How Many Assassins?

[Lisa Padol]

Another part of Saturday's session involved the PCs learning that someone was trying to assassinate one of their number. Now, this is a band, Age of Consent, and the target was the teenage manager and backup techie, Jay Cooper, aka Beth's PC.

To my delight, the players, while they trusted their source, Death Curse Ed, as he'd given good information before, started to wonder how the heck he gets his information. But that's another story.

So, I called for perception rolls, and the high roll spotted the assassin and alerted the other PCs and friendly NPCs. The assassin, seeing lots of eyes turning toward him, tried to leave, not being a total idiot, but was prevented.

Beth decided Jay would do a sweep of the room for yet more assassins, and rolled really high. So, I figured, what the hey, maybe there are more. (Missed a trick -- could have had a non-assassin person she'd have been interested to see was there or someone acting suspiciously who just wasn't an assassin.) I added a couple in the corner, and these were intercepted, as Jay did yet another sweep, and I added a backstage assassin.

At this point, someone noted that maybe they weren't all after Jay. What the hey. I was improvising anyway, so I made assassin #4 be an anti-non human/sorcerer fanatic and go after Avram's PC, Laura, who's more of a shaman, but what the hey. This one was also stopped.

And now Beth's come up with a cool theory about why someone was after Laura -- the band's ticked off a recording company. The company sent a black ops squad that failed utterly. A hitman with Laura as a target makes sense, since, as the band's primary techie, she can attest to what condition the band's equipment was in before and after the black ops team hit.

-Lisa

[Ron Edwards]

Hi Lisa,

Wow - sounds like you're playing InSpectres!

Or rather, this particular Technique is formally part of the resolution system for InSpectres.

I used to use it a lot, especially in Champions games - otherwise the various perception rolls weren't good for much in our particular application of that game.

I don't use it much any more, just because I'm working from a deliberate set of setting/prep constraints in my games at the moment. But it's a hell of a good technique to have in one's back pocket.

Best,
Ron

[Lisa Padol]

Ron,

It's not my default tactic, but I'm trying, I think, in so far as I'm thinking about it, to use a trick Robin Laws taught me -- just asking myself, "Is there any reason it has to be this way in particular? If the players want something, and there's no reason for it not to be there, let them have it."

Now, more assassins than what we had would probably just be too silly. But all I had as a constraint was "NPC X wants to kill Jay Cooper and has put out a contract on her. Death Curse Ed warns the PCs."

Check.

The results I wanted:

People should know there was a contract out on Jay. Check.
People should wonder about Ed's sources. Check.

Hm. Some of my players may be reading this forum -- Avram recommended The Forge as the place where the cutting thinking goes on, so I know he reads some of the forums, and I've pushed the site to Josh and Beth. So I'd probably better not go into more details. But the play constraints were really minimal.

The band PCs' adventures are a bit like Buckaroo Banzai -- appropriate, as that's one of my sources.

-Lisa

[Ben Morgan]

I just wanted to say that Death Curse Ed is one of the coolest nicknames I've ever seen.

Incidentally, what system are you using?

-- Ben

[Lisa Padol]

I just wanted to say that Death Curse Ed is one of the coolest nicknames I've ever seen.

Incidentally, what system are you using?

I use OTE, and recently added the rule that all 6s explode, which makes the game more cinematic.

Death Curse Ed was so named because...

Well, it started when I read Unseen Masters, a -way- cool CoC supplement. One of the scenarios has a paper that, if read, is a death curse on the reader unless it is passed back to the original caster within 2 weeks, in which case, the caster gets the curse. It is similar to a nifty sequence in Cast a Deadly Spell.

So, originally, I wanted someone to have put a death curse on one of Avram's PCs, Laura, from the band Age of Consent. Then, I decided that this guy, Ed, was basically a schmuck. He wasn't trying to kill her -- he thought he was using a love spell to get her to come back to him.

Laura: That's -- possibly worse.

Ed was sternly informed by the PCs that he -would- voluntarily take the paper back, whereupon they would do what they could to break the curse, but if anyone were to die from it, it would be him, as the idiot who cast it.

I had expected that the PCs might well want to save him, and let the players know that I had no set solution in mind, but was open to suggestions. We played with tarot cards and ideas, and decided that, as the curse worked by frightening the victim to death, Ed should try to find someone willing to take the fear on -- someone who didn't fear what Ed feared. If you've read Charles Williams, especially, um, I think Descent Into Hell, this is what he spoke of as an exchange of burdens. My bag is too heavy, so you carry it, and I get something you can't quite handle. The Sixth Sense is a movie he would have loved. But anyway.

So, we thought about who could and would do this. Laura, as the victim and romantic interest, could, but wouldn't -- she didn't want to get back together with him. A teacher figure could, so he was set up with Ray Stantz -- the events of the Ghostbusters movies mostly did not happen, but I loved the idea of Ray in the second movie running an occult store, so he is. Ray has many faults, but he's perfectly capable of facing someone else's fear.

So, Ed works for Ray, who makes sure Ed doesn't do anything that dumb again. And Ed, somehow, has Sources. And Ed has been very, very helpful -- sincerely so. But he is still stuck with the name Death Curse Ed, and probably always will be.

-Lisa

[John Kim]

At this point, someone noted that maybe they weren't all after Jay. What the hey. I was improvising anyway, so I made assassin #4 be an anti-non human/sorcerer fanatic and go after Avram's PC, Laura, who's more of a shaman, but what the hey. This one was also stopped.

And now Beth's come up with a cool theory about why someone was after Laura -- the band's ticked off a recording company. The company sent a black ops squad that failed utterly.  

A question: to what degree were the players aware at the time that this is what you were doing?  Were you trying to give the impression that you knew who the assassins were and what they were after?  Or was this sort of a pause and the group openly determined this as a new fact?  

I use OTE, and recently added the rule that all 6s explode, which makes the game more cinematic.  

It's funny.  Just yesterday, I got a note from Bruce Baugh, who said that he got a lot of mileage out of my suggestion that the opposite is true.  My take was this: open-ended rolls increase randomness, so abilities have great potential but are not as reliable as high stats in a non-open-ended system.  I suggested that high randomness doesn't generally more cinematic in the sense of matching the tropes of mainstream cinema.  I thought that outrageous results seemed better handled with James-Bond-like hero points (which aren't random).  Then again, there might be some difference in Over the Edge for this.

[Lisa Padol]

A question: to what degree were the players aware at the time that this is what you were doing?  Were you trying to give the impression that you knew who the assassins were and what they were after?  Or was this sort of a pause and the group openly determined this as a new fact?

I was playing it like I meant to do it that way all along. I don't know that my players didn't realize that I was improvising based on suggestions and die rolls -- either way is okay with me. But I made the decisions, being on the autocratic side of GMing, and, while I don't mind if the players see through the facade of "I meant to do that", it's a useful facade, as it allows them not to break the suspension of storytelling if they don't want to. That is, if asked, I would say, truthfully, that I was adding plot elements, but if folks would just as soon keep things flowing, I'm all fof that.

It's funny.  Just yesterday, I got a note from Bruce Baugh, who said that he got a lot of mileage out of my suggestion that the opposite is true.  My take was this: open-ended rolls increase randomness, so abilities have great potential but are not as reliable as high stats in a non-open-ended system.  I suggested that high randomness doesn't generally more cinematic in the sense of matching the tropes of mainstream cinema.  I thought that outrageous results seemed better handled with James-Bond-like hero points (which aren't random).  Then again, there might be some difference in Over the Edge for this.

It may be -- which system are you working with?

In OTE, as written, a roll of all 6s means you roll an extra die and add it to the total. If the extra die is a 6, roll another, and so on.

What this means is that someone with 2 dice is more likely to roll a crit -- 2 6s -- than someone with 3 dice -- 3 6s. Now, while this may actually be realistic, it isn't as cinematic in feel.

Also, in terms of the results we were seeing, our 5d fighter just wasn't generally as effective as she ought to have been. This has been much less of a problem lately.

There were also a couple of amazing rolls, including one for an NPC, which had the nice side effect of justifying something I'd planned on doing anyway -- and planned on doing with the active encouragement and at the suggestion of the player whose PC wound up most hosed. 6s upon 6s -- I wound up with a total of 50.

Now, if this winds up happening too often, I may rethink, and I do reserve the right to say "6s don't explode on this roll."

-Lisa

[Valamir]

Now, if this winds up happening too often, I may rethink, and I do reserve the right to say "6s don't explode on this roll."

That wouldn't be unprecedented.  Several games have had the concept of "stress roll" where criticals / fumbles can happen and non stress rolls where they don't.

[Walt Freitag]

Lisa, your account is an insightful and revealing look at a Technique I and some others call "no-myth" play (or more specifically, no-myth GMing). The myth that's being rejected is the so-called "myth of reality" -- that is, the idea that anything in the shared imagined space (such as an assassin) exists or doesn't exist or is otherwise established until it's narrated to be so in the course of play. This leaves you free to improvise in the ways you've described.

It's great to read an account by someone who's just broken the ice on the technique. You seem excited by the discovery, but perhaps nervous about whether this is really an OK way to play. Both feelings are understandable. Few role playing texts instruct GMs to play this way. In my experience, most players will accept such improvising, surprisingly regarding it as implicit in a GMs traditional prerogatives (even though few GMs do it). The facade of an objective pre-planned reality is more important to some than to others, and yu might find that players are increasingly willing to drop that facade over time. (Basically, they might come to accept, and eventually expect, that they have more of a say in the creation of the shared imagined space than they would in most traditional play.) Plausibility and consistency are extremely important -- players are likely to object, for exmple, if one more assassin always turns out to be hidden in the one place where nobody thought to look. Players will see implausibility or inconsistency as unfair. But problems with plausibility and consistency, and their connection to fairness, have never seemed to me any more severe in no-myth style than they are in a fully pre-planned setting.

The other misconception that can arise about no-myth technique is that it necessarily means the GM goes into a session with no pre-developed map of the space or plan of events at all. It's just as much no-myth if you have a plan, but are willing to modify that plan whenever circumstances (including player suggestions, whether expressed directly or through play, and also including "amazing" die rolls) warrant.

There are also systems like InSpectres (as Ron mentioned) and Donjon that implement "no-myth" improvisation in an entirely overt consensual way.

If you're more of a happy autocratic GM like me, then you might want to consider not generally going along fully with players' theories (e.g. about who sent the assassins). Let the player's theory become part of the truth, enough to get them investigating in a productive direction, but add your own twists to it.

- Walt