone drifts your players might also drift they might not want that so bear in mind that your tone overall once you've set it for the game if you have set horror as your tone or you have set dread for your turn you're playing a ravenloft campaign for example and you want the sense of dread it's really important to entrench that tone in to yourself so that if you have adventures that step away from the tone that's fine but you have to come back to that tone because if you drift over time your players might get a little bit bored so there are lots of different tones you can choose any kind of tone really i always advise to choose tones that you find interesting i'm not particularly interested in the adult tone i'm not particularly interested in comedic tone where everything is just farcical i like a bit of a mix i like drama i like grittiness i like darkness generally because those allow us to explore the evil nature of the npcs and the nemesis but at the same time allow for the players to be heroes and occasionally yes i do like a comedic outcome where everyone is laughing and it's it's a bit of a ridiculous situation but not too often i kind of like my games to be serious so that's my particular tone but understand that tone then and go well those are the constraints so if i'm coming up with a world space i can't have in my drama gritty dark world i can't have a duck as a king that doesn't make sense but i can have a king who abuses his power and forces those that are uh prisoners to go and pretend to be ducks which he then fires ballistas at because it's grim and it's dark and i want the players to realize that the king is absolutely evil so there are those kinds of of of of constraints that come in really really powerful stuff so once you have looked at your tone and kind of got your tone in mind along with the expectations that come with those tones you are then set to get ready to prepare to to make sure that you are in a state that could become or could stop you're ready to create your campaign and that's exactly what we're going to be doing in next week's video now if world anvil was useful in terms of helping us to define our tone next week's video where we start to create our campaign world anvil is going to be even more useful so a massive thank you to them for sponsoring today's video a massive thank you to you for watching all the way through until the end and of course a huge thank you to our patrons we love you love you love you all very very much and i cannot wait to see you all next week when we begin the process of deciding on how we're going to begin i know i know i couldn't resist it really is i mean it's the journey that we're on we're here for a whole year folks you might as well get used to it anyway till then happy gaming

Channel: How to be a Great GM

Views: 9,793

Keywords: creating the campaign, campaign creator, how to be a great game master, how to gm, great gm, campaign creation, dnd campaign design, dnd campaign ideas, rpg campaign design, rpg campaign ideas, rpg campaign, role playing campaign, campaign design, fantasy campaign, running the game, game master guide, dungeon master guide, gm tips, dm tips, epic guide to creating campaigns, using tone, tone in a rpg, rpg atmosphere, atmosphere in a rpg, dnd tone, dnd atmosphere

Id: BSCmcPfpTsw

Length: 12min 55sec (775 seconds)

Published: Mon Apr 18 2022