X-Games

On a side note, we had a built in hook for our group as well (we were mercenaries too, but part of a very large company). I assumed early on that Paul had done this to keep us together, but it turns out otherwise.

Well...um...actually that's why I did it. I had lazily decided against running the game as a relationship map scenario, because I didn't want to devote time to reading and mapping a crime novel only to discover after I was done that the map wouldn't meet my needs. So I fell back on the tried-and-tested "your mission, should you choose to accept it" method.

Interestingly, even though aggressive scene cutting, an elastic sense of time, and use of authorial power by players has rendered "keeping the party together" irrelevant, I think the "you're all part of the same mercenary company" thing has been important to the scenario in other ways. One of which, it's hard to describe, is the close-knittedness of the individual subplots that seems to come from the plausible cropping up of some of the same NPC's in scenes with different PC's across the separate storylines. I started doing it because it gave me more options for what would result from the dramatic events of a scene, for what the impact would be on the informal relationship-map. It was kind of a way of squeezing the wet rag of the scene all I could get from it. I can throw an NPC like Jiri Moth or Gila Heartbreaker or Vulf Power into a scene, for no real reason, and maybe they just stand there, or maybe they get drawn into things and turn out to be important later. The scenario has felt particularly dense to me as a result.

In some ways it's like a safety-net Narrativism. With retroactive justification you don't really need a reason to put an NPC into a scene, but the comfortable plausibility of this makes me not at all apprehensive as a GM of doing it. I'm not hindered by worrying there'll need to be a later justification. I fell into doing it, because it had utility. But now I totally love it.

Paul