In the course of a campaign there are a lot of surprises: dramatic reveals, shocking twists, spooky mysteries, unforeseen betrayals. But along with these, there is often a fair amount of foreshadowing, which adds a risk of the players guessing ahead of time what the surprise will be.
In a work of fiction, the audience anticipating plot twists isn’t a problem. The author is in control, and even if the audience knows what’s going to happen next, the characters don’t.
We encounter examples of this all the time in horror movies, when the audience sees the killer stalking one of the protagonists, who is unaware of their impending demise. More generally,
the audience commonly receives dramatic interludes to check in on the villains for a little foreshadowing of what’s to come, thereby heightening the dramatic tension.
The problem is that this simply doesn’t work in a roleplaying game. In an RPG, the players possess aspects of all three roles; authors, actors, and audience. Where a narrator in a novel might turn the spotlight away from the protagonists for a moment to highlight something important they are currently unaware of, a GM cannot foreshadow to the players anything they do not want the characters to know as well.
Literary characters are also controllable from an authorial level, while PCs are the one element of an RPG that are trulynot under the GM’s control. Unlike the NPCs you control, the players are not obliged to follow the dictates of narrative logic. They are free to ignore or sabotage the plot as they like, and they are capable of metagame thinking.
“Called It!”
No matter how well roleplayed, a PC is on some level aware that the universe they inhabit does not operate by the laws of cause and effect that rule our own universe, but rather according to the dictates of narrative logic. Logic such as “all viziers are beard-twirling villains,” for example. Or “if two characters on a TV show have an inexplicable heart-felt scene in the middle of the episode, one of them is about to die.”
Any knowledge that you provide to the players—no matter how obliquely—will be churned over, analyzed, and used against you at the worst possible time. For example, where a detective is required not to puzzle together the identity of the killer until the last thirty pages of the book, a PC in a noir game (like the person actually reading a detective novel) may very well deduce it within the first couple of game sessions.
I once ran a game in which the PCs’ kindly old mentor was in secret the Big Bad Evil Guy of the campaign, pulling strings from behind the scenes for nearly a year of real time, while the players were none the wiser. None the wiser, of course, until one player idly wondered aloud if the two might be one and the same, mere moments before we were to sit down for the session at the end of which this was to be dramatically revealed.
Once the thought had been aired, the players had only to ponder the events of the game through this new lens for a moment before the conclusion became inescapable. It was designed to be so, through months of ever so carefully laid foreshadowing and hints. Except the conclusion
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was meant to be reached at theend of the session we were about to sit down to, after the players had placed the game’s McGuffin right into the hands of the one person they needed to keep it away from, thus setting up the climatic finale.
This is the reason why GMs often grow increasingly paranoid about the players guessing beforehand any aspect of the story to come, and why they begin to develop tactics to avoid that situation—which unfortunately tend to be a terrible drag on the game as a whole. The most common GM reaction to players divining future plot points is to either try to convince them they are wrong or just completely change that plot point. However, both of these courses of action are ultimately counter-productive.
In the former case, you are robbing the players of an achievement, and when that plot point finally rolls around they will remember that you tried to trick them away from it and resent you for it. In the latter case, you’re likely making a last minute change to something which has already been foreshadowed, and that never works well.
A salient example of this is the DC Comics story-line Armageddon 2001, from the early 90s. In that story32, it was revealed that sometime in the future a well known hero would go insane, become a villain named The Monarch, and take over the world. The true identity of The Monarch was a secret throughout most of the series. However, his true identity (Captain Atom) leaked out about halfway through the series. Upset that the surprise had been spoiled, the editors at DC quickly changed the final issues, revealing the Monarch instead to be another character, Hawk.
The change was very poorly received, and was widely decried as making no sense either in terms of the story as presented so far or the character of Hawk. It is exceedingly likely that any last minute change you make to your own plot will be received just as poorly by your players.
Regardless of how you try to protect your dramatic reveal, you aren’t doing yourself or the game any favors, and in fact you may end up harming your game even more than if you had simply let things stand.
Arbitrary changes to the game aside, predictive players do pose a risk to the integrity of a campaign. Fundamental elements of storytelling, such as foreshadowing or the dramatic twist, become torturously difficult to pull off when the protagonists—that is to say, the players—are not bound by the same constraints of genre convention as the rest of the story.
32Spoilers, if you haven’t read it!
So then how do you present the plot in a way that makes sense? Give your players too little information and your game will seem disjointed and random. Give them too much information and they’ll short-circuit you.
The solution is two-fold. First, recognize that while the audience may speculate as to the ending of a story, and while they may guess correctly, that does not necessarily diminish the story in-and-of itself. Lots of people guess the ends of movies, and it doesn’t necessarily make them any less good as stories. The journey, after all, is often important more than the destination.
We naturally assume that the hero of the story will win out in the end. That doesn’t make the hair-raising escape from the villain’s death trap any less hair-raising.
Don’t change your plot simply on the basis of the players guessing what it’s going to be. All you’re doing is diluting it, and if your players are paying enough attention to pick out the plot points, they’re going to smell bullshit a mile away. If anything, the fact that your players are interested enough in your story to be paying attention is a sign that you’re running a good game.
Second, it’s a given that your players are going to turn anything they know to their advantage.
You can’t avoid that. But you can plan your adventures in such a way that your plots don’t depend on the players following a specific course of action—especially if that course of action is predicated on them not making logical conclusions about the plot.
Instead, you have to budget for the players seeing through your clever schemes. Keep in mind the popular mantra of the computer world: “There is no such thing as security through obscurity.”
In the example I gave earlier, I was wrong to hinge the outcome of the campaign on the players not figuring out a major plot point that had been heavily foreshadowed. If anything, I was lucky they didn’t guess it weeks earlier. It would have been a great climax for a novel, but it was not a good RPG plot. What I should have done was give the villain himself a back-up plan, in case the party uncovered his wicked schemes.
Dealing with the players’ power of prediction ultimately boils down to not relying on player ignorance and being prepared for the inevitable moment when they get a jump ahead of you, instead of the usual jump behind. The ability of the players to meta-game makes scripting an RPG enormously different than writing a novel, play, movie, or video game. As the GM, this is something you need to anticipate and be ready for. In short, always have a Plan B.
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