A DMâs Fair Play Guide To Plot Twists
I love running a game with a lot of surprises. The challenge to pulling this off well is that, unless youâre playing a one on one game, your players outnumber you: and between them, they have a good chance of figuring out whatâs going to happen, no matter how sneaky and clever you are.
The first way of dealing with this - which Iâll just call the bullshit way - is to not give your players the information they need to solve the mystery. Donât let them find out about the secret society until itâs too late. Donât give them any reason to suspect that their NPC ally is planning to kill them. Donât let them find the murder weapon, donât let them locate the witnesses, donât give them the chance to skip to the end of their investigation.
This sucks, and if you run your games like this, youâre going to piss off your players. Because it isnât fair.
In mystery literature, a âfair play mysteryâ is one where the reader is given all of the information they need in order to figure out the solution before the Big Reveal. Itâs what makes the reveal good: that GASP, the âoh shit, the knife! the knife from the party! that was hers! I forgot!â
Pulling off a twist in a fair play game is an incredible feeling. Your players will think youâre a genius (or an absolute dick bastard, which is just as good) and theyâll respect it more when they land in hot water that they plausibly could have avoided. So how do you run a fair play game without your players figuring out the twists ahead of time, given that youâre definitely not smarter than all of your players put together?
By fucking with their expectations.
Here are some things that I keep in mind, to keep my players guessing. And itâs important, with all of this, that if your players see through something, let them have it. They should figure out a lot of things on their own! But if youâre regularly seeding your stories with all of this stuff, eventually your players will miss something. Those are somethings you can build on. The same way that a low level enemy who gets away once can keep coming back again and again until they become an important antagonist, a misapprehension your party proves to have a blindspot for can grow and develop until they get smacked with a breathtaking twist.Â
Whatâs a twist if not the sudden overturning of an assumption you never thought to question?
1: Make your powerful friendly NPCs know a lotâŠbut not as much as the players think they do.
Player characters often end up with powerful allies. It would be very convenient for the party if those allies always had accurate information. Make sure they donât always enjoy that convenience.
Itâs a balancing act: you want your powerful NPCs to be powerful. You want this alliance to be meaningful and beneficial to your players. But give your NPC an Achilles heel of some kind, when it comes to the information at their disposal. The Noble General commands powerful forces and knows the lay of the enemyâs land wellâŠbut that doesnât mean he knows what every squadron and scouting party is up to. The Political Mastermind may know the ins and outs of the court, and have keen insight into the motivations of others: but he has an enemy who pisses him off so much that he loses all objectivity around her. The Powerful Wizard can call upon great magic to aid the party: but his divinations arenât as accurate as he thinks they are, and heâs prone to finding, in his signs and omens, what he wants to see, more than whatâs actually there.
Most of the time, their information should be good! That will make it more likely that your players will trust them the one time when it isnât.
2. Let (apparently) less powerful NPCs sometimes know more than the players think they do.Â
Most NPCs arenât the Noble General or the Powerful Wizard. Most NPCs are Daves, designed to get the players from place to place. Most of those Daves know about as much as youâd expect them to. But some Daves have plans of their own.
You donât always have to signpost with big blinking lights which of your NPCs are âimportant,â and which ones are âunimportant.â Sneak in a crafty Dave from time to time. That assistant they talk to, every time they go to see the prince? That bitch knows everything, and sheâs almost ready to make her move.Â
3:Â There is no such thing as a completely reliable witness.Â
If the players only get information from one person, that information should be flawed in at least one, potentially small, but important way. Smart players will seek a second opinion, or at least allow for the possibility that their information may be incomplete. But even smart players get out over their skis sometimes.
4:Â Let your NPCs be aware of the power of a first impression.Â
If an NPC gives a strong first impression of being a particular kind of person, itâs because theyâre comfortable giving that impression. That might be because itâs who they are. But maybe not.
One of the first characters the PCs met in a VtM campaign I ran was Gawaine. Gawaine was a good old pine-scented manâs man, with salt and pepper stubble and a blue Ford truck. He listened to AC/DC, and talked about the war. He was affable and honest and willing to lend a hand. You already know Gawaine. Everybody knows a Gawaine. Gawaines are trustworthy, salt of the earth types. You donât necessarily think to question a Gawaine.
Thatâs exactly why Gawaine was such a useful persona for Krystiyan, the Tzimisce Voivode, a cruel and alien sculptor of flesh who ânever left his haven.â There were plenty of clues that they were the same person, but that campaign was in its endgame before the players put them all together.
5: Sometimes, dangerous and villainous NPCs should be helpful and cooperative.Â
Not even necessarily because theyâre manipulating the players, or even deceiving them about their true natures, but because their interests and the playersâ interests genuinely alignâŠfor the moment.Â
One of the easiest levers in your playersâ brains to exploit is the expectation that people who help you are your friends. Even if your players know, consciously, that they shouldnât trust this person, most of the time they kind of canât help it, if the NPC is genuinely helpful to them and at least a little charismatic.Â
6: Sometimes, good and valuable NPCs should be unhelpful and uncooperative.Â
No matter how mature your players are, thereâs a natural tendency to react to uncooperative NPCs with a reflexive, âHey, fuck you! Weâre the protagonists! This guy is an asshole!â so from time to time have a helpful, honest, good-aligned NPC have a wholly justified but as-yet-unknown-to-the-party reason to flatly refuse to deal with them.
7:Â Every NPC should have a secret.Â
Not necessarily a bad secret. Were it to be revealed, it might even make the party like them more! But for their own reasons, the NPC does not want their secret to come out, and they will lie to the party to protect it. Players go crazy when they realize theyâre being lied to, and often jump to some wild assumptions about your NPCâs motivations. Iâve had an NPC lie about the opening hours of a shop, and had the PCs assume that they were black market dealers for the villain when the dude just wanted to be able to close early so he could go smoke weed in the park.
8. As a DM, itâs polite to remind your players of the common knowledge their characters would possessâŠeven when it doesnât reflect the truth.
We all know itâs tedious when the DM calls for a roll when youâre just asking for common knowledge. I shouldnât have to make a roll to know the dumb space word for plastic in a Star Wars game. I shouldnât have to make a roll to know who the Holy Roman Emperor is in a game about medieval vampires. The DM should supply common knowledge for free, whenever it comes up.
That doesnât mean common knowledge is true.
This is different from just lying to your players, because you donât put the weight of DM word-of-God behind it. Itâs not âYou would know this guy is a Ventrue, based on XYZ.â Itâs âit would be a common assumption that this guy is a Ventrue, based on XYZ.â He might not be a Ventrue. It might in fact be extremely important that he is not a Ventrue. But if it is commonly assumed that heâs a Ventrue, that is - word for word - something you can share with your players. If they donât look any deeper than common knowledge, thatâs on them.
9. Obviously untrustworthy NPCs provide great air coverage for less obviously untrustworthy NPCs.
The obviously untrustworthy NPC might or might not be planning to betray the party. But if you introduce two untrustworthy NPCs in the same storyline, and one of them seems normal and cool and has a genuine plot-related reason to be there, and the other one is Jaffar, Jaffarâs gonna get clocked, but Susan over there will probably slip under the radar, and might even get tapped to help out with the whole Jaffar situation. They might get Susanâs number, by the end of the session. Susan might become an âally.â Susan might even get romanced by a party member. Play your cards right, and Jaffar might just end up a footnote in the introduction of Susan, Scourge of Worlds and most hated NPC in the entire campaign.
10. Your villains should always have a secret plan B.
Your villain isnât stupid, right? And your villain probably isnât so arrogant that it is inconceivable to them that their plan might fail. Theyâve been planning this ritual for ten thousand years, after all. Itâs always possible that some plucky band of heroes could show up at the last minute and murder your high priest, or steal your amulet, or seduce your second in command. So what does your villain have in his back pocket to make the players go, âOh, shit - he planned for this!â
This may mean that there is a whole separate plot happening, running alongside the main story. This is great, because when weird things happen, the players have to figure out whether this is part of Plot A or Plot B, and working out who did what and why gets a lot more interesting. If they end up foiling Plot A, great - your villain was also secretly behind Plot B the whole time, and will transfer all of his resources over to that.Â
Sometimes your players will figure out that Plots A and B were both the same plot the whole time, with the same villain at the head, and theyâll feel like the smartest people on the planet, and it will be their favorite moment of the entire game. Thatâs great! You gave them that!
Sometimes, they wonât. And when the villain of Plot A, apparently defeated, starts laughing and reveals that he was also the mastermind behind Plot B, which is now too late to be stopped, that will probably be your favorite moment of the entire game.
