The Gauntlet G+ Archives

I’m trying out Flags in a home game of The Sprawl to replace Personal Directives. I’m doing it a little differently. I’m giving a player character XP if they hit another PC’s flag. They can get the XP once per scene.

Personal Directives in The Sprawl are a lot like flags to start with, except they’re on the GM to implement and the player to notice and record. So they read like “If your loyalty to The Killers causes trouble for the mission, mark XP.” The GM has to create a situation where the PC’s involvement with the Killers might complicate the mission, and then the player has to remember to mark XP when it happens. In my experience, the GM part wasn’t all that much bother — I drop character hooks in as often as I can in every game from D&D to Fate. The player part was kind of a bother, because as the GM, I didn’t think of my character hooks as a moment to break the action and say “oh, and you get XP for this.” They’re just a thing I do. And the players often didn’t remember to mark XP, either. Often it wasn’t obvious that the Directive triggered.

Flags change the onus of intention. I still have to create situations where the players can hit each other’s flags. But now each player chooses to hit a Flag, like they’re making a Move. It takes them out of the game world frame and into the game frame a little. Because of that intention / frame shift, they naturally remember to mark the XP. And “hitting a flag” becomes sort of synonymous with “create some flavorful character interaction.” I can even write it as a Move:

When you’ve engaged in flavorful character interaction, check the flags list. If your character hit another character’s flag at least once this scene, mark XP for hitting a flag in this scene.

Players don’t get XP when their Flag gets hit. They just get spotlight time. So the incentive is to create easy to hit flags that don’t derail the action too much. That’s fine for characterization, but there was some concern that we would miss out on deeper character development and spend too much focus on more shallow characterization. Frankly, even that is a good problem to have IMHO. But we tried to address it: Everyone gets three flags, and it’s strongly recommended that they make at least one easy to hit / low impact (i.e. shallow) flag and at least one deep character development flag.

Thoughts? Do you think this change will make my table “suck less”? 😉