NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Campbell" data-source="post: 7075365" data-attributes="member: 16586">When it comes to writing yourself out of the game this is an area where having unity of interest is critical. In Blades in the Dark our interests are settled on the crew and its effort to make an impact on the Underworld of Duskvol, rather than any particular character. Individual characters get to pursue their own outside interests during down time or free play over crew interests, and this might lead to conflict. This can also be consequential. While my character, Candros Slane, used his downtime actions and Coin to pursue his missing wife last session he was not clearing Heat, pursuing alliances, or gathering assets  However, we all come together for our scores where we mostly work as a team. I mean the fiction and various xp triggers mean we often will approach situations with different methods in mind and have different approaches to risk taking. That's part of the fun though. In game conflict despite overwhelming unity of purpose.There are always going to be bounds on the fiction we are exploring. Many Powered By The Apocalypse games have ways to move your character away from the locus of play, and getting there can be part of the point. Consider this advancement from Masks:When we are playing Masks our interest is on how these young heroes mature into full fledged members of the superhero community, how they come to see themselves, and how they come together as a team. Once a character basically grows up we do not play them any longer because they are not part of the fiction we all agreed to be interested in when we signed on to play Masks. The mechanisms, principles, and agenda of play are no longer suited to following their fiction. We let them go.I feel the same can be said for a D&D game. We are interested in adventurers who boldly go into the dark corners of the world, kill or trick monsters, and take their stuff. If we are not really interested in those things we are probably playing the wrong game. All the mechanisms, procedures, and content are tuned to that. That's not saying I do not see the value in games where we are not so wedded to the group concept. Quite the opposite. Part of what draws me to games like Apocalypse World, Monsterhearts, Burning Wheel, the way we used to play Vampire, and Sorcerer is that we just get to follow these characters around. Players get to decide who their characters allies and enemies are, including each other. One of my best experiences with Apocalypse World revolved around two different factions of player characters vying for political control of their hardhold. I got to sit back a good deal of the time and just enjoy seeing that play out, occasionally spicing things up when my fronts demanded attention. It was filled with the sort of shifting, temporary alliances seen on shows like Deadwood.</blockquote>

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