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Back in April, I bookmarked a Mark Waid post at Kung Fu Monkey about false suspense in fiction. By false suspense, he means…

The kind of “suspense” that disintegrates the moment you give your reader one second to think about it. … The only reader who might actually be fooled into wondering about the outcome of those questions is one who’s never read a single piece of fiction before. … “Will he choose the sandwich–or his mother’s life?

Waid is a comic writer, and so this is a very serious issue for him, and for anyone who writes read-only (i.e., non-interactive) stories. We’d like our stories to hold up to more than a second’s thought. We’d like them to hold up to a whole next day of thought.

So, yes, of course. False suspense in read-only narrative is bad. The main problem for the creator is catching himself, and then calling bullshit when it’s warranted. Waid’s pair of suggestions for turning false suspense into real suspense are great.

False suspense is a more interesting issue in RPGs, and especially in story-driven games, because the fact of immutable rules intended to simulate reality (to a greater or lesser extent) tend to make suspenseful moments in the game real, rather than false. That is, given some set of die rolls, your character might actually die.

But also, in story games, art imitates art. We see the horrible consequences that make suspense suspenseful deliberately neutered, often in secret, by dice fudging and its mechanical kin. Read through the comments to the question Will posed about fudging. Gamemasters often want to ignore the simulation of reality when it makes for a bad (“bad”) story. And there’s usually additional (if unspoken) pressure on the GM not to be, or not appear to be, a dick to his buddies by hosing their characters.

But when the dice are fudged too frequently, the entire game becomes false suspense. The players eventually get the (true) sense that no peril is real. To the extent that the game’s fun hinges on the suspense of whether the heroes will prevail, the game becomes unfun.

It takes solid guts for a storyteller—a comic writer or gamemaster—to maintain suspense in a story with a steady diet of real and horrible affliction, given how much everyone wants things to turn out well for our heroes. But I say to you, gamemasters, have those solid guts.

That’s not to say you must force or allow the unfolding story to take an unsatisfying turn in service of whatever way the dice happen to fall. Waid’s post suggests two judo-style methods that false suspense can be made into real suspense. Similar judo exists for gamemasters. There are RPG afflictions short of character death; some are worse. (Post your favorite in the comments!)

It’s valuable to give critical thought to the quality of suspense you’re creating, in games as well as stories.