When one player is in the spotlight, give everyone else a job

When dramatic scenes are taking place, let everyone else introduce consequences

Making Great Scenes at your Game Table — a series

1. Preface: Everyday gamers don’t always know how to make great scenes

2. Introducing: The Scene Kit

3. How to ‘Set the Scene’

4. Adding tension by introducing a Scene Partner

5. Ending out scenes with ‘Scene Breakers’ and resolving the scene

6. Adding ‘Minor Scenes’ to add action and movement to our story

7. The Scene Kit, distilled down to one page!

8. Activating the off-screen players in the ‘Support’ role

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You’re running a TTRPG session, and you’ve got one player in the spotlight. For a while. In fact, they’re pretty much running this big, solo scene, while everyone… waits their turn.

This used to be my problem often enough. But one of my favorite things to do these days is to put those other, idle players to use. Specifically, I want those players to help me with the hardest part of duet play: Coming up with a series of interesting consequences for the player in the spotlight.

There are many games where players who are not in the scene are given cool stuff to do. Ben Robbins’ Follow, my main source of inspiration, has players outside of a scene offer “consequences,” which I believe should be called “complications.” In cozy horror game Brindlewood Bay, the investigators are often split up, but players around the table are still welcome to offer consequences and ideas. Microscope, another Ben Robbins game about making a history, has a rule like it for its Scene process called “Playing Time as a Character:”

Instead of playing a normal character, one player in a Scene can choose to play Time, a special type of character. Time represents forces or groups of people who are pushing the situation to some conclusion, for good or ill. The barbarians at the gates, the cavalry come to the rescue, the angry mob, the black plague, the tanking economy–these could all be Time.

A player decides to play the court nobility as Time. They are eager for the king to make a decision. If he doesn’t stop waffling, they may take matters into their own hands.

Time can be a required character, but the current player must define Time as something specific (angry senators, the barbarians, etc.) instead of just requiring “Time.” When Time reveals thoughts, it should always be about how or why it wants to hurry things along.

If you’ve been looking at scenes so far and thinking “It’s formulaic as it is,” this might be just your kind of solution. Now, when players are running their scenes, slowing down, getting stuck, or running on auto-pilot, we have others around the table giving prompts, adding complications, and helping you close down scenes when they run on for too long.

So, for the process of putting together Dramatic Scenes, which include just two players, we want to give a similar something-to-do to everyone else who’s not simply facilitating the process. And so, without a better name, I’m calling these roles “Support.” Here’s how I think it works…

The “Support” Role

Those around the table who are not in the scene take on the role of the SUPPORT, offering up a prompt or two during the scene to help increase the drama, focus the pacing, get clarity about what’s happening, or add new elements and complications. Once the scene is under way, players can chime in respectfully with any of the six moments below.

Players in the scene should feel encouraged to accept your offer and roll with the trouble, but are always free to reject an offer that leaves them uninspired, or goes against their own feelings and intuition about their character or the scene.

Here are the five things they can do.

• Complication – Something rears its ugly head, either from the environment, a focus object, the broader world, or even a memory from the past.

• Focus Object – Invite the players in the scene to come up with an object that is a focus of importance, that sits in the scene like its own character.

• Gut check – Pick one character who is encountering a difficulty, or a barrier, or new information. Ask them to add some emotion.

• Scene Breaker – Is the Scene lagging, or crescendoing, or just running too long? Call for a Scene Breaker! Has one of them already happened? Name it!

• Activate a Flaw – The tension is causing someone’s character flaw to show itself. Prompt a character to act out!

And so while we play, each person has a small sheet that looks like this:

So here’s the thing: That’s it. In the last post, we laid out the entire Scene Kit Process Thing in one page. Then everyone not in the scene, or helping move it

Here are the questions I’m still left with:

• Do you need a facilitator/director? It could still be good to have one player whose job it is to hold the Process Page and literally go through the prompts out loud, leading people from one moment to the next, just to keep the flow moving. Or maybe that undermines the “GMless” nature of this process.

• Do we need the longer version? Last week I boiled the process down big time, but there’s still all of the extra little pieces I put in. Sure, the boiled-down version is the one I’ll end up using, but maybe some people would still like the additional pages? Maybe I should release the whole thing for free, and then maybe people can pay for the additional material?

• Do I need specialty scenes? I toyed with the idea of writing some custom workflows for doing like a Reject-the-Quest scene or a Lovers-Quarrel, since they are dramatic scenes that have unique factors. I wonder if that might be a fun exercise, I might learn a lot just by building and running them.

• Do I need better design? Is the kit just… ugly as it is? Hell, I made the thing in Canva. I’ll have to figure that out later.

Now I’ve gotta put it all together and throw it in a zine and write the damn thing. Let me know what you think of what we’ve got so far! And if you want to run it, message me and I’ll send you the PDFS!