Cutting scenes
Ron Edwards saved my Sorcerer actual play report from falling off the third page, and I’m thinking about what to answer. I haven’t read up on orthogonal conflicts yet, but it sounds like something that generated one of the two rule discussions during the game.
One thing I didn’t mention in my play report was how wonderfully effective it is to cut between scenes in a rapid manner. The three players had their characters in separate scenes most of the time, but because I kept cutting between them no one had to wait for long before their turn. Good places to cut are right after something new or cool has been revealed in the scene, or right before jumping into a conflict. I would say stuff like “he doesn’t agree… so that’s a conflict, but first…” and then cut to someone else. That means that the game is full of mini cliffhangers, which in turn means that the players and me are eager to get back to the scene to know what will happen.
You don’t have to decide if you cut away because the scene is over or because you want to keep the tension up, you can decide when you get back to the scene. I would say something like “your wife says she’s been seeing someone else… (evil grin) Cut to…”, and when we got back to the scene the player could either say he wanted to confront the wife directly or play a scene where the character complained to his friends.
On another note, right now there’s Stockholm’s Spelkonvent (Stockholm’s Gaming Convention, page in Swedish) where Anders Sveen and Jonas Möckelström are game mastering four games: AG&G, The Shab-al-Hiri Roach, Polaris and Shock: Social Science Fiction. I think that’s cool.
Hey, it was cool! Thank you for mentioning our little endeavour, Jonas.
We played In a Wicked Age on Friday and Polaris on Saturday and great fun was had.
I was a bit wary about posting my questions about your Sorcerer-AP when it fell off the second page, so it was good to see Ron catch it and be explicit about the guidelines. What I was interested in was to know more about scene framing, though, and you've given the answer to that in this post already!
But I'd like to know if this is purely from your perspective or if you talked about the way scenes were cut afterwards, and a little bit more about the players reaction it.
Since everything worked really well we didn't have any deeper discussion on scene framing. When I asked afterwards what the two players of the third session thought and they said it was good. I remember that Tobias, my friend you met at LinCon, said he didn't feel he had to wait too long between scenes.
I've had discussions about keeping the characters together with him before, and I don't think he normally thinks separate scenes are a good idea. So it was nice that the frequent cuts worked so well, and to realize that you don't have to decide if you'll return to the scene or after the scene until you cut back again.
I read you play report on Rollspel.nu, but I don't think I have any bright comments right now. You know I'm glad you had a good time.