Orlando Trash Wrapup

[bryant]

According to the wiki, I put up the prospectus for Orlando Trash on June 6th, 2006.

“Mickey Rourke is in this movie. Val Kilmer is in this movie. It’s directed by Michael Mann, or maybe Tony Scott. But it’s not The Hunger. Luis Guzman has a role as a shiftless drifter who erupts into surprising bursts of violence.”

Hm. I never did get Luis Guzman into the movie, but in retrospect that was just as well. Danny Trejo made it in.

This is the first campaign I’ve ever run to completion. I planned for it to last about one long story-arc; this was really liberating in that I didn’t worry about handing out experience too quickly, and I didn’t worry about whether or not the world would be playable long term. I just went full speed ahead with whatever caught my eye, following the leads of the PCs, and it worked like a charm.

Things I concentrated on:

Cool NPCs. I do good NPCs, so I wanted to let that shine. (Also I’m modest.) I like to think I have a strong range of voices, and since every NPC was played by a well-known actor, it was even easier to make the characters memorable. I had to pull off imitations of Val Kilmer, Meryl Streep, and Nathan Lane — sometimes in the same scene — but I was pretty sure I could do that.

Big blatant plots. It turns out that it’s almost never a lose to telegraph stuff from a mile away, and it’s always easy to turn around and surprise players when you need to. Also, I have a tendency to automatically do mystery plots, and I wanted this to be an action flick rather than a detective thriller. So while I wrote in a certain amount of mystery, I never wanted it to be too mysterious — answers weren’t ever that far away. It is not my fault that the players occasionally decided to kill the source of the answers.

Balance between shooting things and talking. Given our approximately 3-4 hour session time, a good fight wound up taking up most of the session, as I discovered a few sessions in. That meant, to me, that the right thing to do was to throw in a chance for a good fight scene every two or three sessions. I think that worked well. I could have stepped up the fight scenes if the group had seemed to want more of them.

Player-driven. I let ‘em do what they wanted, and it all worked out okay. I was ready for just about any turn of events, although I would have been sad if the group had split up. But I was ready for their allegiances to go wherever, I had spurs to push them back towards the action as needed — I was a leaf in the river of their plot interests. Boo yah.

Things I want to do better next time:

Foreshadowing. Example: in the last session, I pulled out Jack Trash’s body, and that was cool, and I showed them a letter clarifying a couple of issues. Also cool. But it would have been better if I’d pulled out Trash’s corpse in the previous session.

This goes with planning; I didn’t really have an overarching plan. I had a few key NPCs with strong motivations, and I let the world react to what the PCs do. Good for me for empowering the PCs and avoiding railroading, but it meant there wasn’t as much build as I woulda liked. I think the way to fix this is to have some cool multi-session things in mind, and remembering to drop the setup scene in there.

I’d also like to take more advantage of player backgrounds. I didn’t pay enough attention to that, particularly in Teo’s case.

But all in all? Quite happy.

Originally published at Imaginary Vestibule.

Comments

[head58.livejournal.com]

It was awesome and teh sexy.

I really think you couldd see the growth in the characters there in the last session, where instead of setting fire to the Revival tent or strafing it with machine gun fire or lobbing in grenades or whatnot as we usually would have, we only hit it with firehoses. That's character development right there!

(and the more I think about it the more I like the idea to put the bit in the letter about Jake being Jack's kid. It explains why Vincent grabbed him.)

[bryant]

It can be true even if you don't know it IC!

[mizkit.livejournal.com]

It is not my fault that the players occasionally decided to kill the source of the answers.

*laugh*

[bryant]

By "occasionally" I mean "all the time."

Mason: "Hi, I'd like to offer you a seat by my side while I rule Walt Disney World."
Bobby: "I hate you. You must DIE."

Vincent: "Sure, I'll tell you who your sires are, but you'll have to beat it out of me!"
PCs: "Not only will we beat that out of you, we'll beat your life out of you."

Jessica: "I'm your sister, Nate. I can tell you things about your family that you never knew."
Nate: "I hate you. You must DIE."

The lesson here for me is that PCs dislike snotty NPCs who show off their superior knowledge. I can't blame them, really.

[michele-blue.livejournal.com]

Mason: we were ordered to kill him! There, absolved.

Vincent: his posse killed Bobby! There, absolved.

Jessica: last seen running off into the woods toward Jacksonville. No killing!

[mgrasso.livejournal.com]

I wish Lost worked like this. Then again, if it did, there'd be like two cast members left.

[bryant]

If the castaways were PCs, everyone they'd met on the island would be DEAD.

[that-cad.livejournal.com]

It was great. Thank you for it.

[michele-blue.livejournal.com]

And yeah, it was. Thanks, Bryant! Thanks, VBSC!

[my-tallest.livejournal.com]

Yay, game good!

Also: Don't worry about Teo's background. Had it been important to me to have you bring it up, I would have said something. If we'd had to call on the Feds, or go to Miami, you would have had your chance, but as it happened, we didn't.

Thanks again for a great game, and to the rest of the players for a good group.

You know, I've never played Vampire.

[robotnik.livejournal.com]

As I check in on LJ to see what games are going on in Happy Gaming Land there are some games and game ideas that kind of make me go 'meh' and there are other games that make me weep with envy and regret for being so far away from them. Without doubt, this has been the one that kills me the most. Sounds very very cool. Sooo jealous.



What's next?

Re: You know, I've never played Vampire.

[bryant]

Currently shuffling around for mindshare in my brane:

Tarnished Brass -- unapologetic fantasy, with kind of a post-apocalyptic vibe. Influenced by Shadows of Yesterday, Jennifer Roberson, D&D. Dungeons.

Scion: Pirate -- Arrrrrrrrr! There be gods in them waters, matey, but "god" is only one consonant off from "gold!"

And I still gotta do a wrestling game some day. Edge of Midnight would be a kinda cool setting for that, come to think of it. In fact, that'd be perfect... OK, twisted magical fifties noir wrestling game, there, that's three.

Let's see if Rob can actually turn green...

[(Anonymous)]

Without doubt, this has been the one that kills me the most.

C'mon, you'd be all over SteamWars if you were here.