When it comes to entertainment I like nothing more than a good-old unexpected ending. How easy is it to do this sort of thing in ForgeQuest? ;)

Actually I should qualify that by acknowledging that, in all likelyhood, being able to pull off a good surprise ending is probably never easy, regardless of the medium.

As I see it the required elements are...


• You shouldn't be expecting it.


• Therefore it can't be something that happens frequently.
• If it IS going to happen this time, the events that lead up to it will need to have been structured in a way that they either put you off your guard or lead you to suspect something else.


• It needs to be plausable to the storyline as a whole.
• It helps if subtle hints/clues have been included during the course of the story.
• And on a personal note I think it should leave you with at least one of the following...


• an unanticipated sense of elation.
• an elevated desire for more.
• an explosion of new plot ideas and/or directions.





Given that some of these points are at least partially at cross purposes and most rely on hiding information from the players I'm wondering if such a device is possible in HeroQuest without either railroading the entire story or activating a pre-determined (and hence somewhat arbitrary) deus ex machina should the climactic scene go badly?

Hmmm... it just occurs to me that in a 'success is cool, failure is cooler' style of game unexpected endings may not be advantageous since they often serve to change the hero's situation from major defeat (or worse) to major victory (and so forth). Am I fretting for naught?

Thanks,

- John Galloway

Hi John,

Have you ever played anything like Universalis or Dust Devils? In both games, any player might end up narrating, even if their character wasn't part of the conflict. While you don't need to go that far in HQ, simply opening the table for suggestions often does lead to surprising events, for the GM as well as the players.

Remember, all the issues of foreshadowing is a matter of drawing plausible connections between the past and the present- sometimes players can come up with better ideas than you, or sometimes as a group, people can bounce ideas back & forth and come up with something no one could have anticipated.

This also doesn't require changing the rules or anything like that:

Narrating the Heroes
Heroquest requires cooperative creation. Let the player help determine what is important or fun
pg. 171

First, there's this sense that people get that you can't have any secrets in the sort of play that we talk about herabouts. This just isn't true. Yes, you have to be willing, I think, to some extent to let your secrets get "damaged." That is, if you're not willing to reveal early what the secrets are, and you are willing to let play go "anywhere" the players drive it, then they may, in fact, crush your secrets in the process of play.

Just adjust when this happens. The instinct is to either protect the "reality" that you've created in the background, or to just allow the secret in question to become irellevant. Simply come up with a new secret that fits. Use Fang's No Myth thinking, and realize that since you haven't established it, that it can't have any meaning for the players yet.

So, for instance, let's say that you have an NPC who seems to be a man, but who is a woman in actuality. To be revealed at some climactic moment when it'll have all of the qualities that you want. Well, what'll happen is that, at some point in the story a player will narrate the characters writing their names in the snow.

Now, you have a few options here. You can retcon the situation saying that, no, Jean didn't want to wiz in the snow, and does something else. But that's suspicious, and telegraphs what's going on if you're not really good at it. Another option, however, is just to alter which character is the transvestite. Look around at that point, and check to see if, in fact, it wouldn't be more interesting if one of the other NPCs was the transvestite. If you've already said a bunch about Jean's lack of masculinity at times, in order to foreshadow this, that only makes it more ironic when it turns out that it's very butch Pat that's the transvestite. (At that point, I'd actually leave clues that somebody was a transvestite, and let them all assume it was Jean, just to make the Pat revelation more shocking).

This is hard for folks to do, and with good reason. Often when you make an adjustment like this, you have to check to see that other continuity isn't broken. Did Pat stride through a room nude previously? Then you might not be able to make it fly having Pat as the transvestite. Worse, did Pat make out with Elena, a PC? This might work fine for the right group of players, and with the right characters, but watch out that you might be "deprotagonizing" Elena by doing this. Certainly don't say that they made love, and you just forgot to mention to the player that Elena had discovered that Pat was a female, and had just gone along with it. That has to be a player choice.

But it's not undoable. If you have to, call a stop to play to think out the neccessary change to your secret to make it still viable. What's neat about this is that the players can't accidentally stumble over the secret prematurely. If they do something that would uncover your current secret, just change the secret so that it's not uncovered. Be sure that the PCs are more protagonists after the adjustment, and not less, and that continuity is preserved, and you're good to go.

Another protagonism pitfal here is that you shouldn't prevent a player from discovering the truth, if they're on the trail, and clever enough to find it. That is, my advice about making the truth a moving target should apply only to cases where it doesn't make the character look like a buffoon for having failed to find things out. If the player guesses the truth, then let his character discover it. Else the players will feel that you're shifting around facts behind the scene to "railroad" as you suggest above.

If they do discover the "truth" at this point, however, just come up with a new secret. Or embelish the old one. Sure they discover that Pat is a woman - but little do they suspect that she is also the king's long-lost dughter, who is in drag to avoid being detected as such (she'll give a bull story about wanting the respect that only men get or somesuch).

In fact, I find that when you make these adjustments that the end story is always better than the original one. Basically these adjustments make you append further detail into the surprise. Which makes them all the more telling when they do come out.

The skill to do this, while not causing protagonism problems, is the same that you have to practice to make character failures not make a character a weenie. Basically it's not the character's "fault" that the misunderstanding is in place, he is not dumb for not having seen the secret coming.

In the end, you just can't have a predetermined scene worked out for releasing the secret. You don't need to, however. You'll find some scene in which it becomes a really fun idea to reveal the secret, and you'll reveal it. Think sooner, rather than later, but just watch for it to happen. Having this happen "Naturalistically" instead of in a planned fashion feels much less contrived than your typical illusionist railroad to a set scene of revelation.

And keep in mind that the beginning of every episode of The Saint starts with Simon Templar's cover being blown. Which is to say that it's just fine to reveal a secret early, it adds to the game. Just come up with some other secret to make that "twist" that you're looking for.

Mike

Hobbitboy wrote:
Actually I should qualify that by acknowledging that, in all likelyhood, being able to pull off a good surprise ending is probably never easy, regardless of the medium.

As I see it the required elements are...


• You shouldn't be expecting it.

1. You shouldn't be expecting it.

1. Therefore it can't be something that happens frequently.
2. If it IS going to happen this time, the events that lead up to it will need to have been structured in a way that they either put you off your guard or lead you to suspect something else.

Let me add my vote to the "don't let the player be a weenie" approach. I've had way too many GMs protect their "surprise" by making PCs become idiots.

But the "moving target" secret is also a skill that I can't recommend highly enough. I've seen it referred to as "writing in a trap door" as well. If someone is supposed to play a certain role, reveal a certain secret, think about a few options for if it is discovered another way. Either the "second layer" to the secret, or someone else who could be it.

VERY often, the players will actually do this for you. Talking around the table, they will pitch out a dozen possibilities the moment they think a secret is in play. Take the most interesting one, or if they latch on one immediately and you still want to throw a curve, take one of the ones they've pitched but forgot.

Or, sometimes, just let them find out earlier than you intended and go from there. :)

Oh, and Mike Dawson. The "they've come to expect it" can be lots of fun to play with. I used to do this in my Buffy game. The players knew how the Buffy-verse works, and that the expected big bad is in someway never the real one. So I set up two warring vampire factions, and expected to instead have the real big bad be a personal foe of one of the PCs, and also making it difficult to guess which side of the vamp war had the big bad.

What happened instead was that the second in command of one of the Vampire factions (a vampire witch) captured and bit (getting some mystical control over) a PC.

Very quickly, the PCs began focusing on her, and not on my vamp leaders. Needless to say, by the end of the season, SHE was the big bad, had betrayed her leader, allied with the second in command (and main physical thug, who had started a rivalry with one of the other PCs) to get rid of HIS leader, united the two factions and became the Big Bad. All of which fit the "who we think is the villain isn't the real villain" twist, while being COMPLETELY different from what I had intended when I started. (Hell, even the physical thug vamp guy was a replacement for the original one who got killed with one critical shot the first time the PC fought him. Crazy roll. So I invented the guy who trained him and had THAT become the rival.)