The Alexandrian

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Batman Begins - Interrogation

In the last Rulings in Practice I mentioned that the techniques used for resolving perception tests can be contentious and result in a surprising amount of rancor and anger.

But social skills are where the long knives come out.

There are three main reasons for this:

  • Social skills can be used to take control of a player’s character away from them. Players tend not to like this, and it’s particularly disruptive for any players with a strong sense of character ownership and immersion. The mechanics can actually violate such characters, having a permanent negative impact that lasts long after the immediate interaction has been resolved.
  • Many players put a very high premium on playing out high quality social interactions as their characters. They often come to not only associate but to equate these social interactions with roleplaying (leading, for example, to memes like “roleplaying vs. rollplaying”), and because it can often be hard to find groups that truly commit to these interactions, players who value them can be very protective of them. Social skill tests can be used to bypass these imaginary social interactions.
  • Many published games are very bad at handling social skills, contributing to the belief that social skills not only CAN be used in these ways, but MUST be used in these ways. Ironically, it has often been the case that the more a game system attempted to focus on social skill resolution, the worse its actual handling of those social skills would be (because, apparently, attempting to codify the complexities of human social interactions with a couple of polyhedral dice is a tricky proposition).

Generally speaking, I’m of the opinion that social skills (and other social mechanics) can be used well. I’m also of the opinion that, when used appropriately, social skills can actually enhance and improve the aspects of the game that they so often harm instead.

THE SECRET OF SOCIAL SKILLS

The secret to handling social skills is to treat them exactly like any other skill:

  • State intention
  • Make the check.
  • Narrate result.

For example, you would never do this:

Player: I jump up, grab a branch, and quickly make my way to the top of the tree. Once there, I leap to the balcony, pick the lock on the door, slip inside, find the secret papers in the lockbox on the princess’ dressing table, and sneak back out without being noticed.

GM: Make a Climb check. (it fails) Okay, I guess you didn’t actually do any of that stuff.

So don’t do it with social skills, either. Don’t play out an entire conversation and then say, “Okay, let’s go back to step one and see if any of this actually happened.”

Instead:

Player: I want to convince this guy to spill his guts.

GM: Make an Intimidate check. (it succeeds)

Player: “SWEAR TO ME!”

GM: “I don’t know! I never knew! Never! They went to some guy for a couple of days before they went to the dealer. There was something else in the drugs. Something hidden!”

Or:

Player: I want to convince this guy to spill his guts.

GM: Make an Intimidate check. (it fails)

Player: “SWEAR TO ME!”

GM: The guy chuckles. “Nobody’s going to tell you nothing. They’re wise to your act. You’ve got rules. The Joker… he’s got no rules. Nobody’s going to cross him for you.”

Note that the out of character declaration of intention isn’t essential here. This would be an equally valid declaration of intention:

Player: “SWEAR TO ME!”

GM: Make an Intimidate check.

Or this one, if the player and GM aren’t on the same wavelength:

Player: “SWEAR TO ME!”

GM: What reaction are you looking for here?

Player: I’m trying to convince this guy to spill his guts.

GM: Make an Intimidate check.

What you’re actually looking to avoid here is mistaking the declaration of intention as a fictional truth: “I stab the orc with my sword!” is a statement of intention, not truth, and no one gets confused if the attack roll fails and it turns out that, no, you didn’t stab the orc with your sword. With social skills, on the other hand, people often move past the intention or interpret intentions as fictional truths; and then they get dissonance when the mechanical resolution is out of line with their intention.

The classic archetype of this is playing out a long, dramatic, and beautifully delivered speech and then rolling a 1 on the Oration check.

ROLEPLAY THE OUTCOME

A major stumbling block you can run into at this point is to come out of the mechanical resolution and remain generic or general in the narration of outcome. Instead of shifting into roleplaying, you just broadly describe the result. Like this:

GM: Make an Intimidate check. (it fails) It’s clear he’s more afraid of the Joker than he is of you and he refuses to tell you anything.

This can be okay in some situations, but it’s usually preferable to actually roleplay through the outcome.

One of the reasons players can fall into this bad habit is because it’s fairly typical for narrating outcome to be the GM’s responsibility. So a mechanical check is made, the outcome of the interaction is determined, and the GM falls into the default pattern of describing that outcome. But since the GM can’t put words into the PC’s mouth, they’re sort of “forced” into describing that outcome in a general and non-specific way.

Once you recognize the unintended consequence of following familiar patterns, it’s fairly easy to break yourself of the habit and frame the outcome in terms of strong NPC dialogue.

MECHANICS AS ROLEPLAYING PROMPT

When the player and GM both understand this paradigm, however, they can push the technique to even greater effect by using the mechanics as an improvisational cue:

GM: Okay, you find him shaking down a falafel dealer.

Player: Great. I’m going to wait until he’s a little isolated, then batarang his leg, haul him up to the roof, dangle him over the edge, and scare the shit out of him.

GM: Great. He cuts down an alley towards 6th Street. Make an Intimidate check. (it succeeds)

Player: “WHERE WERE THE OTHER DRUGS GOING?”

GM: “I never knew. I don’t know. I swear to God—”

Player: “SWEAR TO ME!” I release him and stop him just before he splatters on the ground. Then I haul him back up.

GM: “I don’t know! I never knew! Never! They went to some guy for a couple of days before they went to the dealer.”

Player: “Why?”

GM: “There was something… something else in the drugs. Something hidden!”

The GM doesn’t have to try to bundle the entire resolution into a single line of NPC dialogue (and maybe a short summary). Instead, the GM and player can both key off the mechanical outcome and roleplay out the rest of the scene consistent with that result. This basically extends the narration of outcome and turns it into a collaboration between everyone participating in the conversation. The above example also shows how you can also think of this as a form of letting it ride: The check determined that the NPC is intimidated and will spill his guts, and that remains true as the PC continues to ask questions.

This technique isn’t appropriate for every situation, but can be very powerful in practice and result in roleplaying that’s more daring, interesting, and definitive than would otherwise be possible.

Once an entire group gets into sync with a technique like this, you may discover that mechanics-first declarations – which some would consider anathema to immersive play – can actually end up being incredibly effective at creating powerful, unexpected, and memorable moments for exploring character.

On an abstract level, what you’re doing is declaring intention, making a mechanical check, looking at the result, and then figuring out what your method is through play as a result of the check you made. It can push characters (PCs and NPCs alike) in completely unexpected directions and give space for strong, bold choices in how you play your character.

SOCIAL VECTORS & MULTI-STEP RESOLUTION

Although letting it ride is one option for a social encounter, you can also use multi-step action resolution. As with any other multi-step resolution, there are a few good practices to observe. Most notably, you want to make sure that each additional resolution point is landing at the point of a meaningful choice, a meaningful consequence, or both. Don’t just make another Diplomacy check; make another Diplomacy check because the conversation has reached some crucial moment.

For example, you should probably avoid making a new Intimidate check for every single question you ask the informer you’ve got strung up by their ankle. But it might be appropriate to make another check to convince them not to tell anybody about your conversation with them.

Similarly, during tense negotiations each point of contention in the final agreement might be determined by a different skill check. As you play through these negotiations, this also allows you to change your methods: You might use a Diplomacy check for certain points, but then let the barbarian come in with a strong Intimidation routine to close the deal.

Although they can be less clear-cut, social interactions can also be structured as vectors. Vectors, if you recall, are about figuring out how to establish a “line of sight” to your objective: You need to do X before you can do Y before you can do Z. You need to sneak up to the door before you can pick the lock before you can open it. You need to convince the frightened barkeep to let you in before you can convince the frightened villagers to evacuate because time is running out.

(One of the cool things about thinking in terms of vectors is that you can freely swap in non-social solutions or vice versa: Maybe instead of persuading the barkeep to open the door, you just kick it open. Or instead of picking the lock you convince the security guard on duty that you left your badge up on the 6th floor and it’ll just take a minute to go grab it. As the GM you can just say, “There’s a thing in your way,” and then let the players figure out how they want to vector around – or through! – that thing.)

Because social situations tend to be less easily quantifiable and, as a result, more malleable, they work really well with abstract vector depth: You can go into a social interaction without really knowing how many obstacles might exist between the PCs and the goal they want to achieve or what exactly those obstacles are.

What I refer to as complex skill checks, therefore, often work well for social interactions that you want to give some heft to. (These mechanics are stuff like “X successes before Y failures” or, in many dice pool systems, “continue making checks until you achieve X successes.”) Each mechanical resolution can be framed as an obstacle and the players determine how they want to deal with that obstacle, prompting the next skill check. Exactly what the obstacles are along the way (i.e., what objections the person they’re talking to has to their plan ) and how they’re dealt with will depend heavily on context and will naturally evolve as the conversation continues. (It’s not unusual to discover that a conversation you thought was about one thing suddenly becomes about something else entirely.)

The Psywar system I designed for the Infinity RPG was built on similar principles: You could influence people to do what you wanted by inflicting Metanoia on them (using the same mechanical systems that inflicted Wounds in combat and Breaches when hacking; Metanoia meaning literally “the changing of one’s mind”). The amount of Metanoia you needed to inflict was dependent on the Intransigence of the target, and that was determined by their unwillingness to do the particular thing you wanted them to do.

SOCIAL SKILLS COMPELLING PCs

Intransigence in Infinity also gave me a mechanism for giving players flexible control over how their characters would be impacted by the Psywar mechanics. As I wrote in the rulebook:

PCs can also be targeted by Psywar attacks. This means that they can suffer Metanoia Effects and, as a result, have their beliefs or actions altered.

For some players, this can be problematic because their enjoyment of the game depends (for one reason or another) on having complete control over their character. The line between what’s acceptable and unacceptable for these players can be a fuzzy one and it can also vary significantly. Some players, for example, will be okay with their characters panicking against their will and fleeing from the scene of a battle, but will not be comfortable if they are “forced” to trust someone or to agree to a particular course of action.

If your group has concerns about using Metanoia Effects on the PCs, we recommend having a frank discussion and figuring out where to draw the line. However, we also recommend that what is good for the goose is good for the gander: If, for example, NPCs cannot force the PCs to retreat, then PCs cannot do the that to NPCs, either. Keep the playing field level.

Another possible compromise is to allow players to set the Intransigence scores for their own PCs, the same way that the GM sets them for the NPCs. (These can, of course, vary based on circumstance and the Metanoia Effect being attempted.) This only works if the numbers are set in good faith, of course, but it empowers the players to make sure that the system is reflecting their sense of who their characters truly are.

Broadly speaking, this passage covers most of my thoughts on this topic.

First, social skills that compel behavior create more friction when they aren’t modeling character behavior “correctly,” particularly from the point of view of the player controlling that character. (Allowing players to set their own characters Intransigence value was a really good way of empowering them: If they felt their character would be strongly opposed to X, they could express that without vetoing the mechanic entirely.)

Second, RPGs are fundamentally about making choices as if you were your character. Therefore, a mechanic which effectively “plays the game for you” can be very problematic if it’s not handled correctly.

(The reverse argument I’ve often heard is that being forced to believe a lie against your will, for example, is not fundamentally different than being stabbed through your kidney with three feet of steel against your will. Both will remove character agency and there’s really no reason to distinguish between the two.

A more revealing example, however, is the distinction between dominate person being used to force your character to do something and a Persuasion skill doing the same thing. Why do the same people who readily accept the former object to the latter? Because one of these things is removing the character’s ability to control their actions and the other one is removing the player’s ability to control their character. That distinction doesn’t matter to some people, but it matters intensely to others.)

That’s why, when you do have a mechanic that compels PC behavior, I generally prefer a mechanic that gives a prompt to the player and then allows the player to determine what that means for their character and how it plays out. This is how I handle the Sanity mechanic in Call of Cthulhu, for example: The mechanic provides a “you’re broken now” prompt and then the player decides whether that means they’re running away screaming, breaking down into uncontrollable sobbing, fainting dead away, regressing into a non-responsive catatonia, etc.

SOCIAL SKILLS AS INFORMATION

For similar reasons, I tend to like social skills that give the PCs information rather than dictating their behavior.

For example, should the outcome of a Bluff check be “you believe the lie and you have to act as if you are completely gulled and have no doubts whatsoever” or should the outcome of a successful Bluff check be “he looks like he’s telling the truth / you don’t see any reason not to believe what he’s saying?”

To put this in perspective, imagine that this was a poker game: Someone makes a Bluff check and succeeds against your Sense Motive check. Should the mechanics force the PC to call his bet without having any choice in the matter? Or should the mechanics simply report “you think he’s got the better hand” and then let you make the decision?

(In the presence of meta-knowledge this can potentially lead to abuse, but that’s really a completely different situation that’s only tangentially related to the social skill resolution itself.)

If you’re feeling resistance to this idea, consider that it’s not really limited to social skills. For example, a PC makes a Spot check to see someone hiding in the room. The successful check doesn’t compel them to immediately attack: The Spot check provides them with information (“there’s a dude hiding there” or “you don’t see anybody hiding there”) and then you make a decision about what to do with that information. Similarly, a Sense Motive check provides you with information (“you think he’s in love with Sarah” or “you don’t think he’s lying”) and it’s still up to you to make a decision about what to do with that information.

SOCIAL SKILLS WITH MECHANICAL CONSEQUENCES

Social skills can similarly apply mechanical consequences without compelling character behavior (once again leaving the ultimate choice of how to respond to that mechanical stimulus up to the player).

For example, instead of forcing a character to retreat, a successful Intimidate check might apply a morale penalty to the affected character’s actions. The ultimate decision of whether to drop their sword and run away screaming in response to that stimulus is left up to the player.

SOCIAL SKILLS AS SOCIAL CLUE

As social skills provide information, they can create fortune in the middle resolutions: The initial social skill resolution provides clues about what approaches might (or might not) work with the targeted character: Are they susceptible to bribes? A coward who can be intimidated? Maybe you realize that they’re secretly in love with Teodora… is there a way you can use that information (or do you just tuck it away for later)?

Many social skill resolutions can actually be systemically broken down into this two-stage approach to good effect.

Flubbing the initial check, of course, is also likely to have an impact on how the conversation plays out. For example, consider what happens in X-Men: First Class when Charles Xavier – who can read minds and, therefore, has never put a single goddamn skill point into his Sense Motive skill – is suddenly faced with the need to figure out the best argument to use with a Holocaust-survivor wearing a telepathy-blocking helmet:

Charles: Erik, you said it yourself. We’re better men. This is the time to prove it. There are thousands of men on those ships. Good, honest, innocent men. They’re just following orders.

Erik: I’ve been at the mercy of men just following orders. Never again.

NEXT: Sanity Checks

IN THE SHADOW OF THE SPIRE

Session 19C: Shilukar’s End

Last week we talked about players creating a firewall between player knowledge and character knowledge. This week I want to talk about some of the pitfalls in doing that.

Think back to when you first started playing D&D. If you’re lucky, then you’ll remember the time that your DM described a huge, hulking, green-skinned humanoid. You chopped at it with your sword! A mighty blow! But the wound begins closing up right in front of your eyes! Nothing will slay the thing! Run away!

AD&D 1st Edition - TrollThe creature was, of course, a troll. And you eventually figured out that the only way to permanently injure it (and eventually kill it) was by dealing damage with fire. Think about how exciting it was to figure that out!

There are countless other examples of this hard-won knowledge that you have probably accumulated over the years. And not all of it is as clear-cut or specific as this. It includes stuff like “always bring a 10-foot-pole” and even “put the squishy wizard in the back.”

Now, here’s the question: Having learned all that stuff, you’re starting a new campaign with a brand new 1st level character.

Should your 1st level character know that trolls are vulnerable to fire?

It turns out that what seems like a simple question isn’t.

Let’s start by acknowledging the elephant in the room: You can’t actually put the genie back in the bottle. Once you know that trolls can’t regenerate from fire damage, you can’t “unlearn” that and truly play as if you don’t know it in order to rediscover it.

I knew a group once that mimicked that experience by randomizing the vulnerability of trolls at the beginning of each campaign. But even that isn’t truly a complete reset of your knowledge because you’re still carrying the knowledge that trolls can regenerate and you need to play “guess the element” to truly injure them. Even just the knowledge that some things in the game are immune to damage except from certain sources is knowledge that you had to learn as a player at some point!

The argument can be made that, since the character actually lives in a world with trolls, it might make sense that they know that trolls are vulnerable to fire even if they haven’t personally fought a troll before. Maybe you could make an Intelligence check to see if they know it or not.

… but if you do that, why didn’t the DM have you roll a Knowledge check for your first character?

The answer, of course, is that it’s fun to be surprised by the unknown, to recognize that there’s a problem that needs solving, and to figure out the solution. And it’s generally not fun to simply roll a Solve Puzzle skill and have the DM tell you the answer.

Nonetheless, there’s a good point here: Assuming that characters who have spent their entire lives within walking distance of the Troll Fens don’t know anything about trolls is, quite possibly, an even larger metagame conceit than “my peasant farmboy has memorized the Monster Manual.”

But for the sake argument, let’s say that “trolls are vulnerable to fire” is, in this particular D&D universe, not a well known fact.

Another argument that can be made, therefore, is that you simply need to roleplay the character not knowing the thing that you, as a player, know.

In my experience, however, this approach usually takes the form of indicating that the character doesn’t know it, which often does not actually look like someone who doesn’t actually know it.

You often see a similar example of this when players have metagame knowledge of what’s happening to other PCs and begin explaining, out of character, the thought process of their character so that the other players don’t think they’re cheating by using the metagame knowledge. This, too, often does not resemble actual decisions made by someone who doesn’t actually know the information: It, in fact, looks exactly like someone pretending that they don’t know the solution to a problem even when they do. Like a parent playing hide-and-seek with a toddler and pretending that they can’t find them even though their feet are poking out from behind the chair.

I once played in a game where some shit was going down in our hotel room and I said, “Okay, I finish my drink in the hotel bar and head back up to the room.” And the GM immediately pitched a fit because I was using metagame knowledge. I had to point out that, no, I had already established that I was going to finish my drink and head back up to the room before shit started going down. Nevertheless, there was an expectation that my character should instead NOT do what they had already been planning to do because there was an expectation that we should go through a charade or pantomime in which my character would do a bunch of other stuff in order to indicate what a good little player I was by not acting on the metagame knowledge.

WHAT IS FUN?

This is not to say, of course, that players should freely act on metagame knowledge. The issue is more complicated than that, and largely boils down to personal preference and a basic question of, What is fun?

Is it fun to pretend to re-learn the basic skills of dungeoncrawling? Generally not, IME. That’s the Gamist streak in me: Problem solving for the best dungeoncrawl techniques is fun because I’m figuring out how to overcome a challenge; it’s not fun for me to simply pretend to be challenged by that stuff. I’d rather focus on the next level of challenge. (And, if the GM is a good one, there’ll be a constant fresh supply of new, non-arbitrary challenges as we move from one dungeon to the next.)

Is it fun for players to act on metagame knowledge and all rush towards where something interesting or dangerous is happening as if they were gifted with a sixth sense? Or to instantly know when another PC is lying or holding information back? Generally not. That’s the Dramatist streak in me, and if I’m GMing a group that’s having problems refraining from these actions OR roleplaying naturally despite possessing metagame knowledge, I’ll start pulling players into private side-sessions in order to resolve these moments. (Because if I don’t, valuable and cool moments of game play will be lost.)

(Over the years I’ve also come to recognize that the possession of certain types of metagame knowledge are, in fact, virtually impossible to roleplay naturally through. And I will use techniques — including private side sessions and non-simultaneous resolution — to control the flow of metagame information to best effect.)

These lines, however, are not set in stone. They’re very contextual. If we’re playing a typical dungeoncrawl I generally don’t think “let’s all pretend we don’t know that 10-foot poles would be useful” is fun. On the other hand, if I’m playing Call of Cthulhu I’m totally onboard with stuff like “let’s all pretend we don’t recognize the name Nyarlathotep” or “let’s all pretend that we don’t know what a Hound of Tindalos is.”

Ptolus - In the Shadow of the Spire
IN THE SHADOW OF THE SPIRE

SESSION 19C: SHILUKAR’S END

April 13th, 2008
The 8th Day of Kadal in the 790th Year of the Seyrunian Dynasty

TORTUROUS PLANNING

They left the Foundry. After a brief discussion they decided to take Shilukar to Greyson House: They didn’t want to take him to the Ghostly Minstrel. They didn’t think they should take him to Castle Shard until they’d gotten the secret of the cure out of him. And, given the fact that it was one o’clock in the morning, there didn’t seem to be anywhere else they could take him.

But it was also decided that someone should take word to Castle Shard. For this task, Ranthir volunteered. They performed a cursory search of Shilukar’s body, removing anything that seemed valuable or mysterious – a magical potion, two vials of alchemical fluid, a ruby ring concealing a magical pearl, a minor spellbook – and then packed Ranthir into the first carriage they could find. A few minutes later they found a second carriage to carry them up to the North Market and Greyson House.

When they arrived, Tor and Agnarr bundled Shilukar up to the house while Tee paid the carriage master a rich sum to make sure he’d “forget he’d ever seen them”. (“Of course, mistress.”) Then she moved to join the others.

But as she crossed the porch into the house, Tee noticed that there were large scrape marks – as if something heavy had been dragged here. She followed them into the house and saw that they led towards the trapdoor in the kitchen (which led down to the cellar and, from there, to Ghul’s Labyrinth).

There was a moment of panic, but then they remembered that they’d deliberately sold the knowledge of this place to the Erthuos. (At least, they hoped that’s who it was.)

In any case, they did a quick survey of the house to make sure they were alone, and then sat down to a serious discussion about what methods of torture they would use to loosen Shilukar’s tongue. The general consensus was ear-eating and hand-chopping. The shock they had once felt in seeing Agnarr bite a man’s ear off had disappeared. Life was hardening them… (more…)

IN THE SHADOW OF THE SPIRE

Session 19B: Beneath the Foundry

Tee missed all of this. Hearing the explosion she vaulted through the ventilation window and back onto the roof. Scampering twenty feet or so across the clay tiles and then looked through the ventilation windows about the first foundry. From this vantage point she could look down into the materials storehouse.

Although this week’s campaign journal is Session 19B, I’m actually going to continue chatting about the big, messy three-way confrontation between the PCs, the Shuul, and Shilukar that was wrapping up in the first part of Session 19.

This whole sequence worked really well at the table: The stakes were high. It was well-established that the PCs only had one shot at this. The battlefield was a complex, three-dimensional arena. The combination of action and stealth – which was being pursued in a mixture by both PCs and NPCs alike – gave the whole thing a very unusual texture and forced a lot of creative thinking (from both players and GM alike).

One of the essential elements that went into making this sequence work as well as it did is that I was blessed with a group of players willing (and able!) to seamlessly firewall player knowledge from character knowledge: When Tee split off from the group and got into trouble, the other PCs didn’t act as if they were gifted with clairvoyance and knew exactly what was going on. But they also didn’t fight so hard against the meta-knowledge that their characters turned into morons. Instead, they very smoothly took in what their characters knew and acted accordingly.

As the GM, I helped this process by specifying what information was flowing where: Something has just exploded in Room A, so characters X and Y hear the explosion; Y also sees the flash. And so forth. (These are really just crossovers, right? And they can be handled fairly seamlessly as brief “recap orientations” when you cut to the next group of PCs: “Okay, so you’ve just heard an explosion coming from the far side of the building. What are you doing?”)

By explicitly providing this information to the players, I’m removing the need for them to process it for themselves. They don’t have to think, “Okay, so the explosion just happened over there. Would I hear the yelling and then the explosion? Or just the explosion? Would I know where the explosion was? Or just a general direction?” All they need to do is focus on taking the information in as if they were their character and then making decisions based on the information they have.

THE GM’S FIREWALLS

The trick to doing this as a GM is to basically half-pretend that the other half of the party doesn’t exist when you cut between them. For example, let’s say that this wasn’t a situation with a split party: The PCs are exploring an area and, for whatever reason, an explosion goes off in the distance. What information would you give to the players in that situation? That’s the exact same information you should give to them even if the other half of the group were the ones causing the explosion.

This is kind of like a firewall in your own head, but rather than preventing meta-knowledge and character-knowledge from getting muddled up together, you’re preventing what Character A knows from getting muddled up with what Character B knows. You have to keep that clarity of perception clear in your own head so that you can present it clearly to the players, too.

Now, I say “half-pretend” because in actual practice the players DO know how you already described the scene of the rest of the group and you’ll use a sort of verbal shorthand to quickly review what they know without belaboring the details over and over again.

Which is one of the reasons why it’s great to have a group that can do this firewalling effectively. If I’d needed to take players into other rooms or pass notes or whatever, the pacing on this sequence would have suffered. Not only because of the logistical hassle of physically moving players around or writing out notes, but also because of the need to repeat information that otherwise would have only needed to be established once.

The GM also has to maintain firewalls between the NPCs. In fact, one of the quickest and easiest ways to make your NPCs feel like real people instead of puppets is for them to clearly demonstrate that their knowledge doesn’t map to the GM’s knowledge.

(An advanced technique you can use is to “cheat” this firewall in order to mimic NPCs with genius-level intellect that outstrips you own: In much the same way that it’s easy to solve a puzzle if you know the answer, so, too, can your NPC Sherlock Holmes make amazing “deductions” about the PCs because you already know the solution. But using this technique effectively is actually more difficult than it might seem, as it can easily lead to player frustration.)

This session also provides a great example of this kind of NPC firewalling, with both Shilukar and the Shuul being possessed of very different (and very incomplete) sets of facts.

You’ll also notice that, as the PCs figure this out, they’re able to take advantage of it in order to manipulate the NPCs.

OTHER FIREWALLS

Let’s back up for a moment: I said that passing notes and/or taking players into other rooms in order to have private conversations can have a negative impact on pacing. Does this mean I’m saying that you should never do this?

Not at all.

There is a cost to be paid for this stuff, but there are any number of circumstances in which the pay-off is worth it. The key principle, perhaps, is that you can’t put the genie back in the bottle: If you want to create an experience like surprise, paranoia, or mystery then it’s not enough to just ask someone to pretend that they don’t know a thing. They have to actually not know it.

Here are a few examples of where I’ve guarded information in order to prevent some or all of the players from gaining meta-knowledge.

  • In the Ego Hunter one shot for Eclipse Phase, each PC is playing a forked version of the same character. Each fork has access to a unique subset of information and also a unique goal. I prepped custom handouts and took each player aside for private sessions. (The scenario is based around paranoia, secret agendas, and also the discovery of character and identity through incomplete information.)
  • Similarly, in the Wilderness of Mirrors structure I designed for the Infinity RPG, each PC has a secret agenda. As the name suggests, the goal is to create paranoia and uncertainty in a universe filled with warring factions.
  • In the Tomb of Horrors, when PCs choose to move through magical portals (that I know are one-way and, therefore, they cannot return through) my preferred method of resolution is to begin strict timekeeping and keep records of when the other characters pass through the portal. I can then jump to the other side of the portal and begin resolving actions as the PCs arrive one-by-one on the same schedule. (This heightens the extreme paranoia which is at the heart of the scenario.)
  • In the Ptolus campaign, Tee’s decision to keep the Dreaming Arts and the other secrets of her elven clan secret from the rest of the PCs was the player’s choice. (Which is, at least 19 times out of 20, a good rule of thumb to follow: If a player requests a private meeting, honor the request. There’s some reason why they feel strongly about keeping this information secret, and you should generally default to respecting that.)

Ptolus - In the Shadow of the Spire
IN THE SHADOW OF THE SPIRE

SESSION 19B: BENEATH THE FOUNDRY

April 13th, 2008
The 8th Day of Kadal in the 790th Year of the Seyrunian Dynasty

SEARCHING FOR SHILUKAR

Agnarr strolled into the entrance hall.

“What’s going on?” Tor demanded.

“They think we’re Shilukar.” Agnarr grinned. “Which is probably for the best.”

Agnarr jogged up the stairs to Tee’s side. Seeing the doors he blanched in much the same fashion she had.

With Agnarr guarding the stairs, Tee and Elestra quickly searched the rooms. For the most part they were small quarters with minimal furnishings – utilitarian barracks. There was one room that was slightly larger than the rest, but although the furniture was slightly more luxurious it was still almost devoid of personality. Elestra did find a copy of the Book of Vehthyl laying next to the bed in this room, and this she gave to Dominic.

Since Shilukar had not been found, the depressing possibility that he had escaped began to set in. Agnarr and Elestra began arguing again about why he had attacked the Shuul here in the Foundry. What had he been looking for? The cure? Had he found it? Or was it still here?

Dominic and Tor, meanwhile, decided that their best hope of finding Shilukar again before the morning deadline would be to question one of the thugs that were apparently working for him. They weren’t sure how badly they had been hurt, but hopefully Dominic would be able to use his divine powers to wake them up.

Ranthir and Tee decided to search the Foundry again – Ranthir using his abilities to detect magical auras and Tee with more practical means. They didn’t know how much time they would have before the Shuul returned, so Tee’s efforts would have to be fairly cursory.

But no sooner had the search started, then Tee’s sharp elven eyes spotted scrape marks on the floor of the materials storehouse leading straight into a wall. The magical explosion Shilukar had set off had obscured the marks somewhat, but their meaning was still clear: There was a secret passage right where Shilukar had disappeared from her view.

Tee smiled. “It looks like we won’t need those thugs, after all.” (more…)

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