Oh yeah. But you can start to combine them if you're lucky/good/creative.

How did this delusion work as a threat to the PCs? 

It provided context for the MC to make MC moves against the PCs, both soft and hard.

So two games of Murderous Ghost for you, played back to back, with two different groups.

The Set-Up:

As an after AW digestive, we played two games of Murderous Ghosts. The other members of my group (Dave, Taylor, and Christina) had never heard of or seen the game before I pulled it out and put it on the table. I told Taylor he was running it for Christina. He panicked and then said yes.

Game One!

Right from the start this game was a trainwreck. Maybe it was the nature of how I dropped the game on them, but it ...... was the worst. I can't remember exactly what was said at the beginning as I stepped out a bit to give them some privacy as I thought the audience factor would take away from the intimate nature of the interaction.

I came in after getting a drink and lowering the lights and I could tell that things were bad. It as scary, but not because of the content. Basically, neither player did anything that wasn't written down. They did absolutely nothing that the game didn't prompt them to do. When the book told Taylor to consider something, he quietly considered it and told her to turn to whatever. Zero roleplaying. It was painful and they quit.

Game Two

So Dave was like "I've got this" and then he did. He had that. I was the player and Dave was the GM and he crushed it. He REALLY dropped the atmosphere in a way I've never seen him do before and I sometimes didn't want to speak because of the tension in the air.

The game seemed really short, about 15 mins, so we probably could have pulled it out longer, in terms of the exploration. There still was no sense of scenes. There were two locations, the initial room and a hallway. But I also died, so that cut it a little short.


Two issues:

One: I, as the player, didn't know how much to do during my "Turn". How far should I go, how many "actions" do I get? I didn't want to cheat the game, but I also wanted to GTFO. So how much to elide the action or zoom in during MY turn to speak was an issue for me. Dave didn't have that so much on the MG's side.

Two: Both ghosts I saw were wispy and intangible and when Dave read "Does it seem realistic that he could escape?", my attempt to fight the ghost off realistically didn't. Like the ghost could physically hurt me, but I couldn't hurt it. Once it had me, I was dead. There seems to be a built in "difficulty" factor in the nature of the ghost. Not a problem, per se, but making the GM aware of this might be good.


I've actually got the full audio recording, because we record all our AW sessions with Dave's sweet sound equipment and we forgot to turn in off. I could cut the end off and kick that over to you, if you want, Vincent. It's literally everything that happened at the table.

Sure. But no. Like, the MC's job is to ask awesome questions and explore those in play. And the player should step up and work with that. But also, the game just works better when the players are proactive without the MC's constant prompting. The MC framework can be a solution to the problem of passive PC characters, but better to not need it, yeah?

So yeah, sometimes, it absolutely should be something the players do by themselves.

For me, it's the player's job, above everything, to play a protagonist, not just a character. The MC framework gives us a way to help that process, but it's nice to have players that are thinking of their own characters critically and creating interesting, active play.

But the MC himself should be prompting the players to run their characters that way, it shouldn´t be something the players do by themselves...

What, why?

Wait, like a for reals marmot?

It's also a big deal that the Touchstone nominally works through violence. It's at least looking up at you during the game.

I rarely use Seize By Force anymore. Unless they are both going at the same time, RIGHT THIS SECOND, or I want to sort of collapse the action, I never call for it at the table. Maybe once every five sessions. That's just a guess.

Outside of Pvp, I handle almost all the action scenes with a mix of Go Aggro and Act Under Fire.