Can I Get My Thrill, Please?

Today it's time for our first before the last emotion in our series. Today, we're gonna talk about thrills. Although the name is similar to the genre of thrillers, there's no real connection between the 2. Thrills are the moment of sudden sensation, when all hell broke lost.

The main way to create thrills in the players is through spectacle scenes. Think about the sinking of the Titanic in the movie, think about the dinosaurs in Jurassic Park. Opening with a spectacle scene is one of the best attention grabbers there are. There are 2 things to remember when opening a story with a spectacle scene:

The first is not to overdo it at the expense of the story. If it's too much, or not important, or not connected, there's no use for this opening.

The second is to think about what place the PCs will fill in this scene. If there's no role for them there, maybe passing on this scene and opening with how it affects the PCs will be better. Think about the opening scene of The Matrix, part of why it's so great is that here we get Trinity and not just some kind of hacker who talks with her. If the scene can help to establish the characters, so much the better.

When speaking of the opening scene of The Matrix, we can't leave behind the sequence it's part of, the escape sequence of Trinity. Escapes are another great way to bump up the thrills in the story. En escape sequence done right can change everything. Make everything immediate, and the story and players will thank you.

But escape sequences don't have to be done by the PCs, as they can learn of an escape done by the villain. When the characters are there to investigate a crime scene, or an escape from prison scene, narrating their findings in flashbacks to the event itself can prove quiet useful. Always remember one thing when doing this kind of thing, though, it has to be short and it has to give only parts of the crime and not all of it. Strive to give only 50-60% of the crime and let the players fill the rest for themselves (and it's always better to let them fill the dirty parts by themselves).

Another way to get this thrill we're so longing for is by using short intervals of violence. Short intervals that are brutal and dirty are far more thrilling than long tactical fighting. The villains ambush the players, and they have to get to a safe zone while bullets fill the air, the famous monster goes out of the water and advances like an unstoppable nature force into the city, destroying it like a hurricane... This kind of thing is far more thrilling than the orcs who come to kill the PCs and the battle in squares that comes afterwards.

Violence can be replaced by sexuality, though. Think about some of the horror movies we all like to see. Sex=death, and the thrill is in both of this sides of the equation. Now, I'm not saying make the story a porn story or something, but a little sexual conflict here or there does come with its merits.

A better way to use sexuality in the story is by combining it with violence. The sex=death is one way to do this, but there are also other ways to do it. If one of the characters goes to sleep after a wild night and wakes up only to find a dagger near his/her throat, you'll feel the thrilling atmosphere that controls the room.

Before I close for today, there's one thing that I can't discuss thrills and not discuss it, fights. Fights are one of the oldest aspects of the RPGs (and of stories also), but they stopped being this thrilling when they stretch for too long or become too tactical. Although I discussed how to enhance the battles here and here (and also in here), there is also one thing that we can learn from Unknown Armies: making the battles short, brutal and chaotic makes battles less common in the first place, but when they come... The thrills that come with it can challenge action movies.

Another technique is by making the situations more complex, like battling on a driving van, a flying carpet or on a train. If you'll succeed in making a battle between a motorcycle driver (probably the PC) to the villain on the roof of the train, with a chase scene combined with a fight scene, it's gonna be one of the fight scenes of the game.

So, that's about it for today, how about you? How do you thrill your players?

The Story-Cart Is Going Fast

There is one little thing each one of us GMs will be judged by. No, it's not how great our stories are, although that's one of the things most affected by this little thing. It's not how cool our NPCs are, although it surely helps. There's one mandatory storytelling tool each one of us should master, or at least come close to mastering it: The art of pacing.

In some games, it's the only thing that matters. In others, it's one of the leading most important things. If you pace your game badly, the game may drag to a halt, or may go too fast for the players to follow it. It may destroy every one-liner if done wrong, and will make every villain totally badass if done right.

Pacing is one of those things, that can turn a good story to a bad one, and vice versa. There's no one way to master it, but there are a few tricks that I use to help me control the pacing, even (and especially) when I'm improvising (which means about half of the time).

Before we delve into it, I must confess something: I usually GM with a soundtrack, and even improvise according to it on other times, so some of the tricks have a connection to it.

During stressful, tense or high speed situations, I have two main tricks in my arsenal. The first one is that I shout a lot. It helps to get the players into the excitement, but also, no player likes to be shouted at. If done correctly, shouting a little at a player will make him/her do things faster to avoid more shouts. Don't misuse it, though, as it can turn pretty much like a boomerang if done wrong or too often.

A second trick, during those situations is counting. I usually give my players about 6 seconds to act during their round. If they take the time and go over the 6 seconds, they miss they're turn. "Too bad, but your character didn't hold to the pace of everything". They have 6 seconds to decide what they want to do, then afterwards they roll and give the final modified number, but the 6 seconds for deciding are what important. It is of course accompanied by a shout from me about what happened based on what the player rolled. If I want to make things even tenser, I might count on my fingers. When their eyes catch the time, it forces them to be even quicker on their feet.

When characters/players are too long discussing something, except for of course bringing the battle to them, another nice trick that I found was raising up the volume of the music. To keep hear one another, they had to raise they're speaking volumes to the point of shouting, and no one likes to shout for too long. The discussion dies shortly afterwards.

Another way to get things going fast is to use a fast soundtrack. Humans adapt to music far faster than anyone of us have thought. When the music is fast, so are the speech speed and the thinking speed.

If things move too fast, lowering the volume and speed of speech helps to create a calmer environment. Things seem less harmful and the players have to lean closer to me. Things go naturally must slower this way.

Another way to slow things down is to play soft slow music in the background. As expressed earlier, it does magic on the players.

In conclusion, pace is a very important thing, one of the most important ones actually, and there are a lot of ways to control it. These ones are only a sample of the endless amount of ways existing.

"I'm Not Left-Handed"- Lessons from The Princess Bride

I saw again today the swordfight scene from The Princess Bride. A great movie and this scene is a good example that a round by round fight can still be awesome if dealt with properly. So here are five lessons from this scene about how to improve our fights:

1.  "You are using Bonetti's defence against me, uh?" Using famous names and techniques while fighting makes the fighters seem more professional, like they know what they are doing, and helps them look totally badass when they do that. Note how Inigo looks as though he knows what his rival will do.
2. "Cliffs of Insanity". I talked about it yesterday in another post in more detail, but it belongs to here also. The terrain of the battle has a huge influence on the cool factor of the battle. Reward using it and it will be even better.
3. "He flips over a beam and lands next to his sword". Tumbling and acrobatics as a way to move. The enemy already knows how to guard his surroundings so you'll have to trick him if it was a real fight. Why not in a game?
4.  "I am not left-handed". If you always go by the rules, you'll become predictable and boring (both mechanically and in other aspects). In a fight, you begin by learning the rules, and then you break them to gain that important advantage. It's a gamble, yeah, but without it there's no way to finish the fight. Another great example of this, from another movie, though, is in Pirates of the Caribbean, when Jack pulls the gun to get that so important advantage against Will.
5. "Please understand I hold you in the highest respect." Battles don't have to be a life or death situation. Battles should be more than a "you win or you die" situation. Always present, or at least don't say no, to other endings to the fights: Surrendering and running away are only 2 other possibilities out of other, uncountable possibilities...

So these are my 5 lessons from this scene. Have you spotted another thing? Do you use any of them? A completely different thing?

Exploding Dolls, Underwater Bar Fights and Flying Castles

"Remember that battle when we were like in the middle of a factory, and all the dolls that were created there exploded?"

"Remember when we fought a bar fight under the water like in that movie, Top Secret?"

There are always this fights that are kept forever, that we look for again and again. Some of them involved great Roleplaying, or a critical at the right time, but most of them were in really cool places. At least in my games that's the situation.

When I GMed action games, I always reminded to myself one simple thing: "Every action movie has a cool, very cool, set-piece for the final confrontation of the movie". In TV series it's right also. Think about the end of season 4 of Buffy, with the fight in the dream, or one episode earlier when they fought Adam in the Initiative Basement. Think about the end of Matrix, where Neo and Smith fought in the train station. That's the kind of battles, of fights, that we remember because it's cool, because it's special and unique, because we didn't see that before.

So, after I have reminded to myself this thing all through the session, saying it to myself again and again like a mantra, I started to use it, and it paid off. I had a fight in a flying castle, where suddenly it fell and they used magic to keep it afloat while still fighting the villains. I had a battle between ships, with PCs and NPCs going from side to side and trying not to fall. I had fights in total darkness, and multi-planar battles. And after the fifth battle that I ran and was this cool and special, they started to look for it, to wait for it, to try to guess where it will be, and some of them even suggested places by themselves.

It's not a lot of work, making something like this, but it pays off, and it makes the games so much better, and the battles so much special.