I don’t talk about role playing games here, but it’s something I enjoy.
Friday night I ran the conclusion of Silicon Valley Slayage (SVS) , a campaign I’ve run with John Kim over the past three years using Eden Studio’s officially licensed rules for Buffy the Vampire Slayer-based games.
Badgerbag live blogged the finale, which will give you an idea of what’s it like to collaborate with a bunch of fun, smart players; and fight giant, Lenin-quoting mecha.
My sessions were comic: anime pastiche, party-crashing demons, body swapping. John did the heavy stuff: mirror worlds, the death of friends, and horrible betrayals.
Before SVS, I had not run a game for close to twenty years, so it was great to work with, and learn from John. In an interview on the gaming site Treasure Tables, he talks about managing the scope of a game:
Second, I restrict the scope of my games. This means that I keep adventures in the same area, reusing locations and NPCs. Not only does this reduce my prep time, it means that the players are familiar with and invested in the elements of the game. Learning to do this has been a big shift for me over the past ten years.
John explained this to me by suggesting I think like a producer of a TV show, we don’t have unlimited budget for new sets every episode, and CGI still isn’t that cheap.
The other TV metaphor we used was multiple writers and pitches. John and I would take turns running two to four episodes in a row. We would write log lines for potential episode ideas, and submit them to one another.
One Comment
This sounds like a really excellent game, Bill, and it’s interesting to hear a little bit about your end of running it.
Have you ever checked out Primetime Adventures, from Dog Eared Designs? It uses exactly that concept — budget — to limit the amount of opposition that the Narrator has to throw at the PCs. Based on your post, it sounds like it works well in Buffy, too.