eCollapse is a game that rewards GMs who pay attention to the characters from the very beginning. With a lot of games, including many I’ve written, it works fine for the GM to write a scenario and either assign characters to players, or have them generate characters and then find a way to introduce them to the unstable situation so they can poke it until it explodes.
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This game’s different. The characters are like single-issue voters, only instead of hitting the polls they beat people up. You can develop a great plot centered around free markets, and if your PCs all have bees in their bonnets about AI rights, it’s not going to click. They’re going to leave your market plot lonesome as a homely kid at a junior high dance.
Fortunately, you don’t have to guess what’s going to engage and challenge the characters, because there’s a handy piece of paper that tells you exactly what they’re standing for and standing against. Moreover, that same piece of paper tells you what kinds of challenges the players would enjoy for their character. (Well, perhaps ‘enjoy’ is a strong word. ‘Desire’ or ‘accept with a minimum of disgruntlement’ might be more accurate.)
Setting up an eCollapse game is a little like making soup. You don’t get to choose all the ingredients, but at least you have a good idea what the other cooks are going to throw in the pot—and what will get them coming back for a second helping. Grab the character sheets, we’re going to make a little graph. Put the PCs’ names across the columns on the top. Now for every issue they mention, make an entry and put a plus or minus sign in the box, showing who’s for and against what. If you look at the play examples in the Appendix, they center around four characters with various hot buttons. I’m going to knock together their chart.
Jade pyThon ruMp-Shaker collaTeral daMMiT MaidenoF Bleeding eyeS
MuLti-cuLturaLisM + iMperiaLisM - us arMy - anarchy + patriotisM + Gov. corruption - the usa +/-
That’s a lot going on, but that’s good. It gives you lots of issues to explore, with hope that at least one character is going to bite on it. Now let’s take those issues and extrapolate. Guess, based on the character and the player, how the PC is likely to respond to other characters’ hot buttons. Put those guesses in parentheses, as I’ve done below. If you don’t think the issue generates heat for a particular character, leave it blank.
Jade pyThon ruMp-Shaker collaTeral daMMiT MaidenoF Bleeding eyeS
MuLti-cuLturaLisM + (+) ( - ) (+) iMperiaLisM - ( - ) us arMy ( - ) - (+) anarchy + ( - ) patriotisM ( - ) + Gov. corruption ( - ) ( - ) - ( - ) the usa (+) ( - ) (+) +/-
If you’ve got a full line where there’s agreement, that’s your golden motivation. In the above case, it’s government corruption. It has the best shot of motivating all the characters, and why not? The anarchist is against it because he thinks its symptomatic of everything bad with politics. The authoritarian (and jeez, what’s Collateral Dammit doing with these flower children anyhow?) is against it because it besmirches the beauty of civil legislation. The other two are against it because it’s like puppy-kicking: Almost nobody is loudly in favor of it.
Start your game with the golden motivation. If there isn’t one, see if you can get players to change their characters a little for more concord, or look for something close—three plusses and a blank, or at worst two agreements and two abstentions. Try not to get anything where one character is for and another against right at the start. Save that for later.
Giving them an agreeable common enemy opens the group to situations where they help one another, work together and, in a word, bond. Encourage friendships among the characters. If they’re chomping at the bit to get into bitter rivalries, maybe find a quiet moment to suggest how much more intense those rivalries can be if there’s an element of betrayed friendship. Besides, it’s the roles, drawn from the deck, that should provide a good seasoning of friction in early sessions, when people are still getting into character.
When the unambiguous plot is up and running, or is nearing a conclusion, you might want to start setting up something that’s geared around ++- or --+ or something like that. After working together (one hopes) and getting used to the idea of being together, an issue that strains the relationship a little can play well. With the four example characters, something with a clash of cultures might do. Three out of four PCs can be expected to take a conciliatory tone, with the fourth getting to act as the devil’s advocate and play “I told you so!” if it goes rotten. Any time it looks like the group is in danger of breaking entirely, steer back towards the issue of agreement (or a common threat, that works too). If a character doesn’t seem to be fitting in, try to find an issue that pulls him without alienating the others. If, for example, CD is feeling more and more like the fourth wheel on a trike, I’d try a threat to the USA from foreign agents. Python isn’t going to like that idea, the Maiden may be ambiguous but at least she isn’t instantly averse. Rumpshaker might balk, but if the foreigners are fascist or something, he might consider fighting them the lesser evil.
(This is all without bringing in Weaknesses or other factors. Rumpshaker might just shrug about the spies until a girl with doe-brown eyes and a trembling lower lip asks for his help.)
Watch out for issues that turn up just +-, especially if those are stated and not just your parenthetical guesses. Issues like that can be third rails, and if you jump on them, your game might die. But don’t fence them off from the players! PCs are, after all, the engines motivating the game and they have that stuff on their character sheets for a reason. Those reasons ensure they’ll bring them in. Trust me: The lure of improving their results spurs loads of creativity.
If you let the players bring in those elements, the two characters can argue and debate on the side, while you keep the primary issue looming to hit them with when it things are getting too tense or the other players are getting too bored. When the players touch the hot button, it’s far more acceptable for the GM to try to steer them away. If the GM starts it, it looks wishy-washy or manipulative to then try and yank it back. This is especially true if you made it a central motivation. Then you might have really screwed yourself by putting two characters in a situation where they can’t agree, with two others not really
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caring, and nowhere to escape from it. You don’t want that. Let them bring those troubled ideologies in themselves—especially when they have Villain or Crux fates to make their points particularly sharp.