What Feels Heroic

Players tend to feel like their characters are heroic when

• They figure out something they think the GM was trying to hide.
• They solve a puzzle using clues, not hints.
• They pick one of many paths to bypass opponents’ strength or capitalize on opponents’ weaknesses.

Players tend to feel like they’re being humored, railroaded, or spoon-fed or might be bullies when

• The GM tells them the one thing they can do next.
• They think they’ve figured out something but it turns out to be nothing at all, not even a trap, just a dead end.
• They fail at first and then the GM gives them something that lets them succeed.
• They defeat their opponents by straightforward application of might.

Puzzles, Mysteries, and Obstacles

I’ve found it helpful to distinguish between three kinds of situations requiring cleverness.

A Puzzle has an intentionally obscure solution. Some agent created a hard-to-parse situation as a test or passcode. Maybe it’s a defensive trap that only the knowing can bypass. Maybe it’s a secret that only the knowing can parse. Maybe it’s a way of distinguishing between the chosen ones who can solve and the counterfits who cannot. The common thread is that there is an in-game agent who created both the situation and a way around it for a reason.

A Mystery has an answer, but the answer is not directly available. Maybe no one ever knew it. Maybe it’s a conspiracy where the conspirators don’t want anyone to know. Maybe all who knew it are missing, sworn to secrecy, or otherwise inaccessible. Maybe it’s public knowledge, but so are many equally-compelling falsehoods. The common thread is that there is a truth but not someone to share it.

An Obstacle is too daunting to expect to handle by direction action. There’s no right answer or truth, but creativity or strategy is still needed to bypass it. Maybe it’s a crevasse too wide to leap or a wall too steep to climb. Maybe it’s a dragon too mighty to slay or a thief too speedy and stealthy to catch. The common thread is that the obvious path is blocked but some creative path may yet work.

These three have different kinds of set-up and different feels. I’ve had players that preferred one over the others or that disengaged if one they didn’t like came up. That said, I’ve rarely seen an RPG that didn’t have some of these, and all of them present a similar challenge to the GM: how do you ensure that the players find a solution so that the story can continue?

Hints

The most obvious way to ensure that players know how to solve a challenge is to tell them the solution. But if that is done directly then the challenge isn’t actually present: a mystery that the GM explains to the players isn’t a mystery at all. One step back from this is the hint.

A hint points towards a solution without saying the entire thing. And a hint is given GM to player, not world to character. If a GM emphasizes certain words, repeats certain descriptions, or weighs in on player deliberations then the GM is giving a hint.

Small hints can work out, but most often hints are unsatisfying. Deciding to give a hints suggests a lack of trust in the players, a lack of confidence as a GM, or a suggestion that the players are not intelligent enough to get it on their own. I’ve almost never seen a session with significant hinting that felt satisfying and fun.

As a GM, I generally find the urge to give hints arises when my preparation depended on the players solving something they are not on track to solve. The story can only continue if they get it, and they’re not getting it, so I have to help. One of the best safeguards against hint-giving I’ve found is to explicitly plan for how the story continued whether they solve it or not. If I know how the story continues when the puzzle stumps them, the mystery stays mysterious, or the obstacle can’t be passed then I feel less pressure to drop hints and erode the game experience.

Clues

Clues are like hints that are given in-world. They can be literally hints given by NPCs or left written in the world to be found. They can also be oddities in how NPCs speak of things, unexpected patterns in events, or oblique allusions. They can be secrets that are overheard, stolen, or otherwise acquired without the secret holders’ intent. They can be purchased or acquired using special resources. The key is that the characters, not their players, get the clues from the game world, not from the GM’s pity.

Figuring something out from clues feels very rewarding. The more clues are needed for the solution, the more clever the players feel: several clues that only make sense when put together or clues that lead to other clues can convey the sense that intelligence, not luck, was the deciding factor in solving the challenge.

But giving out clues is hard. To feel like clues instead of hints, they need to blend in with the rest of the narration, but if they blend in then players are likely to not even notice that they are clues. Placing many clues in the world can help increase the odds that PCs notice them, but noticing some helps them notice others and if there are too many they can feel like they aren’t so much out-smarting as they are seeing what is blatant. Clues are also hard to make feel authentic to the world while being the right mix of helpful but not giveaways. I’ve also found that clue leaving patterns that worked well for one group of players was inadequate for another group, suggesting that some level of personalization is needed in dropping clues.

I do not pretend to be an expert in leaving clues, but I have found three tips that are sometimes useful. When players are struggling I find that a quest for a clue is a useful technique, consisting of two parts: an overt unlooked-for clue that there’s a document or the like that might help but is hard to access, and then once they access it a significant clue towards the original challenge. When players reasoning appears derailed or stuck, adding a seemingly-unrelated clue that invalidates the incorrect reasoning can get them back on track without appearing too interventionist. When I wish to give a big clue or partial exposé, creating an in-world prop like a worn letter or diary fragment to give the players when their characters find it helps reinforce that this is an in-world clue, not a GM-pity hint.

All that said, clue-giving is both the ideal and quite tricky. I know of no shortcut path to being a good clue-giver other than experience.

Retcon

Retcon is short for retroactive continuity and refers to changing previously-established facts within a fictional world. In RPGs there are two kinds of retcon to consider. Retcons that invalidate past PCs experience are sometimes needed to deal with changes in the player roster or fix rule-breaking mistakes, but are distruptive to play and should be both minimized and discussed openly as a group. Retcons that invalidate only the GM’s internal narrative that explained and lay behind what the players saw are a different matter altogether and a valuable tool in working with puzzles, mysteries, and obstacles.

Let’s take as an example a riddle, a type of self-contained puzzle. Suppose the GM uses the first riddle of the sphinx, wording it thus: what has four legs in the morning, two legs in the afternoon, and three legs at night; with the intended answer a human. Suppose the players reply A seven-leg relay race delayed in the afternoon by a thunderstorm and finished after dark. That’s not the answer the GM had in mind, but it is consistent with all the information the players have. A GM-mind retcon would involve deciding on the fly if accepting that answer would break anything and if not, saying correct! and acting as if that had been the answer all along.

GM-mind retcons can work in many settings. Mysteries can have their solutions changed to align with the player’s deductions. Obstacles can yield to player creativity even though the GM intended a different path or an unseen obstacle to the player’s path. Combination locks can have the first combination the players try that makes sense for the owning NPC; traitors can become true and allies become traitors if the players have a compelling case for that suspicion; The history and geography of the world itself can be adjusted to align with player expectations and reasoning.

GM-mind retcons are a very powerful tool, but also risky. They rely on the GM correctly weighing if any existing clue runs counter to the retcon or not: if the GM accepts the player’s guess but then realizes that a previously-provided clue invalidates that guess then the world feels shoddy and inconsistent. They also can’t be done too often or the players start to get the sense that the world has no underlying truth and their every whim is realized.

One of my preferred ways of mitigating these risks is to take time during my prep to consider several possible solutions that are all consistent with the clues the players have thus far. During play when a situation arises where my answer could invalidate one or more of the options I chose to keep the one that I think will be most fun: if the players are feeling like things are easy I keep the one furthest from their current guesses but if they are growing frustrated I keep the one closest to those guesses.