By Jason Campbell
We had an interesting scene in my weekly Numenera (TTRPG by Monte Cook Games) session. For background, there are four characters and the party isn’t optimized for combat as you might expect in other games. That’s partly due to the Numenera setting leaning heavily into exploration and I think it’s partly the current preference of my players. That doesn’t mean there will be no combat in the campaign, but that the campaign won’t be built exclusively around going from one combat to the next.
In this session the characters needed to trade with an NPC who had tasked them with retrieving a special purple powder from some underground caves. The characters had previously encountered and collected a bit of this powder in an earlier adventure. Since I thought of this as a small side quest to help advance the main plot I planned a basic 4 scene dungeon. There were 2 scenes with antagonistic creatures but the party had some clues to help them find the purple powder so it was entirely possible that they could avoid combat with good planning, or if they were feeling more adventurous they could encounter these creatures. They ended up in the final ancient room which included pedestals with 6 empty braziers and a 5’ x 8’ metal monolith with a grid pattern where 7 random squares were colored purple.
How the Scene Played Out
There were no creatures or traps to avoid in this final room. The players asked if there was a pattern to the purple squares – there wasn’t. They looked at the braziers which had some interesting markings, but nothing was related to their quest for the purple powder or the monolith. Eventually one character began to experiment to see if this monolith was a control panel pressing one of the non-purple squares which did nothing. Then they pressed a purple square and some purple powder came off on their finger. Another character investigated further and found that the purple grids looked exactly like the powder they’d collected earlier. The characters ended up scraping the powder off of the grids and collecting it to use in trade.
Two GM Lessons to Take From This Scene
As a GM I set this scene up as a curiosity. Maybe the characters will find more about the strange room later in the campaign, but in any case they successfully collected an item to use in trade for what they needed for the main story. What’s interesting is how the players entered the scene and saw the situation as an intricate puzzle.
There’s one moral to this story that all GMs eventually learn: players will rarely ever interpret a scene the same way that you did when you wrote it. Even if you look at what you’ve created and try to find an alternate way of seeing the scene, or maybe 3 other ways of seeing the scene, the players will find a 4th. There’s nothing wrong with that, it just means a GM should be ready to improvise.
There’s another interesting lesson here in that the players are – without knowing it – using meta knowledge. They see the situation and assume it’s a puzzle they need to solve because years of playing TTRPGs have taught them that situations such as this are always clever and possibly intricate puzzles. I would bet that if four real people were exploring a cave looking for purple powder and saw that same scene, they’d think “wow, this is great, we can just scrape it off and we’re already done!” But experienced TTRPG players have learned caution from the way games are traditionally designed. Note that I wasn’t trying to play on this and trick the players, I just wanted to have a pretty simple scene that might be used later.
What do you think? If players do have expectations about TTRPG adventures, should a GM play into those expectations? Should the GM subvert those expectations? Or do you have another idea?
About the Author
Meta knowledge or not, the players entered the scene with some expectations based on their previous game experience. You can either feel satisfied that you taught them an important lesson about playing games with you, or you can let that slight sense of disappointment in that expectation of a fun trap/puzzle not being met, and seek to fulfill it for them in the future. I don’t think there’s a way to escape the meta with experienced players, and I don’t know that there’s any *right* answer. It’s just figuring out the way you want to run it.