So I had the opportunity to play another game of Finding Haven with three excellent role players. I’m doing this write-up here not so much for purposes of game design feedback, but more to focus on my decisions as a GM (in Finding Haven, that stands for General Manager), including the details of prepping situation, and how one scene flows into the next.
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At the Patreon, I began a deeper discussion of my breakdown of "setting" into three more useful terms: backdrop, situation, and scene(s). I presented it first in Circle of Hands and referenced it a lot since then.
So I had the chance to try out the mechanics of the game I’m designing, Finding Haven (you can see the consulting sessions with Ron over in the consulting section of Adept Play). This was a couple of weeks ago at Norwescon (all online this year because of you-know-what). It was one of those gigs where you get into the con for free if you’re willing to GM for a certain number of hours.
Manu's Finding Haven began as a contest entry and runner-up in the 2013 Iron Game Chef, and the accompanying tale is familiar to me. Briefly, these contests degenerated quickly into a takeover process in which game designs disintegrated. I have a fairly reliable procedure in my pocket for this situation. The underlying logic goes something like this.