Maintaining the Horror Campaign – Cliffhangers

Deep Throat: Mister Mulder, why are those like yourself, who believe in the existence of extraterrestrial life on this Earth, not dissuaded by all the evidence to the contrary?

Mulder: Because, all the evidence to the contrary is not entirely dissuasive.

– from The X-Files episode, ‘Deep Throat’

“Oh, no thank you.  I don’t use cliffhangers.  They may be appropriate for television serials, but not for my game.  When my players are done, it’s time to pass out loot and calculate experience points.  Whenever I end the game on a cliffhanger, it feels contrived.  Anyhow, at the end of the night, everyone’s ready for sleep.  Who wants to listen to the game master drone about what’s gonna happen next week, when it’s gonna happen next week?”

It’s true.  It’s tough to make cliffhangers sound natural.  And they fight against the players’ inclination to wrap everything up.  At game’s end, players want to feel that they made progress while they pack books in their bags.  They want to check and see if there’s another slice of pizza in the box they can grab on the way out the door.  They want to drive home, knowing they killed a murderous dragon, and that Kalitasia, the City of One Hundred Spires, is a safer place because of their heroic actions.

There’s nothing wrong with giving your players what they want, and, in your game mastering career, you will have many chances to do that.  In the meantime, however, there are a number of very good reasons why you should work to deny your players the satisfaction of a perfect ending.  For example:

Perfect heroic endings are boring.  You can only end so many adventures with the sentences “And the bad guy falls to the ground dead.  You find N+(N/4) gold and gain N+(N/4) experience points, where N is equal to the amount and number of gold and experience points you got last week.”  Tying up every loose end every week makes your game predictable.  Keep that up, and your players will equate roleplaying to an unnecessary exercise, since it always yields the same results.

Perfect heroic endings give the players nothing to think about between games.  And if your player’s aren’t thinking about the game outside of the game, they’re less invested in the game, and thus, less invested in their characters and your world.  How are your players supposed to take your world’s characters, monsters and plots seriously when they know that, whatever they do, everything will clean itself up by the end of the adventure.

Perfect heroic endings give the impression that players can enter and leave the game whenever they want.  While it’s important that players feel welcome to skip a session or two, or leave for large gaps of time and return, player’s shouldn’t feel that they can join and leave a game at their leisure.  Few things are more disruptive to an ongoing story than the need to rehash that story to players who remain unaffected by it.

Perfect heroic endings are  creativity killers.  A challenging cliffhanger will give you something to wrap your head around between games, and will sometimes write next week’s story for you.  Good cliffhangers can be great writing prompts, providing you with a leaping point to build successive adventures around.  Each time you end a game night without a lead-in to your next story, you rebuild your adventure from scratch.  Again.

Perfect heroic endings give you no insight on your players, and their likes.  When you toss a cliffhanger at your players, you can gauge their reactions.  Let’s say, in your most recent game, that the player’s invaded a crypt, destroyed an undead army, and killed the necromancer that raised them.  But as your players turn to leave, a titanic fist slams, shattering the granite wall next to them, revealing a furious mummified giant.  What sort of reaction does this invoke in the players?  Are they eager to fight this new threat?  Are they mystified as to why a giant mummy was hiding behind the wall this whole time?  Are they groaning in disapproval as the Game Master throws yet one more meaningless monster in their path?  If you began next week’s adventure with this detail, you’d be stepping into the scenario blind, making assumptions about how your characters will react, and responding on the fly if you were wrong.  When you present the next scenario as a cliffhanger, though, you get the other player’s reactions up front, and can tailor a stronger adventure in the upcoming week.

Perfect heroic endings lead to awkward beginnings.  I don’t know about you, and your party, but every time I get together with my group, there’s an awkward gap between when we’re talking about roleplaying, and when we’re roleplaying.  It’s hard to get into character, and it’s even harder to do so when the players and the plot start in limbo.  If, however, last week’s adventure ended on a cliffhanger, then the players have a cue to work with.  Did a thief steal the adventurers’ horses at the end of last weeks’ adventure?  Then your players won’t give you the opportunity to feel awkward about roleplaying, since they’ll be itching to hunt that thief down.

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Cliffhangers are valuable tools that help transition between adventures and keep the players invested from game to game.  The problem with cliffhangers, though, is that game masters feel awkward and hamfisted, especially if the game master is inexperienced at capturing the player’s imagination and attention at the end of a long night.  Cliffhangers ask game masters to cut the flow of the game, jump into the future, see where the game is headed, show a glimpse, then end the game, leaving your players with a number of questions that you refuse to answer.  This requires a combination of separation, foresight and discipline.  Even the best of leaders struggle with these qualities.  What chance do you have at showing those qualities in your little Saturday night pick up game?

It needn’t be that hard, though.  There are many ways to sneak a smidgen more plot into the end of your adventure.  And, if you’re aware of your options, adding a cliffhanger to your game should be as simple a choice as deciding which shirt you’ll wear today.

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The Cutaway

Imagine your game is structured like a TV series, and that your regular Friday night game is a single episode.  This particular episode features a terrific fight between the main characters and a posse of outlaws, set to overthrow the town.  At the end of the show, the city fends off its invaders, and the characters celebrate their victory.  The camera focuses on a campfire, zooms in, then zooms out.  We find ourselves at the heart of a mercenary camp.  An injured man rides into camp on his horse, topples to the ground, picks himself up and tells the outlaw boss the bad news.  The outlaw boss nods, grabs the injured messenger by the neck, and tosses him into a wolf pen.  While the messenger screams, the boss yells to his men, “Saddle up!  We’ve got us a pack of heroes to kill by dawn.”

The cutaway is what many people think of when we talk about cliffhangers.  It’s also a major reason why many game masters refuse to use cliffhangers.  There are no players in that scene!  Unless you’re a brilliant actor, that scene’s going to be tough to represent.

There are ways to do it without arguing with yourself, though.  The players, for example, could play minor non-player characters for you to bounce the scene off of.  Or you can hand out a small script for a couple of players to act out.  Or you could give the non-player characters to the players, give them a little direction, and let them ad lib their way through the scene, altering the destiny of the story on their whim.  With a little care, your players’ favorite part of the night could be the ‘anything goes’ last five minutes of the game.

The Continuing Mystery

For this style of cliffhanger, let’s look at the theme TV series for this article.  At first blush, The X-Files sounds like a terrible show to express the value of cliffhangers.  The entire first season of The X-Files, and the majority of episodes after that were episodic in content, focusing on one mystery at a time, and never advancing the over-arching plot of the series.  But, despite the fact that Scully and Mulder were stuck in a never-ending cycle of Scooby-Doo mysteries, the writers for The X-Files kept a devoted following wanting and watching.  And the most devious tool in their belt was the promise that ‘The Truth Is Out There’.

In The X-Files Universe, there’s an evil government conspiracy to hide some terrible truth from the general public.  But what is that mystery?  Are there aliens among us, and our government is protecting us from the panic that would follow if we knew about them?  Or is the government reverse engineering alien technology from downed UFOs to create an ultimate weapon?  Or is all of the weirdness in the X-Files a smoke screen for more sinister activities, dangling the wrong set of hoops in front of conspiracy theorists for them to dive through.  The audience is never given a clear picture of the puppeteer pulling Scully and Mulder’s strings.  Whenever the show offers an explanation and opens a door, another door is slammed and locked, leading viewers further entrenched in mystery.  Each episode, even the ones that contained no relevance to the greater mystery, represented a small piece of the puzzle.  The sheer existence of a continuing mystery gave importance to episodes which would otherwise be considered filler.

The Continuing Mystery cliffhanger doesn’t need to be as obvious as a cutaway scene.  It’s best used as a gentle reminder that while the players made progress, they’re far from solving the crisis that called them together.  Folded up letters found in a fallen enemy’s pocket, a disturbing mark on the skin of a clutch of tribal warriors, or even something as small as an out of place comment from an ally at the end of an adventure can be enough to stop the players from handing out high fives, and get them thinking about what they need to do to finish this merry-go-round of violence find themselves on.

The Riddle

Not every cliffhanger needs to be steeped in plot.  Sometimes, you just want to give your players something to mull over between adventures.  Riddles can be as substantial as a difficult to answer philosophical question from an otherwise unnoticed non-player character (“If The Daiymyo is as rich as they say, then why does he invest so much energy in claiming our little fishing village?”) to an actual physical riddle that’s important to next week’s adventure (for example, a complicated jumble that, when solved, will spell out a secret password.  Or a nonogram, that, when filled out, reveals another section of the player’s map.)

Riddles may seem to have no value to the plot, and can therefore be deemed as frivolous by some game masters.  But busy work endears players and keeps them involved in the game world during the 97% of the week they aren’t taking an active part in it.  It also gives many socially reticent, yet industrious players a chance to shine.  Keep feeding your players a stream of more and more challenging riddles to solve between adventures, and the players might find their group’s otherwise ‘useless’ over-thinker is now the party’s MVP.

Failure

For some players, success encourges them toward more success.  But for many others, nothing incentivizes like failure.  The allure of the underdog is potent.  It even grabs a hold of overachievers like Steve Jobs and Donald Trump, who both framed themselves as underdogs, when they were anything but.  The ‘riches to rags to riches’ narrative contains a strong pull.  We feel like we’re rooting for people who deserve to retain their previous status, while giving ourselves hope that our own lives can parallel that same struggle.

Since this article series is focused on horror campaigns, this form of cliffhanger should almost be guaranteed at some point in your campaign.  We talked about setbacks in Maintaining the Horror Campaign – Player Death and You, and most of the advice there continues here.  If you want your game to keep a sense of horror in it, you can’t let your players maintain a linear growth.  That sort of dependability inspires confidence, not fear.  It’s okay to take stuff away from your players and let them win it back (or occasionally, keep it away from them forever.)  But don’t over do it.  This is, after all, a game.  Players play to have fun and gain a sense of accomplishment, not to have a +1 carrot eternally dangled in front of their faces.

Up the Ante

What you thought would be a quick sortie is now a drag through the dirt, out and out fight.  Even worse, we’re closing in on 10pm, and the players have work in the morning.  What do you do?

Make it worse.  If you don’t think the fight will wrap up in a reasonable amount of time, go over the top, and make it obvious.  If the players are holding their own, then a stable of the bad guy’s reinforcements crash the fight.  If the players are pinned down, back them up with a squadron of the town watch who stumbled into the fight, or ‘accidentally’ uncover a crate full of healing potions.  If both sides are an even match, spill another conflict through the middle of it, like a mudslide full of giant snapping turtles swamping the battlefield, or a collapsing bridge full of orphans that both the heroes and the anti-heroes must respond to.  Switch gears, change the nature of the fight, then call it a night.  This trick works wonders, and can turn an unfortunate and exhausting encounter into an exciting challenge to mull over on the way home.

Call It In

Stuck on a sticky plot sticking point?  Not know how to resolve it?  Then don’t.  Present your problem to the players as part of the story.  Have one of the non-player characters talk about the complication out loud, then end the game.  Or, if you can’t find a way to explain the particular plot problem in game, end the game for the night, then explain the problem to the players out of the game.  If it’s a tough enough nut that the game master can’t crack it, then it should keep the players occupied, too.

And stay attentive.  Observant game masters will sometimes pick up on player disagreements on the plot problem, and can glean an outside take on the situation.  Feel free to take advantage of this banter, and pretend that the players’ solution was the correct answer all along.  After all, your job as game master isn’t to maintain control and feel superior over your players for outwitting them with a master plot.  It’s okay for the players to ‘outsmart’ you, or, at least, maintain the illusion that they are outsmarting the game.

Keep in mind, though, that when you point the problem out to your players, they’re going to expect you to come up with an answer to your own problem, and soon.  Most times, that’s good.  It gives you a deadline to work with.  At the very least, it will force you to come up with a poor answer, as opposed to letting the problem fester with no answer at all.

Be ‘Spontaneously’ Prepared

This isn’t so much a cliffhanger, as it is a way to be prepared to include more cliffhangers.  Most game masters have an idea of what they expect their adventure to be, either written down, or in their head.  They know adventures sometimes go long, and plan for potential contingencies.  At the end of the night, if they think to add a cliffhanger, it’s often a teaser for the next scene that picks up next week, or an allusion to the greater story continuing in the background.  Milestones further into a story, however, aren’t complete thoughts, so game masters often doesn’t use them.

But constant allusions to the greater story that the players will never interact with can be annoying.  And always teasing the next scene can get dry.  Further, what does the game master do when the game runs long, and they ran out of material?  Up until the point where you stop the story abruptly, the players may never know the game master is stretching.  When the game stops with a snap, however, the walls of the adventure become visible.  The game world suddenly contains limits.

One way to prevent this is to keep a ready list of back-up cliffhangers in your notes.  They can either take the form of pre-planned random encounters, ready to tease now, and play out later.  Or they can take the form of plot points that can be moved into the plot of any next week’s adventure.  The great thing about these random encounters and plots is that you don’t need to fully cook them.  If you’re stuck for a cliffhanger, you can open your notebook to your scratch sheet and toss out any half-baked idea, then end the game.  You now have a full week to figure out why the Mayor is running messages back and forth for an evil cult.  Enjoy.

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