Tone and Tonality

A primer on setting expectations

Consider the following exchanges, dear reader:

player: “Why am I fighting mecha-hitler in warring states not!China?”
referee: “Bob thought it would be funny if his faction was actually lead by mecha-hitler.”
player: “oh, okay”

player: “I want to be play Slim Jimmy, the lawyer bard.”
referee: “That doesn’t really fit the setting of pre-iron age Scandinavia. Please pick a different name.”
player: “oh, okay.”

Clearly, in both of these exchanges the driving issue is campaign and setting tone. Tone is one of those vague things that people like to talk about, but have trouble defining. For this series of posts tone is defined as “the narrative elements of a milieu.” Basically, non-mechanical aspects of a campaign that set it apart from other campaigns. This includes but is not limited to: naming conventions, locations, how goblins look, and what factions are present." Though what is happening in each exchange is something clashing with the campaign tone. As tone is non-mechanical, it can be more difficult to nail down exactly when that clash matters and how to handle it.

Broadly speaking, tone is the next most important deciding factor for determining either what kind of a game to run, or which game to join. Old School Essentials is capable of running a wide variety of games, but I am much more likely to join something set in a medieval-ish setting than I am something like Cha’alt (note not all games are capable of many tones. Hyperborea for example is very opinionated on what your campaign tone should be). All other things being equal, tone is what separates one campaign from another.

With tone being defined, let’s define something else: tonality. Tonality is how important the tone is to the game as it is actually played at the table. Now, as with all things, there is a spectrum to this (Yay nuance on the internet. That always goes so well.). This spectrum seems to go from atonal to rigid tonality. There is a middle ground that can be labeled semi-tonal. Starting from the extreme end is rigid tonality. This is your auteur campaign, the tone matters more than any of the players, even the referee. Games in this style are like high-brow historical fiction or hard sci-fi, their internal logic matters the most. It is rare for any long running campaign to stay in this space, as it grows wearisome to maintain a consistent character and run new adventures that fit in. To the middle is semi-tonal. This is where the majority of healthy campaigns reside. There is a consistent milieu with internal logic, but that milieu has was to handle one off stuff from outside it’s normal tone. This is most readily compared to comics, especially super hero comics. There is a baseline reality that readers expect heroes to be in during any given issue. When things violate the established rules of that reality, it makes the readers think something is off or wrong. This is the same space most tables occupy, when things break narrative convention there’s something going on. Finally, there’s atonal. This means there is no “normal” nothing to go back to after a trip to bizarro land. Anything goes and there’s no need to justify it at all. This can be compared most readily to pulp literature. Even if you have recurring characters, there’s no reason each story has to be in the same world, and being somewhere wildly different from the last story isn’t a cause for alarm on the part of the reader. It’s expected and accepted. Similarly, if there is a consistent world, it doesn’t have rules about what does or does not fit. A race of sentient tap dancing shoes can be introduced and forgotten about with no great consequence. Even if up until previously the story had been set in a stone age world where shoes had not even been invented. These are the three points on the line, with infinity points in between.

The infinity points in between are essentially ratchets on how much justification a large deviation from the baseline needs to be incorporated permanently. If mecha-hitler is allowed into the once grounded warring-states not!China game on a whim, the game is leaning towards atonality. If mecha-hitler’s player had previously went on a massive quest to perform a magical ritual to summon the apex evil from the future, and mecha-hitler was what the ritual produced, then the game leans more towards rigid tonality. The existence of mecha-hitler in warring-states not!China is not what determines the tonality but rather the difficulty at which mecha-hitler was brought into the setting.

Knowing where on the tonality scale a game lies is the only way to determine how to handle a tonal clash. The problem is tonality is determined almost exclusively by table culture and tables are not necessarily all that good at explaining what their tonality is. In the second example it could be that the referee wants to run a very grounded game but his group is used to playing atonally. This is a table issue and needs to be handled at the table. Everyone has different levels they like, accept or reject. Personally, I don’t understand the appeal of an atonal game. Part of the fun of a campaign is using the rules of the milieu to do something unexpected. If the unexpected can just be done on a whim then there’s no fun in doing it. But that is a personal opinion and there are those who really do love atonality and all it’s madness. Once again, table culture rules all and there are no winners on twitter.

In summary tone and tonality are important for determining how a campaign should feel, and how to handle situations that are outside that feeling. Most healthy tables do this without even thinking, but occasionally issues do come up. So for now,

Sail On!
-ShockTohp