Saving the world on a Sunday afternoon
A thunk by Judith O.
Part of a GM’s prerogative is to alter the game world to give the players and characters a novel challenge. If you don’t believe me, go read the GM Rules – on the Notes for Games Masters page there is a section called “How to Break the Rules”, which has some excessively simplified guidelines for breaking the rules. What it doesn’t go into is how to avoid breaking a player’s suspension of disbelief at the same time.
Thing is, there are two groups of people that are affected when you break the world – the players and the characters (to a lesser extent there’s also the monsters but they generally get more OOC insight on what you meant). The characters largely work because the players are spending the day pretending that the world works in a different way to the standard reality, so they’re already having to put a fair bit of effort into making the characters’ world real – so part of a GM’s job is to break things while maintaining a certain level of internal consistency.
A depressing amount of this boils down to nomenclature. If you use something described as a waffle in the game, the players and the characters will expect a waffle – probably rectangular, made of batter, has a matrix of little pockets for holding toppings, acts as a delicious breakfast or dessert product. If it turns out to be a flat piece of cow grilled on both sides, it doesn’t matter how good the steak is – people will still spend the entire time, both as a player and a character, being upset at not getting their syrupy goodness on and still trying to deal with it as a waffle regardless.
So, when it comes to playing with the rules, you have a choice; either make the differences exceptionally clear if you are reusing an existing name for a new thing, or else come up with a completely new name.
For example: Say you want to run out a particularly powerful effect that requires the entire patrol (or at least an enthusiastic subset of it) to do some mystic actions, say some funny words and generally make it clear that they really want it to work before it can happen. At this point, it looks like the easiest thing to do is call it a ritual and have done with it; however, the moment you call it a ritual, the players will expect it to work like a ritual. It needs a specific ritual team to have written a specific ritual script detailing the specific actions required in a specific runeset and use a specific School of Magic. If it involves improvisation, miracles and a ragtag band of stout hearts, the players will automatically reject it because it can’t possibly work – the rules that govern the underlying structures of the world say so.
Another example: Your plot calls for a Nature-based creature that’s quick, nasty, sentient only in the sense of working out the best way to kill things, and mute. If you call them a dryad – even if you call them an angry dryad – people are going to picture a dryad, which means chatty, casty, intelligent, and normally fairly squishy, and are going to be annoyed when it’s not what it’s meant to be.
The Rule of Names applies to pretty much everything in the system. It doesn’t stop you adding to existing things or creating entirely new ones, but the base existing rules and setting should be honoured. It also doesn’t cover occasionally tweaking things for a game in a way that makes sense – swapping Blindness from Willpower to Toughness because it’s a natural effect involving Things In Eyes is entirely fine as long as you tell people OOC at the start of the game, but swapping it to Dexterity is only likely to confuse them.
There are ways around this, to an extent. You can have NPCs that use the wrong name for something on purpose, as long as there’s a logical reason for it and as long as any relevant skills get the right answer – it’s big and scaly, could be a dragon, could be a komodo dragon, could be a skink with a hormonal problem so long as the Rec Creature call gets it right. You can have intervention by deities or entities (so long as you don’t get carried away – there’s only so much deus ex machina a player party will take). You can have an NPC explain things in great detail – assuming that the players/characters/monsters will listen. Or you can save yourself a lot of pain by abusing your thesaurus and coming up with new names for what you’re trying to achieve, and if necessary do an infodump on anyone who needs to know what your new SteakWaffle is.
Geography, history and who murdered who are a lot more flexible, but only because the drive to create some consistency in that side of TL has only managed to take any sort of root in recent times; in general you can get away with more here so long as you don’t get carried away and as long as you only take liberties with other people’s toys with their permission. For example, while the agreed consensus is that Cathay is a veeerrry long way away, there’s no reason that there couldn’t be some way to get the players over there for a game as long as you’re prepared to wibble it (and has indeed happened); however, you can’t necessarily justify an NPC popping home every weekend without a very good reason.
On the other hand, you can always break people’s perceptions of the rules and setting without breaking the rules themselves, and that drives character development. As far as Paths are concerned it’s possible to play anything other than Anarchy as good, bad or morally ambiguous – as long as the underlying tenets of the Path are still adhered to (Anarchy may be possible but I don’t know if anyone’s worked out a way of doing it yet). True, it’s very much easier to play the Lifey ones as good and the Deathy ones as bad, but outside of the Temples there’s a lot of scope to play around. Similarly, the guidelines provided by Tony for breaking the rules do very much apply – hero abilities, Guilds, rituals/ceremonies and artefacts, as long as you don’t get too carried away and as long as what you create makes sense (so a Chaos priest being able to produce spontaneous balloons as a hero ability is fine, but you’d struggle to justify it on a Might priest).
So, there you have it. If you want to break the world, playing with the overlying setting is safer, and if you’re going to tell the players you’re giving them waffles then give them a goddamn waffle and not a steak covered in squirty cream. Your players will be happier, your characters more likely to listen to the crazy, your monsters more likely to do things the way you wanted, and your mellow less likely to be harshed.