5.1 Scenes to Play

Most of the time, the PCs won’t be in conflicts. They will interact with each other, with NPCs, and with the environment. Character scenes are there to allow you to roleplay your characters with some degree of purpose and pacing, and at the same time they provide some benefit for playing out your character.

Not all of the events have to happen in scenes or conflicts; you can have exchanges among the players and with the GM that talk about things that happen and that the characters do at other times. These are like short exposition paragraphs in novels. They take care of the times when the characters go somewhere and nothing special happens, for example. But when there’s interesting character interaction about to take place, a scene begins.

Roleplaying in a character scene looks just like the examples in chapter 2. The players each describe in turn how their characters react to everyone else, bringing in the events of the story so far, as well as trying to play up their traits, passion, seeds, links, and so on. Some scenes are introspective, some show something about the characters, some contain arguments or revelations, some bring about change, and others are more plot-oriented.

Not all of the PCs have to be included in every scene, but you should give each PC the same amount of screen time. That is, if two characters interact together without the third, that third character’s player and the GM should figure out a scene that they can play out afterwards. This way, players will at times be the audience for each other, but you should care enough about your shared story and each other’s characters to enjoy that. The GM can hand over control of NPCs to other players for the duration of a scene to include them and take some of the load off the GM.