And there it is.

“When they win it’s a ‘meritocracy’, but when we win, it’s ‘Identity Politics'”

Illuminas Episode 1

We’re doing a short run of D&D and posting podcasts of the play.  It’s very casual, so this means jokes, what-sound-quality-we-could-get-from-our-various-headsets, and so on.

Because I am new and TOTALLY AWESOME with OBS, I lost the first session, so you get to start with the intro from the first session, and then we start with the second session.  Enjoy!

Scene Prompting

For the current game I’m running, I’m trying a new thing – I’m basically mashing two techniques together from other games I enjoy.

Apocalypse World Random Questions

One of the pieces of advice AW gives is for the GM to sometimes ask non-sequitur, personal questions of the characters.  You might be in the middle of a firefight and the GM is asking you to remember what your character’s first memory of tasting fresh food with your mother was like.

The thing that these questions do, is they basically provide windows into who the character is, and gets us, the audience, to sometimes step out of getting stuck on the immediate plot issues, which tends to become a sandpit for players in many traditional games.

Tenra Bansho Zero’s Emotion Matrix

TBZ has a chart you roll on whenever you meet another PC or major NPC – and it basically gives you a relationship prompt.  This gives direction and cuts out a lot of the testing and jousting to establish who the characters are to each other.  (TBZ also doesn’t let this be pure random chance – everyone at the table can bid some points to alter the results, and often this is where creative players create amazing situations from it.)

The other thing that this does is that it prompts certain kinds of scenes between characters.  If the characters are “destined enemies”, there’s got to be a point that makes it clear to the audience, that this is going to be ugly.  If it’s a friendship, the players have an idea of what to angle for.

Even though this seems to “take away” some control over your character, it ends up getting players to express who their characters are much better than having no prompt at all.

Scene Prompting

So, I combine a bit of both of those.  What I’ve been doing is making small charts, that suggest a type of scene, and the players will get to roll on it once a session.  I’m still refining how these charts should work, and whether they should be static or change session to session, but they have helped a lot in terms of breaking up the traditional RPG tendency to get stuck in plot and logistics.

1 Pick another player character – flashback scene to how they helped you out in the past

2 Pick another player character – you’re doing something mundane and having fun together

3 Pick another player character or NPC – you’re together and you get to ask a personal question

4 Flashback – name an NPC in your past who tried to stop you from your current venture

5 Flashback – name an NPC in your past who encouraged you on this venture

6 Pick another player character – show off something your character is an expert in, in this area/situation

Notice that all of these require at least one other character to interact with?  Also that none of the ones with other player characters are built around conflict or disagreement?  That’s all intentional.  If you’re playing a game based around a team or party, you should probably have some “team building” scenes that show why these characters are working together, particularly if the stakes are high.

I’ve been tweaking the entries each session, and I’m not sure if there has to be a single, unchanging chart, or if it is always best crafted to specific groups and situations.   Obviously, if your game isn’t based on an ensemble of protagonists mostly cooperating, you would choose some different points of focus.

Points of Interest Prep

This is basically the prep style I’ve developed for low work “sandbox” style play.  In most sandbox style of RPGs, the GM preps (or buys a pre-made adventure) that has a large map, and tons of neat things prepped for the players to run into.

This requires a lot of work on the GM’s part ahead of time, whereas, since I run shorter arcs, it doesn’t make sense to spend 20 hours of prep in a game that probably will run 6-8 sessions.  So, what this method is about, is setting up just enough to cover the “next session” without also locking players into a definite path.

Points of Interest

First, write down the place of interest where the characters are at.   This might be a space station, a base of operations, a town, or whatever, depending on your setting.

Next, write down 3-4 more places of interest they might travel to within the timespan of your game session.  Some of this will depend on the scale of the campaign – a game of people warping around the galaxy works very differently than a game focused on a single sprawling city, and likewise, this depends on how long your game sessions are.  I tend to run 2-3 hour game sessions, so that keeps things close.

If you want, you can put these on a simple map, or draw them in boxes with lines like a flowchart,  but that’s up to you.  Early on, it’s not needed, but if you use this method of prep for a longer campaign, it’ll keep things easier to track.  That said, it’s about prep-as-you-go, and reducing the amount of wasted prep, so your effort-to-play ratio is better than a full sandbox map set up.

Three Things

For each of these points of interest, write down three interesting things the players are likely to encounter.  NPCs, threats, big hazards, or things that would be of interest specifically to the player characters involved (“Hey, that’s the oldest temple of my order!”, “The cheapest stardrive parts are sold here.” etc.).

The players do not have to engage or follow all 3 things to their conclusion, however, the players’ interest in these things is a good sign of how well you’re setting these up.   (Yes, you can do 2 interesting things, or 4 things sometimes.  That works too.  3 is a good norm though.)

NPCs want things

NPCs to note are characters who want something that affects the player characters – the druid wants help hunting the dire wolf, the politician wants their cooperation, an informant is trying to get info to sell on them…, etc.  You can write down a short sentence about the NPC and what they want.  If the game has relevant skill/stats that matter, you can usually drop those in without needing a full write up.

While it’s easy to focus on the “plot” thing an NPC might want, you should also consider what social interaction thing an NPC might want from the player characters as well.  These are most interesting when they add a nuance or work at odds with the practical motivation (“The Bishop wants you to turn over the Cursed Sword, but also wants to mend the rift between you and your uncle.”)

Threats

Monsters, bandit gangs, stars that emit radiation pulses, a rickety wooden bridge… if it is something that might directly harm the player characters, you’ll want to prep these.   Since these sorts of things end up taking up the most time to prep in most games, I usually don’t have points of interest that are ALL threats.

This also mirrors the idea of a general sandbox game – danger isn’t in every single place, and certainly not in equal amounts.  Even travelling to a point of interest doesn’t always mean encountering each threat – smart players will use means to gather intel ahead of time and figure out which things to avoid or sneak past.

History and Setting

Any point of interest that is a place where people live (or have lived in the past), is a good chance to fill out your setting.  Obviously, you can show how the characters get by and live their lives, their cultures and practices, but you can also show things in ruins and things left behind.  And, not just describing it in a general sense – you can give more direct information to players whose characters specialize in history or cultural lore.  (“The language on the walls is a form of Later Velnapian, probably part of the Migration after the war…  there won’t be any great libraries as you’d normally expect, but any records they brought with them will certainly be what they considered the most important to save.”)

Aside from cool worldbuilding factor, some of these might foreshadow or forewarn about things in other Points of Interest.  (“Assuming this funeral poem isn’t figurative, I’m guessing they lost half their fleet when their defense drones went rogue in the quadrant over.  How about we go around?”)

Play, Prep, Adapt

After the session ends, note where the players are; figure out 3-4 new points of interest they might reach after that and prep the interesting things there, as well.  If the players stayed in the same area, consider if some of those interesting things might have changed or if new ones might pop up.  And, of course, “what’s interesting” can change quite a bit based on actions in play – characters who are heroes might find people asking for help against bigger problems, characters who are fugitives are hunted, and so on.

Obviously, most NPCs can travel as well, so you might want to have some show up at new places depending on what happened.  Things like extreme weather or disasters might affect a lot of points of interest.  The classic “evil army is invading” always can affect places.

Notice, though, as you build up more and more locations, you’re only having to look at 9-12 things at most, a lot of which are going to be 1-2 sentence descriptions or ideas.   If you re-use NPCs, they become easier to play as you get more comfortable with them as well.

Using this system, I usually have prep times of 20 minutes to an hour between sessions.