Everything I Need To Know About GMing I Learned From “The X-Files”
Every
artist has their own personal and particular set of inspirations and resources that
they go back to time and time again when they need a reminder of why they’re
making art in the first place or just a little creative boost. GMs (who are artists, no matter what
anyone else says about them—hmm, maybe this is a topic for another OOC) are no
different. They simply tend to draw
their inspirations from different places, and to be much less shy about
plagiarism (since there’s really no penalty, even if your players find
out). There seems to be a list of these
sources that most GMs familiarize themselves with, and which always provoke
groans from players: Grimtooth’s Traps, Paranoia, the Book of Madness, the
collected works of H.P. Lovecraft. Or it
could be that you base your GMing style off the storytelling-focused
commandments set down by White Wolf. Or
maybe you just do your best to imitate the style of a GM you had way back when
who ran the best games you’d ever played in.
Either way, a large component of the work of any GM is invariably an
amalgamation of those influences, experiences, and desires. The really good GMs are the ones who make
that knowledge more than the sum of its parts by adding their own special
touches.
Though
my own GMing career has been much shorter than many others’, once I began it about
a year and a half ago, it didn’t take me long to realize that this was the part
of roleplaying that was truly meant for me.
And, little by little, I began to learn from my mistakes as well as my
successes and to accumulate my own collection of influences and inspirations. I won’t belabor you with the full list, but
I will tell you this: While other GMs may think of their campaigns as a war, a
novel, or “just a bunch of guys sitting around a table,” I have always
thought of my campaigns, whether I played in them or ran them, as a TV series. Think about it: It happens every week, it
focuses on the lives and adventures of a recurring cast of characters, each
weekly session is usually self-contained (except sweeps month cliffhangers!) but
also combine to tell a larger story—and if it’s any good, once you get started
it may be very difficult to stop “watching.”
In my case, you even have to wait all summer for anything new to happen
(all the while “re-running” past highlights in your head). I even refer to each session I run as an “episode.” It just makes sense to me, but I didn’t even
realize I was thinking that way until recent events opened my eyes to it.
Sunday,
May 19, 2002: After nine years on the air, “The X-Files” airs its last episode. I actually watch very little TV as a rule, but
for almost that entire time I almost never failed to take an hour out of my week
to sit down and watch the continuing adventures of Mulder and Scully (even rearranging
my schedule accordingly if need be). As
I watched the two-hour finale and its mostly futile efforts to wrap up so many
dangling plot hooks and conspiratorial mythology, I came to a realization: “The
X-Files” has had perhaps a greater impact on the way I GM games than any other
influence in my past. And it seems
only fitting that I should do my best to memorialize this excellent show by
sharing some of the lessons it has taught me with you. So, without further ado, I bring you
Everything I Need To Know About GMing I Learned From “The X-Files”:
·
Simple is good. Can’t you just picture Chris
Carter walking into the FOX offices and saying, “So there’s these two FBI
agents, right? And he’s a believer, and
she’s a skeptic, and they go around investigating paranormal crimes and stuff. ” And can’t you picture the studio executives
looking back at him and saying, “And?” It’s
a simple premise for a show—deceptively simple, in fact. You’d think it would get old really quickly,
but over the course of nine years it never did. Lesson: It’s okay to start with a formula—as long as it’s
an entertaining formula!—and never lose sight of that, whether it’s dungeon
crawls, nights of courtly intrigue, secret espionage missions, or monsters-of-the-week. You can jazz it up later on if it starts to
get old to anyone. Which brings me to
my next point:
·
It’s all about the characters. Let’s face
it: No one really watched “The X-Files” because it had particularly good plots. Sure, every so often they’d come up with
something really creative that took you by surprise, but generally the non-mythology
episodes (I’ll get to those others in a minute) were pretty linear: Someone
gets killed before the opening credits, the agents investigate, Mulder has some
crazy theory that turns out to be right, Scully refutes it with technobabble, it
kills a few more times before they track it down and try to either kill or
capture it, but it escapes/survives and sometimes comes back during sweeps
month and the whole thing ends on kind of a creepy, quasi-philosophical note. So why did I keep coming back to watch it
week after week? Because I loved the
characters, their personalities, and their unique and often clashing ways of
looking at the world. I cared about
them and became involved in their lives.
The writers could come up with the lamest monsters ever (and some of
them were pretty bad) but I never once turned off the TV early, because I knew
if I did I’d be walking out on two characters who had come to feel like old
friends. Lesson: Encourage your
players to make interesting and three-dimensional characters, and it’ll make
your job a lot easier. You can get away
with some pretty half-assed plots when you can’t think of anything better, but
your players will bear with you because they love their characters (and you, in
turn, will be entertained by their mad acting skills or lack thereof).
·
It
follows from this that details make the character. Mulder and Scully such entertaining
characters, but not for the reasons you might think. Their backgrounds, their philosophies, and even their
personalities are actually all pretty pedestrian. They are made interesting by the details that a lesser show might
not have bothered to define. Mulder is
an FBI agent. So what? There are dozens of other FBI agents on
TV. What makes him different from
them? Mulder eats sunflower seeds
incessantly. Mulder does not actually
own a bed, preferring to sleep on his couch.
Mulder has fish but can’t seem to keep them alive for more than a week
at a time. Mulder watches a lot of
porno. Mulder has a UFO poster on the
wall of his office that reads “I WANT TO BELIEVE.” Mulder is secretly in love with his partner. Now a portrait of a true individual
begins to emerge. Lesson: Characters
are often made interesting by their preferences, their secrets, their quirks,
and other details your players might not consider in the rush to come up with a
concept. Ask them to define these
quirks while making their characters, and reward those who incorporate them
into gameplay. It makes the game more
fun.
·
Everything goes better with sexual tension. Let me state for the record that I thought from day one that a
Mulder and Scully romance was a bad idea for “The X-Files.” For me, the most fun thing about the show
was always the unresolved sexual tension at the heart of their
partnership. If they ever actually
acted on that, the show would lose a lot of its fun factor. I knew this in my heart, but I still became
the biggest squealing fangirl in the world whenever one would show any hint of
affection toward the other. Hell, I’ve
probably seen “Triangle” about a dozen times and every time I watch it again I still
squeak like a Chihuahua when Mulder says “I love you.” And the more manipulative the writers got
about it (remember the movie? remember
the bee?), the more I ate it up. Lesson:
While it’s definitely not necessary to mimic this relationship in every game
you run, you should always pay at least some attention to the ideas of love and
romance, because they make your characters seem more human. Wait for the last session to finally unite
your unrequited lovers, and I guarantee your group will scream at least as loud
as my friends and I did when Mulder and Scully kissed at the end of the eighth
season.
·
Inspiration can come from anywhere. One
of the things that never ceases to amaze me about “The X-Files” is the
incredibly variety of its plots. The
writers drew ideas from urban legends, Native American beliefs, religions from
Christianity to Hinduism to Judaism, modern scientific speculation, unsolved
historical mysteries, and the mythology of cultures from China to Mexico to
Tibet—to name just a few sources, and without even giving credit to their own
warped imaginations. Turning on the TV,
you never knew what you were going to get, or what snatch of weirdness you were
going to learn about that week. Lesson:
Everything you come across, no matter how ridiculous or trivial it may seem at
the time, is fodder for a game. If a
fact, a story, or a place catches your attention, your first thought should be,
“How can I incorporate this into my game?”
And you should find a way to use it.
·
Use the metaplot, don’t abuse it. So
there are these aliens, right? And they
abduct a lot of people, like Mulder’s sister and Scully. No, I lied.
Actually, there are no aliens, just operatives from the shadow
government which is led by the Cigarette Smoking Man who are conducting
nefarious experiments on women. No, I
lied. There really are aliens, but they’re
not abducting people; they’re bounty hunters who can shapeshift to look like
anyone, and they want to take over the Earth and kill all the humans by releasing
a plague, and the shadow government is trying to make an alien/human hybrid to
resist the plague and deliver it to the aliens in exchange for their lives. The black oil has nothing to do with aliens,
because that was on Earth to begin with, though it had an extraterrestrial
source, and now these other aliens who have nothing to do with the bounty
hunters are sewing all their orifices shut so they can fight it, and even I don’t
understand this part of it all. No, I lied. The shadow government is only working with
the aliens so it can double-cross them and take back Earth, so the bad guys are
the good guys and the real bad guys are…oh, I give up. You get the picture. The biggest problem with “The X-Files” was
that by the fourth or fifth season, the backstory supposedly driving the whole
series was so complicated that even a fanatically devoted X-phile such as
myself couldn’t keep track of it much of the time. They lost a lot of viewers that way. Lesson: If you are playing a game that has metaplot or a
shared setting, such as the World of Darkness, the metaplot can be very helpful
toward giving you plot hooks and story seeds.
But you should never let it take over your campaign. I’d say that more than 50 percent of
everything you do should always be fully original and not beholden to anyone’s
metaplot.
·
Laugh at yourself. My favorite episodes of “The
X-Files” were always the silly ones.
Like “Bad Blood,” where Mulder stakes a kid wearing plastic vampire
fangs and half the episode is told from his perspective and the other half is
told from Scully’s perspective, with none-too-flattering results. Or “Humbug,” with the town full of circus
freaks and the murderous Siamese twin who could detach himself and crawl around
spreading destruction and mayhem. Or “Small
Potatoes,” with the woman who’s convinced that Luke Skywalker is the father of
her baby and the shapeshifting plumber who turns into Mulder and gets thisclose
to getting lucky with Scully before the real Mulder shows up. Or the episode where Mulder and Scully
appeared on “Cops.” Or the episode
where an X-File gets made into a really crappy movie (“Mulder, I have a
confession to make. I am in love with
Associate Producer Walter Skinner.” “Me
too, Scully. Me too”). Or my favorite episode of all time, “José
Chung’s ‘From Outer Space,’” with the D&D-playing informant and the Men in
Black played by Jesse Ventura and Alex Trebek.
I could go on like this for days, but you see what I mean. Lesson: If things are getting too
serious in your game, give yourself and your players a mental break by running
a session that’s just flat-out goofy.
You can go back to your serious plot next week (usually with a much
better sense of what you’re trying to accomplish), and you’re all but
guaranteed to have fun in the interim.
·
There’s nothing like a cliffhanger. If
there was one thing “The X-Files” always did well, it was to keep you
guessing. The fourth season ended with
everyone thinking Mulder had committed suicide. The fifth season ended with the X-Files burned to the ground by
Cancerman, and you had to see the movie that summer to get things (sort of)
resolved. And the end of the seventh
season…oh, the end of the seventh season.
The was beginning to lose my attention right around then: too much
mythology, too many stupid monster-of-the-week episodes, not enough of
everything else. Then all of a sudden
Mulder gets abducted and may or may not be back, and the episode ends with Scully
saying two shocking words: “I’m pregnant.”
YOW! Suddenly they had my
attention, and I had to wait all summer to learn how it was going to pan out! Lesson: It is your right and your
duty as a GM to end at least a few sessions in really crappy places. Not the middle of a battle or anything, but
with just enough left unresolved to keep the players interested: take them
right up to the door of the villain’s fortress, wait for them to say “We’re
going in,” then break in with, “I think that’s where we’ll stop for the week.” You’ll be amazed by the urgency and energy
it lends to your game. And finally…
·
Know when to stop. As wonderful as the end of the
seventh season was, it was also when “The X-Files” started to go downhill. David Duchovny hung around for half of the
eighth season, then disappeared altogether.
The mythology crossed the line from complicated into
incomprehensible. New characters
(Doggett and Reyes) were introduced but never quite gelled with the rest of the
series. The eighth season had its
moments, but the ninth season quite nearly lost me entirely, with only my
desire not to miss amazing revelations that never came keeping me
watching. “The X-Files,” as much as I
love it, is to me a prime example of a series that went on too long. Lesson: Wrap up your campaigns too
soon, rather than too late. A campaign should
never go on so long that going to weekly sessions becomes a chore rather than a
vacation. If your players groan in
disappointment when you tell them only a few sessions remain, you’ve done your
job well, and I salute you.
Farewell,
X-Files. You will be missed (and I don’t
know what I’ll do with this sudden block of free time on Sunday nights which
you have left me!).
Coming
soon: Everything else I need to know about GMing I learned from “Babylon 5.”
Copyright (c) 2002 by Beth Kinderman. This is my original work, so please respect it.