The Non-Euclidian Staircase

<< Less (and More) | Main | About Not Posting and Travel Woes >>

January 13, 2007

Adventures In Improvisation

It happened six days ago, but I owe a bit of a report on the Spirit of the Century game mentioned last post.

Quick Summary: it went well. Quite well.

Oh, there are things about the system I need to know better before I run it again. I really hadn't gotten the balance of NPC abilities to PC abilities in my head, so my opposition was way too weak. And I didn't do a good job of explaining what sort of characteristics should be Aspects and what should be Stunts (partially the fault of the system, maybe, but mostly me). But I was very impressed with how the "guest star in their novel" character generation built common background elements for the PCs and even as I made up new difficulties on the fly so the characters were challenged, the game ran pretty darn seamlessly.

Hence, the title of this post. If SotC has a strength I hadn't noticed in reading, it would be that it is very easy to change or add things on-the-fly that can make the story the players participate in match their PCs more closely than the one the GM walked in with. And that's a very good thing.

I won't be commenting on detail of the story, as I may use this plot outline (with more effective NPCs and different improvisational additions) as a pick-up game somewhere else along the line, but I had a good enough time as GM and the players say they did as well that I'm hoping we can schedule a next chapter in their story. I've already got a plot in mind, this time more directly matched to who the PCs are, and maybe that'll let me see how well the system works when the improvisations are less crucial to the flow.

Posted by ghoul at January 13, 2007 08:23 AM

Trackback Pings

TrackBack URL for this entry:
http://noneuclidianstaircase.com/cgi-bin/mt/mt-tb.cgi/373

Comments

Post a comment