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Vagabong posted:Do people have advice on how to run the free play part of the game in general? My players and I are all pretty much brand new to actually playing ttrpgs, and going into the fourth session tomorrow I've noticed that while things flow pretty smoothly once we're running a score with a clear objective, when we switch to free play things can get quite aimless and I end up having to use a somewhat heavy hand guiding the players towards the next score. My advice would be to cut it like a TV show. If the players have things they want to explore - great! If not, zoom out or cut to the interesting thing. I often find players and GMs trend towards doing "the next thing" but I find it can really slow the game down. also, be interested in the characters yourself and ask questions you want the answers to. "Brenner, what are you up to over the next week? Doing anything with your newfound wealth?" "Dhal, you'd mentioned that you had some contacts in the university. How did you meet them? Should we have a scene of you meeting up after the score?" Weave the entanglements into scenes like these rather than dropping them all up front. So maybe dhal starts at the scene but one of his friends is a no show. You could then take the camera behind the bar to show his friend getting beat up by red sashes in the back alley. One great tool I use for this is stakes questions. If there's something I want to know about the world or something in it, rather than answering that myself I jot down the question instead. These questions might be a good way to prompt yourself for things you might want to see the characters explore if the players haven't got ideas. I also found that doing a little set of headlines to prompt the start of each session helped the players keep track of what was going on in the world (and let me hint at things that had come up during prep that I thought would be good opportunities for scores) Macdoo fucked around with this message at 10:40 on Apr 5, 2024 |
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Apr 4, 2024 22:00
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Kestral posted:words My last campaign was a blast for this. they were initially hawkers but we switched to using the (absolutely fantastic) grifters playbook from the blades website. They were playing as white collar conmen. Initially the grift was using confidence tricks to steal leviathan blood from the docks which they were then selling at a big markup to the city's new money - but they quickly expanded their remit to every kind of scam under the sun. Rigged card games with the city's elite, fake seances, managing protection rackets from a distance in the abandoned quarters of the city, setting up Doskvol Eel Day (as a cover for a smuggling operation) which ended up breaking even because the brass band and hired ship cost so much and eventually weaseling their way into a gambling syndicate to capitalise on some incoming legislation hitting Doskvol. I loved it. Blades handled all of the players' weird and wacky grifts incredibly well, and there was a lot of scope in the setting for things that were a little more subtle than Blades' usual affair. We had a hound who was the down and out failure progeny of a once grand leviathan hunting dynasty. Asset rich, cash poor because he lost it all gambling. Absolute bastard who was obsessed with channeling the ghost of his dead uncle (whos spirit was entwined with that of the leviathan that ate him). We had a no-show alchemy professor who drank all day, lived above a brothel and who only ever set his class one assignment the entire campaign (make a bomb) and we had a theatre reviewer who's side hustle was showing rich out of towners "the real Doskvol" (where he paid a bunch of actors to fake muggings to ingratiate himself into the city's upper circles). My main inspirations when trying to suss out this stuff were these podcasts (all great podcasts covering real modern gangland stuff): Gangster Underworld Crime World Lords of Soccer (focused on the FIFA corruption but was great for seeing what a big institutional grift looks like) Macdoo fucked around with this message at 11:15 on Apr 5, 2024 |
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Apr 5, 2024 10:58
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