How to Lie to Your Players and Get Away with It...

A little tip for today: If the players catch you lying a once, they won't look for another lie at the same scene. Sounds strange, of course, but to my experience it is true. Players come, for some unknown reason, with the confidence in their ability to know when their GM is lying to them and when the GM isn't. If they catch you lie, as little and as unimportant as it may be, they will trust themselves even better with their ability to discern lies. This enables you to lie big time without them knowing it, or even suspecting it.

Don't overuse it, of course, and don't emphasise that you're lying 'cause they can still get suspicious, but if used lightly, it can invoke miracles at the right moments. Trust me about it, it works...

I Know What You've Watched Last Summer...

A little tip that I've stumbled upon once, and since then I'm using quite a lot: A great way to find what type of horror game it will be, is by getting to know what horrors movies the players really like or found frightening. If the players, for example, have found that The Birds and Jaws are truly terrifying, going for a horror game about nature goes mad might be the right type of game to GM. If the players, on the other hand, have been frightened by The Shining, maybe you should throw the slasher game that you've prepared and go to the psychological realm.

It can also be used, of course, to avoid failures. If the players start to laugh every time that they watch a slasher, maybe slasher is not the right type for them. If they find body horror as too horrifying for their taste, maybe there's another direction that you should seek instead of this one.

There's one danger, with using this technique: If you GM a Gothic horror game for your players, and they know the genre well enough, they might get less terrified as they know the common tropes. Here comes to the rescue the other part of this thing: After you know what the basic feel of the game should be, add a little color from other types of sub-genres. If the players found Gothic horror as the most frightening genre, adding a little bit of nature goes mad and psychological horror will surely confuse the players a little bit, just enough to get to the dreading parts...

Different Ways to End a Story...

I just finished watching Rocky, the original, and I must say that it made me look different on games. I knew for quite a time that losing is at least as interesting as winning, but after watching this movie, I started to think about different kinds of victories.

There's of course the normal victory. The hero kills the dragon, the heroine conquers the land, the Balrog is dead, the devil has been stopped and no more red dragons will interfere with human affairs.

But there's also the other type of victory, or at least, one of the others. This is the dramatic victory (in contrast with the procedural of the first), the success over personal conflicts. Rocky lost the fight to Apollo, but he doesn't care, or agrees to a rematch. Rocky is only interested in one thing, Adrian. This is, at least to my belief, the more interesting win, the more interesting success. We strive to get a little bit of drama in the middle of everything, so why not in the end?

Another type of success, or of a victory or a win, is the one of getting a great story. In the Cohen Brother's movies, we know from the start that they gonna fail, yet we're still hoping for them, still enjoying the story, still... And Fiasco conveys it damn well, while opening to us a door to a different kind of games and of stories.

There's also the ending that we can see in Saving Private Ryan, where everyone dies at the end, but the goal is achieved. Wouldn't it be more dramatic if, in the last battle of the campaign, the characters will sacrifice themselves to save the world?

I can, of course, continue with this on and on, but I think that you've got the idea. It's important not only to start well, but to finish even better (I think), and giving the ending this amount of thinking and of going over it will surely benefit the game.

So, how about you? How do you finish your games?

5 Dialogue Mistakes I've Made Portraying My NPCs

And this moment comes, when we get to finally play a part in the game, pretending to be one of the NPCs in the story. Most of us put a lot of effort into them, creating them and painting them (figuratively or else) and we try to breathe life into them and make them deep and well-rounded and not 2-dimensional and when we finally get to playing them, they sound so unnatural, so mechanic. I don't know about you, but it sure happened to me, and I can't stand it.

I've rounded up a list of a couple of the mistakes that I've made when portraying NPCs (and characters in general):

1. Calling the characters all the time by their names. This mistake is big and old, and I suffered from it for many, many years: Every time I spoke to the PCs as an NPC, I referred to them by name. There are places where it is important (like, when referring to a higher class or something), but we don't, in a normal conversation, refer all the time to one another by names (or at least, I suppose so...). So, instead of saying: "So, Bob, how are you today?" say: "So, how are you today?". Also, try calling higher standing persons "your excellency" and not "Mr. Geldof" and so on. Trust me, it does magic.
2. Not so much me, but I've seen many GMs go and say as their NPC: "Blah blah blah..." he said angrily. In RPGs, we can use our voices to tell that, and it will be so much more powerful. If the NPC is angry, talk angrily, don't say the Queen Regent spoke angrily.
3. Don't give speeches. I remember it like it was yesterday: I was GMing to a group of 4 for the second year in our (then) ongoing campaign. They arrived in the nick of time to stop the villain, and she gave them a speech. The fact that it was a supers campaign was no excuse for that, as their faces turned down, and they started to talk about other things, wandering out of the game. Don't give speeches in games, ever. It never ends well, and for fuck's sake with genre conventions, we're not in comics after all...
4. Don't try to be cunning or clever all the time. You know those players who just can't stop trying too hard to be funny or clever? Remember how annoying it is? Why should your NPCs be the same?
5. Get to the point. In real life, we have, at least theoretically, the time to go round all angles before saying our line. In our game, on the other hand, we don't. Get to the point, with as little as possible of rounds and turns to get time, unless it's... I don't know, actually.

So, that's it for today. How about you? What dialogue mistakes did you make with portraying your NPCs?

The Villain Needs You

A little thought for today: The villains don't have to work in the background; they can be the PCs' best friends! Think about it for a moment, wouldn't a villain who is the one who hires the PCs will be so much better? Maybe even he will be their sponsor and helper?
There are some great examples for this throughout the web, but it's not that complicated to achieve: make it as a 2 way formula: 1) The players need the villain's help in order for their characters to succeed for the short term. 2) The villain needs the PCs help in order to eliminate an obstacle that's preventing the villain from succeeding. The rest will come naturally...

10 Mistakes to Fuck Your Campaign

Not a long time ago, 'bout 2 weeks or so, I've participated in 2 game sessions, as a player. He opened the game well, stretching his great idea into a good game, and the session ended top notch. I was happy, 'cause I had a great game. He was happy, because he GMed well, very well actually, even for a not first time GM.

Then came the next session. I, and the other 2 players, came for the game with the expectation from last session, but for some reason or another, the game didn't stand for what it had promised. I started to think about it, trying to figure out how such a wonderful game can collapse in one session. My thinking brought me to these points:

1. If enough story advancement has been achieved, don't add new players. True, there are game where you can do it, but they are the exception and not the rule. Adding new players changes all of the game up to this point.
2. If you add a player, make sure the player's play style is not that different from the rest of the players. First sessions are there for finding this formula for what kind of a game it will be. Adding a player with a different play style makes the adjustments much heavier. In that game, 3 players who are more free-formy and less technical were joined by a very technical and analytical player.
3. If adding players, or if players are missing, think about a rational explanation for why they weren't there. I stumbled with this aspect a lot in my GMing "career", but saying that the character was in the bathroom for example is not that good of an explanation. I try to do something else: I pretend that the character spoke what s/he had to say, and if there's a battle, the character is taking to the side one of the enemies... The character is still there, but in the background.
4. The PCs are there to get the limelight, not the NPCs. In that second game session, there was an NPC on our side who was unstoppable and just a mind-blowing killing machine. We, as players, didn't know what to do about him as we try to stop the same villain he's trying to stop.
5. Players, you aren't there to do some photosynthesis, so don't be vegetables. In Israel, we have a term for the player whose there for saying the "I attack" when is being attacked and that's all, veg (although in Israel we call the player "a flowerpot", or aziz (עציץ)). Players should act, not stay back and wait for others to tell them what to do.
6. References are good, sheer copying is bad. Don't copy entire stories from other places without some adjustments. Better yet, don't steal characters and put them in mid game.
7. Consequences are not a dirty word. If the PCs do a bad thing, or use a power inappropriately, don't let them get away with it that easy, or they'll do it again.
8. On the other hand, don't forget to appreciate the good deeds, or they'll be less and less common.
9. Make sure the players know what to expect for when entering the game. If you want a gritty fantasy game and your players want a heroic one, one of you will have to compromise, and it will probably be you. Make the compromise beforehand and the game won't suffer for being this late.
10. Don't railroad the players, and most of all, don't think that only a particular way (or ways) will solve the story, it will just get into a halt. "No adventure survives first contact with players", so don't make it too dear for your heart.

And, that's it. How about you? What mistakes did kill your campaigns?

When to Roll the Die...

A little thought for today: Roll the die only when it's interesting. Too many GMs tell their players to roll the die for too many things: "I try to open the door. -Roll"; "I look for a clue. -Roll"... If it's important whether there's a success or a failure, it's a good place to roll. If, by not opening the door, a monster will ambush the PCs, it's a good time to roll (unless the next room is boring, then you should make it a failure), but usually it isn't that. Usually, it's rolling just because the rules say so.

If it's not interesting to fail, or to succeed, don't roll. Just don't roll the die. Rolling and calculating takes time and energy and creates a distance from the story (we break the in-game when we get to the mechanics), so think hard before any such a roll if it's really that important or interesting.