24 - Reveal
Having already discussed ways to present a mystery, and how to involve - and react to - the unexpected, how do you include a big reveal?
First of all, consider the audience. Will the players boo? This is where the complaints of bait and switch come in, where a surprise acts to mess up what made some or all of the players interested in the game in the first place. What will the reveal change? And can it fairly be reversed, or would it need a sharp edit to undo it which will still leave it obvious the game was supposed to change?
The kind of reveal depends on genre as well. You can drop a total reality change into a game with a high enough Weird Level and undo it by the end of the session, but a country house mystery needs enough clues to at least indicate who the culprit is and it probably shouldn’t turn out to be a time-travelling killer robot.
Maybe once.
How much can you foreshadow? This can be tricky when improvising, or when the players go off in surprising directions, and can be easy to overplay and underplay. Like the Three Clue Rule, it can help to do some light foreshadowing repeatedly to reinforce it.
And think of the timing in the session, adventure or series. Is it an early shakeup, a three-quarter swerve cueing up the final act, or a twist at the end? The latter is quite likely to get a boo as well, as it can change the story after the final actions of the PCs, so only good for some genres and best clearly foreshadowed.
And consider how to play it. An open secret hidden from the PCs but not the players doesn’t work for everyone, and everyone has different degrees of wanting surprises versus authorial distance, but it can be a lot of fun sometimes.
24a - 6, 5, 4
How, Confident, Rule
A carnival fortune teller really does know what’s about to happen. So why are they working in a tent and telling people their futures for a dollar a time?
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