Pace Slip

[Fuseboy]

In GMing our Burning Gdinsk game, I made a pacing slip that had interesting consequences.. so I hold it up here as a lesson for others.

The game starts with the players in semi-hiding in the aftermath of being ambushed by unknown assailants. The leader of their criminal brotherhood, Kursk, lies comatose and his body is now in the hands of the players' enemy, Kurk's sociopathic son, Ilya. Saving Kursk is the shared belief.

After the players set the scene (hiding out in the shack of Jude's character, Sergei the Fence), an NPC arrives - Radomir, one of the brotherhood's elders - to convince the players to participate in a meeting to restore order the fractured brotherhood. The party suspects a trap, but Radomir prevails in the DoW, arguing that as Kursk's most trusted lieutenants, they're vital to brokering any meaningful peace.

This is where I slipped up: I set the meeting for "tomorrow night", thinking that we'd get to it in a scene or two. As this was the opening scene, we hadn't established pace yet, and I was way off! After a long first session, we only made it to the wee hours of the night of day one.

Hoping for a slightly faster pace, Sanjeev referred me to the "playing out the day" thread. As POTD is a gripe of mine, I was hoping that's not what I'd been doing!

In hindsight, I don't think I did - I just completely overestimated the rate at which game time would slip by. By deferring the first 'bang' until the following night, I inadvertently created enough "down time" for everyone to work on secondary goals. The first session was fun, but it wasn't really about the central story. Woops!

In other circumstances, though, it's a useful trick. Makes me wish there was a repository of tips for influencing pacing and rising tension - an area where I feel a little clumsy.

[artellan]

Hey man,
Yeah it doesn't sound like what I meant by "playing out the day", since your players were still working on their other goals. I'm pretty sure you'd know it if you saw it!

I can't tell from your post how successful you thought the session was ... nor whether you were bummed out about not getting to the meeting (GMs get to have fun too!). One thing that seems to work in our group is just talking about it, like Sanjeev could have said "hey guys maybe we can address that later, I was hoping we could get to the brotherhood meeting this session". Also if this was your first session, I think Luke said in another recent thread that it's okay to start slow and build towards the big set-piece conflicts.

Luke said BW can still suffer from problems like I described in my rant. While I agree with him in general, I feel it's got a lot to reduce the potential for those problems. For example, if you're following Vincent's Admonition, a session with no conflict will be obvious because no dice will be rolled. Stating Intent before you roll also gives players a lot more power to pursue their goals (it doesn't prevent GM stone-walling but makes it super-obvious). Let it ride, Circles, BITs, all push the game towards real player input and addressing meaningful conflicts. Or maybe it just seems that way!

Cheers

[Fuseboy]

It the first session of the game, so I was expecting to take some time to find our feet. Plus, everyone was so into their characters that it was a lot of fun. Although at the time I had a vague sense the pace wasn't what it could be, I still enjoyed myself a lot as we went to and fro. It wasn't until afterwards that Sanjeev clued me in to the root cause.

Since I wrote that, I've skimmed some of Chris Chinn's articles. His theory on pace is not to bother with an attempt at rising tension, just pile it on at whatever sustainable pace you can manage. That's certainly simpler.

I wonder if that approach, when combined with having a campaign goal, produces rising tension naturally. As the characters (PC or NPC) burn through their resources (money, allies), conflicts tend to get more desperate as the ultimate goal looms, and the likelihood of moldbreaker scenes rises as more pressure is placed on incompatible beliefs.

[Paul B]

Let it ride, Circles, BITs, all push the game towards real player input and addressing meaningful conflicts. Or maybe it just seems that way!

I would hope this was true. I think it may not be, though! I have had at least one player who looked at all these rules individually and could/did not connect them together into an overarching experience.

(NB: This is the main problem with the LiR discussion over at theRPGsite -- it doesn't really work out of context with the rules that surround it.)

I think it's a conceptual jump for some players to go from considering each rule as a distinct (and therefore ignorable or house-ruleable) entity, and viewing the rules as an interlocking whole.

p.

[Deliverator]

I think it's a conceptual jump for some players to go from considering each rule as a distinct (and therefore ignorable or house-ruleable) entity, and viewing the rules as an interlocking whole.

p.


Yes, thanks largely to those stupid introductory paragraphs in most trad RPGs.

Matt

[santovendetta]

I can sympathize Fuseboy, I once set up a meeting at the end of a session for the next morning when it was already evening, thinking we'd start off with "everyone going to sleep? alright, time for the meeting". They spent an entire six hour session on the events of that night and changed the entire political landscape and most of them ended up fleeing the city before that meeting.