How To Create A Tale of Suspense

If you’re not following the online comic, Basic Instructions, by Scott Meyer you’re missing out. Each comic is a four panel dialog to illustrate an ironic way to go about doing something. In a recent comic Scott explains how to create a Tale of Suspense. The gist of the joke is how to create a suspenseful tale, parodying that scene in Scream where the killer is in the house. But in setting up the joke the comic points out some good elements of story-telling that can be added to any game session. These points are more related to the experience of crafting a generally compelling tale, rather than actually adding suspense to an encounter.

Possible But Highly Unlikey

For an encounter (which for the purposes of discussion includes combat and role-playing encounters) to be suspenseful to characters, and hopefully to the players, it must be believable. The situation has to be grounded in the reality of the world. For example if the players are faced with an aberrant monster so alien to them that it may go unrecognized as a threat, then there won’t be any suspense. The second part to this that it has to be out of the ordinary. Players know how to handle a rust golem walking the halls of the Temple of Evilness, but that same golem walking the halls of the Good Emperor’s palace can provoke a wide variety or responses.

Familiar But Spun

Once again there is a big element of surprise here. In a Sarah Darkmagic campaign I played in, she created a Rumplestiltskin-like goblin NPC. The character was instantly familiar to us players. We knew that we would have to figure out the goblin’s name because an NPC told the party we had to find out the name of “a goblin.” We unsuccessfully tried to the defeat the situation in the regular fairy-tale ways. But it took us a long while to figure out was that his name was literally “A. Goblin” because we weren’t expecting it. It created a great game moment, but our DM’ll never be able to use that one again.

Solutions Create Worse Problems

This is a gaming trope if I’ve ever heard one! And it is for good reason. How many times have we defeated overlords only to discover the good guy we helped replace him turns out to be ten times as worse! And I don’t remember how many villages I’ve destroyed with volcanoes erupting from magic rings thrown into its crater. In a game of story one-upmanship between DMs and tired tropes, you can combine this point with the previous one. When players decide that the “good prince” is going to turn out to be worse than the evil dictator, they can kill him, and then have to escape the wrath of the royal family that mistakenly thinks the PCs murdered him without cause. And so on.

End With an Unanticipated Shock

A true unanticipated shock at the end of an adventure is the heroes retire in a world totally cleansed of evil :). But in the normal sense, unexpected endings move the story forward and are useful for stringing encounters together. For instance, after defeating a band of marauding gnolls, the party finds evidence that gnolls were holding hostages at their nearby camp. Or after a tough negotiation with the local lords, one of the Barons is so impressed by the party that he pledges full support. That would be a shock.

I guess each of these points are all aspects of the same thing, keep the story familiar enough to be relatable but fresh enough to be interesting. How to apply the situation to your own campaign will depend a lot on your players, and the story you’re trying to achieve. Just remember to use the unexpected sparingly. If done too often, it looses its effectiveness and you can slow down play when the party starts treating every NPC as a traitor, checks each 5′ square of dungeon for traps, and cremates all the bodies.