Dramatic Irony for Elfgames

    I've been spending the past little while visiting my girlfriend, and on the plane ride back I started reading the book Conquistador, by S.M. Stirling. This isn't a book review, mostly because I'm not done with it and my thoughts so far are "I grew up on Stirling's books, this is a Stirling book, so it feels like a lovely homecoming for me." What I initially found interesting was how much it cuts to the chase.

The best way to describe Stirling's work is "What if Michael Crichton was an anthropologist?" Personally I'd recommend The Sky People, where the US and Soviet Union colonize a Venus full of cavemen and dinosaurs, as a good starting point.

    Conquistador is a book where in 1946, a former Army soldier discovers a portal to an alternate timeline where Europeans never colonized the Americas. In 2009, a Fish and Wildlife officer starts uncovering just what exactly has happened and is happening over there. None of that's a spoiler-it's literally on the dust jacket, but one of our protagonists spends the first hundred-ish pages figuring out the mystery while our other protagonist tries to stop him. 

    Part of me wonders what the book would look like if our officer was the sole protagonist, and we saw things from his perspective as he tried to figure out what was going on, and while I think that could be an interesting twist on proceedings, I don't think it would work for this book, and definitely not this author. Stirling loves exploring the details of alternate societies-his Emberverse series has multiple asides on how groups avoid constipation, for example-and having to wait several dozen pages before getting to The Good Stuff would be awful. Aside from that, it means we also get to avoid an exposition dump when our Scandinavian Muscle Dude (seriously, Stirling seems to love those almost as much as he loves bisexual redheads) finally ends up in the other timeline. By letting the reader in on the actual premise from the get go, we get to see the good stuff-including fun adventures in both timelines.

    All this got me thinking again about dramatic irony, and the perennial trope of the GM hiding behind their filing cabinet, or the player with their dark and mysterious backstory, and so on. I honestly think the best way to have one's cake and eat it too in this situation is to let everyone in on the bit.

I did a google image search for "Dramatic Irony" and is it me or does this feel strangely homoerotic?

    I'm far from the first person to bring up dramatic irony in the context of roleplaying games-this kind of thing has probably been around since the zine days, and games such as The Quiet Year bake it into their presentation. Even things like modern knife theory are based around the idea of sharing hooks and giving them to the GM. It's part of why Session 0 is such a big hit, and why I love games where the classes/playbooks/whatever have prebuilt party relationships built in. If I were to summarize it in a big pithy sentence though, it would be like this:

The juice you get from surprising your fellow players with a plot twist is by and large not going to be worth the squeeze.

    This is obviously going to vary from table to table. Some GMs love when players hand them ambiguously-shaped boxes to fill with whatever. Hell, I've handed out some of those boxes before. Who is my sorcerer's mother? Why did she leave? Who knows! I've had them handed to me before, because sometimes players have trouble coming up with stuff, and that's okay too.

    But trying to engineer those kinds of twists beforehand is a dangerous game, because your fellow players are human beings with their own energy and can absolutely mess stuff up. As a GM you might end giving no direction, yet rigidly shutting down any attempt by players to do something in an attempt to make your story happen, and you run the risk of the story you have planned not being very good. As a player, you might end up with no one engaging with your stuff, and that sucks. Securing that buy-in above the table lessons the shock and surprise, but also means everyone is into it (because if they weren't they would say something). 

    Let me finish off this post with an example: in early 2020, I took part in a game of Scum and Villainy (basically, Star Wars with the serial numbers filed off). One player, Ashleigh, made a character named Cleo whose parents had been killed by the Empire for political reasons. My character, Nico, was a cloned assassin for the government. So I threw out "Hey, what if my character helped murder your character's family?", she was enthused, and we sat with that for several months before the payoff started.

    Nico had ended up taking the Haunted trauma, and I decided to be cute and make it literal; he was haunted by the ghost of a not-Jedi he had killed, but that subplot had been resolved. Obviously Nico was still haunted by someone, and while talking with the GM, I came to the personal realization of "Oh my God, Cleo's family." This was not what the GM had been thinking of, but she was immediately like "Yeah, that's way better than my idea", so Cleo's family started haunting the ship and things came to a head. It was awesome, there was an arc where Nico left the ship for a bit so I played as someone else (and wrote up a document to help the GM figure out what my character was thinking). It was awesome, and most likely way better than if I'd tried to keep it all a secret from Ashleigh.

    All this to say, talk to your fellow players (and that includes the GM). You're all here to have fun, and the best way to do that is, surprise surprise, together.

Yes I'm using this again, but that's because it's good and I like it.