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

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Campbell" data-source="post: 7059542" data-attributes="member: 16586">As with most things the critical bits are your Agenda and Principles. Agenda describing what you are ultimately playing to do, and your principles being broad statements that inform how to pursue your Agenda. The actual procedures, or detailed bits of what exactly you do at the table, can vary, but very much shape play. Your agenda and principles form a set of best practices that help keep the game tight and guide you towards consistently good gaming. Many games can be drifted to be run in this style. I find that certain principles work pretty well for most, but not all games - stuff like Be a Fan of the Players' Characters, Play To Find Out, Treat Your NPCs Like Stolen Cars, and Ask Provocative Questions and Build on the Answers.I have run several mainstream games, utilizing techniques I have learned from Apocalypse World and its cousins. Vampire - The Requiem 2nd Edition, Demon - The Descent, Edge of the Empire, Godbound, and RuneQuest worked pretty well. Exalted, Shadowrun, and Numenera crashed and burned.What I have found is that you either need plentiful prestated NPCs, quick generation, or a game that is entirely player facing to make it easy to drop NPCs in. Stuff where a GM is called on to interfere with action resolution in a way that does not involve simply following the fiction does not work so well. Minimal GM overhead is preferable, particularly when it comes to things like setting DCs. It adds additional room for bias to enter the picture when ideally we should be playing to find out. It helps if the rules are clear when they apply. Games where character creation grounds them into the setting and with each other is immensely helpful. Stuff like Touchstones in Vampire, Cover Identities in Demon, Obligation in Edge of the Empire, and the entirety of RuneQuest character generation are amazing. Caveat: RuneQuest PCs leave very little room for gaps.I would not utilize this style wholesale for GMing in FATE, Burning Wheel, D&D 4e, or Cortex Plus. Closed scene resolution generally requires a substantially different GMing skill set. FATE cuts against the grain of it because we largely know who are PCs are. It's right there in the aspects. I would only run Burning Wheel exactly as written. It deserves to be played as designed.</blockquote>

Verification