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Flashback Adventures
I'm debating on running a flashback game for my players. They wouldn't play their own characters but all would be characters somehow related to their current characters past. I'm just a little worried about a couple things. Some of my players don't have and don't seem to really care to have fleshed out backgrounds for their characters, which honestly isn't a big deal with me cause i'll just work up a background for them that works within the campaign.
The other issue is that i'm a little worried about my players "breaking" time. They just seem to always find that one thing i didn't plan on that really makes everything else go out the window.
Any ideas or has anyone run a session like this and run into any issues?
The other issue is that i'm a little worried about my players "breaking" time. They just seem to always find that one thing i didn't plan on that really makes everything else go out the window.
Any ideas or has anyone run a session like this and run into any issues?
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I have run a few flashbacks before, and I have played in a few, and I can tell you that they can be a lot of work and cause a ton of stress for very little payoff. Unless it is absolutely necessary for the overarching narrative, interactive flashbacks are rarely worth the effort.
If you decide on doing this, I recommend using a modified interactivity model. Instead of free-roaming adventuring, run it like it's an on-the-rails shooter. Write the session as if it is a play being performed on stage, and think of the characters as actors in the play. They have set positions at the beginning and end of every act, but they ad-lib all their lines of dialogue. In this way, the flashback is not so much a roleplaying experience as it is an inclusive cut-scene.
Or, you can take the gamble, ask your players to understand that you reserve the right to veto any history-breaking moves on their parts, and just run it like any other session of your game.
On the other hand, if you've got the right group, it could even be fun to play your actual characters in the past (once again, keep in mind your players) and flesh out some encounters or something that they could then reference in the "present" as it were. This could be especially useful in how they would relate to NPC's, etc. Instead of saying, "you've seen this guy around town," you could say, "you run into Jim the donkey merchant...remember, you were his bodyguard across the mountain pass in that one flashback we did?"
These flashback "episodes" could be especially useful at times where - God forbid - someone doesn't show up to a planned session, you could just say, "let's do a (player one) flashback today, and give the other players some pre-gen characters to surround the "protagonist" with for the purpose of the flashback, and play it out...then someone else's turn the next time. (or other characters from the "present" might be there, too...whatever fits)
Actually, I'm liking this idea more and more as I type.
How far back were you planning to "flash"? The farther back you flash, the more opportunities you give yourself to reconcile their actions in the past with the world in the present. Other entities with their own agendas would be acting in the meanwhile, and the odds go up that whatever the party does in the past could be "undone".
I had Florimel steal my world setting for a couple of sessions, and it really bothered me until I realized that I could reasonably declare the intrusion happened a good four centuries before I intend to start the campaign. So even if his players caused him to be lying about promising not to actually *mess* with Vidria, I could easily bury their influence under several decades of history and effectively forget it ever happened. Which is good, because I was *there* for the sessions in question and I no longer remember what happened. =P
While an individual player is off on their own "side-quest" each of the other players get a pre-generated character that they can use for a session or two. These pre-gens are all people who knew the player or have some knowledge of the PCs past. It allows other PCs to participate in rounding out each others past while giving them fun with new characters in whom they have little investment.
The side quests can take all kinds of forms from defeating an evil NPC who knows a dark secret from the player's past to saving a former sweetheart from the clutches of a one-time childhood bully who has now become a powerful Baron. These adventures can help the PCs define where they came from and can surround them by friends and family from the time that they decided to become adventurers and from moments that defined them.
This does have some disadvantages as I mentioned in my previous post: because temporary pre-gened characters have very little investment in them they can be played VERY erratically and may lead to a major PCs death.
Despite that I was told later by a few of my PCs that the so-called "backstory" adventures were their favorite ones. They enjoyed dabbling with new pre-gened characters each session and fleshing out their own characters when it was their turn for a side quest.
I can't think of anything to add to this thread really. There's some great advice here. I especially like the way Femme Legion worded it: "A drop of food coloring into a cup of water makes more of a change than the same drop into a gallon." That's just poetic!
Edit: Here's an interesting idea: Let them mess up whatever they want, but then they each must play one of these inevitables as a PC and they have to right the wrongs that they created in the flashback! So you make them clean up their own mess. Maybe that's too mean, but it could be fun.
And I suppose it's appropriate to mention one roleplaying experience that I was really happy to avoid ever talking about in character: one of my characters, Nicole Matthews, had a really bad tendency to fall asleep and dream about past lives. One time she *thought* that was happening again, but in fact she had really traveled back to view the world through the eyes of this previous incarnation - and because it's a Florimel game, this previous incarnation was actually a PC in a previous campaign.
The scene I was viewing was the character's dying sister saying "you need to go kill the child and absorb his power before your brother does", then blur ahead a little bit, and there I was in front of the child in question. I genuinely believed that I would be a better and more benevolent guardian of the child's power than my brother, so I did as my sister asked.
Turns out that in the previous campaign, where the "real" character had been in this situation, the player had decided that no amount of power was as important as a life, and if she had killed the child, she would become as evil as her brother. Not only did she let the child live, but she actually invested the child with her own powers.
So, um, yeah, serious dissonance between what had "really" happened and what I had chosen to alter reality to become. My character's friend Mychael, who was a death psychopomp for this region of the multiverse, popped in to point out just how fundamentally I had just altered things. He then patiently endured my immense fit of rage at being asked to make such a fundamental decision without any warning that it was fundamental, or that it had ever been made differently, and because Mychael was an NPC and Florimel knows how to manipulate me, Mychael got Nicole calmed down and amenable to taking the steps necessary to undo this change and (mostly) put the world back to rights.
Nicole then was escorted to her previous incarnation's life moments before the critical decision, where that incarnation got shot in the head. Turns out we'd found the child as a ghost, after we died! So as I understand it, Mychael was able to fix Nicole's meddling by walking her back a few days further in time, knowing he'd be able to yank her out of that past (and thus let it happen the way it'd happened before) the instant the bullet went through her skull.
Does this not make sense? That's okay; it didn't make much sense to me at the time either. =P
However, we started the chronicle with a flashforward scene. They were Several of the players where playing more powerful characters at the expense of being GM tools. And by that, we reserved the right to have their characters act in ways that benefited the game. It was also a means to curb abuses of power.
What was interesting, however, was that the game eventually had player created events that were a self-fulfilling prophecy of the original scripted event we created with our senior players. However, those same players had little to do with these events culminating in that manner.
I suppose it has no real bearing on your issue, but it was pretty interesting in retrospect.