I’m a big fan of the plot twist. That sudden, wrench in a narrative which realigns all that has gone before from one sort of story into another. One of my personal favorites is Timothy Zahn’s The Icarus Hunt. You get right up the very end of the book thinking you know what’s going on, at least in a general sense, and then bam, something changes. Suddenly you see everything that happened in a new light. The clues were there all along, you just thought they meant something else.
I love that feeling. That abashed yet excited moment when you shake your head and say, “you got me…†In fact to this day, every so often I pull out The Icarus Hunt and reread it so that I can remember how great that reveal was. No, I’m not surprised anymore, but the echoes of that pleasure still resonate.
Where are those moments in roleplaying? I know I don’t have them, and I think it actually has to do with the limits of the medium itself. Perhaps plot twists are not impossible in roleplaying, but they are certainly difficult. As far as I know, no one has yet developed an effective set of techniques for reliably pulling them off.
It is a good idea to define what I am talking about right now in order to avoid confusion over my use of the words “plot twistâ€. First of all, it is something unexpected, or more precisely something contrary to what was expected. That is, a plot twist is not an “I didn’t see that coming†moment, but is instead a “I saw something else coming, and boy was I wrong†moment. The greater the force of the shift involved in realigning your understanding of the narrative, the better the plot twist.
Plot twists are also unexpected in that they reveal as true an option you had not even considered. If you were thinking, “Well, he might be a traitor, but I think he’s loyal†and it turns out that he’s a traitor you have not a plot twist, but an error in evaluation.
Finally, the best plot twists at least look predictable. You can look back and see all those clues that you failed to pick up because you did not know to look for them. This is why most Sherlock Holmes stories are not plot-twisty: at least half of the clues that Holmes picks up are not revealed until the end. You have no chance to figure out what happened, even if you know as much strange trivia as Holmes does. However, it is not necessary that all the clues be revealed, just that enough are revealed that the audience feels as if they could have figured it out if thay had paid enough attention.
As far as I can tell, plot twists are best executed using the stage magician’s most vital assistant Miss Direction. Each clue, each chance for the reader to see the plot twist coming must be accompanied by an explanation the audience can grab onto. You want the audience to be surprised when you reveal a character has been a double agent all along? Then make sure that each time you drop a hint about it you offer some other plausible explanation for that hint that fits into the player’s expectations.
Earlier I said that the nature of roleplaying itself makes plot twists difficult, if not impossible. Now I shall endeavor to expand on why I think this is the case. The important thing to remember is that roleplaying is chaotic.
First of all, it is the nature of the roleplaying medium itself that every author involved is also a member of the audience. Since plot twists can not come from the rules (for reasons I think are obvious, but which I am still hoping to explore in a later article), one of the audience members must be the source. This means that it is literally impossible to execute a successful plot twist that surprises everyone at the table. Still, you would think that a plot twist could still be executed that would surprise at least a part of the audience, so let us move on with that assumption.
Plot twists in fiction are extremely delicate structures. Dropping a hint without a carefully balanced bit of misdirection can spoil the whole thing early, and failing to drop enough hints robs your reveal of force. If the audience has no chance to see the twist coming, then they will not be able to appreciate the clever way you misled them.
This means that crafting a good plot twist requires a significant degree of precision. In static forms of media you can attain this precision simply through continuous editing. Need to drop a couple more hints early on? Not a problem. Failed to provide enough misdirection? There is still time. Unfortunately, this just is not the case in roleplaying.
Roleplaying is a real-time activity. This means that if you fail to drop enough hints early you do not get to go back in time and do it retroactively. If you fail to produce enough misdirection then it is too late because you learn your misdirection was too weak because it already spoiled your reveal.
A possible solution to this is to work out your hints and their accompanying misdirection in advance. Prep them before play so that they are as well-tuned as you can make them. Unfortunately this runs into another problem with the structure of roleplaying: you are not alone.
No single person is the sole creator in a roleplaying session. This means that the story can go in directions you never anticipated. This is often devastating to prepared plot twist material. What if someone reveals that your planned double agent can not possibly be a double agent because of thing X? What if the story flows in such a way that there is no good time to drop your hints?
Thus the solution must be in editing. Remember last week when I talked about game design as a form of editing? That is what I mean here. In order to generate good plot twists without robbing the other players of agency you would have to have some sort of incredibly powerful structure in place that supported the generation of well-balanced hint-misdirection pairs on the fly. The problem here is that not only can I not imagine what such a structure might look like, I am not even convinced that such a structure can exist (though I do hope it can).
But the structural problem is not the only one to be overcome (though it is, as you will see, the only problem that can be overcome through design). Indeed, there is an equally difficult problem brought on by roleplaying, at least in the traditional face-to-face mode: more channels of communication.
It is hard enough controlling a single channel of information (like text in a novel) with enough precision to execute a good plot twist, but in most roleplaying we are dealing with not just words, but voice pitch, facial expression, body positioning, and all sorts of other non-verbal stuff. The skill required to convey hints with misdirection without inadvertently letting something slip by increases significantly with each channel of communication you add.
To make things worse, much of the time you are playing with people who know you. That is, your audience is familiar enough with you to catch many of your unconscious mannerisms. They know you always smile just so when you lie, and other similar things. To add even more problems, they are also familiar enough with you to know how you think, they know that making this character a double agent is just the sort of thing you would do.
All of this contributes to the enormous difficulty of making effective plot twists happen in play. It is a problem of precision. Some things can be made more precise through the use of procedures and rules, hopefully someone will develop a good set of hint-misdirection rules. However, some things can only be improved with practice: the only way you get better at controlling the various channels of communication is by doing so.
The end result of all this is that good plot twists come from good procedures for generating material combined with a set of skills that are not often associated with roleplaying.
Now for everyone’s favorite part. The part where I make you do all the hard work by answering the tough questions. This week I want to know about your own play: have you ever had a plot twist of the kind I’m discussing here? Was it a fluke, or is it repeatable? What kind of structures have you developed in your own play, formal or informal, that help you do plot twists?
Next week: Mechanics in roleplaying games are good for two things: teaching and easing a path to the good stuff. Don’t miss the exciting discussion: Taking a load off.
Tags: Theory
I’m afraid I must contradict. In my experience, plot twists are quite easy to achieve. Without realizing it, you are introducing the impossibility by the simple assumption that at least one person at the table will not be surprised by the twist.
When I decide that a plot twist would be welcome, I don’t decide on one and start doing set-up. Instead I look for the other players to give me a plot twist. Not unlike seeking an optical illusion I look for a series of clues or events whose overt meaning has been selected by the group, but which could assemble to a very different meaning. Then I merely need to seek a single fact or revelation which will flip those intepretations.
If I introduce that, the plot twist occurs quite naturally. The beautiful part of all of this is that even I get very little warning before the twist. Indeed, the experience of discovering and enacting the plot twist is not far separated from the experience of having it fully revealed. The longer you wait from the personal to the group discovery, the less interesting the twist will be, and eventually you drift into the same troubled waters that you chart in your post.
Mendel,
Thanks for dropping by, and thanks for pointing this out.
My guess is that I’m using a terribly restrictive definition of plot-twist here. For me, part of the enjoyment of the plot twist is knowing that I was misled. In the sort of emergent story stuff you’re talking about, no one has been actively misled, and to me that means it’s not a plot twist.
From another angle: this sort of thing does happen in my games, and I enjoy it, but instead of thinking “Wow, that’s a plot twist”, even if I am totally surprised by it I think “Wow, that’s a cool emergent bit of story”.
You see the difference, right? In the one case you have a planned campaign (for lack of a better word) of misleading information leading up to a big reveal, while in the other case you have a point in the story structure that could go multiple ways and you choose the less anticipated one.
It looks to me as if it’s a definitional question: am I being too narrow with my thoughts about what a plot twist is? Should I instead be calling it something else, like maybe “the ‘gotcha’ feeling”?
Finally, now that I’ve hopefully gotten a bit clearer about what I mean by “plot twist”, do your experiences match mine (that this kind of intentional misleading is hard or impossible in play), or do you experience the intentional misleading thing in regular play as well?
Thomas
I agree with many if not most of your points, but not neccessarily your conclusion.
First, I agree that real plot twists are difficult. But I think they are difficult—period—for role-playing or film or books. I think you give films and novels way too much credit here. I find it’s a rare film that truly surprises me (sorry, I actually don’t read novels very much). I can see 95% of plot twists coming a mile and a half away. My wife hates it when I guess at what plot twist is coming up and give the story away.
So I think part of the problem with creating plot twists is due to the nature of plot twists, not neccessarily role-playing. I believe that with the proper practice players can become reasonably good at creating plot twists.
But here’s the more significant comment—I agree that editing can greatly enhance plot twists. But it’s possible to edit role-playing sessions. My group, at least, does it all the time. But it isn’t about re-writing what happened, as it is with writing. It’s about giving new meaning to previously established facts.
Here’s an example of a “plot twist” from one of my Mountain Witch games—I was playing a ronin named “Ichi-yama”, which isn’t a proper name. Roughly translated it means “First Mountain”. My fate came out that I was the head general for my former lord, but a failure in battle lead to my master’s death, and I was now living in shame. Just as that came out, one of my fellow players goes, “Oh, I get it, ‘Ichi-yama’ isn’t your real name, it’s a nickname to hide your identity.” No, actually, but it was a cool idea, so I ran with it.
My group does stuff like that all the time. Something will happen in the present that makes us look back at previous events with a new light. Sometimes this is just a change of emphasis, sometimes we tweak our “memory” of the event a bit to make it fit the plot twist better, as in the above example.
Now, many of such plot twists do *seem* to happen randomnly. But they do happen. And they happen more than you would think. So the question is why do they happen with my group?
I’m not totally sure, but I think one reason *might* be because we play lots of short games, where it takes us a while to establish our characters and the setting. In other words, we play for a while in “experimental”/”I’m not totally sure how I want to run things yet” mode. This type of play creates a variety of events that we can later look back upon and choose which ones we want to emphasize.
Edit—Somehow I missed your comments about “emergent story”. I think you would probably view my above comments as such, and thus not a proper “plot twist”.
And to answer your question, I think you’re being too strict with your definition. If I may, I think you’re looking at “plot twists” from a film/literary perspective, and not from a role-playing perspective. Role-playing, IME, is an emergent artform. But I’ve had plenty of “emergent” moments that feel close to, if not the same as, those “gotcha” moments in film or novels.
Interestingly enough, the only necessary difference between the “emergent story” and the narrowed “plot twist” definition you’re using lies entirely in the social context (even in non-RPG forms – like novels or movies). The former simply changes the interpretation, the later changes the interpretation with a social assumption of protracted deceit on the part of the revealer.
In fact, what seems to be missing from emergent story is the appreciation of that very deceit. But in an emergent story you didn’t set up anything, so how can you take credit? (This isn’t entirely true, there is a subtle art to encouraging potential twists.) Easy, you use deceit.
I usually call it reverse Illusionism. I encourage the social perspective that I am the man behind the curtain, but that is the illusion, in truth the players are building the narrative of play, I’m acting more like an editor, pulling things together and helping the other player’s contributions be more clear or more interesting.
Consider, for example, if Zahn had written the entire “mystery” of his novel as an interesting plot, and at some point realized that his original idea for what was happening could be twisted to something much better. He promptly did so, and finished the novel. If that had happened then your example would actually be an emergent story, not a plot twist. But what makes it a plot twist is the assumption you and I make as readers that the author intended everything at every point of the story.
But I’ve certainly read novels where you could easily tell that the author didn’t have it all planned out at first, often because of poor crafting. Zahn is a good enough author that I might not be able to tell. And even if you ask him, he might very well lie, just to preserve his mystique. So there really isn’t a way to distinguish the plot twist and the emergent story, except in the mind of the audience.
So, the easiest way to get what you want is to build the mystique, and exploit the emergent story structure. After all, the master craftsman who controls everything is a fiction, you might as well use it as one.
Mendel,
That’s a really good analysis actually. Now I’ve got something to seriously think about. One last question: have any good ideas for doing this on a regular basis?
Thomas
Tim (or do you prefer “Timothy”?),
Thanks for chiming in. While I’m perfectly willing to use a different term, what you think I should be using to talk about “gotcha” moments. Mendel’s got some good points (above) about the difference being perceived artistry.
It seems that there’s an important difference between the two (emergent surprise stuff and “gotcha” stuff). Does that seem accurate to you, or do you think that I’m worried about a difference that doesn’t exist?
Thomas
There are two things you can do to produce these sorts of situations more often.
First, during play frequently contribute in ways that allow multiple interpretations. You should try for suggestive elements, rather than elements that suggest only a small number of options.
For example, having a NPC recieve a missed phone call or have arrived after speaking with someone unknown, gives considerable room for speculation. An just like the free association effect that speculation will typically be confined to the current theory at large.
This also includes spinning other player’s contributions towards greater freedom. You want quite a bit of room to maneuver, because you are looking to fit something immediately engaging into that open space.
The second is much harder to do, but is one of the secrets to reliably generating plot twists. Train yourself to view events as statistical superpositions of possible explainations based on recognizing your limited information. By doing this you are more likely to see the “optical illusion” of a potential plot twist, and better able to choose one which is not so improbable or contrived that it becomes annoying or silly. (It was all a dream is the classic one.) This also helps to discourage the tunnel vision of simply holding the most likely or most expected explaination, which prevents you from seeing as much evidence for any other.
Both of these are skills, and they help in developing each other. The best way to get better at them is to practice. And when you do it well enough, a little reverse illusionism is all it takes to make it feel like a real mystery.
I think, if you select a sufficiently narrow definition of plot twist, then you can (by definition) make them impossible in role-playing (or any art). So I’m not sure if this qualifies, but here it goes.
I love using plot twists. I often use twists on story arcs that run two to three sessions, but sometimes stretch it out longer.
Here’s the basic formula. Start by misleading the characters (or by discovering that the characters have mislead themselves). Reinforce their false assumptions, allowing those assumptions to build up momentum. Then, start dropping clues that contradict the assumption. Start with things that are tangential to the story arc (those are most likely to be ignored), but increase the tension until something breaks.
One of two things are likely to happen:
1) Someone figures it out. Great. The players typically love this.
2) You reach a dramatically appropriate time to completely pull the covers back, shocking everyone. That, I think, is a pure plot twist.
I think there are a couple of things that work to your advantage when including plot twists in RPGs. First the players are active participants (not just passive observers). Their actions help create the false assumption–and so they have a stake in it. This can give the assumption more weight than it would have in a novel or movie.
Role-playing is also an unedited art. We accept a certain amount of inconsistency, even in the best games. Lets face it, consistency is hard. Authors and directors struggle with it all the time, and they can put a lot more time and energy in maintaining consistency than we can. So, players tend to ignore information contrary to their current assumption. It is camouflaged in the background noise.
Lastly, many players are accustomed to games that follow rather predictable patterns. For example, the dungeon crawl. It is easy to get them to buy into an assumption that fits this pattern. For example, it is easy to get most players to buy into the idea that the goblins living in the sewers under the city are evil.
I’m currently playing with two excellent players. Still, I can occasionally catch them by using typical gaming tropes. It’s almost pavlovian. We may have come a long way in our gaming styles, but all three of us cut our teeth on kill-them-all-and-loot-the-bodies games.
One side note, my plot twists typically occur near the two-third point in a story arc, not at the end. An author can cut a story wherever he wants, but my players demand a chance to react to the new information. So, the reveal usually works as the gateway between act two and act three (in a typical three act structure), and lead to the final conflict.
-Rich-
Rich,
Thanks for talking about your experiences. I’m not entirely sure, but your writing seems to indicate that you tend to be the GM. Is that right?
Do you think that the techniques you normally use for plot twist stuff would work if you were a fairly empowered player? Or in a GM-less game?
I guess it seems to me that what you do is rather effective when you have a disproportionate amount of authority over what happens in the game. So I have to ask: do you think you could execute a plot twist if you had less power than the other players?
Thomas
Tim,
Oh man, I can’t believe I forgot to cover this earlier!
So I think part of the problem with creating plot twists is due to the nature of plot twists, not neccessarily role-playing. I believe that with the proper practice players can become reasonably good at creating plot twists.
Yes, but… You’re right that plot twists, at least as I’m thinking of them, are hard to handle effectively in any media, and that as you get more skilled you get better at it. However, I think that roleplaying, because of the inability to edit it, is a more difficult medium to handle them in.
That doesn’t mean that skills can’t help you do it, but I think that plot twists are so hard that no medium can handle them well without the distilling effect of editing. Remember that I think that editing lets you concetrate stuff, so given enough editing you can make anything have a good plot twist.
So, I guess I have to ask: do you think that it’s common, or even practically possible, for someone to gain enough skill at plot twisting to do it regularly in the medium of roleplaying?
Thomas
Yes, I was largely referring to games where I’m the GM.
I find that I prefer games with a GM, but with highly empowered players (e.g. a Sorcerer game). I haven’t enjoyed the gm-less experiments I’ve been involved in so far. This is a bit of a tangent (which I’d love to discuss some other time) but in a nutshell, I think its related to the differences in writing styles. Some writers like to work without a net. They just start writing, playing around with ideas and hope something emerges. This is a much more organic process, and can produce very interesting stories–but there is a real danger that you’ll get to the end and discover there’s no story there (or a story that badly needs editing). Other writers like to prepare detailed outlines, then writes from the outline. Here the effort is more likely to lead to a well-plotted story, but there’s a risk that it will feel forced or lifeless, particularly if the writer doesn’t let himself vary from his original notes.
For me (as a player) the best games are those with a good GM who I trust. The GM plays from a loose, flexible outline. Something that gives the story structure–but still allows it to grow and change organically. I don’t mean this as a critique of GMless games. Rather, I’m just trying to establish where I’m coming form, and what I look for in games. I like knowing that someone has their hand on the till–that we’re definitely going somewhere interesting, but that doesn’t mean the GMs have a disproportionate amount of power.
So, from that perspective, I really don’t know how you would pull it off in a GMless campaign. But then, I haven’t really figured out how to pull off a satisfying GMless game yet.
You could pull it off as an empowered player, but you’d need to work with the GM. I guess I feel players have a responsibility to communicate openly and honestly with the GM–if you’re actively trying to mislead the GM then, somehow, the game feels broken.
Having said that, some of the best plot twists do come from players, and are the result of good player-gm collaboration. Most other players are very willing to buy into a false assumption presented by one of their peers.
And GMs don’t need a disproportionate amount of authority to spring a plot twist. Assuming that players run the protagonists, and that the GM runs the support characters and antagonists. The story revolves around the protagonists. They are in the center of the conflict. Their actions (and more importantly, their decisions) create the story. Still, the GM has the advantage in the plot-twist-producing arena since the GM can play characters that reinforce the false assumption. This includes both antagonists who are actively trying to deceive the players, as well as support characters who have been deceived themselves.
Hope that clears things up a bit.
-Rich-
Rich,
What you say makes a lot of sense, thanks for expanding on it. I’d love to talk to you at some point about the guidance thing, you’ve got some interesting stuff to say about that, I think. Unfortunately, the downside of running the blog the way I do is that it’s not nearly nimble enough for me to handle that conversation here. If you want, feel free to grab me by email.
Thomas