They Will Surprise You

Players will surprise you. They will side with the occasional villain, and then betray both him and the good king they were supposed to be protecting.

They will discover some clever way to kill an NPC who was supposed to survive to become an ongoing villain.

They will ignore obvious clues and obsess over details you added to make the dungeon seem real. They will believe the most blatant lies and disbelieve the most obvious truths.

Perspective and Motive
This is not because they are being difficult or because they are stupid- it is because the world looks very different from their side of the GM screen.

What seems obvious to the Game Master only seems so, because the Game Master knows what the clue means. To the players things are less obvious, because they have less to work with than you do. Like the twist ending of a movie, a Game Master must be more obvious than they would like to be if the players are to spot things.

Furthermore, the players have a different motivation than the Game Master. The Game Master's goal is to have fun and unfold a story. The Players each have their own goals- which may or may not include the other players. Having fun is normally a player's goal, but after that their goal is rarely to unfold the story. Players would, in general, much rather get rich and powerful.

Your goal as Game Master is to show them that they can accomplish this by unraveling your stories and playing along. but even if a Game Master accomplishes this, the players are still trying to unravel the story in the most advantageous way possible for them.

This means that they will do things that will surprise you, because they are trying to surprise the NPCs that you are playing. Players are ingenious in ways that will amaze, surprise and frequently disturb you. Playing in Superhero games they will do things with powers that will warp your memories of the Fantastic Four and Spider-man forever.

Playing Vampire games they will find ways to bend the rules of vampire abilities and weaknesses into pretzels that you would never have imagined and probably would never have wanted to if you could imagine them.

Playing in fantasy campaigns, players will combine magical items with hair-brained schemes that shouldn't work, but sometimes do work just -it seems- to spite you. Players are as smart as the Game Master and unlike the Game Master, they do not have to manage a world or shape the plot of a story- they just have to win.

And they will set all of the cunning to this task and you will be surprised.

Contingencies
If you look at the back of a pre-made adventure you will likely find contingencies for how to respond if the players do something that disrupts the planned plot of the story.

They will have contingencies on what happens if the players decide that the Vizier is a traitor and kill him, or kill the Villain who was supposed to escape, or accidentally destroy an item that would only become important later in the campaign.

Study these.

Sometimes such actions will mean that they players will die or at least fail, this happens.

If they merely fail then study and mine their failure for later plot points and complications. However, frequently a campaign can be salvaged as long as the Game Master can look at things from the player's point of view and examine how it would still be possible to play the campaign and how it would still be possible to win. Have contingencies ready whenever possible, and be ready to improvise where planning wasn't an option- and be ready to let players fail as well. Keep in mind though, that most pre-made adventures are disturbingly unrealistic on what surprises player can think of the heat of the moment.

Inter-Player Homocide
Players will kill each other for financial gain, or simply because they're bored. Players will think of the most bizarre ways of doing this too.


 * The wizard will cast “Tasha's Uncontrollable Hideous Laughter” on a character that can't swim and kick him off the boat.


 * The Mind Melter will use telekinesis to remove the soldier's helmet just as a grenade goes off.


 * The Thief will boil the Wizard in the bathtub while the wizard's mind is off in the astral realm.


 * The Pilot will rapidly accelerate and stop repeatedly to break the neck of the only passenger not strapped into a seat.

And this just what they will do to each other! To NPCs they will do much worse!


 * Players will side with, then betray the villain, then usurp his position, then claim it was all undercover work if another force of good guys arrives at the wrong time.


 * Players will torture innocent NPCs because they have suspicions that you as a Game Master simply won't be able to fathom.


 * The party Ewok will abruptly decide he doesn't trust the party Jedi and hide, forcing the party to search for their missing member and actually manage to get injured looking for him.

You cannot anticipate what players will do, because they are as creative as you are, and not as burdened by the world. So read the contingencies in pre-made adventures and realize that these apply to only to most boring of players and only the most boring of player strategies.

Note: All examples in this page are real examples done by real players, who seem reasonably sane during none gaming hours. You have be warned.