Collaborative Games and "Verisimilitude" · Game Master's Laboratory

Collaborative Games and "Verisimilitude"

A common phrase in a bunch of GMing advice videos, books, and articles I read growing up emphasized believability in a game. Matt Colville's "Running the Game" videos have an echoing refrain about maintaining "verisimilitude!" and it's something I've definitely taken to heart. Something that's been on my mind recently is how this concept meshes with collaborative games. I've heard some people say that the ideas are contradictory to each other, which I really don't agree with. A vivid piece of advice I remember hearing more than once was to make sure every NPC has a name. Even if you don't have a name for them, make one up, or say it's in your notes and you'll find it later! I think this is good advice, generally. Letting the players (including you) believe in the secondary reality is important. Why is that?

Not every game needs to be believable, or even every game I run, but most games I run; not *realism,* these are fantasy games after all. But believability. When my players steal gold from a dragon, they know the dragon will get mad at them and try to fry and eat them. That's believable! When they summon a magical explosion that slams an ogre into the base of a tower, damaging the stonework and causing it to totter, it isn't realistic, but it's believable!

As a GM, I think one of my most important jobs is creating interesting choices for my players. Those choices can be interesting for a number of reasons, but dramatic tension is certainly one of them, and part of that tension comes from the resolution and consequences. To make these consequences matter, the players need to be able to understand what the potential results will be (grab the gem, get cursed; flirt with the ogre, maybe get an ally or an enemy; chant the song, light the candle, fuck around and find out). You can explain the results of actions to your players, and I think understanding potential outcomes is important, but there isn't enough time in a day, much less a session, to explain every single possible outcome for every choice. Instead, we want to inject our world with enough consistency, a logic in the fiction, that we can intuit the broad strokes of what will happen. That's why a lot of GMs, especially those interested in tactical combat or long-running stories, don't run Looney Tunes-esque escapades. Taking the world a little bit seriously helps us believe in it, which in turn makes it easier to engage with and form interesting choices and consequences.

To that end, I'd argue collaborative games make that *easier* because the information we use to make these decisions has already been partially communicated in pretty great detail to the players! When we as a table create an NPC together, we know some of their goals, their personality, their drives, their habits. The act of making this person together can help make them "real," and since no one person has control over them, they can take on this life of their own. It's pretty cool! This is a messy, simplified, and probably not ideal explanation of my line of thought on this subject, but I do think it's pretty important. Creating a fictionalized logic lets us communicate stakes, tension, and consequence to our groups.

Something of a rant, and I hope it doesn't come off as too preachy. Writing this has helped me figure out my thoughts on the subject a little more, I think, and this definitely isn't applicable at every table...but I think it definitely is to mine haha, anyone else find a lot of advice on "believability" in TTRPGs? How does that seem to work in a collaborative campaign, if you've run one or aspects of one?

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