2.5 Player and GM Responsibilities

Many other roleplaying games and groups distribute the workload in a very unbalanced way. The GM does a lot of preparation work, which includes drawing maps, creating NPCs with dozens of stats, making up plot points in advance, preparing encounters and battles, and so on. The players simply show up. Then the responsibility to entertain the players lies with the GM.

Not so with Anima Prime.

In this game, the responsibility for the group’s enjoyment is evenly distributed among all of the participants. That means that in a group with a GM and three PC players, everyone has a quarter share of responsibility that the game is fun for everyone involved. As a PC player, you are responsible for entertaining the other PC players as well as the GM, just as if you were playing a friendly non-competitive game of soccer, where you pass the ball to the other players without looking at who’s the best shooter, to make sure everyone gets a chance to play together equally.

Anima Prime is meant to be picked up and enjoyed with little to no preparation. The key to doing this is to provide each other with usable materials—such as seeds, links, and traits—and then spontaneously riff off them during play. I call these things “flags” (thanks to Chris Chinn!) because they mark what each player would like to see brought into the game. You’ll learn about these things as the book goes on, and there’s an essay in chapter 11 that talks about flags in much more detail. The GM as well as the PC players can use each other’s flags to play in a spontaneous way that keeps everyone interested.

Each player drives the story forward. It’s not just the GM who keeps on bringing up things for the PCs to do. Instead, the players of the PCs need to make sure, at any point in time, that their characters have something they’re striving for and some action they could take to get them closer to their goals. And if they can somehow tie those into the other players’ flags, you’re really starting to cook with high-powered gas.