While I understand that Figures of Note follow the same rules for scene mechanics as characters do, how does of it work out with Intersticial scenes? Yes sometimes those will directly involve a character, but won’t those sometimes invovle another NPC? If you have a vaylen doctor trying to get stuff on world and he goes to talk to the crime boss, who is an NPC, to smuggle it. Can’t you just get some end up with some very boring NPC theater there?
Would this be more of a building scene? It seems you would save intersticial scenes for use with PC’s only, but if you have and vaylen in an intersticial scene with a psychologist, then couldn’t the vaylen be found out? Is this something where you just have to have better scene control? Is having the Vaylen to accessible a mistake?
I’ve been doing GM interstitial scenes. The key is to have a reason to do them–and that reason should be provocative for the players. In general, you can avoid the dialogue and instead simply summarize the discussion–perhaps with just a phrase or two of what was actually said. It’s like a cut-scene in a movie–the scene builds suspense by giving the audience (the players) information that the characters don’t have. The reason I include NPC interstitials is because I want the players–not the characters–to know something. I’ve depicted the leader of our planet informing one of his security officers that a PC was actually born a slave and so must be returned to the slave pits. The officer replied, “we’ll get him, sir. We’ll put the collar back on him” because I wanted the players to be worried!
Mel
Yeah…I’ve already expressed my extreme displeasure with trying to act out a full-on Interstitial among my own characters. Mostly I just summarize what they cover, along with a buh-buh-BUHHHH! zinger drawn from that conversation (i.e. “Nothing can stop us now! Bwahaha!”).
I was treating “boss talks to minion” scenes as Color, myself, and reserving Interstitials for scenes in which two different real people around the table were talking to each other.