#digimon tabletop

So in Digital World Stories, there's a flow that campaigns go through of Adventures followed by Interludes. Adventures are the action, the drama, the exciting happenings, battles, and progression of story. Interludes are meant for lower stakes periods of rest and recovery in between Adventures, which also cover leveling up and upgrading of characters and, most importantly to this conversation, Interlude Actions.

There are three Interlude Actions in DWS, and every Interlude each player picks one of them to perform. Here's a quick summary.

"Have a Conversation" is an Interlude Action designed to facilitate inter-player conversation in a moment of rest. It rewards being performed by allowing players to reduce Torment Intensity and Darkness, two gauges that increase as stressful events and harm pile up on characters during Adventures. There's a couple reasons to perform this: wanting to get those values down so they don't crop up quite so immediately in a campaign, wanting to interact more with your human or digimon partner to further develop the relationship between the two, or fundamentally just not being interested in what the other two options offer. Have a Conversation is in my mind the default option, the fallback, and that's why it's the only one of the three to have a mechanical reward.

"Make a Contact" involves player to GM conversation, and introduces a new factor to the campaign which will (likely) become relevant in the next Adventure. You roll a d6 and, depending on the combination of that result and your current Darkness, a character is introduced who has some form of business with you. In design terms this isn't something you should be able to solve during an Interlude because that's not what Interludes are, but it should pose some combination of complication and advantage that can be made use of in the future.

Now even before we get to the third possible Interlude Action, let's talk about the failings here. One, in the last Interlude I ran for my players, all five of them chose "Make a Contact". The other benefit of "Have a Conversation" is it being player-to-player causes them to be busy with one another, and gives the GM a little room to breathe. Having to handle introducing five NPCs and then RP interaction with each of them simultaneously was… a test. Not particularly fun. Furthermore, the requirement for me to decide what all five of them are at the same time is both overly stressful on GM and also less engaging for players.

So I'm thinking right away something to do is to present the Make a Contact table and say "you can roll a d6 OR choose one of these options in your darkness column". That puts some agency back in player hands if they specifically want to chase a certain thing, or if they seek the randomness of the die they can choose that all the same. The second is that rather than just the GM concepting an NPC on the spot using the vague description of the NPC table, what should be occurring is a conversation between GM and player about what that description means to their character, what they'd be looking for based on current experiences, and what would be interesting to them. Then with those seeds bring in an NPC - new or existing - that summarises those traits.

Finally, I think there should be willingness to bundle Make a Contact together if multiple people choose it. That is, have each choosing player get their option, then workshop as a group to present a single Contact that fills the many specifications. That changes things down from (in my situation) five NPCs and a lot of roleplay to one NPC with a complicated situation that involves all players not only with it, but also with each other via shared interests the NPC bridges.

Now of course doing all that live is a different kind of test, especially with many players. The conversation with them could definitely help, but it's still a bit of a jump. Hard-requiring it to be only one NPC no matter how many players select Make a Contact is definitely not a good idea, too much restriction, too little flexibility. But I think there should be room to group up players all the same, and reduce the total NPC count down. So if, in a normal Interlude only 1-3 players choose to Make a Contact, that makes it a lot easier to make that one singular character.

The one flaw here is less individually personalised things for each character, but also I think that's kind of a trap? The roleplay game is designed to have players interacting with one another, not each on their own solo quest, and by sharing their contact across multiple players it links them better together. I am definitely in a difficult spot of my own making right now that I have a lot of puzzle pieces I can invoke on some of my players' characters, allowing me to do things with them constantly that weave them into the greater happenings, and not a lot of pieces for some of their others, leaving me feeling like I'm neglecting them and not giving equal focus across the party. There's definite wisdom in combining Make a Contact actions of multiple players AND discussing what that Contact might be with the players before introducing them. That's a good update. I'll add that to the Player's Guide.

Okay so the third Interlude Action is called "Change the World". Rather than player to player conversation or player-to-GM conversation, the design prompt of that is "Player as GM". For a short scene, with access to NPCs, world, and setting (but not any player characters), a player may narrate something happening and that thing becomes true. This was my fun little idea while I was searching for a third Interlude Action that I immediately got scared of actually being used. Let's talk a little about that.

The latest Adventure for my players is simply called "Beach Episode". The concept was starting with an "everyone goes to the beach to have fun!" setup that then becomes more twisted and complicated once they're there. Before setting this Adventure in action, I asked each of my players to select an intensity they'd like the Adventure to have, where 1 is "everyone has a nice time at the beach :)" and 10 is "I am going to put you in abhorrent metaphysical danger". Minor spoilers for my players reading this but the selected average ended up roughly in the middle, though I won't say exactly where. If you guys had averaged out to under 3 you really would've just had a good time at the beach. If you'd averaged over 8, well, your characters wouldn't have had a good time, I'll tell you that.

I do like that general approach, the intensity each player chose gave me some design room for how to approach their characters individually and then the average set the tone overall. I wouldn't say that's a requirement for DWS that should be done before every Adventure, but I do think it has its place.

Now the big design flaw of Beach Episode is that I was planning it before the Interlude occurred. That's incorrect - as GM, I should not be thinking specifics about the next Adventure until AFTER the Interlude, which has given my players the chance to reaffirm things important to them, make a new contact, or potentially invoke Change the World. THEN in response to all of that and the choosing of Crest Arcs for the next Adventure (which we're not going to get into here), I as GM would try and design the setup of the Adventure to come.

Anyway because I was thinking of Beach Episode in advance, I wanted to make the terrible mother and beloved sibling of one of my players' characters appear on the beach, so their character would have to deal with that. However there's a way I could not be able to do that. Do you see it? If player in question had chosen to Change the World (which I honestly thought they were planning on when I introduced the options), I thought there were pretty good odds they'd want to do a cutaway scene to their character's family. And doing that could lock them out of appearing in Beach Episode depending on what player did.

If I as GM am sitting there during Interlude Actions thinking "I sure hope player doesn't do (thing they have good reason, interest, and right to do)", I've failed. That's a genuine failing of design. Now admittedly this still comes back down to a misordering of events, I should not have been designing Beach Episode prior to the Interlude, and while I hope to have another Adventure in the same Campaign after Beach Episode, I will not set any specifics of it until after the next Interlude is done. That's not to say I haven't been regularly having visions about things that COULD be relevant, but that's just having fun in my imagination space. I don't even know how this current Adventure is going to end, you know?

Anyway that's an easily fixable issue with Change the World, that just requires me to progress through the game as intended, but there's a greater issue too. I don't really think this is a very appealing Interlude Action. It puts too much pressure on a single player, and can intimidate them out of wanting to make changes to setting or npcs that the GM has established. Made worse because in this last example I was concerned about a player making changes to existing npcs I wanted to use.

Let's go back to the thing on Inapt Discussions. It provides players opportunities to change the setting in live action, by theorycrafting the nature of the world and happenings and then rolling to try and make it true. For a GM with a strict storyline this is a nightmare but even though I HAVE a storyline in mind, I think that's actually not a good thing and I should learn to be more flexible in giving creative agency over the setting to my players. Am I going to do that in Beach Episode? Ehhhhhh, I should but I don't want to because I'm a little precious over what I've designed, which in itself is a flaw that needs correcting. I will say that I am going to do better to be more embracing of my players making big swings to affect the setting, and respond to their efforts appropriately, but it's still going to be a learning process. I guess I'd appreciate it being pointed out if I'm ever being too narrow or restrictive when a player wants to do something.

When I think about what should be done with Change the World, I think it, much like Make a Contact, should be a conversation. The "Have a Conversation" action is still great, I love to provide opportunities for my players to just start roleplaying amongst themselves, so there's no need to workshop that one. But when it comes to Change the World, rather than writing out a scene, I'd rather have a player nominate an aspect of the world that's caught their attention, and then maybe make use of the conversation style from The Quiet Year where every player weighs in on it.

So primary choosing player says "there's this thing about the world I'm interested in". Then each player could add a sentence or two about it, whether that's belief, observation, interest, or link to other existing factors. After each player goes, the GM adds one in too, and then the primary player of the action can say one last thing and then that block of sentences becomes truth, lens of focus, aspects that will become relevant in the next Adventure.

At that point it's much less "Change the World" and more of a drawing of focus. I liked the use of a C-word since "Have a Conversation" and "Make a Contact" are the other two options, so maybe like… "Create a Focus". As an easy example for my players to recognise, the Death-X/DEX Digimon have come up a few times and their pitiful state has drawn attention from a few of your characters. Choosing to make that a Focus of an upcoming Adventure is definitely an option I've thought of, so something like that. I wouldn't want the interlude action to be a single person says one thing and then that's it, especially compared to the RP of Have a Conversation or Make a Contact, so I still would want a group conversation about it, just at the player level instead of the character level. Yeah, I do like that.