The Mechanism Slide

It can be very difficult to run a campaign when you simply don’t know the rules, but that’s the way Shadows in the Fog works. You and the group will make up the rules as you go along. The danger is that you will start to slide into mechanism without realizing it. Since that’s the comfortable way to do things, you may not notice until it’s too late.

Avoid any sort of repetitive magical acts. Lots of players want to know that “My guy can do this thing, and it works like this, and it has this effect.” Discourage this at both a meta-level and a character level. At the character level, one way to do this is to get other Trumps involved, so that the player can’t entirely foresee the situation or correct for all variables. Make sure everyone realizes that there are a lot of variables, and make those have meanings and effects.

Discourage repetitive Concessions. This is easiest through social pressure: “Oh come on, you did that ten minutes ago! How many handkerchiefs are you going to drop?”

Be sure that NPCs run by you have similar variation in their magic. This is actually more difficult and complex than it seems. First of all, you don’t want to waste too much effort figuring out all the details of a relatively minor NPC, and the easy solution is to have a single effect that works X way. Second, if the NPCs seem to have magic all over the place, the players may interpret this incorrectly: it may seem as though the NPCs know what they’re doing, and are really just too tough for the PCs, and the whole thing isn’t fair. The problem here is that the PCs and players don’t know what a given NPC intends, so when an effect occurs, the tendency is to assume that this was what the NPC had in mind. Consider having a bizarre effect that clearly is not what was intended, for example one that trashes the NPC. Consider also setting up a situation in which an NPC explains how and why his magic is consistent and powerful, then demonstrates it—and then it goes terribly wrong. Ahh, irony.

Encourage players to come up with their own special ways of doing things, and play them out. This will entail that each player sees the others doing things that do not seem to make a lot of sense, but work. Eventually, people may start borrowing concepts from each other, and developing increasingly intricate and bizarre personal approaches to magic. This is a good thing.

-- ChrisLehrich^? - 24 Dec 2004

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