5 Thoughts on Mystery Planning

In one of the bigger RPG forums in Israel, there's a discussion about investigative games: Possible, or not? And if possible, how can it be achieved? As a person who GMs quite a lot of investigative games, I started to think about how one should plan a game like that and how it should be GMed. My thoughts about the subject follow:

1. The most important thing to consider is what place clues should take in your mystery. In some investigative books, the investigators like Sherlock or Poirot, finding the clues is not the challenge, and both Sherlock and Poirot find them quite easily. In other stories, we can go for quite a lot of time before a single clue is found. For me, I think that the real challenge shouldn't be to find the clues, but to use them together to find the real criminal.
2. Red herrings. This is another important thing to consider, as this concept is used in almost the entire investigative canon of books. For me, I always thought that red herrings are one of the more unique qualities of the genre, and one of the hardest to pass to RPGs. While in other mediums, you can decide when the investigator will throw the red herring, in RPGs you cannot. If I want to use it (and boy, I sure want), I tend to use it as a comeback in a later investigation, or more likely as a small level. You solved the mystery, but there's still a hidden layer that you might need to find, someone who activated the criminal that you caught.
3. Types of crimes. We have to face it, solving mysteries can become as tedious as dungeon crawling (and far more frustrating, of course). Because of that, we have to rewind the mysteries. One crime will be a murder mystery; another will be a kidnapping mystery... But we can go to even farer places: One mystery will contain a moral dilemma; another will confront one of the characters with his/her deepest fears...
4. Complexity levels. I've written about it once, but it worth repeating: Not all mysteries were born the same, some are harder than the others, some are more complex than the others, and some have a bigger scope than the others.
5. Team work. In the canon, the investigator never was alone. Sure, s/he did almost all of the work, but there was another one. In RPGs, we can't have one player who will be the mastermind and the others to be the sidekicks. One way to solve it is with having one person to play the computer genius of the group, another to play the interrogator of the group and so on... A little better approach (to my belief) is to have this allocation of experts, but to have skills that are known to more than one expert. The computer expert might be better at using the Internet, but she will also be good with sneaking past cops. The sneaky might be better at sneaking past cops, but he'll also be good with using the computer. This way, there's a greater feeling of teamwork, as the characters can help each other...

So, these are my thoughts on the subject. How about you? How do you plan/GM investigative games?

"My Character Wouldn't Do That!"

Yesterday, inspiration struck me. I was reading a post over at Stargazer's and I understood right away that he's right. Sure, I had a few posts that were directed to my players (or to other GM's readers...), but it can't hurt to have another tips' post directed to them, can it?

Anyway, I wanted to talk about something that I've heard a lot, from myself and from many others: "My character wouldn't do something like that!" This dreadful answer is something that we hear or make in order to save ourselves from doing something that we don't like. "The mayor wants you to leave those cops alone. -My character hates cops, Holilo Lombrete won't do a thing like that!" 

Before we go for what I want to say today, I want first to examine why it's so problematic. There are many reasons and many problems that a statement like that carries with it. The first that I want to discuss is that a statement like that means that the player doesn't trust the GM. In other words, we have here a trust issue. If the player says something like that, he's like saying "I know what you want me to do, but I don't like this idea, so fuck off!" This is a sure way to make the next idea by the GM even worse or late or even make the GM have trust issues with himself/herself and no new and/or interesting ideas will come. Sure, I'm a little bit going for an over the top thing, but this is the way to get there (well, one of the ways...).

Secondly, it prevents the player(s) from getting to new and interesting places. Genesis had a song called "I know what I like (and I like what I know)", and this is the point of the song: I know what I like and don't like, and I like what I know, resulting in an anti to try new things.

Thirdly, it makes the characters stereotypes. I'm sure that almost any person that we'll see, even if s/he will say "I won't do that", if they'll have no other choice, they'll do that. More than that, even in less dreadful situations, people do things that they don't want to do.

So, what did I want to say after all of this long long exposition? That any character can do any action that she wants or doesn't want to do. That's the whole point, that's what I wanted to say, and that's probably one of the most shocking (at least to myself) revelations I've reached for this year.

Think about it for a moment. I can justify according to my background almost everything that I can do. I can justify a helping and caring hand, and I can justify in the same way the opposite of it. A pacifist might justify carrying a sword in order to intimidate as a way to prevent wars, and a womaniser might stop chasing a woman by saying that she probably has a good reason for not wanting him (Skins, anyone?). Justification is not that hard to achieve, and if it's not strong enough, a few "yes, and"s and the problem is solved.

One more thing to consider is that this choice, whether to chase the goal while doing something that is against all of the character's morals or to leave the goal, is the highest point of drama. The sudden understanding that my morals stand in the way of my goal, or vice verse, is the whole point of drama. After all, if there's no real conflict there, there's no real interest...

So, this concludes this post. What do you think? Do you also agree that everything can be justified according to the character's background? Why, or why not?

5 Quick Tips for Your Descriptions

"You see in front of you the entire city, trees full of green leaves watch the city. Many people go from place to place, making the city seem full of life and unresting. Large red areas fill the remains of the surroundings, as the enemy siege towers grow bigger and bigger as they come closer to the city..."

So, today I wanted to talk about a thing that was overlooked by me for many a years, and I'm still seeing it in many GMs' description: Exciting all the senses. Every literary character, and PCs are included there, has 6 senses: Sight, hearing, smell, touch, taste and the sixth one. A mistake that is commonly used is to forget about the last four, and to go almost solely for sight with a little help from the hearing sense. The description from above is an extreme example of this: Only sight.

Tip 1: In every description, excite at least 2 different senses.

Tip 2: Don't go for the same 2 senses every time, make as much movement in the 2 you go for as you can.

The sixth sense, which deserves a paragraph of its own, is the feeling sense: "A dreadful feeling fills you..." This kind of things. It's a sense that should be used, but it needs a special consideration. It's always better to say that this place makes you want to puke than terrifies you. It's even better to say that "it seems too easy", or "too silent", etc... Go for the sense, but don't state for the players how their characters really fill, make the players do this "dirty job".

Another thing, that is often overlooked, is the description of how someone speaks: "She speaks with anger as she says this", or describing an atmosphere of tension. It's far better to give it through the voice. Talk angrily for the first example, or squeak for the second, and the tone and atmosphere will reach the character quicker and far more powerful.

Tip 3: You can use your voice to convey anything that you want it to convey, including contradictions to what you say, use it.

Lastly for today, is "how many details should I include in a description". Truth is, there's no definite answer. It's usually better, though, to make descriptions short and to the point. Don't be afraid to give just the surface and to expand the description according to the players' questions: "A smell of blood fills the room. -From where is it? -You go after the smell and you find, behind the table, the body of Sir Lancelot!"

Tip 4: Make descriptions short and to the point. 3 things in 20 seconds should be enough.

Tip 5: Don't be afraid to expand and/or to wing things on the fly according to the players' questions. It seems much less of an overdose...

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? 

4 Minutes of Suspense

12 minutes of suspense are far better than 12 seconds of surprise. It's really cool to surprise the players and all, but surprise is less useful and much weaker (story wise of course) than suspense). Hitchcock gave an example once which went something like that:

2 people are speaking over a dinner table in a restaurant when suddenly a bomb that lied underneath it blew up and the characters have been hit. We've got here 4, maybe 5 seconds of surprise. Now, imagine that the camera showed the ticking bomb from beforehand. Now, every line in the dialogue, every beat of action, is full of suspense. When the bomb finally blows up, there's no surprise, but we've got 4 or 5 minutes of suspense.

That's the whole thing. If you want to surprise the characters, think about the way you want to do this. If you can find a way to make the same thing, but with replacing the surprise with suspense, it's far better. Think about this situation: The characters arrive back from their mission and are on their way to the mayor's house to get their reward. When they arrive there, they find his body. We strived here for surprise and we got it.

On the other hand, wouldn't it be better if we would have plant clues in the scenery that something bad is gonna happen? The sun is bloody and red, the town is silent, and people go from place to place wearing black... Now, the players start to feel this tension, this suspense that something bad has happened. Suddenly, we get far more powerful time with this mayor's death.

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When You Come to the Session Without Even the Slightest of Ideas...

Coming with an idea for today's post was hard; I actually needed a second cup of tea just to find it. Then, it finally struck me, an idea that just waited there to be explored: What do you do when you come to the session without even the slightest idea about what to do?

1) Ask the players to tell what happened the last session

Sometimes we just don't remember what happened, but usually we do, so why to ask for this rewind? Because the players see a picture of their own, that is quite close and similar to yours but not completely. I care more for certain points, they forget others and they'll tell you these things if you'll just listen.

Asking for this rewind gives them the stage and the limelight they need to tell you just that. They'll tell you what they like and what you didn't, if you know how to read between the lines, they'll tell what they want to see more and what not... All of these things will give you heavy doses of inspiration for the session.

2) Let the players run it without knowing it

Using "yes, and" responses, let your players build the "platform" for you. This will give you both a place and a few NPCs and also a routine that you can break. "When we last left you, you were in a bar. What do you do? -Is there a barmaid there? -Yes, and he's showing you his hand waiting for the money for your drinks. -Are there other people who sit in the bar? -Yes, and they have empty glasses and torn clothes..."

From here, it's easy to get a conflict inserted: "The barmaid refuses to get your money, but receives those poor people's money with a cynical smile"; "The poor people draw their swords and they look at you with anger, 'you should have invited us for beer when you had the chance'", and so on...

3) Bring 2 cultists with a gun

You didn't expect me to leave it behind, did you? It doesn't have to be cultists, or a gun (it can be 2, for example, one each...), etc. It can, and should be, a little bit more interesting: "Your sister enters with a gun pointed at you", "Your husband enters with a gun pointed at you" and so on...

4) Someone has been murdered

Another classic. Murdered people are always a way to bump up the excitement and it gives the players something to chew while you think of something cleverer. It can also be used to dramatic effect: The NPC the players wanted to meet was murdered 3 days before they've arrived to her castle; the villain the characters wanted to bring to justice committed a suicide moments before the characters got him...

5) Take inspiration from the last show that you've seen on TV

TV series is just like a campaign in so many ways, that taking a plot from a TV series is a sure way to get something that is appropriate to a campaign (well, almost a sure way...). Because it's the last thing that you've watched, it's the easiest one to apply to the game- it's fresh and new, after all...

If you've watched an episode of Buffy with Adam there, you've got a monster to unleash at the party. If you've watched an episode of Seinfeld, you've got a situation you can apply, and a few NPCs (you can get some NPCs from Buffy also, but they are usually already there, disguised as PCs...).

You can get this inspiration from a movie also, but it will be less appropriate usually to a campaign (and it is also quite longer than a single TV episode...).

And that's it. How about you? What do you when you come to a session without any idea?