[UA] Lingo, and My failure

[Royal Minister of Stuff]

Oh, Chance, don't be so hard on yourself.  

That's Tim's job.


Seriously, though, if this is going to be a discussion
about Out-of-Player* Knowledge then I have to firmly
straddle the line.

I actually enjoy using knowledgeable players.  In Call
of Cthulhu, for instance, the game seems much more
chilling if the players know who the hell the great
old ones are.  I played CoC recently with a new GM and
new players.  The GM had read the rules backward and
forward, but very little of the mythos stories.  The
players had never read a word of Lovecraft in their
life.  The problem, of course, is that CoC, once a
game with a twisted little sense of humor, got REAL
SERIOUS in its last couple editions, so the poor
rookie GM took all that crap about "keeping the mythos
a mystery" way too seriously.

In the first games, when the Investigators knew
nothing about Cthulhu or his buddies, the players were
just bored stiff.  They bitched and moaned and it just
didn't make sense to them.  I tried to alternately
lighten the mood and inject a sense of urgency
whenever I caught a whiff of Deep One or
Vampire-in-the-Cellar (from that one frickin' scenario
in every frickin' book which I've played over and over
in some sort of twisted living mandala), but the GM
damn near lynched me when I started to push the out of
character/in character knowledge envelope.

Once players got a taste of the mythos, things changed
a little and they've slowly started getting better,
but that enmity lingers, sullenly, in the background
of the group.  Cthulhu rising from the deep is a lot
more scary when you know who Cthulhu is.  Graveyard
robberies are more disturbing if you've heard of
ghouls (and you're more likely to do something
foolishly entertaining, like checking for tunnels.)

I think that goes for some, but not all, of the
elements in UA.  The sleepers, for instance, work well
(especially for players coming from a WW background
-they're used to dealing with silencers.)  Since the
sleepers are only a minor cabal in UA, that makes the
overblown panic most players experience at the first
hint of Hushhush activity both entertaining to the old
hands and exciting to everyone.  They might even go to
the police (in my games, Cletus is always a local
cop.)

On the otherhand, my group is full of rotten,
backstabbing bastards.  We ALL want to be GM, so we
rotate once a week, trying to be fair.  The spirit of
this is that you put your best foot forward in other
people's games so they'll put their best feet forward
in your own.  The reality is that each of us has bad
days, days when we're ready to try any dirty trick we
can think of to trip up someone else.  That includes
some very disruptive and underhanded "leaks" of player
knowledge (something for which I have a definite
advantage, considering how many Call of Cthulhu
supplements I own, have read and have played through. 
I'm trying to get the GM onto Delta green, but he's in
love with the 1920s.)

So, there's the rub.  I think metagaming techniques
are useful and they usually work.  I think horror is
enhanced by knowledge as much as terror is enhanced by
mystery.

I can imagine Chance being somewhat disruptive, but
I'll bet it's more youthful zest than cruel intent.

Of course, a few hours in a closet with a ferret
scrabbling at the door tends to make people think
twice about revealing the true agenda of Lilly Morgan.


*Originally this was a typo, but then I thought, no,
my subconscious needs its two cents worth, too.

=====
-- Rp Bowman, Royal Minister of Stuff
The Electronic Nation of Yokeltania:
http://www.geocities.com/yokeltania/

__________________________________________________
Do You Yahoo!?
Yahoo! Sports - live college hoops coverage
http://sports.yahoo.com/

_______________________________________________
UA mailing list
UA at lists.uchicago.edu
http://lists.uchicago.edu/mailman/listinfo/ua