The Gaming Outpost

Laying there in a hospital bed gave me time to reflect on the strange world, and the bizzare way my absent doppleganger was behaving. Seeing as my injured body healed wrapped in a full body restraint cloth that let air flow through, and it felt soft as silk, yet it was a rigid as steel, I had plenty of time to reflect and examine past events for a clue.

And so, I felt a door opening in my memory. A world I had been too in those lost years more than a century past unveiled itself to me. With a surge of hope that my amnesia might at last be healed, I pushed into the memory forgetting the problems of the moment in the joy of the past…

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I had woke, no let’s say, I woke up (it’s more immediate and helps me remember better) laying on a bench in a windy and decrepit park with five story tall skyscrapers looking down on me from across the street with their broken eyes. Clouds of brown leaves swirled down the canted and cracked sidewalk past my rusted bench. The air was cool and refreshing except for that taint of sulphur.

Sitting up, I looked about for my items. They were not to be found. I cast about with my scriff sense that most versers have in varying measure, and I found multiple sources scattered about me at an indeterminate range.

I’d had some of my stuff, like the plasma cannon, and the horse pistol, and the self-cleaning solar campstove (I remembered that tool, what joy. But how had I lost such an excellent and easy to use stove?) stored in my apartment over the High King’s great hall. And I had been out riding when, when …ambushers, yes, assasins had sprung their trap.

I rubbed my chest where the arrow had gone in, but the pain was gone, and so was the arrow. I’d heard tell of a verser who tried to keep every weapon that killed him. The poor fellow was a little morbid, no?

Anyways, I had been trying to steer England to avoid the Black Plague, and the London Fire, and start the Industrial Revolution centuries earlier than in my original world.

Such a plan is easy to say, but it costs many hard nights and troubles to accomplish, if I did succeed. History is too big for even someone with foreknowledge to steer. Look in your history books for any given day and important things in varying fields are happening at the same time. History is busy.

Ripples from my choices would come back to me distorted from what I expected, and the High King made decisions all the time, and I could not keep up with him, let alone all the other groups I was manipulating. In the end, I think, a group that I had started turned against me, and hired the assasins.

(I was struck in this memory by how young, and careless I had been.)

Back to the cold bench by the rundown park…

My Army-style .45 I’d picked up in some world was not in my small of the back holster, and neither was my nobleman’s dagger in its holster on the inside of my right wrist. Worse, my wallet and my PDA with their pictures of family, friends, other versers, my just beginning angel collection, exotic sights like the land whirlpools of Teleusne, and so on were gone. The thieves who had stripped me could have at least left me my pictures from my wallet.

Granted, I had indelibly engraved each and every picture of my family into my memory with a rather heavy-handed mental technique that the Old One had taught me even as he cautioned against using it too much.

“It makes you rigid inside. Too much, and you will not be able to change your mind, little frog.” Most Oriental mystics and masters of martial arts that I met in the various worlds would have said “little grasshopper” or “student” or nothing at all. For some reason in that world, it was frog this, and frog that.

I sat up, and before I could set off to tracking down the items by my scriff sense, a piece of yellow paper fell off my chest. Retrieving the official looking document, I read it despite it being in Mandarin.

“You are in violation of anti-vagrancy laws, and must pay a fine, or appear in court two days hence to argue your case.”

Great. Just great.

I set off, and soon came upon an auction in the lee of a multi-car wreck. The cars looked to be steamers, and rusted a bit in place.

Some very smooth and brazen thieves were putting up my items for auction along with a lot of other presumably stolen merchandise. This was two hundred yards from where I had been laying.

There was a crowd of about thirty people, and about six men and two women running the auction.

“And what am I bid for this fine, silky smooth piece of electronic equipment?” The auctioneer asked as he held up my PDA.
“What is it?” Someone asked.
“I dunno.” The auctioneer replied. “But it looks pretty. Can I hear five, someone give me five?”

I started to raise my hand.

One extremely large and rotund individual saw me, and slowly thundered over to me like a bull to loom over me. I’m not easily loomed, but this guy was six foot, eight inches and about three-hundred and seventy-five pounds.

“You don’t have any money. Go away.” His voice was almost polite.

It took me a second to process how he would know the empty state of my finances. The obvious reason–that he had been less than ten minutes prior shuffling through my pockets while I recovered from transition to this new world—came up and smacked me on the head so that I felt stupid. But really its hard to know what to think in the face of such sheer gall. It took me aback.

Then I smiled.

“You know what they say. The hard way or the easy way? Give me back my stuff.” Then I took a horse stance, and waited. It was too bad that I did not have a true collection of fighting skills, a system. Instead I had a mismatched bag of tricks to fight with.

He sighed, and called for some help. The help came in the form of two other guys much lighter. One looked fast, and bouncy. I looked into his eyes and saw they were dilated. He was probably on some variant of speed, an amphetamine. I’d take him out first.

Letting him come in and in response turning a feint of a high kick at Big Man into a reverse crescent kick into his face just ruined his day.

The auction stopped as the crowd gathered around the free entertainment.

“I just want my stuff back. There’s no need for this.” I knew being civilized and offering a peaceful way out might be a mistake, because such people, criminals, often think of that as a sign of weakness, but the Old One would have reached across the dimensional barriers and smacked me good if I did not try, at least.

They chuckled. Yep, it had been a mistake.

“Uh-hmm.” I heard from behind me. Suddenly everyone was running and screaming in every direction. I just turned and saw a police officer standing there. He raised an eyebrow.

In less than a minute, everyone and everything was gone. Except for me, and The Man.

I told him my story, and he listened until I mentioned my vagrancy ticket. Then he told me that it would be my word against solid citizens with alibis and plentiful witnesses and I might as well give it up.

I reached out telepathically. It was hard, but I caught some of his thoughts.

*Stupid jerk. Should know better than to sleep in a park. He’s just trying to make my life difficult. If I help him, I’ll have a weeks worth of paperwork to fill out, and my low ‘official’ crime rate for this district will be spoiled. I suppose I could bring him in as a troublemaker and a vagrant.*

I bowed to the officer, and smiled my kindest and most pleasant smile.

“Thank you for your time, officer. I shan’t bother you again. It was possibly a misunderstanding.” I said as I moved away. He looked doubtful, but he let me go.

Meanwhile, I was transforming to furious inside. It takes me a few minutes to shift from placid to angry, but …

“Possibly a misunderstanding.” I quoted myself. “In the same sense that its possible that gravity is going to reverse itself in the next moment.” I mocked myself savagely.

I started hunting. This was a shadowfight. I’m often best in the shadows anyways. Stalking my gear into the dark alleys between the dimunitive skyscrapers brought me into contact with some extremely unsavory characters who were arranging business in the alleys and shadows.

They took one long look at my face, and stayed out of the way.

About an hour later, I came to a factory and I felt my stuff above me. So I leapt up to the almost rusted through fire escape. It swayed dangerously, and the nuts holding it in the brick wall wobbled back and fourth.

There went surprise I told myself. Carefully, I climbed the thing hoping not to jar it loose from the wall.

Below me, a passing woman shouted up at me.

“You crazy.” I waited until she went by since I did not want to land the multi-ton assemblage on her head.

Five stories up, and I looked at a dull painted sign for Coca-cola I think, but they labeled it “Mandate of Heaven” in kanji script. To the left of this now useless advertisement, since the nearby building was also mostly empty, rested a multi-pane window.

I looked in and saw my “friends” hanging around on some trashed sofas in the midst of an empty factory floor. One guy was juggling my .45 and my dagger at the same time. He was pretty good. I marked him as a threat.

Reaching into my bag of psionic tricks, I sent out a clairvoyant seeking. It was hard. Probably the scientists in this world did not believe in psionics. So few would be the people with the strength of mind and talent to succeed at even the most basic tricks due to the huge amount of static in the psi ranges.

I found a door in a nearby office, and exerting myself with a force that had moved asteroids, I slammed it shut.

That started an argument about whether it was anything; what it was; and who should go investigate.

I used that to crack the window open and slip in like an eel. I walked calmly like I belonged here, and several people looked at me in passing before they realized that I did not.

Ten feet from them, and someone shouted while fumbling for a weapon. They all looked.

“I want my stuff.”

“How about we give you a bullet in the head?” The leader asked me with a rabid viciousness in his expression.

“You don’t want to go there. You do, and people are likely to die.” I said this calmly, and their laughs started and then stopped. There was a long moment of them looking at me. I was way too calm for their peace of mind.

Already, I had designated them all in a mental trick I’d learned from an AI, and I had five different combat plans for stomping them into the ground.

“Say we do, whats in it for us?”
I was tempted to say. “Your lives.” But that would have been deliberately choosing a fight. I had won; they just wanted to save face.

“I can tell you how I found you.”

They looked at each other, and I could see the curiousity and worry in their faces. Just how had I found them?

The leader nodded in a sharp jerking motion. I gathered up my stuff including the things hidden in a sofa cushion. They looked a little wierded out at that.

I tossed the Big Man a quarter. Then I turned around.

“Pass it around amongst you. Someone hide it in their hand.”

“Is this a magic trick?”

“Something like that.” I replied enjoying the moment. They were too. Being a criminal can be pretty boring. I was probably the most interesting person they’d met all week.

I turned and walked back. They all had their hands out, and closed. Smirks decorated their faces. It took a bit of triangulation, and I think they passed it a couple of times, but by keeping an eye on them, and by cutting back and forth through them to find out if it was on my left or right, I singled out the juggler, and then his left hand.

“How’d you…?”

“Scriff sense. When you come from another dimension, you can sense your stuff.” It was more complicated than that. Some dimension-travellers could not do this, but all versers could.

Complaints of my being crazy or putting them on were mixed with disbelieving laughter.

“You looked at the quarter?”

“Yeah, what’s that odd writing on it?” The leader asked.

“It’s the English language using the Roman alphabet.” I said, and they looked blankly back at me. “I don’t think you have it in this world.”

“Say maybe you could give me some advice? Seeing as I’m not from around here.”

They looked skeptical. I showed them my ticket, and the universal response was an impolite version of “You are so messed up, dude.”

I left, and proceeded to track down my other larger cache of stuff. It was laying scattered over a landfill. Wolves ran loose on the landfill, and they had gotten into my food, and then for sheer sport had scattered my stuff over a several mile expanse of the giant, and overstuffed landfill.

My magic did not work here, and the wolves were not intimidated by my growl. The .45’s sharp, cracking report sent them yelping away, however.

Eventually, I got the stuff back although one book, a first edition of Ringworld signed by Niven, I had to toss because of it landed inside a bucket of melting, rancid lard courtesy of a bored wolf.

I really had too much stuff. It seems that as you get more experienced at this versing you can carry more stuff. Well, I’d kept it down to a reasonable amount that I could tote on my back. Then in the last world, I’d stayed for a long time, more than two decades, and I accumulated a lot of things that had come with me. It was more than I could carry.

Looking about because I remembered seeing a child’s wagon rusted and with a missing wheel, I came to it and found a lawnmower style wheel as well. It was not a smooth solution as the new wheel was smaller than its brethren, but after thirty minutes, I got it to work.

The cooling winds brought chills and stinks, and relievedly, I trundled off the mounds of garbage back toward the dark alleys. Seeing as it got toward nightfall, I picked a building that was open, and moved in. The second floor protected me from drafts, and I found a stack of cardboard uninfested by anything more dire than a spider I shooed off.

So I went to sleep, and was awoken by light shining in my face, and a complaint.

“Here now. You haven’t paid for your spot. Pay up, and right lively.” I could not see the man’s face behind his lantern until I twitched my eyes to see in alternate frequencies, and still it was not clear.

“Look, I’m not interested in your extortionate schemes. So go away.” That said, I stood up and towered over the guy. He also had a little girl about six with him.

“Here now. I know my rights. You can’t just steal from me because you’re bigger than me. That ain’t right.”

His slightly whining voice, and the child, and his argument which was not the one a criminal would choose caused me to pause.

“Pal, this is an empty building.” I said soft and slow.

“You were sleeping on my pad, I put there to rent. It ain’t empty. I ‘own’ this building.”

“’Own?’” I asked.

He shrugged a bit embarrassed.

“Not actually like all notarized down at the courthouse, but yeah, I do. I take care of it. And when I find some free cardboard or something, I put out beds for them that pays me. A lot of people do it. So you buzz off unless you want me to call the Sharkbait Patrol on you.”

I paused and thought.
“Let me ask you another question. How many people live like this? And why?”

“Two questions, Daddy. Two questions.” The little girl interjected, and her father padded her on the head. He seemed calmer now that he started to see how baffled I was. He was beginning to think I’d made an honest mistake.

“Oh, I don’t know, man. Three, maybe four out of ten in the City.” He shrugged and sat down on the ground, and I joined him. I began looking through my backpack for something to pay him with.

“Books, Daddy. Books.” The little girl said in the dark and empty vaulted space of the second floor. I pulled out some comic books. Wonder Woman. Green Lantern. Spiderman.

She took them. I told them that it was in a different language. The child looked and then started turning pages.

“Pretty pictures, Daddy. Pretty pictures.”

The man laughed, and nodded at me. I had a spot to sleep. He got up, and took her by the hand while she tried to flip the pages and hold the book with the other hand in the shadowed room. The lantern and her father she positioned rather impatiently to hold the light on her new treasures.

“Its like this, buddy. Guy wants to buy a house, he has to go to the DHS for a certificate, the GMR Board for a license, the …” He went on for about ten different agencies describing a precise and almost sensible in every step procedure, but the procedure as a whole thing being a nightmare. “And then you usually have to go back to the GMR to refile because time ran out.”

“And each one of these steps cost money?”

The man nodded vigorously which disturbed only slightly his battered sheepskin coat.

We parted, and I went to sleep. The next morning I used a first edition and autographed “Foundation” by Isaac Asimov to buy breakfast from a mobile wagon-drawn kitchen which could run and hide from License Raids. The food was a heavily spiced sausage atop a lard-heavy biscuit with a melted pungent goat cheese they called ‘Colonial’s Best’ inserted in as well. The name for the cheese came from the fact that the residents of the homelands didn’t like milk products. The meal filled one up nicely. And I did not ask what they used the book they could not read for. Finding out that Asimov’s book made excellent tinder was more than I needed or wanted to know.

The day passed pleasantly. I did get several pieces of advice telling me that maybe I should not go to court, but I was curious about how this society worked. And the people were mostly tentative when they gave advice. These outliers were not pushy people.

In fact, come to think of it, but I had met far meaner criminals than those of the day before. I expected that they provided a mixture of irregular law, and honest trading, and theft.

The next day I showed up at court. There was a large amount of people there. Most were well-dressed compared to the others I’d been staying around, but nothing all that great either. And there was a certain blandness without any sharpness of design to off-set the boring colors. It was like the fifties for men, but without starch or collars on suits.

It took a long while as I sat in the over-crowded courtroom. The group in front of my group argued about definitions and about differences that were too subtle or arcane for me to follow.

The judge and his clerk had a big box-like computer on his desk to help them. They entered data, and waited on it, and spent all too much time quibbling over tiny differences of no great deal.

Finally, the group in front of me was finished. Then we were all hustled forward. And the judge started zipping through the ones in front of me. It turned out we were all vagrants.

“Name?” A few questions more, and a fine was determined. I also became determined. I wanted to get off, especially as I had no local currency.

They asked me my name. I told them, and the computer complained. I was not in their records. Big shock to me since I had been born in another universe. I got my chance to talk more.

I explained I’d been dumped there, and should not be held responsible. They ignored that, and asked the questions they wanted to ask. They did not like my answers. More accurately the computer did not like them.

About this time, I realized that the judge was not a judge, but just a glorified clerk entering data into the computer.

The computer determined that I was likely lying. So they shot me full of truth serum. And I told them the truth.

The computer had a problem. It was axiomatic that a subject under truth serum could not lie, but I did not fit into their categories. No matter how many different categories they tried to stick me in; I was a round peg in their square holes, or rectangles, or triangles. Whatever.

And the clerks had a problem. A supervisor came by and wanted to know why they were falling behind in their “production”. I heard this by listening closely, and I cynically surmised that they were not interested in justice. It was about churning us through as quickly as possible to make the maximum in fine money off of us.

They explained the problem, and the supervisor showed them a trick. They could make my case be hypothetical. A “what-if” test of the theory of the Big Book of Rules for Every Situation.

The weak and worried faces stared at me, and I roused myself enough from the serum’s stupor to reach out with my mind.

I found fear in their minds. The computer held the files for the Rulebook which described in mind-boggling detail every possible situation that might occur, and the appropriate penalty after all mitigating circumstances were taken into effect. It even described the method to use to determine if someone was guilty.

Justice reduced to an equation.

I saw their fear. Making changes to the Book of Rules required vast efforts of the initiators, and garnered little credit. They could easily be spending the next year in a small room filling out mountains of paperwork to find a way to fit “verser” into their system.

Or, they could deal with the situation in another way.

“Have you committed any other crimes while here?”

I burbled on for a while about what I had done while here. I suppose I could have resisted the serum, but I hardly wanted to. Curiousity killed the cat, I should have remembered. And there was no Fortune around here to “bring him back” because Fortune is unpredictable.

They ran my crimes of promising violence, stalking, evil intentions, squatting, and about two dozen others which I had not realized I was guilty of, and the computer spoke for the first time.

“Habitual offender. Chronic, unmitigatable danger to society. Anti-authoritarian personality.”

The bailiff led me across the courtroom which had turned almost silent, and he opened a door for me in the wall. I walked in, and found a bored looking guy eating a sausage biscuit like I had had for breakfast.

He finished it as I stood dazed. Then he pulled out his pistol from his boot.

“Got any last words, or are you still too shocked that the perfect society declared you a ‘permanent threat’? I mean, man, this is your chance. They can’t do any worse to you than they are already going to do.” His eyes held curiousity, and an odd sort of compassion.

I shook myself loose of the stupor, and I wondered if I should fight. The thing is, teaching a slave how to be free is one of the hardest things in the worlds to do, and this whole society worshipped a Ten to the Twenty-third Set of Rules, and never once used their brains except for cheating.

Maybe once it all collapsed of its own massive lack of functionality, the outliers could burn it down and start over.

“A moment please.” I asked, and he nodded. I sent a telepathic call to the gang leader who would have the ability to recover my stuff. I told him that I was giving him much of what he’d seen. It was too much to tote with me.

He understood even if telepathy freaked him a bit. And he told me I should have listened, and stayed out of the courts.

“Last words?” The man asked.

“I’ve seen a lot better, and even a lot worse places than this. But I’m not sure if there is anyone I feel more sorry for than the people of this world. I’m a verser; blast me out of this world.”

So he did.

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I relaxed in my sick bed, and considered the dream and my current problems. No further doors into memory seemed to be opening, so I let that be for a time. And right now sleep seemed the best “solution” I could come up with. I fell asleep dreaming of million-ton mechas chasing me across a soccer field as I tried to score.

Tadeusz

  It strikes me as odd that in nigh on two and a half years of weekly columns I have never written one on this subject, a subject in which I am something of a recognized authority, which has been part of role playing games from the beginning, and is a source of great contention among gamers.  For some, it is the central motivation for their characters, absolutely vital to any serious approach to play; for others, it is superfluous, there for color, and not well executed as it is.  I am not, in fact, talking about religion.  Although I am recognized as one of the most visible Christian gamers, I have actually addressed that long ago in the article entitled Faith, and on the forums I do point people to the Faith and Gaming series at the Christian Gamers Guild site.  No, I’m talking about that old Dungeons & Dragons™ concept of what it is that determines what side you’re on in any conflict:  alignment.

  I say I’m a recognized authority on the subject; to that, my web pages addressing the subject of alignment as it appeared in the original Advanced Dungeons & Dragons™ books were recognized by the game’s best known creator, E. Gary Gygax, as useful and accurate explanations of the concepts entailed in it.  When he was running his web site at Gygax.com (no longer active), he had exactly two links on the page to D&D-related pages, and both of these were mine, and both were about alignment.  One, my alignment quiz, provided a great deal of insight into the application of alignment to questions that arise in fantasy game play; it was reproduced in a self-scoring Javascript version which you can take online, as well as translated into German by Xemaris.de, in a CGI-driven self-scoring version originally done in English by an MIT student, Wei Hwa Hwang.  The other was from my character creation site, an explanation of alignment to assist in choosing the right one for your character.  I’ve always used alignment in D&D games, and always found it useful.

  I’m not here to argue the merits of alignment, though; I’m here to use the concept as a way of helping you improve whatever games you play.

  I said a moment ago that I wasn’t talking about religion; yet in a sense I am.  D&D gets a lot of flack for all the deities and demigods it contains, the polytheism it promotes, the pagan concepts it provides; but in the end, those are just color.  The real religions of the game are the nine alignment slots.  These are the things the characters actually believe, the ideas that drive who they are and what they do.  In explaining the concept of alignment language, the rules draw the analogy to the Latin of the Christian church, a language which refined the meanings of words to express concepts that were peculiar to a shared belief structure.  In that context, we see that whether your character worshipped Amaterasu Omikami, Athena, Bahamut, Diancecht, Heimdall, Moradin, or Vishnu, if you were lawful good your real beliefs were similar enough that they were explained and discussed in the same words.

  I have elsewhere written my Parable of the Boiler.  It is a simple story whose moral is something I was saying long before I thought of that example, long before I knew anything about alignment:  what you believe will control what you do.  It is a very simple notion.  It is not what you assert that you believe, but what you actually do believe, that controls your actions.  If you believe that the boiler in the basement is going to explode, you will turn down the thermostat and leave the building.  If you really do believe that it is better for you to help others, you will help others; if you really do believe that it is best to look out for number one, you will act in a selfish manner most of the time.  Whatever you really do believe will control your choices, and thus your actions.

  D&D characters really do believe their alignments; they just have doubts once in a while, and that’s when they act out of their alignments.

  It is this concept of knowing what your character believes, and letting that control his actions, that you want to draw from this column.  Back in Flirting we talked about how playing your character well can help you understand how others think and feel, and to discover who you are and who you might become.  Similarly, to begin from what the character thinks, feels, and believes, and work out his actions from that, can help us better play that character because what he does springs from understanding why.

  Most role playing games don’t include alignment as one of the characteristics.  Even those games TSR published at about the same time as Original AD&D™ did not have it.  In Dungeons & Dragons™ alignment was part of the heroic setting, defining who was wearing the white hat and who was really the villain.  Multiverser™ keeps a bit of this in its concept of affiliation; affiliation, though, is only mandatory for gods and worlds–player and non-player characters don’t need it unless they establish a connection between themselves and some deity.  A few other games have characteristics and aspects that emulate some of what alignment did, but in the main this has dropped into the background.

  Even in the background, though, it continues to have impact.  Every player knows whether he’s playing a hero or a villain or something between the two.  Every player needs to know what his character believes, values, hopes, and dreams.  It is by grasping these concepts that we can follow through to knowing how they will act.  Certainly you can’t always reduce the complex psychology of a human being to a few core principles; yet for most characters, and even most people, you can derive a few core principles that control a great deal of their choices, and deal with the exceptions separately.  The concept of alignment is quite useful to this end, even if the details may require tweaking for any particular character.

  This will be the first of several articles addressing the subject of alignment; but they will not be in sequence.  We’ll probably get around to good, evil, law, and chaos, and deal with the rather odd concept of neutrality.  I probably have something to say about edge alignments and corner alignments that will prove useful to understanding characters in all games.  It’s a rich area, filled with great game ideas.  They’ll be spread out over the rest of the year or so; we won’t do it next week.  After all, there are too many game ideas left to do to get locked into one subject for more than one column.

  So, next week, something different.

—–

M. Joseph Young is co-author of Multiverser and Vice President for Development at Valdron Inc.  His many contributions to online literature are indexed for convenience, and he looks forward to discussing these things by e-mail or on our Gaming Outpost forums.

M. J. Young has offered a lot of good gaming advice. One bit of that advice is that the player should never know more about the world or the scenario than the referee. It’s certainly logical; how is a GM supposed to surprise the players when they already know what to expect. In the Multiverser game I’m currently running, though, I have a player in the Star Wars universe. Had I been thinking clearly, I would’ve put him on the Starship Enterprise instead. I’m very familiar with Star Trek, while Star Wars is the one he knows quite a bit about. I’ve learned, however, that having a player know more about the universe than you do, while it’s generally something to be avoided, can work with the right player and a few tricks from the GM.

First, I like to make it clear to my players that you may not be playing in the version of the world that you know from fiction. This is both a way to give myself creative license to mess with the plot and a method of keeping anybody from nitpicking. (But, you had that figher pilot in a red shirt rather than a blue one…..) So, say you’ve got a player in Star Wars, toward the end of Episode 6. He comes up with the great idea of warning the rebellion that they’re about to walk straight into a trap on Endor, since the Death Star’s weapons are actually operational. If you want to be cruel, you can decide that, in your universe, there was no trap, and the rebels have all sorts of other problems never mentioned in the movie, not least of which for the character is that he’s no longer seen as a reliable source of information. Of course, you don’t have to be cruel, nor should you all the time, but shaking things up a bit keeps players on their toes. The changes don’t have to be earth-shattering either. In the Princess Bride scenario that I’m running one character through, his comments to Westley got him missing Buttercup, his love, so much that he sent her a letter, subtly altering the course of the plot in ways that weren’t readily apparent. I also chose to make Buttercup a bit more intelligent and a bit less annoying, partly to keep the player guessing and partly to make her more fun to run as an NPC.

Secondly, you should never ever get yourself into the situation where a player knows more about the world than you do unless it’s a player who won’t take advantage of that. I’m fortunate in that I can ask questions of the player, knowing that he’ll be good about separating in-character knowledge from what he knows out of character. For players who would try to manipulate that situation to their advantage, I’d steer clear of any scenarios where they have the upper hand.

The type of game you’re playing in also matters. Obviously, in a game where it’s the GM “versus” the characters, you want to keep every bit of information about the game a closely guarded secret. If you and your group are more interested in telling a good story, however, having them know things they “shouldn’t” doesn’t hurt nearly as much.

Another component that makes this work is getting along well with your players. In one sense, that should go without saying. If you don’t like these folks, or they don’t like you, what are you doing gaming together? However, sometimes friction does arise between gamers and GMs for whatever reason, in game or out. If that’s the case in your game, giving a player the upper hand in this way is probably a bad idea, unless, of course, it’s a peace offering of some sort. Say, you put them in a familiar world after sticking them in a situation that you later realized was a bit unfair. I’m fortunate in that my gaming group is made up of my boyfriend and my closest friends. I realize that dating the player isn’t exactly a solution that other GMs can replicate, and it really only works with *one* player anyway.

My final suggestion, assuming you’ve got a player that this will work for, is to ask the player for information about the world. You can do this in a way that doesn’t give anything away, by asking for information on several topics, a couple of which are red herrings. Not only does this help you know what you’re talking about, it’s also a nice gesture of trust that you’re willing to let the player be a source of information in his or her own game. Again, though, some players will take horrible advantage of this.

In most games, you might run into this situation if players have read the scenario books or some of the GM materials, maybe because they run their own games. In that case, if it becomes a problem, change the scenario up. Make the villain actually a good guy who’s a double agent working within the evil empire. Or, switch maps around so that things aren’t where they thought they were. The nice thing about Multiverser in particular, though, is that if you end up knowing less about a world than your player does, either intentionally or accidentally, and the situation gets ugly, you can always find a way to kill them off and put them somewhere else.