Claiming the Throne, Part 3/5: Unsurprising
I understand Wizard’s pain. As an author, I want to surprise and delight my audience with unexpected twists and turns. When the response is an eye-roll and a muttered, “Well that was obvious,” it’s easy to feel like I’ve failed in my job. I think the lady doth protest too much though.
Take a look back at Intra-Party Romance. There I drew a line between two different kinds of PVP: cloak and dagger PVP (in which players have hidden agendas) and metagame PVP (in which players know other PCs’ secrets). The pleasure of metagame PVP lies in dramatic irony, the delicious feeling of knowing more than the characters. It’s hard to achieve that effect when you’re the only one aware of the plot.
Do you guys remember that study from a few years back about movie spoilers? The bottom line that people like to quote is that, according to the experiment, people tended to enjoy stories more when they were spoiled. I have no doubt that many of you feel differently. For my purposes though, the most significant bit is the explanation:
If you know the ending as you watch it, you can understand what the filmmaker is doing. You get to see this broader view, and essentially understand the story more fluently. There’s lots of evidence that this sort of fluent processing of information is pleasurable; that is, some familiarity with a work of art enables you to enjoy it more.
I think there’s a reason that TPRGs tend to rely on stock plots and genre tropes. Originality is a big deal in literary fiction, but the pleasures of formula done well are central in fantasy, science-fiction, and adventure genres. Get the plot out of the way and suddenly you’re free to revel in the other elements: special effects, character development, costuming, artistry…. What happens when we translate that to the tabletop? Well try this on for size: Plot tends to be the GM’s department. When the GM’s plot gets out of the way, the players’ contributions are better able to take center stage. You’d think Wizard would be happy about that.
So what do you think? Do you strive for originality and surprise when you GM? Or are you content to let your “what” take a back seat to the players’ “how”? Tell us all about your favorite plot twists down in the comments! What worked, what failed, and how do you do a “big reveal” well?
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I’m choosing to believe that this is not, in fact, Aristocrat’s ear – just some random severed ear Wicked Uncle found in the torture chamber. He was like “blah blah blah I have your sister yada yada yada revoke your claim to the throne… Hmmm… Still needs something… squash ewww, what’s this? Wait, that’s perfect! Just pin it in here aaaand done!”
Please see attached.
Love,
–Wicked Uncle
Double plot twist – that’s Wicked Uncle’s ear. He underestimated lil’ sis!
Triple plot twist- He cut it off voluntarily, just to intimidate lil’ sis into not challenging him. He’s crazy!
While I’ve developed a reputation in our group of being the “GM with a plot”, I view everything save modules and adventure paths as collaborative experiences. Nothing makes me happier than revealing something that I’ve been building up to and seeing the player’s eyes light up as he recognizes the description of the guy who burned his village that he gave me back in Session Zero. In my opinion, the game works best when we all have fun, the Fate tapestry comes out best when woven with everyone’s color of thread.
For example, in one of my Anima games, my first quest was the players finding a monastery/covent thing under attack by goblins. Yet, as they dig deeper, they find that some of the monks are wearing armor under their robes, and have swords. Finally, they found one of the sisters alive, who tells them that there is a young woman here who has been wrestling with her innate connection to dark magic (The Path of Darkness, negative emotions and such.) She went missing hours before the goblins showed up, and the men were getting ready to go look for her. A little bit later, they find the young woman’s diary, who talks about how she overheard a few of the monks talking about how they should kill her before she becomes a greater threat. She fled for her life. They then meet a man claiming to be her father, who is a Chosen of Azreal (basically, traditional D&D paladin). They track her down only to find her in a ruin being worshiped by goblins as the fulfillment of a prophecy, their “Dark Lady”. They rescue the young woman and after a brief parent daughter squabble, suggest that the woman adventure with them.
Then I ran several sessions of them following their own stories, doing their own things, and generally making a big name for themselves with the young woman being an occasional support, mostly voice of reason and healer. I let them handle the story of the corrupt noble who was trying to press orphans into his criminal syndicate in the Rogue’s home town, the ancient necromancer who had lost his humanity long before his undead apothesis who had killed the mage’s family, and the church’s plot to seize power in the nation by wiping up a warmongering attitude toward the neighboring nation. Then while she is quietly studying at a library, their friend is kidnapped. They trace the kidnappers back to a cult of Erebus (Basically Nethys with a dark twist) who had traded her to a Wake Lord (demon lord) for eldritch knowledge.
They want to go after her, but at this point I inform the fighter who was secretly the prince of the neighboring kingdom that his father is deathly ill. They rush to the neighboring nation to end up spending a good bit of time there dealing with a political coup, then descalating the war. Then I had a messenger arrive with word that someone calling themselves the “Dark Lady” had just appeared in a city, killed one of the heroes of the last war, and shrouded the city in a supernatural darkness that drove everyone out in a panic. Now the goblins, orcs and other monster races were gathering in an army like they did twenty years ago, and the last war was gearing up for a repeat. The shock on their faces when they traveled across the land and saw no one but their missing friend leading the army of monsters was fun. They confronted her only to be given a “reasons this land sucks” speech detailing all of the corruption, evil and systemic problems they’d been squashing given to them.
One of them actually exclaimed “Did we raise our own BBEG?” The speech was my cliffhanger before a hiatus because some players were having scheduling problems, so I’m curious to know which side of the army they’ll end up on.
How is a module or an AP not a collaborative experience? There’s an additional collaborator in the form of the module writer, but in practice the module never sees play except as it’s filtered through a GM. That sounds like collaboration to me. It’s asynchronous, but that doesn’t mean that multiple parties aren’t working together to tell a single story.
Any dang way, there’s a lot of plot in your example. I’m sure you worked hard to keep it coherent and to make the big reveal a big-deal moment. But between all the proper nouns and prophecies, the thing that the players exclaim isn’t, “My god, it all hangs together so perfectly.” It’s, “Did we raise our own BBEG?” Emphasis is on the “we.” Players care about the parts that they affected.
I think that’s why your revelation works better than the shtick with Aristocrat and Wizard. Your party made their own monster. Aristocrat’s plot is external to the PCs. It’s much easier for players to care about the former than the latter.
I was using collaborative to refer to GM + Player interactions rather than it’s more general meaning, which was a mistake. What I mean is that modules and APs are full of stuff that is all carefully balanced against each other. Introducing things outside of that causes this domino effect that alters the whole experience. For example, if you were to pause Rise of the Runelords after the first chapter and do a personal quest tied to a PC’s backstory, the players would now be higher level than they should be for Skinsaw Murders. This requires you to alter encounters in Skinsaw murders and every AP after that. The more Personal PC quests you do, the more out of wack this becomes. Modules and APs don’t play well with outside plot threads, and thus don’t work as well with Player Inputted material.
And you caught the catch to that style perfectly. It was indeed a lot of work to make all those proper nouns, prophecies, metaphors and different stories play well with each other, but its the player’s actions that catch their attention. The way it feels like the setting changed because of them. A setting that doesn’t react to its players is doomed to mediocrity in the world of tabletop. We have those stories already, they’re video games. People play tabletop so that they can actually change things. At least, that’s my two cents.
My advice to any Gm who wants to get their players more involved is to remember to make the world react to them. If they do something impressive, have people mention it. If they are particularly dangerous, have people be scared of their name. If they do something you don’t expect, run with it and see where it takes you.
You ever read this one?
https://www.amazon.com/Creation-Narrative-Tabletop-Role-Playing-Games/dp/0786444517
The line I always liked was that, “The TRPG as a generic form gives players agency to define the form of their game, their social interaction, and the narrative that results… The purpose of the TRPG, as a communicative act, is to foster this sense of agency over narrative.”
I have not, but I may pick it up if i get time. Sounds like the writer and I have a lot of ideas in common.
She was one of the main texts I used in my MA thesis. 🙂
I have dmed exactly one time now, just yesterday, and I can tell you this. I definitely did not strive for originality for the most part. Basically the plot was that they needed to find out why a town built on an ancient burial ground for a massacred people has been having a lot of dissapearences, both in people from the village and travelers, these last few years. They then came across various fairly stock horror factions, a vampire baron with his thralls in his castle, a jerkass werewolf gangster, a family of redneck deformed cannibal hillbillies called the skeeeters, and a friendly frankenstein, who was a buffed flesh golem with frightful presence, looking for his missing wife. The biggest twist was probably just that frankensteins wife was actually a female bear version of jeff goldbloom from the fly who experienced a teleportation accident while wild shaped into a bear. It all went pretty great regardless though as the players had a lot of fun fighting and interacting with the various creatures. I also got to give out what I at least consider a awesome pun item. You see while thinking about frankensteins portion, i jokingly thought the classic line, beauty is in the eye of the beholder, when deciding to make frankenstein’s wife a bear-woman. Naturally, I decided to then make frankenstein have a makeshift scope with the primary lens being replaced with a beholders eye. The benefit to the item was that it can see at a right angle within 250ft, which can be nice for scouting. The penalty being that if you look at someone you consider particularly attractive, you risk the scope making you charmed by them for an hour.
Right angle? More like a wrong angle. Am I right fellas? Huehuehue.
😛
Grats on getting behind the screen though! Sounds like an awesome session.
It was, definitely glad that my first session went so well. I was fairly worried ahead of time it would go rather poorly, especially since I had trouble accessing a lot of stuff such as most monster stats due to having just gotten a new computer which didn’t have office yet. Luckily the players were ok with a few delays, and I managed to either remember most things planned, or just wing it pretty well
Players are a surprisingly understanding lot. Just take all those little hiccups in stride and your players will too.
Good luck out there, and happy gaming. 🙂
I think once in a while it’s okay to be obvious. There’s an adventure I’ve played in in Pathfinder, for example, where at one point you’re interacting with a bunch of bigwigs, and one of them is actually a bad guy.
Said bad guy happens to dress like Ozzy Osbourne doing a ridiculous Dracula cosplay. It’s suuuuuper obvious that he’s the bad guy. Like, so obvious that you actually begin to suspect that this is a meta fake-out, and the bad guy is actually one of the sane-looking people.
…And I think that’s okay. I like originality and twists and whatnot, but sometimes “There is no twist” is as good a twist as any all by itself.
Did you guys guess correctly, or was this a successful fakeout?
We got everyone together for a zone of truthing, and he retaliated before we could confirm things our way. Ultimately I think he was suspect numero uno, but there were definitely some doubts.
Plot twist: the letter is not from Wicked Uncle, but Gunslinger, who hopes that this drama will be sufficiently pressing for the heroes to accept him into the party.
I had felt sorry for Wicked Uncle, thinking that with such a name it was possibly all a misunderstanding, but he’s turning out to be quite the Ramsay Bolton.
As for originality, I think it’s misunderstood. Pratchett nailed it when he said that the fun of a magic trick isn’t that it’s impossible and magic, but seeing the trick performed well. At the risk of upsetting an enormous number of people, this means there is an element to viewing / reading / playing maturity as well. I will try to show that the “spoilers” mindset is “childlike”, and the way our media indulges it is preventing us from maturing our engagement.
If you consider magic tricks, when you perform them for a small child, you can see the wonder and awe. They don’t know how it’s done, they don’t have expectations, it’s just in the moment and fun.
However, when you perform them for a slightly older child, you can see them trying to rip down the veil of wonder by trying to see (and show others that they know) how it’s done. Essentially, they cannot suspend their disbelief because it is more important to be clever and see through illusion. It’s a key part of learning and development.
But as an adult, I find that it’s possible to enjoy the skill and showmanship of a magic trick, without being fooled and also without having to figure out how it’s done. To be entertained for the sake of entertainment – willingly suspending disbelief.
I feel that in today’s media world, the “spoilers” culture is a desperate attempt to rediscover the sense of wonder. I think this is so dominant because it coexists with the “everything wrong with” culture, which is the child trying to show how smart they are by tearing down the work rather than enjoying it.
What we are discussing in terms of understanding genre conventions and spoilers allowing us to better understand the whole story as it’s being told, is a process of learning how to enjoy stories as adults. That it’s fun to see “this is what’s going to happen, let’s see how we get there”.
Why, for example, is there anger over spoilers for Marvel films? You know the heroes are going to win, in a three-act structure with a really dull CGI battle at the end – when Deadpool stops his film to do a presentation on it, you know it’s pretty certain. I posit that the anger is because viewers think they are meant to not know what will happen, but in fact only the tiniest variation is possible.
I think there are different levels of enjoyment going on here. It’s possible to be shocked and surprised by a plot twist. When that happens, the internet blows up. (Witness the Red Wedding for example.) That is likely a more childlike way of gaining enjoyment, but that doesn’t necessarily mean it’s wrong, or that is should be dismissed as immature. In my mind, the real trouble is when audiences think that’s the only way to enjoy media.
“Seeing through the magic trick” is an appreciation of craft. As an English major type, I’ve bemoaned my fate more than once regarding my difficulties in ONLY seeing through the magic trick. It sounds like you’ve got issues with people dismissing that side of the coin, and demanding that the illusion be seamless. No arguments here. That does indeed strike me as myopic. I think it would be a mistake to discount either version of narrative enjoyment.
You ever read “Remediation?”
https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/remediation
I think you’d dig the notions of “transparency” and “hypermediacy.”
Interesting, thanks. I need to read that.
Huh, I’d have expected Wiz to be enthusiastic about her backstory stuff being involved, given his last reaction to horrible things happening to her & her family. Did she turn a bit jaded about it?
Regarding spoilers, I guess my group’s dead swashbuckler counts? We knew we’d have to fight him as a ghost some time later, as the player and some NPC outright told us this (the NPCs told us he was in [dungeon you’re going to thats on the AP’s title]). If anything, it let us prepare (his character could be deadly / TPK with extra ghost powers) and let him arrange things to be perfect for RP.
And then we fucked it up because he picked a template with a very awkward weakness we exploited until he had to flee.
Now we don’t know when we’ll see him again, but we do know he’ll be prepared for our lights, and that we should try to beat him down ‘normally’.
Similarly, our Kitsune kept her identity as a kitsune hidden from the party for a while before she trusted us enough. And later, trauma made her discard caution for her human disguise.
Nah. She’s just upset that the plot was “too obvious.”
Don’t worry. Wizard will get her “spotlight moment” soon. I’m sure it will cheer her up.
this comic is about 5 years too early: If I blurt out my original combination of ideas now, it won’t be original by the time any players are confronted with it.
One plot twist I can probbably safely spoiler is: All „Best/Higest Level Magic Shop In Town“ in my sandbox campaign are owned by the same NPC. By teleporting around the continent he’s the fastest with aquiring and selling magic items to meet demand, and he’s cutting his own throat with the prices.
I can just hear the voice: https://adventuretime.fandom.com/wiki/Choose_Goose
He wouldn’t happen to have a sausage selling relative in Anhk-Morpork would he?
he might just be the grandfather of all the Dibblers in the various towns on Discworld 😉
I love this idea! I may have to steal it and have CMOT Dibbler as the magic item vendor in my setting too.
You know, for a bit chain of shops, could just have a simulacrum set up running each one as a regional manager type thing.. that’d be interesting
very interesting!
Even though he can’t make a simulacrum of hisself for „reasons“ …
he could make them of the wizard who sold the scrolls with the spell on it.
As someone who revels in the feeling of being smarter than other people I love seeing twists comic, and I’m surprised that unspecified school Wizard doesn’t.
*seeing twists coming. Damn lack of an edit button.
Wizard has exacting standards. She does not always have logically consistent standards.
This is why elves shouldn’t be Wizards. Logical consistency is important for Wizardry, and Elves are too emotional for that. Leave the Wizardry to Gnomes and Tieflings.
Something curious happens to me, sometimes i see the first chapter of a series, i may not like it and don’t even bother to watch the rest of the series, but then i may happen to stumble upon the last chapter of the season and in many cases when i see how things begin and how they end makes me watch a series i would’t haven’t see other way. Just something i wanted to tell, my terrible and dark confession born of guilt 🙂
Now about plow twist and formulaic plots i have a theory. Human attention and processing power are limited, humans can’t remember everything or make all the connection needed in any given moment. So a formulaic plot helps save mental energy otherwise needed to things like think and breath. A simple and formulaic plot allows people to focus less on the plot and more in the matter at hand, thing that help when even for swinging a sword you need to roll XD20 plus strengh against XD20 plus AR and that. Using a common plot and stock characters, Evil Viceroy, Wise King, Snarky Chamberlain and the Piss Boy, helps people to not need to focus on the plot and just play the game. Sometime ago when i write the about a little case of intra-party steal the reaction i get was “I get lost”. People is bad at multitasking, i for one have a superior limit in my mental strengths, is more difficult for me to get lost, so i can enjoy more complicated plots, and i really do like them, but other people may not. Still this kind of plot-light may help them enjoy more the game and be more sharp at it 🙂
You ever read his article?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Magical_Number_Seven,_Plus_or_Minus_Two
The chunking thing gets thrown around a lot in game design. It’s also a useful insight for GMs, just as you say.
Have you ever read about Russian formalism? It has nothing to do with the topic at hand, well almost nothing but good read if you like to read. Not i have not read that paper, maybe because i don’t study psychology. Is good to have formal support to my crazy theories, thanks.
This thing of the attention is something i have read more on the writhing of Mark Rosewater, head designer for Magic: The Gathering. There he tells many time how complicated cards, mechanics and that can make lost the players. When one is a DM is something good to have in mind. How glad i am to be the campaign writer and producer 🙂
I’ve got a prof doing some work with Tarot cards as a random D&D generator. I believe she invokes Vladimir Propp in that project. From what I understand, he’s the big one in terms of combining elements into plots.
EH!? I don’t understand, i miss something?
On another confusing topic, i ask this: In the prior comic we see Aristocrat in front of the torture wheel, we saw her left side ear, by that time she was still owning a pair of ears or the one here was cut later? 🙂
Vladimir Propp is the main Russian formalism figure that gets cited in game studies.
As for Aristocrat’s ear, I leave it entirely to your imagination.
Vladimir Propp not one of the ones i study, when i search him i remembered who he was.
So after using the wheel Regent left Arisocrat in the dungeon for some days and then have a servant “help” her escape only to guide her back into the dungeon for more torture and ultimatum writing? 🙂
I have a very reactive dming style, I make general plans of what I want to have going on and only flesh out the parts that the players follow or that have obvious large scale consequences.
Ain’t nothing wrong with that.
Do you ever try to include surprise plot twists anyway? What would that even look like with a reactive GMing style?
You basically have to have some plot threads that you’ve set up that you had already planned to screw with your players. It doesn’t work well if they don’t bite, but hey I have a lower stress levels dealing with my players.
Wow, wizard is looking great! Did she have her hair done?
Barbarian’s salon is the best in the business. 🙂
Hmm, I never really considered the possibility that Wizard pretended not to recognise Aristocrat for the purpose of letting her have her own ‘knife in the dark’ drama queen moments…
Next level role-playing!
You’d think that even if she saw the twist coming, Wizard would still try to up-play her reaction for the drama.
Jaded disappointment is a powerful and fickle master.
So table interpretation of mechanics questions regarding lost limbs; do you allow for a lost body part that is stitched back on to be re-attached with lower level healing, or is it regenerate or bust?
I favor requiring regenerate for old wounds/missing parts, but if it’s in the range where modern medical science can reattach it then I allow needlework and healing magic.
It’s all about the “grittiness” level of the campaign. Your house rule seems solid for high fantasy, but might mess with the flavor of Lankhmar or wherever.
My main grievance is that bringing back a limb is 7th level magic, but bringing people back from death is 5th level magic.
Can’t really supply any memorable plot twists (if I encountered any, they were not memorable, so I forgot about them), I just wanted to say:
Nice villainous ultimatum. I suppose his actual demands are on the backside…?
Elven is a strange language. The oldest dialects are tonal, consisting only of subtle variations on “mua” “ha” and “cellar door.”