Starting a new game tonight (all AW newbies) and my first time running it. I’m tempted to offer XP to the players for producing a journal, character artwork or detailed maps in between sessions. Any thoughts?
Thanks!
Starting a new game tonight (all AW newbies) and my first time running it.
Starting a new game tonight (all AW newbies) and my first time running it.
Why not ask them to show up with some post apocalyptic images that excite them to get them in the mood and jumpstart the fiction?
I do that with my group. I offer 1 XP for any sort of recap and another 1 XP if it is in character.
I think that xp rewards are unnecessary for AW. The system is very well set up to use xp as a means of driving character and plot development. I also think that while journals do add new character depth they break the principle of ‘play to find’ (it’s write to find out and play to demonstrate). I love the idea of having players bring in images that excite them, but the reward shouldn’t be character based, it should be world based. I would tell players that the people and landscapes depicted in their pictures will be in the world and I’d expect that they would show me the types of scenes they want to have in the game.
I do the journals as more of a “remind me what happened” rather than “tell me what is going to happen”.
play to find out doesn’t just mean find out what happens but also find out about what characters care and what they think about the other characters and events that occur. A recap is fine and if a player wants to write a journal I wouldn’t stop them, but when you reward journals then a lot more players will do them and it will rob the game of a lot of the discovery.
I might give them a choice for that stuff: a barter or an XP. Up to you. As the MC it’s all gravy to the grinder.
If you want, I guess you could frame it as a take on Love Letters. “If you brought a map or a write-up or a sketch or anything to add to the world tonight, show us and take one barter. Also, here’s your LL for the session. Love, your MC.”
honestly, I prefer to not have my players do background stuff outside of the game session. A lot of the joy of the game is the way that we discover the character in the session, and most players I know find that it’s more problematic to try and cement the details of the character away from the table: It limits their ability to grow fluidly in play.
That said, Joe Beason has taken to updating a relationship map between sessions which I’m finding very useful. But all it’s doing is noting down the relationships that have been seen already, not creating new things.
I’m a color-coded obsessive. It helps distract me from wondering what’s under the ice.
https://www.dropbox.com/s/ycisnzlo1ie72dj/Black%20Diamond%204.cmap.pdf
Thanks all – some very useful tips/insights (maybe I wasn’t clear, I meant journal=recap from character’s point of view). I’m totally on board with ‘play to find out’ by the way – last night’s session went very well, we had a blast