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?

The Black Cat- Doing It the Lovecraftian Way

Universal's horror films rarely stand to the effects of time. Most of them look aged, irrelevant, and even quite silly. But there are a few that live to this day. The Black Cat is one of them, even though it doesn't bear any resemblance to the amazingly scary horror masterpiece written by Poe and bearing the same name (or is it the other way around?).

It is a movie about a newly-wed couple (yeah, again) who are honeymooning in Hungary, and are joined in the train by a Hungarian Psychiatrist. A few minutes later and they are already in the house of a mischievous Austrian architect. From then on we slowly get to the weirder realm, although when it does get to this realm it picks a Lovecraftian ending pace

And that's actually, the main reason that the movie works for me. There is a reason that Lovecraft's stories are so frightening. I mean, there are reasons for that. One of them is the levels of horror that he's working with, but another one is the pattern that all of his stories share.

In Lovecraft stories', he starts slowly, really slowly, with only hints and such, and only in the last page or two he picks the pace. From that moment onwards, all hell breaks loose and the weird element is skyrocketing in the speed of light. But he starts slowly. True, we know from the very beginning what we will face, but we don't see it till the end, and we only learn about it gradually.

Anyways, this pattern carries with it 2 main benefits. The first one is that it makes the thing, the monster, more believable. After so many pages of trying to understand it, and seeing the effects of its existence, it is much easier to accept this monstrosity.

But there is also another benefit, and this one is far greater. It creates a build-up, and this build up is way better than the build-up usually utilized in the horror market when pulled right. And Lovecraft knew how to do it.

But truth is, it isn't that much harder to pull right. One only needs to understand that instead of showing an attack in the beginning, one shows a diary. Instead of showing the remains of a victim, one only tells about it behind closed doors.

And then, in the end, when we pick the pace and show the true horror, gaze into the abyss and see the tentacles and eyes, we're much more frightened, much more terrified, much more scared. And that's the whole thing, that's the point, in the end, to frighten.

How about you? Have you watched this movie? What did you think? What have you learned?

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? 

Start At Your Best, And Then Slowly Raise It up.

It's not a comeback if I don't write about improvisation or lessons from improvisation, right? Well, I'm here to fix that…

A few years ago I went to a great improve seminar. We talked, and practiced stuff and the like. And then, during one of the Games, this instructor says: "Be blunt, whatever cool and interesting stuff you have, bring it on upfront." Needless to say, it created some very different stories.

But you see, there's a lot of logic to it when one really thinks about it. I mean, from a story's standpoint, if I'll keep the good stuff for too long, the audience will get bored. If I'll start with it, though, I'll probably find a way to build upon it with "yes, and-ing" and I've got a better story.

If I'll translate it to RPGs, it is pretty much the same. If I want to ensure that the players 9including the GM) have a good time, I want to present the cool stuff upfront and as soon as possible, and then we'll all build upon it, whether players and/or GM.

In Israel, there's a nice saying that goes something like this: "Start at your best, then slowly raise it up." And apart from being great all by itself, it is far easier to accomplish it when you start at your best.

How about you? Do you use something like that in your games? Why, or why not?

Two Dirty Tricks for the Horror GM

So… I've GMed a nice little one-shot today. It was a minimalistic game, with the players playing themselves, as prisoners in a prison. The "door" of their cell was open through most of the game, which meant that they went out of their cell about 5 times in the entire session, only to come back moments afterwards.

The game ran quite smoothly, although the players did most of the work for me. You see, the players came with things that were much more frightening for them than anything I could come with, so I just sparked their imaginations and I let them do the rest. What followed was a game that was mostly made of their theories, spiraling more and more to the extremely scary things.

But I utilized another trick also. I used the infamous theme from Requiem for a Dream. Now, one of the dirtiest ways to create suspense is to slowly turn up the volume. If one does it slowly but steadily, it creates a feeling of a build-up towards something. So I turned the volume up and up, up to the maximum, and then silence and a bad event. The players did the rest for me.

And that's it for today- two dirty tricks for the horror game. Happy gaming to you all…

4 Scenes Are Going to be Remembered

The players are gonna remember about 4 scenes from your game. 4 scenes, no more and no less if you're lucky. You want a proof of course, and I'm gonna give you. Think about a movie that you really liked. Let's say "The Dark Night". What do you remember from it? You probably remember the opening scene, with the bank robbery where they kill each other when each one finishes his role. You probably remember the end scene, when Batman saves the day and then is hunted by the cops and dogs. You probably remember also one or 2 scenes from the middle, like the death of Rachel, or maybe it is the scene when the ships are supposed to blow each other?

It's also right in your game. The players are gonna remember about 4 scenes from the game, and they are gonna be probably the 2 most emotional scenes in addition to the opening and closing scenes. This means 2 things:

1. We have far less work than we intended or thought that we'll have.
2. We want to choose which 2 middle scenes will be remembered.

The first thing is quite straightforward. We have far less work, and we don't need to try to make every scene spectacular and unique. These are the scenes that their whole purpose is to both create and maintain the atmosphere and to create the pattern.

The second thing is quite more interesting. First of all, it talks at only 2 scenes that we have control about, not the whole 4. Secondly, it doesn't state how we can make them remembered. The first and last scenes are gonna be remembered no matter what. Not only that, though, but they are the most important scenes in the game. The agent closes on Trinity; Jack escapes from the guards saying that this is the day that he almost got captured; Vito says that he can't even call him his godfather... And so it is with the end, as another part falls from the spaceship in Firefly at the end of the episode, showing that everything is back to normal; Neo stops the bullet and makes Agent Smith explode... These are the 2 most important scenes in the game.

For the other 2, we can decide. The most remembered scenes follow one of 2 principles: They are very dramatic and emotional (Hamlet gives his famous monologue) or very spectacular (Neo saves Trinity from the falling helicopter). The scenes that are gonna be remembered are probably going to follow a few things:

• They are going to break the pattern. Pattern is created to be broken. Breaking it makes a contrast that makes the breaking scene more powerful and remembered.
• The drama in the scene is going to be high. Even if this is not the most dramatic scene in the story, it's gonna be dramatic.
• It's gonna be a spectacular scene. Same as above, there is going to be a special thing or even in the scene.
• They are gonna include a lot of build up to the scene. Having a perfect scene is not the only thing; you have to build to it. 
• They have to fulfil a promise. It doesn't matter what the promise is, whether it's the promise for a fight against the arch villain or a promise for a war council against the neighbour country. There should be a promise, and it should be fulfilled in this scene.

Let's look for example at the battle between Romeo and Tybalt and see how each of these things are fulfilled:

• A pattern is broken: Romeo, who was out of the fights and battles between the 2 families, suddenly enters the conflict with a purpose to kill.
• The drama is high: Romeo comes after his best friend has died by the sword of Tybalt. He is in a conflict also, because Tybalt is now his kinsman. Having a responsibility for his friend death also adds to the drama of his decision to confront Tybalt. But killing Tybalt is not enough. There are witnesses to the event, and the prince is now looking for him. Romeo suddenly loses all of his statues and has to run for his life.
• The scene itself is spectacular. The dialogue is short and powerful, each word is important. The body and soul of Mercutio is still there. 
• There's a build up for this scene: Romeo is responsible for Mercutio's death, Tybalt is a short tempered person, he was in the first fight of the play, and he is the one who discovered that Romeo was in the ball... Romeo on the other hand is a peaceful person, and a kinsman to a person from the opposite family.
• The scene fulfils a promise: In the beginning of the play, in the prologue, we already know that it's gonna be tragic. There is no happy ending for anything while our protagonists are still alive. The conflict between the 2 families is all too familiar, and if the protagonists are getting married, the conflict should return to destroy everything. This promise is fulfilled when Romeo kills Tybalt, thus killing the cousin of Juliet (his love) and flaming anew the conflict, on the same time he is sentenced to be exiled. The promise is (almost) fully fulfilled.

And that's it for today. How about you? Do you agree, disagree, something else? How do you create the middle story-peak scenes?

My First 15

Over at Roleplaying Tips, John posted a tip and a tip request by a fellow reader. The question that has been asked there is an important one: "How do I excite my players in the first minutes of the game?" There are actually 2 questions there:

1. How much time means the phrase: "First minutes of the game"?
2. How do I excite the players?

For the first question, the asker gives an answer: 15 minutes. It's logical, and watching movies can prove this point: You need 15 minutes to stress the point and the mood of the movie. Truth is, though, that it's much more dependent on the length of the session being run than on a definite number. A session that runs for 3 hours will need much more minutes of creating excitement than a session of 1 hour. There are 2 reasons for that:

• In the longer session there is more time for the energy and excitement to dwindle down, and because of that we need more energy in the first place so we won't end breathless and zombie-like.
• 3 hours is a far longer time period, which means that far more activities can be done in this amount of time. We need to stress from the very beginning that this 3 hours are gonna be far better than 3 hours of watching TV and playing video games, for that matter...

So, what is the definite time that we need to allocate to exciting our players? I don't know for sure, but about 20 minutes for every 2 hours of gaming sounds good to me (and yeah, I include breaks in the 2 hours). That means that a 4 hours session will need about 40 minutes of exciting the players, or in other words: An act of its own.

Now, for the second question things get far trickier. In the original post, they gave 4 ways to do that. The first that was suggested was with an action scene. I'm not sure that I like this way, as it carries a few problems with it. First of all, this battle, this fight, won't be important to the story, and as such it will be a waste of time. We don't get to the table to kill monsters; we go there to tell a story. It can be a story about killing monsters, but even then, there's no place for a monster that has no relation to the goal of the boss monster. True, at first it might be cool to kill a few monsters every time we start a session, but it will become tedious.

The second tip is to reward great roleplaying during the start of the session. I suppose, as is normally the case, that they mean experience reward, and I've written about it already. But apart from the common problems of using experience points to bribe players to roleplay more, it's a really good idea. Rewarding the players for starting the session with a little bit of roleplaying is a sure way to get them to roleplay more during the session.

Then we get to the second tip by John, which is to finish the last session with a cliffhanger and then continue the next session right from there. This is a classic tip, and probably one of the best there are, but finishing every session with a cliffhanger (or even most of them) will drain from the players the feel of completion. If we'll look at our beloved TV series, it's less than 50% of the episodes that end with a cliffhanger. So, as though it can take us pretty far, something else must be used also. There's also one more problem with cliffhangers that at least from my experience I tend to overlook (and I'm sure that I'm not the only one out there who overlooks this): "Sometimes, the continuation doesn't stand to the promise of the cliffhanger. Then, instead of the benefits of using cliffhangers, we get the drawbacks.

The last tip from John is with the recap. I've wrote already about how to use this recap to get ideas for what to do in the session, but using it to excite the players is something that I haven't thought about well enough. Sure, I've let my recaps excite my players but it was more because it was another moment to shine (and to show what I want to get from my players) than because of the need to excite them.

What about my tip, though? I've written already about building platforms, and about the first act, but 2 other things:

• Start big. It's far better (at least to my belief) to start with a big and grandiose event than with an action scene. I opened a V:tR session once with the haven of the PCs being discovered during a school trip. I've opened another with the assassination of the prince (I don't think that I ever had a prince who didn't die at some stage in the game), another with a history book from the future written by one of the PCs and dedicated to another. It's far more useful, to my belief, than an action scene.
• Throw the PCs (and the players who play them) into the mood of the game. If I GM a horror game, I'm gonna start with a scene that showcases the mood of macabre in the story, and the players will fall into it. The excitement soon will follow, rising up to where it should be...

So, how about you? How do you excite the players in first minutes of the game? 

The Dirty Secret of Mystery Planning

Most GMs wanna run a mystery game, at least once. Some of them, at least from those that I came to know, wanna GM a mystery campaign and not just a little game session. There is one problem that prevents them, "how can I come up with a new complex plot for each mystery?". For that, there is a simple answer: "You don't.

The longer version is more down to earth: After you've ran a complex mystery story, the players won't expect an easy and shallow one. More than that, they'll look for the rest of it. "No, it's just another red herring". After you've made a complex plot, with many stages and many more red herrings, coming with a simple one, a murder mystery at the level of an Action movie's mystery, they won't believe it's that simple and they'll create the complex stages for you.

Take into account, though, that after a very easy one, running another easy one will destroy what you built. It's preferred, at least from my experience, to go for one complex, one shallow, but don't make it too obvious. Sometimes, change of complex levels might be the refreshment the game needs.

On a side note, this can be used in conspiracy games also. When the players and their characters start to unravel the conspiracy, they'll look for more than what is on the surface. Doing all the work of the conspiracy in question seen to all will make them seem much more sinister...

Recurring Motives and Improvisation

A little late thought for today: When improvising a game, using recurring motives makes the game feel more sophisticated and better planned. It helps to create foreshadowing for the continuation of the game, while also creates a way to bring the story back to normal when internal consistency is broken. Motive also has the connection to higher degrees of prepared storytelling, and using it while improvising helps to create the illusion that the game is not improvised.

It doesn't have to be complicated or fancy or anything, though. It can be as simple as a kobold army that brings the forsworn doom, which comes whenever the characters failed in something and as sophisticated as a knight in rotting armour who says "the time is coming" whenever something bad is gonna happen that has an influence over a major NPC.

What about you? Do you use recurring motives when improvising? How?

Finishing with a BOOM

I think that it's time to talk about something that is a little bit more practical, about finishing game sessions. I finish my sessions with what I call a BOOM. I differentiate between 2 types of BOOMs: Those that I use to finish one shots, and those that I use to finish campaign sessions.

The first kind, that I mainly for one shots is the explosion type. It is usually quite straightforward; something explodes a short time before the end of the session. The logic behind this kind of session closure is very simple: It looks cool, sounds cool, and there is no time to further explore the characters, so the game should end with the most positive note that I can close it with. The explosion doesn't have to be physical, though, as it can be an explosion of all the bricks to remain moral or something. It should be something unique, or different, and it should look and sound like something that the characters will want to remember, like being stomped by Cthulhu or something ("remember that time when we were locked in the house and Daniel missed a shot and the blue liquid exploded and killed James and Tom, and then that yellow something came and stomped us?")...

The second type is BOOMs of campaign session endings. There I find two types: The classical cliffhanger, where something remains open for the next session ("the enemy army marched to town, and we all saw it at the horizon, waiting for something..."), and the Bang. Bang is a really important choice that lights a certain aspect of the character. There is no right choice or bad choice in this aspect, what is important is the choice itself, and what was chosen. When Bruce Wayne has to choose whether to reveal that he is Batman or no in "The Dark Night", he's faced with a Bang: What is more important, short term future or long term future? Saving a few people now, or saving a lot more lately, when it might be too late? This choice lights the moral aspects of Bruce.

Usually, I try to finish most of my campaign sessions with Bangs, as I believe it's much more rewarding than the cliffhanger. Also, I find the cliffhanger as cheating. There is no sense of achievement when every session (or most of the sessions) ends with a question mark. Also, I believe that Bangs are much more dramatic, and as such are much better suited for the stories we so strive to tell.

What about you? Do you use any of those ways to finish sessions? DO you use something else? Does it work?

Connotations of Movements

During my long time of watching lots of movies, I saw something that returned in most of the movies. It's actually a simple thing, and a really cool and useful one. The thing is that the place from where the characters come is closely related to their role in the movie. Role as in good or evil, that is.
When characters enter from the left of the screen, they are usually the good guys. When they enter from the right, they are usually the bad guys.
I think that this simple fact can be really useful, in two ways. Firstly, creating this pattern, or another one, can be really useful in making connotations and thus make the players feel differently for things, maybe even without knowing it.
Secondly, is the ability to break this pattern, thus making things that seemed certain much less certain and much more frightening. "What will s/he bring next? What pattern s/he will break next?" The surprise and shock of a pattern well built being broken can be really useful, and breaking that of characters? well...