Exchange of Realities

….and breaking my concentration on secondary character aspects, but this needed to be said. May as well be a rebel all the way.

In the vein of yesterday’s riff, you’d be amazed at how many of the unwritten “rules” of running a game you can break if you’ve got skills and an agreeable group.

One of my favorite examples was a D&D game I was in a couple summers ago. A lot of the warnings I see on the boards and around the blogosphere, he ignored. The primary NPC was functionally the main character, with the rest of the group near-interchangeable satellites, and had powers nobody else had access to until the final session and some of us never even got to use; moreover, he had explicit immunity to death, while the chances of survival for the rest of the group were explained at the beginning of game as low enough that everyone was expected to have a build for a backup character ready. The difference between the strongest character and the weakest was getting on for the power level of the weakest. There was PC Death By Plot, and a general lack of opportunity to strike back at the characters who had offended us. The narrative nature of the game was rather obvious, and near the end, the plot was really rushed. And the villains were guaranteed to win.

But looking back, my only real complaint was the abrupt change of feel in the final session.

How did he make this work? Partly context. This game was in the form of a storytelling flashback narrated by a plot-important NPC in the primary game, which justified pretty much every defiance of the “rules” it racked up. (Besides, what would you rather do—listen to a monologue, or help make history?) Partly the disclaimer—that kind of situation and ending alike are a whole lot more palatable when everybody knows the NPC has Script Immunity and special powers and so on and so forth, and agrees to it. It helped that the NPC in question was a frame narrator: powers or no powers, he was just the unifying element for most of the scenes, and the PCs were the ones who took the stage and got things done. (I do rather wish we’d gotten a better sense of who he was, but eh, rushing players and face to face format, ’nuff said.) Even the level differences were accounted for by the situations being slightly more suited to the specialties of the weaker characters.

But most of it was displaying the three greatest virtues of a GM: flexibility, patience and artistry. There were upsets from the beginning—when aren’t there? Characters managing victories they weren’t expected to, then making a point of not dying even when everyone could tell they were going to have to die sometime to maintain continuity. (I don’t know very many other people who, when the plot requires a character to die, will deal with her cheating death three or four times in a row and still have the patience to humor her wishes as to how to die.) People finding ways to mess with the timeline. Players who just wouldn’t quit making inordinately strong “suggestions”, or who got impatient to get back to the previously scheduled game (hence the rushed plot). Heck, one player who was a voice from a computer for a couple of sessions, despite all the trouble setting it up on both ends, and a little more peevish about it than was really necessary. And you know trouble’s brewing when the scariest mechanics-abuser in the group is designing the magic items.

Did I forget the artistry? It deserves its own paragraph. His style was a cinematic one, strongly influenced by both video games and many of the performing arts, and while that kind of thing can be highly frustrating, in this format it worked. He’d started out with a bang, using a transition between the primary and the secondary as smooth as any professional movie maker could manage. The scening, despite the limitations of description by voice, was spot on. And the eventual plot twist was executed tightly enough that even the (second-string) character working for the antagonist didn’t see all of it coming. And then there was that one on-stage death scene….

In short, breaking the “rules” can be done, and can be done well. Coordinate with the group, remember the three virtues, and roll with the punches, and you can get away with anything as long as you know what you’re doing.

And the product—well, let’s just say it won’t be forgotten that easily.