Last night I got to bust out the "wheel" scenario sheet that Allison and I came up with last March. Sam and Joey acted as co-authors of the scenario, with me mainly introducing procedures, not offering much guidance. Here's what we did:

1) Create a Problem.

Pick two cards, look for how they connect in a bad way.

Wretch (16) plus Departing Kid (1) = ( Read more... )

I tried the F T Meter (see previous post) once myself. As I'm used to GMing this way, it was trivially easy for me. The upside was that the effort to communicate which box I'd checked via roleplay helped me up my rate of useful feedback. The downside was that my eyes were on the sheet a lot, putting a crimp in how I prefer to roleplay with all my ( Read more... )

I've gotten very used to roleplaying my uncooperative Delve NPCs in a useful way. By "useful", I mean giving players constant feedback to inform their choice of approach. Each time they say something to the NPC, I have the NPC respond in a way that gives them new information. (More on this here.)

To help other GMs do this, I can certainly write out ( Read more... )

Fictional example of play, drawn from friends' accounts, vague memories of years past, and stuff that's occasionally come up in less egregious fashion in Delve:

The village elder says old man Donald's been acting strange.  PCs Vandr, Mar and Mengot seek out Donald and have a quick conversation with him where he claims he knows nothing, but is shifty ( Read more... )

I've tried to throw in bits of extensible knowledge in my con games, to give the players a sense of the arc of discovery that's a huge part of campaign play.  And occasionally some player has volunteered a brief in-character reaction of, "Oh, hey, that's cool to know/have."  But the players don't have an actual reason to care, and that's a mismatch ( Read more... )

1/25/11 -- me and Matt W. at Matt's place

Tentacle fight, take 1, me GMing for Matt using Delve rules:

Too many whiffs. Tentacle missed him, he missed the tentacle or only scratched it. Why doesn't this happen in my home game? Is it because, with 3 PCs, something will inevitably go wrong for one of them, forcing the others to react?

An edge case ( Read more... )

The Curse of Vatndale: did I rig the ending?
fast-forwarding through meaningful decisions? also here
Is there any Theme here? Should there be?
how might learning magic make you matter?
pacing & pressure problems
magical investigation = coloring setting???
player-directed exploration of GM-created world
even a skill check dictates pacing
need two Attribute ( Read more... )

4/28/10

Hanging out with John S., Paul T., and published game designers Ralph and Jared at John's place. Delve came up in conversation. Jared asked me a few questions about it, and fired off some quick reactions.

"Delve"The name "Delve" made him think of dungeon crawls. Because he's not interested in another dungeon crawl game, he wouldn't ( Read more... )

Dan went to China for three weeks, and now John is beginning his medical rotations.  No playing Delve has meant little inspiration for me to think and write about play.  Instead, I've been working on getting a usable file into the hands of the people at Dexcon who expressed interest.

I'm trying to present everything simply and graphically, without a ( Read more... )

I've been involved in this thread on the Forge about a game called Dead of Night , which has highlighted some interesting differences from my accustomed play.  In the thread, everyone (GM and players alike) relies heavily on a shared vision of what a game session is supposed to produce, based on common, familiar references.  Creepy Horror Movies, ( Read more... )