The Minimum Viable Session

"This is the sort of thing that kills my campaigns."

I growled that comment over IM to Raoul Roulaux.  As one of my Nobilis players, I think he had a suspicion as to what I was talking about.  We have a good relationship, often complaining to one another, only to get advice on how to solve a particularly sticky gaming problem, and our preferred tactics is asking questions, a habit gained either from reading one too many of Plato's dialogues, or from being veterans GMs.

"What are you talking about?"

"The Reincarnation Engine.  That took forever, and honestly, I haven't finished half of what I wanted to."

"If that's the sort of thing that ends a campaign, why do it?  What exactly is the problem?"

"It's not the Reincarnation Engine specifically.  It's just that I get a vision, and then I can't finish it before the deadline."

"But what's finished?" He asked me.

And I was enlightened.

Nobilis: Session Design Revisited

One of the reasons people worry about blogging is that they're worried about making mistakes, but as Game in the Brain blogger +Justin Aquino  likes to say, "Better to open your mouth and be thought a fool and corrected so that you are no longer a fool, than to keep your mouth shut and remain a fool" (or something to that effect).  I said something a few weeks ago, and I was very illustriously corrected.  Curious about the new data, I did some hunting, learned about even more tools available to me, and then re-evaluated how and why I wanted to do session design the way I did.

Today, we're going to talk about Nights Black Agents, Blowback, Lady Blackbird, and Nobilis itself, and the tools all of them give for session design, and why I want to use the tools that I do, and how, exactly, I'm going to use them.