My Life As A Gamer: Running Through The Rifts (Pt. 3)

(Following from yesterday's post.)

The Current Focus of Attention

Alexandros's actions had the consequence of narrowing the focus of attention down to El Paso and the 100 miles around it, including (in time) Ciudad Juarez across the Rio Grande. This decision. Let's take a look at this from the Referee's perspective.

For the Referee, this means that he can shelve a lot of his RIFTS books. He'll need the rulebook, Vampires, and Vampire Kingdoms for certain. Alexandros compels keeping Pantheons of the Megaverse and Secrets of the Atlanteans close by but not front-and-center; the same can be said for Sourcebook One, the first Conversion book, and a few other books where things present in the area are published.

A Narrowed Focus Means No Analysis Paralysis

The Referee now can narrow the campaign map accordingly to accomodate the focus of attention. This means that he is free to start creating some play aides that will speed things up when it's table time, curate what material he needs to have on hand (and how handy it needs to be), and what to delegate to others (and how).

He grabs a blank piece of paper and draws a regional map; El Paso is in the center, with the Rio Grande right underneath and Ciudad Juarez on the other side. He takes a compass and draws a circle on that map, centered on El Paso, to describe the range of its reach and defines that area as a 100 mile radius. Being that this is not the 1990s, he can open up Google Maps to get a look at the real-life sattelite photos of the region and decide which ones would endure to RIFTS Earth and which would not (or what would take their place). This would include lesser cities, small towns or villages, notable landmarks, etc. and could be done in one evening while listening to podcasts.

He can do the same for a city map of El Paso proper, cross-referencing the real city's layout with what Vampire Kingdoms describes to determines what goes where and how the fictional city is actually laid out. Put on some scaling (on both maps) to determine travel times, and this is done.

From there, referring to Vampire Kingdoms, he can draw up some Random Encounter Tables for various parts of the maps as well as determining Encounter odds and frequency of checking for same. Again, he can use that real-life sattelite photography to inform those decisions.

There's a good reason for why the Referee would want to do this: Palladium products are so deficient in proper gameplay procedures, and thus throws so much back on the Referee's shoulders as "LOL, just make it up!" that he is forced to do just that- and, to no one's surprise, a lot of Palladium users refer to the Dungeon Master's Guide for Advanced Dungeons & Dragons 1st Edition precisely because that game does properly support Referees like this.

(And people wonder why I say "Palladium is Kevin's AD&D house rules masquerading as a full product.")

Once that's done, the Referee can take a look at the NPCs that Alexandros is looking to deal with. Several of them are local power players, and therefore are either personally powerful or able to marshal considerable resources (or both). The Referee drops a line to a few of his pals that run their own games and ask them if they'd like to take control of an NPC after explaining the situation; he puts them into a private channel in the Discord server and they get to work playing Patron games to drive content so the Referee doesn't have to.

That, by the by, takes an hour in total; a few minutes during a coffee break at the office, and then part of an hour after work that same day.

With assistants to generate playable scenarios via NPC interactions, the Referee can take notes of what happens when on the calendar and where on the maps; now the campaign is in motion, and as such Alexandros is no longer the only party able to force changes therein- he can, and will, be changed by them as well.

The Referee has handled his end of the gameplay loop; now to knock the ball back into Alexandros's side of the court. "Old Man Halloway is mad. Some gang assaulted a party that's come to court his daughter, one that he invited."

And now Alexandros has a way to get his ambitions moving.