Gold Roger said:
What's your ten minutes of fun, doesn't have to be another players ten minutes of fun. Say some players love research and planning and research, should they sacrifice their funtime only so you can have more of yours? As long as everyone has more fun than not and the total amount of funtime is equal, there's no need for that.
Well-said - as a player who enjoys roleplaying characters that are skilled in running down details, I would feel quite robbed if the game master simply said, "The results of your investigation lead you to..." I
like figuring this stuff out, and I expect to hit a brick wall now and again - it doesn't detract from my enjoyment to have to backtrack a bit and try another tack.
With that in mind, I definitely like the "montage" approach suggested by
Gold Roger. Our d20
Modern military game takes this approach to
in media res. The opening encounter began with a description of jump school and picked up the action as they stepped out the door of the plane on their last training jump. After the combat encounter ended, there was an interlude (two of the characters in hospital, two in training) then a couple of brief roleplaying encounters over the course of a couple of weeks in the characters' lives. The next combat encounter began with a description of a routine patrol, with the action beginning as the players discover an atrocity that becomes an investigative encounter. This was followed by the passage of another week that included the description of a ceremony in which two of the characters were decorated (and the time that one of the characters spent in jail...), and then the next encounter begins with the characters arriving in a village on a mission to locate an officer with important intelligence...
At each step I encourage the players to fill in blanks for me, and to correct anything that I've written that might be "out-of-character" in my interlude description. I avoid descriptions of character reactions or feelings in the interludes, focusing on what happens, not on how they respond to it.
In this game, gaming every patrol, or every formation, or every trip to the mess hall, would
not be fun. The goal is to shine a light on the really important moments in the characters' experiences as soldiers fighting insurgents. The fact that it is a military game includes the inherent setting conceit that the characters must go and do what they are told makes this much easier to accomplish - one of my goals is to give the players as much leeway as I can to make meaningful in-character decisions while preserving the verisimilitude of the setting in which their characters are fresh-caught replacements in a veteran paratrooper company.
Another classic campaign where
in media res may work is the
Traveller merchant game - a group of characters with a merchant ship, a little capital, and a lot of debt. The campaign consists of trading and travelling, and routine can be easily handwaved - "The week in jump space is uneventful, as is your trip from the j-point to the starport. On receving landing clearance, you are directed to permit an inspection team to board your ship..." In this case, one could use a week in jump space for an encounter or not, a week-long planetfall for an encounter or not - because a key part of the campaign is trading, the buying and selling of cargo is
not something that I would handwave, even if it's limited to, "The broker obtains a price of 12,000 ImpCr per ton for you spices." In this game bookkeeping and logistics are an integral part of the game, and therefore a part of the "action."
Applying an
in media res approach will vary considerably depending on the setting, the characters, and the players. For another d20
Modern game, the characters were placed in a situation from the very first encounter where they were being hunted by a secret organization - there were only limited breaks in the action, such as a plane ride or a long car ride, where they weren't actively
doing something, so other than glossing roleplaying routine encounters like buying airplane tickets or a trip to Queequeeg's Qoffee, there were no large blocks of time that lent themselves to summary exposition. This includes time spent on research - learning about who was chasing them and why was very much part of the game, and did not lend itself well to, "After analyzing the computer records, you conclude..." The game was meant to have a tense, rather claustrophobic feel, and the search for understanding was deliberately calculated to enhance that sense of mystery and foreboding.
