Lovely and Talented Assistants

Matthew McFarland

Running a game is a big job. Especially if you’re a Storyteller who likes to run political games with lots of supporting characters, keeping tabs on everything going on can be difficult. One possible solution, therefore, is to have someone help out with the Storyteller duties, play important NPCs, and keep you from having to talk to yourself too much.

This approach has pros and cons, just like virtually everything else in life (except for Forbidden Chocolate, which is pretty much win-win). Let’s talk about that.

Why Use an Assistant?

There are a number of good reasons to share the duty of Storytelling. The most obvious is simply when a game gets too big to handle by oneself. I’m not talking about number of players, necessarily (although I’m told that in large LARPs, multiple Storytellers are required precisely because groups of 50+ players aren’t uncommon). Sometimes, the scope of a game grows beyond one person’s ability to easily handle it. This is especially true if you’re running something like an epic level D&D game or Exalted; the characters are powerful and important enough to command armies, courts and countries. Running all that by yourself can be daunting, and having another person behind the screen to occasionally run minor (but still important) scenes can be a big time-saver.

Another possibility is having a subplot going on that you, as Storyteller, don’t want to devote all of your time to, but that is still important. The best example I can think of for this is Wraith: The Oblivion (a sadly now out-of-print game from White Wolf). As you might or might not know, in Wraith every character has a Shadow. Wait, actually, rather than explaining all of this, I’ll just have you click here. Right, going on.

Wraith actually suggests that each player assume the role of another player’s Shadow. All very well, but there are two big problems with that approach. One is that it eats role-playing time away from the other players. The second is that it fosters a nigh-unworkable playing dynamic; each player is playing a character who’s actively working against the group (no wonder Wraith games can feel so long). Having an assistant play all of the Shadows works nicely to counter both of those issues (there’s a danger, however, but I’ll cover it below).

A third reason for bringing in an assistant is that sometimes, you want an NPC to have a fresh face and a fresh presentation. Especially in long-running chronicles, you can only play different people so many different ways before your delivery starts to get stale. At that point, it can be fun to bring in a “guest star” — someone who doesn’t normally play in the chronicle but shows up for one session or one story to play a character alongside the regular players. How much “inside information” the assistant has is up to you; we’ll talk about that momentarily.

Rules and Regs

When deciding to bring in an assistant, you’ve got to make some important decisions right off the bat:

• How long? How long is your assistant going to be with the group? One session? Then you’ve got to make sure that the character she’s portraying is out of the action by the end of the session. One story? Then you’ve got one other person’s schedule to juggle. For good? Better make sure your regular players don’t hate the idea of a Storyteller’s assistant, first.

• How much info? How much do you plan on letting your assistant know about the game? If she knows everything, she’s capable, even accidentally, of letting stuff slip that you don’t want your players to know. Make sure to tell an assistant what she needs to know, though — if the assistant is interrupting the game every two minutes to ask “Would my character know this?” your players will justifiably wonder why you bothered bringing in an assistant at all.

• How much power? Can your assistant kill characters? Can the assistant reveal major facts about the chronicle, even if the character(s) she’s playing knows them? Do you really want the assistant sending the game off-course? The players are probably pretty capable of doing that, anyway.

• What’s the function? Why do you want the assistant? I mentioned some reasons above, but get more specific. Is there a real purpose to having her or her character in the game? I once guest-starred in a friend’s Werewolf game because the pack was pretty much incapable of getting anything done. I came in as a higher-ranked werewolf to kind of give them a boost (I was playing Malcolm the Liar, in fact, whom you might know from Tribebook: Red Talons and Book of Auspices. But I digress).

Pitfalls of the Storyteller Assistant

Of course, having an assistant can lend itself to a few problems, and if you’re going to use one, consider these issues.

First of all, as any longtime Storyteller knows, it’s hard to let NPCs that you really like take a backseat to those troublesome players. After all, they squabble, they miss obvious (to you) clues, they dawdle, they go chasing shadows. It’s so tempting to put an NPC in to show them the right road, keep them on track, and…railroad them.

Let’s be honest — sometimes, that’s necessary. When that happens, a guest-star (as in the example of the Werewolf game above) can be a good thing. That works best if the assistant is only going to be around for a single session and then, his work done, disappears into the ether. It also allows you, as Storyteller, to dodge the bullet of “Golden NPC Syndrome” (i.e., having an NPC show up and fix everything) — if another person is playing the NPC, it’s a little more palatable.

The danger here, probably the single biggest problem with using an assistant, is very similar to the danger of having an NPC become the star of the show. You don’t want the assistant to hog the spotlight, and even if the assistant isn’t really trying to do that…well, gamers are grandiose people and sometimes it’s really difficult to shut up. If you use an assistant, make sure she understands that this game is about the regular players, and that she needs to know when to butt out. It all goes back to gaming being a communistic thing; the Storyteller (and any extensions thereof, including assistants) need to remember they aren’t in competition with the players. If the assistant playing an antagonist does too well (and to be fair, assistants often have information that the players don’t) you wind up with dead characters and (worse) frustrated players.

As an example, I played in a Wraith game once, where, as in the one I ran, one assistant played everybody’s Shadows. The difference was that in my game, the Shadowguide (the lovely and talented Mercurial) knew when to let people alone. In this other game (run by my brother) the Shadowguide was great at making our Shadows scary…but he didn’t know when to let up. If the game hadn’t fizzled, I’m sure our characters would have either become Spectres or succumbed to the void (I know my character was well on the way).

The corollary to this is to make sure the assistant knows she’s an assistant and not the Storyteller. I mentioned that “How much power?” is a question to ask. Make sure that question has a firm answer going in, and make sure that the assistant knows exactly what the parameters are. If the assistant has full acting Storyteller authority to reroute plotlines, kill characters, steal snack foods from the kitchen, that’s fine — but if she doesn’t, she needs to know it.

Another pitfall: Villains chatting. I recently played in a very long, very cool Exalted game wherein the Storyteller brought in an assistant for a highly complex political story. Said assistant was meant to portray various NPC folks, including the main villain of the story, and he did very well.

The trouble was that he would often wind up talking with other NPCs, controlled by the Storyteller, which meant that our characters watched them talk. Sometimes we’d jump in, but just as often, it didn’t happen. That story went on a lot longer than it needed to, in part because having an assistant meant the Storyteller couldn’t just gloss over some stuff.

The thing to remember here is that for every body in the room, the game gets longer. With three players, you can burn through game time because there just isn’t as much shit to keep track of. With six…well, if everybody gets their fifteen minutes of fame, that an hour and a half right there.

A final problem with having an assistant: The assistant might get bored. If you’re job is portray Grogor the Barbarian and the group leaves Grogor alone, you’d better have brought a book. The Storyteller is not obligated to force an assistant’s character (if there’s just one) into a game, nor is she required to think up new characters for an assistant to play just because the other characters find a way around interacting with the first one.

In closing, the job of being a Storyteller’s assistant is largely thankless — you’re not really a player, not really a Storyteller, and are of pretty much secondary concern. The reasons for having an assistant (as opposed to either running NPCs yourself or adding another player) are extremely narrow. If it works, terrific — having that new face can be a special novelty. Just remember that novelties wear off, and the Storyteller needs to be able to sense when to retire her lovely and talented assistant and run the game herself.

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