Well well well, if it isn’t TTRPG Tuesday. Didn’t think you’d have the guts to show your face around these parts again. Siddown, have a drink. You old sunuvabitch - how the Hell have you been?
I promised at the end of my last TTRPGT post to stop, take a look at the DOLLIE Extraction as a whole, figure out what kind of experience I want to craft, and work backwards from there. So okay. I’m going to try and cover both sides of the experience; the player’s side, as well as the GM.
So, for the player side: I think that the premise itself has some baked-in horror, but that it doesn’t necessarily have the associations of dread that your Cosmic Horror or Alien or Deep Sea stuff has. The darkness is inherently frightening; the void; the depths; madness. So where should the chills come from? I want to create an experience where the on-the-ground situation is different from the mission briefing. I want the coup-in-progress to make things eerily easier at first than the players expect, but for them to fairly quickly encounter some Frames, in order to really drive home the shock of the body horror, the perversion, the cruelty, the exploitativeness of the Corp. I want to combine the nervousness of not being able to trust the plan, with the repulsion for the clones; I want them to feel like there’s enough time perhaps to execute the mission parameters, but that The Real Story is happening all too close but tantalizingly far away. Resulting press-your-luck tension; I want to create circumstances for the players to get into an argument about how much fatal initiative they should take. In the second half, I want them to feel overwhelmed, swarmed, severely outclassed. Encounters with Shepherdesses should feel like the Devil herself just made eye contact with you. I’d also like to build in some betrayals; perhaps when they establish the hacking connection, they receive revised orders. Provide the player with that jolt of “Change of plans”. Run the players ragged, never let them feel safe or informed; Use the clones of the Employees to cap things off on a profane/despair note.
From the GM side, I’m looking to create a rich but manageable story. The sense that they have a full suite of tools but will only get to show off a couple of their toys. A chance to flex a little improvisation for painting the scene and giving voice to some more human characters. A pantheonic sense too though, like you’re playing with mythic characters that are far from the mundane, more operatic and invested with the spark of true dread/horror/chaos. I want them to walk away pleased with the work they did but lamenting the things they didn’t get to do. I want this to be a scenario they’d happily run at least twice more.
Ok! I think I’ll need to sit with this for a while before I can process some tangible things to write, but it’s a good thing to articulate and return to as I mull over things to add. I can ask of each prospect: how does this serve the target experience? Good stuff.
Alright, got that in under the wire, have a good week, don’t forget to tip your service industry people there’s a goddamn pandemic on.
I promised at the end of my last TTRPGT post to stop, take a look at the DOLLIE Extraction as a whole, figure out what kind of experience I want to craft, and work backwards from there. So okay. I’m going to try and cover both sides of the experience; the player’s side, as well as the GM.
So, for the player side: I think that the premise itself has some baked-in horror, but that it doesn’t necessarily have the associations of dread that your Cosmic Horror or Alien or Deep Sea stuff has. The darkness is inherently frightening; the void; the depths; madness. So where should the chills come from? I want to create an experience where the on-the-ground situation is different from the mission briefing. I want the coup-in-progress to make things eerily easier at first than the players expect, but for them to fairly quickly encounter some Frames, in order to really drive home the shock of the body horror, the perversion, the cruelty, the exploitativeness of the Corp. I want to combine the nervousness of not being able to trust the plan, with the repulsion for the clones; I want them to feel like there’s enough time perhaps to execute the mission parameters, but that The Real Story is happening all too close but tantalizingly far away. Resulting press-your-luck tension; I want to create circumstances for the players to get into an argument about how much fatal initiative they should take. In the second half, I want them to feel overwhelmed, swarmed, severely outclassed. Encounters with Shepherdesses should feel like the Devil herself just made eye contact with you. I’d also like to build in some betrayals; perhaps when they establish the hacking connection, they receive revised orders. Provide the player with that jolt of “Change of plans”. Run the players ragged, never let them feel safe or informed; Use the clones of the Employees to cap things off on a profane/despair note.
From the GM side, I’m looking to create a rich but manageable story. The sense that they have a full suite of tools but will only get to show off a couple of their toys. A chance to flex a little improvisation for painting the scene and giving voice to some more human characters. A pantheonic sense too though, like you’re playing with mythic characters that are far from the mundane, more operatic and invested with the spark of true dread/horror/chaos. I want them to walk away pleased with the work they did but lamenting the things they didn’t get to do. I want this to be a scenario they’d happily run at least twice more.
Ok! I think I’ll need to sit with this for a while before I can process some tangible things to write, but it’s a good thing to articulate and return to as I mull over things to add. I can ask of each prospect: how does this serve the target experience? Good stuff.
Alright, got that in under the wire, have a good week, don’t forget to tip your service industry people there’s a goddamn pandemic on.
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