Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="KarinsDad" data-source="post: 5730231" data-attributes="member: 2011">No, they should be the rule.Anyone can go fight Goblins.Heroes fight Demons and Gods who have large agendas.It's not a matter of mysterious mysteries. It's about entertainment. The more interesting movies are the ones with twists in them, not the ones you can sit in the theater and predict.As for players being in a "fog of confusion", that's mainly due to two things:1) The PCs are adventuring day in and day out. It's been nearly a week or more since the players were in adventure mode. It's extremely easy to forget a lot of details in a week.2) DMs sometimes make their plots too complex. Having a mystery is cool. Having a super complex set of many multiple subplots where even the DM has difficulty keeping them all juggled at the same time isn't.The way to avoid the "fog of confusion" is for the DM to have reoccurring villains, and a few reoccurring subplots. The game keeps coming back to the same campaign subplots over and over again. When that happens, the players become engaged because the DM isn't confusing them with minutia or pulling obscure plot points out of his butt months after he first introduced them. Instead, he is repeatedly reinforcing what the players have already encountered and adding more information to those subplots as the adventures unfold.And by mystery, it just means that there are things going on that the players are not totally aware of, but that eventually need to be discovered if the PCs are going to be successful in their own goals. It's not a Sherlock Holmes "the players have to be super brilliant to figure it out" type of mystery. The players are not working their brains on overtime. That's not entertainment, that's work.The advantage of misdirection is not in making the players think hard, the advantage of misdirection is that it allows for those cool cinematic moments where the players go "WTF?". Just like what happened in your game, but not just because the PCs were betrayed. I try to avoid the betrayed type "WTF?"s (because it is so easy to do and because so many players have had it happened so many times) and instead go for things like the evil merchants were selling magic items to the Orcs in order to protect the merchant's homeland, not because they are evil. They are only evil to the PCs because the PCs have for 8 levels been trying to stop the magic item shipments to the Orcs who are threatening the PCs homelands. In this case, one of the reoccurring villains wasn't so much evil as neutral. The merchants didn't care if the PC's homeland was threatened as long as their own homeland wasn't.On the other hand, if the players make poor decisions like in your example, a betrayal is ok.I actually cringe when I read yet another WotC adventure where there is a female captive that the PCs rescue who is actually a monster with an illusion. Most of the time, it should just be a female captive that isn't a bad guy. This is not the type of misdirection that the DM should use. Cliches are predictable. The secret portions of the game are ones that for the most part, should become known eventually. It's not a matter of fooling the players. It's a matter of surprising the players. It's harder to surprise your players if they understand most everything going on when they have discussions with NPCs.</blockquote>

Verification