Ruddy Mysterious
Oh man you guys… I kind of do wonder who that informant is. She has a cool character design and stuff! Is she an onyx oread? A fetchling slayer? Perhaps a drow with hair dye? Inquiring minds want to know! And in that sense, she’s a positive example of mysterious mystery. The hook is baited, and we in the audience are set up to be interested in the eventual answer. The problems come creeping in when friggin’ everything is a mystery.
Today’s comic is about GMs who are a little bit too in love with the big reveal. Sure it can be a fantastic moment at the table when the mask finally comes off and Lysanderoth is exposed as the villain. But when you hide your campaign world behind impossible lore checks and hand-wavy abstraction, it’s easy for player curiosity to wither and die.
What you have to remember is that players simply aren’t exposed to plot lines in the same way as GMs. When you’re the guy behind the screen you are constantly working with backstory, antagonist motivation, and secret machinations. All this this work is invisible to players though. If you’ve ever encountered a lackluster player reaction (e.g. “Wait… Who was that guy again?”) this is why. It’s a case of out of sight, out of mind. And at its worst, you risk players feeling like there’s a smug adversarial GM bogarting basic campaign info.
“Could I get some common knowledge, please?”
“Fu fu fu. Common knowledge is for my NPCs to know and you to find out!”
This sort of thing has the opposite of its intended effect. Rather than drawing players in, you risk putting them off. Why bother caring about a setting where you aren’t allowed to know the basic rules of play?
So for today’s discussion, why don’t we talk about all those mysteries that failed to work? Did you ever find yourself bored by yet another dead end? What made you throw up your hands and throw your deerstalker cap out the window? Tell us all about your most frustratingly obscure lore drops and too-mysterious mysteries down in the comments!
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From experience, it’s especially a problem if you’re doing an intrigue-heavy game with a lot of these plots going on at the same time… players have no idea what’s connected to what, end up with small pieces of every puzzle without ever completing any of them. At which point *all* of the ticking bombs go off, since the party hasn’t managed to disarm any of them.
So yeah, as a GM, it’s very easy to forget the clues are obvious to you because you wrote them, and you know how they fit into what’s going on. As a player, there’s too much going on, you can’t make any sense of it, and before you know it, everything is on fire and it’s time to leave town… still not entirely sure why.
+1 to this
I run parallel plots on a regular basis but I never try to do lots of intrigue. If anything I will have parallel plots intersect if the PCs don’t resolve some of them quick enough.
I.e. the gnoll barbarians in the mountains, something strange in the collapsed mines, and then whatever politician intrigue has an assassin in town. If they don’t deal with the gnolls or the mine, I’ll have the gnolls open the mine entrance and leave a trail of hogtied villagers to let the “things beneath” do the gnolls dirty work.
Alternately, if the players are flailing but they address one problem I’ll tie it to a lead on another. I.e. they go to the mines and find they were being used as a staging area for troops of the Barony of Grabbingham, who is paying the gnolls to draw out the Duke of Goodplace and has assassins in place to take out the Duke when he arrives.
It might not even be a retcon; Grabbingham may have been unaware of the gnolls but since they were here, paid them to stick around until Goodplace shows up.
But here’s the question: How do you actually deliver that info to the players? What is the mechanism that helps them discover Grabbingham’s duplicitous plot? NPC tells them? Intercepted orders + payoff money?
When in doubt, start a fight. Throw some random thugs at them, allowing interrogation of the survivors / searching of their corpses to reveal information… information which just happens to clarify some aspect of the plot which has been confusing them.
For example, the players have realised there are several secretive factions in play, but are having trouble identifying them, or have jumped to the wrong conclusions about who’s working with who. Fortunately, it turns out that the guys with the spider tattoos whom they’ve just captured / killed are working for a particular noble (the tattoos are a cult thing), and that they’re opposing another faction whom the PCs had mistakenly thought to be aligned with that noble. Now they’ve got a slightly clearer picture of the elements involved.
After defeating the amazingly non-descript “bandits”, the loot-monkey players will find a chest of neatly packed tabards, all with the grabbingbam motif. There will be a few more tabards than bandits.
The only written notes in the place are a list of public places in town with dates and times, roughly every week, with the next one in 2 days. The list is pinned to a gray felt traveler’s hat in thr nicest quarters. A DC15 History check will let players recognize this as a way to contact an agent in town. Criminal, spy, guard, or noble Backgrounds ARE worth +5 to the check, imo.
There will also be a weird bone rattle, which I would have as common knowledge under the circumstances, as being the gnoll form of a parley flag.
A more subtle item is the necklace of teeth thwt ifentifythe weilder as a guest of a gnoll tribe (dc10) and with a dc15+ they know it’s for the Fleshripper tribe of gnolls, who are the ones nearby.
If they show it to the Duke when he arrives in 3 days, his scouts will recognize it immediately. The Duke, if shown the hat & list, will recognize it as a contact point for a spy/assassin.
I think GMs get excited for their plots in the same way players get excited for their characters. It’s like, “Here’s this cool thing I built! How can you not be interested in the fruits of my creative labors?” But if you’ve ever had to listen to someone else talk about your character, you know how rough that can be.
In that sense, I find that handing players the answers on a silver platter is often the way to go. The heavy-handed stuff like, “You find a letter telling telling you where the dead lieutenant’s boss is,” often works better than surreptitious hints, even if it does strain credulity.
Exactly. You you don’t have to be *too* heavy handed… but if the players are stuck, you do need to get them moving. You might not give them the answers directly, but at least give them clear directions to where they can find answers.
For example, the dead lieutenant didn’t leave a convenient map to the secret lair in his pocket, but he did have a letter bearing his own address, and when you search that, you meet a nosy neighbor who overheard him talking to a visitor about a warehouse at the north end of the docks… not an exact target, but it puts you in the ballpark.
Questgiver: “Oh, sure, just replace me with a younger, hotter model. I see how it is. No more need for ol’Questgiver”
The difference is that Quest Giver actually gives quests. 😛
As a GM who focuses a lot on secret plots and background details, I find the opposite to be true, that I’m bursting with excitement to share my secrets, but my dang uncurious, oblivious players just won’t ask! It has come down, many times, to me basically explaining everything that was going on after a story is over, and them nodding along with mystified ohs and oohs.
I am definitely doing something wrong. 🙁
See my comments above about heavy-handed clues.
Players want their characters to have badass moments. If that happens to intersect with a GM’s plot it’s little more than a nice bonus.
As I said in my comment, they may not have even realised that there are secrets to ask about. As a GM, everything seems obvious, because you already know it. As a player with only a small glimpse of the picture, it’s hard to even know where to start… what’s significant and what isn’t. Sometimes you need to spoil some of the surprise by being direct…
Inquisitor is rather inquisitive.
She didn’t earn that inquisitor hat for nothing!
I’ve seen two types of games. The ones that are mystery-heavy and where the main quest is pretty much to find information (i.e., go where the information is), so at least some of the players will be very invested in it. Others were the plot is in the background, and thus doesn’t matter as much as the adventuring part to the players of GM.
Of course, when the expectations or presentation collide, that can cause problem. If it’s an adventure game and the players are focused on mystery, in the ways you describe. And when it’s a mystery and the players are focused on the adventuring… well, to quote my GM friend : “I once put some plot in my games, nobody got it :(“
Big off to that poor GM. :/
My problem is exactly the opposite. One reason we stopped playing 5e, is that none of the DMs would do anything other than completely linear play. My homebrew is wide open and the party can go anywhere and attempt to do just about anything (attempt, successfully doing it is not guaranteed.) If I’m constantly being told, “You don’t see anything interesting”, when my character decides to do some general investigating or even just take an evening stroll, then I’m going to be out of there sooner than later. I HATE the year long crap that WOTC is doing with D&D. Everything is geared to get the characters up to 20th by the end of the year, so they can sell you the next years “adventure”. This kind of play is diametrically opposite of the kind of game I like as a player and run as a DM. And yes, this is one of my well worn soap boxes. Sorry.
Some of the beset RPG advice I’ve ever heard: “If your players are interested in it, make it interesting.”
She is maid and i presume a member of the Blades ;P
I always hated bits like this. Not everyone needs to be mysterious. In fact, some characters in these games are made with high mental ability scores specifically so they can know things, so not being able to really sucks sometimes when its the point of a character.
I do not have a good history of mysteries in games.
Either I just can’t puzzle them out from the clues, because it’s honestly not my forte and I just wind up with the few things I can put together after all the rolling for info I can get away with or….
…the actual info for figuring out the mystery was never designed in such a way anyone could have figured it out to begin with. The kind of thing where when the players finally learn what’s up, they’re just annoyed with the GM for asking them to try and solve a puzzle without most of the pieces.
I’ve also experience a LOT of frustrating railroading in mystery D&D games.
One time that sticks out is that we’d identified the bad guys trying to explode some political figures giving a speech and despite figuring this out with advanced time and some of us playing characters these figures or the town guard should have listened to, our every move was blocked or delayed so that boom when the important NPCs anyway. Obviously because the GM had a plot they wanted to follow and we’d derail it by just preventing “the big incident” from happening and capturing anyone to question right away. The game died pretty quickly after that and the advice I gave that GM was that if they feel something HAS to happen in the plot, then the players should not be in a position to interact with it at all, rather than having to waste their time rolling, expending resources, and thinking up ways to prevent something you’re not going to *allow* them to.
That’s just one of the latest examples I can think of, after I’d experienced that kind of thing enough times to have come to that piece of wisdom the hard way.
Intrigue is something that takes a dedicated group to do well, similar to running a serious horror campaign.
I think that remote gaming genuinely can help with running intrigue compared to in-person, as it’s easier to keep track of all the different mysteries in shared documents and it’s easier to sequester information between specific players and GM. Running intrigue in person can feel more intimate, but it makes it harder for everyone to keep track of things IMO and so makes things more frustrating for the players and GM.
Where were you back in the remote gaming comic?
https://www.handbookofheroes.com/archives/comic/unmute
Hmmm… Talking about the learning curve it looks like. 😛
Yeah, the learning curve is significant, which is definitely a major drawback in doing remote gaming. Once you’ve got it sorted, I’d say it is an easier set up than drawing maps etc by hand, but that does require time to get right, which is something that many GMs already have very limited amounts of.
It also loses out on some of the charm of being in person, especially if you act/roleplay as much with your face and body as you would with you voice.
Late response to this one, but it’s been simmering in the back of my head this whole time.
One of my pet NPCs (who I’ll surely use in a campaign someday, he delusionally thought) kind of hits this one from both sides. They travel with the party, and pitch in on chores, but refuse to help more than that without bargaining for favors or concessions because that would go against their nature (though clever players will notice that Kabalin always finds an excuse to pitch in if things get dire). The exception to this is information; Kabalin is more than happy to share what they know, and as a 200+ year old demon they have a unique insight into the inner workings magic, martial arts, supernatural beings, and even some aspects of politics, which the players can tap for their own benefit. Plus, Kabalin is physically incapable of lying.
The catch is that when asked about certain things (mainly Kabalin’s past), the demon clams right up. My hope is that this will create a forbidden fruit effect, making the hidden information all the more desirable because of the contrast with the readily available information. But we’ll see; maybe I’ll have to start dropping more hints than I expect.