Hi. I’ve played an ran masks and handful of times but only as con oneshots. Something I noticed is that in all the games Influence never gets used. I was wondering what other groups have done to make use of the mechanic and bring drama between the PCs?
Hi.
Hi.
You put then in situations where the PCs need different things, and aim them at each other’s heads. The Protege’s Mentor doesn’t trust the Outsider? Cool, give the Outsider alien instructions to cooperate with one of the Mentor’s villains for mysterious reason. Offer the Delinquent the greatest target for a tantrum in the form of the Legacy’s family’s monument. Bring the PCs into conflict, and watch the Influence fly.
Some team moves come out differently depending on influence. I’ve also seen players jump to the opportunity of messing with a PC, when they played an NPC for scene.
Influence is a rather unique concept. So it takes some getting used to. Between PCs it also smells of PvP. There’s nothing wrong with that, but some players are not so comfortable with it.
You can try visualizing the current influence. That is useful at least for determining pool. Give each character a color, and a number of tokens of that color to hand out with Influence.
^ seconding this. I handed out colored dice — red, white, blue, and green — and sync’d them up with poker chips of the same colors. We start the session by players announcing who they have influence over, and those people hand over a chip. Players can look down, see the red, blue, and green chip they have, and look up and see the red blue and green dice of who they Influence over.
If your PCs talk to each other in any way other than cursory greetings… you’re triggering moves that involve influence.
I read somewhere about handing each player a set of cards with their character image on it. They would give a card to the player that has Influence over them so each one knows who they can mess with.
Thanks everyone. I’m using the influence card pdf that came with the kickstarter accept without the image. On the back the write the name of who they have influence over. I did something similar with “strings” in Monsterhearts and those seemed to get used more. I’ll try some of the suggestions here.