Dramatic Irony
Well well well… Looks like we just discovered who put the hit out on Elf Princess. I just hope that partnering with such a dastardly destrier won’t tarnish Paladin’s reputation.
While I continue to be unreasonably amused by this comic’s horse/unicorn/elf love triangle, I can’t help but feel like it might not play out in quite the same way at the table. Very likely, the players in such a game would be totally ignorant of these backroom hired-ninja-assassin dealings. That’s because these goofy shenanigans would likely take place entirely behind a GM’s screen. I don’t think that has to be the case though.
I’m sure you’ve heard advice along these lines before. Make sure that your villains aren’t just reactive. Have them advance their schemes between sessions. NPCs’ lives don’t necessarily revolve around the heroes! That’s all well and good, but figuring out how to actually demonstrate such machinations at the table can be a tall order.
Today’s discussion is all about showing off your complex world, with its many moving parts. And to start the conversation, I’d like to suggest one tactic that I’ve enjoyed over the years. It’s something I think of as “the NPC cutscene.” Generally inserted as the intro or outro of a session, these cutscenes are just brief descriptions of NPC activities going on elsewhere in the world. The PCs might not have any way of knowing this information, but I find that players appreciate a bit of dramatic irony. For example:
Voices murmur in a darkened room. A thin trickle of light streams in through the door, and shadows dance across hooded faces. There are three things upon the table between the conspirators: a fat stack of golden coins, an image of the princess printed on finest vellum, and a dagger driven through its eye. A soft, malicious whinny can be heard from one corner. “Nothing,” says a feminine voice, “Can be permitted to stand between me and my beloved. Not even royalty.”
So let’s get to it then. Have you ever used this “NPC cutscene” technique? How else do you go about foreshadowing your villains’ dastardly plans? Tell us all about those nefarious plots and conspiring scoundrels down in the comments!
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0_o … Okay. Golf clap. I did NOT see this coming.
… I’m genuinely curious where Snowflake got the money to pay Ninja.
Well ninja is obviously pretty low-level (couldn’t even use their own weapons without hurting himself), and I know some higher level groups stop sweating the small stuff as much (say they might sell all the +1 weapons they got from those evil demon cultists for 2150 gp ignoring the small base cost of the weapon itself), If snowflake has been picking those free founds up, that could add up to a relevant amount of money for a low-level character pretty quickly.
There’s quite a few venues for a non-good horse to gain profits from. She
doesn’t pay any taxes or has any major food bills, so she can easily accumulate money over a period of time, in one of the following methods:
Manual labor as a horse, insisting on payments for her services. Weird and demeaning, but honest work.
She’s charismatic/clever enough to win horse shows (races, ‘best of show competitions). Assuming a grand prize for such ranges from 50-500gp, that’s a steady profit based off her performance (which rises on its own via Paladin’s levels).
She might be ‘borrowing’ from Paladin’s charity funds, if he harks from second edition rules where they were outright obligated to give up a portion of their wealth to charity, or otherwise engages in charitable activities.
She can rob/extort people outright via show of brawn/intimidation (as we’ve seen with Commoner), utilizing her legitimate/level-scaling combat prowess as a Paladin’s mount. You think a full attack from a cat is bad, wait till a CR9 horse tramples your commoner ass.
She might be doing a variation of the ‘mount spell scam’, where a wizard sells a spell-summoned horse under the guise of it being a normal horse (by combining the spells ‘Mount’ and ‘Magic Aura’), running away with the profits before the summoned horse vanishes. In this case, she’d sell herself to a stable/horse-owner, fleeing or being summoned away later, leaving a disgruntled horse owner behind with no trails to follow (even if they did track her down, Paladin would be the one to take the ultimate blame).
Hot dang! When I introduced an outright evil, half-fiend warhorse into my campaign, all it did was kick, bite, trample, buck, and on one memorable occasion ‘put out the fire’.
Things got to the point where I described my players hearing the sound of hoofbeats at night, and one of them said: “Oh no, it’s BEATRICE! RUN!”
(Yes, the evil warhorse’s name was Beatrice)
If I’d played her with as much cunning as you suggest, that horse might have actually taken over the party… or conquered the world.
So, you’re saying she’s a female version of Bad Horse, the Thoroughbred of Sin?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VNhhz1yYk2U
Nah, Beatrice was just in it for the evulz, not for any grand schemes – and one time saved the entire party from a rampaging Deathknight. (Who else was going to feed her and be her punching bags, after all.)
Most of the time, she just liked hurting people and stealing their food. ;p
I had actually joked about it in the last Ninja comic, and it seems that it made it in! I am so happy about that!
For legal reasons I cannot disclose whether I read that comment, kicked open the door to Laurel’s office, and shouted, “We have our next Snowflake comic!”
😀
What about illegal reasons? Don’t worry, we won’t snitch.
I will point out that she has access to Paladin’s saddle bags.
Oof, using a Paladin’s money to take out a hit on a well-liked ruler… That naughty, naughty mare. If Paladin ever dismisses her, I doubt she’s going back to the Upper Planes. :-/
I had to double check that the mount didn’t have to share alignment with its paladin.
It’s an interesting loophole, which seems like it would be right at home in, say, Ravenloft. 😉
Which is one of my favourite settings.
At 11th level a paladin mount does gain the ‘Celestial’ as well as the ‘Magical Beast’ template. Neither of which have a alignment requirement either.
Whether this means she continues her evil misdeeds with a shiny new ‘good aligned’ aura, gets fired and replaced by an actual celestial horse, or is brainwashed into being good, is up to Colin’s imagination.
Only problem Snowflake might face at this point, however, is that Paladin still has Detect Evil. Any time he uses it in her presence (e.g. whilst riding her), she risks her true alignment being outed.
I have tried using the cutaway scene once, and had GMs try it, but it didn’t seem to fit all that well with my groups playstyle.
The players normally liked the chance to figure schemes out fairly from subtle in-character hints and that’s difficult to do when you know the hints and have the responsibility of not metagaming. (i.e. you doubt yourself “would I suspect this if I didn’t know OoC that it was true?”).
Though it has been quite some years since then, and we do from time to time enjoy dramatic irony from “one PC experienced something without the others, but the players where still sitting around the table” situations, so it might be worth another try.
I view it as a first person / third person issue. We are so used to playing in second person that any deviation to an “omniscient narrator” can feel like cheating.
Really though, an omniscient narrator is a very old piece of literary technology. I bet it could be adapted as a game mechanic rather than a GM trick now that I think about it. Maybe a psychic detective sort of game….
Something I’ve been trying out recently is dream sequences. If the party is between jobs or I need to throw a plot hook that I’m going to put in their way, I usually message one or even two PC’s with information about a “weird dream” they had during a long rest. These things are basically NPC’s doing shady stuff I want the players to be involved in, even if it may or may not have anything to do with the PC.
For example I wanted the party to investigate a graveyard for a classic murder mystery plot, so I had the party cleric (classic goody goody type) see a vision of a sad looking woman wearing mourning attire at a tombstone swearing vengeance. Low and behold, when the party arrives at the city the cleric sees a sad looking woman in mourning attire and carrying flowers. The cleric’s perception also allowed her to see the woman carrying a knife hidden in the flowers and it was pretty easy to deduce that the knife wasn’t for gardening.
Eventually they managed to find out the murder was due to jealousy, the killer was a disgruntled brother who wanted everything the murdered brother threw away, and the party was rewarded with sweet loot, a fat stack of coin, and the appreciation of a minor noble family who was almost framed for murder. None of which had anything to do with their overall plot (which was a classic case of finding an evil dragon and slay it), but hopefully through this little side quest I can eventually do an epic scene where all the people the party has helped in the past will come to their aid when they need it most. And it wouldn’t be possible if I couldn’t nudge the players to seek out side quests for potential allies. I already have a few ideas lined up.
I’m currently running “In Search of Sanity”, the first book of the Pathfinder Strange Aeons AP as a stand-alone adventure, and let me tell you, the ability to put ANYTHING in a PC’s dream is very helpful. I can even have civilian NPCs dream of something and then tell the PCs about it in the morning if I want, and they have to take it seriously!
The only trouble with this device is that you have to pay it off eventually. The source of the dreams are presumably some god, but why has this cleric been singled out for divine foreshadowing?
We did something like a cutscene in one of the final parts of Return of the Runelords.
We were all told to invent our own ‘cutscenes’, little story tidbits that explained how each of us ‘acquired’ their unique, campaign-specific trait (which usually serves as an easy tie-in or main motivation for the adventure in general).
We ended up seeing each other’s cutscenes through ways I cannot reveal without exposing a bunch of spoilers on the plot.
Interesting to me that this sort of denouement cutscene becomes more palatable at the end of the campaign. That’s the moment when we’re finally saying goodbye to these sense of control we have over these characters anyway.
I suspect Paladin will be in the market for a new partner
I recommend either a giant Wolf or a Shark
I vote sharkhound.
But if he got a shark, he’d be vying against Cavalier for dominance at sea.
Did Ninja dye his hair? It has a few more shades to it compared to their previous appearance.
I’m also amused by Lumberjack Explosion’s continuing ability to ignore opposable thumbs/fingers/basic hooves logic when it comes to interactions in either of his personas.
It’s only a matter of time until someone realizes how weird it is that both Lumberjack Explosion and Horsepower can act like they have thumbs. He’d better teach his methods to other horses before then…
I imagine Lumberjack Explosion’s sheet is one careful inspection from the DM away to becoming a entity that can only exist through multiple houserules, a house of cards suspended by the power of Fighter’s munchkinations, ready to topple at the DM’s smallest rule enforcement.
I call unicorn magic.
Ninja is an aasimar. His celestial tell is prismatic hair.
Nah, Snowflake just left the door slightly ajar so she could get in and out without assistance.
lol. Headcanon accepted!
Ok, so this is one of the great merits of my “30-or-so characters, all of whom are relatively significant in-world” method. 2/3rds of the major campaign antagonists, plus slot of other sinister characters with their own nefarious schemes, are PCs. Dramatic foreshadowing therefore comes up naturally in session, when fragments of their plans are played out and the rest of the group wonders what the hell is going on.
That said, I do use cut-scenes as you suggested for the actions of other antagonists or antagonist minions, generally at the end of the session to build dramatic tension ahead of what would otherwise be a fairly feels-bad situation, such as an assassination attempt, mysterious return from death or the use of some superweapon. Generally, when players and NPCs from a variety of groups are in fairly direct conflict it pays not to upset them by springing surprises from nowhere (at least, not on the players… absolutely on the PCs.)
Twenty PCs seems like a lot… Do you ever lose track of them?
I ask because there are about 12 PCs in my megadungeon, and I struggle to keep them all plot-relevant.
I think the idea of the mini-isolated cutscenes you’re describing are very similar to the ‘Active Time Events’ of Final Fantasy 9.
They were basically little cutscenes (sometimes mandatory, often optional) that you could choose to watch at a given moment, letting you get some context on a few events (or even change the story in little ways for the currently active character) or switch the focus to another character.
https://finalfantasy.fandom.com/wiki/Active_Time_Event
The Glass Cannon Podcast also extensively uses flashbacks for the PCs backstories – most notably having such segments fully played out by the PCs and keeping the ‘anyone can die’ rule for said flashbacks to make things more engaging and causing consequences for the ‘main’ party later on.
With modern tabletop systems like Roll20 or Foundry, you can even ‘simulate’ these cutscenes by playing out a isolated scene, switching to a map where PCs are only spectators, or playing a very minor NPC role, with tokens of characters or names shrouded in mystery until the players learn more in their current quest.
Something similar also happens in Kingdom Hearts, where you often saw robed/cloaked figures in flashbacks and cutscenes unrelated to that of the main characters, only later seeing who’s behind the cloaks, and then learning who they actually are.
You’re right to call in other forms of media. It’s absolutely a more established technique in video games and film.
We tend to think that “I’m only allowed to see what my PC sees,” but that’s like suggesting that it’s somehow unfair for the camera to ever cut from Luke Skywalker to Vader and Tarkin.
Poor ninja is probably thinking he’s not getting paid well enough for all these horse-shenanigans. Especially if Snowflake ends up escaping via a convenient Paladin summon, leaving Ninja alone to face Lumberjack Explosion’s brand of hoof-jutsu.
Heh, I could see a comic where inconvenient summons ruin Snowflake’s plans – moments before dealing the finishing blow to Elf Princess (or otherwise doing some questionable activities, she gets whisked away back to Paladin to go on a jolly cooperative adventure! Possibly to prevent the crime she’s currently commiting.
If you have any idea how to make that work in a single-panel comic, I’m all aboard!
So many good concepts like this run up against the creative limits of the form. :/
I could see a few ways of making it work:
A split-screen strip, moments before the summoning, where we see Snowflake committing an evil deed (or ‘shaking hands’ with BBEG) on one side and Paladin announcing his intent to summon her on the other.
A strip where Paladin summons Snowflake by opening a portal for her to pass through, and we see Snowflake’s evil deeds (e.g. torturing Elf Princess on the rack) through the portal.
A strip where Paladin already summoned Snowflake, who is armed/dressed to commit evil deeds (e.g. dressed as an assassin with poisons, a bandit mask, wearing saddlebags full of drugs, covered in evil-ritual markings, coated in blood, holding a voodoo-doll of Elf Princess…). Alternately she has a kidnapped & blindfolded Elf Princess on her back.
Snowflake’s Scry-Phone rings in the middle of an evil ritual, we see Paladin is calling, or she’s trying to weasel out of the summoning.
In the Great Pendragon Campaign (GPC) (the mega campaign in which you play from Uther to after Arthur in King Arthur Pendragon RPG) this is more or less taken care of by “Court”. Every year (and as every session is supposed to play only one “year” – namely the 60 days that your knight is obliged to spend in direct service to his lord – this means basically every session) at the start of the military season you are more of less obliged to attend (Pentecost) “Court”. Either Uther of Arthurs one, if they are around, or your own lord, if they are not. At court you will hear all kinds of gossip (already provided for the GM in the GPC campaign book), which might be true, and you can speak with some movers and shakers who will give a glimpse of what they are doing, or what they would want you to do. Mordred, for instance, is bitching about the queen and Lancelot long before they are caught. lastly the king (or your lord) shares his big thing (or think) for this year. So these vignettes set the tone for the year (and thus the session) to come. PC’s can either follow up on these leads, or let them be, and concentrate on the quest\adventure\mission that they get from the king\lord, but they are thus somewhat aware of happenings outside of their direct view or control. Some of my groups never bother with any of the rumours. Other are more into intrigue, and (backroom) politics, and follow up on most of them. Either way, they are made aware of other strands of the “matter of Britain” that can, and sometimes do, have an impact on their lives
It’s nice to have this formal “neutral ground” mechanic. So often, the problem with villains if figuring out how to let the PCs interact with them without immediately resorting to combat.
“No worthy knight would draw upon another while in Arthur’s court” is a great setup to accommodate these interactions. I wonder if it’s possible to extend that setup to less chivalric adventures?
Hmm, worst comes to worst you can always use hostages/the threat of collateral damage. If the evil mage starts slinging spells around in the town square, a whole lot of people besides the PCs are gonna get hurt… as he helpfully points out to them when they reach for their swords.
Even without that, though, you might be able to rely on players upholding the rules of parley (for the villain talking to them him-/herself) or “don’t shoot the messenger” (for when they send, well, a messenger) to have peaceful communication between the two groups.
Ooh, and there’s always disguise! Especially if their alternate identity is someone important/seen as benevolent, so taking them out in that persona would cause more problems for the PCs than it would solve.
Literally the last time I did that, my players ignored the hostage and went in guns blazing. Their logic: “We could always rez the hostage if she got killed.”
Yeah, I remember a group of Shadowrunners going into a hostage situation, leading with grenades. They figured, without any particular evidence, that the hostages would be somewhere out of the line of fire…
I’m reminded of the time a lothario musketeer PC in one of my games spotted a chance to take out the anti-party. He chucked his necklace of fireballs around a blind corner. He’d only heard their voices, and had no idea that his lady love was in the anti-party’s clutches. Big ol’ oof.
You might be able to take something like the vampire concept of Elysium. Places that are culturally considered neutral ground, enforced by powerful people, or if push comes to shove everybody else ganging up on you. In some versions of the setting it’s culture specific where other vampire groups won’t respect it, but yours will and most antagonists will be of your culture as well (since those are the ones you’ll interact with most often on the basis of you being much more likely to live in a city controlled by your vampire society than by one of the other ones).
In a fantasy setting you might be able to substitute holy ground with some kind of divine mandate. Say the great god of hospitality Zeus Xenios, might have declared that none shall be allowed to harm the guests of his temples and enforce that with divine smiting. This can be established by an early scene where a minor villain tries to break it against the players and get smote for the affront, and as a bonus it’ll feel better for the players if the first time it comes up is to their advantage.
Once, early on, we had our resident BBEG’s ~~Darth Vader clone~~ lieutenant come in an massacre our starter town when they didn’t give up information on our wherabouts. Kinda surprised we haven’t done it since.
More recently, we’ve been getting bits of information from my character’s sister, who’s the head of our army’s intelligence force. (“I did not say ‘intelligent force’! Though it usually helps for your intelligence force to also be intelligent…”)
I think a spy network is a great asset for this sort of thing. It strikes me as a good way to make membership in a “thieves guild” a valuable game mechanic. Intelligence reports make a constant, plausible source of player handouts!
I’m a big fan of the Psychic Sensitivity feat ( https://aonprd.com/FeatDisplay.aspx?ItemName=Psychic%20Sensitivity ) and the Occult Skill Unlocks it provides ( https://aonprd.com/Rules.aspx?Name=Occult%20Skill%20Unlocks&Category=Occult%20Rules ), namely psychometry. (The others are pretty useless.) With that feat or a psychic caster in the party, once a day the PCs can use a DC 15 Appraise check to try to get a vision about an item’s previous owner. It’s a great way to give little bits of backstory or hints about a character’s plans and motivations. Or completely mislead the party (that time an innocent character looked at their bloody apron comes to mind). Whatever serves the drama.
You remember my occultist / VMC magus?
https://www.handbookofheroes.com/archives/comic/heroes-feast
Gaining at-will “plot sense” was friggin’ amazing.
https://www.d20pfsrd.com/alternative-rule-systems/occult-adventures/occult-classes/OCCULTIST/#TOC-Object-Reading-Su-
I know I’d love to see it come up as a GM. All those cool backstory details that modules love to throw around (but never actually present to the players) are grist for the mill of this ability.
I first encountered it as a side effect of my Order of the Eastern Star ( https://www.d20pfsrd.com/classes/base-classes/cavalier/orders/paizo-cavalier-orders/order-of-the-eastern-star/ ) Daring Champion Cavalier for an Iron Gods campaign that died after about three sessions. I always thought it was a really good trait to have in a campaign that centers around the mysterious ruins of events 9,000 years ago. And sure enough, when I made my Ancient Aliens campaign as a DM (basically Iron Gods’ stuff mixed with Second Darkness’s plot and antagonists), I encouraged the half-elf PC to get it via the alternate racial trait Starchild and can confirm that it is a great dramatic tool to have (even if that player is prone to not sharing all of the info so she can troll other players). The party also has a Spiritualist, though we all only occasionally remember he can psychometry. Also neither of them bothered to put any effort into raising their Appraise skill, so it fails a lot, but sometimes it is really good…
In my just-started In Search of Sanity campaign, we have an Occultist who DID bother to have a decent Appraise score, so that’s nice. Especially since he has an archetype that makes his Object Reading power only work on weapons and armor.
Overall, I highly recommend the ability for GMs to suggest and players to take. It is slightly more work for the GM, but such a great foreshadowing/backstory-giving tool.
For us ins’t about when we use it, but when we don’t use it. Cutscenes is quite common in videogames, so me coming from them to pen and paper make use of them without regard for the consequences to show more of the world the villain plan and to allow the rest of the group to do some roleplay out side of the party but in the same game. Cryptic conversations, in which the players don’t know what they truly are talking about, can be great fun without spoiling anything 🙂
Also, did Ninja dye his hair between apparitions? Now it looks more lilac than grayish and got a nice greenish shade on the middle length. I like it 😀
Ninja is an aasimar. His celestial tell is prismatic hair.
Many people asked that 🙁
So it would seem.
The one time I did an “NPC cutscene” was at the very end of my campaign. “Asdif’s Clone awakens in his Demiplane. With his network of accomplices and minions decimated, his base taken, and most of his wealth spent he no longer has the resources to pose a threat, and knows you will oppose anything he attempts. He never operates on your world again.
Gotta give ’em closure somehow. And if the villain is on an inaccessible demiplane, narrative necessity takes over.
In one campaign I quite enjoyed, the GM wouldn’t do cutscenes, but he would run frequent “one-shot” episodes where we took on the roles of (what were usually) NPCs — sometimes familiar friends or enemies, sometimes complete strangers in other parts of the world — and played out something that was happening to them.
Sometimes it was a hilarious “below-decks” episode where we saw the shenanigans our ship’s crew members might have been getting up to behind our backs; sometimes it was a glimpse at momentous events in other parts of the world or even in the distant past or future. Often we would come away from these sessions with a real sense of attachment, either to the characters we had played or to their friends, foes, and homelands…which meant automatic emotional engagement if our main characters eventually encountered these same folks.
We would have to be careful not to metagame, of course, but we considered that a small problem compared to the vividness it lent the world.
I feel like this is harder to pull off than a cut scene, but also more satisfying from a theoretical standpoint. Listening to a GM narrate is not anyone’s favorite part of RPGs. Getting to explore other characters and run through unexpected scenarios through play on the other hand….
Numenera kind of has this, in the form of GM Intrusions, which is basically allowing the GM to do something narratively useful that “normally” doesn’t fit into gameplay.
Also, can we get a comic on invention (could be a parody of the craft/knowledge skill). I mean, I know that Handbook World apparently has magic item factories (bag of holding/portable holes) and ScryPhones but it would be cool to see something that goes further in that vein.
Are you suggesting that Handbook-World is an internally consistent place where items come from actual places rather than springing into existence out of random loot tables?
…
I’ll see what I can do.
I mean, where did Snowflake spring from for her first summon? Was she always a bad horse (and possibly scammed her way into the ‘Paladin mount’ gig)? Familiars and animal companions have origin stories too, right?
https://memegenerator.net/img/instances/22721594.jpg
That mouse-over text reminds me of my second-favorite Dr. McNinja page, wherein Yoshi and Judy are fighting over the issue of a labeled hotdog being eaten by someone who didn’t label it.
Maybe Paladin just imagines Snowflake doing similar things to that instead…
I dislike using NPC cutscenes on the party. I’ve seen C Team use them and was never satisfied with the result, and no matter how hard they may try, obviously colored the manner they interacted with those npcs.
A compromise I would suggest is to act out those scenes solo while recording it, and perhaps play them after the end of a campaign when it will no longer affect the player’s interactions with those characters. It’s hardly a perfect solution, but it’s the best I can come up with.