23: MEMORY
What characters know or remember can and will be much more than players remember about their adventures. They usually had lives before the first session, and those lives go on in downtime gaps, so they will know the setting better than the players or GM or even its creators.
Do players read big chunks of source material, ask pertinent questions, or in more collaborative worldbuilding add details themselves?
This is also why many games start with the PCs arriving in a new and unfamiliar setting or situation, so they can learn along with the players and the players won’t ask so many out-of-character questions about things their characters know.
Likewise, the PCs’ adventures are often life-and-death struggles where they left the last room five minutes ago, while for the players it’s a low-stress pastime based on description with optional visual references and the scene with the last room was a week ago.
So while I like to take thorough notes myself I don’t penalise for memories being a bit hazy.
Bonus round:
Innovation - I’ve seen systems innovations develop, some developing and becoming standards, some not being picked up. For example, I remember first seeing dice pools in Ghostbusters and then Star Wars, then success counting in Shadowrun making it just that little bit faster to work out results and calculate varied success levels.
Quick - Like simple systems, I tend to like quick systems.
Surprise - An entertaining surprise is a nice effect to achieve, but consider what it takes to get it, and how much more fun it adds than knowledge - and potentially how much fun it could take away. There’s a reason that “bait and switch” campaigns are generally reviled, with only a few people talking about how one worked when the subject comes up. (I’ve also seen some blatantly obvious examples over the years.) Surprise non-standard adventures won’t draw as negative a reaction, as long as the players are in a suitable mood and the plot stays within the agreed Weird Level. To use the often cited example, I wouldn’t run a session where the PCs discover they’re fictional characters with most games.
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