We finished our latest RPG campaign yesterday, and I am flush with a sense of accomplishment. I’d have to call the campaign a success; the players all enjoyed themselves, I avoided the floundering of my previous “City of the Dead,” and the campaign came to a rousing finale. So well done, me.
I can’t rest on my laurels very long, however, or even very comfortably. Blame it on my perfectionism. RPGs, being works by committee and almost devoid of editing tools, are imperfect at best, and, while the campaign was good, it wasn’t great. Reviewing what worked and what didn’t can be instructive.
My previous campaign, “City of the Dead,” was a dismal failure, bad enough that we simply abandoned it. The noir afterlife story of greed and betrayal left my players floundering, unable to penetrate the tangle of personal motives behind the great and terrible events upsetting Cadavera. I learned too late that nobody but me even liked the noir genre. Oy! Determined not to make that same mistake, I designed a campaign intended to keep things moving, and to encourage characters to action instead of inaction. I relied heavily on Robin Laws’ advice to give the players what they want, above and beyond all else.
1. Making the mysteries easy works.
In particular, my players hadn’t liked sinister mysteries where one misstep spells doom. Oh, they liked the idea of sinister mysteries where one misstep spells doom, but in fact knowing this just frightened them from plumbing the mysteries, for fear of making a mistake. Clearly players don’t always know what they want.
So I made the mysteries obvious. No evil mastermind would expose himself this way, so I eliminated the evil mastermind. The threat lay in a complete breakdown in a secret government facility storing arcane artifacts. Until the PCs got to the facility, nobody would try to stop them from doing anything, since nobody had an interest in maintaining the chaos at the facility, or even reason to think the facility existed.
At that, it nearly failed. The minute the players knew a powerful magical entity (in this case, the legendary Crystal Skull) knew about them and had hostile intent, they immediately tried to hide, stopped using their magic powers—exploring which magic powers were the whole point of the game—and refused to go on the offensive, because that would be dangerous. Attacking whatever was in the facility? Too dangerous when we don’t know what it is. Finding out more about what’s in the facility? Too dangerous when it can catch us doing so. Putting up defenses so it couldn’t catch them? Pointless; whatever it is is way stronger than we are. We give up.
Sigh.
I went into this campaign with a deliberate focus on making things obvious, lest confusion lead to inactivity. I hadn’t counted on players taking knowledge as an excuse for inactivity, as well.
2. Making the story up as you go along works, sometimes.
Your players are not as capable of penetrating mysteries as Sherlock Holmes or James Bond. It’s a simple fact of gaming life. But even if they were, they couldn’t solve yours very effectively, because they can’t see what’s going on the way Holmes and Bond can. All your players have to go on is what you describe, which is vastly less information than literary heroes, being immersed in their environment have to go on, especially since they can instantly distinguish significant clues from incidental background scenery. But your players want to tell stories where they uncover mysteries and foil dangerous villains. How can you give them a difficult mystery to solve without allowing them to ruin it all through their own clumsy investigation?
Enter a strange storytelling device that could only work in RPGs. The GM sets up a mystery, and doesn’t bother explaining it. Hasn’t got a clue what’s going on. Instead, he listens to the players as they speculate, in character and out of it, on the possible explanation. Then he fills in the story as they go, using their guesses. Because the mystery is whatever the players think it is, they come across as skillful investigators, and are guaranteed not to unravel the mystery only to announce, “That doesn’t make much sense.”
The technique has some pitfalls. For one thing, it won’t last the entire campaign. At some point, you have to stop incorporating the players’ limitless ideas and start tying it off into some kind of conclusion. For me, that was about a year into our 18-month campaign. Take the best elements, hammer them into a coherent back story, and drop everything else. Once you reach this point, allow no red herrings, or you’ll never get to the conclusion. Axiomatically, your players will take anything you describe in detail to be significant. Do not let them do this! Once you reach the turnover from spinning out thread to tying off a conclusion, eliminate anything your players get interested in before it’s too late. Kill witnesses with interesting stories to tell, if those stories don’t tie into the conclusion. Reward investigations into the wrong subject with nothing, no matter how good the roll is. I realized this too late, and my players seized on every irrelevant detail as an excuse to avoid the scary confrontation at the climax, dragging out a long, painful stretch between identifying the problem driving our story and doing anything about it.
For another thing, you have to keep the technique secret from your players, or they’ll be dissatisfied to learn that they can’t fail. In their hearts, they want easy victories, but in their heads, they refuse to admit it. Keeping this technique secret means you need to depart from the “whatever the PCs guess turns out to be right” occasionally. Just enough to make them feel that the blind alleys they reach are proof that you’ve got a complete, objective mystery for them to uncover. This balance has nothing to do with realism. Real investigation involves dozens, even thousands of blind alleys for every step forward—ask any cop who has had to study mug shots. Or any doctor chasing down a rare ailment. Or any intel officer who’s had to correlate data from satellite photos. This kind of investigation is not fun; it is dull work. Your players don’t want dull work. Keep the red herrings to a functioning minimum. Remember that you may need to eliminate them, one by one, as your campaign draws to a conclusion.
Finally, I found that building the plot from player speculation left me high and dry when the players wound down. Either they ran out of ideas for the moment, or a few bad skill rolls meant their obvious source of the next clue had let them down. Either way, without a direction in mind, I had no direction in which to give them a friendly push. Keep one step ahead of your players while using this method. Keep a running estimate of what you think is happening, given what the players know so far, what the mystery would be if your players magically discovered it all right now. Be prepared to toss your players a bone from that estimate when they get stuck. If they’re stuck, they will obligingly take it. Also, it is essential to have material like this in case your players ignore whatever you have planned for the evening. It happens. Your players decide they want nothing to do with the creepy old gun in the trench coat, reasonably but incorrectly considering him more threat than information source, or don’t even realize that all will be revealed if they go poking around the broken-down mansion. If you don’t have something else ready, that evening is a dud. If you don’t keep a running estimate of what’s really going on given what the players know or guess right now, you won’t be able to improvise the next step.
3. Demand that your players create characters appropriate to the setting.
Our theme was bored teenagers in the tiny farming town of West Bumble, Nebraska suddenly developing unexpected magical powers, and exploring those powers. One of my players wants to play nothing but bored Irish aristocrats with a penchant for poker, horses, gossip, and snuff, or Cockney guttersnipes, preferably from the eighteenth century. She has very specific tastes. That gives me two options: design a campaign around that very specific concept, a concept which other players may find boring, or compel her to create a different kind of character. I made the mistake of allowing her to play a bored Irish et cetera in “City of the Dead,” on the grounds that just about any soul could be found in Cadavera. That character never did anything, because he didn’t give a rat’s ass about corruption and a perversion of the system by which souls progressed to the afterlife. I created West Bumble in part because I knew there would be neither bored Irish aristocrats nor Cockney guttersnipes anywhere. I put my foot down concerning Cockney exchange students. Had I allowed one, it would have been toxic to the game; my player would have used every excuse to try to avoid the entire adventure and complain that she just wanted to go back to England—as it was, she complained about how she wanted to escape to the excitement of New York or Tel Aviv as soon as possible. Because I didn’t allow bored Irish et cetera, or anything remotely like it, she reluctantly created a character that worked.
In some sense, this policy violated my prime directive of giving the players what they wanted: this player couldn’t play her favorite (only) character concept. But in a larger sense, it was entirely in keeping with the principle; the only way I could prevent such a character from being toxic would be to bore the hell out of everyone else at the table.
4. Let the GM choose the system.
I allowed myself to be talked into using the Mage ruleset, a sort of compromise between what players were familiar with and what everyone could tolerate. Not my first choice. The White Wolf game system is generally pretty good, and excellent when it comes to magic. The method of combining spheres to create magical effects in the Mage game is brilliant. Unfortunately, it is also too complicated for some of my players, so I ended up spending way too much time explaining things to them, despite going to the effort of simplifying the magic even farther and writing up a set of house rules.
At the same time, it employs a lot of story-killing powers: telepathy, mind control, time reversal. In trying to keep these story-killers out of players hands, I interpreted the rules harshly when they appeared. I lost a player halfway through our campaign. He had a very busy schedule, but I feel in part he couldn’t live with my narrative style: he was used to Mage allowing him to do certain things, and I was telling him he couldn’t. We could have avoided that had I chosen the right system to do what I wanted my story to do in the first place, instead of trying to employ a compromise set of rules to do what it was never designed to do.
We also had trouble with botches. Many games include some kind of rules for trying something and really screwing up, far worse than simple failure. Fail an athletics roll, and you strike out in a baseball game; botch, and you get injured in play. Botch a diplomacy roll, and you offend the duchess you were trying to pump for information. Botch a demolitions roll, and…well. The White Wolf game is way, way too rich in botches, maybe five or ten percent, when I find that one percent is plenty. This meant that I often had to stop my players just when they were building momentum: they had a good idea, pursued it, and botched a roll. Suddenly they had to deal with the immediate crisis while the window of opportunity closed. I never figured out what I could do about this; players rightfully insist on rolling their own dice, and they can see the botch as clearly as I can. Overrule the dice, and you let the players know that you’re telling the story, and they’re just along for the ride; their character skills, and their own tactical employment of those skills, don’t mean anything. But the overall effect was to kill the kind of forward action I had done everything I could to create.
Final Thoughts.
I am probably more aware of the campaign’s shortcomings than any of my players. GMs keep most plot elements to themselves, partly to add mysteries to the story and partly to help control elements of pacing. If a villain is to be unmasked dramatically halfway through the story, the GM can’t very well tell his players so in the first episode; that would ruin the surprise. Indeed, events may turn in such a way that unmasking the villain won’t make any narrative sense when the time comes, so it may not happen at all, and the GM might need to rewrite “what’s really going on” where the players can’t see it. My GM prerogative of knowing what’s going on means I know all of the opportunities I missed. When a player is frustrated, he chalks it up to the give-and-take of a dramatic environment; when a GM is frustrated, the game isn’t working right, and it feels like his own fault.
My players remained largely, and blissfully, ignorant of whole story lines that failed to materialize, and of the times I was just floundering. So they had a great time, and felt it was a terrific campaign. Me, I still need to work out more techniques for keeping the action moving.