I think you need to distinguish between what the player knows and what the character knows, which is the essence of good roleplaying. If I sign up to a zombie apocalypse game then my character won’t know what the hell is happening, and I will play him accordingly so he can figure out what to do.

However, if I signed up to a light-hearted looking romance game (not that I would, but this is hypothetical) and then suddenly loads of zombies arrived or nukes started falling then as a player I would be pretty annoyed, and would probably just quit there and then.

In essence, trust your players to understand what they are getting into. By all means throw a few curve balls along the way, but totally weird surprises simply risk a player exodus, leaving you with a wacky idea and no players.

 our games  have   have a known plot... things are discovered... hidden bad guys..traitors, surprise  allies.. and..whatever  i can make from the player's  RP.

 i don't know wht anyone  would want to know what's going on, unless they 'earned' that knowledge in RP...it  would be like  reading the   last chapter of a book?

Would it make a difference if I said "There will be a major twist to the game, but I want to keep it a surprise.  It will (or will not, whichever is the truth) involve a genre change."

I'd want to know the genre the game is really going to be. Don't care what genre the introduction is in, I want to know what genre a game I'm going to be potentially investing years into is going to be in.

Otherwise you're potentially wasting every one's time, and the chance is very high that we'll have a major reset of players.

In reply to donsr (msg # 7):

Not like reading the last chapter at all. If you buy a Stephen King or James Herbert book you know that you are going to get horror/thriller/mystery, even though you don’t know how the story will play out. You might expect a twist, but probably won’t spot it if the author has done their job properly.

But if you buy a King/Herbert book and the whole story is a period romance novel then your going to be very disappointed, and probably won’t finish the book.

In reply to mox (msg # 8):

Would still want to know the end genre. If it is zombies, superheroes, etc. then I can make a decision on my long term commitment. If the game suddenly goes in a weird direction I don’t like then I will probably quit. Agree that I would be more flexible on the starting genre as that would only be short term.

there is a differance  between knowing the genre   and knowing what you think the end will be....lets face it?  tons of players out there jump into games..then lose interest, and bail, blaming it on  not knowing this or that..

 in the  end?..join a  sci-fi game..expect sci-fi...join a fantasy game  expect fantasy... if you want to  bring   one genre  into another, that's  fine?..But don't expect purists to stick around.

People don't like bait & switch games, in general. In a table top game where you know each other and the real point is spending time with friends I am more partial to it but on rPoL?

I don't want to spend an hour pouring my soul into a character backstory and connections only to find out it all gets tossed out the window. I don't want to spend half an hour tinkering with adventuring gear only for it all to get tossed out right from the start.

I ran a Skulls & Shackles game and I told players right off the bat "You don't get starting equipment except for a primary weapon, a back up weapon, and anything else vital to the class (spell component pouch, holy symbol etc.)

It kept the surprise of "hey, you've been shanghaied" but nobody wasted an hour creating the perfect dungeon crawling tool kit only to have pirates dump their gear overboard on the first day.

In general when I advertise for a game I lay out all my long term plans. In a vampire game the players started out as mortals but I straight up told them they would (eventually) be Embraced so they could factor that into their character arcs accordingly.

The dice provide enough RNG elements, we don't need a chaotic GM flipping genres at the drop of a hat.

Works for me, twist away.

Only if I know what the genre is changing to.

There is a vast difference between:

"You start as boring work-a-day modern plebs, but will be catapulted into adventure" and,
"You start as boring work-a-day modern plebs, but will be transported into a Fantasy Heartbreaker" and,
"You start as boring work-a-day modern plebs, but will be transported into a Fantasy Dungeon Crawl" and,
"You start as boring work-a-day modern plebs, but will be kidnapped by aliens into a Star Wars romp" and,
"You start as boring work-a-day modern plebs, but will be kidnapped by aliens into a Transhuman Space political campaign" and,
"You start as boring work-a-day modern plebs, but will be swept away into a Fifty Shades of Eyes Wide Shut boardroom and bedroom politicking".

Vast, vast differences




He (and a bunch of other people) gets it.
This message was last edited by the user at 03:52, Sat 25 Apr 2020.

In reply to mox (msg # 1):

Nah, I'm good.  No need to tell me in advance.

As a GM it's part of your job to surprise me, and to challenge my characters.  By revealing a genre change in advance you are spoiling the surprise, and giving me the chance to create a character who is designed to better suit that genre (thus reducing the challenge).

As a player, I get more enjoyment out of adapting to an unexpected twist, even with (especially with!) a character who is not tailor made to excel in the new, post-twist environment.


See, I don't want to know that my boring work-a-day modern pleb needs to have somehow  learned the skill set of a Conan, or a Han Solo.  More fun for me taking a boring work-a-day modern pleb and managing to use the skills he does have to somehow fit into a new environment.

So I guess this is another one of those situations where it all comes down to personal taste - an unexpected genre switch will work fine for some players, but not for others.  Neither group is wrong.

Best way to lessen the problem is to recruit from people you know and who like the genre you're aiming for, or recruit from games of that genre.

It probably won't completely avoid it, but that's the only solution I can see short of ruining the surprise.

And...there you go.

And therein lies the solution: Make sure the game advertisement clearly states that there will be a change to an unknown genre.

Those that are ok with that will apply, those that aren't won't. That should remove most of the risk of having all your players drop out suddenly.

I would say that ruins the surprise anyway. Revealing that there is a big twist takes a lot of the surprise out of it so why not just be up front in the first place?

Some surprise is better than none, and too much surprise means adding a whole lot of new players who aren't going to be surprised because it's already happened.

Well, you could always do everything in private.


One solution could be for everyone to start solo up to the surprise. Only then do you merge those who remain into the group. Not an optimal solution to be sure but...

  going back to the premise of all of this.

  If you had it your  game plan. That   the character s would/could  end up in a different time, era,  dimension ect ect.. there would have to be somehting in the game description

 "..rumor has it, that those who entered were never seen in these realms  again... the few who came back talked  about ( flashes of light...Gas...clouded ..whatever), before thier  conmrades  Vanished.."

 In game, your  'jump off' area would have  someone, or a couple someones, who own an Inn...or  just happened to stop by the Inn you stopped by..or?.. shared your fire on a cold  night, and  told of the same thing...

 Now?..this won't take away the time  wasted on backround and   equipping people..but  it will give the players  a  solid 'why'  in game...and  warn the people as they looked at your  Ad.

This is why I'd only do this if I had a core group I knew would stay.

You could also make the argument you're going to lose players anyway because of RPOL attrition, and just go for it, with maybe a few more than you would traditionally start with to cover the people who don't like the new way the game is going.

I'm just not sure the twist works as well online regardless, because you won't get everyone's honest first reaction to it - some people may react immediately, but others will read the twist post, log off, go to sleep, come back in a day or two, and then give their reaction. It might work reasonably well in a live chat environment, but not sure about play by post.

Ultimately, it all depends on how invested you are in a sudden twist, because that changes how I'd approach it.

Personally, I think it'd be better to let players know you're planning on 'a big surprise' when you start the game, at the very least.

I am very picky about the games I play, as there are certain things that interest me and other things that do not. I despise games/movies/books that start in 'this world' and take characters into 'that world'.  Even in the Ravenloft setting, which I love, I prefer the characters to be native of the realm.

It's no different, to me, than telling players you're going to run a GURPS game and then a page of posts in, switching to D&D.  Surprise!

I suppose you might have some people who like those kinds of surprises, but those who don't not only will quit, but they just might decide to give the GM a wide berth in the future so as to not get caught up in another surprise.
This message was last edited by the user at 14:54, Sat 25 Apr 2020.

  the  attrition thing is  a point made for any game. I bump my ads  each week.. i get some who don't make it past the interview... i get folks that say " hey, this  isn't what i thought" ( those are the  ones who have manners..some just ghost )

 but?  the ones that stay are  normally in for the long haul.

 So?  By telling them somehting can happen, if you didn't want to 'spill the beans' gives them the option to  sign up or no?

You mistake my objection.  I'm not saying my work-a-day pleb needs to start as competent as Owen Pitt, mild mannered accountant who in the first encounter fights off and kills a werewolf (Monster Hunter International, Larry Correia).

I'm saying I want to know if my work-a-day pleb is going to end up in a Wild and Wooly Kitchen Sink Fantasy Dungeon Crawl (D&D) or a Star Trek 'serious bizniz' diplomacy campaign, these are two vastly different genres and I have vastly different tolerances for them.  Likewise if I'm BSed into a Fifty Shades of Eyes Wide Shut I will be highly, highly, highly annoyed.


I've been in B&S games that went very well and in B&S games that ended the group, but mostly I've seen B&S games that petered out because the majority of the Players had no desire for the genre they were switched into (or were burned out on it and were excited to try the new genre... which switched right back to the tired old genre they no longer were interested in).  I've come, over time, to have no tolerance for the shenanigans of a B&S game.





Exactly.  I keep a list.  GM does something to end up on the list?  I probably won't bother with them ever again (some infractions are more forgivable than others, some call for immediate bolding, italizing, and underlining).

Admittedly, here, the majority of the names are on the list for "Can't run a game for more than 30 days before abandoning it and starting a new game".  If they hit the list for that reason more than once they get bolded.
This message was last edited by the user at 17:11, Sat 25 Apr 2020.

I am definitely in the camp that I would not want a genre-changing surprise.  If warned in advance that there was going to be such a surprise, but I don't get to know what it will change to, then I'm probably going to pass on the game.  It might be to horror or zombies or some other genre that holds no interest for me, so I won't bother.

If the game were advertised as a game of the destination genre, with the caveat that we are starting in a different world as a prologue, and the critical character development is how your characters from starting world adapt to their new surroundings, that could be quite interesting.  I'm doing something a little like that right now.  It's a medieval fantasy world but part of the RTJ required players to say how they were captured by slavers.  However, I made it clear that the escape from slavers was just a prologue, and the real game would start with that event complete.

It was partly to avoid the trope of "you meet in a bar," and it also worked to give the players who got their character ready in one day something to do while we waited for the other players to finish.  My scenario is not going to work when I have to introduce new players if I have attrition, but the universe portal idea could -- just another portal that opens randomly and the now-experienced PC's adopt the new ones because the know what a trauma the transition is.

Ok.  I'm liking this idea more and more.  The characters' starting points could be different.  As a player, you get to say what sort of world you come from, modern-day, science fiction, whatever, and all the characters are pulled into the destination universe.  Maybe my next game.

Back to your question:  No, I don't want a major surprise, especially not without warning.  With some warning, maybe, but I would have to know the destination genre or I would just pass.
This message was last edited by the user at 17:27, Sat 25 Apr 2020.

I would side with the "neither side is wrong" opinion, but understand that there are players on both sides. that being said, sometimes it's not even about the player.

for example, i once played a dnd game table top. it was a traditional dnd game, started off low level. we slew the goblins. we tamed the hydra. we bashed the trolls. then the DM decided he wanted to try planescape and take us to different planes of existence. with literally any of the other characters i had made up to that point, i would have been fine with the decision. however, i had made a barbarian that was extremely opposed to anything supernatural or evil. i'm talking, if we had shown up in sigil (a planar city where you could easily find humans, demons, and angles walking down the same road) he would have instantly attacked the first demon he saw and likely gotten the entire party killed. i didn't want to quit the group, or the game, but it killed the enjoyment for me and i was just going through the motions for quite a long time until we stopped jumping planes. i loved the character, but he was completely wrong for traveling to other planes.

so, i would suggest letting players know there could potentially be major changes to the game including genre changes. you should also pay attention during character creation, though. make sure your players are not creating characters that will only work, psychologically, in the original genre. you could try asking questions about the characters like "how might you react if you were suddenly surrounded by demons", "how would you feel if you suddenly lost all magic", or "would you be able to handle leaving your world behind". also, and this is perhaps the most important, be sure you're playing in a system that allows growth. i can't imagine how bad it would suck if someone created a wizard, then the genre changed and all magic went away, and the system was such that the wizard was unable to adapt and learn new things to compensate. so if you're playing a DND like system, allow the wizard to RP through learning new skills in the high tech and magic-less new genre (thereby slowly replacing his wizard levels with something new that lets him or her do stuff in the new genre).

In reply to mox (msg # 1):

Of course I would wake to know.

If it's an idea I think it's cool, or at least workable, I can play and contribute in a way that makes it even better: follow up on clues, not kill key NPCs, walk into traps, etc. My roleplaying can involve much more dramatic irony. When the twist comes, I can roleplay my character's confusion and frustration without being confused and frustrated myself.

This also frees up the GM from being annoyingly cagey and vague, or from having to block PC actions that might accidentally "ruin" the plan.

If it's something I don't think is cool, then I can say so up front, rather than having it sprung on me. I have never been pleasantly surprised in an RPG. I'd rather not waste a lot of time playing a game that I'm going to regret playing, especially since a GM with a secret is likely to be closed-mouthed and not focused on building trust at the table.