So what Fiasco does really well is set up situations ready to pop. And that really drives the game forward at a tremendous pace. So how does it do it. First before character creation you put index cards between each adjacent player at the table. From some very cool tables of potential plot elements, each card is now filled with a relationship or other commonality between the two players' yet unmade characters. Then the players make their characters to fit within the relationships already laid out. Splendidly ready to burst with story.
"Carry : a game about war" does something similar but more implicit. Each player defines a burden for their character, but gets input from each player on their right and left in defining the burden. Not specifically an in game relationship, but player input to player. It then sharpens everything with the lens of war/life and death struggles.
Ganakagok does this with its explicit relationship map.
PTA, the way I do it, also has a relationship map.
And BW/BE/Mouseguard defines beliefs and instincts.
IAWA has its Oracles.
But aside from Fiasco, which mandates what the relationships are, all the rest rely on the player to choose to have one of these relationships, and if they choose not to, then the GM has to push the game to put something in place. Fiasco neatly avoids this by make the relationships before anyone has attachments to their characters (and by having no GM).
I think this is probably why games with pregen characters and conflicting beliefs are always more lively than most of the GM driven StoryNow games (where the GM doesn't pick a direction and drive as hard as possible towards it).
I know this is tangentially related to Bangs, but bangs seem only focused on one character. I think you get better story when one of the elements in play relates to more than one character.
What I really want is a mechanic that would allow me to get this kind of group link before play in other games, especially PTA.
"Carry : a game about war" does something similar but more implicit. Each player defines a burden for their character, but gets input from each player on their right and left in defining the burden. Not specifically an in game relationship, but player input to player. It then sharpens everything with the lens of war/life and death struggles.
Ganakagok does this with its explicit relationship map.
PTA, the way I do it, also has a relationship map.
And BW/BE/Mouseguard defines beliefs and instincts.
IAWA has its Oracles.
But aside from Fiasco, which mandates what the relationships are, all the rest rely on the player to choose to have one of these relationships, and if they choose not to, then the GM has to push the game to put something in place. Fiasco neatly avoids this by make the relationships before anyone has attachments to their characters (and by having no GM).
I think this is probably why games with pregen characters and conflicting beliefs are always more lively than most of the GM driven StoryNow games (where the GM doesn't pick a direction and drive as hard as possible towards it).
I know this is tangentially related to Bangs, but bangs seem only focused on one character. I think you get better story when one of the elements in play relates to more than one character.
What I really want is a mechanic that would allow me to get this kind of group link before play in other games, especially PTA.
One thing my old CoC GM did was hand out index cards to each player, some of them were secret but most were not, and all this happened BEFORE character creation, or, more accurately, was part of char gen. He made up all the cards before the group met so he was able to create relationships, strengths, weaknesses, etc. but then they were handed out in a random manner. It was up to the players to interpret those cards, add details, etc. But it made for some great games, and it was a dead simple mechanic.
ReplyDeleteThis was in a game which never saw any dice rolled, however, and he really was running a sort of story game version of CoC, but none of the players felt hindered or railroaded, but we certainly had the connections in place, not to mention the secret motivations, which drove the plot beyond just a few librarians thrown together in a room & trying to figure out a mystery.
Index cards... always so useful....
ReplyDeleteCool idea. Wish I though up cool s**t like that when I was running games in HS/College.