Never On Sunday

Last night I scored something of a victory as GM. The setup is complicated, but in brief: one of the PCs, as part of his back story, had his own daughter kidnapped, in order to protect her from the reaction of the evil global conspiracy the PCs are up against. He kept this a secret from his fellow PCs, even after his wife—also a PC in a troupe-style rotation—sent them off looking for her, without leads. Well, the wild geese have come home to roost, as a fleet from unknown lands has chosen the same isolated island where Ba’ala had his daughter sequestered as their landing point. After a little prompting (“Good question. Do you know anyone on Galash?), the player remembered this inconvenient truth, and the PCs had to pile into the pirate captain’s ship and rescue the daughter amid an alien invasion.

One of the other players figured out Ba’ala’s complicity with surprising speed, and her character is outraged. Everyone at the table was at least surprised.

It should have felt like a major coup, but for me all the work had been done long ago, setting up Ba’ala’s personal history. Ella’s new to RPGs and asked for suggestions for her character’s mandatory secret; the kidnapping was my idea. Making an explosive scene out of it was simply a matter of waiting for the PCs to travel close enough to Galash to react to whatever crisis should struck my fancy at the time.

Scriptwriters call the technique “laying pipe.” It applies to running an RPG campaign, as well. Simply handing PCs the crisis of the moment is merely adequate; setting up less urgent problems in the background lends those problems an exaggerated appearance of realism and drama when they come to the foreground, because it seems they’ve been scripted far ahead of time. In reality, I’d done no more work for this emergency than for any other game event. Ideed, planning the crisis out in detail would have been counterproductive, as unpredictable players inevitably muck up carefully laid plans. Simply employing something that cannot help but become important somewhere down the line was sufficient to make it appear as a dramatic surprise, yet leave players thinking they should have seen it coming long ago.

Laying pipe is one of the marks of an experienced GM, as novice GMs have their hands full simply keeping up with the needs of the moment. But it’s an indispensable technique for GMs wishing to grow beyond the rudiments of refereeing combats to the proper creation of a story line.