5. Managing Cognitive Load

Part 4: Projecting Engagement

Part 3: Cognitive Load & Information Filtering
Part 2c: Governing the Game

Part 2b: Setting Player Boundaries

Part 2a: The DM's Mental Toolbox

Part 1: Introduction to Session Management

It's believed that managing a session is demanding and difficult, what with constant, stressful pressures that both compromise our focus and drain our energy reserves. It's fair to ask why anyone would do it — while admitting that many don't want to, precisely because of what's involved. After all, we must keep the players engaged, we must improvise content, we must juggle unpredictable demands and manage pacing — simultaneously. This would seem to present an insurmountable problem — something which, in discussing session management, we must address.

We should best start by establishing in clear terms what the DM's responsibilities are. First, setting presentation: describing the physical space, maintaining a consistency in the world's environment, animating NPC behaviour and representing dynamic changes that take place in the game world. These would include weather, passage of time, mass movements of people, pressures wrought by food supply and technological equivalency, and all those things that make it possible for the players to feel grounded in a world that also contains magic, monsters, excessive technology, whatever the genre specifies. We're responsible for relaying those things that fall within the players' five senses, and those things the players are able to understand about the setting in the big picture.

Second, the control of this information, based upon the party's personal experiences and things they're told — which may be either truth or deception. We may tell the players they see a wall; that the wall appears to be solid. But should the players doubt us, we have it clear in our minds what the players must say for us to reveal that it really is solid or if it's a deception. This premise can apply to anything in the setting: which means the players must do more than experience the setting — they must, to be sure about it, interact with it. The setting is indifferent to the players. It does not clarify itself; the players must earn clarity through behaviour.

Finally, adjudication. This includes interpreting rules as they apply to the players' actions, in combat and otherwise. This defines what's possible, what can be done physically, by the players against or for the setting. This clarifies the DM's role as governing body over the rules, as previously explained.

This is a tremendous load for the DM. We must not only present the setting, but consciously create two narratives in our own minds: one for what the players' believe, prior to experimentation, and one for what experimentation reveals. This for the vast and considerable scope of the setting, involving incomprehensible geographic spaces, professions, purchasable items, the effects of all those items, as well as every person the players may ever interact with. This on top of knowing the rules cold, so that instant judgments can be made with the precision of a tennis judge calling ins and outs during a match where the ball moves at 140 m.p.h.

We must be clear, however, about what we're not doing, recalling the principle that the DM's responsibility stops at the setting's edge. Tailoring the setting to suit the players loads a considerable and unfair expectation upon the DM that ought to be, and was once upon a time, shouldered by the player. Expecting the DM to take responsibility for the player's engagement or enjoyment is, again, a burden the player should be responsible for, not the DM. While creating a "story," complete with set pieces and curated moments designed for the players is, again, work the DM shouldn't have to do; it is, in fact, the players who are responsible for deciding what they want to do, where they want to go, and what they want to achieve in the setting. We appreciate that there are lazy players, who want to treat role-playing as a form of personal entertainment for themselves; but having several players, each with individual needs and expectations, demanding that the DM satisfy everyone, is too big an ask. If role-playing is going to be a collaborative experience, then let's have it be one: with everyone accepting the responsibility for their own enjoyment, and not demanding this duty of others.

Moreover, again for the benefit of the DM's managing of role-playing's cognitive load, we should remember that RPGs are games, not a means to personal gratification and fantasy. There are conduits for that indulgence: artwork, fiction writing, the use of one's private imagination — all perfectly acceptable pursuits for the individual's expression, with a possibility of achieving notoriety and even wealth through skill and interpersonal empathy. But this sort of fulfillment is and should remain a personal aspiration. It's not acceptable to perceive that another person, one who does not share your fantasy, should nevertheless be responsible for ensuring you achieve your fantasy, merely because some RPGs happen to include the adjective "fantasy" as an activity description. "Fantasy," in this context, refers to the literary concept of a world where reality is tempered with elements of unreality. It does not actually mean that players are granted fantasies through the game's process.

Granted, those who have been misled, who have been inaccurately encouraged to redefine the DM's role as they see it, will contend with this position. Some will argue vehemently, taking the position that because we are a DM, we are responsible to them: a form of obligation that exists nowhere. It's structurally absurd to attach this viewpoint to a leisure activity. Moreover, this responsibility they wish to impose is not necessary to run the game. That others think otherwise is of no consequence. Their power over us can be obviated easily: they depend on our accepting their argument. Their dependence is not a position of strength.

Having dispensed with this invented responsibility to others, we are left with our responsibility to the game, which is real and follows those precepts described. At the outset of our dungeon mastering experience, these can be filtered also, to again reduce the strain on our mental energy. The dual narrative, for example, can be initially suspended — we can, if we so choose, present things exactly as they are, without exception, until we're ready to engage with both. For example, without this duality, if a group of enemies confronts the players with the intent to kill, we can accept this as fact. Their motives can be simplified; their sense of right and wrong, black and white, can likewise be assumed. This is not the end-goal: but where our effort to grasp and overcome the cognitive load of role-play is at stake, we can make this concession for the present, assigning our stretch into a more multi-dimensional setting structure for another time.

This stretch would include the enemies' motivations as part of their initial attack: are they really aggressive, or do they feel wronged? Are they being manipulated by an unseen force? Would they, in fact, be open to parley and negotiation if the players shouted, over the initial swordplay, that they "Come in peace"? Such additional characteristics, later, should be part and parcel with the game's setting. Imaginably, these would not be mere things for the players to fight and overcome — but would, by our scaling up of complexity, be driven by those motives that might influence anyone: the need for safety, stability, things they don't have, a desire to expand their control or their potential lack of agency due to a force more powerful. We may imagine anything — and yet present the creatures exactly as before, mere marauders with no more self-conception than what the players choose to believe. Such is the dual narrative we described: that there is more going on in the setting than meets the eye, though what "meets the eye" is what we are always responsible for providing as DM.

Because this dual narrative can be factored incrementally, we're not bound by a binary assumption that either the dual narrative is highly complex or non-existent. As DMs increase in skill, deferred knowledge not immediately evident can be introduced gradually, as we build our capacity in-game, expanding the game's functionality without becoming overwhelmed.

Setting that aside, however. What we're left with is the base sensory presence of the setting and the adjudication of the rules. This latter, too, can be mitigated — not by discarding, simplifying or imposing arbitrariness in place of the rules, but by strengthening our comprehension of the rules, both with regards to their purpose and their construction.

We benefit when we introduce new characters to the game who are limited in their skills, powers or technological access. This reduces the number of descriptions with which we must be fluent. It also provides a measure of containment upon the players: the world is too dangerous, in the main, for them to assume confidence or believe themselves to be important. This is something we should stress when introducing them to the game. We should not rush to make them more powerful, largely, because we're still just learning the game; until we fully grasp the effectiveness of low-level tools and traits, we should not assume the responsibility of comprehending mid-level or high-level equivalents. Should we rush to do so, we're bound to find ourselves quickly out of our depth, and the players dance rings around us through the use of skill sets that we don't know well enough how to regulate.

Narrative humility — the players are not the centre of the world, nor are they safe in it — provides an existential clarity that reinforces the game's ruleset. Rules exist as boundaries, dictating what the players can and cannot do. Suspending the boundary on a rule, even a little bit, risks increasing the player's self-importance, perhaps deluding them to believe that with this change, they ARE safe in the world. That small bit of confidence can be their undoing, easily, especially when we impose some other rule which we haven't changed. A good example would be the presence of dice, which are indifferent to player confidence. The smack-down that results, the set-back experienced by an over-confident player, is more traumatic than what a vigilant, threat-aware player feels.

The resultant fall-out of the set-back can easily undermine a player's respect for the rules. In turn, this can create a campaign-destructive loop: the DM, wishing to placate the player, mitigates the die roll, which increases the players' confidence, which requires another adjustment, so that round and round we go until all rules and all consequences are suspect. This is why we must first understand any rule fully before making a change to it, and second why we must stress to the player that the change in the rule in no way should make the player feel safe, because consequences that result regardless won't be mitigated. Otherwise, the cognitive load of trying to keep track of what rule changes have occurred, or what ought to occur, and what conditions must be observed to assure that a harsh consequence befalls a player, soon compromises our ability to properly run other aspects of the game that we should be prioritising.

Rules can be changed: but never in-game and never without first understanding all the implications of that rule, not just those that might affect a given situation. This allows rules to help us maintain order. Our minds are clear when the players understand, also, what the purpose of the rule is, and why it is so limited, not only from their perspective but also ours. We have a reason for respecting a rule because of what it allows us to present in terms of the setting; the player's wish to change it cannot be the priority.

Thus, when sharing out skill sets, at the start of each session, time should be taken to explain what the skill is meant to allow, its limitations, how we see it from our vantage point, and why such and such point won't be changed. At this time, the players can ask questions, make proposals and suggest circumstances where the rule may need reconsideration. Yet we make the final decision about that, and we make our decision based on what our setting requires, and what we're able to cognitively manage... and not on what the player wants or feels.

This establishes that rules are not merely mechanical assets, but negotiated points of interaction between setting logic, player understanding and our adjudication. Agreed, conceptual communication is an absolute necessity: the players should be as versed in their particulars of those rules governing their abilities as we are — and must, particularly, be on the same page. This reduces chaos and misinterpretion in game, subsequently reducing our cognitive load, making us better able to manage the game's more important detail, the conveyance of the setting.

We'll discuss this in our next class.