[UA] Dark Arc got me thinking

[Mike Lake]

Mattias Östklint wrote:
> I want my players to [...] really want and... well, burn for something 
> like that. I'm still stuck in a playing mode where I toss things at 
> them and the play with it. I would like to go from where things are 
> centered around the players being able to do cool, out-there stuff to 
> being centered around the players doing cool out-there stuff.
>
> Any thoughts on how to do this?
That's a recurring question for GMs with ambitions to better gaming.  
Several factors make it recur:

1. Caution.  Players are known for astoundingly stupid acts, but I find 
the default stance for players used to games of mystery and/or politics 
is to turtle until they're sure of themselves, their enemies, and the 
risk-free nature of their plan.  Stupidity pops up in occasional lapses 
of attention or communication.  This is understandable; smart people 
show caution in dangerous situations.  But it's fatal to attempts to 
take the initiative.  The GM's advantage of knowing what's going on 
inevitably bleeds into NPCs behaving more cannily than their PC 
counterparts.  I myself must fight excessive caution and reactivity when 
I'm one of the players.

In my current Mage campaign, I had to deal with this.  We rotate GMing 
among ourselves, and we'd just come off of a long string of political 
games where the NPCs always seemed to know everything we did.  One GM 
was prone to catching every stray phrase and making leaps of intuition 
that placed those phrases into context.  Of *course* the NPCs always 
figured out what we were up to; they knew which statements were 
significant in a way the players couldn't duplicate.  This trained the 
players not to do anything, because any activity exposed them to more 
danger than was justified by the information gained.  I wanted to 
overturn this conditioning.

It took about half a year, but I finally got players in my campaign to 
accept that they could get away with stuff.  A good way to carry this 
message to the players is to have NPCs who aren't plotting just talk 
about stuff, exposing their own ignorance.  My PCs accidentally caused a 
crop circle in Mr. Dieterle's wheat field.  Mr. Dieterle didn't launch 
into a penetrating investigation starting with the PCs.  No, he just 
griped to anyone who would listen about some damn prank that'll cost him 
crop revenue.  The sheriff didn't ask the PCs about a car that 
mysteriously disappeared during a highway cop chase; he just gossiped in 
passing about how the idiots over in Wilmot County lost sight of a 
fleeing driver, and how it makes county policing look bad.  This made 
the players feel considerably safer, and now they're doing things that I 
*will* decide gets them into trouble--but even then, only if do it in 
front of the wrong people.

2. Uncertainty.  No verbal description of events can capture the full 
range of what we can know by being in a situation, and no pre-game 
orientation can equal growing up in the game world, as PCs are presumed 
to have done.  The ground rules are never as clear as they should be.  
Adding unpredictable powers like magic raises the uncertainty (and 
usually the stakes, as well) by another notch.  By contrast, the GM 
knows the ground rules, even if he never expresses them to himself, and 
that knowledge inevitably bleeds into the NPCs the players must face.  
To you, only a handful of NPCs are antagonists to the players; to your 
players, everyone is a potential enemy until proven otherwise.

Restrain yourself from punishing bad decisions when you have a chance.  
The players don't know--can't know--as well as you what is a reasonable 
risk, and they won't recognize all the opportunities you give them, 
especially the trustworthy allies.  (Nobody appears trustworthy in UA.)  
You don't want to let players get away with anything they want, but 
think twice before stomping their heads into the curb for every minor 
error.  Keep restraining yourself until they start seeing the rewards of 
sticking their necks out.  Even then, don't ramp up the consequences too 
quickly, or they'll pull back again.

3. Laziness.  It's a heck of a lot easier to react to events, taking 
whatever story the GM offers up that week, than to create your own 
objective and plan of action from whole cloth.  For some players, this 
level of investment is too much like work. 

There isn't much you can do about this one, either, if all of your 
players are the passive kind by nature, and not by conditioning.  But 
try stating right up front that you want the players to create their own 
campaign objective, and require them to design characters who will stick 
to that objective.  If you've got a strong-willed player or two in your 
group, rely on them to establish a purpose they like; the rest will trot 
along afterwards.

Give the PCs enough information up front to put a plan into effect.  
This is way more information than you would give to PCs in a more 
typical mystery campaign, and something GMs who are into games like UA 
are often loathe to do.  Take a deep breath and give it out.  If your 
players want to become gods, give them the whole godwalker chapter, 
suggest that only one of them is likely to make it, but that one should 
be enough for anybody, and ask which avatar they're going to try to 
seize.  If your players want Alex Abel for a patron, don't make him a 
shadowy figure; presume they've spoken to him repeatedly and have been 
able to size up some of the character traits he doesn't advertise, and 
let them know who's in TNI so they can recognize when someone's jacking 
them around by pretending to be acting on Abel's authority.  If your 
characters want to create a cult out of a backwater town, give them 
credit for living in that town and having time to learn the 
townspeople's secrets, and give them a history with two of the dukes in 
a rival cult who will doubtless object.  (On a side note, I recently 
developed the hypothesis that epic RPGs often seem flavorless because 
they overlook how epic fiction largely presumes everybody knows 
everybody.  Want to go epic?  Give your PCs the NPCs' back story, and 
vice versa.)

4. Tone.  GM-player relations take a different tone when the GM tries to 
tear down something the players have worked hard on than the reverse.  
The GM's plot is created for the express purpose of letting the PCs foil 
it.  It's generally evil or unintentionally dangerous and ethically 
*must* be stopped.  The players' plans are presumably good (at least 
from some perspective), is intended to succeed, must face characters 
backed by an omnipotent GM, and may face characters willing to suffer 
far more than PCs are to interfere.  Stopping a plot with a PC that 
needs to come out all right, or at least survive to the next stage of 
the campaign, is a lot harder than stopping a plot with a disposable GMC.

This is a subtle problem, but a real one.  Happily, it can be defused 
largely by bringing it out into the open.  Players won't feel put upon 
if you start the campaign with an open recognition that, sooner or 
later, someone is going to try to stop them, possibly for altruistic 
reasons, and that someone will necessarily be an NPC.  It feels less 
personal and adversarial when you point out that providing conflict is 
your job, and that the NPCs are meant to be swatted down every bit as 
much as the evil plot is meant to be upset.

The rest of the trouble can be defused by bringing your NPC foils down 
to the level of ordinary PCs when necessary--most especially by making 
them as clueless as the typical PC and just as prone to blunders.  Ever 
been frustrated by your own sense of not knowing what's going on as a 
player?  Inject that into the bad guys.  Ever mistaken an evil henchman 
for someone you could trust?  Ever slapped your forehead as a fellow 
player blurted out the wrong name?  Make your bad guys--rarely!--say 
things they wish they hadn't.  Then ask the PCs not to tell anyone, 
because the NPCs could be in real trouble if what they just said gets to 
the wrong ears.

In short, empower your players to put a workable proactive campaign into 
effect.  Be prepared for them to take a while to feel safe enough to do 
so.  If you want to ramp up the difficulty later, *after* the PCs are 
too far committed to turn back, okay, but make things easy enough for 
them to feel sufficiently safe to stick their necks out, and be careful 
not to drive them back into their holes.  Stay conscious, as you set the 
challenges, of the fact that it's easier to destroy a plan than to 
execute one.  It's worked so far for my Mage game.
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://lists.unknown-armies.com/pipermail/ua/attachments/20070629/420be23e/attachment-0001.html