Creating the Scenario with the Character Sheets in Front of Me

[Brand_Robins]

I don't mean to pick on Brand, but I clicked "Quote" on his post. This applies to what Chris said, too.

It's okay, pick away!

Especially as you're right. Dogs has feedback mechanisms, but they are different than the flags being discussed in the rest of the thread. Trying to shove them all under one heading is probably not best for clarity.

[Bankuei]

Adam,

you're right.  Sorry for confusing the discussion.

Chris

[Judd]

One of those off-the-fly games was set on the under-side of the Spelljammer setting's Rock of Bral, a place I was enamored with.  I decided it was a prison and the game would be set there.  The only guidance I gave the players during chargen was that they were in the Rock for a crime and they weren't framed.  Whatever it was, they did it.

I filled a notebook page with the guards' names, the warden and other prisoners.  Of course these other prisoners, all Drow, Yuan-ti, a Ronin Space Captain from the Imperial Navy were all bangs.  I didn't realize what I had to have down until years later but I had to have bangs, situations the players felt compelled to react to and deal with.

I've been thinking about this game, a successful session that I hadn't thought about in years.  It occurred to me that the game's concept had flags built in.

The players all came up with a crime that their PC had comitted and there it was, my lone freak flags.  One character was a Giff, one of those Spelljammer hippo-men who had gone AWOL from his platoon due to some kind of machievellian elven navy scheme, another was a religious zealot who was making dangerous waves in his world and was sent off for being a political dissident.

I made the guards in the prison Giff, so the player of the Giff convict would be able to play out his problem with his own kind.  The dissident got to stir up the cell block into a political frenzy.  D&D 2nd edition wasn't exactly highlighting my style of play but it was the devil we knew back then.

Anyway, the concept gave us our flags.  These weren't built into the system but before the player could come to the table, they had to tell me their crime and then BINGO, a hand-hold for me to hang on to while I figured out what made the character excited at the table.