[Dresden Files RPG] Learning GMing skills
Chris_Chinn:
Hi Jay,
Quote
We did not know each other outside of an online context
I have the feeling this might be the crucial factor.
Online participation in general works on the idea of a community- either one that's face-to-face transplanted to online, or an online community that exists long enough to hold it's own and people develop relationships. There's numerous forums and discussion blogs just from Forge-related folks, which, are dead, because they never managed to get the crucial number of participants to regularly post to -form- that sense of community.
Even though PBP games seem like very low commitment, you have to also consider what the personal reward is for playing a game - it's very often social. Your game competes with any/every other game they might be playing (including with folks they know) which means we're also talking Counterstrike, WOW, Farmville, etc.
You may want to talk to GMs who've been running long-running PBP games about what they did and how that turned out for them. If your GMing was a factor, it's probably not identifiable at this point - get some advice from PBP folks and run some more games.
Chris
oculusverit:
For the Dresden Files RPG (which for those of you who may be unfamiliar uses an adapted version of the FATE system) there is a lot of emphasis in the game text on using the city creation portion of play to determine what sorts of play and plot the players want to see. This may have had something to do with the fact that the simple, vampire hunt scenario got rave reviews and the complex behind the scenes string pulling caused the game to peter out. It's possible, but we don't have enough information to determine this.
Jay, you said that you and your players completed city creation. What sorts of faces and factions did your players come up with? What do you think they had expressed based on this city creation session as the type of play they favored?
--Kinch
Jay G.:
Hi Kinch,
For the play-by-post game, I came up with 90% of the city creation on my own. This may have had something to do with things, but for the game I'm currently running (which is just starting up) all the city creation was done as a group, so I've avoided that particular mistake this time around.
The themes for the play-by-post (the game that fizzled) were:
Up for grabs (threat) - Several supernatural factions are suddenly competing to gain primary influence over the city. The faces included the leader of a smuggling ring and a red court vampire
some theme about the Summer court having power, with a summer court face
some theme about despair, with a white court vampire face
The themes for the play-by-chat (the current game, where city creation was done correctly)
The Gilding is Coming Off (Theme) - face is a corrupt warden of the White Council
Flooded With Hostility (Theme) - a face is a river fae that is trying to fill the city with strife.
Cult of an Old God (Threat) - the faces are the leaders of the cult, which is trying to awaken an old god.
Clay:
The best advice I can give here is to keep things simple. You see how simple most TV plots are? That's too complex for an RPG. People can't keep track of it very well, and it becomes a gigantic mish-mash and they can't be bothered to care. I've been down this road before, and those games suffered from the same problem.
GURPS Mysteries actually has a lot of good advice for running games where there is an investigative component. Aside from the supernatural component, the Dresden books are straight up hard boiled detective fiction, so a book about running that kind of game is a solid idea.
If you can, I'd also suggest trying a face to face game. There's a lot of human interaction you can read there that will make your life easier. With an online game, it's really easy for the players to get distracted by facebook, funny cat videos, and if the game is going especially poorly, training their goldfish.
contracycle:
I agree with Clay. I've had exactly the same sensation, where I thought the plot was simplistic, but the players loved it (and made a bit of a meal of it). Simple is good. You have, as a player, very limited sources of information. Almost everything you "know" is stuff you have imagined. Under those circumstances it is very easy to get lost and confused. One technique I have used in F2F play is to ask players to tell me what they thought was going on, after each session: it was illuminating how different their impressions were from what I thought/expected they would be.
Games fizzling out and losing momentum is, I think, a much broader problem which RPG as a medium has only partially addressed. The best advice I can offer there is not to try running a game indefinitely, but to try to bring it to an end. A few punchy games that actually have satisfying conclusions are much better than one long running game that falls apart without closure. As in any form of entertainment, "always leave 'em wanting more". In F2F play, I tend to aim for something to finish in the region of 4 to maybe 6 sessions.
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