Tabletop Tuesday — Pre-Game Knowledge (or avoiding “I say that.”)

Hey all! It’s Tuesday, which means a nerdy gaming post! I was working on some game prep yesterday for one of my Star Trek Adventures games, and it occurred to me that one of the things that’s difficult in pretty much every TTRPG is the “info-dump/I-say-that” problem, and I thought I’d share how—in Star Trek Adventures, Mutants & Masterminds, and even D&D 5e, I’ve done my best to counteract it somewhat.

Sorry, the What Problem?

Info-dumping is a term I’m borrowing from my writing life, and it basically means when you’re reading something and suddenly the author jumps into a major list of facts, qualities, descriptions, or what-have-you that can be somewhat overwhelming and often disrupt the flow of the narrative. The reader needs just enough information to get what’s going on, and that can be a difficult balance. “You arrive in the city of Neo Toronto, so named because…” followed by a long monologue of information that has all the players doing their best to listen but fading fast because does it matter what year the original Toronto was ransacked by the Rapacious Fordites? Probably not. Unless the Rapacious Fordites have returned, that is…

Adjacent to this is the “As you know, Bob,” problem, where you try to smooth it out by having characters discuss things that make no sense for them to discuss in-character in that moment, solely to educate the reader. Like two guards discussing the exact timeline of when their relief arrives. They already know this, why are they talking about it? Because the players listening in need to know when to take advantage of their distraction, of course.

The follow-up to the Infodump or “As you know, Bob” in a TTRPG setting is the “I say that.” Your science officer leans over the cool hooded scanner-reader that makes absolutely no sense but does make them look nifty because of the way it shines a blue light across their eyes and says, “What do I have on sensors?” You explain the sensor readings are showing radiation bursts that are off-the-scale, and the enemy vessel seems to be in danger of an imminent hull breach, but the radiation will make transport impossible! And the player turns to the rest of the group and says, “I say that,” or “I tell them that,” or “I explain the situation…” because you’ve already said it all.

Method One: Stacking the Deck with Pre-Game Knowledge My folder of pre-game knowledge in the campaigns thus far…

Games like Star Trek Adventures have a lot of lore. It’s a massive IP, and while I’m a giant Trek nerd, I can’t (and don’t) expect my players to be. And in fact, in both of my groups, I’ve got a few players whose exposure to Star Trek has been one or two of the shows, not all of them, and its different shows to boot. This is actually great, to be honest, since we’re currently in 2372, and things are going poorly with the Klingon Empire and only about half the characters know what’s coming from having watched this time period play out on DS9. I’m enjoying that, even as I’m doing my best to make sure the stories I’m telling are happening alongside the canon timeline, in different areas of space for the players to play in and make a difference in, even if the larger strokes will still play out as they did.

So, one of the ways I counteract the “I say that” and info-dumps is pre-game knowledge.

In Star Trek Adventures, every character starts with Talents, Values, and Focuses (and one Pastime). Before each game session, I look at my adventure, and try to think of where those Values will interact (they’re the driving force of character growth in STA, and I’ll admit I’m not as good at remembering to challenge them as I should be because my players are just so wonderful with their characters), consider the Talents as well, but then really sit down with the Focuses (and, occasionally, Pastimes).

Then I send each character information they’d know that might be relevant for the adventure that’s about to drop. This works as a great equalizer for the player knowledge vs character knowledge thing, especially for the players who aren’t as familiar with Trek as I am. Here are two random examples from various sessions:

Astrophysics—Plasma drifts, which are more common near places like the Badlands, can spin off and pass through whole star systems or large areas of space for days at a time. They’re generally disruptive, blocking sensors and communications, but don’t often pose a major threat to starships or starbases, though they can cause atmospheric issues on planets, dim sunlight somewhat, and block out the stars at night while passing through a planet’s orbit. Starbases faced with plasma drifts tend to run on skeleton crews for the duration, with their shields up until the storm passes, as the storm makes any normal starbase activity borderline impossible. Communications and scans aimed through a plasma drift are similarly disrupted, which can mean the path of a plasma drift can cut off communication for even longer if the storm happens to be moving on a vector between the two points attempting to communicate. [A plasma drift happens in the DS9 episode “Invasive Procedures.”]

Transporters & Replicators—It’s possible to line up multiple transporter platforms into a series, and to “pass the baton” from one transporter to the next, either from one starship’s transporter buffer to another or from one shuttle to another, for shuttles fitted with transporters. Transporting people this way carries a small risk of a minor synaptic shock from the extended transporter sequence—no real health trauma, but a headache or in more extreme cases unconsciousness once rematerializing is finished—but in cases where the signal might otherwise not carry far enough, a string of shuttles can be the solution. [We saw this in the two-part VOY episode “Future’s End”]

Now, in the episode with the plasma drift (our first game, actually) I mentioned “there’s a plasma drift moving through space around Surplus Depot C-9,” and the player of the Science Officer took the baton and ran with it, pointing out the problems they’d likely have with sensors and communications, and that their best bet was to take their runabout in and see if the plasma drift was the entire reason the depot—operating on a skeleton crew—had gone quiet or not. It wasn’t, of course, but it was way more immersive and fun for the science officer to explain the situation to the crew than me.

Ditto when a dense field of asteroidal debris heavy with gallicite particulates limited transporter range and the crew needed a way to beam survivors from escape pods from within the churning field of asteroids before said escape pods were smashed to bits. The Ops officer knew they could maneuver small shuttles amongst the rocks in a kind of chain and get people out that way, since the ship itself was too large to get close enough without getting pummelled by asteroids.

What’s even better? It all comes with their own character voices. The way Steve’s Lt. Xon explained the plasma drift was nothing like the way Lin’s Ensign Grix explained the transporter solution. I love that.

I also love that I can pepper in some pre-game knowledge that isn’t useful as a red herring or two, which I try to keep to a minimum, but if the crew are going to come up against some individuals injured by ion radiation, I might give them a list of causes of ion radiation. One of them will be correct in the instance they’re about to face, but the rest won’t. But they’d know this as the competent Starfleet Officers they are, and they can investigate.

These examples are from Star Trek Adventures since that’s what I’ve been working on most recently, but I’ve always done this with other game systems as well. For Mutants & Masterminds, I use the character’s Skills (and especially their Expertise Skill, if any), and for one of my players, Evan, who’s hero “the Corvid” has a kinda-sorta-precognitive ability where things that will be important are “shiny” to him, I hand him a list of stuff he’s bringing with him that’s shiny. He tends to find a use for all of them, though sometimes not the use to which I figured they’d likely be put. (For example, if I know he’ll facing off against invisible assailants, I might pass him a bag of glitter to fling into the air so they’ll be visible by omission.) In D&D, I’d look at the skills in which the characters are proficient, as well as maybe passing along some class-related information that makes sense. I made sure Kevin’s ranger knew about the local flora and fauna with his Nature knowledge, for example, and I love giving Marie’s bard information through sonnets and poems and songs. I don’t usually write the songs, to be clear, but I do describe them and their narratives, and it’s a lot of fun to have Marie’s character deliver the information to the rest of the group because she’s so brilliant at improv and seeing the rest of the players react to, “Oh, hey, I know a sea shanty about this—want me to sing it?” is always a treat.

Method Two: Direct Messages (or “The Telepath Problem”) Ah Lt. Stadi, we barely knew you. Your brother, however, is the tactical officer of the USS Bellerophon in my campaign…

Another parallel issue that pops up all the time in both of my Star Trek Adventures games—because both of my groups have Betazoids—is the telepath problem. They can read minds. Reading minds can derail a great deal of narrative options, and planning for it is always a major consideration before a session. For a lot of plots, it doesn’t directly matter, though it can provide an edge I hadn’t considered.

Rescue operation? “Can you sense anything, Counsellor?” Interrogation? “Is he lying?” First Contact? “Can we trust them?” And so on. Now, I promised myself at the start of the campaign that I’d not allow myself more than one episode a session where the group encountered a new species that was telepathically unreadable. In canon, Ferengi can’t be read, and the same is true of a number of other species, but I didn’t want to just cheat and say, “Oh hey, how about that? During this investigation it turns out you just happen to be talking to people you can’t read. Huh.”

But one of the best things about my campaigns being remote-played over the internet is the ability to send a direct message. I try to cut down on the “everything is silent while I’m typing” problem with some pre-game prepwork—situations where I think the telepaths in the two groups will want to get a read on people I pre-write in my notes, so I can just cut-and-paste them into a chat—but sometimes the best option is just to type in that little window.

I also keep a handy “That was a lie,” and “They’re telling the truth.” nearby to cut-and-paste as well. Sometimes I’ll just say it, but there are often situations where the telepath is in a room full of people—other players, NPCs, and more—where they shouldn’t just blurt out “she’s lying!” Having one character have the knowledge, and the other characters know they’ve got it but not having it themselves can make for a much more dynamic and enjoyable scene.

Othertimes, I might just say “He’s lying,” sure. It depends on the moment and what’s going on and if I think it’ll adjust the tension in a good way.

Similarly, any time I’m faced with a sensor scan, tricorder reading, or other information that’s on the other end of a roll, I can simply cut and paste the result from my notes into the correct character’s private message box, and then they’re the one relaying the information to the rest of the crew. Especially with pre-printed adventures, this is so immersive and the work is already done for me!

It’s even kind of cool to watch the players on screen eyeing their screens while they read the information because that’s what the characters are doing, right? You can totally pretend they’re looking at their panel readouts.

(Listen, I already said I was a Trek nerd, okay?)

Oh, and the analog version of this works, too: in face-to-face games, I’ll often prepare notes or handouts or drawings. I had a whole thing in a Mutants & Masterminds game where a town called Evansville’s “Welcome to Evansville” sign kept… changing. I’d pass what the character saw to them on a piece of paper. Also a child drew the monster they were seeing. And so on…

Method Three: Blue-booking

This one can be a lot, but it can also be super-rewarding. Blue-booking could be a huge blog post all of its own, with its origins and practices—and, oh, hey, it is!—but the short version is sort of a group writing project or shared little snippits from characters or NPCs the players can read and work on between sessions.

(I may or may not have written them an entire novella once, but that was Evan’s fault for something his character set in motion but anyway I digress…)

Both of my Star Trek Adventures groups take part in this—it’s likely not surprising given my groups are made up of mostly authors—and it’s honestly some of the most fun I’ve had in gaming ever. I also did it with my Mutants & Masterminds group a few times, with news reports and this social media account known as “Hero Tracker!” where they discussed superhero news.

Star Trek has a built-in go-to for Blue-booking via logs. Both my player groups have NPC captains, so I often have the captain make a log or take part in a blue-booking session between episodes, but I can use those blue-booking moments to deliver more pre-game knowledge for future episodes, or just flesh out some characters, or locations, or other bits of lore so when the next session starts and I mention someone or something, the group already knows about it.

And it’s not me saying, “The USS Hydrus is a Constellation-class starship captained by someone your Captain seems to know well…” Instead, here’s a part of one of those little blue-booking interludes:

They were due a supply delivery from the Starfleet Corps of Engineers after Delta Station 8—they’d have enough room in the Cargo Bays after their visits to the first four stations were done for the next batch—which meant someone was bringing them the next set of deflector emitters, EPS conduits, and everything else…

A slow smile spread across her face as she read information she’d only barely managed to glance at at the start of her mission—no point in getting ahead of herself, she’d thought at the time. But the answer to the question “who are we meeting for our supplies after Delta Station 8?” turned out to be a good one.

USS Hydrus. 

She smiled. She eyed the chronometer, then tapped her a comm to the Bridge. “Lomar, can you get me a channel to Captain Wert on the Hydrus?” She wondered if her request had paused whatever music the Lieutenant had decided to expose the swing shift to, a habit she found a little charming, honestly. 

“I’ll transfer it through to your Ready Room as soon we’ve got it, Captain,” Lomar said.

She didn’t have long to wait, and her smile returned at the sight of the human with his mostly-dark hair, which greyed to either temple, and the dark brown eyes that had a way of making her feel particularly seen. 

“Koria,” Captain Douglas Wert said.

Also? She really liked the way he said her name. Which reminded her…

“For the record,” she said. “My tactical officer noticed that, back when you dropped off Nizin.” Kerev crossed her arms. “She’s been asking me about ‘Captain Doug’ ever since.”

“I’d had over a week with that man on my ship, can you blame me for taking some pleasure in the sight of you?” Wert’s lips turned up at one side.

“Save me from charming humans,” she said, but she knew she was flirting right back. “I have a question.”

“I hope I have answers,” he’d shifted from flirty to all-business, and she appreciated it.

Way more fun than me telling the group there might be something going on between Captain Wert and their Captain, and I get to throw in little reminders about the Support Crew (Lt. Lomar, one of the night-shift bridge officers who has a love of music; Lt. Tanan, the security officer having a close enough relationship with the captain to tease her). And since I’m planning on including the Tactical Campaign Rules once things really go poorly with the Klingons at the end of 2372, now when the players are assigning the USS Hydrus to one of the Points of Interest, there’s a bit more weight to it.

I mean, that’s the Captain’s boyfriend they’re sending out into danger.

What about you? How do you face down the challenges of the info-dump and the “I say that” in your campaigns?