From: Elizabeth.Mccoy@bbs.oit.unc.edu (Elizabeth Mccoy)
Newsgroups: rec.games.frp.misc
Subject: Re: Improvisation!
Date: 20 Aug 92 16:21:29 GMT
Organization: Extended Bulletin Board Service

In article <1992Aug19.030145.18318@tronsbox.xei.com> dfrancis@tronsbox.xei.com (Dennis Heffernan) writes:
>In article <4773@balrog.ctron.com> smith@ctron.com writes:
>|I can see someone not liking this style of play, but I must object to this
>|conclusion.  I invariably game master in Stephen's style. Sometimes I know
>|the answer to the mystery.  Sometimes I don't.  And, most importantly, some-
>|times I'm wrong!
[snip]
>|
>|If I'm wrong it's even more entertaining - for me, as well as everyone else.
>|I remember one game vividly where my players carefully analyzed the situation
>|and, with unerring and flawless logic, thoroughly nailed a character I had
>|thought was completely blameless.  I reviewed the facts, thinking maybe he'd
>|been framed, but it turned out the NPC I thought was responsible for the mess
>|was, in fact, a front for the real culprit.  Sometimes your players really are
>|smarter than you, and they deserve recogition of that fact.  If I'd simply
>|invented the scenario beforehand, and stuck to the NPC "culprit" the game
>|would not have been as much fun or as successful.
>
>	A properly written mystery has one and only one possible solution.  It
>must be impossible for any other solution to be valid -- the facts of the
>case must be such that only the intended solution is correct.
>
>	If I found out that my GM changed reality so that my "answer" was
>correct, I'd slit his throat and take away his dice.

On the other hand, if the GM has made a mistake, and the intended
solution is *not* the only correct one (and there's a more-correct
solution, and not just an equally correct one), clinging to that will
irritate the players too! And they'll *know* about that gaffe, while
they might not ever find out about the reality-changing decision.
Believe me, I'd rather have a sane, rational, realistic <at least for
genera> solution/outcome/whatever -- no matter how it was arrived at! --
than have a stupid, illogical, nigh-impossible
solution/outcome/whatever (however *that* was arrived at, too!).

I mean, if you've got 3-6 people in front of you, who took one little
slip you made and turned it into the linchpin of the whole caper, and it
*makes sense* more than what you thought you were doing... Well, it's
going to make the players do a reality-check if you don't make your
decision at least as sensible as theirs, and prefer'bly more-so.

(Yes, I've played with a GM who would *not* deviate from his notion of
what was happening/should happen, even when it was totally bogus,
without violent PC balking. Most of those games are spent figuring out
how to overkill the "problem" and blowing through holes in the plot.)

Of course, either method, taken to extremes, will be annoying to the
PCs. Your kilometerage may differ, that sort of thing.
--
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