Wish: Keeping the Mood

Sometimes in my games, I try to set a mood, only to have a joke or out-of-character chatter/commentary ruin it by going off on a tangent or breaking everyone into laughter, occasionally including me. I have pretty much given up on trying to get my players to be serious all the time - after all, when I'm on the other side of the screen, I'm not always serious either. Plus the game is a social, fun event, and people should not feel forced to be serious or in character all the time. (I'll save that for LARPers)

That said, how do you keep the mood? And once lost, how do you try to bring everyone back? Can you? Is it even possible?

And what do you do with that one player who is always the first one to crack a joke and break up the tension you've built to so carefully, no matter how many times you've asked/warned him/her not to do that?

I have two words: Tangents happen. Let them play their course and you'll usually be able to return to the game in short time. If the tangents keep happening, notice what kind of tangents are happening. This can be a hint for what type of game the players want. If the players keep joking around (the most common tangent), they may need a little humor before getting back to the heavy stuff. Add a light-hearted scene in the game. This way the players will be in character and get the much-needed humor. Unless you've set up some sort of deadline for an event you can usually side-track your oh-so-important save-the-world plotline for a little while with humorous PCs or humorous situations and make it seem like it was part of the plot from the beginning.

For example, let's say your characters were going to meet with "Don Capione", the Mafia capo to try and negotiate a peace-fire between the Capione family and the Leon family. They just dealt with a very serious scene of finding out one of the Leons was shot in the back of the head and they had to tell the girlfriend. The players now seem restless and keep going off in bad Mafia impersonations which eventually leads them somehow into Monty Python sketches (a universal favorite of gamers everywhere). You've tried bringing them back, reminding them how important and tense this meeting will be, but you're afraid they won't be "in the scene". Perhaps, as they are driving to the meeting they see a black car shove someone out at a corner butt-naked and it happens to be "Ronnie the Fink", a small-time hood the PCs can't stand. The car drives off and they recognize it as one of Capione's. So, they stop to interview "Ronnie the Fink" and find out what happened. This scene could be plenty of fodder for humor while revealing some of the plot bits. Ronnie's obviously in trouble with the Capiones and may know what's going on with them right now, but he's a little more concerned with modesty right now. Make sure to play Ronnie a little over-the-top and the players will feel OK realxing and letting their characters be a little silly. (Even super-serious PCs can take part. I play a super-serious quiet-type Samurai in a Champions game that often goes off on silly tangents in game. I have learned that playing the straight man in those scenes can be just as much fun as cracking the jokes with the rest of them. In fact, sometimes the fact that my character is so serious makes the joke.)

Maybe that didn't work. Maybe the PC's didn't get the jokes out of their system or maybe they didn't find much humor in the scene. (Let's face it, the naked scrawny butt of some two-bit hood isn't really going to be that funny.) Then, work in some more light-hearted scenes or....

Increase the drama. You have to be careful with this one, though. It can be heavy-handed and overdone. The games are supposed to be about having fun. If you shove the plot down their throats, where's the fun in that.

Another option a GM can use in some games: Roll Dice. While dice can be distracting at times from roleplaying, it can also act to keep the game focused. If roleplaying isn't really happening anyway, a dice rolled scenario can really keep players involved. I can't tell you how many times I have run campaigns where everyone knew how important things were when I started having them roll dice and when the dice rolled everyone watched. They knew that a "fumbled" roll may not kill the characters but it would greatly complicate an already dangerous or touchy scenario. So, if I occassionally had them roll when things weren't life or death, they felt that things could be and paid closed attention.

When I ran "Vurt", a cyberpunk campaign using the Masterbook RPG, the first session had the players taking a drug called Vurt. When the NPC showed up at the party where they were going to try it he burst in the door, held up a paper back and shouted "Gentleman! Let's broaden our minds!" They took the drug and things got really weird and intense. One character dealt with father issues while another took a wrong turn in a dark corner of his mind called Pirate's Alley and faced his worst fear. When they left the feather dreams of the Vurt and returned to the real world they discovered that they had somehow brought a bit of the trip back with him. A business card a dream-person handed one of them when he took that fateful wrong turn, was still clutched in his hand. Thus, the game was born. For the rest of the campaign, whenever the players got distracted I would say in that one NPC's voice, "Gentleman! Let's broaden our minds!" and they would immediately get back focused. Sometimes there's little catch phrases you can find that the whole group will realize means, "Let's get focused on the game!"

I tried using the phrase again in the next game I ran with that group, a Palladium Fantasy game, but somehow, "Gentleman! Let's bloody our swords!" didn't have the same effect. After Vurt, it became an inside joke, but for that one campaign I had my "attention stick" to hit the players with.

These days, I play in a Champions campaign where we seem to spend half of each game B.S.'ing. We spend more time cracking jokes than fighting supervillians, but I like it that way. We can get "serious" when the situation calls for it and noone detracts from the mood in those times, so I'm happy.

As for "that one player." I haven't run into that player yet. Most players can take a hint.