Monday, 12 January 2015

Numenera: Within the Lines

Hello everyone,

I firstly want to say thank you for the hugely positive response to my last blog, it is seriously appreciated.

Also a big thankyou to Jeff Brown for the awesome new art of Auspar:














So as most of you will know season two started two weeks game time, and a last week blog time. I thought it might be best with the two new plays I now have ,to start the game off without dumping them into my complex crazy kind of DM style. To that end I am running one of the pre-generated adventures re-skinning them to work for my own campaign.

In my opinion to make a successful re-skin you need a couple of things, patience, creativity, logic and interest. A re-skin can be just reassigning the quest giving NPC or perhaps a relevant assistant NPC or re-tooling it down to the fabric on the furniture. However I will give this one disclaimer before I continue. In practice I was pretty bad at all of this.

The couple of hours I spent going through the various adventure options and trying to break it down so that I could weave in my own storyline was difficult. Many of the times I ended up over complicated the matter or not fully understanding the implications in the planning stage. Creativity and logic are a given, you won't be able to re-skin an adventure to suit your own narrative without some form of these skills.

For me however, interest has got the be the biggest influence. Although the adventure, like most of MTG works, was inspiring, however as I was running the it, my inspiration was waning. The problem I personally found was that it broke my flow of conversation with the players. I was wanting to keep referring down to what was written, trying to make sure I remembered what was going on and making allowances for player agency. In all honest I got bored and being bored as a GM kills the game.

A happy GM usually results in a satisfied player, but a bored GM can ruin the experience for them. The game itself was not that successful, most of the time the players were not concentrating on the game itself. Now this could be down to the 'on rails' adventure I was running or my feelings towards it were subconsciously drifting into my play style. As they became more and more disinterested I was more frustrated and at the end I decided to jack the whole thing in.

Running or re-skinning an adventure for me is difficult. I run on my own imagination and this has served me pretty well. The pre-written adventure jarred with my play style. But this is just me, I take my hat off to the Asset Team for MCG and anyone out there reading this that run adventures. They feel to me, completely different skills.  Let me know in the comments if you usually run one-shot adventures or more of a free-style campaign, or your own variant. Adventures are a good place to get inspiration and more than likely you will be more passionate about your own ideas. 

As Season Two starts I want to also make a quick announcement. I will be running one-shot style sessions with my group as they take on more adventures. Not only am I asking you guys for inspiration, but I'm also offering you a seat at my table. I'd love to have a new perspective on my game and the offer is for anyone and everyone. We normally play Saturdays 19:00 GMT for around four hours.  If you're interested let me know.

GMs: Think about your own play style and how you have developed as a GM. What adventures got you excited or invested in? What type of game play turns you off and why?

Players: Do you prefer choice or to follow more as a reaction to the GM. What would you do if you're given a room as a starting point? Explore yourself, ask the GM questions or wait until something happens?

Hope you all enjoy Season 2 and I'll catch you all next week.

/Drew-Tesla

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