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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 6883080" data-attributes="member: 4937">I've written extensively about the X-Files syndrome plague that has gutted TV science fiction over the years.  To say the least, I'm not a fan.  To begin with, aside from Captain Power and the Soldiers of the Future (or maybe 'Blues Clues' and its ilk, but then only if you are like 3), I'm unaware of any TV show that actually delivered on the experience of being an active participant in the show rather than just passive consumer of the show.  What you are actually talking about is a passive medium creating an active fan community, which is what nerds just do - see for example Star Trek or Star Wars.  But the X-Files methodology for doing this, which has been copied repeatedly - The 4400, Lost, the Battlestar Galactica, so on and so forth - is to hint at a mystery by throwing out a bunch of random unexplained stuff and string the audience along as they try to piece together what is going on, when in fact the mysterious events aren't driven by an underlying coherent logical structure but simply the desire to have the audience engaged.  It's a mental tease.  Generally speaking, when you see this happening, it's almost a certain sign that the writer themselves has no clear idea what the mystery is, how they are going to tie things together and as such the payout is almost certain to be unsatisfying.  But by that point, you've already wrung your profit from the audience.  (See the last 20 years of JJ Abrams career.)In general, a twist the reader didn't see coming but which is clear and coherent in hindsight is good writing.  Whenever you have a twist, you therefore do your best to disguise that fact by not at any point hanging out a sign that says, "Look for the twist."  (A good example of doing this well in a module is CM3: Saber River, although naturally a bad DM can spoil the twists.)  Dangling out that you have a twist, often as not because you can't think of or execute a real one, is a trite writerly trick that ought to get people flogged at this point it has been so overused.  These days, the minute I see a story dangling out that the audience should be looking for a twist that needs explaining, I drop it like the bad apple it is.The cynical equivalent in RPGs is to throw out a mystery not knowing what the solution is, and then adopt one of your player's speculations as the answer.I have never lost my temper with a DM, but if one tried that I'd be excusing myself so I wouldn't be tempted to hit them in the face.RPG stories should never be passively unfolding for the characters or the players.  They are the actual actors.  I have over the years come to understand the need of a hook to get players involved in the story quickly, and I can see you could use a cutscene to convince players that there is indeed some actual substance to the plot, but I'd much rather that was done by an actual participatory hook than simply asking players to watch the important NPCs do important and interesting things.Moreover, the real technique you are engaging in here is hooking the players at the level of metagame.  By showing them a cutscene of what their players couldn't know, you are creating player motivation to be involved in the story, but not character motivation to be involved in the story.  If you were indeed counting on players to not abuse their metagame knowledge, the players would not animate their characters to be interested in what they could know only from a cutscene.  In fact, quite the contrary is occurring.  By showing them a cutscene of something more interesting than the game itself, you are counting on your players to metagame to go find that interesting thing.I'm not saying that a cut scene of this sort is always bad.  It's certainly infinitely preferable than being boring.  There are almost certainly cases were good DMs can make it work.  And it is the sort of thing that does work well in passive media like movies or novels.  But the great virtue of an RPG is it is not passive media, and relying too heavily on techniques that work in passive media to deliver your exposition is very likely to be borrowing.  For example, in your made up example, you don't have characters speaking to each other: you merely have players speaking to each other.Perhaps it would help my understanding and encourage my sympathy if I had more concrete examples.</blockquote>

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