There’s a gaming event here in the UK called the Student Nationals. In essence, it’s a role-playing, war gaming and board games ‘competition’ that takes place over a weekend. The idea of competitively judging people for their role-playing seemed a bit odd to me, but as I’d been asked by friends who were organising it to run games over the weekend, I’d be in there and taking part anyway.
So, I end up running good old Call of Cthulhu. The slot you are given is six hours, so I came up with a game set in 1920 Constantinople: Turkish nationalists, British troops on the streets, hordes of émigrés fleeing the Bolsheviks in Russia, all that sort of thing. The game wasn’t very heavily structured, as I really wanted to see how it would progress with more input from the players, rather than being the standard, procedural CoC investigate routine.
Rather than fully fleshed out characters with loads of background to them, I provided basic character details and a sheet with different boxes on it, contain phrases like “I know the dark secret of…”, “I have faith in…”, “This person will aid me for a price…” and “I love…”. There were 11 boxes in total. The players were told that if they filled any of these out, they would get a chip which would allow them to buy a success or add stuff to a scene that they felt was appropriate. It was a bit of a kit bashed way of doing things, but I genuinely wanted to involve the players in the story more whilst still keeping the game CoC.
On the Sunday, it worked brilliantly. Which brings me to the actual play bit I really want to talk about.
There was a point in the game when the players all wanted to do some research an investigation. But, instead of the usual “off to the library” routine, they all came up with their own scenes that they wanted to play out. They spontaneously chucked in chips and said “Can I spend this to have my own scene?”. One wanted to meet their opium dealer, the other and underworld contact and so on. The great thing was that they all developed these NPCs themselves and explicitly stated what they wanted from them.
The suggestion that they could play NPCs in each others scenes was also grasped wholeheartedly and made for a real feeling of participation. All in all, it went really well. The game really did rock quite a lot.
Which was great, because I had been terribly worried about running a very traditional CoC game with absolute GM authority, given that I don’t really take part in games like that any more (perhaps I should!) and would be totally and utterly out of practice. But the players really threw themselves into it and made the stories of their characters and the overall story really vibrant.
One of the best moments came at the end when one of the players came up to me, shook my hand and said it was one of the best games he’d ever played in. That meant a lot, coming from a stranger who had turned up not knowing who he was going to be gaming with and potentially expecting a very traditional CoC game. Great stuff.
Cheers
Malcolm
That sounds great. Not too
Submitted by Steve Dempsey on Wed, 11/04/2007 - 12:40.
That sounds great. Not too dissimilar from the way you ran CC for us. I like the way you provided hints at structure something which CC does more directly.
I've found that many players are happy to accept new things, especially if they empower their characters. It can seem daunting at first, providing creative input when you've probably only ever seen a GM do it before but most players do take to it. It is of course fairly natural - kids do this kind of thing all the time when you tell them a story.
That sounds really cool
Submitted by Iain McAllister on Wed, 11/04/2007 - 21:15.
That sounds really cool malc. A nice simple mechanic for encouraging players to make things up about theit character.
Kudos
Iain
Lead Developer Mob Justice RPG
Check out my home brew games like 'Reel Adventures'
The players did indeed grab
Submitted by Malcolm Craig on Thu, 12/04/2007 - 08:08.
The players did indeed grab things wholeheartedly once the game got swinging. There was an interesting difference between my Saturday and Sunday groups. The Saturday group filled in most of the character information right from the very start and didn't really utilise the chips or the opportunity to input into the story at all. That's fine really, as what they obviously wanted was a traditional game of Call of Cthulhu. Which is cool.
The Sunday group only filled out a few of the boxes on the sheets at the start of the game but filled in more as the game went on in order to bring colour and detail to the story. And by doing this they also got chips which they could use. They were also much more enthusiastic about creating stuff for their characters and for the story by bringing stuff into scenes and so on (and, as was said in the original post, by creating their own scenes).
Cheers
Malcolm
Contested Ground Studios