nezzeraj says:
It's also much less back-and-forth than systems like Forged in the Dark which require bargains and positioning discussions for every roll.
That's the part I'm wondering about. I'm reading through Brindlewood Bay and Public Access, and they both bake this sort of positioning into the game. In a liveplay with Jason Cordova, the writer of both games, there's a lot of this:
GM: "You enter the shuttered house. Cobwebs hang from the ceiling, and a thick layer of dust tells you the place isn't being lived in. But, Janie ... something tells you that someone has been here recently. What is it?"
The idea is to share narrative control with the players, but I worry it will fall into the "waiting for one specific person to respond" trap you mention. I suppose you could make it more open ended and let anyone respond, but then you risk letting one player who's logged in all the time take over. Then you could also just remove these bits and narrate things in the traditional GM model, but I worry that that robs these games of a lot of what makes them distinct.
nezzeraj says:
I just joined a Brindlewood Bay game that should be starting this week or next. Not sure if its public but if it is you can read along in real time!
Oh, cool! I didn't know anyone had run it here. Has your GM talked about doing the co-narrative control stuff? Or how Conditions might work? Jason Cordova does this a lot:
GM: "OK, you rolled a 6. [Narrates some negative outcome.] How does this make you feel?"
PC: "Um, confused, I think."
GM: "OK, take the Confused Condition."
Again, I can see this working if the players are pretty active on the site, but it also introduces another spot where things slow down just waiting for that back and forth. Maybe it's enough for the GM to tell the affected player to choose a Condition that seems appropriate and move on?
Thanks for the ideas, all. I'm excited about these games and want to try them out, so it's useful to hear how others have handled them and to think "out loud" about how I might try to reduce the waiting-on-that-one-player problem.
Last edited July 13, 2023 5:11 pm