Conspiracy Hunting Made Easy
I finished Mike Resnick’s Second Contact last night. Meh. It’s a conspiracy/thriller with a science fiction twist—are aliens masquerading as humans infiltrating space fleet?—and for the first third or so of the book, it was better conspiracy/thriller material than the stuff from conspiracy/thriller specialists like Ludlum. Unfortunately, Resnick eventually started committing literary sins, and ended up with a final product no better than The Throckmorton Initiative, or whatever the latest item on the heap is.
Still, the setup was pretty good, particularly in the way the protagonist, Major Becker, is compelled to pursue a paranoid fantasy without being paranoid himself: he is a military lawyer, ordered to take the case of a space ship captain accused of murder. Since the captain refuses to offer any plea but Not Guilty, and insists on arguing that the crewmen he killed were aliens masquerading as human, it’s up to the lawyer to dig up whatever he can on behalf of his client. Soon (dun dun dun!) he discovers suspicious behavior, then (dun dun dun!) someone tries to kill him, and the chase is on. But even then, Becker can persist for a good long time in the belief that he’s found a conspiracy in the form of a drug ring, but not a capital-C Conspiracy to take over the world.
This worked so well that I began thinking about how to steal the idea for a role-playing campaign. I like the idea of a conspiracy RPG campaign, but there are so many pitfalls to actually trying one. The biggest problem with conspiracy theories generally is that they depend heavily on selective evidence: anything that supports the conspiracy theory is considered proof, while anything that contradicts it considered simply wrong, or possibly even disinformation planted by the conspiracy. In real life, this is no way to examine a hypothesis; in fiction, of course, it’s fine, because the conspiracy is there, the evidence can be found, and the hero can be just clever enough at just the right moments to separate truth from lies at a measured, dramatic pace.
The protagonists of an RPG campaign are not so lucky. Their decisions are not made by the mystery’s author; they are made by players just as much in the dark as the characters, and any attempts to work from selective evidence can take them anywhere at all, including the conclusion that the post office is using mind control drugs to turn the Boy Scouts into assassins capable of destroying the UN, when in fact the real danger is banks fuelled by Nazi gold subverting the phone companies to place an SS double agent in the Oval Office. RPG players are prone to cling to bad ideas in the best of situations. Give them reason to think the bad guys are actively messing with their information sources, and they’ll refuse entirely to accept GM leads designed to keep the story on track. The more firmly he helps the players along, the more “obviously” they’re being led into a trap. Leads will be ignored, players will get frustrated, mistakes will be made, the PCs will expose themselves, and any decent evil cabal would kill them. End of (a very unsatisfying) story.
The whole space lawyer gimmick allowed Resnick to set out 80% of the mystery right up front, and let Major Becker slowly talk himself into accepting it. That’s the trick I thought to steal: give the players almost all the mystery, and trust them to play true enough to character to slowly talk themselves into it. Striking just the right degree of implausibility is incredibly difficult, since players are all too willing to believe in shape-shifting aliens et al., but once past this hurdle, a GM could get away with a lot…until the first time the players go astray, at which point it’s back to square one. I’ll have to think some more about applying this.