The GM who runs the Savage Worlds Eberron campaign that I play over Skype canceled last week, so I agreed to run a second session of Swashbucklers of the Seven Skies for the remaining players. Running this game with no warning and no prep is slowly teaching me the art of the pick-up game, which is an area in which I've been historically uncomfortable. S7S makes this approach relatively easy compared to many other systems for a number of reasons.
-As written, the rules dictate that the players describe their character's successes and failures in play. This removes some burden of creative output from the GM's shoulders.
-The players have a currency (style dice) with which they can take some directorial control of the game.
-Play regularly generates story hooks, which are keywords that the GM is obligated to use in shaping future scenes and sessions.
All of these factors make the game a playground for proactive players, and if the GM comes to the table with little to no agenda, it isn't really a problem. (And with this being a pick-up game, I don't think I could bring less agenda if I tried.)
Some really cool descriptive flourishes came out of letting players take charge of narrating successes and failures. I think my favorite description came from the player playing a knife-fighting spy. His roll in combat determined that he took a fairly serious wound but took out all four of the minions he was fighting in the process, so he described the gradually escalating exchange and finished it with something to the effect of, "...and when the last pirate tries to make a break for the door, I grab a banquet chair from the nearby table and hurl it into his head, knocking him out!" It was wonderfully swashbuckley.
Strangely enough though, I found myself eager at points to take charge of narrating the results PC checks. I didn't initially expect to feel that way, but now that I've had time to think it over, it actually makes a lot of sense. When I (as the GM) narrate the results of all PC and NPC actions, I can make sure a constant tone is maintained, and furthermore that the tone is something I like best. For example, I like combat narration to stay PG-13, but some of the players are more comfortable providing graphic descriptions of gore when they down their foes. This left me experiencing a more gritty-feeling game in some scenes, which was counter to the lighthearted, swashbuckling adventure tone that I imagined the game having.
In any case, at the end of the session, all of the players said that they'd enjoyed playing, so that felt really good. I hope our GM is well enough and free enough to run his game this week. If not, one of the other players might run a one-shot. We'll probably revisit the S7S game again in a few weeks, and thanks to the rules that generate story hooks from play, I'll at least have a few keywords to work off of as I pull the threads of another impromptu adventure together.
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For the pickup game, how did you deal with character generation to kick things off?
ReplyDeleteCharacter generation was tough being over Skype with none of the players having anything but the PDQ# PDF to work from. I basically primed the players by copy-pasting the short descriptions of the major islands in chapter 1 to them and asking, "What sounds interesting to you?" The player who ended up playing the spy (a Barathi Spider to be exact) chimed in that he'd be most interested in the intrigue and revenge stuff happening on Barathi, so I declared that we'd start play there.
ReplyDeleteFrom that point forward, the characters were constructed through sort of a back-and-forth of the players asking me questions about the setting, and me presenting bits that I thought would be universally relevant (such as the concept of Koldun and gifts). At times, the players would describe their characters with prose, and I'd chime in by directing them to write fortes on their sheets.
As far as kicking things off in play, I laid out a very basic mission from the Spider's handlers (infiltrate a manor during a grand party, steal a painting with an encrypted map on it), and depended on story hooks generated by the system to determine the direction of future events.
Thanks for reading, and if you'd like me to clarify anything further about how things went, let me know.