Our players have no idea what game it is they’re about to play. The only way to learn is by playing, the only way to win is by learning, and the only way to begin is by beginning, so without further ado, let’s begin!

Kicking off in 2019, Game Changer has been a big hit for Dropout, the streaming service which subsumed the CollegeHumor brand after the site was dropped by IAC in 2020. The show consists of host Sam Reich running a game show for a rotating cast of contestants, but the actual ‘game’ of the game show changes every episode. One episode may be a particularly twisted variant of Simon Says, while another calls on contestants to make sounds imitating the onscreen prompts, while yet another locks three contestants in their green room only then to explain that escaping the green room is actually the game.

What makes Game Changer so funny is the combination of new and odd gameplay that the contestants are exposed to and the contestants themselves, all comedians who are part of the broader Dropout cast.The way the contestants react to their circumstances (and to Reich himself, who is as much a ringmaster as a host) generates some great laughs, even when facing the real discomfort of handing over their phones, being hooked up to heart rate monitors as a game mechanic, or even having an entire segment set up where the express purpose is to make you (‘you’ in this case being Brennan Lee Mulligan) lose.

Game Changer demonstrates the entertainment power of subverting expectations, something that many GMs are also keenly aware of. The tabletop roleplaying game is built on set and setting with many unwritten expectations, and there’s a lot of play space both outside those expectations and within violating those expectations in the name of the game. Sometimes it literally is baked into the game; Paranoia only works because it builds upon (and then destroys) the tropes of D&D before it. A lot of other times, though, the subversion is entirely within the mind of the GM. These subversions represent common thought experiments on Reddit, forums, and even dating back to Usenet: ‘How would I run a fantasy game where the players discover they’re in a simulation?’ ‘What’s the best way to work the Elder Gods into this sci-fi game?’ ‘When is the best time to spring on the players that they’re in a time loop?’ ‘How can I run a game where the players have to reverse engineer what’s on their character sheet?’ There are a lot of fascinating meta-mechanical ideas to explore in role-playing games, but when so many players aim for significant investment in their characters and campaigns, ‘surprise’ is a very difficult word to integrate into campaign planning. When it comes to taking lessons from subversive gameplay like that in Game Changer, the first step is to understand why Game Changer works the way it does, and why it isn’t your game table.

Who is the audience?

The most important difference between a show like Game Changer and your home gaming group is the audience. On Game Changer, the comedians are not the audience. Their entertainment, their discomfort, their difficulty with the concepts introduced in any given episode are somewhat immaterial to the effectiveness of that episode because the audience is you, at home, queuing up an episode to watch on your TV or computer. If you find a contestant’s distress at being on a party bus and finding out that the rules of the existing game still applied funny, then the game has accomplished its goal. Indeed, not only is the impact on the contestants not directly important (within reason), but the contestants, as career comedians, are often willing to sign up for way more than most people would expect. In a recent IndieWire article, Sam noted that “[cast member] Izzy Roland told me that she would be willing to give birth on camera”, which gives you an idea of what ‘commit to the bit’ means for a lot of performers.

When you’re running a game at home and you want to inflict a twist on your players, you aren’t dealing with career comedians. Something as simple as ‘I said this was a fantasy game but now it’s a cyberpunk game’ has caused people to leave games, in part because they aren’t there to perform. Players are there for their own fun, and as much as the GM is also there for their own fun, they need to remember that an RPG is a social activity. Of course, the other side to the extremes coming from Game Changer cast members is that some people are absolutely into the weird ideas, the violation of expectations…but you need to know that your players are some of those people.

The first rule of pulling off a twist game is knowing that people are up for it. Especially in subversion twists (which we’ll discuss below), there’s an element of ‘ruining the surprise’ which causes a lot of GMs to avoid getting consent for putting their players in a weird situation or a situation which they didn’t expect. You can’t really skip this step and expect a good outcome, which does make a lot of the game ideas dependent on a surprise or twist much more difficult to pull off. The good news is that if you have a long-running gaming group, one where some implicit trust has been developed, then you can get a whole lot farther with asking the group ‘I want to try something weird, are you on board?” This saves some of the surprise but still keeps the communication channels open. On Game Changer there is a fair amount of pre-screening, the difference is that comedians are often willing to go to the wall for a bit.

There are two main twist games I’m going to be discussing. The subversion twist is one that I’ve implied; you frame the game as one thing and then, through a mid-game twist, reveal it as something else entirely. This can work well but can also alienate players who were invested in the original concept. Second is the revelation twist, where you deliberately obfuscate some part of the game, be it rules, setting, or even character abilities. This can work well (and has worked well in Game Changer), but it has a limited shelf life.

The subversion twist

There is a classic subversion twist which shows up on a regular basis on Reddit. The GM wants to run a fantasy game, likely D&D 5e because their players whine every time the GM suggests another game. However, what the GM actually wants to do is run a cyberpunk game. At some point in this fantasy campaign, there’s a glitch in the simulation and the characters begin to see the world for what it really is. Then, they must head out into the ‘real world’ and find their captors. So, at the surface level, this is a really cool campaign idea. The issue comes up when you consider that the GM had the players create fantasy characters and, depending on how long the first act of the campaign went, let them become attached to those characters. Then, with the big reveal comes the fact that most things about the character, not the least of all their backstory and abilities, are all essentially a lie and the character is a different person now. Even if the player isn’t slavishly attached to D&D like some are, the fact is that they signed up for one thing and are now told that the game is something else, something else they weren’t necessarily interested in.

Needless to say, Game Changer is full of subversion twists. One of the most ambitious is of course ‘Escape the Green Room’, where the contestants were locked in their own green room “before shooting” and led to discover the episode was actually an escape room built into the green room itself. As much as the Game Changer crew has the cast express their interest in variously ‘spicy’ Game Changer episodes, the intro of ‘Escape the Green Room’ and the very real realization that occurs among the cast is part of what makes the episode deliciously entertaining. And, unfortunately, that realization is exactly the thing I’m going to tell you to get consent for from your players. Your players are not comedians, they are not being paid to get locked in rooms for others’ entertainment.

Twists are fun, there’s no doubt about it. But in a gaming group, you’re all in it together to make for a good game experience. One way you can get consent for something like a subversion twist and still get the highly satisfying surprise is by getting consent far in advance. If your group has been playing together for multiple years, then they’d probably be open to a lot of gaming ideas. Have the conversation, maybe even using something like “a fantasy game that turns into a sci-fi game when the characters discover they’re in a simulation” as the conversation starter. If everyone’s into it, great! If not, make sure you understand why, and also that your idea may be dead there. But, if everyone sounds like they’re up for it, note that and then put the idea away. A year or so later, when it’s your turn to GM again and everyone’s forgotten the conversation, start your twist campaign. Now, this isn’t perfect, and people’s minds may have changed. Nothing I can suggest will actually guarantee the success of a subversion twist. But, if you’re going to try it at all, you do need to broach the topic first. Maybe you can describe it as a “three chili pepper episode of Game Changer” to obfuscate your true intention.

The revelation twist

Unlike the subversion twist, a revelation twist need not pull one over on the players nor even require surprise. That said, the revelation twist strongly resembles the core premise of Game Changer but, just like in Game Changer, has a very short shelf life. The concept of the revelation twist is simple: You invite the players to a game and explain nothing about the game they’re going to play. Players will get either no character sheet at all or a short sheet describing the character using natural language and no game mechanics. All mechanics of the game are completely hidden, and only through interacting with the game world can the players figure out how the game works and what their characters can do. This has been theorized for very game and mechanics heavy games like D&D, as well as genres like supers where a character’s abilities would not be immediately obvious. Internet commenters who describe trying a game like this describe the surprise and delight of players finding things out about their characters they wouldn’t have expected. It seems like a really interesting gambit for starting a game.

The concept of not knowing what you’re playing is foundational to Game Changer (of course), but if you watch episodes of the show you’ll note that maybe 3-5 minutes of any given episode is spent with the players truly unaware of what the game conceit is (if that). The reason is simple: the amount of time it takes for operating in ignorance of the rules that bind your actions to shift from curiosity and surprise to frustration and apathy is mere minutes in even the best situations.

When you watch Game Changer, you’ll note that only the first question or round of questions is given cold, that is to say without any explanation. Usually by the time that points are awarded in the first round there’s already clear implication as to what the mechanic is. There are exceptions, but these still have important lessons about the best way to keep players in the dark. In ‘Beat the Buzzer’, an episode from season 6, the initial rounds of questions allowed the players to answer, but the mechanic of figuring out which buzzer to use became increasingly convoluted. This did mean more time was spent with the players unsure which direction the game would go, but at no point were the players unable to act or not given enough information to play the underlying game. This can apply in an analogous way to RPGs as well: The key is not that you have to put all cards on the table in a short period of time, it’s that you must ensure your players still have agency even before they’ve figured out what’s going on. While a superhero with amnesia discovering their powers is a fun idea, time spent when they don’t have access to those powers is time that they can’t effectively contribute to a superhero game. A fun inversion of this could be to hand a player a character with a strange list of skills and competencies and challenge them to figure out who they were. There’s still a mystery, but there is no conceit which is robbing the player of the ability to contribute to the game.

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Part of the fun of Game Changer is applying both game design and violation of expectations to the broadly moribund game show medium. By making a game show that does not operate in the way that we (or the contestants) expect game shows to operate, there’s a new level of entertainment going on. While there is similar potential within RPGs (which are often also walled within decades-old conventions for strange reasons), there is a very different dynamic at play from watching a show. At the end of the day I want more players to be interested in exploring weird and wonderful narratives in their games, including unforeseen plot twists. That said, just like not every comedian is going to offer to give birth during an episode of Game Changer, not every player is looking to muck around with their expectations of a game. It is up to you, GM, to figure out if your group is up for some strange. I expect that those of you who have built up trust with your group, provided you don’t try to pull a fast one, may find yourselves pleasantly surprised.

Game Changer is available on Dropout.

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