[In a Wicked Age ...] Out-of-sequence episode play
Valamir:
Our highly successful campaign was played out of order in, I think 3 or 4 different time spots. Its been too long to remember all the details now but the first story started with a pirate queen attacking a town a general and military advisor were defending. In this story the advisor manipulated events thoroughly to throw some other characters under the bus while making the attack look much larger then it was in order to engineer the whole thing to be a great victory for the general which he offered her as a gift to prove his love for her. The pirate queen wound up captured and for a while it looked like she would be the key character in the saga, she wound up married to the king and we flashed back to when she was a girl and offered as a sacrifice to a fertility god only to be "rescued" by a creepy sorcerer, but it turned out she was really just the Macguffin.
The real stories wound up being the unrequited love of the advisor for the general, which noone (including the actual players) believed was genuine until the end when they wound up married with a daughter and the advisor wound up dead and being played as a ghost. And also the story of the creepy sorcerer who was also truly in love (with the pirate queen / girl) which no one believed was genuine. This character was fascinating because he was played consistently as trying to do the right thing throughout but due to him being a creepy sorcerer with sometimes questionable best interests the other players interacted with him as if he was a villain...essentially turning him into a villain even though the player was trying to make him a good guy.
Not front loading is key key key. The only truly bad session we had was when we decided we'd been playing long enough, wanted to have the final session be a capstone on the saga, and so rather than just trust the oracle and best interests we manipulated things by forcing the interpretations of the oracle to fit preconceived ideas of what was necessary to wrap up. This session was the suck as we'd essentially story boarded the whole situation so tightly that there was nothing fun left to play. As I recall we canned it half way through and never did get another session in. The story boarding became something of an epilogue rather than an actual session.
If the oracle and session structure has a weakness its that there isn't a "wrap things up" technique to help reincoporate and draw things together. An interesting hack might be some kind of "create as you go" oracle that you populate with stuff you want to see again and then use that oracle for the last session. As it is, each oracle creates more and more loose threads and an ever expanding base of characters and events, but doesn't much help with the drawing things back together to a satisfying conclusion. Trying to force that conclusion with play-before-you play doesn't work.
Bret Gillan:
That is a really good idea Ralph. I'd been feeling for awhile that there needs to be some way for the fiction you make at the table to interact with the Oracles or build a new one completely. Doing that and using it to close the game with is a solid idea.
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