Hmmm. This has me thinking hard. I guess because I read a lot it's not often I'm completely surprised by a twist in a game - also, Rich (who GM's Pathfinder, Aberrant and Exalted) likes to play with foreshadowing, so when twists arrive you can see how they fit and they aren't startling, as such.
Early in my roleplay career, I was twice taken by surprise by rituals - stopping one, in a Buffy game, that resulted in a Hellmouth opening: we thought the ritual was to open one, but turns out it was to keep an existing one closed. And helping start another in WFRP: summon Sigmar to fight the Chaos gods and thus end Chaos? Sounds good, right? Until Sigmar summoned each Choas god in turn, and destroyed the world in the process...
The nastiest surprise was in ShadowRun, where my very OP Kamaya was starting to prepare to retire from the game so I could try out a new character who was less powerful. The GM had a few loose ends he wanted to tie off, without warning me. Her friend (an NPC whose name escapes me), a wolf-totemed shaman, had gone missing only to reappear and have his head blown off in front of her: they'd pissed of the megacorp Aries early in her career. I really didn't see that coming! We never really resolved it, either, because the game pretty much collapsed shortly after, which was a shame. I learnt to play in that group.
Okay, those surprises sound kind of like back-stabbing suck fests, unless the game kept going and you were able to sort things out?
ReplyDeleteThe Buffy one a 'season finale' and we never got around to the second season, when we'd need to clean up our mess. The WFRP's one the game ended... but Husbit learnt a valuable lesson! And the ShadowRun one caused me to lose interest and drift away from the game.
DeleteI like the Buffy one, nice twist in a Snape (Philosopher's Stone) kind of way.
ReplyDeleteYeah, it was pretty fun.
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