Prologue
I started DMing mid-pandemic. Roll20 made it possible to play and socialize virtually; Donjon and Kassoon made dungeons and towns a breeze, and Inkarnate and HeroForge helped me build an atmosphere even though I can’t draw for shit. And of course, D&D 5e’s pick-up-and-go adventures meant that, with a bit of prep, I could run a solid 1-5 campaign with exactly zero experience.
So why did it feel hollow?
A particularly uninspired one-shot made me so angry I decided to revenge re-create it. I dug into creative depths I hadn’t tapped since college, built a world with deep mythology, geography, and almost-insurmountable peril. Too ambitious by half, I ran two simultaneous, parallel campaigns that came together at the end to defeat the big bad.
Even here, something felt flat. Here I was, putting my heart and soul into this story, with players who were engaged and enthusiastic, and still there was… something. Missing.
We finished the campaign after a year and a half, in an extremely cathartic final battle, with a beautiful, sympathetic final blow. One of my players volunteered to run the next campaign. I took a break.
At least, I intended to. As it often happens, some friends had been wanting to try D&D. Here I was, a now-seasoned DM, with lots of free time, and a funny one-shot kicking around in my head. Alright, I thought. It’s less COVID-y, we can play in person. It’s a one-shot, you can get a little crazy.
I got a lot crazy.
Have a pre-game mini painting party? Check. Build a tiny tavern scene out of popsicle sticks? Check. Print out full-scale, full-color maps? Triple check. Almost kill one of your players, even though this is literally their first game and this is literally a one-shot? Muahahaha! Yes, yes!
But a wild thing happened. Without fail, every one of my players saw my energy and matched it. They dug into details I meant to be only flavor. They pulled out each other’s backstories and interacted with NPCs. The bard player broke out a ukulele and sang us a Song of Rest.
Why did this happen? How did this happen?
A whole lot of the why and how is, of course, because of the specific people in my game. As delightful as they are, and as much as I could perhaps wax poetic about the joys of surrounding oneself with Actually Good People who Actually Want to Be Friends, that’s not really something that I can show you how to do in text-posts on the internet.
What I can show you is how I encourage my players to become part of the world I’ve built.
The DM’s Greatest Tools
Tabletop RPGs rely heavily on the theater of the mind - the shared, imagined space built by the DM and given life by the players. A good DM will give details that help you understand that space, but even the best descriptions are up for interpretation by the players - who may or may not be paying close attention at the moment of description. Consider these two DM statements:
“The ceiling of the cavern looms overhead, its farthest reaches fading into darkness.”
“The cavern is 300 feet long, 400 feet wide, and 150 feet tall.”
The first gives you a good feeling of the space, but lacks concrete detail useful for battle. The second is concrete, and nothing else. It’s hard to work shape and size details into evocative narration, and these details lose meaning and become inapt when describing more natural scenes, like the large cavern above. Let’s try this again:
“The cavern is approximately 400 feet wide at its widest, but irregular, as narrow as 250 feet in some places. It’s 150 feet tall, and the ground surface is uneven, pocked by huge, mounded stalagmites built up over millennia; an ancient cave-in is evidenced by a pile of loose rubble, and the ceiling in that area stretches high into the darkness.”
Okay, that’s… fine. A little contrived, but gets the major strokes across. Unfortunately, for most characters, your darkvision stretches only so far - maybe 120 feet - and that description of space is great for general vibes but tells you nothing about your immediate area. Am I standing on a flat surface, a hill, a cliff face, a pile of loose rubble?
“Okay, OKAY! Jeez. You are standing at the top of a steep, 20-foot slope, damp with the inexorable trickle of water that carved this cave system. A lumpy stone pillar is just visible in the shadows 50 feet in front of you, built up over the millennia. A small stream flows and pools around the uneven floor. Are you happy now, can we continue the game? What am I saying - a huge weight descends on you from above and you take 12 points of piercing damage as fangs sink deep into your unsuspecting shoulder. Make me a Strength check.”
What I’m getting at is that yes, it’s totally possible to place your players concretely in a setting that’s entirely theater of the mind, but it’s difficult. Most DMs use a simple prop to help mitigate some of this - the map.
The map - more specifically, the battle map - is probably the most powerful tool a DM has, and the simplest. A pen and paper. Lines are walls, hash marks are difficult terrain, blue is water. Let’s f’kin go!
The map gives players a concrete, consistent sense of space. They understand how far their characters can see, because that’s all that they can see. They can see broad strokes of the room - a table here, a pillar there, a fissure emanating greenish gas, etc. With the use of player tokens (of any type) they can better understand where they are in relation to each other, as can you, the DM, which opens up all sorts of exciting opportunities.
Thousands of hours of play have been encouraged and enhanced by this simple tool. But how do you control the high ground on a piece of paper? How do you take cover behind a line? How do you stumble and trip over hash marks? This is where Theater of the Mind steps aside, and makes way for Black Box Theater.
Black Box Theater
Black box theater usually is just that - a large black box (the theater) full of black boxes of varying sizes ranging from one cubic foot to maybe 6’x3’x2’, made of scrap wood, scuffed and dusty. These smaller black boxes are the props - the chair, a bed, stacked to make the doorway from which another character enters. This lack of detail puts the focus on the actors and their story, while still allowing for realistic physicality within the space. An actor lays down on a long, low box - they are curled up in bed, musing about their day. Another actor steps behind a pillar - onto the subway, a final, tragically mundane goodbye. Two actors sit on boxes, another between them, arguing over dinner - the box between literally separating them, metaphorically the chasm of a fundamental misunderstanding.
When props are used, it’s because they’re important. I remember a particular black box show I saw some years ago, written by a Hindu man and based on Hindu mythology, where one of the characters was an incarnation of the elephant-headed god Ganesha. At a key moment, the character accessed his godly background, and the actor put on a ritual elephant mask. The whole meaning and experience of the play changed for me in that moment. What an incredible way to represent the unknowability of god, the awesomeness of that power, by using a highly gilt and detailed mask in this sea of black boxes.
In the less-than-real theater space, the realistic becomes more real than real. That black box represents a chair, is indicative of a chair, but resembles a chair in only the most superficial ways. This mask of Ganesha represents godhood, is indicative of his power, but emulates the reality and impact of that transformation only barely. We the audience are meant to understand the parallel metaphors: as a box is representative of, but definitely not a chair, so a human is an aspect of, but still only a shadow of god.
I’m not proposing to make animatronic, Biblically-accurate angels to represent your players’ encounters with gods (yet). What I’m getting at, in talking about this, is that through clever use of inexpensive, simple tools, and tactical inclusion of highly-developed props, you can enhance the whole experience - both for you as the DM and for your players. I call this process “Putting the Magic In.”
Putting the Magic In
Most of this blog will be an exploration of “feelies,” pioneered (as I understand it) by the 1982 text-based computer game Zork. You can read this Mental Floss article for a brief introduction to the game and concept, if you’re interested. The basic premise is to use physical objects to augment your storytelling - giving your players something solid, physical, interact-able, that takes them out of the “real” world, and grounds them in yours.
In my opinion, and in the context of TTRPGs, there’s more to feelies than atmosphere. In essence, their function is to orient players in the world: feelies can help players remember what they have in their inventory, remind them of critical (or non-critical!) NPCs who owe them a favor or to whom a favor is owed, and otherwise serve as imagination jumping-off-points to get players involved. I do consider dungeon tiles, monsters, and hero minis to be types of feelies, and there are plenty of places to buy these and plenty of tutorials that will show you how to make realistic terrain and fantasy buildings. I love these resources and, whenever relevant, will link to my favorites. But I think there’s more to putting the magic in than filling your home with props and emptying your pockets in the process.
Putting the Magic In has three goals:
Immersion
Interaction
Entertainment
And can be measured on four aspects:
Impact
Durability
Repeatability
Cost
My feelies, I’ve just decided, will hereafter be referred to as “Magical Components.” A good Magical Component will increase players’ immersion, interaction, and entertainment (ie. be impactful), and be durable, easily replicable, and not cost very much. As we get into the tutorials I’ll discuss these goals and aspects more thoroughly, but right now we’re well past the five paragraph essay stage and moving quickly toward philosophical treatise. So in the next newsletter, we’ll launch into our first tutorial: Black Box Terrain.