Fluid: Grandmother Spider

We played the second session of the Grandmother Spider campaign this past Sunday night. For those just tuning in, this roleplaying campaign is set in Joss Whedon's Firefly universe during the Unification War, using my own set of rules, which is currently in development.

The session went well enough from the players' perspective, even if it was a bit short again. I made some changes to the rules again, and the changes had the desired effects, but we're still not quite where I want to be. Two of the five players took advantage of one of the established rules that I didn't actually think would get much play, and that was a Good Thing.

Still, I find myself a bit frustrated at this point. I've realized that I've written a set of rules for players with a writer's mindset, and what I have for the most part are players who actually come just to play a game. How dare they? ;-) On the other hand, part of what I'm after is a set of rules that encourage players to contribute to the plot without requiring it, and I think I now have the rules change that will accomplish that without messing up anything else. I'll try the new rule during the next session. By now, the players are becoming accustomed to the rules changing every time, and I appreciate their patience while I muddle through my thought process.

What puzzled me at one point is that the players liked Fluid, even though it seemed to be asking things of them that they didn't want to do. I finally figured out that what they liked is that the simplicity of the system made character generation and task resolution very easy, and the fast task resolution made the plot move much more quickly than in conventional roleplaying, which was exactly what I'd had in mind. The problem is, when the plot moves that much more quickly and the players aren't contributing much to the plot (which the rules assumed they'd do), the GM has to come up with an awful lot of material personally on the fly. I can't just run a two hour fight scene with Fluid, unless the players really want it! And because the plot moves so much more quickly, it's hard to anticipate what the players are going to do far enough ahead to function. And of course, it's very hard to come up with good plot on the fly.

Fortunately, I think I have a solution, which is surprisingly simple. It comes down to keeping a simple question in mind for each character, which boils down to "What do I want to know about this character?", and coming up with story elements that will force the player to, in effect, answer those questions by making a choice within the story. If I'm really on top of things, I might be able to come up with elements that will do the same thing for multiple characters at the same time. And if we run out of questions to ask about this set of characters, it's time to move on to something else. The trick is to come up with good questions fast enough, and I won't know if I can do that until I try. If the players decline to raise questions about their characters themselves, it's up to me to do it, and I think I can.