Epidiah Ravachol said:
Piratecat, any particular answers that shocked you or took the game in a direction you didn't expect?
Oh yes. Absolutely. Although I've mentioned one of them before.
When I wrote the character questionnaires, I was short one question for Frances and wanted a simple "throw-away" question, and I was using my wife (KidCthulhu) for brainstorming. "Where did you get those shoes," she says. "You sure?" I say. "That seems kind of irrelevant." "Trust me," she says, "thinking about it will help define her character."
I always pictured Frances to be a somewhat naive, fun-loving dilettante. Then I got back Xath's questionnaire for the NC game day, and nearly spit up when I read her aforementioned answer.
"These shoes? I was in a Harlem gin joint with my girlfriend when she started macking up to one of my sugar daddies. Once she was drunk, I dragged her out into the alley behind the joint and stripped her of everything she had on her. I left her there unconscious, and I've never seen her since.
I
love these shoes."
Note to self: KidCthulhu is smarter than I am. This minor question completely defined her character: cold, jealous fury. When I got to the point where Frances reported killing her grandfather herself, totally throwing my plot into a tizzy, I was scarcely surprised.
Other unexpected revelations from different games: sometimes the lawyer was corrupt, incompetent, a murderer and addicted to heroin. Sometimes he was utterly forthright, ethical, and a secret coward. Sometimes Daniel was an earnest young man having a love affair with his best friend, and sometimes he was a decadent layabout who would seduce anything female that moved.
Surprisingly, the con-woman maid only held a seance once in all the games I ran, and only two Bertrams used their photography equipment to take spirit photographs. But the old lady never let me down with her two yappy (and plot-useful) dogs... even in the game where, at the end of the session, it turned out that the woman playing Agate never drew
once, and not one person realized it. She kept ordering her son to do things for her, and he handily obliged. I think it improved the game for everyone.