Tantanea Health Thoughts

[jeregenest]

I think I’ve been going about the modern era of tantanea all wrong. I’ve been focusing on my cool plot idea over the opportunity to do character building and interaction with NPCs and have thus been setting up a very unstable social situation. I think I’ve been too much in the mindset of 2 sessions per past life and also spinning from several players leaving at once thus upsetting the game’s dynamics. I need to recover from that quickly and do a few things to remedy the situation.

1. Take a break from the Mandarin plotline. Let things rest in an uneasy truce state.


2. Get Kesh back his crystal skull


3. Link Kathryn’s character firmly to the circle


4. Let some time go by in game to allow the characters to restore their base of operation.

All of this can probably be easily done in about half a session if I go into it with the right mindset.

I’m also growing disenchanted with Mission Play, it doesn’t seem to do the job in this game. Or maybe I’ve been using them as a crutch to avoid awkwardness in the game session. I liked the out-of-session extended contest Jeff and I did and I’m wondering if that would work to establish important items about the past. Or perhaps I’m just worrying to much about these "important items from the past".

Comments

[jeffwik.livejournal.com]

Hmm. We the PCs have indeed been operating in crisis mode verging on eXtreme crisis mode since the modern era began, not like the TV show 24. The points you ID as things to do would indeed pull us out of crisis mode. I think that we the PCs are, however, used to accomplishing things with dramatic speed, and to a certain extent the eXtreme crisis mode has fed on that.

(Side note: I don't especially mind not having the skull, at least temporarily; not having the skull has made having the skull all the more significant. But not having the skull has highlighted how Kesh isn't that great at things that aren't the skull.)

In re mission play: I think that it's fun -- you know I've always been Mission Play's biggest booster -- but would benefit from more structure. In AoP, missions had pretty severe constraints as to their scope, it was established what they were about before the mission began. Also all the players had some kind of angle; if they weren't representing their PC specifically, they were representing his/her faction/agency/nation/ethnicity/moral compass. These are strictures that seem lacking in the tantaene Missions.

[(Anonymous)]

Actually, it makes me think...

The pacing of the previous incarnations had one VERY different thing going for it... we all knew when the story was going to peak. While it took away some game-master tools, it was kind of interesting from a player's perspective: we knew when to pull out all the stops and "go for it." I thought this was refreshing from a story-telling standpoint, since the climax of each incarnation was largely feuled by the players. Now I think we'll probably spend a lot more time thinking how and when we're going to fix each of our problems, and the game might slow down. The short 2 or 3 session format made it difficult to brew extremely complex plots, but it did make for exciting finishes!

that was me.

[dkoulomzin.livejournal.com]

I forgot to log in.

Re: that was me.

[jeffwik.livejournal.com]

Perhaps that's conditioned us (1) to expect terrible things to happen soon and therefore require immediate premptive response.

(1) me.