Conveyance

"Don't kill him! If you kill him...he won't learn nothin'."


A huge amount of my blog posts can be boiled down to a single sentence, if I thought that would do them justice. Don't withhold rewards, Don't be afraid of high stat values, the villain is the most important part of your game's plot, et cetera. I kind of don't mind that, since you wouldn't understand what I mean if I just flopped it out there like a tiny little dead fish. Knowing what I mean is actually our next topic, Conveyance.

Conveyance is a fairly important thing in movies, a very important thing in video games, and an EXTREMELY important thing in pen and paper. Basically, it's telling the viewer(slash player) how they're intended to think and what they're intended to do. Giving them the information they needs to move forward or to understand what's going on. Basically, a lot of the time when you're confused about a movie, it's because it's got poor conveyance. Maybe you don't know where or when a scene is supposed to be taking place because the filmmaker didn't include an establishing shot. Perhaps you weren't sure if a character is present at a scene or not, or where they got an important tool or other item. Video games have a lot of the same thing there but also have to teach you about rules, patterns, controls and other things. A bad game throws conveyance out of the window and simply lets you learn via repeatedly dying. A good game? Well, I have a bit of multimedia homework for you guys since someone else explained it way better than I ever could. This isn't required to understand how conveyance fits into Pen and Paper gaming, but I'd like you guys to watch the Sequelitis on Mega Man X.

Here it is, narrated by the beautiful Egoraptor.

What's this have to do with tabletop gaming? Basically, good conveyance is the art of conveying information without just saying it out loud. Remember when I said it's impossible for you to be objective? Conveyance is something you have to do because of that. Basically, on top of doing it for decent quest and world design(more on that later) you have to convey what you think of the player's plans and actions.

People obviously like their own ideas. They think they're sound. Duh. In the real world when you disagree with them, well. We all find out who's right eventually after the action is taken. In a pen and paper game, the GM is going to control some or all aspects of whether something was a "good idea" or not. So in the spirit of good faith, you as the GM need to try to convey, subtly or unsubtly, what you think of what they're about to do. Luckily, our conveyance in a pen and paper game doesn't have to be GOOD, just okay. It's most of your job to just directly tell the PCs things anyway. You can easily get away with reminding them some aspect you feel is important or that they've forgotten, telling them "that might not be wise" or having them roll a knowledge skill.

You need to do this. It's not optional. You can be sparse with it, or withhold info if they fail checks, but on some level this is very important. It's your job to challenge the PCs, and it's very important that you give them the right kind of challenge. Just because something was difficult doesn't mean it's going to feel rewarding: It's very, very possible to give the party the wrong kind of challenge. Never mistake poor conveyance for a proper challenge. In fact, especially never poorly explain yourself on purpose if you're discussing objective information. I had a GM once who thought it was best to promote any idea the PCs have, right up until it spectacularly failed. He thought that a shitty idea would be obvious and that the GM shouldn't hold someone's hand. Well, he's right about one thing: I'm NOT telling you to hold their hand. However, what's a good idea and what's a shitty one maybe isn't so obvious.

To give a really simple example, the PCs have a quest to get a little girl a pet. In the real world most of the PCs have cats, so they feel a kitten is objectively the best possible option. However, the GM is a dog person. Their efforts are wasted. More importantly, this isn't information the players were necessarily privy to. Of course, if they know the GM well they would've gotten a dog simply because they know the GM and noticed he owns like ten of them in real life. However, this sort of double-think is tiring and really shouldn't be promoted. It's not fun to have to psychoanalyze the GM when you're gaming. Most PCs will just want to try their own ideas. In fact, if they're super excited about an idea they've got and you feel like you can challenge them with it, consider swallowing what you think would be 'better' in favor of moving on from the 'planning' phase of gaming and getting the PCs to the action. Planning can be a lot of fun, but you lose some of that fun every time the PCs have to scrap their idea and start back on square one.

Conveyance is used for more traditional things in gaming too, like what the creators of Mega Man X did. We'll go into this more in another topic, I think, but in general terms you're using it any time you want the PCs to be prepared for a challenge. This should be most of the time. It can be as simple as an old tracker in a bar warning them about ghouls appearing in the swampland near the town, or as subtle as the PCs passing half-drowned graveyards, headstones barely sticking out of the water, or half-eaten bodies long dead. Mix up your tactics and find what works best for your group. Some groups will respond well to subtlety, and some(most) will be fairly bone-headed about clues. It's a very crappy thing in a movie to see someone just announcing a huge load of info all at once, but in a PNP game it's a bit more acceptable. It's a common, mostly beloved cliche to see the old wizened sage delivering an ominous warning or piece of vital information, or the terrified, raving villager who only just escaped a monster withtheir life. In a pinch, they can deliver the info you need to get across.

So yeah, at some point when I talk about quest design this is going to come up again. This is one of the keystones of running a game. If you want this boiled down to a single piece of advice, though, just look up to the bolded sentence above. Poor conveyance is not a challenge, it's an irritation. A good challenge is something that the PCs have all of the parts to, so they can put their strategy together. Poor(or no) conveyance is like taking several puzzle pieces out of the box.