The DM Vs. The Writer, Placing Chekhov's Guns

How their ways differ

The grand principle, enunciated by Chekhov

Remove everything that has no relevance to the story. If you say in the first act that there is a rifle hanging on the wall, in the second or third act it absolutely must go off. If it's not going to be fired, it shouldn't be hanging there.

This applies very little to RPGs.

It is a bit severe on writing, where some clutter is necessary for realism, and to make the world look thicker than cardboard, but clutter has to fall into the background. I have merrily written along and added some details to give local color and vividness to a scene, only for one of them to announce it was Important and Significant, and I had to carry it forward.

Or revise it out. Or, if it really needed foreshadowing, revise it in earlier, which calls back to that major difference.¹

This does not work so well with games because the players have and want their agency. They wish to do things. They wish their actions to have real consequences. (Some wish their actions to have real consequences but only good ones, which gets interesting adjudicating.)

Now, even without revision, the DM can plant some things. Give the parties mysterious objects² and hope that some are picked up; then, later in the game when something is needed, declare one object was what they needed all along. Or fudge that whichever route they picked was the right one. But that detracts from players' agency and so makes the game less meaningful. (And detect magic also needs fudging.)

Perhaps the players will even have their characters pick up the useful items planted for them. It has been known to happen.

The flip side, of course, is that the players can then use magical objects or other things past any notion of the DM. A cursed horn of bubbles that engulfs the unfortunate character in bubbles instead of a more typically useful effect is an annoyance until they have to escort a princess to safety, hand her the horn, and have her blow it at the start of each fight, to be safely recovered after the fight is over.

The ability of players to devise new ways for their characters to use magical objects is legendary. It also tends to be so zany that it would throw readers out of most stories, even comic ones. It is true that readers like unexpected uses of Chekhov's Guns, so that, perhaps, the fabled Bow of Artemis is used not to shoot something at a distance, but to show the king that no archer, not even with a legendary bow, could shoot the distance that the villain is claiming.

But players' uses are often so zany that they would not appear reasonably set up by providing the object. The unexpected use in fiction should be a shock followed by a reaction that it fits, and the reaction is more important than the shock. Partly because if a player decides on such a novel usage, it appears out of the blue when he uses necromancy on a limestone wall and turns them all back into mollusks. A writer has to foreshadow and, fortunately, can go back and foreshadow.

Furthermore, if a player has seventeen different magical objects, none of which are marked out in any way (including by appearing unusually insignificant), any of them may be the one that proves significant. That depends on the players' imagination. A DM can throw lots of items at the party and hope that they will come up with new and surprising ways to use them. And if they don't, well, that's not something that should (or can) be revised out.

This is, in part, because games do not require thematic significance. It is much more significant in writing. That use of the fabled Bow of Artemis underscores that by no striving of mine can I reach a goal that is beyond my reach, or, if you prefer, that a man's gotta know his limitations.

What is the thematic significance of turning limestone into mollusks?

It's a good thing that theme is important only for novels, not games.

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