Category: Roleplaying tips

Events: bringing the mystery to life

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This article was originally published on the Black Armada Patreon – please help us create more great games and gaming content by becoming a patron!

Whenever I GM a mystery game, I aim to create a sense of something that is still happening. Just wandering around collecting clues to solve a puzzle is fun, but I find that it adds a real sense of verisimilitude, but also urgency, when the mystery continues to develop after the investigation begins. I do this by creating a list of events that I can drop in as the investigation proceeds. This also has the benefit of giving the players stuff to respond to even if they’re totally failing to make any progress in their investigation.

The point here isn’t to treat it like a linear experience where you have to go through the full list. You could do that, and it might be fun, but it might also end up feeling like the players’ actions didn’t matter – after all, you made them go through the full list of planned events regardless of what they did. (I often think this when I play games like Assassin’s Creed – I love the dramatic stuff that happens but I know that I can do whatever I want and 90% of the time it will play out the same way regardless.)

Instead what I like to do is react to how the players are progressing. I do this in two ways:

  • Pay attention to how long they’re taking, and release events in a way that reflects that.
  • Pay attention to who they’re annoying, and release events in a way that reflects that.

In this way the mystery is responsive to what the players are doing. It feels like what they do (or don’t do) matters.

When it comes to measuring time, I’m not an absolutist about it. I’m not trying to track everything they do and add it up, Gygax-style. Again, you could do that, but it potentially has some unfortunate consequences, if you thought they’d take a couple of days of game time to solve the mystery, but they went off on a side quest or something and it took wildly longer, so that when they get back you have to roll out your entire events list. Realistic, maybe, but not very satisfying. Instead, I pay attention to, and roughly tot up in my head, things like whether they took a lengthy research action, and whether they spent an hour debating what to do next. Also, whether they fumbled a lot of rolls. Again, this isn’t realistic – an hour of debating is on a totally different scale to a three-day research project. I don’t care about the realism, it’s about feeling like what you do matters.

If they do something that I think would really annoy someone, or draws a lot of attention, that also goes in my mental tally. Again, there’s no real attempt to systematize it.

I then dole out the events with an eye to that mental total I’m keeping. The longer the players take, the more attention they draw, the more events I’m going to hit them with.

And the events are chosen to create a sense that the mystery is not finished yet. If it’s a murder mystery, the events might be more murders. Or, I might have the villains try and interfere with the investigation. The events are always rooted in my theory of the truth behind the mystery, so they’ll always feel like they’re part of it, rather than just random stuff happening.

As mentioned above, aside from making the mystery feel alive and real, this has the added benefit that there’s always more to investigate. If the players just can’t seem to figure out what to do, or they keep messing up their rolls, events give them more stuff to investigate. More opportunities to find clues.

By giving out more opportunities to find clues, you do risk creating a sense of a railroad. You probably don’t want the players to feel like no matter what they do you’re going to make sure they find every clue, even if that means you have to have a giant plot monster come and vomit the clues on their head. So I don’t generally use these events as a way to give out free clues – more like, they’re a fresh opportunity to get their teeth into the mystery.

But also, I make sure the events feel consequential, and ideally that they represent things getting worse. Because that means it feels like it matters. You took too long, and so somebody died. You failed a roll, and so things got worse. Even though these are just NPCs, sometimes ones you literally made up to have an event happen to them, it feels like it matters. Players genuinely feel bad when a made-up NPC dies on their watch! And the contrast this creates with the occasions where they are smart and quick and roll well, makes it feel like their choices (and their luck) are important.

This whole thing gets systematized in Ex Tenebris. Each scenario has a Menace track which the GM can mark. As it fills up, more events happen. If it fills up entirely the villains trigger their endgame with the players running to catch up. The Menace track sits alongside the Clue track, and they’re the same length, so you have a visible measure of how well you’re doing, and how much progress you need to make if you want to “win” the investigation.

With Ex Ten, marking Menace is a Move. So the GM can always do it if the players roll a mishap. They can also do it if they take an action which is time-consuming (like the lengthy research action mentioned above), or one which attracts a lot of attention.

In the current version of the rules (subject to late playtest changes), you can have multiple Menace tracks running at a time. While you only ever actively investigate one mystery, during downtime the GM sprinkles some Menace across these tracks. The players then choose one mystery to investigate. They can choose not to investigate a given mystery, but if they do it for too long, more events will happen, so that when they finally get around to it they’ll already be running to catch up.

You can use Menace – or the more informal version of it described above – with any mystery game. It really adds a lot to the experience.

Let me know what cool events have you sprung on your players to liven up the mystery. And don’t forget to check Ex Tenebris out on Kickstarter – we’re live from 9 September to 9 October.

Shaking the mystery up: discordant clues

Josh Fox Leave a comment

This article was originally published on the Black Armada Patreon – please help us create more great games and gaming content by becoming a patron!

I’ve talked about how using investigation logic, the division of information into Clues and Leads, and driving the mystery with a Theory, to make an emergent mystery feel more real and coherent. Now I want to talk about messing that neat picture up, through the use of discordant clues.

As mentioned in my last article, a Theory can be used to make sure that the Clues and Leads you present in an investigation hang together, and make it much easier for the players to come up with a plausible solution to the mystery. But if everything is too coherent and straightforward, the mystery will feel dull, linear and flat. Discordant clues are how you shake things up a bit and avoid that feeling of predictability.

Throughout the investigation, the GM is maintaining their own Theory of the mystery, while listening to the Speculations and Theory the players are coming up with. If you’ve ever GMed a traditional investigative game, you’ll have had the experience of listening to the players coming up with entirely wrong ideas about the mystery. They latch onto particular NPCs or clues and wildly extrapolate. There comes a moment where they discover something that doesn’t fit with their wrong Theory and they’re forced to think again. Discordant clues are the emergent mystery equivalent to that moment.

Ok, so what are discordant clues? Simply put, they’re clues that don’t fit the players’ emerging Speculations and/or Theory. When someone makes an investigation roll and gets a partial success or perhaps even a miss, the GM feeds them a clue that deliberately confounds what they were expecting to find. Now they’re forced to rethink their Theory and rebuild it.

The GM can do that in one of two ways:

  • They can imagine that the players’ Theory is basically right, but with one important mistake. Reveal a Clue that connects closely to that mistake. Doing that will likely lead to the players tweaking their Theory (not necessarily in the way the GM expected).
  • They can look to their own GM Theory and reveal a Clue that connects to that. Doing that can yield surprising results – it might upend the players’ Theory, or they might find a surprising way to make sense of it, but either way it will probably make them stop and think.

By now it won’t surprise you to learn that this is baked into the mechanics of Ex Tenebris. One of the ways the GM can complicate a Discovery roll is to supply a discordant Clue or Lead. It creates moments of surprise and, sometimes, moments of epiphany as the players work out what they think this new Clue means. But it keeps the feeling of coherence, because the GM is still basing the discordant Clue on a Theory – just not the one the players were working to.

Incidentally, this is something that happens in Lovecraftesque and other GMless emergent mystery games all the time. Because all the players are working to their own secret Theory, without knowing it they are constantly revealing Clues that may not perfectly fit with what the others had in mind. The little tweaks or massive revisions to your Conclusions in Lovecraftesque are a big part of the fun, and what makes it feel like you’re discovering the mystery as you go.

There’s a final step to this, which is that the GM can also do this at the end of the game, when the players go to confirm their Theory. This is the equivalent to the Answer A Question move in Brindlewood Bay, Unlock Doom’s Door in Apocalypse Keys, or the moment where a player generates the Final Horror in Lovecraftesque. In Ex Tenebris, it’s the Breakthrough Roll. When the players roll well, of course, the GM reveals that their Theory was right, and sets them up for an advantageous confrontation with the villains of the story. But when they roll badly, the GM has the option to confound their expectations, presenting a modified version of the players’ Theory or even basing the ending on their GM Theory instead. Of course, with minor tweaks to the rules you can do the same thing in other emergent mystery games like those mentioned above.

The moment in an investigative game where the players discover the truth can be a magical one. When they get it right, there’s the satisfaction of having figured something out. But there’s also magic in getting it wrong. That moment where you say “Of course! So that’s why we saw xyz clue!” A confounding Breakthrough Roll delivers that kind of magic – and as long as the GM has been following the rest of the advice in this series, it will feel like that surprising ending had been the plan all along.

Have you ever thrown out a surprising clue that totally changed the players’ thinking? Tell me in the comments! And don’t forget to check Ex Tenebris out on Kickstarter – we’re live from 9 September to 9 October.

Theory: how the mystery emerges

Josh Fox 1 Comment

This article was originally published on the Black Armada Patreon – please help us create more great games and gaming content by becoming a patron!

I’ve previously discussed how Ex Tenebris is an emergent mystery game, but uses investigation logic, and the division of information into Clues and Leads, to make the game feel more like a real investigation. But that is only one of three major components that make the mystery feel more real. The second component is theory.

I’ve written about this before on our Patreon: if you generate a series of clues without thinking about how they relate to each other, you will get a hot mess. A curated list of clues supplied by a designer, such as you see in Lovecraftesque scenarios or Brindlewood Bay mysteries, go some way to fix this. But even then if you choose the clues without thinking about theory, you are leaving the players a hell of a job to retroactively impose order on those clues when they come to the end of the investigation. Theory can fill this gap.

So what do I mean by Theory? Simple, really: Theory is someone’s idea of what the clues mean. In other words, what is really going on behind the scenes of this mystery: who is the bad guy, what actions are they taking that explain these clues, and why are they doing that. Who/what/why.

In any emergent mystery game, the GM can dramatically improve how coherent and real the mystery feels by coming up with a Theory of what is going on and generating clues that fit with that Theory. Not all emergent mystery games tell you to do this! But you will get a better result if you do.

You use your Theory to drive the clues and leads you reveal in play. You’re still improvising the clues and leads, and/or picking them from the lists provided in the game’s scenarios. But you’re choosing them (and customising them) to fit with your Theory. That’s what makes the mystery feel coherent and compelling – the clues will appear to fit together, because they do.

Note what I’m not saying – I am not saying “decide what the truth is and stick to it”. Just the opposite, in fact. You come up with a Theory at the start, and then you change it as you go. You can change it because you listened in on the players’ discussions and realized they had a better idea. You can change it because the game’s rules permitted the players to create a clue that surprised you. You can change it because you had a great idea while in the shower the morning before the session. All good. Change is good, because it means you aren’t wedded to a particular answer – something that would be very counter to the idea of an emergent mystery.

What you do need to do is pay attention to the clues, leads and other information you’ve already revealed. That means (sorry about this) taking good notes. A trick I recommend here is getting the players to do it – then not only do you have notes, you also have an insight into how they see the mystery. But either way you regularly review all those clues and update your Theory to reflect anything new and unexpected, while also making sure it fits with the earlier clues. Otherwise you wind up with, again, a hot mess.

As I say you can do this with any emergent mystery game. Ex Tenebris makes it a requirement. But it also requires something else, and that is that the players also have a Theory.

You might wonder, why make the players have a Theory? What is the point when they don’t create the clues? It doesn’t matter what they think, surely? Well, there’s several reasons why it’s good for them to have a Theory:

  • The players do, in fact, create clues. Most emergent mystery games include special abilities and rules that permit players to introduce clues. If they have a Theory, those clues are more likely to be coherent with what has already been created.
  • Their Theory gives the GM ideas. By listening in and stealing from the players’ Theory, the GM makes the mystery more compelling, and helps the players to feel smart. As the game unfolds they move from feeling clueless, to feeling like they’re beginning to anticipate what the clues might be.
  • Having a Theory preps the players for the finale where they are going to be in charge of resolving the mystery. In emergent mystery, it’s the players who decide what the mystery means. It’s super helpful if they’ve already been thinking about it!

To an extent this happens naturally. As the mystery spins out, the players may well start talking about what they mean. What you can do – and what Ex Tenebris does – is codify that a bit.

Ex Ten has Reflections scenes which come after each solid chunk of investigation, where the players are asked to Speculate about what it all means. They don’t need to come up with a full-blown Theory, as that can be a stretch early on when you’ve only got one or two clues. Indeed early Speculations are going to be fairly simple and vague, even including different contradictory ideas, and early Reflections scenes will tend to be quite short. The important thing is that the players are encouraged to regularly air their thoughts about the mystery.

Player Speculations give the GM fuel for their own ideas, and naturally tend to build towards a player Theory. They also push the investigation towards the more logic-driven approach I discussed in my earlier articles in this series, because the players will naturally want to follow the direction logically suggested by their own Speculations and Theory. And there’s a third benefit, which is that they shake the players out of an otherwise potentially dull cycle of investigate, investigate, investigate, and start them talking to each other in character – which is great if you like your game to have a focus on the characters and their relationships.

Ex Tenebris takes this further by using the outputs of those Speculations and, later, Theory discussions, and feeds them into the investigation mechanics. I’ll discuss that in my next article. But the approaches discussed above aren’t only for Ex Tenebris – you can use GM Theory and Reflection scenes with any emergent mystery game and see improvements to how smoothly a real-feeling mystery emerges from the clues.

Let me know about your experiences with emergent mystery! And don’t forget to check Ex Tenebris out on Kickstarter – we’re live from 9 September to 9 October.

Fleshing out the mystery: leads vs clues

Josh Fox 1 Comment

This article was originally published on the Black Armada Patreon – please help us create more great games and gaming content by becoming a patron!

As regular readers will know, Ex Tenebris is a gothic space investigation game that uses an emergent mystery framework, similar to games like Lovecraftesque and Brindlewood Bay, coming to Kickstarter in, like, a week (gulp!) A new design feature is that it makes the distinction between Clues and Leads – something I think could be useful for other emergent mystery games.

What’s the difference?

In essence, a Clue is something weird and enigmatic that doesn’t directly connect to the questions you need to answer to solve the mystery. So if one of those questions is “whodunnit”, a Clue will never include any information about the perpetrator. Clues needn’t be supernatural (though they might be) but they are always out of the ordinary, and clearly mysterious. Clues are the gunshot in the night, the pool of blood with no body, the glowing green goo dripping from the walls.

A Lead is almost the opposite: it isn’t weird or enigmatic, and may include information that is more directly useful. If the question is “who killed So-And-So”, a Lead could very well include information like “Such-And-Such has a longstanding grudge against so-and-so and has repeatedly said they wish they were dead”.

Leads don’t have to provide such clearly relevant information – they could instead point to a target for investigation. For example, the murder victim has in their pocket a business card belonging to Such-And-Such Inc – so now you know it’s worth investigating Such-And-Such.

Notice that neither type of Lead solves the mystery by itself either. You might know that Such-And-Such as a grudge against So-And-So and wanted them dead, but that doesn’t prove anything, and it might well be that there are other suspects too.

The point is that Clues are what makes the mystery a mystery. If nothing out of the ordinary is found, there is nothing mysterious, just a collection of ordinary facts.

Leads are what make the mystery possible to investigate, and they are what makes it potentially explicable. If all you’ve got is Clues then (by definition) you have a bunch of seemingly random weird stuff, with no idea where to look next or how it fits together. If you’ve ever played an emergent mystery game and thought “I have simply no idea what is going on here”, it’s probably because the game didn’t contain sufficient Leads.

Ex Tenebris formalises this distinction, and lets you get a Lead as a consolation prize if there is no Clue, either because you rolled badly or because there’s simply no logical reason why you’d find a Clue at this time and place using the method you’ve chosen.

Importantly, the game still has a requirement to accumulate a target number of Clues. Not Clues plus Leads. That’s because there can potentially be a lot of Leads – you could find yourself following a trail of Leads before gathering information about the motives of three different suspects. But not all of those Leads turn out in the end to be relevant to the mystery, whereas a Clue by definition always is.

In playtesting the effect has been remarkable: the Leads help to structure the investigation and makes it feel more… investigate-y. Instead of making the story feel like a clue piñata, it feels like you’re actually following a trail of evidence. And, when it comes to theorising about the mystery, the Leads provide context to interpret the Clues. The theory feels like something you’ve worked out from meaningful information rather than invented to explain the inexplicable.

Although they’re not a format part of other emergent mystery games (or indeed, mystery games generally) it’s a useful distinction for any investigation game. I recommend having a balance between the two types of information, because if you have too many Clues you’re likely to find your investigators baffled, while too many Leads just seems to generate an endless chain of investigation with no real sense of whether it connects to the mystery or not.

And don’t forget to check Ex Tenebris out on Kickstarter – we’re launching 9 Sep 2025.

Puncturing the clue piñata

Josh Fox 2 Comments

This article was originally published on the Black Armada Patreon – please help us create more great games and gaming content by becoming a patron!

The clue piñata is my name for a problem that sometimes happens with emergent mystery games like Brindlewood Bay. Essentially, the rules say wherever the players look for a Clue, they find one. That’s great! It’s a deliberate decision to avoid the classic problem in mystery games of the players struggling to find clues. But it can create a negative effect too: namely, that finding Clues feels too easy and not entirely realistic.

You walk into a room. You whack the Clue piñata. A clue falls out.

Walk into the next room. Whack the Clue piñata. Another clue falls out.

Look out the window. Whack the Clue piñata. Another clue falls out.

I’m exaggerating, but not by all that much.

The solution is rather simple: don’t let the players look for a Clue just anywhere. Ask them why they’re looking there, and how they’re going about it. They only get to roll if the answer makes sense.

In addition, feel free to set limits on how many Clues can be found in a given place. Ok, you searched the office and found a Clue. That means this place is now tapped out. If you want more, you’ll need to search somewhere else – or give an excellent justification for why they think there’s more information here that their first action didn’t turn up.

The effect of this is to increase the feeling that, even though we all know the mystery is improvised, it’s real. Because you have to describe how you’re going about looking for a Clue, and because that description needs to be good, it feels more like real investigation. Because you need to describe why you’re looking for a Clue there, and because that description needs to be good, the Clues feel more logical and more real.

Ex Tenebris, my gothic space investigation game (launching on Kickstarter in September), codifies this into the rules. The GM will only provide a clue if it makes logical sense to be able to find one – both based on the methods used, but also the context of the mystery: in other words is there any information here to find? It’s emergent mystery, so that question isn’t entirely based on GM fiat – if the players have a clear theory that there could be clues to be found, then there may be clues to be found. But they do have to have that theory – because if they don’t, the GM will look to their own ideas, and might well say “sorry, nothing to see here”.

Just because there’s no Clue in a place doesn’t mean there isn’t any useful information – Ex Tenebris distinguishes Clues from other types of information, so if the players go looking with a decent method but the GM doesn’t think there could be a Clue, they can still find something. What that something looks like will be covered in a later article.

In playtesting this has all worked really well. The process stops feeling like hitting a piñata, and starts to feel like, well, investigation. I think it would work just as well as an adaptation to existing emergent mystery games.

How to be a cooperative player

Josh Fox 1 Comment

Addie Stardust on Twitter asked for tips on how to be a cooperative player, and it turns out that I have some thoughts about this.

Cooperation means working together to make the game better. This might mean working with the GM but it also means working with the other players around the table. An important starting point here is that WE are working TOGETHER. So it’s not just one person being a cooperative player and helping everyone else, it’s a collective effort, and you get to look after yourself as well as the others. Ok? Let’s go.

The first step in cooperation to make the game better is understanding what would make the game better, and that is mainly about understanding what the people around the table want. So this means three things:

  • Listening to what other people want;
  • Actively soliciting people to better communicate what they want; and
  • Being clear yourself on what you want and signalling it to the other players.

Obviously it will be hard for anyone to cooperate if they don’t understand what each other want. “What you want” means: what you’re interested in; what kind of story you want to tell; what kind of themes you want to address; what kind of things you want to do; what kind of character you want to play; and so on. Some games do a great job of helping to structure and codify these things, greasing the wheels of the conversation. But even if your particular game doesn’t do that, you can do it for yourself. One part of that is getting the information from the other players, by paying close attention and listening to what they’re saying and doing. If they’re not communicating or you’re not clear, or if you think there’s more to know, you ASK them.

The other half of this is playing your part by being clear about what you like. Don’t wait to be asked – the more you share of your preferences, the better other people can help you to enjoy the game. Plus you’re leading by example and likely encouraging others to reciprocate by telling you what they like.

Now that we understand what each other want, we can work to give each other the game we’re looking for. This means consciously and positively:

  • Engaging with the direction and themes of the story
  • Playing towards the role and image of the characters
  • Building connections and synergies with the rest of the group

Engaging with the direction and themes of the story is what, in a traditional GM’d game, would often mean “following the GM’s plot hooks”. In other words, the GM has prepared a story, therefore you engage with that story. You swim with the current rather than against it. But also, whether you’re in a GMless game or a GM’d game where the group are more closely involved in setting the direction, you follow the other player’s “plot hooks” too. If the players have said they want to engage with particular themes, then it’s just as important (maybe more so) to help them do that as it is to follow where the GM is pointing the story. If we’re all here interested in romantic rivalries, then we can have fun playing into that space by flirting, showing jealousy, opening up new relationships, and so on. And we might choose to ignore the GM’s plot hooks to do this, if it seems like that’s what the group are most interested in. In fact it’s just as much the GM’s role, as a cooperative player (the GM is a player too), to step back and take their foot off the gas, making space for us to address these themes.

Of course even better is if we can cleverly make the GM’s plot hooks and our desire for (in this example) romantic rivalries fit together. A really skilled GM will find out about this interest at the start of the game and build their plot hooks around it. And then we as a group will skilfully use the GM’s plot hooks to get the juicy romance plot we wanted. That is what cooperation looks like: everyone striving together towards the story they want.

Playing towards the role and image of the characters is what has been called elsewhere “playing to lift up”. It means having a clear idea of what each of the characters want to do, and how they want to be seen, and taking action to support that. A really basic approach to this is sharing and (where appropriate) ceding the spotlight so they can have their time in the sun. But you can be much more pro-active than that. For example, if another player describes their character as a leader, then that means they want to lead. A leader has to have people who look up to them, who listen to them, who follow them. As a cooperative player, you can help with that by portraying your character looking up to them, listening to them and following them. You might even at times step away from situations where you are naturally inclined to lead, to make space for them to do so. You might give them explicit encouragement when required, saying “these people need your leadership” to prompt the player to push the character into the role they wanted.

You’re like a backing singer or supporting actor working to make the main character look good. This doesn’t have to mean “look good” in the sense of “look like a badass” – if the player wants their character to be comic relief, you can help them do that too. If the player wants tragedy and pain, you can be the one dishing it out. The point is to know what they’re after (again, if you aren’t clear, ask) and help to give it to them. This may mean you have to tweak your own idea of what your character would be like. Hold your ideas about your character loosely, making space to adjust them to be a better supporting act for other people. Perhaps you didn’t really envisage your character as someone’s follower. But take a moment to think – could they follow another person? Maybe they are a leader in some contexts and a follower in others? Try to keep your character malleable enough that they can fit in with what is going on at the gaming table.

As with the story themes, this is a job for everyone, including of course the GM. And it’s also important to say that you get to have your time in the sun too. Sometimes you’ll be stepping back to make space for someone else’s preferred role to play out, but sometimes you should claim your space in the spotlight.

You can be even more cooperative here by inviting others into your spotlight time: if you’re the leader, ask if anyone wants to be your follower right now. If you’re the protector, ask if anyone wants to be protected. This is where building connections and synergies begins to become important. Right at the start of the game, you can look for roles that are complimentary (leader/follower; mentor/student; unrequited lover/oblivious object of desire). You can also do this in real time during the game, identifying where your cool action in the spotlight could involve someone else. Invite others into what you’re doing. You can come up with any pretext you like: perhaps there’s a genuine logical reason why you’d want a wingman for this mission, or perhaps your character just feels like some company.

The reverse also applies. Don’t be shy in asking if you can get involved in what other people are doing. Having two people in the spotlight at a time means twice as many people are having fun, but also potentially they’re having fun in ways they couldn’t otherwise. Sure, the sneakthief could just go off and do a cool stealth mission on their own. But might it be even more fun for them if there’s another character (you) tagging along, permitting the action to be peppered with conversation, perhaps allowing them to rescue you from a tight spot.

Stepping into someone else’s spotlight is a bit risky, because it could feel like you’re hogging the spotlight or treading on their toes. This is a good time to take the conversation out of character and ask the player whether they would enjoy having you along rather than just having your character ask theirs. Once they’ve said yes you can continue to exercise your judgement about how best to support them and lift them up, enhancing their enjoyment rather than crowding them out.

You can weave the whole of this together into the most beautiful connections and synergies if you want to. The themes of the story can support the desired roles and relationships, and vice versa. That’s what a really tight design can do, by the way – some games dish out character archetypes, relationships and mechanics that are all mutually reinforcing. But you don’t necessarily need the game to do that for you if you are actively working together to do it yourselves. There’s probably such a thing as a too tightly-woven mesh of themes, roles and relationships; you may be going too far if you’re just pre-deciding everything that’s going to happen in the game. But definitely having awareness of what everyone around the table wants and consciously working to play into those things, will create a more cohesive and fulfilling game for everyone.

I personally think that cooperation is the apex skill for roleplayers. You can be an amazing character actor, a genius at deploying the game’s mechanics, an incredibly evocative narrator, a brilliant problem solver, and many more besides. These all can make a contribution to a great game. But if you’re taking those skills and pointing them at the other people at your table, positioning yourself to connect with them and support them in what they’re doing, you’re going to come off as a much better roleplayer, and get a much richer game to boot.

The rock of dramatic potential

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It is a fact that some roleplaying games get into the meat of the story faster than others. One way to do this is to have a clear mission which is the focus of play, like “raid this dungeon” or “investigate this murder”. But what about the more character/relationship driven side of play? What is the difference between a game that cuts straight to interesting, meaningful drama, compared to one that takes ages to get going, whose relationships are lifeless or where the drama is just sound and fury, signifying nothing?

This isn’t just a theoretical question. I’ve lost count of the number of games that have handed me (through character/ world building at the start of the game) a bunch of interesting characters and intriguing relationships, but where I and the other players were at a loss where to start with bringing them to a head. The result, too often, is unsatisfying early scenes where we skirt the drama, or charge headlong at it, emotionally flailing at each other, but without any real sense of meaning.

I think of interesting RPG drama as like a rock that you must get rolling. The rock must have the heft created by meaning, but it also must have momentum so that interesting scenes can happen. To get the rock moving, you must roll it up the hill of dramatic potential, before it can roll down that hill, generating interesting drama in its wake. Games vary wildly in how big a rock they give you, but also in how much work they do to roll the rock up the hill.

Metaphors are all very well, but what does this mean in practice? Let’s take an example of a potential PC romance. A classic game like D&D wouldn’t bother to give any help making such a romance happen; it’s entirely in the player’s hands to do that. They might decide to introduce some romantic interaction but it might feel forced, or require quite a bit of work to get it going or make it feel significant.

Indie games might more typically help set up some potential, by asking you relationship questions like “which other PC do you have a crush on” or even “which other PC are you in love with”. This, then, is the rock: pre-generated emotional weight. It means weaving into your character’s backstory (even if only implied backstory) a sense that they have been interested in this other character for a while. It gives them an automatic reason to pursue a romance, and makes any resulting scenes more significant for them.

But it’s still pretty boring, as it stands. Even having established that one character (let’s call them Romeo) is in love with another (let’s call them Juliet), we don’t have a particularly dramatic relationship. One person being attracted to another, even in love with them, does not make for drama. Romeo may ask Juliet to dance with him, or suchlike, and she is left to either respond positively or negatively. Perhaps they’ll even hop into bed straight away. Which is fine, but not terribly dramatic or meaningful, because we have no real sense of their emotional context beyond “he’s in love with her”.

It’s actually pretty hard to get started on a conversation with your crush, as Peter could tell you.

For drama, there must be this emotional texture and, ideally, interesting complications. Consider these alternative starting relationships: Romeo is in love with Juliet, and Juliet is in love with Romeo, but they belong to warring factions who will never accept their love. Or: Romeo is in love with Juliet, but Juliet cannot forgive Romeo for killing her best friend. Or: Romeo is still in love with Juliet, after their marriage ended in acrimony.

These wrinkles add colour and meaning to a bland relationship, and they set up interesting stuff to happen in play. The warring factions are going to get up in Romeo and Juliet’s face and force them to work to have their romance happen. Or, Romeo is going to have to work to get Juliet to even consider him, and whether she says yes or no it will be freighted with meaning for them both. Or, their every action will be loaded with the regret and longing of their broken relationship and the question of whether it can ever be revived.

Good stuff. This has made the rock heftier, because it’s made the relationship more interesting and dramatically meaningful. Anything that happens to that relationship in future will be more significant because of the work put in to define and complicate the relationship.

But it still takes work to roll the rock up the hill. Some of the above starting relationships have more dramatic potential than others. What this amounts to is, to what extent is the relationship in a stable equilibrium where there’s no real reason to expect interesting stuff to happen, and to what extent is the relationship close to an interesting turning point or crisis that will throw it into motion. If Juliet hates Romeo’s guts because he killed her best friend, that is very interesting but seems like a brick wall in Romeo’s path. It’s hard to know how he even gets started romancing her, because the obvious answer to any move he might make is “get lost, friend-killer”. The relationship is stagnant, immobile. One of the people playing these characters is going to have to work (probably a lot of work) to get their character into a position where that can change.

Did you just kill my best friend? Get lost, friend-killer!

In contrast, if Romeo and Juliet are already in love, and there’s already a war between their factions, then that is close to crisis point. You can immediately see the possibilities for scenes that will pit their love against political reality. All we need do is have their midnight tryst witnessed by a faction member, and we are straight into crisis. Or perhaps we can have a close faction ally of one character kill a close faction ally of the other, to throw the relationship into conflict and emotional confusion. Here, the rock has been rolled nearly to the top of the hill, and it takes only a little more work to push it into action.

We can get the rock even closer to the top of the hill, very easily. Put simply, we can decide at the start of play that a crisis or turning point-inducing event has already happened. So for a starting relationship: Romeo and Juliet are in love with each other, but Romeo just killed Juliet’s best friend. Our game will start with Romeo having to decide how to break this news to Juliet or perhaps to try and conceal it from her. That’s an instant scene starter and, no matter what Romeo does, a drama-generator. The rock has practically started to roll already.

We could have started from cold (as in the D&D example above) and got into the above very dramatic situation in play, and there is a good argument that getting into stuff in play is more interesting than just defining it up front. But doing so entails a lot of work, during which no drama to speak of is happening, and with the risk that we’ll never get there. After all, good authors sometimes struggle to create engaging, meaningful drama between characters. It isn’t actually easy. Instead of taking that risk, we can kickstart the drama, propelling us towards exciting in-game decisions that lead to more drama, if work has been done to put the characters at some kind of inflection point at the start of play.

We can do the same thing but with a slightly less immediate “must address this NOW” feel by putting the crisis-inducing event further into the past. Like this: Romeo and Juliet are in love with each other, but Juliet doesn’t know that Romeo was the one who killed her best friend. Which other character knows about it? This approach puts the rock of dramatic potential at the top of the hill, but stationary. It only takes a nudge to throw it into motion: the character who knows Romeo did the deed tells Juliet. But that nudge can be held back and delivered right at the most exciting moment, when it will cause maximum emotional chaos.

Creating dramatic potential and putting things close to (or preferably at) an inflection point is particularly important for one-shot play. If you want character relationships to be front and centre in a one-shot, they simply must be made complicated and pushed to an inflection point, so that meaningful drama can happen in the session. Campaigns also benefit from this because it gets things going right away and enables the relationship to further develop rather than struggling to get going in the first place.

So, whether you’re a game designer or a GM or player, you can help to get drama going in your games early by:

  • creating emotionally charged relationships at the start;
  • complicating them; and
  • putting them at or near an inflection point as play starts.

These simple steps will virtually guarantee exciting emotional drama right from the word go, and make you wonder why you ever settled for questions like “who do you have a crush on?”

Safety Marks

Frax 1 Comment

In the course of writing, playtesting and now publishing Bite Marks I’ve been thinking and reading a lot about safety tools. The conversation has expanded so much since I started role-playing 29 years ago and I love how people are thinking about play culture, baking safety into mechanical design and normalising the use of safety tools and putting more conscious effort into looking out for each other. The idea that we are still only at the start of this journey is really exciting to me – I am eagerly looking forward to the next iteration of safety tools.

Just recently I was in the process of prepping a game of Bite Marks when I realised that in addition to all the stuff written in the book about safety there is something else I do without realising it – I figured I’d write a post about that.

Like many people I use the three most comment safety tools in my games and my play. The first thing you do in Bite Marks (and all my games) is create a list of banned items via anonymous channels as necessary. This is like an anonymous version of Lines and Veils as created by Ron Edwards. I also encourage the use of the X-card by John Stavropolous and Script Change by Beau Sheldon.

But I also consider what aspects of the specific game I’m playing are particularly safety relevant and then discuss them up front. I point them out with a big red hand. For Bite Marks there are three particular aspects of the game and system which may cause tension for players. Before a game I explain those aspects in more detail and talk through the ways in which those elements will work and the ways in which they will NOT work. Below is a blow by blow account of how I do that for Bite Marks and the three elements I highlight.

Bite Marks Example:

Player v Player

“Bite Marks has a player v. player element but not in the sense that the players will be trying to back stab each other. Player v. player conjures up a lot of different images – most of which probably don’t quite fit the Bite Marks setting. In Bite Marks, players can dominate or scrap with each other, they can force each other to reveal their feelings… but they are all on the same team. They are working to the same goal, they don’t have secret agendas that have the players competing with each other. This means the game has all the trappings of player v. player but the game play is really different.”

I always point this out so that the players don’t just see all the Moves they can use on each other and assume this is a game about screwing each other over.

Domination

“In Bite Marks there is a Move called Dominate. This *can* in some circumstances allow one player character to give orders to and mentally dominate another player character into taking an action they do not want to take. That is deliberate because it is about struggling with your werewolf nature, and your werewolf nature wants to take orders from those with a higher status. You might feel uncomfortable about being forced to take an action you don’t want to take – that is cool, your character probably feels the same way so channel it into playing them.

The move reflects how you are conditioned to obey, it isn’t about someone changing how you think and feel about the act.

This means that if someone makes a successful dominate move on you, then, when you have completed the thing you were dominated to do you are at liberty to row with them about it, blame them and have it change how you see them or even whether you will ever trust them again. In fact, it is encouraged that you do just that!”

Dominate takes away some player and some character agency and it is definitely going to lead to uncomfortable situations. So, by stating this all clearly up front (instead of finding out halfway through a session) people can choose how they want to engage with it; or whether this is not a game they want to play at all before the session starts!

Give In to the Wolf

“In Bite Marks there is a move called “Give In to the Wolf”. This Move gives you a big boost to your powers but if you roll a fail the MC will take over your character. This move takes away player and character agency completely. The Wolf is out of control and they are going to do something bad that your character will take the fall for. You can choose whether or not to use the Move, in fact if you don’t want to use the Move because you are scared of losing control I’d suggest playing into it and making it a feature of your character!

Dominate and Give into the Wolf are STILL subject to all the other safety rules, you can’t use it in relation to material which is Banned, people can and should use the X-card and Script Change tools as they wish to (and there is an additional rule in the game text that you can never use these Moves to get around consent in sexual situations – it just doesn’t work).”

I explain these issues at the start of any game (whether in person or ahead of time in an email or similar. A big part of the reason I’ve written this blog post is so that you can cut and paste this wording and use it in your own Bite Marks pre-session prep if you like.

Identifying which parts of a game world, or system might need some extra explanation and framing is a judgment call. I would say that mechanics touching on consent, anything which is a bit surprising or deals with vulnerability and oppression are good places to look for mechanics and background that you need to put front and centre in this way. Games which have themes of e.g.: horror, sex and/or oppression as a core part of their setting are also good candidates for a pre-game explanation. In a Monsterhearts game I might talk about Darkest Self and ‘Turn Someone On’ and Sex Moves, explaining in more detail how they will work, how they will be framed in the game and how to lean into playing them. In any Lovecraftian game I’ll give a briefing on racism and portrayals of mental health. Don’t forget that a lot of historical-style games will come with various forms of oppression baked into the setting which privileged players and groups won’t immediately recognise.

In a convention or game pitching situation you won’t have a lot of time to get into details – so it is worth highlighting the presence of anything safety relevant and then as soon as you have a settled player group you can do a rundown of the safety tools you want to use and go into any extra detail you need to mention. Part of your explanation will also depend on who you are playing with and how well you know them. Personally I’ll skip some bits of the briefing for people who have played Bite Marks before and are familiar with my three ‘red hand topics’ – but I will always stress and restate what safety tools we are using. I would more explicit running Bite Marks at the convention with a table of strangers especially if I know some of them have played Vampire the Masquerade which has a different way of using a dominate-like power.

Ultimately this is all about making sure that everyone is on the same page with the game and giving people the option to leave before the game starts if they don’t want to play with those mechanics or background.

In terms of other safety tools I think that tabletop RPGs could learn a great deal from LARP in how we approach debriefing after the end of a session or campaign and this resource compiled by Kienna Shaw and Lauren Bryant-Monk is also a fantastic compendium of safety techniques and goes into much more detail and explanation of the ones I’ve mention above.

If you are a UK lawyer one early principle you learn is called Denning’s Red Hand Rule. This rule states that the more unusual a contract clause is the more attention you need to bring to it. Lord Denning suggested in a judgment that some clauses might only be valid if they were written in red ink with a red hand pointing to them. I apply this principle to the games I run. What mechanics, what themes should be written in red in with a red hand pointing to them. Set expectations early, alongside your preferred safety tools. As a GM you will (probably) have a lot more information about a game than the players. So it is your job to identify land mines before people step on them and then point them out… with a red hand.

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How I run investigation games (part 2: in-session)

Josh Fox Leave a comment

Last time I wrote about how I prep investigation games. I’ll talk a bit more about that here, but I also want to move on to talk about what I do during sessions.

My aim in running an investigative game is twofold:

  • Make the players feel smart
  • Make the investigation challenging

Those two aims seem kind of contradictory, but in a way they support each other. You cannot feel smart if the game hands you everything on a plate. You cannot feel challenged if the game is simplistic or handled entirely through dice rolls.

As discussed in a previous article, you can break investigation down into various components:

  • Leads (where should I look next?)
  • Imprints (what clues are there?)
  • Patterns (how do the clues fit together?)
  • Conclusions (what is my theory of the case?)

I want as much as possible of the above to feel like they were investigated by the players themselves, using their own brainpower, without running up against the perennial problems of analysis paralysis and the thing that seems obvious to the GM not being at all obvious to the players. I’m not going to pretend those problems aren’t real – and more on how I tackle them below. But for now, let’s talk about how I handle the components above.

My initial lead is always given away for free. That’s a given: the game will be no fun if you can’t get started.

From that point on, I follow a simple set of rules:

  • If a clue is obvious, you don’t have to roll to find it
  • If a clue is hidden but you look in the place it’s hidden, you find it without rolling
  • You can find any clue with an appropriate roll
  • Once you’ve got the clues, it’s mostly down to you to figure out the logical leads, patterns, and conclusions

You can probably see for yourself how the above could easily lead to an investigation stalling. If the players don’t look in the right place, or roll badly, or can’t figure out the next lead, then everything grinds to a halt. There are three principal ways that I solve this:

  • Critical mass. I make sure there are enough clues available that it’s unlikely they’ll fail to find anything.
  • Keep some leads obvious. Signposting specific characters or locations as being of interest will ensure there’s always a next step to follow (but there’s always the potential to discover more)
  • Move the clock on. If the players are taking too long, then I look to the next event on my timeline and make it happen – so even if they get stuck, the story doesn’t

The aim here isn’t to make it impossible to fail the investigation. That wouldn’t be challenging, and it wouldn’t make the players feel smart. The aim, instead, is to make sure that they never get completely stuck – even if they’re failing, they’re moving forwards. So there’s always enough clues to find something out, and there’s always enough obvious leads that you have somewhere to look next.

Equally, my aim is to create a potential dividend from being smart, from being lucky, and from being quick. Players who get lucky on the dice find more clues; players who think their way around those clues and ask good questions discover patterns and start to reach conclusions; and those clues and conclusions can enable them to get ahead of my timeline. Those who move at the minimum pace enabled by following the obvious links, probably find themselves fighting for their lives at the finalé, having left a trail of murders in their wake. Those who leverage luck and judgement may be able to save some lives and catch the perpetrator unawares.

What this means is: being open to the players failing – so that another person is killed (or whatever consequences I established in my timeline happen); but also being open to them wildly succeeding, so that my villains fail and their plans are completely foiled. The critical mass of clues and obvious leads means that I’m hopefully leaning towards success over the medium-term, with occasional frustrating blocks that make that success more satisfying when it comes.

I cannot overemphasise how important it is for failure to come with consequences. If they get stuck, then those consequences mean that the game doesn’t get stuck; instead of their next lead being a witness they want to investigate or a place they want to investigate, the next lead comes in a body bag. And of course, this also means that when they succeed, they’ll know that it was earned, because they know what happens when they fail.

Very occasionally this means the players fail utterly. The villains complete their plan entirely, and escape. That’s great. It means there’s now a future recurring villain, who the players really want to take down, because they feel responsible for not catching them the first time. As long as things didn’t grind to a halt during the session, so there were always fresh leads to follow and tense pacing created by my timeline events, then failure is ok.

One last thing: do not let things drift towards out of character discussion of clues. To a degree all theorising is out of character, since you don’t actually have the skills, knowledge and brainpower of your characters. But try to keep people talking as their characters, because that will help to reinforce the sense that any frustration they may be feeling is fictional, it’s part of the story. They’re not sat on your couch feeling worn down by the investigation, they’re stood in a dark alley looking at a corpse and wondering when the next one will show up.

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How to be a great RPG player

Josh Fox Leave a comment

I’d like to talk a bit about how players can contribute to making a roleplaying game as much fun as possible for everyone. The headline is: Don’t expect your GM to make all the effort, or to make the game fun for you. Roleplaying isn’t like going to a movie – your contributions are as important to making the game fun as the GM’s contributions. Don’t show up expecting to sit back and watch. Get stuck in!

I’ve observed that people often like to talk about how to achieve GM mastery, or how you (the GM) can best entertain your players and meet their needs. Such things are the fodder for countless articles. And that’s completely valid! In a GM’d game, the GM is often a really key person, and it’s important that they do everything they can to make the experience great for everyone. But guess what? It’s not only the GM’s job to do that. You can and should do things to help to make the game enjoyable for everyone (including the GM, and including yourself).

What things can you do to make the game better?

1. Look out for what the GM is offering you, and SAY YES. Come up with a reason why your character is interested in what’s on the table. And I don’t mean sarcastically saying “oh, I guess we’re meant to go to the dark dungeon, I bet that will be fun”. I mean genuinely looking for reasons to engage with what the GM puts on the table. That doesn’t have to mean doing exactly what the GM expected you to: engaging with the game could mean finding a clever way around a problem or turning an expected enemy into an ally. What it definitely doesn’t mean is turning around and walking away from a situation.

2. Look out for what the other players are interested in and engage with that too. Look to make connections with them. Take an interest in what they’re doing. In some games that might mean reacting strongly, creating intra-character drama. In others it might mean being a supportive team player. Still others might be adversarial in nature. You can probably tell what kind of game you’re in, but if in doubt, ask – discuss it with your group, and then engage in a way that works for the game. Bankuei’s same page tool could be handy here.

3. If you find the above hard, then it might mean you need to talk to the group about it. A roleplaying game should ideally get you excited, and make you want to leap in and engage with the story and with the other players’ characters. If that’s not how you’re feeling then maybe you’re in the wrong game, or maybe there’s something you want from the game you’re not getting right now. But be prepared to listen and think about what you could do, before you start making demands on others. It’s your game too.

4. Look for opportunities to involve the other players in whatever you’re doing. It’s fun to have the spotlight – share it with your friends! Ask another player’s character to help you. Ask their advice. You’ll be helping to enthuse another player and improving the game too.

5. Get comfortable improvising, and throw yourself at the story. Don’t worry about what might go wrong, get stuck in! The GM is constantly making stuff up to make your game feel real and cool. You should do this too. If everyone has to wait while you think or debate the exact right thing to do or say, that’s… sorry, but a bit boring. Your first thought is probably good enough. And you know, if you realise a couple of seconds later you said the wrong thing, you can always ask for a do-over (but only do it if you really need to). GMs, be nice – if you jump on the first thing a player says and use it to hurt them, you are hurting your game. Everyone will want to spend hours thinking and discussing the best action to take, to avoid getting kicked. Don’t make them feel like every moment is a trap waiting to spring on them.

6. Pay attention. Listen. Focus on what’s happening at the table. Chatting to someone outside the game, checking your phone, zoning out – they all kill the energy at the table. Learn to enjoy watching the other players. You’ll get more from the game if you know what they’re doing anyway, because you’ll know how to engage with what they’re doing, and how to push their buttons in fun and interesting ways.

7. Cut down on the funny remarks. Ok, take this one with a pinch of salt, because after all we’re here to have fun, and table banter can be fun. But unless it’s in character, table banter isn’t the game, and ultimately is a distraction from the game. So by all means make jokes, but don’t overdo it. Especially don’t make fun of other people’s characters or ideas – you’ll kill their enthusiasm.

8. Tell the other players what you’re enjoying. Tell them their plan was awesome. Tell them you enjoyed their characterisation. Pump up their enthusiasm! And do the same for the GM, it makes a big difference. Plus all of this helps the group to learn what each other like – and supply it. It will make your game better. The other half of the coin is talking about what you’re not enjoying: but keep this to a minimum, because it’s better to encourage than criticise. Major on what’s good, because if the game focuses on that then the bad stuff gets edged out anyway.

I’m sure there’s more I could write here. The bottom line is, GMs don’t turn up to run a game, to spoon-feed entertainment to you. They turn up to have a fun experience with the other players. Just one attentive, giving, engaged player makes a HUGE difference to the fun the GM has – a whole group is basically GM heaven. And great players improve the game for the other players too. Be that player.

By the way, if you’re still thirsty for more, I cannot recommend these two articles enough: Play to lift up, 11 ways to be a better roleplayer.