Tis the Season

[jaegamer]

It's the season for Chill, and I have a problem.

I love running Chill, and I have a group of wonderful players.  Until I took a hiatus a month ago, we'd been running weekly for a couple of years.  I tend to long, involved scenarios deeply linked into the backgrounds of the characters.  That made for a lot of good play, but Real Life has reared its monstrous head.  Odds are good that no more than 3 of my six players will be able to make any given week night session, which ends up limiting my story options.  What do I do if I've centered the story around a character who can't make it that week - or for several weeks?

I don't want to replace the players who can't make it often - they're great players, they just have Real Life conflicts.  I want to make my game more "absence friendly" without losing the personal connection that I feel is so important in a horror game.

I'd like to go to a more episodic approach (a la Supernatural, Friday the 13th the Series or Poltergeist: the Legacy), but I'm kinda stalled.  I don't want to do tired old stuff - these folks are all pretty well mired in the horror genre.  I'd like to string the episodic events into arcs so that eventually they'd look at them an realize that this and this and OMG THAT all apply to their personal arcs, and it's time to batten down the hatches.

So I turn to you, my fellow evil geniuses, for a burst of ideas for short (3-4 hr) torture sessions...er... games.

Edit: Game blogs are available at: www.chillrpg.net/chilldetroit

Comments

[bluelang.livejournal.com]

An interesting challenge - let me noodle on it. Would you be starting over from scratch or would you want to shift an existing cast/campaign to the new season structure?

[jaegamer.livejournal.com]

I'd be migrating the existing story/group. They finished a big arc, so episodic wouldn't be a story-breaker. One of my challenges is that I'm a slow starter - it often takes me half an hour to an hour to really get into my story zone, and we play on a weeknight. I've got (at most) 4 hours to get them to a conclusion if I want to wrap it up so that absence the next session won't be a problem that I have to hand-wave away.

[bluelang.livejournal.com]

I have a headcold, so the ideas are not flowing as fast and fresh as I would like, but here are some thoughts:

(These are based on the idea that there is continuity to past stories. Please forgive any overly obvious thoughts.)

(1) I would look back over the past adventures of the group to identify loose ends or villians that may have gotten away or the like. (As I type this, I realize this is what I am going to start calling this the Bendis-Secret-Invasion approach.) Taken singly, any loose-end or villian-of-mysterious-ending might serve as the over all Mac Guffin for a season of apparent one-shots. Taken as a set, you could really build a complex web-of-conspiracy to set the season against.

(2) Given a Mac Guffin / Web of Conspiracy, I would identify the central unifying force amoung the characters and intentionally change it. On the surface, this would be to 'justify' the new format, but underneath the change would be tied to the season Mac Guffin.

(3) This new central force could then just start giving orders - whether it is the form of a purchase log (ala Friday the 13th) or crime scenes to investigate (ala Fringe) or out and out orders ("Go do this thing!"). The nice thing about getting orders is that there is a clear cut completion - keeping the 'surface' story time needed brief. You can then fill out the rest of the session with intercharacter dynamics and hints of something deeper.

(4) Given the slow starter challenge - consider looping back to previous settings and set-ups. As the players realize that they've been here before, you can spend less time on set-up and more time on what's changed/what's happening this time.

(5) I've not run Chill, but if it is like most games, combat sucks up too much time for it's entertainment value. If the PCs are not specifically combat-oriented, minimize all-out combats. Even if you have a gun-character to entertain, provide them the opportunity to shine with one-roll stunts and balance that with other skill checks.

And I suddenly realize that none of this necessarially addresses the question of ideas for short sessions.

Let me ponder some more. (Though having a sense of the campaign to date might inspire me.)

[jaegamer.livejournal.com]

I don't have an overall summary, and I suspect that would help me a lot. Just the blogs (which are pretty comprehensive).

Hmmm... I like a lot of your ideas. I'll put that summary together and see what it gets me...