D&D 5E Twist. Just DM enjoyment or OK for Players?

steenan said:

There are two important things about twists to be taken into account.


One of them is foreshadowing. Events that seem meaningful but their full meaning in unclear until the twist is revealed - and then everything falls into place. Foreshadowing ensures that the twist does not come out of the blue. When it happens, players think "Why haven't we realized it earlier? It should be obvious from the facts we knew!".

And maybe they do realize it earlier. In this case, the GM should accept it, without trying to change things behind the scenes and take the well deserved success from players. A twist well foreshadowed is like a good detective story - fun whether the reader deduces the solution or not (getting the "I should have noticed that" moment).


The other aspect is how the twist fits the social contract and metagame conventions of the campaign. For example, in most games I run, the story is strongly player-driven. When I create NPCs for players to encounter, I make no assumptions on whether players will like them or not, if players will trust them and what will come of their interactions. And players know about it. NPCs have their beliefs and motivations and it's not that rare that a genuinely moral person is opposed to PCs for some reason.

But in a quest-driven game, there is a metagame convention that quests are accepted. If players become distrusting and refuse to accept quests (or haggle too much on rewards, or demand explanations why the patron does not handle the matter themselves, or ...), the game grinds to halt. The group, for metagame reasons (fun play) ignores this kind of concerns and skips to the quest itself. So if a patron betrays the party, it's not only an NPC abusing PCs' trust. It's also the GM abusing the social contract.

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+1

This advice is perfect. It's what I wanted to say but you already said it better.

As always you folks deliver. I will shortly become a new DM, and my players are all total newbies as well.

I asked for your thoughts and you have expanded upon ideas after ides, confirmed what the niggles in my head were about and gave an abundance of both pitfalls and other options. All of which are useful and some very amusing. I will talk to my players beforehand and get their thoughts without giving anything away. I will then decide in-game whether or not to actually add this NPC (I like the idea that one of them will notice and solve the anagram early) and then see where the players take me and see if it feels OK or not. But I am now more prepared and aware and can take him in several directions should I use him.

Thank-you to all who replied. Having many varied and differing opinions helps me sift through the whole idea and keeps me both enthused and grounded at the same time.

Cheers.

Without reading the rest of the thread, some groups like cooperative storytelling and some groups like storyteller DMs. It really depends on what they like. What have they liked in the past? Is this a wholly new group?

Twists of that nature can be fine. In my most narrative driven game to date (where I was reading "Heroes of Horror" religiously and my wife never suspected a thing, bwahahahahaha), some people were going missing from town and the town blamed the orcs in the forest. So the players go and beat up the orcs, only to find out that the orcs have had members from their tribe go missing too.

A twist can be good. A telegraphed twist can be fun too. If your players catch on that their benefactor is bad before the big reveal, they'll feel smart. If they don't realize it until it's revealed, then at least they'll have the seeds to look back on so it doesn't feel like it came out of the blue.

Just make sure you don't turn the game into a genre, or use elements, that makes your players undesirably uncomfortable; don't have them find out their benefactor is a vampire lord when they stumble upon the gory orgy in the basement, unless your group is okay with that sort of thing (how were they with the Red Wedding?).

robus said:

Another option: "Valdor Priem".

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An ever-so-slight tweak on this gives "Valdor Prime"; possibly leading to there in fact being a series of these guys in a guild or something: "Valdor Secundus", "Valdor Tertius", etc. Low-level types only get to deal with Valdor Sextilius, but as level advances they get to go higher up the food chain until they eventually meet V-Prime - whose undeadness yet remains unknown to all the lesser Valdors...

Ooorrr... Valdor could be a title rather than a name at all! So, you've got Valdor Priem in this castle, Valdor Marek in that castle, Valdor Sheba in the next valley over, and so on. The King's court might be known as the Valdoriate. The party just happens to be (or become) associated with V. Priem. And again, none of the other Valdors know this one's secret...

And one option always remains open to you: if a few adventures in you feel your players just aren't going to like the twist, abandon it on the fly. Valdor Priem is, well, just Valdor Priem; some lesser lord somewhere.

Lan-"the possibilities are endless"-efan

rgoodbb said:

The PC’s are approached by a man named Malvor Pride, who offers to become their benefactor in the fight against darkness etc. etc.

<snip>

He pays well and sends them on quests until they either start to become suspicious, find out things about him or he springs something upon them.

<snip>

They have been working for him and his dastardly schemes all along. Doing his dirty work and levelling up and gaining power.

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manduck said:

I once did a zombie apocalypse game.

<snip>

in a story like a novel or a movie, something like this is great. In a game, it turned out to be not so hot.

<snip>

deception can do real damage to a game with some unexpected consequences.

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I think manduck has good advice.

Two bad play experiences I remember: (1) first scenario in the campaign, we were hired to do something by some NPC, we do it and get back, it's all a trick and it turns out we lost instead of won. The campaign didn't have a second scenario.

(2) a campaign with a complex backstory that involved a prophecy and stuff (I think based on a previous campaign with different players). There were really two games at this table - the GM playing along with 1 PC who was "the chosen" of the prophecy; and the rest of us, who had fairly detailed interparty dynamics (we were all strangers outside the game, and so social interaction was mostly in character), built up a whole lot of "embeddedness" into the party and into our understanding of the logic of the gameworld, and gradually built up a sense of what the prophecy meant, how it fitted into bits of backstory that had come into play, etc. Then around 8th level the GM time-shifted everyone 100 years into the future. All our sense of backstory, "embeddednes", etc was invalidated - it was, in effect, a reboot of the campaign. I think the game lasted maybe two or three sessions after that.

Invalidating the players achievements tends to be a big deal in RPGing, unless the players go in knowing this is where things are going (eg a CoC game).

I like your anagram, and I like the idea of a sinister villain, but I'd try to see how you can handle it a bit differently. Instead of a "quest-giver", maybe look at having the villain be a NPC who drifts in and out as an advisor, perhaps sometimes a supplier of goods or information, and even someone for whom the PCs do a favour or two. Someone they know about, and are interested in, but are also perhaps ambivalent towards - maybe they see one or two dubious things in his manse that will make them wonder exactly what he's up to, but aren't enough to trigger outright hostility or rejection.

You might also think about how you handle things when they work out what is going on. You might want to try and set it up so a straightforward assault isn't entirely straightforward. Eg the PCs' true NPC friend, whom they can't just abandon or ignore, puts a lot of faith in the villain (here's a link to an account of how I ran an "evil vizier" scenario in 4e). Or, when I ran the Freeport trilogy adapted to a high level Oriental Adventures game, one of the players straight away worked out that the main NPC was the villain. "Can't we just go an kill him now?" - but for reasons to do with etiquette and obligation they first had to reveal his villainy to other important personages.

Jester David said:

The potential problem is you can do this twist effectively once. And then the players stop trusting quest givers. And it becomes that much harder to get the party to adventure and follow the story.

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steenan said:

There are two important things about twists to be taken into account.

<snip>

The other aspect is how the twist fits the social contract and metagame conventions of the campaign. For example, in most games I run, the story is strongly player-driven. When I create NPCs for players to encounter, I make no assumptions on whether players will like them or not, if players will trust them and what will come of their interactions. And players know about it. NPCs have their beliefs and motivations and it's not that rare that a genuinely moral person is opposed to PCs for some reason.

But in a quest-driven game, there is a metagame convention that quests are accepted. If players become distrusting and refuse to accept quests (or haggle too much on rewards, or demand explanations why the patron does not handle the matter themselves, or ...), the game grinds to halt. The group, for metagame reasons (fun play) ignores this kind of concerns and skips to the quest itself. So if a patron betrays the party, it's not only an NPC abusing PCs' trust. It's also the GM abusing the social contract.

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I think steenan's analysis of the dynamics of this in a "quest-giver" game, where the job of the players is to "follow the story", is a very good one.

My suggestions in my previous post are intended to straddle the two different sorts of approach - by avoiding having the quest-giver be the villain, and by locating the twist in a different NPC.

If I was a player in such a game, I would derive as much enjoyment from working out the twist beforehand, and collaborating with my fellow players to turn the tables, as I would if I didn't see it coming. Similarly, even though in the meta it might seem that these twists are kind of par-for-the-course, there is no reason *at all* that your PC's should be aware of it. Blinded by money and glory, they might walk every step he has planned for them.