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!

The 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 1^st level character.

Should your 1^st 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: That 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 constantly 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.”

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.)