Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="zakael19" data-source="post: 9675785" data-attributes="member: 7044099">Managing the spotlight in an active fashion also goes hand in hand with “GM moves” and all the stuff there. Most of it works best when very pointed - put a single character in a spot and ask what they do. There's a <a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/daggerheart/comments/1l2g97k/make_a_move_when_the_players_give_you_a_golden/" target="_blank">great post over on r/daggerheart pointing out that doing this is also how you tee-up "Golden Opportunities"</a> to negate all the worry about initiative-less combat and optimization and stuff. If you ask a Guardian what they do and they say "I stand here doing nothing" then cool, they've given you a Golden Opportunity to maneuver around and attack more fragile people, or root them in place, or whatever. It's also a great way to avoid "letting scenes drag" as the GM Pitfalls section notes.I do think that much as games like Apocalypse World and Blades in the Dark note they're designed to "fail gracefully" if you forget/neglect peripheral systems, to the point that at the very center you're just a bunch of people having an animated conversation pretending to be other people - the root of roleplaying, Daggerheart is designed to "fail gracefully to Conventional game-play." Run the game without direct spotlighting? That's fine, you're missing out on setting up certain cinematic scenes and GM moves; but the Fear economy has your back.So I've been running "narrativist forward" games (mainly the Dungeon World descendent Stonetop, and some Blades in theDark related games) for about a year now, and I've found that the #1 most useful thing as a GM is just ask pointed questions constantly. It's the core GM move in basically all these games - including Daggerheart-  for a reason, and getting good at asking questions that prompt interesting answers or pivots is I think one of the key GM skills I've worked hard on.As Blades in the Dark says:What I've found about this "one simple trick" is that when I ask direct spotlighted questions about a character's interiority + action prompts, people tend to a) build on each other and b) realize that no, I really care about what they have to say.Blades does the excellent job of breaking them out into categories to help you kind of think of the various sorts of questions you might ask, and I think that's helpful for DH as well:<ul> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Establishing Questions (who is doing what, what's your intention here, where are you directing your arguments, etc)</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Provocative Questions (aimed at encouraging expression: what are you thinking when you see that? are you really that sort of person? how are you feeling after you hurt him by accident?)</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Leading questions (helps show how you're thinking about the current situation and prompt Actions - oh, you want to do x? don't you think that Y might happen? does anybody want to make an Instinct roll here to study that thing more closely?)</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Trivial Questions - I love these. Just filling in the world and bits about teh characters together. Things like "hey as you're walking through the marketplace, what scent suddenly reminds you of home? as you're journeying through the forest, what flower catches your eye and why?"</li> </ul></blockquote>

Verification