Maintaining the Mystery in Doctor Who Roleplay

One of the areas where I'm trying to learn, in being a newbie Gamesmaster, is how to give the players an entertaining ride through the plot. Good stories and mysterious situations are the backbone of Doctor Who. Doctor Who is less of a medium which allows you to send your player characters off on a quest to kill a particularly feared beast; in this instance the Doctor is just as likely to uncover a reason why the "evil" beast is, in fact, a victim of the ignorance and double-standards of the terrified villagers.

Like any fiction media, the ideal with any plot exposition is to give away enough plot pointers that the audience can "realise" the plot before it is fully revealed (with the exception of twists, which should generally be fair, i.e. not out of the blue and unprecedented but at the same time unpredictable).

However, the main difference between written narrative and a roleplaying adventure, is that the main characters are the players. In passive fiction, like film, tv, theatre and books, nothing is lost if the audience guesses the plot before the characters. The characters will still go through their own journey to realise it for themselves and this is satisfying to watch. That's why in passive fiction it is possible to show scenes in which the main characters are not involved. We can witness the villain, or traitor or incoming doom without the protagonists being aware of the events the audience have seen.

The Matrix. A much shorter movie if the others had seen the scene where Cipher and Smith started dating.

Player characters, however, are aware of everything that the GM has revealed. The Doctor Who: Adventures in Time and Space Gamesmaster guide refers to this as "meta-gaming." This is where the players bring information to their character which they know from being participants in the wider game. What this means is that player characters will not blindly stumble towards their fate in the same way as fictional characters in passive stories.

The ideal is obviously for people to role-play characters in such away that they appear not to know this information. But this is unrealistic. Tabletop games bring together a group of players who are working together to survive challenges and defeat scenarios. It must be assumed that any information one character knows, all the others have access to that information. They have, after all, heard the GM say it. The only alternative I see is handing out written notes to each player, classroom-flirting style.

The other reality to accept is that players will unearth narrative twists faster than characters in traditional media. Modern audiences will usually be looking for the pointers which hints towards twists and outcomes. There are lots of reasons for this I won't go into right now, but suffice it to say that if you present players with an apparently harmless situation, they won't believe it. They won't write oddities off to coincidence, the way TV characters will. Every peaceful village will be assumed to have a human sacrifice at the weekends. Scientific Research Bases will always be working on a new armageddon virus alongside, say, slightly more effective home pregnancy tests. That nice caretaker who let you into the private area? Bound to be being controlled by a psychotic alien host.

The point really is that audiences and players aren't stupid. Writers usually assume they are, which is why so much TV is predictable. The other point is not to get too attached to how clever our plots are. Until I've mastered the art of maintaining mystery until a big reveal, I have to assume that with one game of five players and a second game of three players, one of them is bound to guess the twist.

And what one player knows, they all know...