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DionAnother prop I remember using was food.
Telling a player that someone’s offering their character food is very different to offering a hungry player food in character.
Hopefully the players reacted on more of a gut instinct than thinking what was best in terms of their character’s survival.
DionWell, we were running a convention game based around the Myths Over Miami article. All the characters were homeless children.
One of the characters was carrying an envelope which she didn’t know what was in it–same as one of the girls that James Palmer wrote about in the “Real Life Horror Stories” side bar in “Garden Full of Weeds”–an scenario in “Weep”
So, we used an empty envelope, because any picture we put in their would be against Australian law because (whilst not depicting sexual activity) would be a minor being shown to be degraded and so forth.
(Personally, I try to keep an eye on the Office of Film and Literature Classifications when I’m writing a game for public consumption)
Of course, laws weren’t our only concern, (other concerns being such as whether we were treating the subject matter with the seriousness it deserved) but it was a factor in some of our decisions.
DionRumours work best, I feel, if the players don’t have a complete knowledge of the background of the game. How good are rumours going to be if a player knows alll the secrets of, say, the sleepers?
This is a problem I saw with people who played Mythos (CCG) then played Call of Cthuthlu–it kinda ended up a little D&Dish…because people knew the background too much to swallow interesting–but ultimately false–rumours.
Not that I’m saying that player’s can’t have this information later on–but I know personally because I run UA (and have read all the books) when I play it I don’t think that I’m getting the full possible enjoyment….
And now I’m changing my mind and thinking that if you take some of the rumours as true, then it would keep players with more information off their feet…
DionThe last prop I used was for a convention game–it was essentially an envelope that was mentioned in a character’s back story (empty because we couldn’t put the in-game contents in there without breaking Australian laws and so forth)
Hopefully it helped to get the player into character–but props come third in my mind after soundtrack and lighting…
DionActually, I thumbed through it, and its all about healing spells through drawing on the power of the Old Ones…which is why I likened it to some of the rumours:
“Look, Bob, this spell will cure your disease, and heck, Shub-Niggurath has to be helpful–after all, she looks after a thousand young, how can a mother be bad?”
DionBasically, I like the rumours because I believe in (I think it’s called) Sturgeon’s Law–that 90% of everything is crap. Therefore 90% of what the players hear should be misleading or not entirely truthful. Personally I run into this a lot myself: because of the bizarre way Australian bookshops sort books, I have to spend time wading through the New Age section past such book as “White Magic From the Necromonicon” to reach the books by philosophers of magic such as Yates, Couliano and Mauss. If it’s this hard in RL, imagine how bad it’s got to be in UA…