After some thoughts provoked by the posts here and here, I opted to eschew the turn timer for the Nobilis game tonight.
Result? Mixed. The scenes were much more complete and felt a lot more ‘whole’ to me, but at the same time there’s something good to be said for an impetus to wrap up a scene instead of letting it simply fade and fade and fade and faaaade to black.
The Great: Mariska’s dinner with her daughter (being played marvelously ad-lib as a stressed out Gen-X by Margie) and her daughter’s new, over-earnest, mysteriously un-scryable boyfriend Noah (being played to the hilt by Dave, who claims he had no real life experiences to fall back on…) great stuff. Generally, people stepping into other NPC shoes to participate in a scene really worked well.
The Good: natural, organic scene breaks that let everyone relax and really play. Lots of fun to be had playing NPCs in ‘someone else’s’ scene. Regardless of who shows up for the trip to Jotunheim, I know I’ll have everyone participating, simply because we’ll have enough NPCs around, and having people play them is really WORKING right now.
The Bad: Longer scenes mean more downtime for people. This is sometimes alleviated when other people can play in the scene (and Kudos to Stan for reminding me to DO this and really work on the NPC playing), but less well when the scene is a 1:1 thing.
The Annoying: I didn’t really feel like I really got into Haley’s voice very well in the scene she had… she came across as less inspired and more air-headed… ahh well, she was drunk, I guess.
Digressions — they were there and some were long — no matter which Nobilis game I’m running, I always find myself telling a story about the OTHER group’s goings on. Odd.
Still, fun time and some interesting stuff going on. I’m really pleased by how the NPC/PC playing is working — it’s a very new thing for everyone involved and gives me a lot of enthusiasm to see it develop in the long run.
Sometimes my imagination is an airhead, as well.
I actually noticed the lack of timer, and felt that it was going well, so I didn’t say anything at the time. I didn’t feel like when the spotlight wasn’t on me that I was bored or shut out; the NPC-playing helped, but in a sense not knowing when the other scene was going to end kept me more engaged.