About Devil Bargains:
I’m going to use them to dump GM stuff into a campaign.
I think this is one of their uses as intended by John Harper .
Little question:
Is it right to propose something mostly/totally unrelated to the scene at hand, if it’s at any rate tied to the PC?
E.g. “If you accept the bargain, tomorrow it’s gonna Homing Snow (thanks +Andrew Shields).
The PC may not immediately realize that his enemies, the Homeless, are involved.
Maybe I should clarify even more “…Homing Snow, AND your enemies, the Homeless, will take advantage of it some way”.
Thoughts?
I think what gives freedom in what you propose in a devil’s bargain is the fact that the player can reject it. They don’t HAVE to accept the terms.
In the example you give above, I could see offering a homing snow BEFORE the roll, and if they reject it and the roll goes poorly, offering again AFTER the roll but adding the homeless angle.
I see the roll as a tool that the game group can use however it wants. Even if the GM didn’t intend to use the roll in that way, a player could propose a complication with another faction, or some unforeseen complication rising in the future, and another player could take it without the GM even being involved (until later.)
I usually restrict Devil’s Bargains to factors related to the current action, but you can use them however you like. Flexibility and customization are key elements of this game system.
I’ve been using them like Chekov’s Guns: they add something that is going to come back and complicate the players’ lives later (“this annoys him enough that the next time he gets pissed at you, he’s going to completely overreact”, “when she hears about the fire, she’ll connect the dots to this conversation”).
The ones the players suggest tend to be more immediate, things like, “Someone overhears,” “you have to expose yourself”, etc.