Game World Consistency and Improvisation by Plot

[Alex319]

The following is a situation that occurred to my character at recent events.

I was involved in a plotline that involved collecting evidence left at murder scenes (for a murder that happened three days before the gather), based on descriptions by "witnesses" of where the murder scenes were and who was involved. During the process of looking at these scenes, I began to suspect that the evidence was planted, and wanted to re-interview the original witnesses to get more information. The Sheriff told me that none of the original witnesses could be located. When I said that it might be a good idea to investigate what happened to the witnesses, the Sheriff seemed completely uninterested. When the plotline was finally resolved and I asked whether they found out what happened to the witnesses, the Sheriff just said "these things happen" and didn't seem to consider it suspicious.

I strongly suspect that what happened OOG was that Plot hadn't anticipated me wanting to re-interview the witnesses, and thus didn't have anything prepared in that direction, and thus had to come up with a reason why I couldn't go in that direction. However, I have no direct proof that this is what happened.

The point of this post is not to express any opinion about this particular scenario, but rather to point out a question that it raises, that is likely to apply to future scenarios. There are at least three possible game-world interpretations of this event:

1. In New Acarthia, witnesses disappear just days after a murder frequently enough for "innocent" reasons that witness disappearances are not generally considered suspicious or worthy of investigation. This is a fact about New Acarthia, that I can reasonably expect to remain true for future similar scenarios.

2. The statement in (1) is not a true fact about New Acarthia; i.e., in New Acarthia, witnesses disappearing just days after a murder would be considered suspicious. Thus it could be reasonable to make inferences about the Sheriff based on the fact that he didn't follow up the obvious lead (for instance, he could be incompetent, or trying to hide something)

3. The part about the witnesses disappearing was an OOG handwave, and thus shouldn't be used to make any inferences about the game world or characters in it.

Situations similar to the one above are likely to occur in any type of "investigative" plotline, if the players start asking questions that aren't anticipated by Plot. The questions I have here are:

A. How do I determine which of (1)-(3) above should be used? It seems to me like the distinction between (1) and (2) is a FOIG: I can do IG research (e.g. researching previous cases where witnesses disappeared) to find out how common witness disappearances are in New Acarthia and how often they really occur for "innocent" reasons. However I wouldn't know how to tell (1 or 2) from (3) using IG means. Is it reasonable to ask Plot OOG about this?

Note that I'm perfectly willing to accept it if the answer is (3); as we've discussed before in similar questions, this type of handwaving is essential in many cases in LARP. The difficulty here is determining whether this situation is actually a handwave, or whether it actually represents a true fact about the IG world.

B. What can we as players do to make things easier on Plot and avoid this kind of situation? One way could be to try to inform Plot in advance if we want to take things in a different direction in order to give them time to prepare. In this particular scenario, I did inform a Plot member earlier that morning about my plans, but that information may not have gotten to the person who needed it. What can players do to help make sure the information gets where it needs to?

C. Have other players been in similar situations before? How have they handled it?

D. Am I thinking about this in completely the wrong direction here? In particular, is the idea of doing IG research to find out general information (like "how often do witness disappearances happen and what do they usually mean") that can be applied to future situations, something that is supported by the game system? Or is it normally the case that discoverable game-world facts are generally specific to particular mods/plotlines (like "where is monster group X hiding" or "how do you unlock spell Y") and the kind of regularity that my question seems to be based on (and which one often expects of the real world) just doesn't exist in this game?

 

[Traceroo]

Alex, I think you raise an excellent set of questions; I don't think that you're moving in the wrong directions in your thought patterns at all.

I have been in similar situations before -- and, in fact, I'm looking down the barrel at a very similar situation right now and wondering how much I should take things in-game. My usual approach is to test the waters, either OOG or IG, and see what happens. If I speak OOG, I assume I'll get a polite nudge to dig deeper IG if necessary.

In your example above, I think you did the right things by asking some follow-up questions of the Sheriff. You'd be be justified in pursuing that further IG, seeing if perhaps the Sheriff knows more than he's saying. You'd also be justified in just drawing aside the actor who plays the Sheriff, and asking politely, "Is this an OOG handwave, and I should just drop it?" It's sort of the "Choose Your Own Adventure" of player choices rather than character choices.

There is a third option: Your inquiries, whether IG or OOG, may alert the Plot Team to an inadvertent string of "handwave" situations which, in volume, add up to an unintended string of clues in-game. Perhaps they had disconnected fishbowls or small storylines which involved witnesses disappearing. They may not have been intended as a big deal, but now that you mention that it seems to happen often, gee, maybe there could be something there after all? Your observations may be helpful to Plot in seeing the larger picture from the perspective of the PCs. This is one reason why Event Commentary forms are so super helpful to the game writers and runners.

Good topic, Alex! I think your questions are helpful.

Trace

 

[Alex319]

Thank you. Just to clarify, this is the only situation I've been in that involved witnesses disappearing in any way. (Note that, in this post and others, "disappearing" just means the authorities can't locate them, not necessarily that they were captured or killed.) The comment about "witness disappearances being common" was as follows.

Basically, witnesses could disappear for either totally innocent reasons (like dying of natural causes, or moving away) or they could disappear for malicious reasons (like being killed, captured, or intimidated into keeping quiet.) The statement that the Sheriff made seemed to imply that the probability that the reason for the disappearance was malicious was low enough that it's not even worth the time to investigate the possibility that the disappearance was malicious.

Now, given no other information than the fact that witnesses have disappeared, the probability that the disappearance was malicious is equal to [fraction of crimes of this type where witnesses disappear for malicious reasons] / [fraction of crimes of this type where witnesses disappear for malicious reasons + fraction of crimes of this type where witnesses disappear for innocent reasons]. So in order for this probability to be very low, it has to be the case that either (a) the numerator is very low, or (b) the denominator is very high.

It seems unlikely that (a) is true. Clearly, in a murder case, the criminal was willing and able to kill to get what he wants, so it seems logical that he would be willing and able to kill witnesses if that is necessary to escape justice. So the key piece of information here is (b) - what's the "base rate" of people disappearing when there is no foul play? For instance, if New Acarthia is a highly nomadic society where people normally don't stay in one place for more than a few days, then it is very likely that when witnesses disappear, it's just because they've moved, not because of any foul play. But if New Acarthia is a society where people normally stay in one place for several years and it's usually easy to locate them again, then the fact that both witnesses disappeared in a span of three or four days would be very suspicious.

It's quite possible that our experience of this is clouded by modern technology. In the modern world, with cell phones, computerized records, etc. it is usually very easy to locate someone unless that person is deliberately trying to stay hidden (in which case it would likely go into the "malicious" category), so the chance of someone just "disappearing" when nothing suspicious is involved is quite low. But maybe in a world with medieval technology levels, it would be different - maybe in the medieval world it actually was quite common for someone to "disappear" just by innocently moving to the next town over. I don't know enough about the medieval world to know if that's true. And New Acarthia is probably very different from the "real" medieval world in many ways, so the "base rate" here could be very different.

This type of "base rate information" is part of what I was getting at when I made the comment about "regularity" above. It's something that's inherently difficult to get at from background material - the Player's Guide and such tells you a lot about the history of the world, but it doesn't really have the kind of background information about what it's like to live in this world, such as how often people move or how easy it is to locate people. And this is not really a complaint - there's no way that the Player's Guide writers could have known that this information would become relevant.

 

[Graham Wolsey]

I find myself also struggling in our local game to determine how much reading into situations I should do IG and how much I should assume is a portrayal that needs to be hand-waved as an OOG thing. When an NPC acts uncharacteristically shady are they enslaved? Are they taking a moral turn? SHOULD we the players hand wave these sorts of things?

I've noticed NPCs that behavior one way when acting off the cuff and then very differently after they've had a game to "think about it". Should I ignore these inconsistencies and chalk them up to NPC by committee or assume something is afoot and question if the NPC has just received orders from the person controlling their enslavement elixir?

 

[B.Barber]

Honestly ditto on much said.

Much of our crowed reeeeeeaaally thinks about and investigates plot stuff in an intense way most chapter's players do not, and dont expect to. Its because a lot of us are WOD, and other very intricate game players who actively seek out this kind of thing and hugely enjoy big cerebral conspiracies, activieis and game-world-ecologies (wich to be clear, are NOT the same thing as pre-planned story arcs that the players are just on the ride-along for, I have to emphasize this)... buuut Alliance isnt inherently set up for that, never has been, so theres some growing pains going on. I think that the plot staff of alliance denver does try to present some of this, but its inconsistent as to wich are real deeper plos and wich are "yeah no ignore this, what you see is what you get." - but the trouble is weather it is deeper, or it isnt deeper- they get presented the same for the most part so we dont have any great way of knowing if its worth the time or not. And so I suspect is a combination of communication issues and mis-directed (possibly mismanaged at times) expectations.

Points of potential failures in the process
-Delivery of plots not being clear enough, or directed at the right people
-NPC portrayers going off script when they shouldnt
-NPC portrayers not being equipped enough for what they are delivering in the event of characters throwing a curvball
-Plot not being equipped enough for what they are delivering in the event of characters throwing a curvball/
-Inability or unwillingness of plot or ownership to shoot from the hip as often as need be to accomodate curvballs.
-Inefficient catalogueing of stories in motion and who is involved (so stuff falls through the cracks)
-Outright character failure to do the right things to move foreward- cant rule that out
-Lack of exact ooc knowledge as to exactly what is expected from players, by staff, in order TO investigate certain things (or make the world function for that matter). What info do we need to communicate to plot? in what context? HOW do we need to frame our investigative process to you guys in order for you to process it properly?
-Lack of mutually understood expectations between players and plot.

Theres a lot that could be going wrong... and its not so much anyone's fault, but I think something is disjointed somewhere weather its in the realm of expectations, or communication.

 

[Alex319]

I think that this is a question that it might be a good idea to get guidance on from Plot.

I recall that back when I was at the quest writers' workshop earlier this year, I presented a plot idea with a subtle clue (an NPC who claims to have been attacked by a necromancer, but whom the PCs can tell is lying because the number of Body Points he's down doesn't match up with his story about what spells the necromancer threw) and the response I got was "That clue is WAY too subtle for the PCs to get." And in David's writeup on quest writing tips, one of the things he mentions is that PCs "usually will not get subtle clues."

So maybe that is the answer - that if there really was a plotline where the Sheriff is corrupt or someone is enslaving someone, that the clue will be a LOT more obvious than an NPC just "acting uncharacteristically shady" or a "dropped" murder weapon that is suspiciously wedged under a rock. On the other hand, I do recall a discussion from earlier in the year about players wanting to get involved in "shady" plot but not being able to, and Plot saying that they have sent out "shady" plot that characters haven't picked up on. So maybe there is a disconnect here too: maybe Plot is sending out subtle clues and the PCs are seeing them, but the PCs are ignoring them because they're assuming that they're OOG handwaves/anomalies.

So I guess the questions I should have for Plot are:

1. What should we be looking for that we aren't? Are there particular types of clues that get sent out that PCs don't pick up on? Maybe if we knew, we would say, "Wow, I noticed that at the last event, but just assumed it was an OOG handwave! Now I know that that kind of thing actually has plot on the other end?"
2. What are we, the PCs, doing that causes problems for Plot? What kinds of questions do PCs tend to ask that forces Plot into coming up with handwaves that then get interpreted by PCs as suspicious? Are there ever "cycles of suspicion" where the PCs investigate something, making the NPCs improvise, and the PCs notice that the NPC seems to be making something up, leading to further PC investigation, forcing the NPCs to improvise even more, and so on? What can PCs do to make it easier for Plot to give them an answer to their question?
3. In such a "cycle of suspicion" case, is one possible option from the Plot perspective to retcon the explanation on their end to say that there actually WAS something suspicious going on? This wouldn't involve retconning anything that already happened in game, it would just be changing the explanation to be something that has a better fit with what was actually observed by the PCs. Trace mentioned that above - if there's multiple OOG handwaves that all involved witnesses disappearing, then maybe Plot puts something in that says that there was some foul play behind it. This would give the PCs what they're clearly looking for, and also make the world more consistent, because there would be an IG reason behind what happened rather than just a handwave.
4. Is it a possible option to set up some sort of IG "code", known to all players, that means "this is an OOG handwave, don't pursue it?" For instance, the code could be something like "the stars are/aren't aligned." Then if the NPC said "We can't interview the witnesses right now because the stars aren't aligned," then I would know as a player that this is an OOG handwave and not to pursue what happened to the witnesses.