Making the transition from mission based play?
Jasper Flick:
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For mission structures, one effect I have encountered is that if the general structure of play is to travel to some far away place to do some thing, this effectively always makes the characters strangers in their local surroundings.
Dogs in the Vineyard is basically mission-based (town-based). But you're not anonymous stangers! You are divine agents, and recognized as such. And third house on the left? There lives your cousin Jack. As a Dog, you're a stranger to none.
Dogs towns are very different from stuff like Shadowrun missions, but the structure is similar enough that mission-based gamers aren't completely bewildered. At least, that's my experience.
Frank Tarcikowski:
Hi Jim,
Thanks for the info, that puts things in good perspective. I don’t know if my own experience is very helpful to you, because the group constellations were quite different. The one time it worked well, it was because the characters had already got a lot of personal stuff going on, in which the players were invested, and then the GM simply took away the missions and started building on the personal stuff instead.
It’s good you have a bunch of enthusiastic players with many of them also sometimes GM’ing. That means they are generally able to, and interested in, authoring their own “stories” (in the broadest sense) through the medium of role-playing. One question though: Do you usually switch GMs in a running campaign? So that different GMs will be running games for the same bunch of characters? I suggest that such an approach would not be optimal for player-authored, story-oriented role-playing. You would want to have a consistent development / build-up of the story, so I would recommend setting up a new game entirely, with new characters, where the same players and the same GM will be playing until the story is finished (which need not take forever, maybe aim at 5-10 sessions to start with). Probably three to four players would be a good number.
The characters should be created in the presence of the other players, maybe with specific restraints in mind to gear them towards a premise of the (mini-)campaign. They should not be a typical adventurer party, and they should not be travelling around looking for adventure. Instead, they should be staying in one place (e.g. a city) where they are doing whatever they are doing. You might work together to link them in some way, give them personal relationships. You should encourage the players to put in conflicts with NPCs or even PCs, and maybe some issues for their characters. Maybe you as GM will want to add some external conflict as catalyst (the city is under siege, there is a gang war going on, the ruler just died and a new one has not been appointed yet, etc.)
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So we need a way for players to say, "I so put this on the character sheet BECAUSE I'm ok with it coming into play. In fact, I want it to come into play!"
Just talking about it is already very helpful. If you are looking for a mechanical way to implement these kinds of “Flags”, maybe take a look at The Shadow of Yesterday / the Solar System. The “Keys” are superb at this and are usually easy to patch into your trad game of choice. Another approach would be to tell the players that everything on the character sheet will come into play, so they better consider this. The Keys are great because they reward players for this stuff coming into play.
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In our group it's considered bad form to put the other players in the position of sitting around watching while one person plays.
I once read an article by Wolfgang Kramer, renowned German board game designer, in which he explains how players must not wait too long for their turn, but an important factor of how long you can let them wait is whether they have a chance to participate while it’s not their turn. So on the one hand you should not let solo scenes drag on too long, or maybe try to run parallel solo scenes, cutting back and forth. There is a technique called “Flashpoints” (I think) where you let different scenes climax at the same time, cutting back and forth quickly, and even would play (say) a fight at the same time, going through each round by order of initiative (or whatever you have) even though it’s really two different fights.
On the other hand, you should encourage players to engage in scenes where their characters are not present. This may be limited to listening and commenting here and there, but you could also (for instance) hand an NPC to one of the other players. Some games also explicitly use mechanics that let other players participate, the simplest being “Bennies” of some sort that you may spend on rolls other than your own, and/or may award to other players (popular example: “Fan Mail” in Primetime Adventure).
Plus, with three players, everybody gets much more screen time than with six players.
Hope any of this helps. Good luck!
- Frank
Aelwyn:
One of the things I like about Spirit of the Century is that character creation explicitly ties the characters together and is used for developing NPCs, especially antagonists. So instead of the players being dragged into a complete world created by the GM, the GM has to create the world based on the types of adventures and enemies the players pick.
Here's how it works: Characters are the stars of pulp novels. During character creation, the player whose character is Sally Strife decides her one of her background novels is Sally Strife and the Cult of the Withered Hand, co-starring the Man from Outside Time (another PC). Boom. That's how Sally and the Man from Outside Time know each other, and the GM now has a group of NPCs to throw at the characters--the high priest of the Cult of the Withered Hand and his minions. The player gets to create the nemesis--the GM fleshes out the nemesis and plays it in the game.
The GM can still run the characters through a preplanned mission, but at some point, the Cult should show up as a red herring or an ally of the bad guys--or maybe a group that surprisingly rescues the heroes for even more nefarious purposes!
This system requires a lot more flexibility from the GM, and I don't think it would work with a complex, traditional RPG where you need to have NPC sheets ready before a campaign.
Now if we could figure out a way to base adventures on character abilities...
Paul T:
Along the lines of the last couple of posts, one really effective technique for the GM to get away from "mission-based play", as you're describing, is to consciously limit his or her concept of preparation. You or another GM in your group can try this very easily without having to change anything else in the game. Here's how:
Once you have a concept/premise for the game (e.g. pirates fighting a fanatic religious cult off the coast of Sri Lanka), have everyone create characters. Ideally, do so in a way that tells you a lot about the actual characters and what/who they care about--those are much more important than things like equipment and ability scores. The usual "character history" can be a good source of this stuff. (It can be great for the GM and the other players to ask each other leading questions to deepen this information, e.g. "Your father abandoned your character as a child? How does she feel about that now?")
Once that is done, the GM collects all the character information and prepares for the actual game. This is where the "conscious limit" comes in: the GM makes it a rule for herself NOT to put anything into the adventure or scenario that she did not take directly off one of the character sheets. The raw dough the players have given you in terms of character concepts is all you have to work with. The harder you make this rule for yourself, the more effective it will be.
That's just a simple experiment you can start with, but I think you'll find it revealing.
contracycle:
Quote from: Jasper Flick on April 10, 2010, 01:27:25 AM
Dogs in the Vineyard is basically mission-based (town-based). But you're not anonymous stangers! You are divine agents, and recognized as such. And third house on the left? There lives your cousin Jack. As a Dog, you're a stranger to none.[/uote]
I don't buy it. Neither authority the PC carries in the game, nor any made-up-for-the-moment personal connections to the place, qualify at all for providing a sense of ownership and involvement. Dogs are still there to Dog things, not settle-down things. Play is not going to recur in the same place, and I don't see that the players will consider it any differentl; no matter how allegedly familiar it is supposed to be to the characters, it's still new to the players. I don't really see that this is particularly different to a Shadowrun mission, nor is there any reason in general that it should be.
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