#RPGaDay2025 - 15 Deceive

 

To deceive, or not to deceive.

There still seems to be a massive market in “DM screens”, which feel to me like a way for the person running the game to deceive the players whose experience they’re facilitating. I remember my earliest days of playing games when other DMs would roll dice behind these screens, sometimes seeing an impact in the gameplay and narrative…sometimes seeing one set of die rolls quickly followed by another…or mysteriously hearing die rolls in combat, and somehow no matter what was rolled (we never saw those die rolls) our enemies would always hit us and we’d never manage to hit them. The screen was a barrier between us and the truth, and it led to a very antagonistic play experience (which often led to the DM getting confused as to why the gameplay was turning that way). For these reasons I never use a DM screen, I always roll things openly. It doesn’t matter what way the dice go, we can turn that into interesting storylines.

As for deception within the narrative, I’ve got no problems with that. I’ll have supporting characters exist within the story as unreliable narrators, describing things as they understand them, or filtering their words through agendas that the player characters may not know. Where possible, I’ll make reference to characters being untrustworthy, perhaps by having other characters within the story suggest that they’d been lied to, or indicating that certain parts of the information hadn’t been revealed yet, and certain folks had filled in the gaps with guesses and faith. I’ll reveal additional bits of information later, and let the players piece together their own understanding of the situation…and I guess this links into the ‘Mystery” question that was answered previously, but the whole aim is to avoid the variability of the dice and to feed the narrative through the information given instead. It’s not about how successfully any conflicts are resolved along the way, but understanding why those conflicts were there and how their resolution impacts the wider world.

…and everyone has an agenda.