![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Champions. Ash's retrocog.
Jan. 6th, 2005 09:44 amOne of my resolutions for this year is that I'm going to journal all the adventures I run, at least my new campaigns.
We've had two Champions adventures so far. Both were fairly simple, purposely intended to have a thin plot, introduce some villains without closing off their later storyline potential (i.e. have them get away), mostly have a combat and learn what the characters are like.
One thing that comes to mind is that I really have to work out with Sherilyn exactly how Ash's Retrocog works. I hate and love it. I love it because it lets me fill in backstory in a believable way ("okay, what just happened here?" "Well, you can learn that...") and it overcomes the weakness of my player group at deductive thinking (they often can't figure out, from my descriptions, what's happened and what the villains are planning, and what they should therefore do.)
But I also have problems with it. It needs a strongly defined self-limiting special effect -- right now it's just defined as "psychic based retrocog", which means I wind up making it operate sort of ad hoc -- sometimes you get something, sometimes you don't. This feels manipulative. I don't like it when the players feel manipulated (obviously neither do they).
The ad-hoc feeling is exacerbated by the look I get when I make a decision that goes against what they ask for -- a "there you go again" sneer that reminds me I've never been forgiven for killing off the PCs in the TOEE three years ago, and that Sherilyn decided a long time ago that as a GM I'm a control freak, which means everything I do is seen through that filter. I have to tread very carefully to avoid looking arbitrary.
So I need her power to be better defined. But I really like that it's there. And Retrocog is supposed to be intrinsically limited somehow, to avoid the GM having to give away all his plots.
For the first adventure I treated the retrocog as though it had an implicit limitation "only seeing through the eyes of people who were there at the time you're probing, works better if they died here" but that would obviously be a limit worth some points, and Sherilyn didn't buy it that way and doesn't appear to see it as working that way. (I could require some such a limitation, of course, but I'd rather negotiate one.)
I also think it's going to exercise my storytelling skills. In both the adventures so far, the PCs have happened on a location after the fact, and everything stopped for too long while I figured out what to tell Ash for her retrocog. So at the least I have to have it canned and rehearsed so it doesn't take long to give them background -- even better, write it ahead of time and have the printout ready -- plus, I have to have more adventures that don't have the obvious early step of going where the bad guys were and retrocogging to see what they were doing there.
Anyway. Hey, I was going to summarize the two adventures, before I completely forget them. Soon, I guess.
We've had two Champions adventures so far. Both were fairly simple, purposely intended to have a thin plot, introduce some villains without closing off their later storyline potential (i.e. have them get away), mostly have a combat and learn what the characters are like.
One thing that comes to mind is that I really have to work out with Sherilyn exactly how Ash's Retrocog works. I hate and love it. I love it because it lets me fill in backstory in a believable way ("okay, what just happened here?" "Well, you can learn that...") and it overcomes the weakness of my player group at deductive thinking (they often can't figure out, from my descriptions, what's happened and what the villains are planning, and what they should therefore do.)
But I also have problems with it. It needs a strongly defined self-limiting special effect -- right now it's just defined as "psychic based retrocog", which means I wind up making it operate sort of ad hoc -- sometimes you get something, sometimes you don't. This feels manipulative. I don't like it when the players feel manipulated (obviously neither do they).
The ad-hoc feeling is exacerbated by the look I get when I make a decision that goes against what they ask for -- a "there you go again" sneer that reminds me I've never been forgiven for killing off the PCs in the TOEE three years ago, and that Sherilyn decided a long time ago that as a GM I'm a control freak, which means everything I do is seen through that filter. I have to tread very carefully to avoid looking arbitrary.
So I need her power to be better defined. But I really like that it's there. And Retrocog is supposed to be intrinsically limited somehow, to avoid the GM having to give away all his plots.
For the first adventure I treated the retrocog as though it had an implicit limitation "only seeing through the eyes of people who were there at the time you're probing, works better if they died here" but that would obviously be a limit worth some points, and Sherilyn didn't buy it that way and doesn't appear to see it as working that way. (I could require some such a limitation, of course, but I'd rather negotiate one.)
I also think it's going to exercise my storytelling skills. In both the adventures so far, the PCs have happened on a location after the fact, and everything stopped for too long while I figured out what to tell Ash for her retrocog. So at the least I have to have it canned and rehearsed so it doesn't take long to give them background -- even better, write it ahead of time and have the printout ready -- plus, I have to have more adventures that don't have the obvious early step of going where the bad guys were and retrocogging to see what they were doing there.
Anyway. Hey, I was going to summarize the two adventures, before I completely forget them. Soon, I guess.
