Hi. I’m going to start a game soon here in Kuwait (yes, we tabletop!). Nobody in the group is a wrestling fan but me, however we have played Fiasco and D&D in the group before so we’re all familiar with RPGs/narrative games.
I’m thinking of doing a one-off episode with premade characters (I’ve created some lovely CHIKARA/Kaiju Big Battel characters) to introduce everyone before running a full season in something more grounded. Does anyone have any top tips? House rules? General ‘Creative’ advice? Super excited to plan it out and have tons of ideas!
When I ran the game for a group of non fans of wrestling (heck, I’m not really a wrestling fan either) I decided to do some extra theming to get some more buy in. Specifically, it was the week before Halloween so I decided to do a “Monster Mash” where most of the wrestlers were vampires and werewolves and such. The game’s mechanics are flexible enough that it worked without any rules changes and we had an absolute blast. Your big battle stuff should be awesome.
Maybe if you’re doing an extreme match of some kind, be sure to throw in all kinds of vicious and/or goofy weapons (depending on what kind of promotion you’re looking to run) for the players to use.
My advice is to always try and make something happen when the players end up with a roll of 6 or below.
I.e. a sudden attack by an npw, a management figure stepping in to force them into a match they don’t want.
Ah, so cool! At conventions I’ll often organize the session around a big multi-person match (like a Regal Wrangle, from the core book) so everyone knows what they’re going for. If you only have a few players, just a multi-person match (a three- or four-way match, or a tag match) works fine, with some kind of fictional reward at stake for the winner (a title, or a title shot, or a briefcase full of money, or whatever works for your promotion). Everyone knows that this is going to be the climax of the session, so at the top have everyone cut a promo about the big match coming up (without rolling dice, just to get into the spirit of the thing). Be open to changing things as play progresses, of course, but giving everyone a solid fictional endpoint helps a one-off go smoothly, IME.