Am I doing this right? I'm pretty sure.

Am I doing this right? I'm pretty sure.

Last night, I ran Worlds In Peril with Davey Cruz , Jonathan Davis and George Austin . As per usual, let me stress: I have fantastic players.

For this session, I did a bunch more prep than normal. Probably more prep than I've done for any PbtA game. And, here's the kicker: it was still a bunch of fun.

I used Focal Point (http://www.enginepublishing.com/focal-point-the-complete-game-masters-guide-to-running-extraordinary-sessions). This book is fantastic. It has challenges for the GM.

You should buy it and everything they produce. I ... got the book from a friend and now feel bad. Is that stealing? That's probably stealing, and i should buy it.

Anyway, maybe more on my moral repugnance later. For now, here's what I puilled out of this book that made my game better:
1. We started very differently (violent corrupt cops kicked down the door for a midnight raid while serving a no-knock warrant on behalf of a mega corp.)

2. Theme music for the PCs, and some major NPCs. The cops had "Cops!", the villainous Crash Override had "Welcome To Our World", and the gym had "Eye of the Tiger". To inform everyone we were coming to the end, I turned on "The Final Countdown".
 
3. NPC hand out sheets for the players -- a more coherent version of my notes, with less information. Just there to jog memory. There have been several, and the cast continues to expand.

4, The 3/2 rule for NPCs. I didn't do this as much as I wanted to but, hey, there's always room for improvement.

5. I walked around much. While I've used this to great effect in years past, this space doesn't lend itself to it quite the way I want. The table is loooong.

6. "tweeted" recaps -- went around for short "last time on" bits. I've done this before, but the emphasis on it being short is brilliant.

Note: Buy this book.

Even with all this prep, quite a bit was on the spot and indicated I should have had a bit more prep.

For example: Crash Override was leading the cops -- from the rear. He has no super powers, is just a sellout hacker. We discover he can somehow teleport! We don't really know how.

We learn it is through his suit, which is made of computronium, and has a bit of a personality.  This was totally in the moment, and worked really well. He's also really bad at physical violence: our mentalist PC hit him with fists. Twice.

Some really great changes, thanks in part to this book.

My players want even more: a more complicated world, with them being pulled in more directions. There are children starving in Kenya, why are they focusing on Philly?

And we'll get to that. Hopefully next session.
http://www.enginepublishing.com/focal-point-the-complete-game-masters-guide-to-running-extraordinary-sessions