As a player I gather intelligence, confirm suppositions, make a plan with branches for probable contingencies, and prepare and cache or carry resources to improvise with when something happens then I did not specifically anticipate. I like to say “fortunately I thought of this” truthfully. I enjoy playing Xanatos Speed Chess. But GMs who just pull bullshit out of nowhere to contrive that everything I attempt fails aren’t playing Xanatos Speed Chess.
The way to make the execution of a detailed plan exciting would seem to be not to tell the GM, and I would feel free to do that in one of the games where you are supposed to use abstract planning & preparation points to retcon contingency planning. I’ve played a little bit of Night’s Black Agents using plans that involved using Preparedness pool points and my MOS to, essentially, conceal from the GM preparations that I could have done otherwise.
Yes! There ought to be a mixture of easy and tough encounters, and the tough encounters should be an actual challenge. The player’s plans should face chance and the unknown, sometimes getting unlucky and forcing us to improvise, adapt, and overcome, or even to fall back defeated. But the hitches and failures have to be natural, to be actual results of that plan encountering those enemies. If the plan is going to fail because the GM says so, if any possible plan would fail at this point, then there is really no point in asking me to make a plan at all, or to make any choices, really. I’ll be in the terminal lab. Tell me what happened when you are done.
There is no interest in making plans or choices when they make no difference to the outcomes.
Back in 2018 in A&E, I wrote about a convention game.
The second half of the adventure was infiltrating a guarded office in a skyscraper to recover somethingorother and I appreciated the GM, voiced through our NPC handler, [said] that any reasonably cockamamie plan would do so long as we actually got moving.
Great discussion, everyone.
I think there is also the issue of different people having a different perception of what is suspenseful. Taking a non-RPG example: game shows & talent shows on the telly. Specifically that chunk of the game show where the compere does the “And the answer/winner is…” bit, where there is a ‘dramatic pause’.
My mate Flipper (not a dolphin) thinks those pauses are nail-bitingly tense. I think they are unbelievably annoying, time-wasting nonsense to pad out the air-time of the show. (If I become Ruler of the Universe, I shall ban any show where you can say “Oh for fek sake get ON with it, you time-wasting bastards!” before the pause has ended).
So presumably Flipper thinks some things in games are suspenseful, whereas I would not?
Similarly in a game I ran at conventions several times, one group did an audible gasp when the creepy monster which had been scuttling in the walls and under the floors was revealed. Other groups were blase about it.
This sounds exactly like the structure of Blades in the Dark, which I own but haven’t inflicted on my players yet. I’m not sure I’m the right GM, or that they’re the right group, but it sounds like your players would love it.
When I did Canberra by Night (a Vampire the Masquerade game, at CanCon in the mid nineties) there was a bit of personal horror in which the villain revealed how he had perverted each of the PCs into something that would have disgusted their original selves. One group were completely baffled and nonplussed, because it all just seemed like the natural course of Life to them. In another group one player passed out and had to be revived with adrenalin and antihistamines.
