Quotes #4 - Referees, Let Yourself Go...

"If you sit down before play, and write an “adventure” for your players - you are playing this game the wrong way. In SBRPG, referees do not write adventures, create series of linked adventures, create location- based or script-based scenarios, or do any dungeon drawing. What does the referee do? The referee runs the Factions, sets up the action, and handles the reactions to events in the Game World. Everything is handled live, “as it happens.”

This means no “story preparation” time is spent between games - only bookkeeping such as Faction Reactions. During the game, the referee must improvise when a situation comes up. This doesn’t mean the referee “makes everything up” as the game is played. Systems such as Ripples and Faction Reactions exist to direct the action by suggesting Factions do in response. It’s up to the referee to decide what they do, implement plans, and keep the players informed of what’s going on.

This doesn’t limit the creativity of the referee; the referee is responsible for playing every Faction’s NPCs, and imagining, launching, and running Plots. There’s plenty of room for a referee to use their creativity within SBRPG’s storytelling systems. We have found SBRPG’s storytelling systems frees up a referee to be more creative, by “automating” many of a referee’s tedious tasks.

The action in the game comes from the interaction between the Factions and the players. Factions come into conflict, and Plots are launched by Factions in response. A PC may be part of one of these Factions, or get swept up in the action. PCs have the freedom to get involved with these conflicts, cause their own Ripples, which generate Faction Reactions, which launch Plots, and the cycle continues....

You are the referee, and you control the action as it happens. You decide what a Faction does during a Faction Reaction. If a player crosses a Faction, you get to decide how the Faction’s NPCs react. Not only that, you get to set up every scene players find themselves in; and create the challenges, situations, and opponents that will face them in those scenes."

This comes right after the player's role description, and lays out the role of the referee in the game. This is kind of like D&D 4's referee, where he runs things and keeps the session going, but a little more interactive and fun. Think of the game world as a huge sandbox game, like GTA4, Saints Row, or an MMO...well, maybe not like an MMO, but a sort of "big world with action and things happening on their own." Once a faction is created, the referee takes control and spins it off on its own.

The fun comes when the players start being players, and cause trouble, get involved, and start making ripples in the world. The referee consults some charts, gauges reactions from various factions and characters, and says, "What comes next?"

Of course, the referee can always come up with set piece locations, draw maps, and do all sorts of creative prep work. Ref's prerogative. Most of the ref's work is keeping track of the chaos players cause, tracking things happening in the world, coming up with faction NPCs, running to opposition, and being the master behind the scenes. The players really are enough work to handle, so we wrote out all the boring referee-work from the game, like drawing maps, writing scripts, and scripting set-piece adventures.

Yeah, it's referee-fan-service, but they loved it. After 30 years of me having to write adventures for game sessions, it was justified referee fan service. It's also how I love to play, and it was fun to share with our fans.