I’m looking for opinions regarding mayhem during downtime free play.
I’ve been running free play pretty much as do what you want and explore the world, and see what the world has been reacting to various events that have been happening in the world, typically chain-reacted from crew actions. Because of this, the crew keeps getting into risky situations which require die rolls that naturally spiral out of control into chaos.
For example, last night we had some players “simply reporting in” to their Dimmer Sister contact, which ended up with them escaping an interrogation by firebombing their storefront and burning her alive.
I guess I’m wondering if Downtime Free Play should be relatively safe? Or should harm-causing, stress-spending actions be a common thing, even if, unlike a score, the original intent of that kind of wackiness was never intended by the players.
If free play goes wrong it can become a score and have the consequences of a score. If your free play downtime goes haywire and turns into a firefight and getaway, then that’s what you have; the “fight your way to freedom/evade the bluecoats” score.
They likely won’t earn coin from it by the nature of it, but it means their actions can still gain rep and generate heat and they get a downtime afterwards so stress gain isn’t horrendously crippling. I wouldn’t say downtime free play should have the same action as a score; that’s what scores are for. But you can be very flexible with how impromptu starting a score can be.
We say “cut to the action” with scores, but sometimes the action comes to you.
Adrian Wills I hadn’t thought of doing this before, but I like this a lot. I’d been assuming if you get into fights and mischief during downtime, that’s just how it goes, but I like incorporating rep/heat and opportunity for future stress reduction into any sufficiently action packed moment.