Posts Tagged by Spotlight
| February 5, 2013 | Posted by John Arcadian |
One of the things that bugs me when I’m a player is the fact that games can tend to get really bogged down if the spotlight gets stuck on one player or style of play. Sometimes it is hard to avoid, and the nature of a particular session will be on one style of play or a particular player’s story, but I’m a firm believer in every player getting at least a little time in the spotlight in every session. When I’m a GM,…
| August 18, 2011 | Posted by Scott Martin |
Pixedragon asked (in the suggestion pot) about several things that often tangle together into a big knot: mysteries, clues, and the GM’s spotlight versus the player’s flashlights.
One thing that a good railroaded adventure (or module) has going for it is coherence. Because the players don’t have many options, the GM can spend a lot of effort working on the scenes that they know will happen. Even in a less structured game, the GM is still (usually) the arbiter of scene setting. There are at least two paths a GM can take when the game starts grinding gears.
| November 20, 2008 | Posted by Scott Martin |
I was cleaning our office [aka, the room where we toss piles of junk] last night when I stumbled on a box. As soon as I opened the box I smiled. I would have sworn that I’d tossed them out a few years ago– a mistake I rued. The magazine I found was Shadis. As soon as I saw the cover again, I fondly remembered many afternoons spent reading it. By the time I discovered the magazine they had already reached issue 13 (shown to…
| November 6, 2008 | Posted by Scott Martin |
Recently Vanir brought back a good post about the spotlight– who gets personal (as opposed to group) attention. Much of the article is about how a player should treat spotlight time, which started me along a path of thinking– who is responsible for spotlight distribution? Before I dive in, let’s figure out what we mean by spotlight. (Or cheat, and just use Martin’s definition in GMing 142: Spotlight Moments.) In some games, the default assumption is that each character acts alone, on essentially parallel but…
