By James Gildard

My friends want to talk about Tone in TTRPGs. I’m several weeks behind now on contributing something because I can’t for the life of me come up with anything wise to say about the subject at all. Truly, this topic more than any other has made me realize how much I have no idea what I’m doing here. In fact, I’ve been feeling pretty frustrated and disappointed in the way I’ve been GMing my current campaign, and I think it is precisely because I lack any clue how to deal with this exact subject. There is an incredibly rich and technical art to TTRPGs (whether you’re playing, GMing or designing) that can take decades to master, and I myself at least am woefully early on in the learning process. 

That said, there is only one direction to go, onward! Practice makes perfect! All that stuff! We’re going to keep that humility in mind and delve into the unknown anyway. This will be an exercise in postulating theory. I don’t know if my ideas will work long term, but we’re going to try and formulate them as best we can anyway.

So before we begin in earnest it is important as ever to nail down what the hell it is we’re talking about. 

In a TTRPG, “Tone” refers to the flavor of the atmosphere in the story being told. The emotional temperature of the room at the given moment. It carries vital importance to the story, transforming boring ones to exciting and vice versa, and is – horrifyingly – most directly controlled by the players themselves. The question I don’t know the answer to is how can a GM influence the tone to make sure it is enhancing the story and the player’s experience and not running it into the ground?

Well let’s take a second to identify all of our tools first. We can influence the soundscape by introducing a speaker and a highly curated set of playlists. We can maybe influence the lighting if we have the tools necessary. I have some of those color changing lightbulbs in my game room area so that makes it pretty simple, but you can use candles, lamp shades, or any other kind of light device at your disposal as well. We can use artful minifigures and battle maps or drawings and images from online. 

The majority of the player experience however, is nested in the words that are exchanged between GM and player. That is afterall, where the heart of the game is, and so that is where my focus will be. Indeed, the game itself takes the shape of a conversation between the GM and the players, and human conversations have rules – even if they get bent and broken sometimes – of which everyone has some level of intuitive understanding. It should hold therefore that manipulating the tone as the GM can be treated in the same ways that good conversation is, and that it can be just as delicate and complex. 

I want to think of our game and its tone as a horse drawn carriage driving through the countryside. In this analogy the players are the horses pulling the carriage and the GM is the driver (and also the creator deity who actively sculpts the landscape, but forget about that for now). If the players just decide they want to sit down and huff at you then… well you’re stranded until you can change their minds. But that’s exactly your job as GM is to keep them running in the right direction so the carriage actually gets taken on the desired journey. 

This is great, because now we get to talk about what the hell the right journey is. Now you might think this is going in the direction of “set clear goals and expectations with your players above the table before the game ever starts”. Sure. Go ahead. Or don’t if that’s not the way you roll, idk. The point I want to make is that this conversation of “what is the right journey for us” is actually going on the whole time you’re playing. It’s in the subtext, and if we’re going to be good carriage drivers we need to be reading that subtext all the damn time. 

Let’s have an example. Example break! Snack time! Come on everybody!

So you sat down in session zero and everybody was on board that this is going to be a really heavy grimdark campaign with big stakes, high difficulty encounters, and lots of serious moral dilemmas. Everyone was really excited about that. Great. A couple of sessions in and you have a little primer reveal of your big bad guy. You make it a big show of grandeur. Show off their power and malice and give the players the heebie jeebies and stuff. But you named your guy Spooky McDookie and your players are just totally enraptured by how silly that is and simply cannot take this shit seriously. Jokes are cracked left and right and their in character decisions are being heavily influenced by this silly tone that has erupted at the table. 

Maybe you shouldn’t have named the guy god damned heckin Spooky McDookie in the first place, but that’s not the point. The point is that you have a couple of options. You can crack down on the players above table and tell them to get serious cuz that’s the type of game they’re playing. You can crack down on the players in character and punish their lighthearted decisions with serious consequences. You can go with the flow and just let this big bad guy become a total fool comic relief. You can lean in even more and decide that this campaign actually needs to be a silly campaign because that’s what your players obviously want.

What I’m suggesting is not that one of these choices is necessarily correct, nor that there is a formula to figure out which one you should choose in a given variation of this dilemma. Maybe there is a correct choice, or a formula to follow that will lead you to that answer. I don’t know. What I do know is that when we find ourselves in that moment and are able to at least realize that all of those options are available, and that we can even choose mixtures and blends of each available route we are much better equipped than if not. This is what I mean by reading the subtext constantly. 

Now take our little example in terms of our little metaphor. In terms of one of our metaphors, no not the horse one the other one, the one that’s not actually a metaphor…damnit, think about casual conversation in social settings and how you navigate such waters. You and your friends are talking about something exciting. You think of something exciting to contribute to the conversation! Before you get your turn to speak though, somebody knocks over a wagon carrying cabbages and causes a commotion. Now your friends are all talking about the cabbages and no one cares about that other thing. But…!!! The thing you wanted to say!!! Oh no!!! 

I think you can imagine the kind of thing I’m talking about and why it’s relevant. Influencing the tone as GM is similar to influencing the conversation amongst friends, or amongst strangers, whatever it doesn’t matter. Sometimes things flow in a direction you don’t want and it would be rude or weird or annoying to resist it too much. It can also be rude or annoying to just not shut up about the same damn topic that everyone is tired of. Or to change topics out of nowhere when everyone is clearly very interested in the thing they’re already talking about. Or to generally just not let anyone else control the conversation and whenever they try to introduce something new you shoot it down or belittle it and steer everyone away because it’s not YOUR thing. 

Every little rule or guideline that applies to good conversation like that is one we should also follow in terms of tonal manipulation as well. I can’t give you an exhaustive instruction manual on good conversation, but I’ll at least flesh out a couple examples of those things translating into the GMing space. For the most part however, you’re going to have to rely on your own sense of courtesy and social wisdom. Take all of those things and simply translate them, as I’m about to do, and you’ll probably be in a pretty good spot. Probably. I mean idk, I told you I’m shooting in the dark here, but I do feel pretty good about this.

PROBING

Y’know how when you’re first getting to know someone there’s that moment where you make a little bit of a risky joke that’s up your personal sense of humor alley and there’s a moment of tension where you aren’t sure if they vibe with that kind of humor? You’re probing. You’re testing them to see if they’re down to clown, and if they accept the gambit then you get to dive down that alley a little more and have some fun in that direction, but if you get a stonefaced “uhhh, ahaha, yyyeaa… anyway…” then you swallow a little embarrassment and know not to try that again for at least a little while. Do the exact same thing in games with the vibe. Are you thinking of introducing a really serious big bad evil guy named Spooky McDookie but your party is currently in candy land? Well maybe they’d be game for that kinda change in atmosphere, so PROBE EM a little bit. Maybe the bartender Ice cream scooper after handing out magic 2d4 +4 health potion Strawberry Mochi Ice cream bites does quick look left and right and then leans in close and lowers his voice “best be keeping those close to the chest, there’s been rumours of a killer on the loose, real nutjob, takes his victims skins and walks around in ‘em. I’d hang on to those and keep to the main roads at night If I were you.” Now WATCH and LISTEN. Are your players all staring intently at you? Do they ask mr. ice cream man more questions about the spooky murderer? Do they crack a joke about “oH nO! NoT a MaN iNsIdE mY sKiN”? Do they cheer and start doing frothy mouthed above table planning for murder hoboing the npc murder hobo? You see, by just dipping your toe into a new tone, but just sliding the players a little tone tapa at the tone dinner table, you can gauge where they already want to go (and are going to go regardless of your efforts) and then feed into that. 

RIFFING

When the conversation is good, everyone knows it. It is obvious. Everyone is contributing, people are riffing off of each other, people are emoting before, after, and during their turn to speak, as well as while others are talking. It’s like magic, or like a fire, or like several horses strapped to a carriage having a race with each other. Now it’d be great if this just went on forever but horses get tired, fires burn through all their fuel, and magic wouldn’t be magic if there weren’t a whole lot of mundane to compare it with. So we want to do two things here. We want to fuel the fire as much as possible, but we also want to keep our eyes peeled for when the players start to lose interest, and quickly offer a viable change of pace option. 

Fueling the fire is easy and you probably do it instinctively, but we can get even better by reminding ourselves exactly what it is we’re doing in those moments and meditating on it so that we can be even more intentional when the time comes. I’ve latched onto the word ‘riffing’ here because of the specific connotations it has in regards to teamwork and synergy. When the players are enjoying the current tone, they are engaging with it and reacting to the narrative with ease and enthusiasm. Riffing with them means we’re going to try and make their contributions even cooler by rhyming with them, by repeating them, by reacting to them, etc. You’re describing a war-torn village still smoking from the violence of last night, the party is passing through on the way to assassinate the king responsible for it all. When you describe the body of a child halfway crushed by the smoldering roof of a collapsed building, one of your players describes their character dismounting and rushing over to check for a pulse. You shake your head, and the player goes full in-character grief-rage monologue mode. Okay wow, didn’t expect that from the quietest player at the “we’re too cool for voices” table HUSH SILLY GM, THIS IS THE MOMENT! JUMP ON THAT SHIT! There’s a strategy I love to employ when a character does something cool. You probably already do this intuitively, but again it’s about recognizing what we do and why and doing it with intention. Take a second to summarize what just happened. Don’t change a thing about what the player described their character doing, that is sacred. Recap what just happened and add some context. Use the exact same tone they were playing into and describe the world around playing right into it perfectly. “Okay you all see your comrade, Borgus Beeple rush to check on the limp figure. As he breaks down into tears and says all this, rain drops begin to fall and what’s left of the fires that destroyed this village are slowly put out of their misery. The last bit of structure holding up the walls of this building let out a final groan before giving in completely, and the child’s body is lost completely under the ash and dust.” I added some stuff I probably wouldn’t have come up with off the dome, but hopefully you see my point. The player does something cool or poignant that’s feeding the tone, so we do something that feeds them. Let the world take in the emotion the PLAYER is expressing and reflect it back so the character gets to shine all the more brightly.

PROBE AGAIN

Okay great your players are leaning into the vibe and it’s a great time COOL but here’s the thing, maybe one of them is secretly not as much into this part and wishes you’d get back to bashing skulls or something. We don’t know though, so throw out another probe to make sure! “A villager in singed pajamas and covered in soot stumbles over with tears in his eyes. ‘This is not your place to mourn, traveler! We’ve had enough newcomers! Off with you, go on! Step off!’ and he shoves you away from the ruined house” and so we rinse and repeat. Does anyone come punch the aggressive (actually defensive) villager in the face? Are there threats made? Apologies? I think the best versions of these probes are those that allow viable options both for the current tone to be continued and for new directions to be struck. A good flow should look like Probing for the right tone, locking in when the players respond well and riffing with them, then checking periodically with more probes to make sure the tone is still amenable, and then letting them run in a new direction when the energy points that way.

MINECRAFT CREATIVE MODE

Remember when I said that you are not only the carriage driver but also the creator deity and designer of the universe? Well, obviously, that’s literally the case even if you are playing a module someone else wrote. What I mean is that we can actively step into that role in order to make sure the carriage goes where we want it to without making the players horses feel like we’re cockblocking them.

So we’re a bit wiser now. We have a serious bad guy we want the players to take seriously and want them to be all cool and dangerous and stuff, but before introducing him we probed to see if the tone would work. Unfortunately however, it really seems like the players just want to joke around right now, and aren’t latching on to the serious vibe. What do we do about Spooky McDooky? Well like I said, there isn’t a correct answer, but what’s available to you is pivoting any number of directions in terms of tone until that one is ripe. Maybe The bartender Ice cream scooper raises an eyebrow at your player’s ‘man in my skin’ bit and goes “I heard there was a man in your MOMS SKIN last NIGHT OOOOOHHH BURRRRNNN!” and we keep the silly vibe rolling until a day or two later when the party stumbles upon the ice cream mans body in the street at night, perfectly stripped of epidermis and muscle fibers bare and exposed, still twitching. Another probe, closer to home. Maybe it picks up this time, maybe not. Maybe you’ll decide the serious thing just aint workin right now, and the right journey for your group is something else. Maybe you’ll decide to finally rename your stupid ass bad guy. 

That’s about all I got.