Withholding a planned clue to avoid potential meta gaming
Sept 26, 2013 4:35:04 GMT -8
Post by bradscott on Sept 26, 2013 4:35:04 GMT -8
Ok so as players are want to do they threw me a massive curve ball the other night.
I have said to my players from the start of my Campaign that anything that they the players know is also fine for their PC to know. If I don't want their character to know they don't get to know it.
Now here is what happened
I'm running post TV show cannon Stargate using GURPs and this week I did the "you think you are the main character but you are actually a copy episode" like the time SG1 were robots or the Atlantis Team were replicators episode.
The PC's woke up thinking they were them selves but were actually robots with the memories of the PC's, it worked a treat because it had been a month real time since the last session and we played a session in between where they played NPCs so when they woke up not where they thought they were and a day earlier then they though it was they were little confused but not totally, the players memories were just as fuzzy as I wanted the characters to be.
They started the day with a mission briefing that they though they had already had and some of them mentioned it leading to them being taken away for medical tests, they were given a clean bill of health so proceeded with their briefing effectively explain their entire plan to the bad guys which is why he orchestrated the whole thing in the first place.
They started getting ready for the mission and then were told there was delay and to stand down. They knew things were weird and the more they looked the weirder things seemed. Everyone they came across had the same name badge as other members of SG teams they knew, one of the players retired PCs who is a field medic was the one bringing them messages and when he wasn't doing that he was just sitting in the mess eating blue jello. WHen they asked if they could go up to the surface they were told the elevator was down for maintenance, there was no-one watching the feed in the security room. They of course thought that things around them were fake and maybe the people were impostors.
Naturally they eventually came to the conclusion that they had to take action and ended up stunning their CO with a Zat gun. They made for the elevator only to discover it wasn't real and there was nothing behind it but rock. They got into a few firefights and finally discovered that the guards main weapons weren't real.
The guards and other SG teams on the base (who were clones by the way) started hunting them and eventually they (the clones) switched to their sidearms which were real and one of the PC's was shot in the torso, how ever instead of blood he was leaking black fluid.
Now to this point everything had gone perfectly and I was really really happy.
What I expected to happen next was for at least one of them to escape the complex, get to the Stargate and report in, thus the real PCs would know what had happened and hopefully not walk into a trap next session.
What happened instead was 1 PC had split off from the group and been trapped in the lockdown, the other 4 got into a firefight which they were winning until they got a little unlucky and 3 of them went down, the 4th guy instead of shooting the last bad guy turned his weapon on himself...
The guy that was separated was my last chance but once the lock down was over he just went and had lunch went to the gym and went to bed. (never to wake up because the Bad Guy had no use for him at that point).
Now one of the things that was going to happen next session was that, the PC's will note some weird energy signatures, and with investigation will discover evidence of their consciousnesses being scanned and sent somewhere.It shouldn't have be too much of a stretch for them to work out what happened from there. The problem is that this clue now points to information the PC's don't have but the players do, so do I withhold that clue because it won't mean the same thing to the PC's that it will to players?
I have said to my players from the start of my Campaign that anything that they the players know is also fine for their PC to know. If I don't want their character to know they don't get to know it.
Now here is what happened
I'm running post TV show cannon Stargate using GURPs and this week I did the "you think you are the main character but you are actually a copy episode" like the time SG1 were robots or the Atlantis Team were replicators episode.
The PC's woke up thinking they were them selves but were actually robots with the memories of the PC's, it worked a treat because it had been a month real time since the last session and we played a session in between where they played NPCs so when they woke up not where they thought they were and a day earlier then they though it was they were little confused but not totally, the players memories were just as fuzzy as I wanted the characters to be.
They started the day with a mission briefing that they though they had already had and some of them mentioned it leading to them being taken away for medical tests, they were given a clean bill of health so proceeded with their briefing effectively explain their entire plan to the bad guys which is why he orchestrated the whole thing in the first place.
They started getting ready for the mission and then were told there was delay and to stand down. They knew things were weird and the more they looked the weirder things seemed. Everyone they came across had the same name badge as other members of SG teams they knew, one of the players retired PCs who is a field medic was the one bringing them messages and when he wasn't doing that he was just sitting in the mess eating blue jello. WHen they asked if they could go up to the surface they were told the elevator was down for maintenance, there was no-one watching the feed in the security room. They of course thought that things around them were fake and maybe the people were impostors.
Naturally they eventually came to the conclusion that they had to take action and ended up stunning their CO with a Zat gun. They made for the elevator only to discover it wasn't real and there was nothing behind it but rock. They got into a few firefights and finally discovered that the guards main weapons weren't real.
The guards and other SG teams on the base (who were clones by the way) started hunting them and eventually they (the clones) switched to their sidearms which were real and one of the PC's was shot in the torso, how ever instead of blood he was leaking black fluid.
Now to this point everything had gone perfectly and I was really really happy.
What I expected to happen next was for at least one of them to escape the complex, get to the Stargate and report in, thus the real PCs would know what had happened and hopefully not walk into a trap next session.
What happened instead was 1 PC had split off from the group and been trapped in the lockdown, the other 4 got into a firefight which they were winning until they got a little unlucky and 3 of them went down, the 4th guy instead of shooting the last bad guy turned his weapon on himself...
The guy that was separated was my last chance but once the lock down was over he just went and had lunch went to the gym and went to bed. (never to wake up because the Bad Guy had no use for him at that point).
Now one of the things that was going to happen next session was that, the PC's will note some weird energy signatures, and with investigation will discover evidence of their consciousnesses being scanned and sent somewhere.It shouldn't have be too much of a stretch for them to work out what happened from there. The problem is that this clue now points to information the PC's don't have but the players do, so do I withhold that clue because it won't mean the same thing to the PC's that it will to players?