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| This year's RPGaDay (full text list here) |
A. Berlin-87 for Cartel (and Character-vs- Character games in general)
Spectacular sessions are hard to do, because there’s a whole mix of ingredients that you need make them work. Convention games are the epitome of these, and perhaps even harder to get right because they’re often with a group of strangers. Guy writes an excellent blog which is packed with advice on running one-shots well, which I wholeheartedly recommend.
To get a good session, you need compelling characters that the players are invested in. Ideally you want them to be engaging with each other, perhaps with a little joking and snark. For a one-shot, this is often harder unless the system or the GM deliberately sets things up to do this. They need objectives (which may not quite align) and crosslinks to each other.
I quite like PVP games for this because they explicitly give players permission to both engage with each other and interact. I really don’t like the tag PVP though because while it is appropriate for online games, in tabletop roleplaying games it should always be CVC - character vs character. Explicitly, if you play a game like this you are giving other players permission for their characters to do mean things to your character and vice-versa. Hopefully, a shared objective will help avoid things coming off the rails.
A plot isn’t essential. It helps, but it isn’t essential. I’ve played and run sessions where the players have just got into their characters and had a bunch of fun interacting. Often you sigh and lay the plot to one side at that point, knowing that they’ll get back to it at some point. Sometimes these are the best sessions ever. In the recent game of the Berlin-87 setting for Cartel at Revelation, the characters had the general mission to get an agent out of East Berlin without creating too much noise, but their personal agendas dominated. The nominal plot was a backdrop.
The most spectacular sessions that I’ve played or run have tended to be those with CVC tendencies. Blood Operas for Conspiracy of Shadows, Cartel drug based conflicts, The Slow Knife - a story of revenge, and most recently the Berlin-87 game.
So for this, I’ll pick Berlin-87.
19 August 2024
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