Inspired by yesterday’s observations.

Looking at it now, I don’t think there’s any situation in which there’s a clean divide between two groups, even when one is clearly demarcated as Not-[The Other], when the groups have different amounts of social power or when in any way you’d expect a clear boundary. You’ve got one, and you’ve got the other, and then there will be people from the second who hang around the first so long that they think like members of the first. (Or are just really good at assimilating.) This liminal (in-between, what have you) group is absolutely perfect for the kinds of people around whom stories center—particularly, in the case of a gaming group, PCs.

Why?

The most game-oriented reason is knowledge. In subcultures like this, there’s a lot that people need to know—a little bit of ritual, a little bit of history, all sorts of quirky details and protocols and ways to fit in. It’s hard enough to try to get all this across when you’re writing a story, but attempting to introduce a character who’s supposedly been steeped in this when the player is anything but, when being able to handle the group’s idiosyncracies matters? Probably not going to work too well. On the other hand, if the characters are in the middle group, they’re not as ‘expected’ to know all the little odds and ends, as those aren’t likely to be quite as relevant—but there are still things from the in-group they’ll need to be able to remember. Necessary knowledge, but not quite so much of it.

Another is position. Often, the in-groups we want to use are rather hierarchical; people have their roles and specialties, and it’s harder to deviate from that. Or there’s a situation where you just can’t use a member of the in-group, probably due to image concerns or other public relations issues. But you can’t use someone who’s fully out-group, either—there’s too much group-sensitive information and procedure for that to be feasible. Characters in the between-group, though, balance this out; they’re outside enough not to have the problems of being in-group, but they’re not out-group, either.

Third is an amusing fact about the division between the between-group and the out-group (because you know there’s going to be one; with that much division between in-group and out-group, something’s going to carry over). It’s already pretty much identical to the division most people make between PCs and NPCs. If they’re going to do it anyway, why not make an in-world distinction of it? They’re not in the in-group because they either didn’t qualify or chose not to be there, but they’re set apart from the out-group by thinking kind of like in-group members. They’re something else, something different, something interesting.

PCs have to interact with a large assortment of groups anyway; giving them a liminal group like this puts them in a position where they’re already doing so and getting used to it.

And now, for something a little different.

0800 hours on MCRD San Diego. I’m sitting in the food court with my mother, looking out the window at the roiling mass of families here for graduation. By now, the crowds are something I’m used to. They’ve turned on music in here, loud enough that I’m not sure I’d hear a bugle if it was being played right outside the window.

But that doesn’t keep me from noticing when, outside the window, Colors begins. If you’ve never been on a military base, it might not mean much to you, but Colors—the raising or lowering of the flag every day—is a big deal, big enough that if you’re outdoors and that bugle’s playing, you aren’t allowed to do anything but pay respects in the general direction of the flagpole until it stops. It was one of the first things they taught me when I hired on with the library.

The recruits knew. There was no way they wouldn’t. So in and among the crowd outside that window, anyone wearing a uniform was stock-still, standing at attention, all facing in the same direction. And yet there were all these people—their friends, their families, still talking or moving around or carrying on, not even holding still in deference to the fact that there was clearly something that these people had to do.

Now, I’ve never considered myself to be one of the uniformed crowd. When they showed me the video on why “civilian Marine” isn’t an oxymoron, I still had my doubts, since there’s a big difference between fixing weaponry and my shelving books. I still can’t keep my ranks straight beyond being able to tell low-range from middle range from officer, and all that takes is simple collar reading. And I operate under no illusion that I’d last a minute in training, let alone out in the field. Heck, even in dress most of the visitors seemed more associated with their recruit relatives than I—you had the small children in their “Mini-Marine” T-shirts and the proud parents and grandparents and what have you with theirs, and the main thing marking me as having anything to do with the services was just the government-issued ID on the lanyard about my neck. As far as I’m concerned, if there’s an ‘us’ and a ‘them’, my ‘us’ is definitely the civilian population.

Except that something in me speaking to sheer instinct seemed to disagree that morning. I looked out over the mass of families talking and carrying on, over at my mother on the other side of the table, rolled my eyes at this sign of what seemed to me to be mass obliviousness (didn’t anyone tell these people how seriously the Marines take Colors?) and muttered “Civilians.”

I’m sure there’s something in there to be learned. About the gray area in dichotomies, perhaps, or about how self-identification works. About things that seem obvious to people who already know them and can justify them easily (we’re used to standing still for the flag at sports events or graduation, aren’t we?), and how they might look to outsiders. About how much rituals and understanding them can create a feeling of in-group and out-group even when the usual in-group/out-group lines are drawn somewhere else.

But right now I think I just need to think about what this means for me.

It’s easy to think you know what a character is—backstory, skills, motivations, the whole nine yards. But sometimes, you really don’t get what makes that character until you’ve gotten a chance to use her voice. And more often, it isn’t just the voice you need, but being able to see how she interacts with other characters.

Hence, the cross-universe conversation. It doesn’t actually have to be between multiple universes, though if you’ve got ‘em, why not use them? The main point is just to have the character talking to someone she would never get to speak to otherwise. So the conversational partner might be from her world’s past or future (this is noncanonical, though, so no fair letting her use whatever she learns!), from a part of her world remote enough that they could never feasibly meet, or even from another story or game entirely. The conversation partner doesn’t even have to be one of your characters; I’m sure you have friends who have figments who could put up a pretty good chat.

One thing that helps with these conversations is to have either a context or a topic; you don’t expect these two disparate characters to be saying “How’s the weather?” while twiddling their thumbs in a pocket of nowhere, now, do you? So your context might be an activity or a location they’ve both happened into; for instance, one of my college friends and I used to do long conversations in various characters’ voices while playing a Parcheesi-like board game, often using the game itself and the metaphors it created to set us off. On the other hand, context might not matter so much as topic; I have another friend whose primary character in my game tended to get into cross-universe conversations with my primary character in someone else’s game based on the clashes in their viewpoints. And of course, there’s no reason not to have both, particularly if one or more of you wants to work with grounded body language; is there any reason you couldn’t have your character discussing politics with a long-dead ancestor while engaging in your world’s primary racket sport?

Note the general tone of the conversation as well. Holding an interview-style conversation is good for factual information and things the character definitely knows about herself, but it’s a little too targeted for emotional context, so you might learn why the character thinks she’s doing something or what she tells everyone about why she’s doing it, but you’re less likely to learn why she really did it. On the other hand, something that feels more like a normal conversation and doesn’t target so much as cleanly segue into the topic might not be as good for facts, but the more comfortable feel of it means the emotional context will be less guarded. And of course, there’s the underlying emotional context of the conversation itself; you’re going to get significantly different results from an argument than from a friendly exchange of jibes.

Format is also a thing to consider, depending on your purpose. A conversation in which you’re just trying to get the voice and body language of a character is best done live, preferably with a friend. On the other hand, if what you’re looking for is subtle emotional context and you don’t have an eidetic memory, a text format will probably be more convenient (I favor autologged or save-windowed IM when with a partner and word-processor when alone, but your style may vary); you can pore over it looking for subtext as long as you need to.

Ever tried this? Has it worked for you?

One complaint people often have about bad writers is that they claim their characters are good at doing a certain thing or have a certain interest, but there’s next to no evidence in the text that it’s actually true. Characters who love books don’t seem to be any more literate than their friends who don’t, the charismatic strike the audience as ordinary and possibly a bit off-putting, and in general, the skill comes out looking like it’s just there in name only. But at the same time, sometimes a character is going to have a skill that, while it might be relevant for her to have it, just isn’t actually going to come up most of the time—or you’re going to want to properly foreshadow a skill she has before it becomes the thing that will save her bacon during the climax. Without just telling the audience “And oh, yeah, she knows how to do this.”

Here’s how.

1. Jargon. It’s more common in technical fields, but just about any skill or interest has its own unique vocabulary. If someone has trained in the skill, or spent a lot of time on the interest, it’s probably had an impact on her vocabulary—just think about the kinds of words and phrases that being a gamer tends to sneak into people’s dialogue. If someone knows about dice designations, they’re probably a gamer; if they know what you mean when you talk about “Pulling a Miko”, they’ve probably read Order of the Stick.
2. In-jokes. These are a subset of jargon; essentially, a set of references and ideas that people in the know would find hilarious and people who aren’t might not even realize were jokes. The difference is that not all of these are based on necessary knowledge; some are just as peculiar to experience and specific groups as they are to people with the skillset. To use a gaming example, just about everyone who knows from gaming can identify with jokes about saving throws or failing a Spot Check, Exalted players would probably chuckle over my group’s Terrifying Apparition of Stealth, but you’d have to actually be in my group to understand why we get such a laugh out of waffles.
3. Analogy. People often frame things they don’t entirely understand in terms of things they do, whether they’re trying to explain something or make sense of it. I’ve seen the immune system explained in terms of a police force, the seasons demonstrated with a fire and a marshmallow, and making an argument put in terms of carpentry. Characters with a strong body of knowledge in a subject or interest are likely to do the same thing; why wouldn’t a magical theorist, having trouble with an idea, suddenly brighten up and start making connections when someone begins analogizing the issue to sympathetic magic, or maybe attempt to rationalize shapeshifting through her knowledge of alchemy? It doesn’t even have to be correct.
4. Application of Skills/Knowledge. Ability doesn’t occupy a vacuum; skills and knowledge involved in some fields are likely to spill over to others. A light physicist may not be too good at hitting the cue ball in a game of pool, but she’s probably going to know ; a demonologist may not know much about most of the history of a city, but she’s probably going to know about the part when Lisar, Lord of the Seven Fires, had made his home there and how he was driven away. Give the character’s gifts a chance to be pseudo-relevant; you can probably even get away with having them chalk their success up to what their original field did for them.

If you scatter these, people are likelier to react to the discovery that the character has background in the field with “Oh, that makes sense” or “Thought so!” than with “Where did THAT come from?”

So, let’s talk about public opinion and politics. (And thanks to @TheGamerDome on Twitter, without whose interest I would never have gotten around to putting this in article format.)

I’ve been thinking about this one for a while; one of the hazards I’ve found in being on Twitter is the people who every five minutes or so will launch into some vitriol-filled political statement. It rather horrifies me, the lengths to which some people will go in their criticism of political leaders. I won’t claim I’ve never poked fun at a sitting president, but I have a personal rule: never ascribing anything more dangerous than incompetence unless it really is a desperate situation, and even then trying to avoid the ad hominems. In that, at least, I seem to be pretty rare; the vitriol I’ve seen from both parties over the last ten years or so could corrode diamond.

This got me thinking about history, and human nature, and eventually got me thinking about one thing that both might be a factor and might be useful to a DM: perceived helplessness and a tendency to lash out because of such.

Consider the United States of America, circa World War II. President who’d already inherited a rather messy economy, who had been known to try to cut corners when it came to the Supreme Court, and who’d ended up with a situation in which the best thing to do was to declare war on one country more than an ocean away…. and then focus at least as much on another country with whom the first was connected. You don’t hear much about the kind of political vitriol that goes on today, though. I wouldn’t call it totally unified in purpose; opposition to the war ran through conscientious objection and draft-dodging, there was the occasional conspiracy theory about Pearl Harbor, so on and so forth—but as far as history implies, even when you account for textbook whitewashing there didn’t seem to be all that much infighting.

And then you look at today, and you wish you hadn’t. From a distant perspective, the situations for the last two administrations wouldn’t seem all that different, but the reaction of the people is anything but. Insults and implications that earlier generations would have likely considered beyond the pale fly between the parties on an everyday basis; it gets to the point where people on both sides loudly accuse the other party’s big names of plotting treason or trying to ruin life for the common people, while the rest of us just keep our heads down and hope it’ll go away. Most of the factors we could use to explain why This War/Economy Is Different don’t seem to apply too well.

Picture by lusi

But there’s one we aren’t taking into account, and that’s personal effect. In both times we have the military fighting the foe and the politicians playing whack-a-mole with the issues. But what’s different is the involvement of the everyday citizen. Back then, whether people actually could make a difference or not, they were treated as though what they did mattered. Food was rationed for the sake of the troops, and people were encouraged to plant victory gardens, buy bonds, donate scrapmetal; even children could help make things for the soldiers or collect up and donate bottlecaps. Compare to now; the solution to the economy is as far as we can tell out of our hands, and the closest most standard citizens get to sacrificing is having a relative in the fight.

In other words, the average citizen is perceived—and most likely perceives herself—as having next to no responsibility for the state of the nation. It makes it easy for her to shift the blame onto someone else—even easier when as far as she can tell she had nothing to do with the people in charge having been put in charge. And if she can be heard by like-minded people easily, so much the better; they can settle down and cheerfully justify each other in trying to bring down Those Oppressors or talk like anything about how their people would handle this better and here’s how. Would they be able to live with themselves doing the same if there was something clear and productive they could do, and most people agreed that it Would Definitely Help? Sure, some of them might, but I don’t think the behavior would be quite as prevalent.

Assuming I’m correct, what can the gamer learn from this? That the rest of the group is the same way. Players will complain to each other about the GM and about other players; even the GM might complain about one player to another. It’s human nature. But it’s the problems they don’t think they can solve—when one person either refuses to bend or just appears to refuse to bend, when there’s a solution the GM clearly wants but hasn’t given them enough information to get to, when concerns like “This wasn’t the game style I signed up for!” or “Can we spend a little less time on the rules and a little more on the characters?” seem likelier to be blown off than addressed—that bring out the most vitriol. And this is why for many gamers, fully railroading the group instead of quietly guiding them, or getting rid of the illusion that their actions have an effect, is more unpardonable than fudging a few dice rolls or playing mild favorites.

Agency is important. Let’s try not to throw it away.

Greetings! This is a public service announcement from your friendly neighborhood Generic Villain, particularly for the sneaks and manipulators all over the multiverse.

We’re all used to having an edge over our protagonistic opposition: dishonesty. We’re the ones who change the deal at the last second, or cheerfully inform them that when we made the deal, we lied. We’re the rotten, untrustworthy scoundrels, and while they can never tell if we’re lying or telling the truth (as always lying is honest in its own right), we can know with reasonable certainty that every word we’re hearing from the protagonists is pure, unvarnished truth, because they’re just not good enough liars to beat us at our own game.

Or so we think. Then we run into a liar-protagonist. On the plus side, it’s rarely the end, as she finds us too amusing. The disadvantage is that she seems to revel in our having to deal with the fact that she’s just outwitted us.

Fortunately, there are a few warning signs for a deceptive protagonist, and a few ways of telling who she probably isn’t. That fresh-faced farmchild of destiny? No—a good thing, given how irritating he tends to be. The spunky, rebellious princess? Odds are usually against it, since dishonesty is at a core politics, and she’s usually trying to get away from those. (Which doesn’t mean that she won’t necessarily use it, but does mean that you can turn that fact against her.) The clean-cut holy warrior? Most likely not, though you’ll want to check their code to make sure that 1. lying to others is frowned on and 2. there isn’t a loophole the size of a foreboding keep about evildoers being “nonpersons”. (You’d be amazed how fun even the honest ones find exploiting that one to be.)

The ones you have to worry about are a varied sort. They tend to dress either for the courts or the roads, though there’s room for variety. When attractive (which is often), they tend to run more to the striking or sexy end of the scale than the conventionally pure and pretty end favored by more straitlaced protagonists. Most of them are well-spoken, and almost all have strong if slightly twisted senses of humor, which you will likely end up on the wrong end of if you’re not careful. And all of them are clever; if they weren’t, they wouldn’t be good at this.

More devastatingly, deceptive protagonists manage to take elements of the standard Hero’s Rules and make themselves even more dangerous with them. They won’t actually lie, as it’s bad for their reputations, just twist the truth so that it does what they want it to. So using lie detection magic on them is counterintuitive: not only are you not likely to catch them in a lie, but you’ll be too busy detecting lie/not lie to realize that they aren’t telling you the whole truth. They know Power of Love and Friendship as well as any hero, and will probably even sell your minions on the concept. And most of them can read you and your minions so well that they’ll figure out half of your plans from five minutes of conversation.

On the plus side, due to the fact that they enjoy rubbing your face in their victories too much to ever actually get rid of you, they make excellent cultivated nemeses or career opponents.

So be careful; just because someone’s on the side of Light doesn’t mean she won’t play you for a sap. Be canny, be careful, don’t let your guard down, and try to play the game as well as they do. Have fun!

Earlier this week, I talked about arranging surprises for the GM. I’d had occasion to practice; this week, I got to arrange one such surprise in my primary game. Imagine, if you will, having to make an escape from a world that isn’t exactly your own, right under the nose of something very large and very powerful that could make mincemeat of you pretty easily. Now imagine that you’ve come up with a way to elude it, but that way involves using a mirror to sneak into an other-reality version of that other-reality, and mirrors aren’t exactly in common supply where you are.

That was about the situation my group found ourselves both in and exploiting. We’d had several weeks to think about this, and when I have that kind of lead time, I plan. I started, of course, with catering to my GM; he’s a very Rule of Cool oriented individual, so I made a point of ensuring that I kept that in mind in all my endeavors.

And I did tell him most of the plan—what I wanted to do, what my contingencies were, how I was arranging safe passage through the mirror-dimension, what was being used as a diversion for what. Details are good, and in this case they even allowed him to throw a “Bet you never saw THIS coming” right back at me. The one detail I left as a surprise was just how I planned to get into the mirror-realm itself.

This is where my friends come in. See, one of the other players had an ability that basically translated to improvisational sorcery. Turning a vaguely reflective surface into an appropriate dedicated mirror for long enough for us to use it sounded like a perfect low-difficulty application thereof. But the sorcery was known to be unpredictable, so I didn’t think I could let him know I was planning on it ahead of time. On the other hand, I’d been back-and-forthing with the other two group members on the project—the one who had the ability in particular, though I ran it by both of them. The actual execution ended up being a three-part coordinated trick with extra effort by the character with the actual ability, and looked downright spectacular.

Then there was the question-asking. What I’d wanted was a large picture window, or a large brass wall. When I asked what the area we were in looked like, I didn’t get much in the way of specifics, except that the building materials weren’t quite as shiny as I expected them to be. So I phrased the question differently, asking not if there were shiny reflective windows large enough to take up a wall, but if there were large windows one could feasibly dramatically crash through in a spray of glass while being at considerably larger than human size. And then he mentioned bathhouses with large windows of the appropriate sort, and… well, water’s always good for a reflective surface, and being able to use the windows as I’d originally asked was an added bonus.

All in all, it was a good surprise, and well-received.

I got a lot more of a response than I expected from my riff on people with hostile or abrasive character concepts, so I think it’s important to clarify; a little conflict isn’t too bad a thing. It’s just how the conflict’s played out that can make a lot of difference when the player with a teamwork playstyle and the one who finds characters’ annoyance with each other interesting get into the same group.

One is planning ahead—fair warning, if you will. I’ve found that in a lot of cases, people will have a great deal more tolerance for things that they themselves have chosen to get into. A warning, though—this isn’t going to be perfect. Particularly when most of the group is all for something, and the player who needs to agree can’t quite articulate why it might be a problem, and just agrees so the pressure goes away. Personal example: in one play by post I almost got into that never really started, one of the other players decided it would be a bucket of laughs to be engaging with my character in what he saw as harmless banter but from the sample looked more to me like sexual harassment. At the time, I didn’t quite have the concepts to explain my problem with this and didn’t want to deal with the pressure… so instead I just started preemptively plotting vengeance. Keep an eye out for that.

Another is finding points in common to balance out the points of conflict. This one might also take a little planning ahead, but it’s good for making it clear that you’re not just doing it to be annoying, and for group unity in general. Sometimes it’s done deliberately, by seeking out things that can be shared; other times it just happens that two characters with disparate goals, modus operandi or similar issues getting along are still fond of the same legends, share an enmity with the same things… or heck, can just carry on an hourlong conversation about tea. Displaying a trait the other character admires can also be a good impression-countering factor, though it’s one I hardly ever see used. If you can’t get common, complementary will do; imagine

Yet another is having a character who’s pretty much explicitly (at least, explicitly OOC) asking to be given a reason to lose the abrasiveness. Of course, with planned arcs like this there are a number of catches. One is that if you mess up your signals, it’s likely to backfire and just make the character look completely antisocial—yeah, been there, done that. Another is that you can’t tag it on just one person. Okay, technically you can, but if someone else wants to get in on the interesting character development, they’re going to be a little frosted that there’s no room for them.

Then there’s one I’m rather fond of, which is keeping the antipathy a bit more subtle. Sure, this might be the Loner What Trusts Nothing And No One, but who says all such have to make such a big fuss over keeping people at arm’s length? It doesn’t need to be an overstated trait, just a present one, and the real acerbic tendencies can be kept to a minimum against the party and come out in force against the opposition. (You never know; your teammates might even like the way you insult the foes.)

Another thing to note: when it’s a first game with someone, particularly when you’re at a distance and/or have never communicated with them before, make sure they get a first impression of you around the same time that they get a first impression of your character, and play up the contrast. It’s one time when OOC knowledge really is as important as IC knowledge.

I’ve seen most of these put to good use in the games I’ve been in; have you seen them at work, or come across other mitigation tricks?

Into every gaming group, a jerk tends to fall. I don’t necessarily mean the players, though it’s been hard to avoid those too. But I’m hard put to it to think of even one game I’ve been in that has not at some point had a PC (not necessarily a player, many of them were nice people really) who didn’t play well with much of anyone and seemed to be bent on alienating the entire group.

I’ve never been fond of the type. Part of this is that my playstyle is as much about the group-feeling as anything else, and while these antagonistic relationships may be amusing for character development, they ruin that. (Particularly in games in which there isn’t much tabletalk, and particularly in virtual games. More problems with play by IM than I originally thought, I suppose.) Is it really that bad to want to be able to focus on camaraderie rather than “All right, buddy, quit leering/threatening/attacking things we’re trying to negotiate with, it got old five sessions/pages ago”?

I’m not going to completely say I have no use for characters like this. But I’m going to come close. I have next to no use for characters like this, I don’t understand their popularity, and I’d rather not have to deal with them.

What makes them so popular? I’ve never been quite sure. I suppose in one sense, there’s the fact that there aren’t as many consequences for being a rude little git in most roleplaying games as there are in real life. If you can pretend to be the kind of person who commands anything from the power of the earth to a couple of legions, why not want to pretend to be the kind of person for whom common courtesy is completely optional?

For some people, the conflict is in itself amusing. I’ve no problem with that as a concept, but it’s not really to my tastes personally—at least, not without a clear idea how it’s supposed to work ahead of time.

And, I suppose, it’s realism. Most groups don’t know each other, and they certainly aren’t going to get along at first sight. (This is why if I ever run another game, I am making my players cross-backstory.) Though while I can accept that, I tend to play focused on the idea that realism also means we can’t make people too incompatible, or they’re going to ditch each other at the first available opportunity; we really can’t have that.

So my call would be, particularly when dealing with a new group, ease up. Try to keep it to merely irritating rather than completely obnoxious, or at least see whether the people around you are interested in that kind of dynamic before you introduce it. It’s probably not that big a difference to you, but you never know how much of an impact it might have on someone else.

Surprises mean many things to many GMs. For some, it’s a way to see the unbridled creativity of the players, or an extra layer in the running competition between the two. For others, usually the more methodical planners, a surprise is just another wrench in the gears, and as off-putting as it is interesting.

I’m accustomed to playing with GMs who are somewhere between the two. As a result, I’ve learned to turn surprises into a balancing act, finding ways to make them as amusing as they are frustrating. Here are some tips I’ve learned.

• Make it something your GM would ordinarily like. If he eats, sleeps and breathes the Rule of Cool, make your surprise follow that rule. If she’s fond of character development and introspection, give it to her.
• Make it fit within the rules, or at least the game’s meta-rules. Duh, right? It’ll just get vetoed otherwise. Moreover, make it work with as few twists or exploits of said rules as possible. It makes it harder to call “Not fair!”
• Coordinate with other people. With plans like this, there’s strength in numbers, and not just because it makes it that much harder to say no when outnumbered. Conspirators can point out flaws in the plans you have or suggest improvements you might not have thought of. Both in character and out of character, their skills can help turn what might otherwise be unfeasible into a possibility, or even assure success. Besides, there’s something particularly awesome about a carefully coordinated escapade, even to the more jaded of GMs, that speaks of effort, resourcefulness, and sheer concentrated awesome.
• Don’t make all of the plan a secret, just part of it. Not only does this give the GM something to plan for (we like that, or at least I do), but it also makes it less obvious that you’re still holding back. If you don’t say anything, you’re hiding something. If you lay out a basic plan, you’re either hiding something or underthinking the problem (or just not a planner). If you lay out a plan with several contingencies, recruit a few NPCs to help you with parts of it, and are generally open about the basic idea, your GM will probably get complacent… and then you hit him with the twist you’ve been planning all along.
• Speaking of which, when you’re asking for things that are relevant to the twist, figure out how to ask about them so it sounds like the part your GM expects rather than the part he’s not supposed to—the point is just coming up with some other way you can get to the desired quality. (For instance, if what you want is something that can be improvised into a mirror and you’re looking at metal plates or shields, don’t ask specifically for reflectiveness—ask instead if it’s been well-taken care of, whether it’s chipped, or dusty, or things that would interfere with mirror-qualities.)

These have a combination of effects. They make the surprise unexpected, but easier to plan for (particularly if it’s just a variant on the existing plan); they tailor it to the GM so he’s likelier to have as much fun as you are; and in general, they try to make it seem like something that’s to make the game better rather than just a way to inconvenience the GM. Give it a shot!