Antagonistic GM

[Blankshield]

Blankshield:  I commented on your game, and I've read through the design stuff you've got so far.  It's an interesting conceit, and has the potential to lead to lots of good Story Now.  I see an element of Step On Up in the structure of the game, but that's not largely the point of the game, is it?  Did I miss something?

No, I did.  I was skimming this morning and missed your post clarifying that you were looking for gamist-type step-on-up and conflict.  You're right that it's all about the Story Now, and what little elements of Step On Up are present are meant to push the Story Now. (You are, if competing for resources at all, competing by telling a better story, not by 'beating' your opponent, by and large.)  Mea culpa.

thanks,

James

[Vaxalon]

I presume that a game in which the referee and character players are truly in adversarial positions must place limits on the referee power, or the event is fixed.

XCrawl does this.  The DM is given a limited set of resources in putting together his dungeon.

[Ben O'Neal]

Hey Jason.

Scarlet Wake is built around an antagonistic relationship between players, who are split into two groups, called... wait for it... the Protagonists, and, you guessed it, the Antagonists. This effects everything in the game, from play structure to credibility distribution, and from resources to rules.

The Step On Up in Scarlet Wake is, I'm told, very explicit between Protagonists and Antagonists, which is good because that was my goal when creating it.

Character sheets are a little different. It's not like the "players" have character sheets for their characters, and the "GM" has a character sheet for their powers, more like everyone is a player with a sheet containing both their personal character and all their character's enemies (the "GMs" characters). The role of the GM rotates and is split up between players.

I'm doing a horrible job of summarising SW in typical game terms... but if you read it (it's not all that long), you'll get the idea.

-Ben