The first step is awareness of goals. What does the overall party want? What do individual players want? How can we see player actions as driven by what they want? Where do desires by players overlap or conflict? Answering these questions will give you a good sense of what direction you're headed in. It will also give you the ability to anticipate things better. The next level of this is figuring out what the players want from the game, which will also help guide our understanding of things.
Storytime: Once, I was running a campaign, and I had a player who was playing a paladin. But the player tired of being ceaselessly good and decided that the most compelling thing to do was have him turn evil. Actually, the player wanted to kill the character off and start over, and I insisted we find a way to make the paladin interesting. So we did an evil turn which was preceded by playing the character as increasingly disillusioned and hopeless. The player's intention was to have an epic, exciting turn in his character's story, and that overrode what the character wanted, and since the other players weren't factoring in their fellow player's goals, they were taken totally off guard. It was exciting, but the clues were there had the other players been looking.
Once you recognize the motivations in your game, it's time to decide which ones you want to focus your energy on assisting. Your personal goals will almost certainly make this list, and the main story should be represented as well; deciding how and where to help your allies is another element of this process. This can be a simple or complex process. If you agree with the goal and the person with the goal is a friend and ally, the decision is simple. What if you disagree with the goal but want to offer an olive branch to the person who holds the goal? What if someone you detest wants to help with a goal of yours? All of these factors can grow complicated, so keeping our base desires (which goals we will prioritize) in mind matters a lot so we can avoid getting distracted.
Another story: I got to play a con artist build I'd been dreaming about for years. Our DM put us on a sprawling, epic adventure that spanned a continent and multiple dimensions. There were endless fascinating details to latch onto, many of which inspired new goals in our group. We tended to these in the way that D&D players do--"yes, we just slayed a den of vampires, and now I'm eating 40 soft pretzels and watching a boxing match--leave me alone." In the end, our schedules fell apart. There were seven of us trying to coordinate together, and it got to be too much. Our DM gave us a written epilogue wrapping up the campaign and seeing our characters off into the sunset. We all felt similarly: there was more we wanted to do. We never saw the end of the story ourselves. We'd spent sessions frolicking and puzzling and chatting, and the actual story had eluded us. I think if we had kept in mind that real life time was an issue and been more diligent, we would have lived out that story, and while I'm not claiming you shouldn't goof around or explore, I do think that there's a balance to keep.
Then it's time to coordinate. You know the goal, and you know who's cooperating with you, so you have to figure out who's doing what. Fortunately, tabletop games clearly spell out who has the best chance of success at a task via your skills--you can compare the skill rank of say, Survival, on two different character sheets and see which one is higher. Much of tabletop games involves getting a sense of who is good at what; it becomes intuitive, as having the most skilled person do something is classic and fairly obvious strategy. For more abstract challenges, though, teamwork is usually the solution: brainstorming solutions to problems, collectively convincing someone of something, and outright doing tasks in tandem are all common strategies in tabletop games. What matters most here is that you're strategizing consciously, not acting on impulse.
Storytime part three: In Of Gods and Dragons, my most recent campaign, I tried to pose all abstract problems to my party. I had designed the campaign to be about roleplaying and emotional experiences, and that meant using their wits and creativity to solve problems, not to mention diplomacy. You could see that it was pushing the players to their limits at times--everything was complicated and messy and directionless, and they had to sort it all out. But they persevered. They cooperated. They thought creatively. And when all was said and done, they had amassed enough power to steamroll over every other challenge in their way. But this was only possible because of cooperation. I have never seen a group so focused on the same goals; it was truly magnificent, and I hope to see that again as a GM some day.
And then it's time to act. This is the easiest part to consider. You declare an action, you roll dice, your GM tells you the result. But! Then it's back to the drawing board. It's time to plan again.
You may be saying to yourself, but this is all simple enough and can be done without thinking too hard about it. Perhaps. But I have been playing tabletop games for a long time. There are a number of things that happen in practically every party at every table with every game. Panicked decision-making is one of them. Unclear, poorly thought-out, conflicting plans are the bane of every group of tabletop protagonists' existences, and any player or GM who would claim otherwise is unaware of the chaos they live in.
Storytime one last time, and of a very different nature. I grew up hating myself. I thought that there was nothing positive about me to be said, that people rightfully hated me, and that I deserved the bad things that happened to me. I tried therapies and antidepressants and religions and all kinds of stuff. I was still miserable. Then in my mid-20s, a therapist recommended a book. It was called Self-Compassion by Dr. Kristin Neff. It basically argued that if you are mindful--if you can be aware of what you are thinking while you are thinking it--that you can change your thoughts. You can make them gentler and kinder. You can teach yourself to love yourself. It sounded far-fetched like all self-help books, but I saw no reason to not give it a chance.
It wasn't immediate. Mindfulness is hard and gradual and only as effective as you let it be. But I got into the swing of things and started shifting to gentler thoughts. I learned to like things about myself, then to hope for good things for myself, and finally to actually loving myself. It hadn't been far-fetched. It was neuroscience, and it worked for me. Mindfulness works on whatever you set it to--any change you want to make, even just in attention, is possible. It is, without hyperbole, a total gamechanger in terms of how you exist in the world.
So what I'm addressing here isn't frivolous or too simple to discuss. If we can use a tiny dose of mindfulness--just a little constant check-in in your mind that asks some basic questions--we can make much better decisions in-game. These are questions like, "How does what we're doing right now relate to our goals? What other paths might we take to get there? How might we simplify our plans? How are my allies in the party and the NPCs we're working with interested in our plans?" These are simple, yes, but they are critical thought questions that keep us from getting caught up in crazy plans or overlooking important things.
But finally, beyond understanding and contributing to plans well, there is one last key to working well with other players: friendliness. I don't mean your character should embrace a caricature of polite behavior or some kind of chipper demeanor. I meant that you, the player, outside of the game, should be friendly with a player when you work with them. It's a big thing to offer assistance in tabletop games, and a spirit of kindness goes a long way in terms of making that assistance into a meaningful moment in the campaign. We are all here to have fun, so try to embrace the cooperative in-game spirit with the same energy out of game.
This will guide you in most things. When new situations arise, trust your intuition. Most of all, remember that this is a narrative game. Failure is just as interesting as success, and often more interesting. Don't be afraid to ask for help and guidance if you're nervous. And just have fun--that's the point.
That's all for now. Coming soon: how to stop railroading, a profile on the island of Ramsey, and how to "win" tabletop games. Until next time, happy gaming!
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