Does anyone know if Speak Up and Talk Sense has any alternate rules for use with NPC’s? It only seems to work on PC’s as it is written and that kinda fell flat for us last night. Otherwise the moves really sang during our first session!
Thanks in advance.
Why not use the advantage/disadvantage rules for npcs from Monsterhearts ?
That was our first thought too. Just wondering if anyone had another approach.
The intent is to fall back on principles and moves when dealing with an NPC. I agree this is sometimes suboptimal. But if your game is starting to become about NPCs you should recalibrate.
It was only the one NPC in the scene with four PC’s. My character was trying to talk him down and have him see reason. Perhaps Goad a Man into Action would have been more appropriate?
Yeah, Goad is what we did in a similar situation.
Nb I also enjoy that you can’t really talk sense into an NPC. The moves are set up to escalate and get ugly.
That’s one of many things about SotI I can’t figure out is premeditated genius or just luck.
We used that move on NPCs, too. This in how i dealt with the move as the MC: if the NPC followed the woman’s advice, I asked myself “How this could turn better for that person’s interests?”; if the NPC went against the woman’s advice, I asked myself “How this could turn worse for that person’s interests?”. Either cases, I did a move accordingly to the answer.
Sean Horwich
Paul Beakley lots of little interactions like that in the game were premeditated, but I don’t know about genius, sometimes it was more like laziness. The fact it doesn’t work on NPCs was, as far as I can remember intentional to focus it on PCs but also because making it work on NPCs would require it to be twice as long or it would have to work in a completely different way, so I trimmed it down, leaving other cases to fall under principles and MC moves.
Andrew Medeiros can you say more about how and why it fell flat, here or in private. I’m still interested in feedback in case I do some rewrites sometime.