The new campaign is off and running: our five PCs are to usher in a new epoch, whatever that means. I’m guessing that the once-invisible spirits which hover near select individuals and give them superpowers are about to manifest to the entire world. Hard to know for sure, because (A) we’ve only had one session, and (B) divine guidance reaches us via the PC who just escaped from an asylum. I’m playing the badass this time around, a retired hitman and field operative who operated in the murky boundary between CIA, drug cartels, and revolutionaries in Reagan’s Latin America.
This is Ella’s first stab at GMing a campaign. (Did I mention that already? Yeah.) She’s still insecure, and worries aloud about whether she’s “doing it right.†She’s doing fine. But, alerted to her insecurity, the players are being more cooperative than usual with what they perceive to be the GM’s needs, as opposed to individual character integrity.
In particular, our group has met and coalesced into a whole quite abruptly. One might even say implausibly, given our disparate backgrounds and the fact that we all carry some big secrets. (I know this because we were asked to create characters with secrets.) But group cohesion is a perennial problem for GMs, and Ella worried aloud about it more than once, especially since she decided not to require us to create a shared background. Thus alert to the newbie GM’s concerns, we seized on any convenient excuse to pal around together—in my case, respect for the consequences of ignoring an oracle, crazy though he may be, outweighs a field op’s considerable reluctance to throw his lot in with a nutjob and a ten-year-old. Yeah, kinda wacky.
So we bend our self-conceptions a bit—maybe more than a bit—to keep the game on track and accommodate Ella. Problem solved, right?
Not exactly. Ella confided to me as we drove home that things have progressed more quickly than she expected. She figured she’d need two or three sessions just to get everyone working as a team, and now she’s worried she won’t have enough material to keep us entertained next session, maybe for the whole campaign. Not an insoluble problem, of course: just add complications as necessary. But a nuisance, requiring more GM work and introducing lots of elements she hasn’t thought through quite so carefully, and thus high-potential candidates to derail the story entirely.
The lesson to be drawn from this, apart from being careful what you wish for, is that the things a GM says outside the game, like worrying about group cohesion, can be just as important to how a game unfolds as things said within the game as judge’s ruling, narrator’s voice, or NPC mouthpiece.
Improperly handled, a GM can drop hints he never intended, which revelations will worm their way into play no matter how careful the players try to be about the barrier between in-character and out-of-character knowledge. But properly handled, a cunning GM can make this same porosity work for him.
In our last campaign, I felt I needed to manage expectations. The PCs were on islands whose fate would be the foundation of the Atlantis myth. They were still thinking how to save their people from destruction, which was impossible, when I wanted them thinking how to ensure the Evil Conspiracy went down with them, rather than escaping into the larger world. So I stated off-handedly that I suspected Dave had figured out what was going on, but was keeping it to himself out of polite concern for the division of knowledge between player and character. I chose Dave because he’s generally good at figuring out the larger picture, and because he’d made some good guesses already. He hadn’t yet worked out the Atlantis connection, and probably wouldn’t have until it was too late, but that casual comment was enough of a hint to get him there, without—and this is important—seeming to tell either player or PC what he shouldn’t know. Feeling he’d been clever, Dave redirected the group’s goals to something more achievable: the survival of fellow PCs’ child Ibella—and, it turns out, her parents as well. Not exactly the death of the inner circle of conspirators, but close enough to an upbeat ending in that I was happy to seize upon it.
Ella overdid it a bit expressing her concerns, and her players overreacted a bit, but with a bit more sophistication and experience, she could have fine-tuned that response to get the players violating—er, refining their character definition to her ends, and leaving the players thinking it was all their idea. It’s all in the pacing of the story, and the timing of out-of-game information. A wise GM will stay aware of how side conversations bleed into the game and watch carefully what he says, what he shouldn’t say, and what he isn’t technically supposed to say but should say anyway.
Post a Comment