I have anxious players

[Overdrive]

Yay, seems my two Pool GMming sessions (and some InSpectres, Dust Devils,..) have waked up the dormant players from their eternal roleplaying sleep. They wanna play! Me too.

The first Pool session was a blast. Two players, two characters, one villain. Unusual setting, winter, cold. Really cool.

When I was figuring out the setting, I came up with a very, very cool idea. One PC was a thief, the other a count visiting another count (the villain) at his castle. Now: Suppose the count doing stuff at the villain's castle. Cutting scenes between the PC's, the count eating at the main hall, the thief sneaking in the villain's chambers, etc. At one point turns out the timeline differs. The thief has come one day after the actual horrendous happenings.

The thief's player can insert stuff during monologues, and why not in the meantime as well. There are corresponding things happening in the count's timeline. E.g. the thief finds a body. Whose body? It may well be discovered when suddenly cutting to the count who's sneaking through the same corridor. Likewise the count's player has power to affect what happens in the thief's timeline. I find this concept very intriguing.

Now I'd like to have some feedback. Has anyone tried this before? What could be the maximum intensity scenario? How to handle stuff, there can easily be conflicts. One thing to consider is how to bring the twist to the players. It might be pretty spooky thing to discover.

I didn't think I could run such a scenario so both PC's were at the same timeline.. Now after some pondering I think this could be done. The Pool is just the right game to run it with.

Oh well, happy and productive thoughts to all :)

[Lxndr]

I've done something similar, I think, assuming I'm reading you right.

The last Pool game I ran uses my variant Snowball (see the thread).  It starts at the END of the story and works its way backwards, like Memento but without the plan.  It's set up to handle (in addition to forwards play) backwards play and "out of order play" like what you've done.

So, sort of like your thief/count game, the discovery of the body is narrated first... and afterwards, in a later scene, one can narrate the death.

[Overdrive]

I think I wrote on the wrong forum.. but thanks for the reply anyway, Lxndr. I checked the Snowball and it seemed pretty interesting. How did the play session go? Was it difficult to link the scenes?

None of my players probably read this forum, so here we go. Should you be a player of mine, please stop reading :) I'm planning on running an 'out-of-order' (like the term) scenario to three players. I'm thinking of a mysterious monastery, temple or whatever, roughly in the renaissance or late middle ages. Something like "steampunk" or "clockworkpunk", perhaps achieved with magic. Pretty much like the computer game "Thief", which had some kind of walking robots with coal furnaces. The point is that there might be *anything* sinister in the monastery.

One PC could again be the thief. Another would be a diplomat of some sort, investigating the late weird happenings. The third PC wakes up from the prison with no idea who he is and how he's got there. The twist being of course, that the third character wakes up "the next evening". Who is he? He could be either one of the two other PCs or some completely different guy. What has happened during the previous night? Why are there bodies everywhere?

Damn, can't wait to run this!