I wanted to kick around something I’m considering trying to do occasionally with my players here, before I went out and had it crash and burn. Caveat: I have yet to take the game for a spin myself, but I’ve been in a couple play-by-post oneshots.
My general grasp of the game is that it’s running in two phases – Score and Downtime – and there’s not much happening in between. For a lot of things, this is 100% great! What I wanted to do was have some action taking place which doesn’t seem to fit cleanly into one or the other of those.
In other games, we’ve enjoyed the occasional between-run short focus on one or two characters (or even the whole group) in a way that’s not really what the game would consider a proper score, or really downtime action. Something like when the action clock (or front, taking from Dungeon World) hits a certain point and an assassin is sent after one character, or something like that. As long as it’s not overwhelmingly long and as long as everyone gets their chance at it, the other players usually enjoy getting to play audience for one character getting a cool spotlight moment.
I’m thinking of using all the rolls as normal, flashbacks if they work (flashbacking to setting up traps for the unwary!), the whole nine yards, but being more generous with stress recovery afterwards, so that the character who got some cool focused attention isn’t hosed for the next Score in comparison to everyone else.
Any advice? Thoughts? Am I going to be Doing It Wrong?
Sounds totally reasonable and fun. I’d treat it just like any other Score, but with less teamwork really. There is even examples of this in the QuickStart on page 18, Version IV.
Dig it!
I think we do that without labelling it as such via the flashback mechanic and downtime moves.
When I advance a faction’s agenda for instance it may trigger one of those little scenes you mentioned, or when a player is pursuing a project, the action roll ‘snowballs’ into a few other things. The entanglements from the heat roll often deserve a scene or two as well.
In terms of stress, well we just leave it. I find that our group is less stress adverse than what some folks seem to find a ‘difficulty level’ of the system. But yeah being generous, or having more than one character each (so the ‘resting’ character can indulge in vice) seems the simple way to go.
I dunno, I think stress generates the same if someone is busting into my house as it does when I’m on a mission….
That’s not a problem for us it seems… If stress is generated then its because of scene-time. The game is highlighting complications in our characters lives. If stress just accrued without any interesting fictional highlights, then yeah, that could get lame.