In most story mediums, you will get "cutscenes" that the characters are unaware of – a figure in shadow gives an order to do something, you see the swat team enter the building but the characters don't know yet – in order to provide Dramatic Irony.
How good or bad of an idea is this in table top RPG? Can it work? Does it just give up things too soon? How can you make this work similar to how it does in other media?
[RPG] How effective are foreshadowing cutscenes that PCs would be unaware of
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Probably the easiest way to avoid forgetting a few key things is to use a physical prop.
When you have an important bit of information or a "quest item," write it down on a notecard and physically hand it to the players.
You're not "giving away" anything if they've already identified the thing as important by themselves. But now they have a handy reminder sitting around on the table, and flipping through their small (keep it very small!) stack of cards is a good way to catch up on loose ends at the beginning of a session.
This approach may seem like you're "going easy" on them compared to making them keep their own notes (because, well, you are!), but consider:
- When the players forget something that the PCs really shouldn't, does it lead to interesting situations or frustrating situations? If it's interesting, maybe you should make them work for a it a bit and throw some complications their way. If it's just frustrating, though, then it's in everyone's interests, including the GM's, to avoid the problem altogether.
- Pacing matters. If your challenges and rewards emphasize caution and detailed record-keeping, games tend to be slower. Groups that thrive on the action-drama aspect of adventure gaming benefit from play procedures that streamline and simplify record-keeping.
- If the players liked taking notes, you probably wouldn't have this situation in the first place. So I'm assuming they don't.
My best villains are based off the what the players care about. I'll talk about methods and some recent (in the last 3-4 years) examples. You may want to check out my 7 Types of Antagonists as well.
What the players care about - Flags
So first off, I tend to play games with explicit mechanics for the players to tell me what kinds of conflicts they're into. That makes it easy for me to figure out what kinds of villains will press on those conflicts in interesting ways. As we play, a key point is finding out what exactly hits a player's hot button which is usually near, but not quite on the Flag they've given you.
As you play, pay attention when the players are really serious about winning conflicts, or when they're going above and beyond to protect something or accomplish something - all the physical cues (body language, voice) that tells you they're feeling suspense are key to getting more on point, though games where you can spend hero points can also give you a mechanical cue as well.
The General
About a year ago, I ran a game of Tenra Bansho Zero - the player had a character who was basically an adopted outsider to the daimyo - he was close to the family but still politically a second class citizen. Emotionally, he's like a step-brother to the daughter. In TBZ, mecha can only be piloted by children and adolescents - so usually daughters are put up to this task while sons are raised to be leaders.
Long story short - the country ends up having to fight a defensive war, and a general is pretty eager to send her out on the front line. The player character speaks way out of line at court, and gets exiled by the general's pressure.
The general has hammered on the fact the player character is an outsider, separated him from one of the NPCs he cares a lot about, is going to send her into serious danger, and also put the player character out to the border where he could possibly die.
This only worked because I had successfully played up the daughter as being sort of a great younger sister character - a nice kid trying to do her best - so the player CARED about her, and now the general was basically threatening all of that. The thing is, the general actually isn't entirely wrong about wanting to use the daughter to defend the nation - they're outmatched and a giant robot is actually one of the few things they've got to equalize. Because of this, it makes it harder for the players to argue against it. What finally made him absolutely hateworthy was that the general had nothing but trash talking to the player on TOP of everything else. (The general falls under "The Hater" category).
AU Star Wars
5 years ago, I ran a Primetime Adventures game in an alternate universe Star Wars (clones were not an army, but rather a way for the government to replace troublesome individuals in positions of power...)
We had several villians who were all very good and emotionally charged:
A senator - the father of one of the Jedi. He was kind of an ass and ended up getting in the way of their plans, though I made sure his motivations were clear. He was hated because it hit on the player's actual personal issues with his own father.
A clone of one of the player characters - absolutely there to take over someone's life, and threatened to pretty much do the opposite of everything the player character wanted to do. The player found themselves having to kill the clone and feeling terrible about it - it forced them to cross their own moral line in the process (see below for more on that).
A Jedi who was on the same side as the player characters, but was just a little too overzealous and violent. He took the player's goals but twisted the reasons for doing so, even though he often used the same rhetoric. He made the players question the very cause they were fighting for.
The moment of moral bankruptcy
What usually makes the villain click for players is the point when the villain crosses a single line that makes the players angry. What people often confuse is the idea that this moral line has to hurt the player characters, or their allies - it doesn't. This also can be how a character who is relatively neutral or even supportive of the player characters becomes a villain in their eyes.
This works best if the goals are understandable, but the methods are extreme or twisted along the way.
Transhumanism whether you want it or not
I recently ran a sci-fi game where a roboticist found out one of the AIs he had built had survived the destruction of his lab, and in fact, was still out there, doing stuff. Since the lab and it's fellow robots were destroyed by angry rampaging humans out of ignorance, it decided the solution was to improve and fix humanity. To snatch up souls from the dead and give them immortal bodies, better bodies, and more time to learn - eternity.
Of course, no one was asked if they wanted this. And the AI simply treated them as objects, to be turned on or off at will. ("Don't worry, if this unit bothers me too much I'll just reset it's memory. It's easier that way.") And the AI decided that in order to show how much better this new path was, it would destabilize the religion on the planet by supporting terrorist violence along the way - "If they die, it doesn't matter, I can simply bring people back. This is why my path is superior to religion. I can bring people to life, eternally, now. So who cares if they die in a bomb blast? They'll be back soon enough."
The casual disregard for human life, or human will was pretty much what made this AI a great villian. It stepped on the roboticist's sense of responsibility for his creations, and another character's sense of obligation to the dead soldiers he once led.
Drifter's Escape - casual racism
A friend of mine played a game of Drifter's Escape and relayed this event in play. The main character, a drifter, is picked up in a truck along with several other folks to do day labor. The character is white, but the other men are Latino. The farm owner picking them up, also white, says to the drifter, "Hey, why don't you sit up front, in the cab? We'll have some good work for you." and throughout the session basically offered the character preferential treatment to the other workers throughout the session.
For everyone at the table, it was a great example of a villain who didn't have to do anything overtly violent or say anything ugly - in fact, he simply offered the drifter good things - but everyone could see that part of that price was to participate in putting down/cutting out the other workers from a fair shake too.
A simple, moral line.
Justice delayed is justice denied
Along with the specifics of a villain being either an obstacle to goals or twisting ideals, etc. a key part of how you play that out is having a villain the players cannot pay back or overcome immediately. The frustration makes you hate them more, and you really can't wait to finally see them get theirs. Of course, when that time comes, it might cost enough that you have to really decide if it's worth going for.
A good extra is your allies or friends also like this terrible character. It turns the battleground into fighting for their hearts - convincing your allies of your cause and avoiding social fallout for taking action.
Troublesome Villains > Fiat Villains
In the games I run, I don't have villains who simply auto-succeed at doing terrible things - they don't just manage to kidnap your loved ones, or get you ousted without the players getting a chance to prevent it. I don't fudge the dice or simply play a "gotcha" on the players.
What this does is establish a position of trust for us as a group - the players know if they protect or save something, they really did it, I didn't hand the victory to them. They also know if they fail or things go wrong, they COULD have possibly succeeding and stopped the villain, which means they really rack their brains over "what could I have done better?"
In comparison, when you have a game where the villains do their evil by GM Fiat, the players don't feel like fighting harder, they feel cheated and angry at the GM, not the villains. I've played those games, they're not fun.
Related Topic
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Best Answer
The Point of Cutscenes
Cutscenes/dramatic irony scenes are difficult to do in tabletop RPGs, in large part because of what they're meant to do. In movies and even video games, cutscenes work because they let the viewer/player see something coming, without necessarily letting them do anything about it. Alfred Hitchcock talks about this: a boring family dinner suddenly becomes incredibly tense to watch if the audience knows there's a timed bomb under the table. The suspense comes from the audience knowing there's a bomb but being unable to warn the diners or defuse the bomb.
However, in many tabletop RPGs, the whole point is that the players can do something about whatever problems they are aware of in the world of the game*. So showing the players a cutscene doesn't have the same effect. As movie viewers, they can't do anything to help the characters on screen, and even in a video game, their ability to respond to the cutscene is likely to be limited. But the open-ended nature of tabletop RPGs means that there's nothing stopping the PCs from dropping everything and acting on their newfound knowledge.
How to Use Cutscenes
There are a few tips to help you put a cutscene into a tabletop game and still achieve the goal of increasing suspense while giving the players knowledge they need, without losing drama or excitement:
Make the cutscene too vague to act on. For example, a shadowy figure in a dark room slicing their hand over a silver bowl, while a demonic form begins to coalesce in a rune circle. There's simply not enough information here for the players to run out and immediately stop whatever's happening. It's at the GM's discretion to allow additional checks (such as perception or arcana) by the players to see or understand more about the cutscene, depending on the method by which it reaches the players (see #4).
Show the cutscene with the expectation that the players will act on it, and have roadblocks ready. The PCs want to run off and deal with whatever they saw? Great! But there's a dangerous mountain range in the way, or perhaps as they try to leave town, the king's guards arrest them and they have to defend themselves against false charges brought by the villain to delay them.
Use the cutscene to cause a moral dilemma or choice. Perhaps the cutscene shows a town being sacked by the evil army, and if the characters drop everything and head over there, they can save the town. Except that the characters are in the middle of saving the elven tribe they're staying with, and if they drop everything, the elves will be slaughtered.
Make sure the players understand why they're seeing the cutscene. Movies and video games restrict the audience's ability to interact with the events of the world, so they can use cutscenes because the audience inherently understands the storytelling tactic behind it: that the cutscene is there to increase suspense because the audience can't do anything about it. In tabletop games, however, the understanding is usually that story information provided by the GM is being given specifically to allow the players to act on that information. So if you just show them the cutscene, the PCs are likely to assume it's meant to be acted on immediately. But if you give it to them some other way - perhaps a dream, or a magical vision, or a prophecy - which puts the cutscene "inside" the world of the game, then it becomes more clear that it's not necessarily something that needs immediate action.
Think long and hard about why you want the cutscene, especially if you only want to show the players (not their characters). This is related to #4 above, where the understanding of most tabletop games is that the GM provides information to be acted on. Dave made a comment about the distinction between the players being aware of something, and the PCs being aware of it. In my opinion and experience with tabletop games, the narrative is usually meant to come from the point of view of the PCs. Strictly speaking, this would mean that nothing the PCs don't witness firsthand (whether by actually being there, seeing a vision, etc) should be in the story. In my opinion, player-only cutscenes break the illusion that you the player "are" Cutter the barbarian - they put a wall between the players and the story. There are some games where this works or is encouraged, but unless the system is specifically designed to handle that (as Sardathrion mentioned Fate and VtM are, and as discussed in the comments below), it can damage player immersion. So I would recommend using them sparingly, if at all, and instead try to find a way to convey the cutscene to the character within the world.
An example from my own game:
I needed to use a cutscene to make the players aware of something they wouldn't be otherwise (that one PC's father had been kidnapped by the villains). So I had some of them, based on Wisdom rolls, experience a dream where they watched the villains - including a couple of cloaked figures they hadn't yet met - torture the father for information. My players did want to act on it immediately, of course - but because they had no idea where the father was being kept or why the villains were after him, they first had to find where the father had been staying, hunt down his notes, retrace his steps, and finally uncover the secret he'd found that the villains now wanted.
Ultimately, it took them three or four sessions to track down the villains' lair and rescue the father. It was made all the worse because they knew that every minute they spent elsewhere, the father was being tortured. When they did finally find him, we had one of the best roleplaying scenes of the game as the PCs took out (real-life) weeks of frustration and fear on the villains' minions in the fight to rescue him.
TL;DR: Cutscenes are tools to help build suspense in a narrative. If you want to use them in tabletop games, you must use them in ways that increase the players' suspense, by preventing the players from immediately acting on them.
*I've had the debate before that not all games are like this, but for the purposes of this question, I'm talking about games where players have individual agency to affect the game world.