Aging Campaigns

[Fedifensor]

Re: Aging Campaigns

 

Email's really good for bluebooking, because you can copy and paste into different document files to keep track of things for the campaign, and print them out later. When everything's just written down in a single folder, you can lose it, spill soda on it, etc.

 

Keeping things to email also keeps you from taking up 'face' time. If I have the group there, I'd rather GM for the group then have everyone sitting there scribbling in folders.

 

Of course, since I type a lot faster than I write, I'm probably biased...

[levi]

Re: Aging Campaigns

 

On the topic of Blue Booking, I have used the $.35 spiral, palm-sized notebooks found just about everywhere. I bought an assortment of colors and let the players pick the one they liked best, then asked them to jot down any campaign notes they wanted, particularly ideas and directions they would like to see their characters expand in. It worked pretty well and I was able to see what they thought of different NPCs I Was introducing as well as what plot points they were interested in.

 

As far as building the characters lives beyond punching bad-guys in the face. I have found that some players will never develop their characters beyond combat machines, but the good ones are frothing at the bit to do so. Super Squirrel, how easy would it have been for Reptile's player to have just said, "I live in the sewers and eat rats and the occasional stray dog."? Instead he concocted a scenario where him man-lizard actually works as a short order cook in a diner, that's an open invitation to RPing. As far as he and Voltage double-dating goes, I would look to the Avengers comics where Beast was a member, he and Wonder Man would double date all the time. There are women out there who are just after being seen with a celebrity and others who may be into reptiles, who knows maybe there's a lonely herpetologist out there somewhere.

 

Either way, your players should be encouraged by the fact that you actually WANT to flesh out their characters. Good show!

[AliceTheOwl]

Re: Aging Campaigns

 

Heh. Funny you should mention that.

 

Upon finding out that a girl was interested in dating Voltage, but only if her friend could date Reptile, Reptile responded, with horror in his voice, "I don't want to meet the kind of girl who's interested in me!"

 

He had a lot of fun with that character.

[zornwil]

Re: Aging Campaigns

 

I've heard some details of Blue Booking. Has anyone actually used it in their campaigns? Do you still use it? If you use it' date=' how did you introduce it to your group and what do you use the Blue Booking for? I'm quite the experienced GM and have thought time & again of intro'ing it to my group.[/quote']

Normally I've just passed a note the rare times I've done it. More often I'll pull someone aside. In groups which unfairly metagame, I've heard the best thing to do to keep everyone from over-reacting to note-passing is to occasionally pass a note that says something like "This doesn't mean anything, just passing you a note." or trivial notes, so that people get out of the habit of having characters react when there's no reason other than metagaming. I haven't had to worry about it as an issue so normally I just pull people aside. I figure if I have to break the flow to write something it's just as easy to do so directly. Though I will write something if it's brief or prepared or seems like it would make more sense communication-wise.

 

PS - also, my hand-writing is so bad that's another reason I avoid doing so.

[Cancer]

Re: Aging Campaigns

 

Recurring villians in a long-running campaign make me want to save my XP's and buy off my Code Against Killing disadvantage, but not change actual character behavior until the moment comes to end the recurrence.

[Tech]

Re: Aging Campaigns

 

Recurring villians in a long-running campaign make me want to save my XP's and buy off my Code Against Killing disadvantage' date=' but not change actual character behavior until the moment comes to end the recurrence.[/quote']

 

Ah, the recurring villain. We've had a lot of recurring villains, including Lazer, Foxbat, Halfjack, Wee Willie (how could you not have someone this weird not show up again) and many others besides. The fun with recurring villains is eventually, at least in our campaign, those villains that have a conscience of sorts will eventually be asked to give up being a villain - and be given the help they need to do just that, if they want to give it up.

 

I've seen villains get cured, retire, get up being a villain (and almost always retired), even change sides and get married to a PC. There have been times when I really wished I didn't have a Code Against Killing on my character so I could pound the living daylights out of a villain but hey, it's part of the character.

[Markdoc]

Re: Aging Campaigns

 

I've heard some details of Blue Booking. Has anyone actually used it in their campaigns? Do you still use it? If you use it' date=' how did you introduce it to your group and what do you use the Blue Booking for? I'm quite the experienced GM and have thought time & again of intro'ing it to my group.[/quote']

 

We've used it (to great effect) in some games and it has belly-flopped when I introduced it in others. The key is that your players have to *want* to do it.

 

So for some games, where it has worked well, we have used it to introduce new NPCs and fill in their backgrounds (GM-initiated material), as well as using it for handling off-screen PC interactions and activities (mostly player initiated). We've even used it to develop PCs outside the main group (it's a great way of handling "one player goes off on his own for a while" for example).

 

At the extreme end of the scale, we ended up with three groups in one of my games - the face to face group, a small group of email players, who interacted entirely with NPCs in a different geographical area *and* a different time frame (about 3 years ahead of the FtF group) plus a second, smaller group of PCs who were playing alternate characters. My idea was that these bluebookers would fill in some backstory. The email players woud run with a different (complementary) story focussing on how the chief bad guy got to be who he was and also introducing several major NPCs for the FTF group, while the alternate characters would fill in some details on what the chief bad guy was up to *now* and then link up with the FtF group for one of the grand finales (the game ran for several years, so there were two major story arcs each with their own grand finale).

 

This required a certain deal of plotweaving and careful pacing (not to give away too much, too soon) and also meant that the players knew things that their characters would not, but that could be handled by the GM (me) without too many problems and any extra trouble was more than worth it, for the added richness and immersion it created.

 

Sounds cool, right?

 

The game straight after that, I set up the same deal but with a new group of players. The idea went bust: with one exception, people simply weren't into the extra writing and planning involved and I soon got tired of nagging people for input. So we went FtF only.

 

cheers, Mark