Role-Playing With Style.
Lessons Learned - Moltke’s Theory of Gamemastering
by Chris | Jun 16 2008
Helmuth von Moltke was the chief of staff of the Prussian army for thirty years. He was an innovative military strategist in the 19th Century. His theory of war is simple and to the point: it can be translated as “no battle plan survives contact with the enemy.”
Now, replace “battle plan” with “chronicle” and “enemy” with “players,” and I think you’ll see where I’m going here…
No chronicle survives contact with the players.
No matter how hard you work on your setting, or NPC or what have you, your players are going to do something you haven’t planned for. I played in a campaign once where we were FBI agents. Think the X-files by way of Call of Cthulhu and you’d be spot on. We’d been chasing this bastard for sessions upon sessions, and when we finally confronted him? He gave his Big Bad Monologue before getting in a helicopter and flying off to bedevil us another day.
Except he didn’t.
One of the other players shouted “GUN!” and unloaded on him. The (human, and therefore particularly squishy to lead projectiles) Big Bad was Dead. Our GM (Hi, Frank!) expected us to follow the conventions of the genre. He didn’t expect Steve’s character to follow the Malcolm Reynolds school of diplomacy.
It’s important not to get too invested in a storyline that when things go south– and they will go south– you can’t conceive of any way to continue.
Regroup
Be honest. “I dunno where to go now. Hold on.” Take a break and figure out where you can go from here. There’s no shame in acknowledging that someone did something you didn’t expect. Take a bit, find a quiet room, and look at your options.
- Killing your players. This is murder, and is frowned on in most societies. Moving on.
- Accept and adapt. I suggest this option.
Depending on how you were caught off guard, there are any number of ways to work around…
In the example above, the guy we thought was the Big Bad could have simply been working for someone else. Or, since it was Call of Cthulhu, his body could have gone missing from the morgue. And show up at our houses. Which is what I think happened. I don’t remember, it was a while ago and we’ve played a lot of games since then. Don’t judge me.
But one of the great things about RPGs is that you have unlimited budgets for casting, props, sets, locations and special effects. There’s no reason you can’t fix things. You just have to make it believable and/or consistent with your chronicle. In a World of Darkness game, he could even start making the characters’ lives hell from beyond the grave as a ghost. In D&D there’s always resurrection, and even more fun, undeath… If the Big Bad is resurrected, he could be indentured to the evil priest that raised him and return as a minion for something even worse than he was. Or you can assign his future actions to a different or new NPC… I’m liking the resurrected and now in service to dark powers option, but that’s just me.
Of course, killing an NPC at the wrong time isn’t the only way you can be taken unawares, you can even be blindsided before the game begins.
Which I’ll leave for next time.
How do you recover from a game going sideways?
Tags: lessons learned
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There was a bug keeping the last two entries from allowing comments.
Fixed now. Sorry about that!
Shadowmancer,
Yea...I gotta admit. Steve took me totally by surprise but in so doing created one of those truly unforgettable moments in gaming which make it all worthwhile. BTW, Bruckner was one of the Big Bad’s chief lieutenants but still I was hoping to wring a few more escapades out of him but what the heck.
Anyway, I think that one of the best ways to avoid chronicle derailment is to structure it so that the players have a great deal of leeway in how the story unfolds.
For example, let us say that, that I’m putting together a fantasy chronicle. I’ve already got my theme “The Price of Glory”. I’ve got my setting: The Barony of Waldstatten, a small barony within a larger kingdom. The Main Story Arc concerns the invasion of the Barony by an army of gnolls. Obviously, the PC’s are going to be warriors and combat mages.
But what if they don’t want to be? Okay, let’s go back a few steps. What has been left out? How about the enviroment of Waldstatten itself. What about the baronial town, the villages, the inns, and the farms to say nothing of the inhabitants therein. Make them come alive. In short, let the setting be the chronicle.
Finally, always be prepared to invoke one of the, if not the primary law of the Universe: Actions Have Consequences. Sure, they may whack that NPC earilier than expected, but what does this mean for them down the line?
No chronicle does survive initial contact with the Players and IMO, that’s a good thing.