Unmasked, Part 1/4
When you’re living the neutral life, it pays to keep your moral ambiguity hidden from the party. Whether you’re beating the information out of the captives or heading out for an honest night of thieving, it’s smart to keep the details on a need-to-know basis.
We’ve gone over some of this ground in the “Mean Girls” arc, but it bears repeating. If you’re up to some nefarious shit, then one of the easiest ways out of the “my guy would try to stop you” trap it to practice good spycraft. Employ that deception score. Lose yourself in a crowd. Wait until Dudley Do-Right is busy setting up chairs for Lawful Good Bingo Night, then make with the skulduggery. This is how the evil alignments of the multiverse can get on partying with the good. When you keep things discrete, you keep things friendly.
There’s a rub though. Our old friend metagaming loves to crash the party, and that can spell all kinds of difficulty for would-be criminals.
ROGUE: “I sneak off for the rendezvous with my thieving crew.”
PALADIN: “I follow, suspecting criminality is afoot.”
ROGUE: “What the crap? You’d have no reason to follow me! My bluff score is through the stratosphere!”
PALADIN: “I’m following a hunch.”
This is the age-old impasse of player agency vs. game mechanics. The hypothetical rogue’s dice say “you believe my lie,” but the hypothetical paladin is still free to act however they wish. Ideally, this mess can get sorted out with a little player maturity and compromise. In the present example that might look like either 1) “Your guy is a smooth talker, and we are friends. I’m going to let this one go,” or 2) “I am a known criminal, and lots of nobles have been robbed in this neighborhood. Go on and try to sneak after me.” But when the justifications wear thin, there’s another option. And that’s the subject of today’s discussion question.
What hidden plans have you successfully snuck past the rest of your party? I’m talking about secret notes passed to the GM, text messages wafting to the other side of the screen, or between-sessions plots perpetrated in a private forum. Confess your best IRL deceptions down in the comments! We’ve entered the land of the cloak and dagger, and I’m looking forward to learning all about your sinister schemes.
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I had a drow bard who would often have private chats with me, in order to keep his various plots secret. One of the other players was amazing at not metagaming, and we weren’t too worried about him. However, the other player, a fighter, was new, and thus was the reason for avoiding metagaming.
Eventually, once we were around half-way through the campaign, the bard decided that the fighter could now be trusted not to meta game. The fighter had been knocked out during a quest to retrieve a magic sword, and the bard switched out the sword for a duplicate.
The fighter awakened, claimed the sword, and founds it’s magical powers failed to work. Without skipping a beat, he turned to the bard and said, “What did you do with it”.
And that’s the story of how the fighter never again heard of the bard stealing magic items, because then the chats became secret again.
Did the fighter know that PVP was on the table? If this mess seems to come out of nowhere and is never discussed, that’s when people get pissy.
Now, what did that bard successfully sneak past the party… one arc of the campaign hinged around recovering a set of magical items. The party was going to retrieve a set of magical armour, but needed to rest first, as the bard had stated he no longer had enough steals to sneak past the guards. The bard had of course lied, and while the rest of the party was sleeping stole the armour, and a good amount of loot. The next day, he cast invisibility on the fighter and rogue, who then had an unsuccessful expedition. The bard also managed to successfully negotiate a peace treaty with the BBEG, which the PCs then immediately decided to betray. I can’t recall his various other acts of thievery and deception, but I do recall that we had quite a few private chats.
Was he ever discovered? Was there ever an opportunity to discover his antics in character?
Probably the best character at creating a hidden plot, though, was our monk. He went off to scout on his own, and got taken out by an intellect devourer; since I hadn’t realised this was going to happen, this meant that the rest of the group was in the room, though their characters were unaware. While the monk did occasionally have to sneak off, he was very good at coming up with believable descriptions of why, such the even with the players suspicious, the character had no reason to be; meanwhile, he would send me texted, and construct a nefarious plan behind the other player’s backs. It wasn’t until the other intellect devourers struck that the PC’s realised their doom.
TPK?
I’ve mentioned the Scion game where I played a Scion of Loki who was secretly the antagonist of another band before. That was mostly done through a series of text messages, rolls on phones, and the occasional minor after-session discussion cause the GM stays over at my house a bit chatting after the game ends.
We’re you ever unmasked?
In a manner of speaking. My father, Loki, showed up with the chariot because he needed it to break into Ker (the Sumerian Underworld) so we could stop a Scion of Nurgel from releasing him. He and Sun Wu-Kong (one of the other Scion’s patron) were keeping Erishkegal busy while we did our thing. After we got out of Ker (also requiring two gods and the chariot), my father did look at me and scowl “Would have been easier if you had left me the reins.” To which I replied “It’s a poor thief that doesn’t profit from a job.” And the Scion of Tyr I had been traveling with laughed “Daughter like Father.”, echoing one of the character’s build aspects.
I played a high-intelligence rogue during a one-shot, and was able to in a batman-esque style craft contingencies to defeat every other member of my party, should they turn out to be evil. (Which, as it happened, turned out to come in handy, when our druid tried to end the world). It was really fun, trying to figure out how to beat people more powerful than you, on your own, after they’ve surprised you, and without the limitless power of being DM. With that same rogue, I also crafted various other plots and contingencies, such as creating a fake wand of Orcus, then entrusting it to the fighter, and pouring heaps of resources into the defending the “wand”; the shock on the player’s faces was amazing when the BBEG had spent so much time and spells trying to burn through our defences, and finally claim the wand to bring the doom of all things, only for absolutely nothing to happen. The shock on the evil druid’s face when I, the rogue, hit him with power word kill was better, though.
Sounds like a clever rogue. How did you get access to Power Word Kill?
Use Magic Device is a hell of a skill.
Via the wand of Orcus that everyone was searching for. I had determined the druid was part of the Cult of Elemental Evil, but didn’t want to kill him until he had outlasted his usefulness (he was extremely dangerous, and thus good to have on our side). At the end of the one-shot, myself and the rest of the party were in the same room as Asmodeus and Mordenkainen; we had become indebted to the former, and thus had to give him the wand. I had temporarily convinced everyone that I, too, didn’t know where the wand was. As Asmodeus was telling us to find the wand, I pulled it out, dropped a Power Word Kill on the druid, then held it out to the archdevil and said, “here it is”.
A fellow party member once managed to off half of the pirate crew in Skull and Shackles without anyone ever definitively pinpointing her as the source of the “accidents” that were suddenly running rampant.
Eventually, we mutinied to take control of the ship from the NPC we didn’t like, and it was only once we did that we (the characters) realized that almost every single crew member who supported our enemy had been systematically killed off. And we still didn’t actually have any in-game evidence linking it to her. We only knew because we’d sat around the table and watched from out of character as she engineered accidents and feuds, slit the throats of sleeping enemies and pinned the blame for it on other enemies, and fabricated evidence of foes being involved in betrayals so worthy of death that our own enemy head-honcho was killing his minions “As a warning to others” without us ever even having to fight them.
It was pretty darn glorious. Nobody ever suspects the cutesy, cheerful gnome girl. We never did actually confirm for sure if she was an antipaladin, but I’m mostly sure she was, and that she and the GM kept it hidden from us.
I like this as a middle ground. You get the fun PvP without risking the hurt feelings of working against the party.
Having difficulty figuring out what’s going on in this comic.
Is Vigilante being blackmailed by Thief to assist her in robbing Elf Princess?
Is Vigilante reluctantly being assisted by Thief to steal the necklace for some ‘greater good’ purpose he’s unwilling (or able, since hooves) to do himself?
Or did he just catch Thief, violet-handed, mid-robbery, with his stealth check and her bad luck keeping him hidden from her notice?
The last one.
As a GM, I usually handle this by talking privately with the player who’s doing something in secret.
When the campaign is such that there is a lot of plotting going on, information is power, the PCs are not technically a party or they are in the same party because they have to be (and not because they want to), then I have the rule that the players see and hear only what their characters do. For example, I’m running a World of Darkness game like that right now. (Though a large part of it is play-by-email, which simplifies that aspect.) Someone speaks with an NPC in private? We step aside to do that. Maybe they were just chatting with an old friend – or maybe there is a nefarious plot going on. It’s the not knowing that keeps the suspense up.
If the players are a standard stick-together party, then I don’t fprce this on obviously trivial issues (like the aforementioned brief chat with a friend), but I do it anyway ehen it’s something secret and/ot important.
I’d also like to add that it’s not just whether the PCs have some information, but how they get it. If one PC is talking to an NPC in private, but you’re playing it in front of the rest of the party because the PC intends to share the info later, everyone gets to see and hear the NPC talking and to interpret it on their own. If you play it in private and the PC then retells the conversation to the rest of the party, they depend on his interpretation. And that can lead both to a) fun roleplay moments and b) misinterpretation. Of course, it is more time-consuming and can get boring if it’s trivial stuff (hence why I don’t do it for every little thing if the PCs are friendly), but it’s totally worth it for something more significant!
I could give examples, but this post is rather huge-ish as it is, so only if someone’s interested. 🙂
Do you do World of Darkness LARP as well? Stylistically, this sounds very Mind’s Eye Theater to me.
I did similar things for my Dragonblooded Exalted game, and it ends up that way. Also ends up with a lot of the GM being outside with a rotating door of players running social encounters on the carport. ;p
I’m a master of bluff IRL. I simply loudly announce my intention to do X nefarious thing, and the group then leaves me to my own devices. I still don’t know why this works exactly, but it is slowly dawning on them that they shouldn’t play poker against me, as they have no freaking clue how to read me if I don’t want to be read.
There may be a difference between a high Bluff score and a miserable Sense Motive. Sounds to me like your party suffers from the latter, lol.
The Paladin in the party of kleptos I DM has an intelligence of 5. (Rolled stats can end badly) He’s very easy to do crime around.
I love that Dorkness Rising clip. 😀
I am currently scheming with the DM of one of my campaigns to pull a Gandalf the White with my character, minus the dying part. Basically, the plan goes like this:
Party loses or decides to run away. My character goes missing.
“Wait, Gawain is dead?!”
“As a doornail. I wanted to play someone else, so I told [DM] to lift whatever plot armor he had.”
This will also cement the
My new character joins the party. He or she will be a character established earlier as someone capable of keeping up with 8th level adventurers. Resurrection is a pain in the ass in our universe, but my character’s siblings will be deciding to go to the effort of trying to convince the one goddess who has that power to bring him back.
“So this is just a temporary arrangement?”
“You’re just assuming we’ll succeed in having him resurrected?”
LATER:
“You misunderstand. I cannot resurrect Gawain, because he is still alive.”
Dammit, I can’t fix that mistake.
“This will also help cement the DM’s claim that he isn’t pulling punches.”
Make sure to drop some hints! In my experience, these moments are best when the other players “should have known” as opposed to feeling blindsided by the big reveal. In other words, don’t play it so close to the vest that the resurrection, when it finally comes, seems random and arbitrary.
Good luck building the cool moment! Sounds like it’ll be a good one.
So much about Elven beauty always being perfect and untarnished. Why does she sleep with her jewelry, though?
Where do you think they get that reputation? Face masks, cucumbers, and Periapts of Health are all important parts of the elven beauty regimen.
Maybe she was born with it…
Or maybe it’s Sun Orchiiiiid~
lol
Could be one of those terrible magic items you have to wear for twenty-four hours before it starts working, or a cursed necklace that can only be removed by someone that doesn’t know about the curse while also not alerting the current wearer to the theft.
I’ve run a campaign where one of the player character was Lawful Evil ; the rest of the party varied from Neutral to Good. He had read of few things on how a LE character could function in a group, and thus wasn’t antagonistic to the other characters : it was in his own interest to stay in that group, until he got what he wanted.
He kept dropping hints here and there, such as summoning a bunch of animals into a magic trap to test its limit rather than carefully investigate it, and generally by being ruthless, and talking bluntly with the group. The other players were oblivious.
No one asked him about the loose pages they kept finding in various temples that he would claim and then keep for himself. So, eventually, he found the last missing page of the Book of the Damned, and promptly used it, betraying the party by stealing the essence of one of the other character’s angelic guardians, and becoming the BBEG in the process.
This was done as a send-off to the players who had to leave the campaign early. It was cool. And the other players never saw it coming 🙂
A send off to the player*. Singular, as in the one who played the LE character. My bad.
I gather they’re the incurious type.
Yup. To be fair to them, I don’t think they were expecting any sort of intrigue. It was one of our first campaign, and we hadn’t figured everything out yet.
only e-mail I send inbetween sessions was my rogue using prestidigitation to slip coins in the pockets of some refugees in the common room of a tavern and scribbling the name of his chaotic good diety on the ceiling.
at our current table I don’t pass notes, Shadow Dancer ‚openly’ snuck ahead to „wake up the sleeping troll for the fight“ to report to the paladin afterwards that „he didn’t wake up“ from the flame to the head.
Shadowdancer learned teamwork! It’s super effective!
Playing with me is like playing with Machiavelli. Each time i pass the DM a note they grasp and start going paranoid. But what i really like is to mess with their minds. What you know is dangerous to your foes, what you think you know is dangerous to yourself. Sometimes i use that and pass another person a note like this: “Read this and feign is a shocking turn of events, then turn and look the guy at my right like he is part of that”. Then the guy at my right will not know what the note is about only that it involves him. Another tactic i like is to simply blackmail. Like the Paladin above in your example, if he insist in ignoring the game mechanics in favor of the roleplay, roleplay is what he will get. Rogue: “If you follow me i will tell what i know about that time with the horse, the goose and the poor duck” 🙂
Also i am shocked at seeing Thief thieving, i can’t believe it. And this is the page 4/1, new mythological arc 😀
Laurel lost her shit in one of our Exalted games when my buddy passed her a note. It was just a drawying of angry eyes. The rest of us were super curious.
Paranoia level of the players: 0/10
note gets passed
Paranoia level of the players: 500/10
That little pieces of paper are so funny 😀
And that is nothing compared to some V:TM games, we have played games that make a Jyhad game a pretty straightforward thing 🙂
Does anyone else at the table ever manage to sneak one by you?
Hahahahha, good one 😀
My favorite trick is to send the GM a text message or note that says “Laugh like something’s funny, then tell me to “roll it.” Nod sagely at whatever I roll and go on like nothing happened.”
That too is a funny one 🙂
I remember Rich Burlew did a strip along those lines. The GM passed around a note that said, “Roll 1d20, add the day of the month you were born, and tell me the result.” And they all watched the metagamer lose his mind.
“Plus 31? You haven’t got a mod that high anywhere in your build! What is your character doing right now? Just standing there with an unreadable look on her face, you say? I detect evil! I detect good! I cast all my defensive buffs! Help! No, none of YOU help me! Stay away!”
Hahaha 😀
Link? 🙂
lol
So my Curse of Strahd campaign was entirely this. It got a little out of hand with how many notes we were passing haha. As the DM, my party pulled a fast one on me.
I thought I had persuaded the party’s warlock to sell out the paladin to Strahd. They had bad blood between them, so it was plausible. And the warlock had accepted some gifts from Strahd, which made everyone even more suspicious of her.
Strahd told her to bring the paladin to a distant corner of Valleki, where he would let her escape in exchange for the paladin. The warlock agreed and said she’d be there. Strahd had no intention of honoring this agreement and was going to nab them both if they were dumb enough to show up, but sent along a minion squad led by Arrigal to wait for them there.
While the rest of the party went about their business in Valleki, shopping and chatting up the locals, Arrigal and his minions moved into position. Many stealth rolls were made (since the party were outlaws in Valleki by this point), but they got through unspotted.
Arrigal and his chaps didn’t find the warlock or the paladin though. Instead of a pair of hapless PCs ripe for abducting, Arrigal found a single letter lying on the ground. That’s when the Warlock’s player handed me an immaculately calligraphied letter in real life addressed to Strahd that said:
My dear sweet summer vampire,
We don’t need your help to leave Barovia.
Goodbye
(8 glyphs of warding, roll saves!)
The party was rowing across Lake Zarovich when they saw a small magical mushroom cloud erupt from Valleki. Even making four saves, it was still lethal for poor Arrigal and his minions.
I’ve seldom been prouder of my party than that moment
Nice! Death by calligraphy is a hell of a way to go.
I prepared explosive runes this morni-
Also, the Elf Princess is asleep?! I call foul! 😛 https://www.handbookofheroes.com/archives/comic/elves-dont-sleep
It’s a purely cosmetic elven beauty trance. Trust me, her eyes are wide open under those cucumbers.
Hahahahaha yes!!!
As a scientist though, I can’t just take your word for it. We need evidence, like a picture sans cucumbers…
Dear lord, how is she not screaming in agony from having cucumber juice fermenting on her eyeballs?
Little-known Elven immunity. It’s an alternate racial trait.
In the immortal words of Beyoncé, “Pretty hurts.”
Looking at Princess again, are we confident she isn’t just screaming incessantly?
I have no acne, and I must scream.
My finest real-life deception was with Mipt Selsu, a kobold rogue who had the entire party convinced that he was an NPC. I controlled him through private messages and made him work behind-the-scenes to sabotage enemies and steal useful supplies for the party, and my primary character did more of the onscreen interesting stuff to help keep people thinking she was my only character. It was only several years after the campaign went on hiatus that the other players finally caught on.
So the GM was just furiously texting you in the middle of an IRL game? How exactly did this work?
It was on Roll20, actually. All our communication was via the chat system anyway, so it just added some extra whispers. I was actually able to have him talk in character directly (this was before they added the option to have character portraits replace player icons), and simply had to switch back to the primary character or OOC to keep my cover.
I really need to start taking advantage of that feature. All three of my games are on Roll 20 at the moment, and I don’t know that I’ve opened a separate chat window yet. That’s just leaving affordances on the table.
I recall a campaign where the players nearly always trusted one another with secrets that would have appalled the actual characters. Hell, we had to, or we’d have missed the best character moments, as well as the best jokes and irony.
Our mild-mannered alchemist has had enough of abetting and enabling the mad surgeon’s horribly misguided decisions, and is striking out to make horribly misguided decisions of her own? Aw, they grow up so fast! (Though in-universe, the good Doktor is saddened to imagine the bitter regret Fraulein Elizabeth must feel at the unforseeable accident that ended her rival’s life, beyond even his own considerable capabilities to repair.)
The drunken engineer who was befriended by a party member’s old enemy? The engineer doesn’t know who his new drinking buddy is, though all the players do. In-universe, he’s just glad for a friend with good taste in whiskey and conversation topics (namely, all the damned stupid things the rest of the party do, as filtered hilariously through his own biases.)
But the one secret too dark to share even out-of-universe, at least until the whole arc had long-since ended, was that time we were all freezing and famished, and Liz diced a rat she’d caught into the stew. Because, ew.
I empathize in matters of stew-ew: https://www.handbookofheroes.com/archives/comic/psychedelic
Aww, poor lil’ Stool.
But I love the comic itself that you linked, and I don’t think I’d ever seen it before. Magus with pupils the size of the universe is hilarious.
“But…he’s still not CLEAN enough. Like, mew. Have you ever, like, really LOOKED at your tongue?”
You ever see a cat on catnip? I have no doubt that she next proceeded to do cartwheels half way across the Underdark.
The only instance of secret-keeping in an RPG for me was a combination of secret character (Mesmerist) and secret alignment (LE, in a neutral-to-good party).
The concept relied on the assumption that psychic casting couldn’t be noticed ordinarily (due to lacking somatic and vocal components, replacing them with emotion and mental ones instead – later, I learned this is not the case via an FAQ). This, coupled with the nature of a Mesmerist’s abilities being subtle (stares and implanted tricks aren’t very obvious), allows a Mesmerist to use their abilities relatively unnoticed.
Thus, I built a Mesmerist Kitsune, its race reflavored to be a Half-Rakshasa (tiger-man) who could turn into a cat instead of a fox. Always in feline form, they could use all of their Mesmerist abilities and spells without it being obvious they were the caster.
To complete the disguise, a decoy was required – someone to ‘cast’ his spells for him. Thus, I made sure to buy an Elven slave, whos job was to pretend to be a Witch, the Mesmerist pretending to be her familiar. She did her part acting to cast spells, he would make the magic (and orders, via message spell) happen.
The character’s secret never was revealed, though this is mostly due to them playing only for a few sessions before having to leave the game due to scheduling issues.
Did you speak as the slave or the cat?
The slave witch did the speaking (she was friendly and a sweetheart – and way over her head), until we met a merchant from whom we got a ring that ‘allowed’ her familiar to speak (which he didn’t need, but it was a good excuse), allowing him to act like his arrogantly pragmatic and hedonistic self (‘feed me’ / ‘I urge you to accept me as your new ruler’). Which was perfectly normal for a cat.
I play in a Star Wars game (Saga Edition) where I am a fallen Jedi. Of the 4 other players in the group, only 2 and the GM know that I have fallen, because one player NOTORIOUSLY metagames. If he knows it, his character knows it! I’ve had off sessions and have had to constantly bluff my way out of it. Now I’m slowly turning one of the other force users into a dark force user, and I have them all on my side and they all think he is crazy!
I’m always more sympathetic than the average gamer when it comes to metagamers. If secret knowledge is flying around the table, and you’re the only one trying to play it straight, it’s very easy to feel like the world is ganging up on you. That risks turning the cooperative game into a competitive one.
I’ve got this experience in the back of my mind:
https://www.handbookofheroes.com/archives/comic/powers-of-perception
…And that’s done a lot to shape my opinion of secretive play.
I once played in a Star Wars: Age of Rebellion game as an Imperial spy (with an intended story arc to turn him into an actual rebel, of course). This meant a lot of after-game discussions with the GM, and several instances of me leaving complex plans if I couldn’t make a session. My character kept randomly showing up with expensive weapons for the party (explained as him being a “trader”), leading them to various hotbeds of sedition and rebelliousness, and inexplicably becoming The Cavalry every time they found themselves in Imperial custody. All in all, it was the closest I’ve ever come to pulling off the Chessmaster archetype, and I was quite proud of it. I’m just sad the campaign died before his profession came to light.
Awwww… That’s too bad. Half the fun of the Chessmaster is revealing your glorious plan!
We had a party made up of escaped convicts. Having got to another land we got jobs, amusingly enough, as town guards. One of the other characters was causing friction and I knew who was hunting her. I informed where she would be and during our next patrol a hit squad teleported in. She got captured and another character killed but my character and his, in character, brother escaped.
What made it even funnier was as we were going on patrol the party had discussed that we had been in one place too long and we should take the money we had got and move on the next day.
What’s the PVP policy in the group? Were there hurt feelings on the other side of the table, or was it all in good fun?
Played the seneschal in a Rogue Trader game who was made with Dark Heresy rules (so I was quite a bit weaker than the other players), and I was a double agent for an Inquisitor that didn’t like the Rogue Trader I was ostensibly working for.
However, I found a sword possessed by a powerful daemon that would help me find the people that had sacrificed my sister in some cult (which I had previously been a part of, so the guilt and self-loathing was through the roof) in exchange for some simple and totally harmless tasks.
So, I “accidentally” leaked that I worked for the Inquisition, pretended all the weird info and help I got was from them, all they while working for Chaos.
It was glorious, up to and including when I accidentally ended the campaign by creating a new eye or terror/portal to the Wyld or whatever it’s called in 40k. So long since I played Warhammar.