Lots of work to do again tonight, it seems...
But all these things
did happen. There were clues as to the brother's moral status (possession by a balrog; his treatment of his apprentice - the assassin PC; the discovery of the black arrows). There were "second-party" interactions, between the brother PC (who wanted to redeem the NPC brother) and the assassin PC (who wanted to kill him, and has now succeeded in that).
The game has been working with all this stuff
the whole time. In
the very first session, the PCs found a spellbook apparently written by the brother and in the possession of a mad murderer.
The confrontation between brother and brother; the need for the NPC to then recupreate in the mage's tower; and his decapitation by the assassin PC-turned-NPC - these have been the events to which the whole campaign, to date, has been leading up! It's hard to envisage any way it which this stuff could have been more at the centre of the game, given that it also has other PCs and so other elements in play (eg the naga and its PC servant).
But why, then, is the mystery even better if the GM already knows the answer?
Because the GM can then both frame it properly (provide set-up and clues) and provide internally-consistent reactions to what the PCs' investigations (if any) turn up (if anything). Both of these would be rather difficult if the GM doesn't know the solution: at best she'd be guessing; more likely she'd just be floundering.
A game can have clues - in the sense of events that point to something that lies beyond or behind them - without having a pre-authored mystery that the players are trying to unravel.
I don't want to say outright that I don't believe you, but what's the next closest thing?
But how do you know it wasn't filtered through his evilness?
If his evilness was unknown to everyone
even including the person who was supposedly playing him (that's you the GM, by the way), then basing his words and actions on said evilness could not have been possible (though random chance could, I guess, achieve a similar result).
Or to put it another way: suppose there had been prior interaction - and it took whatever form it did - why would that be inconsistent with evilness? Does "evilness" always manifest itself in some particular and distinctive way?
No. But there's always a chance it might manifest in any of a gajillion different ways - or not at all. That's where the roleplaying would come in. Further, in a game like mine that has alignment detection spells and abilities if he had done or said anything that provoked undue suspicion he might have got pulled right then and there.
This is why I'm puzzled by these concerns about inconsistency - they seem to derive from some very particular conception about how certain sorts of characters must behave, or how certain sorts of events must unfold, if certain other things about those characters or those events are to be true. But this doesn't seem to be the case in the real world, and so why would it have to be so in the imaginary one?
The consistency issue comes from a number of places, not all tied to the brother example:
- cause and effect consistency. If cause A leads to effect B once then logic says it will do so again if repeated, all other things being equal
- in the brother example (but assuming prior interaction) if he was always evil he'd in theory have been motivated by that all along...which may or may not have given the party pause for thought; but as the evilness didn't exist in the fiction until the last minute the chance for such was lost
- memory consistency: if Torvallen was 20 miles north of Qar'Nora last time we were here it needs must still be 20 miles north now we've returned (or another one: if the dungeon's ex-armoury with the painted targets on the walls was to the left at the bottom of the spiral stairs last time we visited it should still be there this time - which if it's been three years real time since that place was visited and neither players nor DM mapped the thing is likely to cause headaches unless you've got photographic memories)
Think back to rolling reaction dice in a B/X game. The PC elf stumbles across an ogre. The GM rolls the reaction dice. They come up 5 - and the GM has the ogre say "MMM - I think I might have some elf for dinner!" And now the player of the elf can either resign him-/herself to a fight, or try to persuade the ogre to (say) take money in lieu.
Suppose instead the dice come up 10 - then the GM has the ogre say "Ooh, look at the cute elf. You remind me of the elf I saw that time when I was just a baby ogre!" In other words, the ogre's backstory and motivations are written in to fit the rolls. The same can be done for peasants in a town.
At the first encounter, yes. But the next encounter needs to have some consistency with or at least reference to the first one. The elf meets the same ogre again 3 months later, the ogre remembers the money the elf gave it and wants some more; it'll approach on that basis and thus trump (or very much skew) the dice.
That's why I keep emphasising the significance of action resolution. We have, in our game, techniques for the players declaring actions for their PCs and then determining whether or not the PCs get what they want. We don't need an extra filter of secret backstory to resolve these dice rolls. Rather, we can construct the backstory off the back of the results. (And as part of framing. And as part of PC building. Etc, etc. But there is no need for GM's secret backstory.)
Which butchers any sense of consistency in time. The broad-brush backstory and game-world history is already there...either that, or you're playing in a vacuum...and everything is filtered through that. This is true in the real world also.
If the ogre ever comes back into play again, chances are everyone at the table will remember it. If not, roll the dice again!
Or make notes. Written backstory isn't less effective because it's written down as a product of play rather than as a prelude to it.
Again, my experience makes me think that you're exaggerating the issue. It's just not that hard. So I think you're exaggerating 1 and 2.
I'm used to my own note-taking and memory, and those of a whole bunch of players I've DMed over the years. I'm not exaggerating at all.
My campaigns tend to run for many years, so 3 is not relevant.
As do mine...log and other info for the current one is at
www.friendsofgravity.com/games/decast
You've left off 5 (no one remembers and so no one cares). And 5 can be quite important, because if something happens which turns out to go nowhere or be of no concern to anyone, then it doesn't really matter if it drops out of the group's collective memory and never gets brought up again. (It's hard to give example of 5, because by definition they've been forgotten. But I suspect early in my main 4e game, when the PCs were opposed to a Bane-ite sect, some stuff was at least implied about that sect that I think ended up dropping out of the picture, because the player who would have been mainly interested in that stuff - due to playing a cleric of Kord - moved to London.)
You're right, but only until something thought to be irrelevant suddenly takes on new importance (remember my talk of breadcrumbs earlier?) - that guy you met in passing three years ago has just become the key to everything in the players' eyes, while in the DM's eyes he was key all along and thus notes were pre-made. Doing that all from memory wouldn't work...I mean, hell, I can't even remember clearly what happened in what sequence in my session two nights ago (as I realized when I went to type up the log this afternoon! I think I got it mostly right); as I've already said, my in-session note-taking is woefully inadequate as I don't want to have to stop things while I write.
But the overall anchor of consistency and continuity is the players' play of their PCs. That provides the focus of play, and the common thread around which events turn.
It provides the focus of play. It provides a common thread. Events go on as they will, possibly influenced by the run of play and possibly not.
But they're not a planned arc, at least as Campbell is conceiving of them. They're springs to action. But they will be tested, perhaps realised, perhaps changed or abandoned.
An abandoned planned arc is still a planned arc. I played a character whose backstory was that giants had overrun his family's farm when he was a kid. His planned arc from day (and session) 1 was to take his home back, once he got big enough and bad enough through other adventuring. Years and levels later I was able to convince the other characters to go along with this...and they did, for one inconclusive adventure, after which they got bored with giants and went off elsewhere. I retired my guy at that point to carry on the fight as best he could with whatever locals he could round up.
Yes. But when, at the table, is the GM licensed to introduce such results.
With an eye to the plot and-or story and an eye to what makes sense within the game world vis-a-vis backstory and so forth, the answer is quite simple: whenever she bloody well wants.
In my preferred approach, as the narration of failure. Because that's what you're describing: the players (and their PCs) have not got what they wanted.
They haven't. However, they think they have, which makes all the difference.
But this is just wrong.
Players make up bits of their PC backstory all the time. Heck, some players make up names for their PCs sometime after the first session.
Sure, and minor stuff like that - while at all times completely subject to DM veto - is just fine. I do it, as a player, unless the DM tells me no. But I make sure never to insert anything that would give me any undue advantage or status or suchlike.
GMs have been making up the settting in response to play ever since the first time Gygax or Arneson or whomever said - "I wonder what's in the neighbourhood of this dungeon - I'd better write up a village". The City of Greyhawk clearly was conceived of by Gyggax efore its history was. Etc.
Which is one way of doing it, but I've come to realize is not my preferred way. I want a game world with history, with backstory, and with a life beyond what the PCs see. Why? Because I've also come to realize that this history/backstory/life is the richest mine imaginable for story arcs, adventures, intrugie, mystery, and all-round fun.
There's some major - very major - things about my game world that no player or character yet knows...nine years in...that have been every now and then influencing things all along. Reveals will no doubt come at some point(s), but till that time if I didn't have these things already baked in then how could they have had those influences?
This just seems confused.
If the Baron does something, that doesn't mean the GM did that thing.
If my character Terazon does something then in theory I as his player am responsible for it, right? Same goes for the DM when an NPC does something.
Sauron killed Elendil. Tolkien wrote a story about Sauron killing Elendil.
But if Sauron was a PC and Elendil was another player's PC, instead of being pawns in a single-author fiction, you and loads of others would be jumping all over the Sauron-player for the PvP. This tells me that the character *is* tied to the player...and by extension all the NPCs are thus tied to the DM.
In terms of the relatonship between backstory, GM narration thereof, and the way that play of the game works, the GM can just as easily narrate that the Baron did such-and-such as part of narrating the consequence of a player's failed check, as decide on it secretly in advance and then use that decision as the basis for deteriming that the player's action declaration for his/her PC fails.
So the DM does in this case have secret backstory. Good to know.
And, what if the check is never made...or it is and the roll says success?
The GM is doing quite different things in each case, but what the baron did remains the same in either case. This is why it is helpful to analysis to distinguish the doings of (real) GMs from the doings of (imaginary) NPCs. If we don't, it's very hard to talk coherently about what is driving the game: we end up with assertions like "The baron cause such-and-such to happen in the game", when the baron in fact (being imaginary) exercised no causal power on anyone ever.
This point is pretty well recognised when it comes to alignment and characterisation - ie most RPGers recognise that "I was playing in character" isn't a good reason to explain anti-social play, because the character isn't real, and it is the player who has to take responsibility for the choices s/he made.
The Baron causes things to happen in the game world - imaginary cause, imaginary result. The next step back shows the real DM is causing the Baron to cause those imaginary things.
And, your point about "I was playing in character" in fact makes my own point above, that the character is tied to the player. So, if my character Sauron kills your character Elendil because Sauron in character is bat-spit evil and killing Elendil suits his purposes that's not me-as-player killing you-as-player. That's me-as-player playing my character to kill another character that happens to have a different player attached.
Exactly the same point applies in other contexts too. The fiction doesn't write itself. It gets written by someone, via some process. And we can't identify or talk about that process if all we talk about are the imagined causal powers of imaginary people.
Why not? In the case of RPGs it's the causal powers of imaginary people as imagined by a combination of the players and the DM that in the end gives the story (though it's up to one of us real-world types to write it down!).
Lan-"a reminder to all that elf is, in fact, the other white meat"-efan
