So that’s how it is.

This week we’re talking about how smart players are. Sorry, but this one is mainly focused on tabletop games.

Players will almost always try to think ahead of their Dungeon Master. If they can out think you, they can predict what you’re going to do next, and be prepared for it. And if they’re prepared for it, they stand a much better chance of surviving it. Probably, at least. The thing about players, though, is that they generally have to discuss their theories with each other, and considering they’re generally sitting across the table from you, you generally get to hear both what they’re planning, and what they think is going to happen.  A bad dungeon master will take this information and use it to thwart their players at every turn. That is the sort of behavior that leads to players communicating with each other only in whispers, passed notes, and semaphore. As a rule, if your players decide to leave the room once in a blue moon because the ultimate battle of ultimate destiny is about to happen and they want to keep their preparations secret, let them. But, if they leave the room when deciding what route to take to the store, you need to reevaluate your table dynamic.

That being said, one of the greatest thing a DM can do is steal from the players. They are going to be coming up with all kinds of ideas about how your game world works anyways, you might as well use some of them. If you’ve come up with an explanation for something, like why the chancellor is plotting his revenge against the king, and the players have decided he’s out for revenge over the perceived slights the king has been heaping upon him for the last thirty years while you decided he was being mind controlled, incorporating the player’s idea will only enrich the story. Perhaps the demons in his head found firmer purchase thanks to the years of abuse he felt he had suffered. Storytelling is a collaborative effort, and it pays to get help with it. That being said, don’t tell your players you’re doing this, as it detracts from the feeling that the game world is a concrete place. Letting players know you changed your mind about why the great space war was fought based solely on an offhand remark one of them made about how funny it would be if the space elves had masterminded the whole thing will draw unwanted scrutiny to your universe and make it seem far more fluid than it should be. Also, while blending of ideas can be done fairly regularly, such as the mind controlled chancellor example, outright stealing of ideas, such as the space war being masterminded by the elves and not starting over a mineral dispute in Alpha Centauri, should not occur with any kind of regularity. Players love to find out that their suspicions were right all along, but it doesn’t do to let them think they’re smarter than you are, unless they do actually guess what you are planning, in which case they earned it. Quick little explanations, such as the shop keeper being prejudiced because he hates elves, are generally fair game though.

In summary, your players sometimes have good ideas. Just don’t ever tell them that.

I didn’t need to know that.

Today we’re talking about explanations.

Many times, while you are running a game, players will demand to know the rational behind a certain choice. Why did the orc choose to stab the rogue instead of the fighter? Why did the designers of this warehouse decide it needed an acid pit in the center? Why did the quest-giver decide that the fate of the world/universe/kingdom was best left up to a team of murderous vagabonds? And no matter what explanation you give, they will endlessly question and debate your reasoning. As a rule, if you’re players are asking such a question, it is because they have come up with a separate, and in their minds far better, explanation for why whatever situation has just occurred should have been resolved differently. The orc clearly should have stabbed the more dangerous looking party member! That acid pit is a workplace hazard and OSHA would never have stood for it! Fighting the inescapable horror from beyond the universe threatening the world/kingdom/universe should really be someone else’s problem!

And you will want to argue with them! It’s only natural, they are impugning your ability to craft a believable universe, it’s only right that you feel the need to defend your handiwork. You might even start trying to explain things ahead of time, in an attempt to forestall argument. The orc realizes the rogue is an elf, and takes a swing at his hated racial enemy! Do not do this! Your players don’t need an explanation, it’s enough for them the things their characters see and hear. It’s perfectly fine to give them hints, along the lines of “The orc snarls as his eyes fall on your pointed ears and takes a swing”, and it definitely provides an enriching experience for the player, but refrain from telling them why YOU are doing anything. Maybe that rogue is getting stabbed because he’s tactically the most dangerous, or because the player is getting on your nerves, or because the fighter is completely untouchable. It doesn’t matter, because you’re not going to tell them. They are living in the world you establish, and it is up to you to make sure that world makes sense, not them. This doesn’t mean you shouldn’t use player input, which I will cover later, but it does mean you shouldn’t discuss the rational for game decisions with your players.

If you’re players ask within the confines of the game, though, that’s a different story. If they subdue the orc, kidnap the building designer, or make demands of the ruler, they deserve an answer. They may even do some research into their questions, searching the infoweb or ancient libraries for reasons. This is a good time to get in your backstory, give out the thought processes behind the NPC’s decisions, and put a bit for realism into your world. That being said, I’m not in any way suggesting you have to tell them the truth, just that they deserve to know something. Remember that NPC’s are allowed to be just as untrustworthy as your average player.

Remember, don’t explain yourself, don’t have your NPC’s explain themselves unless someone asks, and don’t forget to lie to the player when appropriate.

Game! Set! Story!

Ok, this one is coming at you a bit late, but real life is one of those things.

This week I’m talking about the importance of set dressing, the little touches and objects that give places and people character without you having to rub your player’s noses in it.

Unobtrusive set dressing is one of the best ways to convey information to players, and it gives your game a vibrancy it would otherwise lack. A player who walks through town to the mayors office and told “Times are hard because of the recent goblin attacks, and we need you to fix this” is going to be nowhere near as engrossed as the player who walked through a shantytown of refugees to the scorched walls of town hall, where the bedraggled mayor pleaded for their assistance. I should stress, though, that sets are not just a matter of applying adjectives until the right feeling is achieved. Seeing an object can generally be relied upon to get the player thinking about how it got there, which in turn helps fabricate their opinion of someone. For instance, the crusty old barman might have a hook for a hand, but it’s the well worn sword hanging on the mantle behind him that tells you how he got it. Objects speak volumes, and go a long way towards giving players the back story they need to hear, but could never possibly stay awake for. The town was saved by a mighty hero hundreds of years ago? There’s a statue of a burly man with a sword standing on a dragon’s head in town square. This kingdom has been at war with the dwarf mines for fifty years, and have settled into an uneasy truce? The tavern has a “No-Footstool” sign up and there’s still a couple of people with beards nailed up on their walls. The humans and weird blue skinned aliens have had an alliance for hundreds of years? The holonews has an alien and human anchor, and all signs and announcements are in human and crazy alien gobbledygook.

The rule is pretty simple. If you can show it or tell it, show it. A player who can visualize your world more clearly is a player who is more immersed. Same for visual media, don’t tell the player, put it there for them to see. Not in a cut-scene, but something they stumble across in their travels. Possibly the best use for set dressing is for defining characters. If you walk into a man’s office and he has a messy desk, newspaper clippings of his past triumphs on the wall, and a half empty bottle on a shelf in the corner, you can suddenly form a picture of them in your mind. This sort of thing is remarkably easy to do, and can be done fairly quickly. Generally, all it takes is to think about the person or situation you want to describe, and come up with three sentences about it. Simple things, like a dungeon being damp and musty, or an abandoned outpost having moss growing over it’s broken walls, or even the sides of a man’s computer being covered in layers of post-it notes will let the players delve deeper into your world and construct a more satisfying narrative.

Nowhere is this concept more important than in a video game wherein the player’s character is expected to have a certain personality. Giving the player a chance to visit some space that belongs entirely to them is by far the one of the best ways to tell the player who they are and why they act the way they do. A fussy character may have an extremely neat desk denoting his meticulous personality, a grizzled mercenary commander may have a little box of medals and a picture of the girl of his dreams hidden in his locker to show he is courageous but sensitive, and pretty much any character would have a box of machine parts shoved discretely out of the way because they are secretly a robot. The main thing is that you let the players see the environment their characters have created for themselves, so they know why they are expected to act they way they do.

Remember, use objects, not just adjectives, and try to make three sentences. It makes it long enough to be worth listening to, but not so long they tune out.

Right to Die

It seems only fair that if I do a post about killing players, I should do a post about player’s right to control their character. Just as it is the DM’s right to kill the players when they decide to kill the king in the middle of his throne room, it is the player’s right to try. Whether you’re playing a pen and paper or video game, the PC is the player’s only method of interacting with the world around them, and you cannot take that away from them. This isn’t to say that their characters can’t be forced to do things they don’t want to do, but the player has to be the one that does it. Kidnapping, extortion, blackmail, and even guilt tripping can give a player motivation to do something he doesn’t want to, but it must be his choice. A good way to think about it is “keep it first person”. Games like Bioshock, anything from Valve, and even most Call of Duty titles have pivotal moments that reach out to the player because they happen under player control. In Modern Warfare One, YOU die of radiation, not some random soldier, just as every Valve game cut-scene is performed with you still in control of your character. It is even admissible to mind control a player in some fashion (as long as you roll for it), but make sure the player is still in control of the character. Bioshock is a good example of forcing a player to do things he wouldn’t actually want to, but never taking away control.

But this is a digression from the point I was making, which is the player’s right to break things. It’s been said that players hate the railroading, but it’s more correct to say players hate obvious railroad tracks. And this is understandable, as the DM is trying to impose their ideas on the players story, however necessary that is. The player is allowed to buck the tracks as much as they can, in an equal degree of severity to the amount of railroading. Let’s say a player needs to go into a room to talk to an important NPC. If a large man pushes you into a room, break out the window and flee. If, on the other hand, a small man mentions that there is free cake in the room, go inside and grab a slice. The DM can do their story either way, but the player gets a better deal if he got to choose. I talked last week about the detriments of killing quest givers, but the player has the right to try, especially if it makes sense to them. A Crimelord hands the player a gun and tells him to kill a rival in exchange for his family’s safe return? Shoot the Crimelord and roll them into a ditch. If the DM didn’t see that coming, it’s their own fault. King sending you on another suicide mission? Fireball the throne and leg it. You might even get away with it if you can escape before the DM manages to come to terms with what you did. I understand that these are hard to escape in video games, where the game designer cannot plan for every contingency, but the easy rule of thumb is to have a plan for every NPC the players can kill.

The player’s most important right, however, is the right of suicide. A PC, being the only thing a player can control in a game, is also the only thing a player can be sure to destroy when they need revenge. When the DM has committed some completely unjust act, such as saving the day again with their precious DM PC, the players have the right to kill themselves in any way they can. Often, this involves attacking whoever just wronged them in game, which almost always means death. Sometimes they don’t have a plan beyond charging the throne and taking as many with them as they can. Sometimes they just turn on each other, and the party descends into madness and bloodshed. Whatever they do, a good DM will take note of what caused it and discuss it with the players later, when cooler heads have prevailed.

How to kill a player.

So I was talking to my brother earlier today, and he asked me a question, one every Dungeon Master, Storyteller, or Game Master needs to have an answer to. What happen when your players decide to off the quest-giver? Some of you will have to deal with this constantly, with the perpetually meandering party who takes your carefully scripted campaigns and perforates them until all semblance of plot has drained into the muck, and some of you just have that one player with the character sheet no one is allowed to look at who’s totally not playing an assassin this time guys, for real.

Regardless, at some point in your life, the players are going to lob a fireball at the king, stab the kindly old mayor in the neck, or pull pistols on the crime lord. And you are absolutely not going to be expecting it. So, back to the original question, what do you do?

First things first, you give them an out. Always drop the “Are you sure?” when the players have decided they’re going to do something that will get them killed. If your players are half as smart as their characters, they’ll at the very least think twice before offing that guy. They’ll probably still try it, especially if they’re new, but you gave them an out, so your hands are clean now.

Second, make them roll for it. If they’re trying this sort of thing, they probably just rolled out of fighter college and think they’re top dog, and their chances of pulling this off are ludicrously low. They can take their shot, but they have to earn it. Plus, if they botch it, no harm done. Have them get beaten by guards, throw them in jail for the night, fine them, but you can get back to the important business of making your players dance for your amusement.

Third, let’s say they pull it off, or near enough. The rogue crossbowed the king in the eye, the little psycho whose mom you owe a favor threw a satchel charge at the president, or they snuck a disassembled LAW rocket into the crime lord’s mansion. Now you’re in a bind, because they cannot be allowed to get away with this, but you can’t listen to your first instinct and just drop rocks on them until they die. This leads to angry players who never want to play with you again. Of course you’re still going to kill them, mind, just not that blatantly. If your important plot person had bodyguards, this step is pretty easy. Roll some dice behind your screen (you better have a screen, even if it’s just a binder), and then tell them the guards killed them. If the important and now deceased NPC didn’t have any guards (what’s wrong with you? You put a defenseless NPC next to the players?) then you need to have someone nearby who can call the guards. City, military, royal, whatever, somebody yells for them and the players get killed.

That’ll learn ’em! Remember, give them an out, and roll enough dice that it seems legitimate when they die. And maybe next time they won’t be so stupid.