How to Be a Good Game Master, Lesson 3: How to Attack your PCs with Finesse

This will probably be the last in my series of "better games by making things difficult for the players" posts. This time I will deal with the dos and don’ts of direct assaults on player characters (PCs). This is actually one of the more difficult things to do as a game master; at least, it is one of the things I have seen many game masters, including myself, mess up regularly.

First of all, this is not a guide for eliminating an annoying PC. That should be simple enough to do. A giant robot picks them up and throws them into a pit of lava. This post is about using a direct assault on your player characters as either a combat encounter or a plot development.

Making Sure You Know Your PCs’ Defenses:

A super tough character should be hard to incapacitate. The character that has eyes in the back of her head or what not should be hard to sneak up on. If you ignore traits such as these, it will be hard for your players to accept what you have happen as legitimate within your game world. Not only that, forgetting one of these defenses might amount to negating one of the PC’s defining traits. That’s not to say you can’t incapacitate the super tough guy or sneak up on the girl with eyes in the back of her head, just make sure that you have a satisfactory reason why this happens. In the case of the super tough guy, after the assault, the other PCs might find an empty elephant tranquilizer lying on the ground.

So, how should a game master go about making sure that he or she knows all of the PCs' defenses for a given situation? Simple, ask the players! Of course, if you don’t want to give things away to the players (which you shouldn’t), the question becomes when to ask and how. One strategy is to ask for the information you need long before you need it, say at the beginning of the session. Obviously, this requires some planning ahead. You might want to obfuscate further by asking the players about their character’s defenses against a series of scenarios, only some of which you are planning on using. Additionally, you can do this at the beginning of a session during which you aren’t planning on using any of them. This adds the possibility to players' minds that it might be a false alarm.

Another strategy is to ask the players' what their characters defenses are the moment after it’s too late for them to avoid the attack. The nice thing about this option is that you don’t have to know what you are going to do beforehand to use it. For instance, if a PC steps into an elevator with an invisible, soundless assassin, this might be a good moment for the game master to ask the player if there was any special way that they can detect an assassin that’s invisible and soundless. Chances are the player will just go "Oh, shit!" In this case the game master makes a obligatory awareness check that only succeeds on a ridiculously good result, and then proceeds to begin mauling the unaware PC. However, this scenario did happen in a game in which I was playing. The game master did not ask about the PC's defenses and thus forgot that the PC in question had an ability that gave him radar. Hence, he should have been aware of the invisible monster right away. Oops!

A third moment to ask about a PC’s defenses is when he or she walks up to the creepy old house or starts down the dark alley. This is much like the beginning of the session option; it gives the player’s extra information about what is going to happen and you might want to drop dummy scenarios to cover things up. You’re actually giving away more information than if you ask at the beginning of the session, because the player’s are going to guess that one or more of those scenarios is going to play out in the near future. The advantage is that asking at this time can lend to the atmosphere. Bear in mind, this is not a substitute for a good description of the location. Without a good description, the players won’t know why this particular alley should be a dangerous place. It is, however, an awesome way to compliment descriptions.

The street before you cuts through some of the worst parts of Farport City. The sides of the passage are stacked with old crates and piles of trash obscuring your view. Far up ahead you see one working street light, and even that has a flicker to it. You think the rustling sound you can hear near by may be rats. By the way, how hard are you guys to sneak up on?

Getting the Assailant to the Scene without Violating Realism:

Another thing to think about is how the assailant got to the PCs' location. Was the assailant stalking the PCs? If so, there should be some sign of it in the build up to the encounter, even if there’s little chance the players will put two and two together before the encounter starts. Perhaps the assailant knew where the PC’s would be before they got there. If so, the assailant, or whoever sent the assailant, must have some way of knowing this and the PCs should eventually be able to learn what it was. Make sure you can provide the answer. A third option is that the assailant would have attacked someone at that location whether or not the PCs were there. This is often a good option because it doesn’t require any explanation as to how the assailant got there. However, it does little to build the players' fear for the personal safety of their characters.

Carrying Out the Assault:

As for the actual assault, there are two options: one is to have a real danger to the PCs and give them a chance to fight back; the other is not to give the PCs any real chance of self-defense, but not putting them in any danger of being killed or permanently hurt either. Which of these options you should use depends on what you are trying to accomplish. If the PCs don't get a chance at self-defense and couldn't have reasonably avoided the situation, there should, in general, never be any real chance of them getting killed or anything else they can't recover from. The only exceptions I can think of are if the players are playing throw away characters or if you're playing Paranoia where each character has 5 backup clones waiting to be thawed out.

If you choose the first option, you’re likely to have a lot less trouble with your players but be prepared  for anything to happen, as it's going to turn into a combat encounter where the dice rule. The other option is not to give the PCs any chance of self defense. The PCs are knocked out or restrained, maybe without even a roll to determine what happens. Many players and even game masters will likely balk at reading this; players should always get a chance to resist, shouldn’t they? Well, not necessarily, a character might get overpowered by the assailants so thoroughly that there isn’t a realistic chance of them resisting. That said, this maneuver is something that requires trust between the players and the game master. The players need to believe that the game master is working to maximize their enjoyment of the game. If they complain when you’re doing this, you'll need to assure them that you’re going somewhere with it and you'll shortly return their agency to them.

Why would you want to do this? One reason would be to set up a plot point. For instance, a minion might knock a PC on the back of the head, drag him off, and the PC wakes up in the enemy’s secret base, where he can over hear certain conversations important to the plot before escaping. Another reason would be to put the PCs in position for another, more interesting encounter, after which they’ll be able to return to what they were doing before. You might even use this as a way to get a group of PCs into a dungeon, perhaps without all their overpowered gear.

What you should not do is take a way a PC’s agency for an extended period of time. Nobody likes playing a damsel in distress.

One last thought: I’ve said this before in other posts but I’m going to say it again. Tension and fear are important to a fun game, but the best fun comes from relieving those feelings. Hence, a game where the players are constantly under assault from their opponents might be fun for a while, several sessions often, but eventually it’s going to get old. Eventually, to keep your game fun, you’re going to have to give the players a chance to strike back or otherwise bring an end to the attacks. That is, at least for a time.

This post didn’t go into social encounters.  Fortunately, my next post on how to be a good game master will likely be entirely on them, which should please some of you. I've got an idea I call the lock picking metaphor. I’m hoping to try it out the next time I get to run a game, which may be next weekend.