Scene Framing Workshop (IRC)

[Jonathan Walton]

So, this morning, I was pondering the simple beauty of some of the pick-up games I've played in IRC over the past few months.  It happens like this: a bunch of us are sitting around talking about games, someone gets a hankering to play something, they recruit other people, and the magic happens.  I find these instances to be hugely educational, especially because I'm playing with the bright, open-minded, and progressive roleplayers that usually hang out at the Forge and Indie-Netgaming.  Usually the games only last for a few scenes and never get revisited, but they're no less cool for all that.

So, I'm looking for a way for this kind of thing to happen more regularly, with a rotating group of people, basically consisting of just whoever shows up.  I'm still not 100% sure of a format, per say.  Probably something that's a mixture of Primetime Adventures and Polaris-style scene framing: we brainstorm a situation together, invent the key characters in a few sentences, get the situation rolling, and just play it by ear.  As for a system, I'd suggest we just freeform it until we need some support and then kind of improvise: reaching for Otherkind or Shadows-style dice mechanics or similar, the kind that are all about hard choices and not getting exactly what you want.

Things that I'd personally like to get out of such sessions:

1. Further Develop My Skills in Collaborative Scene Framing, which means not just being able to set up interesting situations but being able to work with other people to do that.

2. Figuring Out How to Set Up Functional Player-Player Antagonism, where there are no NPC "villains" really, and the PCs have to provide their own antagonism to each other.

These goals have to do, specifically, with creating functional GM-less or rotating-GM play, but I'd definitely be open to also addressing issues that other participants are interested in.  Bring something that you want to work on and we'll see if we can help you out with specific design or play goals.

Maybe it would be a good idea to try to run 3 scenes in each weekly session and then quit, nomatter where the story is going.  And then, afterwards, if people want to stick around, we can discuss how the scenes went and what me might want to address or change next time around.  The point of the scenes would not really be to create a story or enjoy roleplaying with cool people (though that would inevitably be part of the fun too), but would instead be actually making an effort to get better at this roleplaying thing.  The story of the previous 3 scenes would not continued the next week.  A new group of players would do 3 completely unrelated scenes, though some of the themes and issues explored could be the same, obviously.

TIME: Right now, I'm thinking a few hours on Tuesday Evenings, say 9-11pm EST?  If you're really interested but will consistently be unable to make that time slot, let me know.  That'll be Wednesday mornings for me, because I'm on China time.

PLACE: Indie Netgaming, which is the #indierpgs channel on magicstar.  If you don't know anything about IRC or have trouble getting sortware or loggin on, we can help you with that too.

Hope to see some of you there.  Write-ups of the scenes should be regularly posted in Actual Play.

[Mike Holmes]

Sound like a cool idea. You'll be running across from my HQ game, so there'll be a lot of traffic that night (which is probably a good thing).

Make sure to post it in the list (if you have, I missed it somehow).

Mike

[Jonathan Walton]

This is just a reminder that the first pick-up session will be in 10 hours or so (9pm EST).  Tuesday evening Western time.  I'm about to go to sleep, cuz that's early Wed morning for me.  I should be up and online around 8, so if anyone needs help or has problems getting online or whatever, let me know.  I'll try to have an Actual Play post up tomorrow, assuming all goes well.

[Jonathan Walton]

One more quick note, in case people haven't shown up to Indie-Netgaming in a while: the server is now accessible from "galaxy.magicstar.net", which might be important.  I was having trouble logging on earlier.