Apart from schedule conflicts and published adventures with suboptimal presentation leading to user unfriendliness, my biggest challenge in running role-playing games is trying to remember exactly how I portrayed a given non-player character in a previous session, especially when the last session was months (or years) ago. This frustrates me to no end. How can I create a believable world and its inhabitants if I can't remember how I portrayed recurring characters? It isn't easy.
For Omnia, I borrowed an idea from QAGS. In QAGS, player characters have something called Who Would Play Him/Her In The Movie, or WWPHITM. The player is advised to think of a thespian who is best suited to play the character in a hypothetical movie to help the other players imagine that character. In Omnia, there is a similar characteristic for player characters called Portrayal, but it occurred to me that this would also be a useful characteristic for non-player characters—not only for helping visualization, but as a means for helping the moderator remember how to play the character. The moderator need not ever reveal a non-player character's Portrayal. It can just be a mnemonic device for the person responsible for playing an entire cast of supporting characters and antagonists every session. It's a simple solution that works for any role-playing game. I might need to highlight this aspect in the rules.
No comments:
Post a Comment