After two sessions with my 7, because of work commitments we’re having to split in to two groups this month, a 3 and a 4. Interestingly there is a good story driven reason for this happening which is nice.
However essentially the first two sessions were the introduction, an extended one-shot. I want to give the players some autonomy in what they do next, to drive where they want to find the next steps of their adventure.
Does anyone here run any games where the story has a structure that is more like a computer game’s “side quest” system, where the heroes need to seek out the next adventure to conquer? Any tips from those that have?
Superhero stories are largely reactive. Find the chars motivations, give them scenes to address their problems, throw in supervillains.
So I have scene ideas, based on their back stories and similar, so that isn’t really my issue…. what I’m interested in is how to get people to those scenes. I could just go “Boom, [X] tells you that [Y] is attacking [Z], are you going to go and deal with it?” but it feels, to me at least, like it’s a little too much hard framing for general play.
Well they all have phones don’t they? Give’em soft moves via text.
I’ve decided what I’m going to do for this. We’re split in to two groups this weekend, I’m GMing both. The first group are going to be given four sets of information between the four of them, and so it’ll be down to them to decide which information they act on first.
There’ll be a protest planned in the city that they’re seeing information for on the news, one of the group will have received an urgent message from their homeworld, another will have discovered some propaganda seeming leaflets at school and finally there’ll be some comms chatter from a global law law enforcement force about a warehouse raid going down.
I’m planning enough to explore three of the four scenarios (one specifically is meant to be resolved later if at all), it’ll be interesting to see which route they decide to go down. Narratively one choice would seem obvious for them to explore, one will provide a better grounding for a future arc development, and another will be clearly more predictable and traditional.
Then the second group of three I’m going to start out by giving one of them a task to do, based on their Doom and their sanctuary, then provide them with some 18 areas of the city to explore in order to complete that task. They’ll get autonomy to explore where and how they want (split or stick together, up to them), but there’ll only be one location that will give them what they seek.
Some areas will have some minor threats, others will be straight forward information points, but as long as they don’t roll terribly then they should quickly whittle down the places that might contain their goal and places that definitely won’t.
It’ll also give me the chance to finally, after two sessions, introduce AEGIS!