Meta Gaming vs Momentum
Do any of you have a specific term or phrase you use to cut short overplanning and encourage players to get to action?
I’m pretty new, but so far my biggest success has been to say
“That’s a workable plan – tell me what you’re doing so I can figure out what move it is”
I could definitely use a better trick than steamrolling, so if you’ve got one, share it!
A friend and longtime Shadowrun GM says: “Listen. You can sit and plan a bunch more or we can play. Whatever your plan is I promise something will go wrong in a fun way. You, the players, are gonna have fun even if your plan’s not perfect.” It worked really well!
Hamish Cameron has used an actual countdown timer before, to great effect. “You have two minutes to make your plan…go!”
Dana Kubilus Now I can only imagine putting a random countdown clock on the table and slowly filling it in. When the players ask me what it’s for I tell them I can’t say but the longer they plan the quicker it’s going to fill up. At the end of the game I reveal that if the clock reached midnight it was me loosing my damn mind in real life… 😉
Dana Kubilus This is described in The Downtown Dataheist.
I use my phone’s clock and the carrot is +1 xp if they finish within time.
Ooh, my players love +xp!
And also there’s a projector hooked up to my laptop in our gameroom, so I can put a giant animated countdown clock up there ad maybe play the Jeopardy theme at 200bpm to enhance their sense of urgency.
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I am sure you could find a techoremix of the Jeopardy theme.
“I need an answer [sinister laugh],” was usually enough for me.
My other thing I tend to lean on is just using the system for pressure. The longer they overplan the more bad things start building up around them (show them the barrel, and expose a new threat). And also soft moves to move up the legwork clock, reminding them that the longer they plan, the more their enemy plans as well.
Granted the crew I played with most recently wanted to go with plan light and strike fast.
(They saw those bennies on the Get Paid move, and wanted to try to get those).