You know, in movies/books/comics/whatever, other than the scenes regarding the main characters, you have now and then a scene about the evil guys while they scheme their ordeals, fight among themselves, build their ultimate destruction device, make a pact with another evil guy or supernatural power, recover from a wound, and so on.
Now, in a role-playing game like Pathfinder it is usually (if not always) crucial that players know only what their characters know, and thus that they don't witness scenes like the ones mentioned above. Yet, it would be fun to let them know some more of what is going on out of the main light they're under, showing interesting and otherwise unknowable sides of their nemesis, and the relationships between certain enemies.
So, I was wondering if anyone can suggest a good way to do such things AND to do it by involving the people around the table, because a mere GM soliloquy would just usually cause the players to send their brains in "finished-yet?" mode (usually = always, for my gaming groups).
Making the players roleplay the bad guys is of course an awful idea, since they could super-easily A) stray from the plot I intended for the bad guys to follow, and B) make the foes do (stupid) things that could unnaturally advantage their normal PCs; and if I let them roleplay the enemies and then say every two seconds "you can't do that, you must do this", the thing becomes pretty dumb.
Not sure about group interaction, but if you type up a few beforehand(a couple paragraphs) you can use those when players start using scrying, divination magics, and other things. Their 'answers' can take the form of the little vision cutscenes as clues. I've done this a few times so far in my PF converted Savage Tide AP, and its been well received by my group.
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I've done this exact thing before in my campaign several times, and it has worked great. What I do is type up a specific script for the cut-scene. When it's time to whip out the cut-scene, have every player pick a role, and then let them act out the scene instead of you. Despite how much they hate them, my players LOVED getting to play the bad guys, and it was really fun for them afterwards: they knew the NPC was evil because of OOC knowledge, so they had to act like they didn't know in game, even though they knew (OOC) he was scheming against them. Very diabolical..
Hope this helps!
Until they get access to some form of scrying, I'd say villain cutscenes would probably be rare...
I've had a cutscene occur while talking to an NPC. She has witnessed the unveiling of a big evil plot, and so instead of simply roleplaying her telling the PCs, her story was presented to them in the form of a flashback, witnessing the events through her eyes. When the flashback ended we cut back to the PCs, and they roleplayed as though she had just told them what she'd seen normally.
I think the players enjoyed that it was spiced up a little. From the point of view of the PCs, it was a simple retelling. From the point of view of the players, it was a villain cutscene.
About scrying cutscenes, yes, I already use them when the PC scry, or are watching someone from the shadows (or while invisible), and so on. And indeed, that's nice.
The flashback I didn't try, I'll have to.
About writing down other scenes and letting the players act them, this is a thing I must try. I am a little concerned about their reacttion to this, though. And, moreover, I'm the kind of GM that rarely writes up something, also due to the fact that I kwnow how often I change the course of background events on the fly, either because I have an apparently better idea or because the PCs' actions cause certain consequences, so I must find a way to improve/customize this method.
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You know, back in the day of Erik Mona's in-house Age of Worms campaign I remember him posting in his log how, in order to foreshadow the part where spawn of Kyuss had overrun this ruined tower he had his group generate some low-level guard stats and they role-played said guards as they each met their doom at the hands of the spawn of Kyuss (in many cases becoming spawn themselves).
Then of course they got to play as their own characters returning to said fortress which was now overrun by the spawn. It seemed like a really cool way to foreshadow the event.
Let the players play victims instead. Make a number of characters who try to persuade the villain not to go through with it, say, and adjust the villain's plot depending on the track taken in the scene. Let the temps manage to protect some little piece of information, hurt a lieutenant, or the like. Make it a scene that happened long ago, or far away, or even in a place the heroes just left. Even better, make it a place the heroes will visit and could recignise if they are observant. As for timing, use the scene to let the heroes get partial answers to some questions they might have, especially questions they have been concerned with earlier.
I did this for awhile when the PCs were very low level and the eventual BBEGs were so powerful the PCs didn't even know their names yet. While the BBEGs remained anonymous and their plans nebulous to the ignorant PCs, all went very well.
But what I found was the more the PCs learned, the harder it was to not give too much away, and eventually this had to stop. The result was disappointed players, who had come to like the "cut scenes."
On the other hand, I have done the thing where the beginning scenes involved the deaths of NPCs, and I let the players play them, leading into the adventure itself. That went very well. I kept the nature of the threat nebulous enough that it didn't let too much of the cat out of the bag, and the players loved playing these doomed people who didn't do much more than run and scream and try to hide in the wrong closet at the wrong times.
When the PCs then showed up to the scene of the crime, the place was familiar, but they still got to solve exactly what the threat was, and where it was coming from.
Yep, the "let the players play some minor NPCs or important NPCs whose nature is not yet revealed" is nice and I already did it; trouble is when there are no NPC that I can let them play because there are too few NPCs in the scene and/or they must go on a precise course and I can't risk that players do something wrong.
One I use is giving them surveillance reports if their allied with a faction with those kinds of intelligence assets at their disposal. But of course as with real surveilance reports the vast majority is useless, and is up to the players to pick out what's relevant to act on. Often waiting for enough evidence to prevent making a fool of themselves in whatever law of the land deals with evil masterminds.
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I tend to start my adventures with the "Monster of the Week" style opening scene.
Think about your typical TV show: Fringe, CSI, etc. The opening scene introduces the antagonist of the show, usually as he/she/it utterly destroys some poor soul. The PCs start out as these poor souls, and get uttery destroyed... then cut to the actual PCs.
It's a great technique, because the players now know what the threat is, and have a reason to kill it--it just killed their character, after all! Thanks to the ambiguous nature of the opening scene, there's usually enough mystery in what the monster or challenge or whatever is, that the players aren't spoiled.
It's part of my personal style of GMing, where I never separate the players from the action. If the party splits up, I still keep everyone at the table and do everything in the open. If certain PCs aren't involved, I'll give out NPCs for the uninvolved players--sometimes as enemies of the PCs present!
I'm actually considering foreshadowing quite a bit for my next stint behind the screen. I really like the idea of letting the characters play low level redshirts, so I'll try to work that in now. The idea I started with though, was to give the PCs shared dreams which showed the bad guys doing things.
I've also toyed with, instead of showing bad guys, showing an important NPC - could be a potential ally, could be a bad guy, the vision might not be clear on that (kind of like Person of Interest, where all they get is a SSN and from that a name).