Preparing a scene in a game

[Doc Democracy]

I have been playing this game so long, I tend to do everything by judging things by eye.  And I adjust on the fly depending on what the dice throw up and the way the players react.

 

It is not something you can really teach someone to do except by delivering them the same experience over time.  Reading other systems is enlightening though. I have been reading the Sentinels of the Multiverse RPG and the bought adventures have (I rthink) a fantastic structure.  It really does make you think, as a GM, and probably will provide a bit more structure for the players.  The GM notes for one scene looks as follows.

 

 

The question is whether you guys do anything similar for HERO and whether it would be useful for published HERO scenarios to do something like this too?

 

Doc

[Duke Bushido]

I am not certain what you are asking, Doc,but I _think_ you are asking if the clock still euns when the heroes aren't around.

 

If that is the case, then yes; I do that.  If I decide that Event happens fifteen minutes after the players so The Thing, then whether they get to the Event or not, it happens, and yes; it can radically alter the direction of the game in an instant, but as long as everyone remains on board with it, I don't expect to stop doing it.

 

Now to be fair, the "timer" I use isn't terribly strict, but I do not pause time in the rest of the universe because the  players have decided there is an invisible observer somewhere in the completely empty room, and spend twenty minutes here looking for him.

 

Or you know- whatever the situation may be.  You really do _not_ need a complicated plot.  Say the "main plot"- or rather, the ideal run through of the scenario- might consist of perhaps four linear scenes.  Then add two layers behind those scenes of what the adversaries are doing to move events along.

 

The players Will complicate it for you; I promise.

 

And when they talk about it later, they invariably want to know how you come up with such intricrate plots over and over again....

 

 

 

[Doc Democracy]

The Sentinels game almost requires this kind of detail for every scene.  The published scenarios have this summary in there for every scene the publisher envisages.

 

I was reading it, initially, not sure if I appreciated the explicit hand-holding or resented the handcuffs it was putting on my (and the players) creativity.

 

I have come down on the former side. I like the detail and structure it provides. It gives a great insight into the author's mind of what is going on and demands the author put that detailed thought into it.

 

Timers are front and centre in the game.  Every encounter has a timer, which has Green, Yellow and Red zones and certain powers are only available to heroes and villains if either the environmental (or personal health) counters are in the yellow or red zones.

 

Like Blades in the Dark, you can have several timers running at once and I reckon they will add to the pacing of encounters and the session.  When you tell players they can access their yellow powers, even when their health is in the green zone, it means things are getting tight.  Access to red powers, things are getting critical.

 

It is something HERO does not provide in any form at all.  However, having this explicit structuring of encounters in published adventures, I think, would be a great thing, no?

 

Doc

[Sean Waters]

Sentinels is an interesting game.  I've read it but not played it.  I do not structure my plots to that extent because I find players usually have very different ideas from me about what they should be doing next.

 

I usually write quite an extensive background, so I know what has happened already, and how we got here (the last one I did started, "20 billion years ago, the Scourge had annihilated every other sentient species in the Universe and so, naturally, turned on each other..." - I was quite pleased with that*) and a skeleton of what I think is going to happen, if everything goes according to plan (HA!).  Then I build a bunch of characters I think I might need, dream up a few red herrings and just have at it.  Most of the play is Theatre of the Mind, or whiteboard, but I will clear the floor and set up piles of books and stuff and use miniatures for the big fights.

 

*Most of my 'plot/backstory' never actually turns up in the game, but I feel better knowing it is there if someone asks a pertinent question.

[Sketchpad]

It's an interesting idea. So maybe set up an adventure like:

 

To the Foxbat Cave

OO   Uncover clues to where Foxbat Cave is (-3 to rolls)

O      Confront and Defeat Leroy the Exo-Skeleton Man 

OOO Interrogate Leroy as to Foxbat's Scheme. Each success grants 1 info statement.

OO    Find the two bombs (-2 to rolls)

O       Confront & Defeat Foxbat

 

Give 1 XP for each successful plot point. 

 

Each point has to be achieved before the next can be used. 

[Doc Democracy]

In Sentinels, each of your steps would be broken down as above, in the uncover clues section you might set up the scene to provide a couple of ways you envisage they might find those clues or what actions might turn them up, which means thinking, even in sketchy terms, of who or what holds the clues.

 

It is a decent way to structure things for folk who are not confident of winging their way through with a decent idea, a glib tongue and a few scraps of paper with some numbers on. 🙂 

[Sketchpad]

1 hour ago, Doc Democracy said:

It is a decent way to structure things for folk who are not confident of winging their way through with a decent idea, a glib tongue and a few scraps of paper with some numbers on. 🙂 

 

It definitely has some merit. By listing a modifier, it gives a task some difficulty rating to some extent. Maybe this would be good at the beginning of an adventure section in a kind of summary, while expanding on it within the adventure itself?

[Rich McGee]

On 7/22/2024 at 3:38 AM, Doc Democracy said:

The Sentinels game almost requires this kind of detail for every scene. 

I've played a lot of Sentinels and that definitely isn't the case for homebrew adventures, anyway.  Montage scenes rarely require any GM planning at all, and Social scenes don't need anything more than maybe a list of what your NPC motivations and info are so you can carry out a sensible conversation using them.  Action scenes are where most of the mechanical prep time for a session goes, and usually where the bulk of your table time will be spent because that's where most of the mechanics (and all the combat) live.  It's really only that last category that calls for much detail, and even that varies wildly.  When I'm prepping I'll prep a climactic combat (or chase, or heist, or whatever - they're all Action) and maybe a second Action scene to set up for it, but usually I do just one and throw together any others on the fly.  Once you know your way around the scene design system and have a stable of enemies and challenges to draw from it's easier than it looks.

 

That "Stop Fracture's Plot" thing isn't even a scene anyway.  It's a (quite complex) challenge, which is a type of scene element.  You have a budget based on how many PC heroes there are to "buy" scene elements when creating an action scene.  That particular challenge is a doozy and probably counted as a Difficult element, which means either the whole scene was meant to be rough (which is probably the case - that scene was the adventure climax IIRC), or it "cost" two elements in a standard scene.  Assuming there thing's written for 4-5 heroes there would be other elements - the villain Fracture is probably another one or two chunks of your budget, and there's likely an environment producing complications for one or both sides.  For larger groups there'd be some lesser challenge or threat to deal with as well.

 

If anyone wants to dig deeper into this chunk of Sentinels there are a bunch of articles on scene design, scene elements, and an example of a (rather over-scripted) climactic scene over on my Sentinels blog, which are most easily accessed through the sub-index page here.

 

Interesting challenge, BTW.  You really, really do not want Baron Blade completing that Meanwhile track (he'll escape if he does so, and this is a Doctor Doom-tier villain in the setting), so taking the shortcut route to draw out Fracture puts a real tight clock on you wrapping up the scene fast.  You're probably much better off breaking in to the rocket and dealing with Fracture afterward, even though it costs more actions (and probably triggers more twists) to do so.

7 hours ago, Sketchpad said:

It's an interesting idea. So maybe set up an adventure like:

 

To the Foxbat Cave

OO   Uncover clues to where Foxbat Cave is (-3 to rolls)

O      Confront and Defeat Leroy the Exo-Skeleton Man 

OOO Interrogate Leroy as to Foxbat's Scheme. Each success grants 1 info statement.

OO    Find the two bombs (-2 to rolls)

O       Confront & Defeat Foxbat

Now that's a full adventure draft, and might even take multiple sessions.  In Sentinels it would consist of several scenes of each type, probably something like:

 

Montage scene to locate the Foxbat Cave (which is probably in the penthouse of an abandoned skyscraper knowing FB), maybe mixed with one or more Social scenes with potential informants.

Action scene to deal with Leroy and the no-doubt fearsomely unreliable Foxbat Cave defenses.

Montage scene to heal up (the system expects you to take damage a lot but heal from it rapidly during Montage breaks) and possibly get some clues/bonuses going forward from investigating the lair.

Social scene to interrogate Leroy - a good time to use those bonuses from teh scene before if you have to improve your odds of getting info out of him.

Probably a combined Action scene where the players need to split up at first to deal with the bombs, then come together to deal with FB in person - although there are other ways to do if you wanted.  FB by himself isn't beating a hero team, but he might run the scene tracker out on them and escape if they took enough time dealing with a couple of complex bomb challenges - or if some heroes got blown up while trying.   

 

That'd be a full 3-5 hour session in Sentinels depending on how fast (and numerous) your players are.  Only thing I'd be worried about is how linear it is - offering some branching approaches so everything doesn't have to be done in order would be less of a railroad, and provide a little more flexibility for when your players inevitably do something utterly unexpected.