I’ve got so many people hopped up to play BE that I’ve been tossing around an idea: A 3-on-3 game, with an impartial GM there pretty much just to set Obstacles and crack the whip to maintain pacing. The only required mod I can see would be removing the GM-specific advantages the “other” side has, and rewarding all Artha as players (no GM-specific Artha awards).
Is this a fool’s errand? Will this setup lead us all to ruin?
(Mostly I’m concerned about real-world logistics, herding cats and all that.)
Sounds kewl Paul. Send some players my way. We’ve only got 3 plus the GM and I’ve got a big basement with plenty of food and drink.
Normally I’d say you might have a problem with keeping the two sides secret but with everything out in the open for everybody to see it should be awesomely vicious!
We just started playing BE this past Saturday and burned the world and almost finished the characters. One guy thinks he’s a ‘stealthy’ 8 foot green lizard Kerrn superhero who wants to teleport, fly, and have an AI supercomputer ‘friend’, another guy is a human anvil psychic/pyschotic robocop, and I’m a Forged Lord trying to keep some semblance of order. Already the 1st two characters are eyeing each other up and we really haven’t started playing for real yet lol. Should be interesting…
It’s a cool idea. I’ve discussed it with Abzu before. He said there would need to be a few changes–equaling the number of LPs between the two sides would definitely be one. I’m not sure about the others.
My other concern, actually, is that I think it might be really, really boring for the GM. If you have six people who really trust each other, I’d say, play it GM-less!
But I could be wrong. I have been before. Occasionally.
Hoo boy…I think you’d need a BE guru on each side to kind of adjudicate and give the thumbs up/down to the other side’s stuff for it to be truly GM-less. Right now that’s the weak link in my scheme, and why I think I’d still have to GM – my current players are only very slowly learning the ins and outs of the game, and I’m often having to step out of adversarial-GM mode to give them advice on how to conduct their turns.
In that case, you should definitely do it the way you suggested! In fact, that will probably help–because you won’t have to switch rolls, you can spend the whole time as “facilitator” GM–so long as you don’t favor one side over the other!
