So there you are, working on one of your scenarios, one that’s currently either in-progress on your writing or something your game group got halfway through before session had to come to an end. One group of characters is doing something that you know for a fact was orchestrated by another character, but they’re exceedingly coy so you’re not 100% sure of all said character’s objectives in orchestrating this particular situation. And this character is Awesome-Smart as far as you’re concerned, someone you could put toe to toe with Batman in a gambit match and get a pretty sweet show out of it, so you want to get that across to the audience. What’s the first thing that comes to mind? It’s probably “All right, everything they’re doing right now is exactly according to plan, so let’s structure the parts of the plan we don’t know around that.”
Can you see what’s wrong with this picture?
First, of course, is figuring out how the character was able to so perfectly guess what was going to happen, given that it’s even odds you’re still figuring out how exactly this is going to go as you’re writing it. And not in the Just That Awesome-Smart way, but in “Does she actually have the information to get this? Is it really possible for her to have realized that the coyote will be in Gamma Quadrant and the guy with all the guns spilled his milk two hours past and is still having a good cry over it?” If she doesn’t, how the heck is her plan supposed to accommodate all these random factors anyway?
Second—well, the plan allowing for this exact contingency implies a perfect understanding. We’ve already discussed why perfection is a bad thing.
Third, particularly if the characters can’t seem to do anything about how easily they’re being predicted (particularly obnoxious if anyone has a stake in one of the characters planned around being Awesome-Smart), that’s starting to push its way from true Awesome to Better Than You. It’s one thing if the character’s clever, but when you get to the point of “Look, I predicted your every move right down to the color you’d be wearing, ha!”, even if the character doesn’t actually try to drive it home, that just starts looking like a focus not on how the planning character stacks up objectively but how she stacks up specifically with regard to these other characters. When these other characters are PCs…. ugly. Really ugly.
Now, this doesn’t entirely eliminate a character perfectly predicting her opponents’ circumstances in a given scenario, but it should at least curtail it. You can do it once, probably somewhere in the middle where she’s gotten a chance to see the characters in action but before they know how much she knows about them. And if you do, try to make sure that either very few unpredictable things happened to throw it off or the seemingly unpredictable things were her work; that makes it easier to justify the level of understanding needed to predict them so well. You might get a minor pass if it was just that there were a lot of contingencies, or the plan was particularly flexible. More than that, it just gets irritating.
So what do you do instead? More to come soon!