So, the game I’m running at home is called In the Shadow of Giants, and is set in an urban environment, a city built by the giants (evil overlords, but at present so far above the PC’s heads that there’s no real interaction going on). The players are playing members of the Watch, an attempt to ensure there’s a little law & order going on for the “lesser races” living in and among the giants’ towers in little ramshackle refugees’ towns (the rest of the world is having a small apocalypse, and the city — though run by evil beings — looks like the last safe place by comparison). This has given me an interesting opportunity to focus on a few things.
The first is fixed-location play (which sits at odds with the points of light paradigm but should feel familiar to Freeport fans). I’m not going to talk about that first thing yet, because the second is what’s exciting me more: it’s the fact that the PCs are responsible for people. Not in a typical “we go out into the world and do adventurous things in the name of GOOD!” responsible sort of way. I mean, they have other watchmen they might command, and a citizenry to keep happy and protected in a city that’s rife with organized crime and worse. So with that in mind I want to talk a bit about the things I’ve done to bring the responsibility thing home for the players.
First and foremost, I’ve given them encounters taking place in populated places, where half of the encounter’s point is not to take down the bad guys but to keep the bystanders from getting hurt. The game’s very first encounter took place in a crowded market, where a gang fight broke out. The Watch was doing its best to stay out of the way of the gang war — but I’d placed a number of pennies on the map to represent the civilians. Whenever a bad guy’s attack missed — someone got hit. I’d pick up the penny affected and drop it into a glass I had positioned prominently to one side of the map. I called it “the casualty cup”. The players got the point.
Interesting stuff came out of that. The Healing skill became even more important as PCs not in the thick of it ran around tending to those wounded by the light show the criminal element was generating. Our Paladin spent a couple turns frantically digging through the crushed remains of a stall to see if the folks trapped within had survived — and thankfully, with the Watch’s help, they did. Our Rogue, perhaps most cynical of all about the matter, carefully herded folks away from the fight before it even started. And several of our more Intimidating types used their skills as crowd control: I ruled that they could roll their Intimidate (or other appropriate) skill, and for every 5 points they got on the result, that increased the radius of their burst area by one. Those civilians within the resulting burst fell under the player’s control for that turn, when they came round on the initiative order (basically, I said to the player: okay, these pennies? you control their move, up to six squares, when it’s the civilians’ turn).
It ended up adding a nice, dynamic element to the encounter that wasn’t just about hurling damage around the board, and it really brought the idea of “We are the Watch. We look out for people.” home. (It worked well enough, in fact, that two sessions later I broke the trick out again — only this time with a rapidly-spreading fire and civilians trapped inside needing help. It proved a nasty distraction when the Blazing Skeleton started hurling some pain around.)
But that’s not the only element of responsibility I’ve given the players over our first few sessions. I’ve also sent them into fights with minions of their own. It’s pretty simple to just stat up a standard minion of equivalent level to the PCs (I just go to the Monster Manual, take the basic attack, and strip off the special abilities, usually). Then, I give each player a second minion-mini to control on the board.
The allied minions have proven nice in more than one way. A little extra help flanking an opponent. Someone to do a needful secondary task while the player’s real PC takes on the primary threat. Gives the player just a little bit more to do during a long fight — especially nice when the main PC is pinned down somewhere and can’t get to the rest of the fight. Just a little extra “realism” in that the good guys are actually losing people in a nasty fight. And as a DM, it’s given me a little extra padding on the PCs, allowing me to crank the encounter dial up just a little bit harder without as much worry of a TPK. Those minion watchmen slow down the bad guys just enough.
At any rate, it’s a texture that I’ve really enjoyed having in my game. Giving the PCs some in-character responsibility that they have to manage during an encounter can really change the experience from a straight-up slugfest into something richer. I can’t recommend it enough.
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