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Game Changers

Source GameMastery Guide pg. 46
When you play a campaign long enough, the rules change. The characters that once limped into the village to beg for healing now use magic to cross continents, consult with extradimensional powers, and rescue their allies from death itself.

Alertness is your best tool as a Game Master. Keep one eye on what’s ahead—what abilities you’ll need to account for as you plan your future machinations. Whenever you’re dealing with new mechanical elements, you should have three goals:

Don’t get surprised
Don’t let the new ability run amok
Don’t render the new ability useless

Players are inherent “surprise generators,” and being surprised by their ingenuity is one of the joys of being a Game Master. You don’t need to consider every possible power combination. But when you see a game-changing power coming down the road, take a moment to think like a player. What will Bob want to do once he can turn invisible? Once you answer that, you won’t be surprised (or at least as surprised) and can move on to the other two goals.

“Don’t let the new ability run amok” and “don’t render the new ability useless” are two sides of the same coin. Your fundamental job as Game Master is to provide entertainment, challenge, and above all, balance. Players have a natural desire to play with their new toys—you helped instill that desire in them when you put all those interesting challenges in their way in the first place. Now you have a responsibility to make sure that one player doesn’t trivialize the game’s challenges, for himself or for the whole table.

Below are some potentially difficult game elements, and some thoughts on how to manage them.

Invisibility: There’s an inherent mischief to invisibility. Consider The Invisible Man, or the iconic example of Bilbo in The Hobbit. Let the players have their mischief—it frequently costs you nothing, and they’re having a good time—and deploy the traditional countermeasures (divination magic, traps, creatures that don’t use sight) only at points where you want to preserve the challenge. If invisibility isn’t available to everyone in the party, that helps puts a brake on their invisible ambitions in two ways. First, invisible means invisible—the other party members can’t find the invisible PC for healing, communicate silently, or know where she actually went when she said she’d scout ahead. Second, for every sneaky gal in the party, there’s usually a guy buried under layers of clanking plate armor as well. That guy is the Game Master’s best friend, providing warning to enemies. The invisible player can probably choose her position and get a surprise attack in, but the presence of loud, visible companions ensures that the advantage of invisibility will be fleeting unless the group splits.

When the whole party can turn invisible, brace yourself for the entire table choosing to sneak past encounters you spent hours preparing. As long as they’re truly quiet and don’t run into monsters who can counter their invisibility, let them do so. You can recycle those encounters later, and it’s probably better for everyone’s fun to respect the party’s choice to bypass. It’s possible they’re using invisibility to tell you they’d rather be doing something else. So move along, but save those encounters for later use.

Flying: Your immediate concerns are more tactical when flying shows up at your table—do melee-only monsters get slaughtered like bison on the Great Plains? You’ll need to consider the monster mix in your encounters more carefully so that the players don’t just fly above the dire wolves and drop rocks on them. But there’s nothing wrong with letting the aerial advantage be an advantage every once in a while. Let the flying PC trivialize an encounter or a trap—there are always more of both coming down the line.

Unlike most other game-changing powers, flying comes with a hidden danger to players: altitude. When a ground-bound player gets stunned, knocked out, or dropped to negative hit points, he slumps to the ground. Depending on the exact nature of the flight power, the consequences for a flying character might be far more severe. If a character runs out of hit points and can’t fly anymore, impact with the ground will almost certainly finish him off.

When a player learns to fly, it’s worth a brief conversation with that player. Show him the math: “If you reach 0 hit points when you’re x feet in the air, you’ll take y damage on average, which leaves you at negative z hit points—dead, in other words.” Once he’s got a grasp on the inherent danger, the player can take calculated risks, and it adds even more drama to a desperate battle in the sky. Teleportation: Teleportation raises an issue similar to invisibility: once the whole group can do it, they can bypass content. And as with invisibility, if the players have done a proper job of playing by the rules, let them have their way. It’s likely not that the players want to skip the encounters you’ve made, but rather that they’re abundantly eager to get to the other encounters you’ve made. Tap into that eagerness! (And don’t forget to recycle the work on those skipped encounters later.)

Teleportation can also challenge your preparation and ability to improvise. If your players can open a portal to the throne rooms in any of the Hundred Sacred Kingdoms, how do you cope with the mountains of preparation that come with unfettered, instant travel?

You improvise and cheat, of course. You don’t have a hundred throne rooms (with a hundred high-level monarchs, royal guard complements, and sets of court intrigues) prepared. You have one prepared, notes for a second, and a good idea for a third. You rename your prepared stuff on the fly—the Peaceable Kingdom of Jarrach becomes the Shadow Duchy of Sindrauta. Prince Karelius becomes Countess Kar’than’draya. The royal guards become elves—and you just describe them as having pointy ears, because nobody really cares that their Perception scores are +2 higher. You’ve got better ways to spend your precious time, and your players will never know the difference.

For that second kingdom the PCs teleport to on a lark, go with your notes. Steal stat blocks as needed, from any source. A devil’s stat block works just fine for the sinister seneschal who’s rumored to consort with dark powers. Likewise for the third kingdom. And if you feel like the PCs are teleporting around too rapidly for you to keep up—well, you have a whole book full of monsters right in front of you, don’t you?

Lie/Evil Detection: This magic can be exceedingly troublesome, especially in mystery adventures, yet instead of banning it outright, your best alternative is to stick with the three goals. First, don’t be surprised. When your NPC schemers start scheming, consider how the players will put divination magic to use. Second, make sure that discern lies and detect evil don’t run amok. You have magical countermeasures, of course, but save those for “this guy absolutely must be able to fool the PCs” moments. When you can, use low-key solutions such as:

The NPC can use nonmagical but expert means (high Bluff score, natural defenses against divination) to thwart the PCs.
The NPC can tell half-truths and leave the really incendiary stuff unsaid.
The NPC gets caught lying, but that doesn’t help the PCs uncover the truth.
The NPC is serving evil under duress or is otherwise sympathetic.
The PCs spot the lie, but jump to the wrong conclusion— they know that “troops are marching to Declanburg” is a lie, but it’s a lie because the troops are already there, not because they’re marching elsewhere.

NPCs—at least some of them, anyway—know how the world works. It’s reasonable to assume that just as you thought about what your players would do with divination magic, so too will an NPC consider what meddling PCs might do and prepare accordingly.

Third, let the magic work—as a clue delivery system for you. PCs sometimes make astounding deductive leaps, but sometimes they ignore the blindingly obvious. Use discern lies and detect evil to get important information in the players’ hands fast. Players might find a traditional interrogation of an NPC riveting, but they’re unlikely to find the fifth such interrogation as interesting. Put a little divination magic to work, and watch your table quickly get the information it needs to get on with the fun.

Remote Viewing: Clairvoyance/clairaudience and other scrying magic poses many of the same issues as teleportation. On the one hand, remote viewing is less work for you because the PCs aren’t interacting with the NPCs and places they’re observing. But on the other hand, remote viewing is generally easier and less risky than teleportation, so PCs are more likely to employ it.

By now, you’re likely accustomed to the familiar refrain of “think like the players,” and are largely concerned about remote viewing in two ways: Reconnaissance: PCs use clairvoyance and similar spells to get a look at adventure sites beforehand. On balance, this usually works in your favor, because players will then plan a route (often when you’re within earshot) that tells you exactly what they want to experience. That makes your job easier—now you just provide encounters that either support or confound their expectations. That’s the beauty of remote viewing—it’s more of an information trade than the players realize.

Espionage: Players love to scry on the Big Bad Evil Guy when he’s going about his sinister business in his chambers. This is a test of your ability to improvise— you’ve got to describe an interesting scene on the spot. Espionage-style spying can also be a clue delivery system for you. Decide what information you want to impart, surround it with enough dialogue and detail to make it believable, then get on with the fun.

But what if you don’t have specific information to deliver, and in fact you’re trying to keep the PCs and the antagonist separated for a while? If you don’t want PCs tuning in at the dramatic moment, then you have two choices: describe a realistic but utterly mundane scene in the villain’s life, or come up with a scene that refers at least obliquely to the ongoing narrative.

When the PCs are scrying, the players are pure spectators—a recipe for boredom for everyone but you. It might be realistic for most espionage-style scrying to reveal the mundane, day-to-day life of the villain (and a nice reminder if the players seem to be overusing it), but that doesn’t do anyone any good. So accept the blow to realism and give the PCs tangible—if sometimes obscure—information with each scrying attempt. Even a mundane conversation about troop movements can have a little hook (it takes 2 hours to reach the northern watchtower) that makes the players say “Aha!” They might never go to the northern watchtower, but in that moment, they get a little “I know something I’m not supposed to know” feeling—and that can propel them into action.

Portents and Omens: Few things are as difficult as predicting the campaign’s future. How can you tell a player her future when the campaign’s conclusion might make her a demigod—or a string of bad rolls might make her a halfling-kebab on an ogre’s spear?

First, do what real-life oracles and fortune-tellers do all the time: couch your predictions in symbolism and metaphor. Don’t say “Your father won’t give up the throne for you.” Say “Winter refuses to acknowledge spring.” It sounds more ominous—in the literal sense of the word—and gives the campaign’s plot some much-needed elbow room.

Next, be specific, not general. At first, this advice seems counterintuitive. Isn’t a general prophecy easier to keep than a specific one? That’s true, but specific details are easier to insert into the narrative. Don’t say “You shall become the king of the elves.” Say “When winter’s moon is nigh, the fey will dance to the tune you call.” You have a likely fulfillment of that prophecy in mind (a formal dance at the coronation ceremony), but if the campaign goes off the rails, there are other ways to make that prediction come true. Specific details have another benefit: they make the players feel like they’re getting their money’s worth out of the prophecy. If you try too hard to leave yourself room with a prophecy, you risk a prophecy so vague that the players find it useless or feel deliberately cheated. You’re smart enough to engineer something interesting involving the fey near a full moon in winter—even if you aren’t sure what it is yet. But based on that detail, the players will think that the oracle—and by extension you—has it all figured out.

If you have to hit the reset button, make it obvious that you’re doing so. The campaign may have gone in a bold, player-driven direction that you weren’t anticipating. And when it did, all that talk of destiny from the crazy lady back in the starting village was invalidated or became completely irrelevant. If you feel like you’d have to stretch the narrative too far to cover an out-of-date portent, then make it clear in the story of the world that the old destiny no longer applies. Perhaps the stars rearrange themselves in the sky (due to the PCs’ actions, ideally), and now everyone’s fate is uncertain, or can be perceived anew. Maybe the goddess of destiny appears and says that the trickster god has stolen threads from her loom of fate—including the threads that represent the PCs. You’re operating in a realm where anything is possible, so avail yourself of that power.

Archives of Nethys

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Game Changers