We Forgot to Challenge

A small thought for the day. We all play with house-rules. Nobody really plays a game to the exact details of the rule-system (or at the very least- almost no one). If there is a single thing that I saw common to all of those house-rules, it was without a doubt the side they favored.

All those house-rules that I've seen through the years? They were all in favor of the player characters. They made their lives easier, they're role-filling quicker. They diminished the challenge.

To put it differently, it's like we GMs forgot that being fans of the PCs doesn't mean letting them succeed without a sweat. It means putting them through a challenge and hoping to see them triumph, believing that they'll succeed. But they do need the challenge firstly. After all, without challenge, there's no real point in winning, or even in playing those things, battles, intrigues etc. And yet, we make their lives easier with house-ruling and with so much more.

I don't know if I managed to say something, if I managed to express what I think. But I do hope that at the very least, I'm not alone in thinking about this, in hoping to see it changed.

Making Race Important to the Game

Over at Roleplaying Tips they're hosting a nice little blog carnival, centered on the concept of races. And… I must say that I don't normally play with race too much, or at the very least- not today. But it doesn't mean that I don't have anything to bring to the table. I did run a year or two of campaigns centered on races and our prejudices surrounding them, back in the day.

John asks for tips and ideas about making race an important factor in the game. For me, the number one trick, the first tip that I offer for GMs who come to me with the same question, is to lead by example.

Think about the GM-player relationship in most traditional games- the GM sets the stage, decides what is important and what not, and the players (at least to a certain extent) internalize those themes and ideas, and then bring their own versions of it. That's how we explore themes in RPGs.

But it also means that the GM has to set the stage. If the GM will make race an important factor in her games, like having some racist NPCs or handing a prejudices index (just like we can find in every WOD race book), sooner or later it will become a major factor in the game.

If, for the sake of example, I bring to the table a Dwarf NPC who hates Elves and think that they just stink, suddenly it is important to know if Lucy plays an Elf or if she plays a Halfling. If I'll continue this stage-setting and the next NPC will think that Halflings are not real men, Mr. Halfling will have to find a way to show his manliness.

In other words- making the concept of races important to you, as GM, and playing to this concept, will make it important for the whole group. Before you'll know it you'll have Dwarfs who don't like Gnomes and Orcs who want to be Elves.

And that's the whole truth, actually. Make it important to you, stress it through your portrayal of NPCs, through your descriptions ("you see an Elf. She…"), through handouts... If it is important enough for you to stress it, it will become important enough for them as well.

Or you can just go and play Vampire. I "heard" that they've done it right.

How about you? What tips and tricks do you have for making race an important factor in your games?

NPCs are just Tools

NPCs are just tools. They're not there to steal the limelight, they're not there to give some amazing monologues. NPCs are just tools for the GM to use, to nudge the game a little bit to one direction or the other, to help make an enjoyable evening or something along those lines. As such is the case NPCs don't need complex personalities but a way to affect the PCs and through them to affect the players. When they've filled their roles, they're not needed anymore, they can be discarded, or move to the reserve pile for later scenes and/or sessions.

Drosselmeyer, in Princess Tutu understood this well. When talking to Edel in episode 12 of the first season, he says to her: "Your role is to add glow to the story in my place". Unlike the players, the GM doesn't have an avatar in the game. All the GM has is everything that is not controlled by the players. But, as we know, those things are there to serve the PCs and/or the players. The Gm should forget herself, of course, but for now please stay with me.

 Most problems of using NPCs come from not acknowledging this simple idea. If the NPCs are just tools used by the GM to serve the game and players, then one wouldn’t give them amazing and way too long monologues.  One wouldn't let them steal the limelight either.

But it grows deeper than that, unsurprisingly. It means that trying to give them life and complex personality is a futile intention. A gm should think in terms of how the NPC affects the PCs and through them affect the players. This calls for a simple motive, for example, so it will be easy to grasp. It also calls for something that will challenge the players' perceptions, like am NPC that divides the players and the characters to a few sides.

It also means that one shouldn't get to attached to the NPCs. Once they fulfill their role, they should finish they're part in the game. If the players don't connect to them, they should be left out. And if the players like them enough, make their part greater, make them more colorful.

So how one should use this kind of tool? There's no one true way, of course, but for me it always was about giving the illusion that they're far more complex and alive than they truly are. They should sometimes be busy, or they'll use some fancy words to describe some simple ideals. They will be distinctive, different from one another. And most importantly, they should be made such that I will always be able to bring them to the present scene, if I'll ever need them. Usually, this combination does the trick for me.

What do you think? Feel free to write in the comments.

We all have a role to fill

Last time I've covered a Princess Tutu episode, it was a really early one. Since then, I began to question my remark that this series is a great GMing guide, but the ending of season one showed me otherwise. In episode 11, which I'll cover today, we are presented near the end with a remarkable scene. The annoying Drosselmeyer shows us that he does understand stories, when he reminds each character of his or her role in the unveiling one.

Now, this is an interesting case, because each character in the series plays a role in the story. To a certain respect, it is just like an RPG: each player is assigned a role to fill in the story that is being created (this is, again, a topic for another post). Our 4 main characters are our players, and Drosselmeyer is our GM.

This scene asks about roles. What roles does each side fill in the game? What is the players' role? What is their GM's role? To a certain respect, after almost 11 episodes, we are presented with the Social Contract of the "game". Each player got a role to fill, assigned to him or her by the GM, and this is their job. As long as they fill it, though, Drosselmeyer doesn't intervene. But when they do leave the role behind, Drosselmeyer reminds them and guides them back to their role.

This is one type of a Social Contract that can be made. We can also "sign" a contract that gives the GM an even greater role in the shaping of the game, a kind of game in which the players are only there for the ride. Or we can go the other route, to a game without a real GM, a game in which the players guide the game themselves. It can also, unsurprisingly, be somewhere in the middle.

But the Social Contract is only a part of a greater contract, the one called the Group Contract, which also covers such things as rule-systems and the like. It answers questions such as "how do we choose a rule-system?" "How closely do we follow the rules presented in the rules-system?" and so on.

Both of these concepts are there to help us play better games. They do it by giving us the tools to describe in detail the roles, expectations and responsibilities of each participating party. 

Winning Is Not Mandatory

Winning in the end is not mandatory. I know, I know, in most fantasy stories, actually in most stories regardless of genre, the protagonists win. They win and save the world, get the princes and princesses and get so much treasure that they can just retire and even their grandchildren will be filthy rich. They always win in fantasy.

But it is not mandatory. It is not mandatory to win in the end and neither it is mandatory to win in the middle. Loses makes the story change direction, makes it fuller and richer, gives place to a huge set of emotions that we don't normally see in our games.

Losing can also change and rewind the game. If the PCs always win, there's no challenge, there's no need for playing. If they will always win, it doesn't really matter that they've chose right and not left, or that they killed the orcs and not the goblins.

When we play for the plot, for the story, losing is what gives us those dark moments in the middle of the third arc, the moments from which we find something in ourselves and rise to the challenge, amazing those around us and even us as we do so.

Losing shows us other sides of our characters, sides that we couldn't really explore otherwise, because we didn't have those moments of loss, of depression, of disappointment from the way the things turned out. We were about to win, and somehow we lost.

Losing gives meaning to a learning curve, losing gives meaning to those hard-earned victories. Because they truly are victories that were hard to earn, scattered between all those loses.

And losing in the end is part of what makes a story into a tragedy. Because in a tragedy, we either lose or lose what we fought for, we can't really win. And tragedy is not the only type of story in which the end is bleak.

Winning is not mandatory. Losing should be part of the outcome list. It deserves its spot there.

There's No One True Way

And we're back to what will hopefully be my normal schedule. I've started to watch an anime called Princess Tutu. I'm yet to say what it is about, as I'm only 2 episodes in it, as of the moment of writing these lines. What struck me so clear while watching its second episode was how good it is as a GMing guide.

In the second episode, we have a rivalry between Anteaternia and Rue-Chan (yeah, I know that Chan is not part of the name but it's easier for me). Anteaternia asked Rue-Chan how she learned to dance so wonderfully, for which she answered with practice. Then Anteaternia said that she'll practice as hard as she can so she'll does as wonderful as Rue-Chan. Rue said that it is not possible.

And that's and amazing thing, because as we watch the episode we learn that Rue-Chan didn't say that from the point of contempt. Anteaternia will never be able to dance as well as she can, because Andteaternia will have to develop her own style.

And that's true for our GMing. There's no right or wrong, there's no true and false. There's no better and worse. Each of us GMs has different strengths and weaknesses, goals and needs. And each group has a different mixture of players with different expectations, needs, goals and abilities. Because of that, this combination, there's no ultimate style of GMing. There's no better way to GM.

There are only two rules for GMing that are right all the time- "don't be a dick", and "know thy players". All the rest is just style. So don't try to copy another GM's style. Instead, try to develop your own. Try to find your inner truth about GMing and go with it, play to it, GM according to it.

Jacob's Ladder- Knowing When to Say Goodbye

I couldn't find a more fitting movie to end this project. Jacob's Ladder is a brilliant masterpiece about life and death, about the things the wars do to ordinary people, about family. It is a horror movie, it is a drama movie, it is a war movie, and it is a surrealist movie. It is hard to explain exactly what it is, just that it is one of the greatest movies of the nineties, perhaps even one of the greatest movies of all time.

The movie chronicles the life of Jacob, a divorced man, a Dr. of the arts and philosophy, a war veteran who fought in Vietnam. It chronicles the way that his mind, his world, starts to fragment after 2 years of war. From conspiracy to feelings of loss, from love to hippies, this movie has it all.

And (and from now on I'm gonna spoiler) it is also a movie about the need to accept one's end, one's death. In the end of the movie, Jacob accepts that he's gonna die, and just lets it happen, smiling, peaceful.

Campaigns and one-shots are going to end too. And we'll have to accept that, acknowledge that. Everything oughta end. Nothing good lasts forever. And as such is the case, we need to learn to let go, to know when something should end and to ensure that it will end there. Not all games need to last 200 years. Not all games need to last even a full single year. Some need to end after a single session, others after 3 or four. We need to accept that, understand that, not to stretch it more than we should.

Because it is better to let go of things, when they get to their natural ultimate ending than to stretch it any longer and let it disintegrate into no more than a thing that was once epic and now is… not.

Ending things is hard. It is not easy. But living isn't easy either, and we don't give on life because of that. We make the hard choices, we choose to live, and we choose to end our campaigns. We will end them on a high note, sure, but they will end. And we'll know, deep inside our hearts that the stories of those characters have ended. That now we do something else.

Because every ending is a new beginning. When a campaign ends, a new ones starts, filling the place of the earlier one, of the campaign that ended. I don't know if I succeeded expressing what I had to say, what I had in mind. But I do hope that you'll understand and take from it what you want.

Thanks for reading.

28 Days Later- Changing Just a Little Thing

And that's how a masterpiece looks. I guess that I shouldn't have expected any less from the director who made Trainspotting, but you know, when I should give a compliment I will give a compliment. 28 Days Later is our age's Night of the Living Dead, a movie that is so inventive and amazing that everyone tried to copy it, yet it still tops them all.

In short, a group of animal liberation militants free a virus throughout the entirety of Britain, resulting in a zombie apocalypse. The zombies this time are fast, real fast, and scary like they were never before. To that we add the personal horrors of the last act. Oh, and did I mention that it has the same amazing directing touch that Boyle employed in Trainspotting?

And that leads us to the lesson to learn from this movie. Apart from utilizing lessons of identification and beautiful scenery (which makes this movie a textbook example of how to do a high-level horror movie), it practically invented the concept of the fast-zombie.

And the zombies here are fast. Apart from being fast, they are the normal Romero-type zombies, but their greater speed makes them so different, so refreshing, and so terrifying. And that's a pretty good lesson to learn.

I wrote, a long time ago, about ways to make one scene characters unique, utilizing a known, common stereotype and building upon it. Boyle gave the same treatment to his zombies. And we can do the same- when using a known monster, keeping it the same, just like we read or watched hundreds of time, but changing something inherent in it, like the speed of the zombies. Or it might be a vampire that lives on computer data, sucking hard-drives and all the personal folders and documents.

Or we might drive a known characteristic to 11. The zombie isn't slow, it can't move, it just lies there waiting to be found and eat. The vampire isn't burned by sunlight- it explodes when the light touches it. And again, much horror ensues.

Or we might add a characteristic. The vampire can change its looks so he can look like your wife or husband. The zombie can now climb on walls. And these monsters won't ever look the same.

How about you? What have you thought about this movie? And what lessons did you take from it?

(Also published as The Bleeding Scroll's addition to the October Blog Carnival)

Dracula (1958)- Adjusting as Needed

It took me quite a while to finally see this version of Dracula. The vampire buff in me stands now in the corner, ashamed of himself. I hope that you'll forgive him… Anyway, this version doesn't disappoints, which is quite amazing to say when considering the bad aging of most of Hammer's Films.

I guess that most of you do know the plot of Dracula, but this version changes the plot of the book on the one hand and of earlier adaptations on the other hand, quite enormously. For once, Van Helsing is young, and for the other Harker is there to kill Dracula and not to sell him anything.

And that's quite interesting. Instead of sticking with the original book, like the opening scene might suggest, the movie quite clearly makes the story its own, changing what it sees as needing a change, a breather, some fresh air.

And that's something that isn't utilized enough. Many of us GMs try to do everything by the book, whether we're talking about the stats of monsters or of the plots of published adventures. We so try to go by the book that we sometimes forget that these things were written as guidance, so we will be able to adjust them according to our needs.

A great GM once said that nobody knows one's group better than this particular one that comes from the group. I know my group better than any other GM in the world, because I GM for them regularly. So do the players in my group. And that's an important truth, because when it comes to this, to GMing for them, or to figuring out what adventure to buy for the next session, or even which parts of the adventure I should stress and which I should eradicate, nobody knows it better than me. And it is true for you and your groups.

So please, when GMing published adventures, or when playing some fight scenes, or whatever else, don't try to play by the book. Instead, adjust it as much as you need to make it fitting with your own group, your real group, and not some theoretical one.

How about you? Have you watched this movie? What have you thought about it? And what have you learned from it?

Phantasm- Meeting the NPCs in Normal Situations

Some movies leave you with a lasting impression, others just don't. Phantasm belongs to the second group. It's not that it is a bad movie, or that I didn't enjoy it, but it just wasn't that good either. For me, it didn't have anything memorable within its 90 minutes, and even The Tall Man himself wasn't anything inspiring. I mean- after knowing The Slender Man, all I can say in benefit of this movie is that it was a nice inspiration for some great artistry. Too bad it's all I can say for this film.

Anyway, this movie's plot is pretty complicated, and not because of its presentation. You see, the movie twists itself quite a lot, combining gypsies with ice-cream men with heroic sensibilities, aliens and dwarfs, brotherly love and much-much grief over death in the family. Anything beyond that might be a spoiler, and I don't want that to happen.

Our protagonist, Mike, begins as a certain kind of stalker- he follows his brother anywhere, because his afraid of his brother leaving him behind, to leave his life alone. In a scene near the beginning, Mike follows his brother and witnesses his brother doing it, or at least beginning to do it.

And that's a great idea to use in our games. No, not this particular idea, but… one of the greatest GMing tips that can be given about portraying NPCs is that they should be given a sense of life. They should feel alive beyond the scope of their encounters with the PCs. A great way to do that is to have the PCs meet them in normal situations.

Imagine this scene- the PCs are doing their businesses in the city as usual, when suddenly they see the villain in a flower shop. "A-ah, this time we'll get ya!" they'll say to him, for which he'll respond "Can't I just but some flowers for milady?" or something along those lines. Or maybe he collects flowers because this is one of his hobbies? Or maybe because he is lonely and this is his way of escapism?

As an added bonus, try to think about ways to utilize these instances to make the players feel bad. "Look, if I'll try to kill this woman you'll be the first to know about it, and then you'll come and take revenge on me, and then you'll destroy my base (again) and then I'll have to start all over again (again)." Two benefits for the price of one, I'm taking it…

And that's it for today. How about you? Have you watched this movie? What have you thought about it? And what have you learned from it?

Tomorrow I'll cover the last five movies of this project, so I hope you'll enjoy it too.

Day of the Dead- Have Yourself a Little Bub

I don't think that it will come with any surprise, that I found Day of the Dead amazing.  Truth be told, it is not on the same level of his earlier two zombie flicks, but it is not surprising. The first two films were (and still are) groundbreaking, satirical, amazing, among the best the horror genre ever came to be. Those films weren't just great in their own genre, but among the entire world of cinema. Day of the Dead doesn't have a chance against this, but truth is- it doesn't make it any less good. It is still a treasure trove of the genre, and it still has a lot to teach us.

In short, in this iteration of the series, we follow a group of humans, some of them civilians and some of them soldiers, and we see how humanity collapses due to a lack of real communication. Like with most of Romero's films, though, the zombies are there in the background and not much more, and this sets them apart, shows why they received such high remarks, why they are still being imitated throughout the entire world.

But we're not here for a lesson about the movie industry, and as such is the case I wanna move towards the GMing side of the things. Because, like I said a few days ago, most older horror movies which still hold their charm have something to teach us, positively, or otherwise they wouldn't be as scary as they are. And with this film, we have a great lesson to take.

Somewhat towards the middle of the film, we are first presented with Bub. Those who have watched the film know by now to where I'm going with this, but still… Bub is a thinking zombie. It has a brain, some feelings, a sense of an earlier life; it even enjoys listening to music. And Bub raises the level of the film by so many ranks.

And Bub is an amazing takeaway, because we don't expect to see, to meet, to encounter a thinking zombie. We don't expect to feel something for one of the monsters. And yet, we do. So many blogs and GMing books will talk about giving the goons and mooks a face, maybe even many faces. Most of them don't ask you to give the mindless monsters a face. They're just cannon fodder. But when you will give those mindless monsters a face, and a brain, you get so much more. Because when Bub salutes the "evil" soldier, after shooting him to death, one can't stay calm, uncaring, unfeeling. One only has the ability to look in amazement, to feel. And that's the power of Bub. So have yourself a Bub also.

How about you? Have you watched this movie? What did you take from it? And what have you thought about it?

Re-Animator - Adding Just a Tiny Bit of Humor

I don't like Stuart Gordon's adaptations of Lovecraft. Here, I said it. They are just so bad, so… they're just bad. This time, he does his best, giving us a trashy film done professionally. But that's about all I can say for this bizarre movie, too much for most of us' appetites.

In the movie, Herbert West is transformed into the early eighties, with that time's weird sense of fashion and strange ideals. I might have exaggerated a bit there, but the movie doesn't take itself too seriously either. Herbert messes with the dead, granting them "life" with a strange serum. Then we got much nudity, gore and something that is supposed to be some characters to identify with.

But I guess that I have to say something in its favor, or at least I need to find something to learn from it. After all, if I found something to learn from the terrible Braindead, I must find something to learn from this re-animated dead flick. And what can I say? It got a weird sense of humor.

Humor, from quite an early stage, was associated with the horror genre. When the movie is built around tension-and-release moments, doing the "release" part right is mandatory. And one of the greatest release-mechanisms ever? Why of course, it is the infamous humor.

And that's the lesson to learn from this movie- use humor, but use it well. The reason that the head-on-a-stick is so funny is that it comes just after so much seriousness and villainy, and suspense and so much more. After being serious for far too long for this movie's level, it just comes with a childish joke, breaking the ice, the statues, and our ability to take this movie seriously.

So, I don't know if I succeeded with explaining what I meant. Truth is, this movie's sense of humor is so hard to explain also. But yeah, use humor, it might be what you're looking for your "tension-and-release" cycle.

How about you? Have you found this movie any good? And what have you learned from it?

The Abominable Dr. Phibes- How Not to Use a Pattern

Another campy movie. Sometimes one has to ask himself (or herself) why camp goes so well with the horror genre. But this is a topic for another day (and maybe even for another blog). The Abominable Dr. Phibes is campy enough for its characters to remark about the stupidity of the characters' names. But, unlike with other works of film and television, here it doesn't help the movie to look any better, too bad for this movie…

To put it shortly, the movie chronicles the revenge that a famous and now supposed to be dead organist on a series of surgeons and others of the medical profession for letting his wife die. For some reason he chooses to take his revenge according to the plagues that hit Egypt in the famous chapters from the book of Exodus.

Now, up until now it is a very descent premise, and the list of actors is quite remarkable and promising. The musical score is wonderful and… you get the idea. So why does this movie fail? Mainly because it chooses such a wonderful premise, such a promising pattern, and destroys what it has to offer.

You see, the actions, the killing ways, they're not in the same order as shown in the bible. The film tries so much to be scientifically accurate that it changes the order of the plagues to something else. More logically correct, far easier to believe in terms of causality, but it has a devastating effect in terms of our building dread.

Most of us remember the order of the plagues, at least in broad strokes, enough to understand when the pattern is changed. And when they change the pattern, we don't know what death scene is gonna come now. So instead of looking forward for the death scene, we're busy trying to remember what the Rabi said will be the next one, and we can't because what comes to mind are the original order and the knowledge that it was changed. So we don't look forward to the next death scene, we don't have the anticipation building the right way, and as such it's far harder to dread the upcoming death.

So please, when creating a villain, or a monster, and trying to think about a pattern for the killing, if you'll ever think about using a common knowledge pattern, don't change it. You'll just make it worse.

How about you? What did you learn from this movie? And have you enjoyed it?

Let's Scare Jessica to Death- The Powers of Clothing

Some movies hold to their title, others do not. Too bad that this movie belongs to the latter group. Let's Scare Jessica to Death is an interesting movie, its soundtrack is creepy like hell, and it knows how to play on the audiences fears. Each and every element works perfectly when looked at separately. But when combined? They overshadow each other. And that's the main problem in this movie for me.

In a nutshell, it is the story of a woman who just got released from a mental asylum and who now tries to readjust to her new life, in a house far from town, nice and cozy and quite morbid. She hears things in her head, many-many things, and she tries to deal with it.

What struck me the most about this movie is its use of clothing to tell us about the characters. Especially when looking at our two leading ladies in this film. Emily is dressed in red, which puts her in the sensual realm, as an adult woman. She knows what powers her sexuality possesses.

Jessica, on the other hand, starts the film dressed in violet, and her clothing grows darker in tone with each passing day. I mean, she "chooses" darker clothes with each passing day. And that's interesting, because we can see through her clothing the naivety being broken, we can see how what she hears makes her older, forces her to grow.

And this can be used in our games too. Clothing is such a powerful tool to convey feelings, to convey characteristics, to shed a light on the inner feelings and workings of the characters, it is useful to show social differences. In other words, we can say that "show me what you wear, and I'll know who you are".

All I can say is that maybe, just maybe, one should try to use it. I know that I do, and it works magic for me, why shouldn't it be the same for you?

How about you? Have you watched this movie? What did you think about it? And what have you taken from it?

The Mist- Learning When to Stop

13 years after directing The Shawshank Redemption, Darabont directs another King's adaptation. And I can’t say that I was impressed. It is considered to be one of the greatest and most frightening horror movies of the century so far, but I couldn't agree less. It was one of the most disappointing films that I've ever seen.

On the surface, it has all the elements of being a good horror movie, and also a good movie outside of the genre, the same line that for me holds movies like Casablanca (my all-time favorite), Psycho, The Silence of the Lambs, The 400 Blows and so many more. It has some very nice acting, and it has a political sting, and it has some interesting and surprisingly deep characters (well, most of them, if you look hard enough). It has a really nice conspiracy, and it tackles religious fanatics and hubris filled scientists. It has everything that a movie could ask for.

And that's the problem, it has way too much. The mist isn't scary, because there are creatures in there. They aren't scary, because we've got big ol fucking Cthulhu in there. Cthulhu isn't scary, because we got a conspiracy, and this conspiracy isn't scary because we also got some religious fanatics, and we're also told about the scientists, and we see the people going mad, becoming beasts like in Night of the Living Dead, and… I think that you've got the idea. We've got way too much.

And that's even before we look at the movie on the genre level. We've got horror, and then we got a love story (only for the woman to get killed 2 seconds or so later). Then we get into a Christian movie, later turned into a post-apocalyptic film, before finally ending on the melodramatic Hamlet side of the spectrum.

Maybe it's just me, I don't know. But for me it was hell too much to really care for what's going on. I watched the movie trying to understand what's going on at the beginning, and then started to guess what strange twist they'll bring this time.

And that's a lesson to keep in mind when designing and writing your stories, your adventures. Think not only about what to put in, but also about what to put out. Remind yourself that too much of a good thing turns everything into something bad, or at the very least tasteless. When every few minutes the story changes completely, and you throw something too different and too big to handle, you'll just end with people who don't care.

They don't care not because they don't want to, but because they can't, because you put too much for their minds to handle. Because, and that' a thing that one should keep in mind, you as GM's know everything and you had much time to absorb it, to analyze it, to understand what goes where and when. But players? They only have a few minutes. So have mercy on them, or don't be surprised when they can't get what you're doing next or don't care for your uber-impressive plot twist.

How about you? What did you think about this movie? And have you learned from it something else, something positive?

Daughters of Darkness- Playing with the PCs

Some movies match to their masterpiece title. Others, like Daughters of Darkness do not. I can't say that I was impressed with this movie, or even close to that. It is so over the top that it comes close to the campy group of horror films, it is so trying to reinvent the eroticism of the vampire that it becomes too non-erotic. The dialogue is bad; the acting is mostly mediocre (except for the one playing Bathory who is perfect); the composition of the shots is pure genius at times and complete rubbish at others.

If I had to describe this film, I would say that it is a film about a couple, a newly-wed couple with not much love for each other, and the meeting with the vampire Countess Elizabeth Bathory. Bathory plays with them, enjoys their suffering. Throughout the whole movie, it seems like whenever the director was stuck he threw in some boobs. This idea works as bad as it sounds.

But there are some good things in this movie, specifically the acting on the part of Seyrig, the composition of some of the shots (you'll recognize them when you'll see them) and… the way Bathory plays with the couple. Okay, not all of the playing is good, but the concept is interesting and sometimes even a little bit surprising.

And that's a great takeaway from this movie, this playing thingy. Let your villains and monsters play with the PCs and much hours of enjoyment on your part and frighten looks on the players' parts will be achieved. They will enjoy afterwards, and when they'll win (as sure they will), they'll be far happier than every other defeat they bestowed upon a villain(ness). Make your villains play with the PCs, use the PCs for their own benefits, sometimes even treating the PCs like stolen cars (if I might paraphrase Avery McDonaldo's GMing section in Monsterhearts).

But don't drive it too far, right? You'll might just as well finish like (spoiler alert in 2 seconds or so) Bathory in this movie- dead and copied. Pull it as much as it seems needed and not a single second more than that. Or at least, I think that it's better this way, but I might be wrong…

Anyway, that's it for today. And now it's time to hear you? Have you watched this movie? What did you think about it? And what have you learned from it? 

Threads- Giving the Victims a Face

I don't really know how to start this post. I'm pretty shocked and horrified, you see. I've just finished Threads, a TV-movie made in 1984, about how a single nuclear bomb hit may affect the UK. It's suffice to say that the movie is way too realistic to go unnoticed, unremarked, to let you leave it without the urge to cry. I don't know what else to tell about it, before delving into one of the far too many lessons to learn from it. Should I say that it is not your typical horror movie? That the movie chronicles a little more than 13 years in the characters' lives? That when it was made and first broadcasted this nuclear bombing incident was a possibility, that this movie had a chance to become a reality? That society just crumbles and one starts to somewhat envy the dead?

No, I wanna go to the lesson as quickly as possible, I want to just let it off of my mind. You see, the main reason for the movie's power is that we have feelings and empathy for the victims. We identify with them, we know their normal ways of lives, and they feel real. We also see how the bombing affects them. Them and not some random people, them and not some red-shirts. We get to know the people only to see them become the victims of the bombings.

The bombing itself occurs about 35-40 minutes into the movie. Up until that moment we got to know about 10 characters pretty-pretty well. We watched the Kemps banter, we watched the Suttons say their last goodbyes, and we watched the love story of Ruth and Jimmy who are going to have a baby and so decide to marry. And after we got to know them, the pain is so much stronger, so much more close to home.

But it is more than that. Because we know of people who feel for each other, we feel their fears for their loved ones. We feel for Mr. and Mrs. When they cry for not being able to save their children, but also we cry for them when they only fear it. We cry for Ruth who fears of her baby being deformed, and we hope for Ruth to find Jimmy when she goes out to try and find him.

We also see how they change, how they become quite monstrous themselves when they have to commit crimes in order to survive, how they change to the "dog-eat-dog" mentality. It's the feelings than we have for them that enable the movie to touch us on so many levels, on so many emotions (from the d'aaw in the beginning to the "oh-my-god" of the ending and all those feelings in the middle).

And we can also use it in our games. When we want the players to fear for a city, or to feel for a kingdom, we have to get the players and their characters to know the people there. To know and feel they human-ness in them. Bring those faces out and show them to the characters and to the players who play them, and when the city will be under threat, or when the country will be under a nuclear threat, the players and the characters will do their best.

How about you? What did you learn from this movie? And even more important, how did you feel afterwards?

God Told Me To- Stop Worrying and Embrace the Good Enough

The streak had to be broken, right? My seventh movie in the project wasn't that good. It wasn't that bad also, but… it was okay. Just okay. Nothing spectacular, nothing to fancy about, nothing worth remembering from, one of those movies that you just watch and 5 seconds later you don't remember anything about it or from it. God Told Me To was a watch & forget nothing more and nothing less.

It is a movie about a cop who investigates a series of murders committed by unconnected and too ordinary men. Slowly but steadily he learns that there's far more to it than what meets the eye. Yeah, even the plot is a big cliché, but at least the director knows how to do it. ;-)

And after this movie I did learn something. I learned that not every session has to be perfect, or great. In order for those really great sessions to feel great, they have to feel unique, well above the rest in terms of their level and all. If the rest of the sessions are nice, good and enjoyable, the campaign is in good hands.

And for me, that was kinda new. I learned to accept bad days, or sessions that were almost perfect, but sessions that are just nice- that was inconceivable. I expected from each one of my sessions to be at the very least almost perfect. And the sessions just took too much energy from me, and there were days that I came from the sessions depressed because they didn't live to my expectations.

And I don't know, maybe it is just a certain stage in my GMing career that had to come. And yet, this movie ranked better than some perfect movies like Cronos. And it says that maybe, just maybe, sometimes a nice and no spectacular session is better than the most perfect session imaginable. Sometimes "nice" is just enough.

How about you? When did you learn this truth? And what did you think about this movie?

Invasion of the Body Snatchers- When Knowledge Destroys the Fear

I think that by now it's three great films in a row, if I include this last movie I've seen. And I have to confess, I expected a lot more of the campy side of the genre in this project. I don't know, some of the names sound so campy, like Braindead (which was) and I Walked with a Zombie (which wasn't), but I guess that that's the beauty of it all, right? But today I watched, or should I say finally watched, the movie "Invasion of the Body Snatchers". True, it was the 1978 remake, but I haven't seen the original also (yeah, I know, shame on me). Anyway, let me just say that I was amazed.

To those who are like I was, this is a movie about a deputy health inspector of San Francisco who finds (with the help of one of his workers, and some accidents…) that some creature from space has come to Earth and it starts to spread in the city, creating duplicates of the townspeople. A lot of conformity and paranoia ensues. I didn't do it justice here, but honestly I didn't want to. You just have to watch it yourself.

The movie is great, and one truly becomes paranoid at a certain point (quite early, I must say), and some of the moments are just heartbreaking or utterly terrifying. But the first part of the movie is the most effective part of it, if you ask me.

You see, in the first part, all we have is a few crazy people, and the lead heroine, telling us that something is amiss (we also have a little feeling ourselves that something is amiss, but they pretty much dispute anything like that in the first hour of the film). We slowly begin to understand that there's something bigger in here, something far more horrifying than we thought, and the sense of conspiracy grows. We get the most effective fear of all- that the world itself is evil. As the film goes on, we start to get some info about how and what are those things that do the body-snatching job.

And that's the problem of the film. It shows us the monster, and it will ever be far less terrifying than what we have thought about. True, it gave us hope and then smashed it in the last scene of the film, but even so, it was less effective because at this stage we knew how those aliens work.

And that's a mistake that we can avoid in our games. In horror games, if you don't have to show and explain the monster- just don't! And if you have to explain it? It might be wiser to change the monster to something that you don't have to explain, that you don't have to describe. Because glimpses of something bad, just like we had in the first half of the movie, will be far scarier than any monster we can create ourselves, far more dread-inducing than what our players can devise. Because no one knows how to scare someone else than that someone and this person only needs some glimpses to get the engines to start rolling and to scare himself/herself.

And that's it for today. How about you? Have you watched this film? What did you think about it? And what did you learn from it?

Braindead- When Death Becomes Boring

Another day- another movie. Or something like that, at the very least. Braindead is a bad movie. It should have stayed dead, never becoming alive or even close to that. It is a campy movie drawn to the extreme, and today it's a cult movie, because its director is Peter Jackson. Yeah, that Peter Jackson. It doesn't make it any better as a film, or as a horror film. It's just bad.

It's a movie about a 25 years old virgin, who lives with his mother, and tries to start a relationship with a woman named Paquita. The mother is bitten by a rat, and becomes a zombie, thus starting to infect the entire city. If I made a mistake somewhere about the movie's plot, it doesn't matter, and it doesn't survive any kind of scrutiny. Actually, I'm not even sure that it survives a brain shut-down.

But I promised a lesson for each movie, and this one is no exception. Because, if you'll look pretty hard, and try with all of your heart, you might accidently find something positively to learn from it, like what I've found: That death is kinda boring.

Think about it this way: it is true that if the mom would have just died, I wouldn't have spent these 100 minutes almost cursing this idea of mine, to take this challenge. But you know what? Death is boring. If the mom would have just died, we wouldn't have this movie. And bad as it is, without it we wouldn't have the Lord of the Rings film trilogy, and that's a shame.

So, what can I say? Death is boring, death is not scary that much. Try instead to make the characters suffer, try instead to ensure that the NPCs suffer, and then let them blame it on the PCs. And that's actually, a pretty good lesson. After all, it is far more interesting to have an NPC say to a PC "I lost everything because of you, and now I want you to repay for my loses" than to have this same NPC just die.

And maybe, just maybe, you can get the PC to kill this NPC and go the personal horror route. Or maybe I'm just exaggerating at this point. I don't know anymore, this movie messed with my head way too much.

And that's it for me with this movie. I do hope that at the very least you've enjoyed this post.

How about you? Did you find something else in the movie? Did you use something like along the lines of this lesson in one of your games? How did it go?