Hey John Harper,
Would you be able to tease a little about the ‘fade out’ co-gming technique? The regulars (Spectral Sisters)Â are on our third session now and the gang is keen to try the mechanic, as two of the crew are itching to GM and that means I get to make a character!
I understand that whoever is NOT on point can ‘take the gm reins’ for the scene, and all clocks / obstacles are transparent and available to the group.
Are there any other useful tidbits? Oliver Granger, anything else you guys might add?
I’m excited!
.
Sub!
dun
dun
dunnnnnn
.
.
. 🙂
Oliver’s done it more than I have, I bet!
You have the gist of it. Swap GM every scene or every session, whenever the mood strikes you. I’ll need to play this way for a bit to have any wisdom here.
You could formalize something like: When the GM’s character goes on point, choose a new GM.
It could also work well with a crew setup that has splitting up as a natural thing they do, so you can smoothly just not have the GM’s character in a scene they’re GMing and explain it as them being off doing some other thing.
Linked plans are your friend. And not the one roll but whole separate setup/distraction plan. The the player who’s on distraction can GM the main heist, maybe running concurrently so there’s a countdown clock for when the distraction run dry. This is cool because there’s no need to contrive a way to that PC in on the main action.
Yeah, makes sense Olly. Thanks!
We use Monsterheartless as an inspiration, particularly how it suggests generating hard moves.
Here’s how we handle a question or a danger the GM has to answer or create. Everyone at the table, except one, suggests something briefly. Then the odd one put picks which suggestion they like. Usually the odd one is the asker or PC on point, but sometimes they just have the PC most invested in that part of the fiction, be it: ghosts, cons, thuggery, etc. The latter often happens in downtime, particularly with entanglements. Then whoever answer is picked narrates the detail, NPCs, whatever is needed.
We use this all the time. It’s particularly good for taking the pressure off any one person hitting the tone and the challenge level right every time. Plus it naturally shares around the spot light rather than just giving it to the quickest. Players’ can just support another’s suggestion if they can’t think of anything or just have a breather.
For NPC downtime, we’ve been picking a faction or two each and deciding mostly on our what their action and agenda and clocks are. We often try to avoid players’ driving factions that aren’t hunting down their PC, for example.
I like that group share thing. I might have to re-read gamestorming… I think it might have some similar sharing / choice of one of them techniques
That’s a really cool technique Oliver Granger​. I must give it a try!
Letting the player whose character is under pressure steer the fiction – by letting them pick the hard move, danger or answer that interests them the most – is the main technique we use to drive play. Sprinkle with the rest of the Blades arsenal of player directed plans, a wide assortment of player-facing clocks, teamwork moves, flashbacks, and the odd scene where one player takes the GM helm, we find works for really engaging, creative and fun play.
Anything else you’d add Justin Wightbred or Narayan Bajpe?