benlehman

Been thinking about this a lot lately. It seems to be a huge problem for me. I'm almost coming full circle and starting to think "screw it, just make a gm do the work". I think it's mostly because when I'm asked to generate content in realtime, it's not a practice I would call fun (I tend to get performance anxiety from myself and less buy-in from others).

I'm working a bit on an idea that's a mix of 2a and 4 right now, tossing around thinking about gamelike prep as a part of the fun, not a predecessor. This post was pretty useful in pointing out possible pitfalls. We had an idea like that in "Last Houses" where there was a set phase in the game for bringing in player content. For example, players could call for a monster introduction scene which would trigger a formulaic scene where one player was the monster specialist and the other was a scribe. At the start of the scene, the monster specialist would have a vague sort of idea of what kind of monster they wanted to add to the setting, and the player of the scribe would help flesh it out by asking three questions from a list and recording the result; once the scene was over, you'd finish filling in stats. Never really tested, but I thought it would be fun. I like the idea of low-stress in-character content creation as setup.