# How Can David Mamet Help My Game?



## Radiating Gnome (Jul 25, 2013)

Great piece -- I like Mamet a lot.  And it's a good lesson for DM's too.  Information is lost, drama is remembered. 

Do you have any examples of encounters/scenes/adventures that you've worked on or run that you applied this to? Or maybe examples (like we did for my piece about boxed text) where we take an encounter and give it the Mamet treatment? 

-rg


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## I'm A Banana (Jul 25, 2013)

I think the most successful use in my personal games pertains to the Goals for the PC, and making it so that failure at accomplishing those goals was assumed. For instance, there was a PC there who had the goal of Independence, and was an escaped slave. I made it clear up-front that it was assumed that, at the end of this little 5-level mini-campaign that the PC would be captured by her previous owners -- _unless she did something to stop that from happening_ (each character was assumed to fail at their goal unless they did something active to counteract that). The three stages on her path to her goal were all about stopping that fate, and she was always well aware of what the future held for her. There was a scene where the party was pretty blinkered from a series of difficult combats and was in retreat, but her character charged during a particularly difficult combat, because "If I die here, at least I die before they can catch up to me" (or something like that). Really awesome scene, and all because the stakes were high, failure was assumed, and the player was thinking about what was going to happen in the future. It also helped me, throughout the campaign, to set up scenes where Who Wants What and Why Now and What Happens If We Fail were very, very clear. That combat itself was based on another PC who, with the goal of Peace, was doomed to failure if he didn't do something active to stop his Rome-esque empire from going to war. It pushed him to attack this nation he was very loyal to (he was a monk trained as a soldier in the army) and be branded a traitor, all because he wanted to see the wars end.

High stakes and clear goals and the real and present threat of failure bring out a lot of juicy drama.


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## Mark CMG (Jul 25, 2013)

*A*lways *B*e *C*ampaigning


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## Janx (Jul 25, 2013)

Having read the penguin article, I see some other interesting lessons from Mamet.

mamet talks about writing for TV and not radio, since thats the people he's addressing.  The inverse is really true for GMing.  You're writing for listeners, not watchers.  People can't see anything, so you've got to hold their attention in an audio medium.  That still means not boring them to death.

mamet hates scenes with 2 people talking about a 3rd person or exposition scenes.

in D&D, I take these concepts from that:
any scene with 2 people talking means the rest of the party is bored.  Cut some conversations down to summations rather than back and forth dialog that the rest of the party is stuck waiting for it to finish.

Don't spend a lot of time describing everything or giving length backstory.  Somebody else has an article on cleaning up boxed text.  Read it.

in that same vein, don't describe, show.  We don't need to know exactly what the evil prince of evil is wearing.  But if you want me to think he's really evil, show me the results of his evil or have him do something evil in front of me.  That'll get the point across better than trying to dress up how evil this guy is and it'll use less idle game time to do it.

I still like KM's mandatory goals for PCs, as a driver of action.  Just about every scene should be actions taken to get the goal.  

I was going to say "driving to the goal", but that's another metaphor.  Don't waste my time describing the ride along the trail.  Ain't nothing happening.  it's filler. Cut to the chase.



KM raised an interesting point in his second post here about goals, in that they are predestined to fail unless the PC exerts effort.  He should have put that in his original Goals article.  But I'll extract another lesson from it.

One of the ways TV shows lose audience is when they take so bloody long to resolve themselves.  Lost hit a lull like that (season 3 if I recall the complaints).  As a writer or a GM, you can only milk a goal for so long.  It needs to move to the next stage or end in final defeat.  If you keep milking the same cow, you're going to jump the shark.

This is part of what Burn Notice suffered from.  How many seasons is Michael going to be burned, and go after the guys who burned him, and then go after the guys who were really behind the guys who were really behind the guys who burned him.  Even an onion has a limited number of layers.  Finish it.

There is a pacing that should be kept, so the player feels tension, and progress.  And if the PC is lucky, eventual success.  But certainly not never ending repetition of being stuck in the same stage for 20 levels.


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## Herobizkit (Jul 26, 2013)

Janx said:
			
		

> If you keep milking the same cow, you're going to jump the shark.



May I quote this in future posts?


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## Janx (Jul 26, 2013)

Herobizkit said:


> May I quote this in future posts?




Sure.  I was going for a mixed up metaphor, as sticking to the milking thing was going to offend Eric's gramma to finish that idea.


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## Lord_Blacksteel (Jul 26, 2013)

I was expecting to hate this article based on the title alone - "oh look another attempt to turn advice from a completely different medium into DMing advice" - I find most of those to be just wrong. 

Lo and behold - this is actually good stuff, and if your players keep coming back you're probably already doing some of these. I'm especially a fan of "information is boring".


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## Man in the Funny Hat (Jul 27, 2013)

I think Mamet is an excellent writer and his instruction is spot-on for screenwriting.  I'm a little reluctant to just say, "Do this same thing with D&D."  It's a serious mistake that is repeatedly made - the things that make a good book do not necessarily make good D&D.  The things that make a good movie do not necessarily make good D&D.  Books, movies, TV shows, plays, D&D; they share many of the same requirements, the same terminology, but they are NOT INTERCHANGABLE.

For one thing the DM is not actually writing most of the scene - THE PLAYERS ARE!  The players determine what their characters motivations are - NOT THE DM.  The players write their characters dialogue - NOT THE DM.  D&D is not a wholly written medium, nor is it a medium dominated by visuals as movies and TV are.  The job of the DM is not like the job Mamet assigns to the screenwriter - to ensure that the hero repeatedly fails or is otherwise prevented from succeeding until the end of the show.  The DM has to compose adventures in such a way that at any point when the players come up with better ideas that they can actually succeed prematurely.  It is considered BAD DMing to write as Mamet suggests and we even have our own name for it - railroading.

I think our greatest challenge, our most needed skill, is the ability to re-write our entire show on the fly.  To not have our episode or our entire multi-story arc collapse in a puff of logic just because the PC's succeeded in achieving goals before we initially planned.  We have to anticipate that they will REPEATEDLY achieve goals before we really want them to.  We have to RELY on the idea that things will NOT develop as we WRITE them to develop and that we will then have to REWRITE everything that follows quickly and believably.

I am not David Mamet, however.  I could be wrong.  But I suspect that he'd see the truthiness of this.


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## I'm A Banana (Jul 27, 2013)

Man in the Funny Hat said:
			
		

> It is considered BAD DMing to write as Mamet suggests and we even have our own name for it - railroading.




I'd disagree.

The idea is that the character's goal isn't something you can accomplish by the end of the encounter. They're _still looking for their goal_. There's a reason they're still out there adventuring and risking their life, a future they are seeing that killing this wave of goblins didn't accomplish.

That's a failure. They failed, in this encounter, to get what they want. If they didn't fail, this would be the end of the character: they'd have what they want, and go home happy. But they failed to get what they want. This keeps them moving onto the next encounter, and keeps the players interested in how they will eventually have their characters accomplish their goals.

I agree that the mediums have differences, but if I get everything my character wants, it's just as boring as when the character in a TV show, play, or movie gets everything they want. It doesn't make me interested in what happens next.


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## Random Axe (Jul 28, 2013)

Kamikaze Midget said:


> The idea is that the character's goal isn't something you can accomplish by the end of the encounter. They're _still looking for their goal_. There's a reason they're still out there adventuring and risking their life, a future they are seeing that killing this wave of goblins didn't accomplish.
> 
> That's a failure. They failed, in this encounter, to get what they want. If they didn't fail, this would be the end of the character: they'd have what they want, and go home happy. But they failed to get what they want. This keeps them moving onto the next encounter, and keeps the players interested in how they will eventually have their characters accomplish their goals.
> 
> I agree that the mediums have differences, but if I get everything my character wants, it's just as boring as when the character in a TV show, play, or movie gets everything they want. It doesn't make me interested in what happens next.




My biggest stumble over this concept in this article, is that it keeps sounding like an instruction to the effect of, "You must make the characters fail" in order to keep them coming back.  Well hey, lemme tell ya, that's not going to happen.  If my GM keeps thwarting my victory, my catharsis, my triumph at finding any particular macguffin or defeating any particular warlord, I start to lose interest in the game itself, not just that campaign.

Instead, I would want to specify that this concept really only applies best in _general_, in respect of the over-reaching 20-level campaign, where what we want as characters from that life of adventuring, is never fully satisfied _generically_ until we die.



Kamikaze Midget said:


> Regardless of your system, anticipation requires ambiguity and chaos: you cannot know for sure what hit will drop you to 0 HP. You cannot know for sure what you’re going to be able to do when you gain a level. You cannot know for sure what capabilities your magic items have. If all these things are nebulous and unknown, but important to your character’s goals (and those goals are, as noted above, acute and demanding), you create a circumstance where you need to pay attention to see if everything falls apart, or not. Abandon the precise math, the wishlists, the recommended wealth-by-level, the guaranteed powers from these specific lists each time you get X amount of XP, and embrace more chaos, more unknowns, and more mystery.




Yes and no.  I love and fully support the idea of mysterious magic items.  I dislike the concept of going to ye olde local magicke shoppe in Waterdeep and plunking down a mysterious piece of paper that has "60,000 gold pieces" written on it and placing an order for a custom-made *Boots of Hasty Striding & Springing* or a _+2 Sword of Doing This and Extra That and One Neat Thing Per Day_.  That's not mystery.  That's an abstraction that reduces the fun of the game to a numerical transaction.  Instead, I love the feeling of finding that magical bippy in the dungeon, that sword or that shield or that wand being used by the bad guy or hoarded by the monster, that I win by defeating them.  That's where the fun of the game comes from, in the discovery and the literal winning of.  Not the buying of.

I do NOT agree with doing away with the by-level ability "wishlist" as you put it.  Me being able to plot out my PC's level plan of feats and class abilities is completely necessary for me to be able to reach a prestige class, for instance, that as a character concept I want to work toward; or to keep track of the different abilities that I get, and so on.  I don't like the idea of my abilities being a mystery to me as a player.


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## Man in the Funny Hat (Jul 28, 2013)

Kamikaze Midget said:


> I agree that the mediums have differences, but if I get everything my character wants, it's just as boring as when the character in a TV show, play, or movie gets everything they want. It doesn't make me interested in what happens next.



Yeah, but do you write the encounter/adventure with the specific intent that until they reach the end the characters WILL fail to get what they want until the end of the encounter/adventure?  That they have no possibility for successes because repeated failures is all that propels the character into the next encounter?

We have random wilderness encounters.  Are they engineered for PC failure because failure at this encounter drives them to the next?  No.  SUCCESS at one encounter after another propels them forward - an obstacle _overcome_ not an obstacle that sent them packing.  We have clues or trails of information that lead to interactions with an NPC to get the next clue/more information.  Is it FAILURE to get what they want that drives them further?  No, it's success at achieving the next step of their goals.  Or is Mamet correct that this is a BAD way to give _characters _information and thus impart that to the players?  Are the tropes of D&D interfering with good drama or are the requirements of D&D just different from a screenplay?


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## best news (Aug 3, 2013)

*JYrXoXxneHEJ*

XRUjVq Fantastic article.Really looking forward to read more. Really Great.


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