[Traveller] Spotlighting problems.

[Jack Aidley]

Since my main campaign has hit rather a road bump (one of my players has got a new job meaning he can't make it every other week, and another has been unavailable on the weeks he can make it for the last month), I've ended up running a seperate game on alternate Wednesdays with two of the same players and one new one (who've I've gamed with before).

I'd been planning on running a Fantasy game, and got some details worked out but when it came to it my players expressed a desire to play something different, and settled on Traveller (well, actually MegaTraveller).

Since I has nothing prepared I figured I'd just let them generate characters and see where it lead. We ended up with these:

Minty Farquar An upper class Diplomat, quite skilled, and with some Linquistics knowledge - played by my Girlfriend, Gilli.
Baron Karitha A young, largely unskilled noble, played by Ant, one of my regular players.
Lt. Cdr. -I forget- A naval officer of many years, played by Pete, my new player.

Thinking quickly, I came up with this setup. Baron Karitha is on a routine diplomatic journey to a neighbouring planet, Minty is his Diplomatic Attache and Pete's character is the Captain of the starship (a Patrol Cruiser for anyone familiar with Traveller), and thus refered to as 'Captain' by everyone. The ship comes with a crew of seven, plus a ship's robot. On their first jump something goes wrong and they are hurled a 1000 parsecs from their destination (Voyager anyone? Yes, I know).

Now, I figured this could work pretty well. Pete would enjoy playing a starship captain, dealing with first contact type situations would play to the strengths of Minty. And Ant, well, Ant is the kind of player who can be relied on to make his own fun whatever the situation, and I figured the conflict between the Baron - who's mission it is - and the Captain - who's ship it is - could be interesting.

Now the first (short, since we'd done character generation first, and I had to do scene setting first) worked out pretty well. We got everyone introduced and had the Jump disaster. At the start of the second session I handed the crew members over to the players to control between them as they saw fit (except for the Ship's Doctor, who I kept as a full NPC). The game was thereby exploring two aspects I've wanted to look into for a while; the control of additional minor characters by the players (grogs, as it were), and the interaction of players of different in-world rank.

But the second session was much less satisfactory (not helped by Ant having not slept all weekend and being rather out of it), although the plot went pretty well. They've found a planet with near-future tech and they're formulating plans to get hydrogen supplies from them, and the parts needed to build their own hydrogen refining plant.

The trouble is that the 'spotlight' has pretty much all been on Pete's character, and the way he's been runing his character has been exasperating this. I figured I'd let it run and see what happened, figuring that when they finally made contact things would shift to spotlighting Minty and the Baron. Unfortunately the session ended with him deciding he'd need to deal with the negotiations himself.

Gilli complained after the game that she hadn't had much to do. And she's right, she didn't. Although the playing of minor characters did give some spotlight time to the other players, it's not very satisfactory time.

I plan to start next session by having a chat with Pete, and asking him to make sure he delegates negotiation and the like to the other PCs, and maybe pointing out to Ant that his Character is technically in charge of the mission if not the ship. I'm hoping this will bring things back round to the kind of setup I envisioned, with the three PCs sharing the areas of command.

[Ron Edwards]

Hello,

Could you clarify how Pete has been playing? With examples, please.

Best,
Ron

[Jack Aidley]

Hi Ron,

Could you clarify how Pete has been playing? With examples, please.

Ok, I omited this from my original post because I don't want to engage in Pete-bashing since I don't think it's really his fault that things have come out they way they have. But since you feel it's important...

But first, I think I'll explain a little about the other two players and PCs so you can see the background he's playing against. The baron is a bit of a foolish fop. He thinks very highly of himself and expects the very best from everyone and everything. Ant (his player) is normally well able to find something to entertain himself, but was rather out of it this session. Minty is the perfect upper class lady, polite well-spoken and intelligent, she deals with Baron diplomatically and the Captain with respect. Gilli (her player) is very unassertive, so will tend not to put herself forward unless nudged, whenever the Baron gets involved she tends to also become so, but with Ant feeling so out of it the Baron wasn't doing much either.

Pete has taken his role as Ship's Captain a bit further than I would like, he's been ordering all of his crew around to get things moving and not really consulting the other players about any of the plans. He has also been actively trying to keep the Baron from interfering. (For example, he had the Ship's computer inform him when the Baron finished breakfast so he could 'cut him off at the pass' and stop him coming to the bridge and distracted him by getting him to look over some minor aspect of the Alien 'TV' footage telling him it's very important.). He did involve Minty in the translation effort, but there's not awfully much roleplaying to be done in translating an alien language (although Gilli, being something of a linguist herself did improvise some nice flavour details about the language).

By in effect, taking over all the running details of the investigation effort, and the planing of their next move he's left nothing for the other PCs to do that has actual meaning. The final hitch came at the end of the session when he called all the Ship's crew and the PCs together to 'discuss' the plans, initially he was going to offer the negotiations to Minty and the Baron, but then changed his mind; deciding that 'he'd need to make military decisions at the moment'. Thus cutting out what I saw as the other PCs strong area.

All this has been well role-played, and has moved the plot forward and Pete is obviously thoroughly enjoying himself but at the unacceptable price of excluding the other players.

[Ron Edwards]

Hi there,

Yup - that matches with what I'd suspected.

What I think you might consider is taking a strong hand in "scene framing." Here's how I see this ...

Pete does X - fine. Now cut to one of the other players and bloody well have them do something. If they're vague about it, or a little unsure, then toss them a real conflict, right in their lap.

Really good times to cut are within one of Pete's actions, rather than announcing, rolling, resolving, and narrating his actions all the way through before cutting.

Now, this may or may not be the best thing for you, so I'm just presenting it for consideration, not "do this do that" (which it kind of reads like, unfortunately).

But in my experience anyway, this kind of GM-activity still provides lots and lots of player-freedom in terms of what they want to accomplish and get involved in, but shares the spotlight much better. Especially that second point about when to cut - just because Pete's character is dealing with a conflict doesn't mean that he gets full spotlight until it's done.

Best,
Ron

[AnyaTheBlue]

...and here are some ideas for things to throw at the other players:

1. There's a sabotuer on board -- that's why there was a misjump.  And they're still mucking about.  Maybe leaving malfunctions or booby-traps that the other players *have* to deal with.

2.  It's the night watch, and there's some sort of untranslated communications coming through.  Do you wake up the captain, or do you wake up the linguist?  Probably the linguist.

3.  Charater(s) learn about poor morale and/or talk of mutiny amongst the crew, stuff they wouldn't talk about with the Captain.

4.  Infect the captain with something, requiring him to be confined to sick bay.  Maybe it's the sabotuer?  Maybe the doc is the sabotuer?

5.  Have the doctor actually releave the captain of duty due to stress and halucinations (probably not a good idea, since this deprotagonizes the captain)

6.  Have the aliens insist on face-to-face negotiations.  Seperate the captain from the ship.  If some of the other PCs are left on the ship, have something happen that requires them to deal with it on the ship.  If they also go on the negotiation trip, have alien reps come up to them and attempt 'out of band' negotiations in an effort to gain position or political advantage.

It sounds like what's happening is that the Captain has become the 'Ars Magica' mage, while everybody else is stuck running grogs.  If you want to explore the grog idea, you should maybe think about having everybody have a couple of different ranks of character.

Right now, they all have 'command' characters.  They should also all have 'enlisted'/below decks characters.  And don't let them mix, if you can help it.  That is, send the below-decks characters on a mission together, and don't include ANY of the command level characters.  Don't let the Captain get away with playing his command guy in a mix where the rest of the players have to play his subordinates.  That way lies madness!  Madness, I tell you! =)

[DevP]

Ron's comment about the aggressive scene framing is right on. In fact, in my own game (another space hopping deal) I used scene framing of this sort to great effect when the group had to split (between an "away team" and a "stuck on the ship reading Arthurian romances" team).

If your players are keen on the idea, they can get a lot of mileage out of B-plots in parallel to the captain's plotful bits. My favorite example comes from the show Blake's 7; leader Blake and other crew ran around a port looking for a missing McGuffin; the Bastard Hacker and the Dumb Rogue meanwhile split off and attemtped to win a huge bounty for playing DeathChess. <g>

Especially when Pete is coming across more assertively/scene-stealing, giving the other two a stage to themselves might be more liberating. This can greatly empower of the other players in-between scenes where everyone is involved.

Of course, it's really important to talk with Pete. I find it useful to ask him to consider *out-of-character* that's its more fun for everyone to be involved, so that in-character he can slightly bias his choices towards such opportunities. (That is, make him feel like he's co-scheming the narrative along, rather than making him feel ordered around by a GM.

[arxhon]

Ok,

I think the problem can sort itself out in the next session.

You mentioned that Ant was out of it last time around. You also mentioned that Gilli was somewhat uninvolved because Ant was out of it...the interplayer dynamic here is important i think.

Maybe Pete felt that he had to keep things running (sadly, by hogging the spotlight) because Gilli isn't really that assertive in game.

Hopefully, Ant is feeling better next time around, and will be able to participate more, and by proxy, so will Gilli. If i may suggest, trying to get Gilli a little more involved without making it look like your trying to get her involved could help her feel a little more assertive in expressing herself.

Is Gilli the newer player? This may be why she is being so quiet, she may be unused to the group dynamic.

On the other hand, if Pete is the new player, he may be used to playing in groups where one had to compete for spotlight time, and his behavior may be a reflection of that. Since nobody else is competing with him, then he naturally wins out and gets it.

Is Gilli's character the ship translator? If so, then Pete's character may be cut out from the negotiations to a greater degree than he may have originally thought, unless some kind of translator module is being used...i'm not sure about the level of Megatraveller technology, so this may be possible. Play up the diplomatic attache angle of her character...the Captain makes some blunders, perhaps, and she is needed to sort them out before the aliens do something involving excesive firepower.

Aggressive scene-framing is a very good idea; give it a shot.

If it continues to be a problem after the next session, then a little pre- or post-game chat may be in order.

[Jack Aidley]

Thank you all for your advice. You've pretty much confirmed my thoughts on the matter.

I intend to start next session by having a brief chat with Pete, which I think will resolve the matter; if not, I'll use some of the ideas above as a plan B. I should say that I've played with Pete before, and never had any problem with him, so I can't see any reason why we shouldn't be able to resolve this without being heavy-handed.

I think the problem partly stems from the linearity of the plot. Since they're all stuck on the starship; there has been only one problem to solve. Normally I use a spotlight shifting system similar to the one Ron describes above, but I haven't had anything to switch to.

1. There's a sabotuer on board -- that's why there was a misjump. And they're still mucking about. Maybe leaving malfunctions or booby-traps that the other players *have* to deal with.

They have indeed found a sabotage device in the Jump Drive, and I intend to have the Saboteur on-board. I'm hoping to introduce this plot over the next few sessions.

3. Charater(s) learn about poor morale and/or talk of mutiny amongst the crew, stuff they wouldn't talk about with the Captain.

Hmm, good idea. That I like.

[Ron Edwards]

Hello,

It'll be an interesting case study for the ongoing (friendly) debate over how "talk it out beforehand" or "fix by playing differently" interact with one another.

To me, what stands out in your post is the contrast between:

- acknowledging that the scenario needs more than one conflict in order to work

- bringing in another conflict "over the next few sessions"

That latter bit jars me. Are the players supposed to notice something going wrong over several instances, then get subtle hints that someone might be causing these problems, then decide to look for the saboteur, etc? In my experience, such a plan for play lacks a lot of grab.

It's up to you, of course, but I suggest considering having the saboteur be (a) wholly and crucially effective, such that he must be acknowledged and must be found, (b) nearly right away in the very next session. The more this overlaps with whatever conflict they're dealing with at the moment, the better. Definitely a "my two cents" issue - discard/adjust to fit.

Best,
Ron

[Jack Aidley]

Hi Ron,

Yes, that would seem like a bit of a contradiction - what I intend to do is introduce other areas of conflict, but hold the saboteur plot back for a while. I haven't yet fixed on what conflicts I will bring in, but I've a couple of weeks to think about it. If I don't get any good ideas I will bring the Saboteur plot forward.

Are the players supposed to notice something going wrong over several instances, then get subtle hints that someone might be causing these problems, then decide to look for the saboteur, etc?

You're right. Play like that does lack grab. What I want to do is have several acts of minor sabotage at times when they can't fix them because they're too busy. I hope to misdirect the players into thinking all the sabotage devices were pre-planted. Building up to more serious acts and finally the identification and dealing with of the Saboteur. If I bring it all out quickly in the next session I feel the plotline will lack both tension and impact. I like to have 'backburner' plots that bubble for a while under the surface before being resolved, or which raise their head briefly and then disappear for a few sessions before being dealt with. I find this helps stitch seperate adventures together into feeling like an on-going game. Particularly in a game like this which is likely to have a rather 'episodic' feel.

[Ron Edwards]

Hi Jack,

Agreed on all points - with the proviso that many a GM has fallen into the trap of shoveling fairly trivial and uninteresting "forward plots" at the characters as he lovingly tends his subtle and fascinating "connector plot" ... which of course he can't reveal, because that would mean the game might be concluded.

So it's those "up front and center" conflicts that seem most important to me, in your current situation.

Anyway, thanks for this excellent discussion. I look forward to seeing how it goes.

Best,
Ron

[stingray20166]

You're right. Play like that does lack grab. What I want to do is have several acts of minor sabotage at times when they can't fix them because they're too busy. I hope to misdirect the players into thinking all the sabotage devices were pre-planted. Building up to more serious acts and finally the identification and dealing with of the Saboteur. If I bring it all out quickly in the next session I feel the plotline will lack both tension and impact.

I did read your reply and agree with the theory of backburner plots, but it seems to me that the backburner plot is "Why is the Saboteur here?  Who sent him?  What will that agency send next -- an assassin?"  The re-occurring villain idea is good (having the saboteur strike again and again) and does tie episodes together, but here the saboteur is just a minion.  

The first thing I thought when I read your post was "Hmmm, this week the Jump engines, next week the life support!"  If there's no urgency to what the saboteur is doing it seems to me that he loses a bit of importance, whereas if he is really throwing a wrench in things doesn't that take the Captain character out of the negotiations (after all, someone is trying to blow up HIS ship) and give the other players more of a chance to shine?

"You all are preparing to leave the ship to meet the alien envoy when alarms start ringing.  The shuttle has to leave now to be on time."  The Captain is then put in a tough position and by giving him more and more to deal with the other players might take up some of the responsibility.

Tell them to get some rest, though. :-)

Nick

[Jack Aidley]

Hi all,

This is a follow-up to the above, I considered starting a new thread for it, but I don't think there's much new to talk about. Could be wrong.

Last night I ran the next session of the above game. As luck would have it I was giving Pete a lift over to my house, so I got a chance to chat to him over a friendly game of Dead or Alive before the session started. The conversation went something like this:

Me: "About tonight's game. Last week your character pretty much dominated all the play."
Pete (nodding): "Yes."
Me: "And this is a problem."
Pete (nodding more): "Yes."
Me: "I need you to involve others more in the decision making, and delegate things to them. Specifically I think you should hand over the diplomatic stuff to Minty and the Baron."
Pete makes thoughtful noises.
Me: "If you need in character reasons, they have more diplomatic experience and it's often wise to have negotiations carried out by intermediaries, because its harder to pressure people when they can't make the decision themselves." (Pete's very big on IC/OC distinctions and keeping true to character.)
Pete: "The other problem is that IC I don't trust the Baron."
Me: "I'd point out that technically the Baron is in charge of the mission, and although you're captain of the ship; the ship is at his disposal."

I started the game just before the last session finished, after a brief recap so we could redo the 'course of action' discussion. This time Pete handed the diplomatic responsibilities over to the Baron (Ant, who was rather more awake this week), who in turn asked his Minty to assist him. The players also got a lot more into the swing of controlling the minor (crew) characters, so they all got a little bit of spotlight in almost every scene.

Over the last couple of weeks I'd spent some time thinking up additional complications to throw in, but in the end I never had to use any of them. When their initial radio communication was ignored (the aliens thought they were kids pratting about) they took their ship (which we named the ISS Sceptre) down over the one of the oceans, and there then ensued an attempt by the three most powerful nations on the planet to claim them for themselves. The characters decided to establish a 5km no-fly zone around their craft, and ended up shooting down eighteen (!) incoming jets, and capturing two ejected pilots. While Minty was 'interviewing' them, the captives government launched cruise missiles at the Sceptre, which they avoided by plunging under the water; and another nation (The People's Republic) shot down two of the missiles to try and gain their trust. Between the various factions vying for their ear, the dealing with prisoners and their trying to organise a plan I was able to keep the spotlight moving and the session packed.

So, all in all, it went much better than the last session and I think the problem is now resolved. Chatting with Pete had entirely the desired effect, although he was clearly aware of the problem before I raised it, so it may be that it would have worked out OK anyway.

Thanks again for all your advice.

[Ron Edwards]

Hi Jack,

I was really enjoying that post and looking forward to the "what happened" paragraph ... and hit a dead stop.

I don't care about the ship and the aliens, man! I wanna know about the players! How'd it go among the time-sharing, spotlighting, back-and-forth stuff? Did Pete's character end up increasing or decreasing his distrust of the Baron - and most importantly, how did that (whichever) get established through the interactions of the players?

And that sort of thing. Um, sorry about the urgent tone; it's just enthusiasm. Post at your own pace.

Best,
Ron

[Jack Aidley]

Hi Ron,

I was really enjoying that post and looking forward to the "what happened" paragraph ... and hit a dead stop.

Sorry Ron, I was in a kind of 'happy now' posting mode. I'll see if I can provide a better summary now.

How'd it go among the time-sharing, spotlighting, back-and-forth stuff?

Very well. Let's start from the beginning of the session, and I'll see if I can explain how things worked differently this time. Since we 'rewrote' the first scene of this session replacing the last scene of the last we can get a fairly direct comparison here. Incidentally I'm not sure whether any of the players other than Pete noticed the re-writing. I simply announced the session as starting with the meeting.

In the last session, the meeting went something like this:

Pete: "I'll put out a ship wide call telling everyone to come to the mess for a meeting."
Me: "Ok. Everyone there?"
Players nod.
I'll have to summarise this next section because I don't remember the details too clearly. Essentially Pete began by telling everyone what was happening and The Plan. Then asked for questions. I, as the crew, asked a few questions. Then something like this happened.
Pete: "Miss Farquar, I'll need you to perform the diplomatic discussions... Actually, no, I'll need to do them myself. Military decisions may need to be made."

The new version, this session, went something like this:

Me: "Right then, you're in a meeting to discuss what to do next."
Pete: "Ok, does everyone agree with the plan?"
Ant: "Er, what was the plan again."
Brief discussion while we remember the salient points of the plan (contact the second most powerful group by tight beam radio, offer to exchange Medical technology for things the PCs need).
Ant (back in character): "Ah yes, why is it we're contacting the second most powerful group? Surely we should deal with the best."
Pete: "We don't want to disrupt their culture too much. If we give extra power to the most powerful we could unbalance things."
Ant: "That sounds reasonable."
Pete: "Baron, could I ask you to front our diplomatic contacts with the aliens."
Ant: "Yes, of course, that would be appropriate. Miss Farquar I'll need you to advise me from behind the scenes, and see if you can pick up on anything more subtle from their words or actions."
Gilli: "Yes, of course Baron, I'd be happy to."

I think even this one example shows the difference in play, from Pete taking everything on himself to the players sharing the spotlight and bringing each other into the discussions.

I'm at work at the moment, and I'd better get back to it. So I'll leave it there for now, but I can back to it later or perhaps tommorow. I hope this is the kind of thing you're looking for, Ron?

Note: Chances are none of the above quotes are accurate; consider them paraphrases.