On Playing a Doppelgänger and the Fun in Secrets That Aren’t

 I really like the idea of playing a shape-changer in Dungeons and Dragons, but I’ve sometimes wondered if I could pull it off and make it fun for myself and the others at the table. Doppelgängers, changelings, mimics, trappers, lurkers above, piercers, rugs of smothering - I like the concepts but have often wondered if I could pull it off.

I finally broke down and am giving it a try.

https://damanor.blogspot.com/2022/10/rime-of-frostmaiden-keth-hand.html?m=1

Obviously I’m not keeping it a secret. Here are some of my thoughts.

I’ve read two big bits of advice for secrets in social-focused RPGs like Houses of the Blooded or Vampire LARPs:

1. Keep all your secrets to yourself and nobody can betray you.

2. Play with open secrets and let any player who wants to know about it in on the secret so it’s more fun for everyone.

Obviously, these two pieces of advice are in conflict. In my mind, each piece of advice comes from a completely different goal in playing the game.

People who follow guideline 1 are playing to beat the other players and win, or for the excitement of fooling everyone at the table, the joy of revealing their duplicity, and the admiration of the other players at their cleverness. All of these are valid forms of fun. I have fallen into the powergamer trap before, and it can be fun to work towards that goal. I can also see the pleasure in tricking someone and the joy that comes from being fooled. Any student of sleight of hand and anyone who’s watched a skillful magician perform knows that. And there’s a certain pleasure that comes from revealing that all along you’ve known something they didn’t know, or that you’ve been pulling the strings the whole time.

But it isn’t always fun to be the one who’s being fooled. It isn’t much fun to find out that you’ve put a lot of effort into doing something, you’ve done your best, and then someone else comes in and steals the prize leaving you with nothing in your hand. Anyone who’s been mugged, or had something stolen from them, or been stuck in a bad situation knows that feeling. Okay, I suppose there must be someone out there who enjoys that sort of thing. People like playing poker, mafia, and Call of Cthulhu, but I have to be in a very particular mood to enjoy something like that. I don’t like most horror movies either.

Somehow, we can still watch TV shows and root for someone who is doing some bad things. The series Leverage was all about that, as is the follow-up, Redemption. Same with Burn Notice, White Collar, Hustle, Remington Steele, the A-Team, The Blacklist, Hannibal, Person of Interest, Seven Days, Ocean’s 11 and assorted remakes and spin-offs, The Italian Job, Doctor Who, 24, Men in Black, Batman (or any other superhero media), any good espionage show, or almost any western. Some people will argue that not all of these media feature bad people, or not all of them are doing bad things, or they’re doing what they do for good reasons that justify it, but in all of them they’re doing something that’s bad, or illegal (or would be illegal if anyone knew about it), or is in conflict with some authority somewhere. Even the Ghostbusters went around with unlicensed particle accelerators on their backs and bilked every client for as much as they could get.

I’d say one of the differences is that most of the time we know it’s going to happen and we get an immediate reveal. We may not understand how or why it all happens, and sometimes there are reversals, but it happens and then we get a thrill and then we can immediately move onto whatever happens next.

But one of those factors is that we know it’s going to happen. For some people playing a game this way, it ruins the fun for them if anyone else knows what’s happening. But what about everyone else’s fun? What if there was a way to make it fun for everyone else, not just the one with the schemes?

My suggestion is to look at guideline 2. Have open secrets, and trust the other players to know the difference between what they know and what the character knows.

Not all players can keep that divide. I wouldn’t ask young kids to keep it separate, and like always, I’m sure there are adults out there who can’t do that. But if they can, they can add to the fun of having the secret. There’s the tension of wondering what will happen next, but that can come from wondering what people will do when they find out the secret.

You see that? Create tension, build the tension, then release it. That’s the way novels work. That’s the way music works. That’s the way movies work. (Except for The Color of Pomegranates or The Star Wars Holiday Special, and they’re just terrible.) That’s the way comics work. That’s the way STORIES work.

But where do you find more tension, and where do you find more excitement? Is it when Batman is sneaking through the shadows, unseen by his quarry, or is it when Batman finally reveals himself and four thugs start pulling out lead pipes, revolvers, or whatever other Clue weapon they might have?

Okay, sometimes it’s fun to succeed. Competence porn is a real thing, and when you play an RPG, you usually want your character to be good at something. That’s fine. But if they’re ALWAYS perfect at everything and NEVER make mistakes, you don’t have a story. You don’t create tension, so you can’t build tension, so there’s no excitement that can be felt when you release the tension.

(I just realized how dirty that sounds. Sometimes I’m slow on the uptake.)

Sometimes it’s more fun to be in on the secret so you can help it be EVEN MORE exciting.

So, a couple of examples from real games. Sorry, I’m about to tell gaming stories. You can leave if you want.

Legion, the exiled warrior, meets up with the PC. What does the DM do? Drop so many hints that he’s the missing prince that it’s not remotely a secret any more. What does the player do? She has her PC line up the prince with the youngest daughter of a noble or someone like that. Then there’s the “big reveal” that isn’t a reveal at all, and what does the player say? “I knew it!”

Well, of course you knew it, it’s no secret at all! It’s like when you watch a TV series (make it a telenovella or K-drama or something by Jane Austen or anything like that) and right in the opening credits they show the hero and their romantic interest kissing. They can hardly stand each other for the whole thing, but if you’ve paid attention at all, you know it all along. Of course you knew it! It would be an incredibly dull story if you can’t see the clues to the story! (Tangent: Mysteries are a tricky genre to get right in an RPG.) But it was fun to know the answer and see it coming.

An example from media: The Lies of Locke Lamora by Scott Lynch is a great book, a fun one, but the big “reveal” of the villain behind the scenes is a total letdown. It’s like some obscure minor character that has no connection to anyone except two other minor characters. Seriously, great book, but it could have been so much better.

Another example from media: Dragonball Z, the Frieza Saga and the Legacy of Goku. The heroes are on Namek and they’re fighting Frieza’s followers, then Frieza himself shows up and starts taking them down. Finally, after 35 1/2 hours of Goku’s training montages interspersed between Frieza’s bad behavior, the hero arrives. He hasn’t seen Frieza at all, but we’ve seen Frieza do enough bad stuff that it’s obvious he’s on Santa’s naughty list, so when they fight, it actually means something.

Now, the GBA game DBZ: the Legacy of Goku covers the same story, but it’s a bit different. The game is all about Goku, nobody else, so you don’t see what Frieza is doing. At all. I think the name might be mentioned a few times, but you’re going through, winning boss fight after boss fight with bosses that you honestly don’t care about, and then you’re fighting Frieza. You’re going to think this is weird, and maybe it is, but I hadn’t seen the whole Frieza saga on video at that time. I was kind of like, “Oh, this guy’s supposed to be scary? Okay, um, what’s so scary about him?” I hadn’t seen all of the excitement of Frieza killing however many of the fighters, he was just like this white-colored version of the alien from Alien only not as scary because in Alien the xenomorph (I think that’s what Alien canon calls it) has been sneaking around doing scary stuff through the whole movie. Frieza was more like a white plush version of the alien. If I hadn’t had to fight him for two boss fights in a row, I wouldn’t have even noticed him.

Anyway, back to gaming stories, which are actually more boring than you’d think. The 5e game that introduced me to Eberron. I wanted my character to be a scoundrel (because I always want that). The DM does some random roll thing and says, “Oh, too bad, you can’t be a changeling” and I’m like, “Whatever.” I didn’t even know what a changeling was in Eberron. Instead, I created a human. He had a unique name, Talon Creed, and a history that was a cross between Jean Valjean and Han Solo. (The name wasn’t that unique; there was another PC in the group named Talon.) He was on the run from an inquisitor and claimed to be a great magician. Sorry, pal, but Magic Initiate and a positive attitude don’t make you a great magician. But instead of trying to keep it a secret, I was open with the other players about it. “Yeah, he’ll try to fool everyone’s characters, don’t worry about it, he’ll never actually screw them over.” So when my character spotted an enemy sneaking off on a nearby trail and used minor magic gifts to cause a breeze to blow that way and say it was “spirits,” I didn’t have to describe all the secret actions he did or how he was covering up his magic, it just happened. And people went along with it because it was fun. I didn’t bore anyone with descriptions of what might have happened, everyone got it and the game moved on, and other people had fun with it even though it didn’t affect their characters in any way. The fun came from the amusement of wondering what the character would do, and then from listening as the character did something entertaining, then moving on with the game.

Create tension, build the tension, then release it.

Another later session in that same game. The party was trying to convince the town to abandon their festival because there were evil necromancers around. (My memory is questionable at best, so I may have this completely wrong.) I had no idea of what to do, and neither did anyone else. So I said that Talon had a plan. (Spoiler: he didn’t have a real plan.) Talon used minor illusion magic and telekinesis to create a few lights and knock down some festival decorations. When in doubt, destroy something. I had this vague idea of having the decorations spontaneously combust and force the villains to reveal themselves or something, but I didn’t tell any of the other players about that. I wanted to see what they would do and it was obvious the characters couldn’t have planned ahead. Well, one of the other characters stands on the ruined decorations and starts making an impassioned speech to the people in town. It totally threw away my vague plan for pyrotechnics (which I really didn’t care much about) and put the spotlight on this other character doing something awesome.

So the fun there wasn’t in doing something according to some well-thought-out plan, because that wouldn’t work and would just use the creativity of one person. Instead, we just ran with it, and by combining our creativity, we made it more fun.

And if the other player hadn’t come up with a great speech on the fly? Well, fire is fun too.

Last gaming story, I promise. Council of Wyrms adapted for 5e. We were playing dragons. (The DM came up with this idea long before WOTC started releasing play test material for Fizban’s Treasury of Dragons.) The fact that they were dragons was kind of irrelevant, though. It was a scene like from Harry Potter - a bunch of students needed to break into the professor’s office, so some distract the professor while another two sneak in. We cleverly bypass the locks and use some interdimensional hijinks to break into their private closet, but then we triggered an Alarm spell. Not only that, but the ones in the office most likely wouldn’t know that a very large dragon was about to tear down the hall of the school until it was too late to stop it. By a series of surprisingly improbable perception checks and stealth rolls, some last-second spells, dumb luck, and a minor quirk of the spell Find Familiar, the students worked together in an attempt to escape. But here’s the thing: it would have been just as awesome whether they succeeded or failed! So in a sense the numbers on the dice didn’t matter, because the fun of the story was the situation and the crazy lengths they had to go to try to escape. And I’m not going to say whether they got out because it doesn’t matter to the excitement of the story.

There, I changed it up. Create tension, build tension, and leave you with a minor cliffhanger. Just to make you think.

In the end, I plan to have fun by charging in head-first and seeing where it takes me. It makes me think of a quote by David Weber from the Foreword to the Christopher Anvil collection Interstellar Patrol. I’m honestly not a huge Weber fan (his characters and situations sometimes go between Mary-Sue, Deus ex Machina, and Deus ex Deo, or maybe Deus ex Pluma) but I am a big fan of Christopher Anvil,  Lois McMaster Bujold, and Keith Laumer, all of whom Weber refers to in this quote, so here we go:

“In many ways, Anvil's storytelling style has always reminded me of the historical romance novels by Georgette Heyer or Lois Bujold's Miles Vorkosigan stories. Like Heyer and Bujold, Anvil's characters always have a perfectly logical reason for everything they do, yet they slide inevitably from one catastrophe to another in a slither which rapidly assumes avalanche proportions. A Keith Laumer character triumphs through an unflinching refusal to yield which transforms him, permits him to break through to some higher level of capability or greatness. An Anvil character triumphs by shooting the rapids, by caroming from one obstacle to another, adapting and overcoming as he goes. In many ways, his characters are science-fiction descendents of Odysseus, the scheming fast thinker who dazzles his opponents with his footwork. Of course, sometimes it's a little difficult to tell whether they're dazzling an opponent with their footwork, or skittering across a floor covered in ball bearings. But Anvil has the technique and the skill to bring them out triumphant in the end, and watching them dance is such a delightful pleasure.”

Excerpt From

Interstellar Patrol

Christopher Anvil

This material may be protected by copyright.

(Actually it IS covered by copyright, but I’m using it in an academic context and giving full credit so I’m pretty sure it’s allowed.)