DB

One of my favorite things to do in a scene, if the opportunity provides it, is to acknowledge something that happens outside of the scene as a part of, but a different experience than what we know in real life. I remember that during a performance where I was improvising with my team, a cell phone ringtone went off. I remember saying something like: “There’s the alarm again!”

When done well, it’s an acknowledgement to your fellow players and to your audience that you’re listening. Something that is outside of a game or a performance could be disrupting to it in some way, but there are always ways to integrate them in a fun way into the fictional world. I think the best example that we have in actual play for that is Pike in Critical Role’s 1st Campaign.

Finding reasons to be in-and-out of adventuring

Because of Ashley Johnson’s role on the TV show Blindspot at the time, it was difficult for her to make the regular CR games that were live streaming at the time. To explain her absence for adventures, Pike would be busy doing work for her goddess. I believe the one leading up to Vox Machina’s adventures in Whitestone was that she was helping to build a temple.

That’s an expert move! I love it so much when a player has to be absent from a game for a period of time, and the rest of the group wants to continue playing. You can find and work together with your GM to figure out a way for your character to take a break from the story in a way that feels real to their motivations. Instead of the GM playing the character for that extended period of time, the agreement with the group still retains the player’s agency of their character–they’ve just decided to commit to a long term mission, almost like an away-from-the-keyboard style of idle game.

Throughout the game, there were times when Ashley was able to finish up shooting earlier and she could hop on Skype to call in and play with the rest of her friends. In world, this was explained as a divine, astral projection. Awesome! We have an in-world explanation for the out-world circumstances. It is even paralleled in a way that feels like Pike too is “Skyping in”. It is clunky and perhaps imperfect, but that’s the joy of tabletop RPGs. We roll dice and make stuff up on the spot because we want to engage with a story that feels honest. And acknowledging the real world unfortunate circumstances can help maintain that honesty.

In the superhero Cypher System game that we have going on, our group has a few players who will be busy from time to time. There have been a few sessions where they were on a long-term mission, and I did my best to play as them. There have been other times when those players who were unavailable had their characters spend some time studying–it was a pretty easily available excuse for them to be busy. And, there have been other times when some characters decided to do covert, solo missions instead. It’s nice to have that happen off screen, as it saves time for group scenes, and also helps to sow the narrative that the character is doing stuff behind the backs of the rest of the team.

Letting interruptions inspire play

In the game of Epistolary that I’m playing with my good friend, we have decided that we wanted to write physical letters to one another as a means for playing. We could have done it as a play-by-post over the Internet, but it didn’t feel as fun for a game whose title implies for us to write and send letters. And hey, writing letters is fun!

Unfortunately, because of real life circumstance, my friend will be unable to read any of my letters for the next 3 weeks or so. That pause in play makes things a little weird. The way that we are running Epistolary is to have time in the game advance the same as time in real life. So, a day in our world would advance a day in the world of the characters. That means for 3 weeks, they will be unable to read any of my letters. We won’t be able to advance the game at all.

I was stuck with how to acknowledge this in character in a way that felt honest to the world and to the characters. We were both trying to solve a mystery, and it wouldn’t make sense for either of our characters to stop working on our investigations for 3 weeks without word. I had to present evidence to my friend so that they could interpret it in character, and I also had to present some new developments of intrigue…

(PS. Friend, if you’re reading this…spoilers ahead.)

Huh. We’re playing in a vaguely supernatural world. What about some weird time stuff, because we have a weird time gap right now? What if it’s a weird memory thing? What if my character didn’t know that 3 weeks had passed. One day it was 3 weeks ago, and the next day it was…3 weeks later. With no memory of any of the events that occurred, but with testimony from their neighbors and peers that they had been around for the whole time.

It felt uncanny, strange, and like the roll of the dice, a choice that I would not have made on my own had we been freely roleplaying without the use of a game. I wouldn’t have made this choice if I did not acknowledge the real world, and how it affected our game. And I wouldn’t have made this choice to acknowledge the real world if I didn’t enjoy so much the way that the real world affects the fiction, and how the fiction affects the real people.

It’s why I play these games in the first place, and why I think you should start acknowledging your surroundings every now and then. It can be easy to do it too much, but when used sparingly…? Deeply satisfying.