I was musing about Tom’s entry into the Blog Carnival (Void Travel Sickness) while approving his notification/pingback, and the thought came to me: if the players were the test crew on board the first starship to be built, they might have no idea that “jump shock” would be part of their situation.

That was how a broader principle, one that I hadn’t paid much attention to in the past, was brought to my conscious attention: “Anything not disclosed in the game rules and background that the PCs are going to have to cope with is, by definition, unexpected.”

So let’s rectify that omission.

Rules as Plot Delivery System

This notion isn’t one that comes naturally to me, in either concept or execution. It’s a whole different concept in Metagaming – using the rules, and specifically, willful omissions from the House Rules that are provided to the players, as an important element in propelling the plots forward.

It’s very hard to surprise players if the house rules that you provide go into lavish detail on one of the central phenomena of your game. At the same time, you need to have those rules in place, ready to use. A good example comes from the Shards Of Divinity campaign: there were lots of rules about illusions and how the perception of them bent reality. I think something like 1/3 of the initial set of House Rules related to the subject (unlike my usual practices, I shared the House Rules for that campaign as they were being developed, rather than in a single block of finished rules).

As a result, the abilities of the Fey when the PCs reached the Land of Two Courts came as no surprise, and had unexpectedly little impact. I now find myself wondering if I missed a bet in my handling of that plot development (which was intended to be a major campaign milestone); would I have been better off had I not shared those rules, and left the powers of the Fey to be a surprise?

I’m still of two minds on the notion, because of the dangers of willful omissions from the Rules.

A wasabi-flavored chocolate would come as a surprise.
And yes, there really is such a thing.
Image provided by FreeImages.com/Marta Rostek.

The danger of willful Omission

There are three significant downsides to not being inclusive, when it comes to the rules, that come to mind. These are the prices that may have to be paid in return for the surprise factor, and hence the heart of the question of whether or not that surprise is worth the effort.

Danger One: Verisimilitude

House Rules and related content should always describe the game world and “operating environment” as the PCs understand it to be. What relationship that understanding may have with the reality is at the crux of this question.

My reasoning (under the heading of “Verisimilitude”) in including those illusion rules, had the question arisen, would have run something like this:

1. If the application of Illusions actually ‘bending reality’ are as ubiquitous as I intended them to be, any educated mage would be thoroughly familiar with them. Since that knowledge might well impact on a player’s decision to run a mage, there is a metagame argument against keeping them a secret, but let’s set that aside. This argument states that all Mages (and any other class who has a valid educational argument for understanding the general principles of magic) would posses some level of understanding of the theory. (No one ever got as far as understanding the ‘why’, but let’s set that aside, too).
2. Illusions have been used on the battlefield to fight Wars and Skirmishes in the past. They are too effective, and too well-known, for that not to have been the case. It follows that anyone with military training would at least know of the general principles and how they have been applied in the past – in gritty detail. Furthermore, anyone with knowledge of History would also be aware of the generalities.
3. Magic is as well-known in the game environment as basic physics in the USA of the 1940s. Almost everyone knows of it, and some of the more colorful past experiments and theories are well understood or misunderstood. Everything would fall at the same speed if not for the air; ‘for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction’; the basic relationship between speed and distance traveled, and the broad concept of acceleration as ‘what makes you go faster’; and so on. So everyone should be aware – at the very least – of the general principle that ‘Illusions bend reality until you see through them’.
4. Understanding the basic principles of Magic would be an absolute requirement for effective administration at a political level. So anyone with any political knowledge should also have at least basic knowledge of the general principle of Illusions.

With every step of this reasoning, the circle of those who should have at least some awareness of the principles has grown, to the point that it encompasses just about everyone except a rural hick. Certainly, every PC should know enough, even as a first-level character, that they should be so informed. What’s more, only one character was being deliberately started as a 1st-level PC; the others were all to be 5th level, for reasons that have nothing to do with the current subject of conversation. They would all be that much better-informed as to the reality in which they were living. So the secret is out of the bag already; what more harm can be done by spelling out the actual mechanics that were going to be used to translate theory into in-game practice?

Under the above circumstances, keeping this element of the game-world premises a secret would only have harmed the verisimilitude of the entire campaign. Maybe it would have been enough to keep the actual mechanics a secret until the PCs had direct experience of them, but even there, anecdotal information would outline those mechanics in summary. The work-level involved in redacting this information is going up, but the payoff is getting smaller – and the risks are not being in any way mitigated. So, in hindsight, I would have done exactly the same thing – at least in this circumstance.

Danger Two: Player-GM relations

Another problem to contend with is the perception that could arise that the GM is keeping secret from the players things that the players are entitled to know. Players are generally tolerant of the occasional breakdown in verisimilitude and the occasional oversight on the part of the GM, but this is a horse of a completely different color – this is a willful and deliberate act on the part of the GM.

It would be like promising a light romantic comedy and delivering a tale of love in the midst of a zombie apocalypse. Half the audience may love the surprise twist; the rest will feel like they’ve been deceived, even cheated. Or an action-adventure in which there are no stunts.

If your justifications for secrecy are ironclad, you might be forgiven. Through gritted teeth, in some cases. But is it really worth the risk of putting your players off-side?

Danger Three: Player-Campaign relations

And, even if the players forgive you because they can see that you had what you thought were good reasons, how would this perception impact on the way the players feel about the campaign? There is a very real threat that the deception would fatally poison it. Because if the GM can withhold one crucial set of facts, you have to ask the question, What else is he hiding?

Overcoming the Dangers

All of these problems are avoided if the omission can be made central to the premise of the campaign and explicitly described as such. Which brings me back to Tom’s article.

If you describe the campaign as “The world’s first starship, equipped with a brand-new propulsion system called Void Jump, is ready for launch, and you are the expert crew who have been assigned to find out exactly what it can do,” then the absence of rules concerning Jump Travel is an inherent selling point. You can even go so far as to tell the players that you have worked out the rules concerned but they will have to learn them, in character, the hard way.

All of the negatives go away, and in fact become positive selling points for the campaign.

It should come as no surprise

The key difference between the two proposals is that the surprise in the latter case comes as no surprise at all – the GM has deliberately highlighted it. Because the players are expecting it, and there is an obvious and ironclad justification for not having the rules spelt out for them, they know what to expect. Furthermore, because the players will be expecting an adventure of some kind to result, they will even be expecting things to go badly wrong.

There might be some residual time dilation that leaks into the trip, so that while they think that they have undertaken only a 10-second “jump” to give a basic full-power test to the engines, they’ve actually been running for a decade or more – and the PCs suddenly find themselves a long way from home, and with an obvious hole in the basic theory of operation of their transportation and its underlying physics, and faced with problems of navigation that are (10 years divided by 10 seconds) 31,557,600 times worse than they expected. Throw Jump Shock and aliens into the equation, and the need to figure out exactly where they are and how they got there, and there will be plenty for the PCs to do.

(You would have to ask why this effect hadn’t shown up on unmanned tests of the drive. Two answers come to mind: they did, and the crew were warned in advance that none of the unmanned test vehicles showed up where they were supposed to; or there’s some sort of quantum “step” that they have tripped over because these engines are so much bigger than the small prototypes, which in turn was necessary for moving a ship large enough to have a crew on-board. Or, a third answer: they did, and the authorities deliberately withheld the information for their own reasons – and those reasons had better be good ones! But if an action can be plausibly attributed to an NPC, the GM can frequently get away with things that wouldn’t otherwise be tolerated. If choosing the third course, I would have a message ‘delivered’ to the PCs in some fashion explaining the in-character justification, to be found as soon as they emerged).

In fact, there would be similar questions for the GM to have answered about Jump Shock itself – are mechanical and electronic systems subject to it? If yes, the phenomenon should have been discovered by those unmanned test flights – perhaps through animal “passengers”. If no in both cases, then it comes as a surprise to the PCs – but there is something that can be done about it, long-term. It might be that the pre-electronic sci-fi writers had it right after all, and the best solution is to have the ship ‘programmed’ to function via machined and pre-designed Cams and gears…

The Natural Method: Organic Rules Growth

It was when laying out this article that I realized a second broader principle: This sort of thing goes on all the time, quite naturally.

Rules structures evolve organically over time in most campaigns. Some new situation comes up and the GM evolves rules to cope with it, or some deficiency in the existing rules comes to light. Any set of rules are always going to be insufficient to cover every possible situation than might arise. Or it might be that the GM creates an adventure and then discovers that the rules he’s been using don’t have the scope to cope with its needs.

And so the rules evolve to meet the changing game needs. It doesn’t matter that the GM may be as taken by surprise as the players; it doesn’t matter how necessary or justified the rules change might be. What matters is that the willingness and ability to evolve the rules when necessary is one of the mandatory traits of even a half-reasonable GM, and that – by definition – these rules come out of nowhere because of a plot development – something a PC or NPC is doing, will do, or wants to do. (One of the marks of a great GM is being able to do this without delaying or stopping play. I admit to not quite hitting that standard most of the time – I take a minute or two to think things through. And, if I have to, I will suspend play and get everybody at the table involved in drafting a rules solution – but that hasn’t happened in a looong time.)

Plot as a Rules Delivery System?

Finally, there is one other aspect of the whole question that’s worth mentioning. One of the big points that I emphasized in my mega-series on New Beginnings is that you need to allow space for players to familiarize themselves with any house rules that you have introduced. I even suggested throwing in an encounter or a plotline specifically for the purpose of letting them do so without anything earth-shattering, like the main campaign plot, hanging in the balance.

In essence, this is like interrupting an online adventure with a tutorial on some new capabilities that you have just acquired.

Let’s go back into the tabletop RPG arena. There are some new rules that will be in effect henceforth, for whatever reason. You’ve designed a “tutorial” encounter or adventure to show them off, test them, and permit final tweaking before they become as canonical as any of the other game rules for the campaign. There are two possible approaches: you can publish the rules in advance, possibly confusing players and yourself, pre-empting the tutorial adventure, and taking a lot of time explaining, clarifying, and answering questions in advance – or you can reveal the rules one at a time as the tutorial unfolds and only after they have been tested and approved, and are declared canonical, do you make them available to the players – saving you a lot of time and effort that can better be devoted to getting the test/tutorial right. Sounds like a bit of a no-brainer, doesn’t it?

Players may even turn up to the game table not knowing of the metagame agenda for the day. So long as they get an adventure out of it, they have no real cause for complaint under these circumstances.

You can even encourage tolerance by asking each player to offer an opinion on the proposed rules changes after the test/tutorial. That makes them ongoing participants in deciding the future of the campaign. And that’s never a bad thing.