> >b) The group will want to play powerful characters (not necessarily
> >Heroes at the start, but not the "stickpicker" level - I personally
> >don't mind that, but I know my group).
Is the concern here that they'll trounce a scenario that's built with challenges that are too weak? Or that the action will not be appropriate to heroes of this level of prowess?
The former is trivial to adjust for. Wheras the latter does create some restrictions in scenario selection.
>From: donald_at_...
>
>I'm dead against the "create as you go" option. It relies on the
>GM guessing what the players are going to want from the game.
This is a good point. Actually I've refined a few techiques for dealing with this. But it's always a lot safer bet to give the players something based on what they're obviously interested in terms of their character selections.
As a compromise, however, what you can do is encourage the players to write up their characters as far as possible, and tell them to leave out whatever they're not comfortable enumerating. Often half a character is good enough to get a feel for, while also leaving it flexible enough to adapt to the world and by this get more and more interesting to the player. You can adapt the game events to the character, while the player can adapt the character to the game events.
>One thing I did find was that this method chews through an awful
>lot of plot in a few hours because each contest only takes a
>couple of minutes. Granted most of that plot isn't finished and
>will continue in later sessions but you want a lot of potential
>storylines given that at least some will be ignored.
Donald gives good advice here. I and some others find that "chewing through an awful lot of plot" is precisely what the doctor ordered. This is a feature, but, as he says, one you need to be prepared for. Well enumerated and complicated NPC motives that require the NPCs to hit the PCs up for help are often a good way to have material that you can extemporize from to create new plot twists as play proceeds.
Mike
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