It just occurred to me:
You could play a Spider which never actually goes into the heist and still be very useful with foresight and flashbacks because you simply had prepared everything the other Players need.
It just occurred to me:
It just occurred to me:
I think I’ll make a Mycroft/Nero Wolfe character next.
My Idea was an old Matriarch which is bored to hell and sits in a wheelchair. She uses a group of children called “little Birds” to do her Bidding. ^^
I played a character like that in a (sadly, shortlived) recent online campaign. It’s a lot of fun, but you do sometimes feel a bit like an asshole because going hard for your XP triggers means going “nope, that didn’t actually just happen” a lot.
What I really loved (and found surprising) about the design of the playbook was how centered around Consort it was. The fiction of the “mastermind” is of somehow who has perfect knowledge and control at all times, which would thematically work off of Study better, perhaps.
Consort, though, is a very powerful skill that works as both for information gathering and soft social control. However, it is also a skill that is about relationships with at least some degree of reciprocity.
So if you’re going for the most powerful early option on your playbook, you very soon end up enmeshed in a network of semi-friendly contacts that you owe a lot of favours to. Juggling all that builds up the world around you and makes you feel cool like only a fixer can.
But it gets better! As a Spider, you are very good at being the center of this whirlwind of debts and favours, but you usually lack the boots-on-the-ground skills of actually resolving these favours without incurring more from somebody else. So you do what you think is a clever thing and hand off the delivery of these favours to a capable crew member…
But their motivations are not yours, and they feel pretty distant from this social maelstrom you are trying to manage, and are very likely to act on their own interests instead of yours. Which can be just so fun!
The last session of this game we had was set up with me handing a sick child to our Physicker Leech for healing, as a way of getting in good terms with the child’s mother. However, the Leech turned out to be a research doctor, and chose to learn all he could about the disease at the expense of the child’s life.
We had to explain the situation to the mother with the child’s ghost in the room. It was a horrible, wonderful scene where me and the Leech had to present a unified front despite having different goals and my Spider having a great big axe to grind. I have good reason to believe I have the excellent choice of skills for the playbook to thank for that.
Daumantas Lipskis , that’s freaking awesome!
Daumantas Lipskis interesting. I had not considered Consort a critical Part until now.
I had a few interesting Ideas to use foresight also:
– use Craft to provide them with little extra Gadgets or Substances right when they need it (a bit of sand to cover tracks, extra protection at the Point where they are hit, a dose of Antidot ect.)
– Use Wreck to “prepare” certain Doors or Mechanisms to break when needed.
– Use a Flashback to get into a good Snipers Nest when they need additional Firepower with “hunt”
Stuff like that.
Good eye. The Spider is The Fixer in Runners in the Shadows for this very reason