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Message: <blockquote data-quote="aramis erak" data-source="post: 8414695" data-attributes="member: 6779310">Horror and prep do not go hand in hand. Prep often gets in the way of actually putting fear for their characters into play. If the super-intelligent baddy is smarter than the GM, then prep just hinders making him a full threat... While I harp on the idea of meaningful choices¹ as my primary metric for good GMing, sometimes illusionism² is essential to tone. (Note also: I don't like GMing a story I wrote - I just create encounters that are likely, and see if the players head for them. ) The trick is to not let the illusionism take away the meaningfulness of their choices.Note that I said tone and not story.  Horror is about tone. Mysteries, too. One of my dirty secrets in running L5R Magistrate games is that I set up 3 NPCs as potential doers, and it's up to them to decide which one did it. I don't know, and until the needed roll, neither do they. I don't pick. This also means my tells don't actually tell them whodunnit. Again, tone, not story. I can't lead them to the right or wrong choice, because, until they get a confession, it's not decided. This has had some seriously interesting in character RP at the table.A mystery in an AW style game can be the same way. The prep is a list of suspects, and clues to narrow it downm but the final decision? make the accusation and see if it elicits a confession or not. Clues can point to two or more targets. -=-=-=-1: Meaningful Choices: players have enough information to know whether each of the clear options is risky or not, and some idea of the potential consequences, and the odds thereof, and the outcomes are different.2: The appearance of player impact without actually having impact, or of something having been a fixed fact, despite not having crossed the GM's mind prior to the topic being discussed by players</blockquote>

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