In the Groundhog Day example, we also see that Murray's character isn't able to escape his situation - if the arrow's moving upward, it's doing so against a downdraft and not getting very far. That sequence explores the premise, sure, but it also establishes the way the character is trapped and gets across not just his efforts to escape... but the fact that his will is broken and he sort of gives up trying.
For sure there's measurable conflict in these encounters, but they're also episodes that illustrate, usually standing for something larger. Parker's training stands in for a lot of other training; the Ghostbuster's first case stands in for many cases. It's not just exploring the premise, it's representing the premise so that we can better appreciate the departure from the characters's (often new) norm throughout the second act.
If Ghostbusters were a TV show, we could've spent a couple of episodes on that time exploring the premise, just to set up more Gozer action in the last two or three episodes. But that's not just exploring
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In my Changeling: the lost game, I think we spent the first four sessions just establishing what "Normal" felt like for the motley to allow them to establish patterns, cooking habits, meal schedules and all those points of mundanity that when something bad happen, get shook up and get disrupted.
It's an important thing to do, for sure. I think my last D&D campaign(s) suffered a bit from not having a good baseline for normalcy for the characters, even if it was just established in dialogue or a single encounter. It's one thing to plunge the characters into weirdness early on, but it's quite another to do it without some understanding of what's normal - even if normal for the PCs is as weird as faerie huntsmen and bloody dungeons.
Actually, I'm beginning to wonder if this is a common downfall of many established campaign structures for roleplaying games; a lack of normalcy. A lot of adventures go straight into "Here's a mysterious map to a magical treasure." We're told that the heroes are "adventurers" in a non-descript sense, but we don't really know what that means. It becomes difficult to know when the events of the story have gone past what is normal for "adventurers" in the setting. Do these people regularly save the world from terrible danger, or is this something out of the ordinary
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I find that I like establishing "Normal" in an interactive way in my games, and then letting it get paid off in interesting ways later.
In fact, I am relaunching a vaguely Firefly-esque game using HQ2 now that I'm back in Montreal, and the players are looking forward to establishing some of that normal in game so that we can tip it all over.
For sure there's measurable conflict in these encounters, but they're also episodes that illustrate, usually standing for something larger. Parker's training stands in for a lot of other training; the Ghostbuster's first case stands in for many cases. It's not just exploring the premise, it's representing the premise so that we can better appreciate the departure from the characters's (often new) norm throughout the second act.
If Ghostbusters were a TV show, we could've spent a couple of episodes on that time exploring the premise, just to set up more Gozer action in the last two or three episodes. But that's not just exploring ( ... )
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I find that I like establishing "Normal" in an interactive way in my games, and then letting it get paid off in interesting ways later.
In fact, I am relaunching a vaguely Firefly-esque game using HQ2 now that I'm back in Montreal, and the players are looking forward to establishing some of that normal in game so that we can tip it all over.
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