Still very much a work in progress
For my next playthrough, I’m going to make a few changes to how I run the game.
Firstly, to the setting - I’m going to move away from espionage and more towards a crime/thriller setting and run a game that takes a more investigative angle. Most of the mechanics in Cold Shadows will work fine for this and will just require a change to their interpretation (which is very much in the spirit of the game to my mind).
I want to be clearer about the encounter tables that I draw upon. I like the mechanism of the dice pool and pre-determined success value. I will keep the multiple characteristics (the risks that are rolled upon) because I think that with experience this will make for more rounded characters. At the moment, my thinking is:
| Table | Purpose |
|---|---|
| Adapted Segment Suggestions | Using these to make sure that there is a narrative drive to every segment, making sure that they are not all too ‘big’ |
| Simple Oracle | Really useful just for making simple decisions that are not based on a character’s abilities. In this game it will be used to drive conversations |
| Skill or Ability rolls | Using the Cold Shadows mechanism, with simplified characteristics and clearer guidance about the level of risk/difficulty that is being faced |
| Urban Encounter Tables | Useful for helping to give characteristics to NPCs or to encounters with NPCs - the ones I used before were fun, and not too literal |
| Type of Evidence Table | I’ll look to see what exists for this, but in the absence of anything else I will create my own, using some or all of the evidence types from Chronicles of Crime as inspiration |
| Quality of Evidence Table | I’m actually not sure how to handle this, but some sort of roll would be fun (!) |
At the moment, I’m not really that interested in fighting, but I will keep the basic mechanism from Cold Shadows (I used it once in my first playthrough) because crime fighting can be a dangerous world! I do not want to use it often though.
The roles will need adapting slightly, but I will drop the spyware (it can come back if necessary at a later stage). Some of the other complications from Cold Shadows may be used, but we’ll see.
I do want to something about the way that time is handled. I like the system from Chronicles of Crime, where moving between locations costs time and investigative actions cost time, so I will use something like that. Given that my first try at this will be set in a city I will use Google maps to determine time to move between locations assuming walking or driving as appropriate. Conversations will be a minimum of 15 mins, and will increase in 15 min blocks. I’m not quite sure how to record it at the moment…
Yes, I do really like Chronicles of Crime, and I think that I’m probably looking for an rpg version of that!