Inspectres - Starting Interview Question

[jburneko]

Hello,

I have some questions about the purpose of the starting interview.  Now, from what I can tell the starting interview is NOT the same thing as the initial approach by a client at the start of new job.  So, my first question is what is the exact purpose of the starting interview?  Is it a "warm-up" exercise to get players into the whole Director Stance Mindset since they'll obviously have to make up tons of stuff about their company during this phase?  Or is there more to it than that?

Also, does EVERY session of Inspectres start with the starting interview or does it just happen at the top of the very first time you play with a given franchise?

Thanks.

Jesse

[mahoux]

I'm not sure if Jared has changed things for the spiffed-up version of the game, but when I ran Inspectres for my group, we did the starting interview as a job interview.

Our franchise was a start-up, and my NPC, who was the owner of the franchise, did an interactive interview - for the job of course.  We used it as a n opportunity to flesh out characters, get the idea of who they were and how they interacted with others.  I asked some pretty "job interview-y" questions, did the whole ghostbusters kind of thing.  We had a ton of fun with this part of it.

-Aaron

[joshua neff]

Jesse--

You don't have to start each session, or each group of sessions, with a job interview. When I ran InSpectres, my group decided they were all established employees of the franchise, so we started with, I think, a press conference. Or maybe we started with the client coming in. I can't really recall now. But I know we didn't start with a job interview.

[Ron Edwards]

Hi Jesse,

You may be reading too much narrowness into the "starting interview" concept.

My latest run of InSpectres involved a startup company that had come under potential ongoing contract to a large insurance firm. So their first scene was meeting the insurance VP and discussing their contract; they had to pitch themselves and articulate the vision/etc of their little company.

Then they chose one of three files that the insurance firm was coping with and went to go deal with the situation, technically "the client" in the sense of the person experiencing the supernatural problem.

So later runs might start with further interactions with the parent insurance company, or they might start with job interviews for new people for the little company, or they might start right off into a new client/problem situation.

Don't get so locked into the idea that every session must start with an "interview," or that every interview is the same thing.

Best,
Ron

[Jared A. Sorensen]

Hi, Jesse.

All these schmoes are correct. The starting interview is meant to "gel" the group of players to their characters (and to each others' characters). It's a great way to establish the nature of the franchise, introduce recurring NPCs (like the vampire investor mentioned in the text) or get new players into the game (because you CAN have more than one starting interview).

It's not mandatory, and the nature of the "starting interview" doesn't have to even be one of the three examples. One idea I had for the start of an InSpectres game is to stage a "bar scene" where the characters meet after being laid off from work to talk future job prospects...