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Message: <blockquote data-quote="hawkeyefan" data-source="post: 8140323" data-attributes="member: 6785785">So I wanted to come back to this post. I'd rather take this as a prompt to give an example, to maybe try and cut down on all the back and forth in which we can all get caught up. My group played a Blades in the Dark campaign. They were a group of Hawkers, purveyors of illicit goods. What goods? We all discussed it ahead of play, and we decided they were dealing a potent substance dubbed Third Eye. It allowed the user to experience echoes from the Ghost Field. So one player chose to play a Spider, which is like a mastermind/schemer type of class. He was an attorney who somehow became disgraced and lost his license to practice law, and so he turned to crime. One of the goals he had was to regain his license to practice law. Through play, it quickly became established that he really didn't want anything to do with the supernatural; he was afraid of ghosts and whenever that kind of stuff came up, he did everything he could to avoid it. Another player, who joined a few sessions in, decided to play a Whisper. This is the character type that's basically doing weird stuff with ghosts and magic and so on. The way we set it up was that the crew needed someone who could deal with that stuff, because they were kind of vulnerable to it, and it's kind of unavoidable in the setting. So this character came on board.....and then started using sorcery as a means to everything the crew was trying to do. So as we played, there emerged a very clear point of tension within the group; the idea of avoiding the supernatural, and the idea of embracing the supernatural. And that theme was so strong that if I had to look back at that campaign and say what the "story" was about, that conflict would be front and center. So one of the main thrusts of the game arose out of no prompting on my part as GM. I certainly took the characters and put their conviction to the test through play, but the tension was entirely of their making. If either of them had made a different character, the campaign would have played out in an entirely different way. Almost nothing would have been the same. I don't think that this is unique to Blades or any other game; I'm sure that there are similar examples folks can provide from their games (and I hope they do), but the method of character and crew creation, and the method of worldbuilding and prompting the players to describe things and having the flexibility within the setting to define elements in your own way.....all these things really promote that kind of play. It's one of the reasons why I find the game so impressive, and so much fun.</blockquote>

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