This is a comment I posted on Robin Laws’ livejournal some weeks back. I saved it to share here on a slow week. Since I’m not technically back from my deadlines-imposed hiatus until next week, we’ll call this a slow one. Enjoy:
One thing I do to maintain a degree of input on tone, during play, is take a minute to refine the descriptions that come in before they go “on the record.” This is the quickest, slightest form of a rewrite, live during play. The player describes his character being all fearless and unengaged while he’s punching some thug off a cliff, and I offer back something like, “With the wind and the rain and the clay at the edge of cliff sliding away under your feet, would Mack still be so fearless when he reaches the edge and his footing slips, or is that a face he puts on for the thugs?”
Then the player answers, reacting to that question. Maybe the character’s attitude shifts a bit, maybe it doesn’t, but the idea that fist-fighting at the edge of a crumbling cliff is actually dangerous has made it to the player, so I’m happy. Sometimes this provokes a brief internalizing, like, “Oh, yeah, inside Mack’s as scared as anybody, but he doesn’t show it,” which is nice.
Another thing that works for me is to pull the player outside the character for just a moment, to see his PC’s behavior as an audience. Thus, we can create two simultaneous instances of tone: The fearless hero (who is casual in the face of danger) and the gasping audience (who thinks, for a moment, that the GM might be pulling us out of Mack at the last minute, ’cause he’s about to go over that cliff!).
“To everyone else, though,” I might say, “Mack’s punch drives him so close to the edge of the cliff that it looks like he’s going over the edge right after that thug. It’s just the casual turn on the heel you described to get him back on his footing, but for someone standing over here it sure looks like he just stepped within an inch of his death. That might not scare Mack,” I say, “but having the ground wash away under my feet like that would scare the hell out of me.”
It sounds like these comments are coming from two different places—the Official Voice of Narration and a brief aside (or GM’s commentary)—and they are. But they’re both going to the same place and serving the same mission: to provoke a sense of peril without undermining a character’s blasé demeanor.
That, to me, is where the trouble lies with letting player whim determine tone: it undermines the sense of peril. I maintain a firmer (but not exactly strict) hand on tone because I dread the moment when we backslide out of our imaginations and realize how silly it is that we’ve put so much suspense on the outcome of a ten-sided die.
If the tone organically developing out of the players’ gestalt imagination respects suspense and peril, I’ll follow it almost anywhere.