For the record

[telerib]

I decided that the Spider needed some alone-time in San Francisco before the party caught up with him. It would make things waaay more interesting. How to accomplish this?

Why, attack NYC with zepplins, of course.

*insert mad scientist villain here, who kidnaps the President to force US Steel, GM and Ford to turn their industrial capabilities to making robot soldiers to fight in the "coming war."*

PCs obligingly decide to rescue the President.

Is all this a stall? Oh hell yeah. It also fits back into EVIL and that cast of characters, so it isn't a totally *random* stall.

PCs look into the situation in Pittsburgh and Detroit. Some schmuck they've never heard of is running the factory floor in Detroit; Gunter Schlosser is in charge of Pittsburgh steel production. They met him during the Sky Pirates adventure.

So they go to Pittsburgh, with the thought of trying to get information out of Gunter. Which they do. And find mail from the Mad Scientist, postmarked Detroit. And we run out of time. Detroit next week.

One player wondered why they were going to Pittsburgh first, instead of Detroit. "Just because there's a named NPC there?" he wondered. The other PCs insisted that yes, this was a good reason. Post-game, he told me that he was hep to my "stalling" - feeding a named NPC to the group to get them to go there first.

Now, for the record: I never encouraged them to go to Pittsburgh or to Detroit. While the entire game was a stall, very true, Gunter Schlosser was in Pittsburgh because the Mad Scientist needed a competent lieutenant to oversee operations there *because he was (in or near) Detroit.* He could use Unnamed Goon #36 as the Detroit foreman because he's close enough to those factories to micromanage if he feels like it.

I really half-expected them to go straight to Detroit if they had recalled that Gunter had been taking orders from someone, and assumed that his boss would be at the other industrial center. Hey, I had ideas for conveyor-belt fight-scenes either way: one with molten steel, one with bandsaws and welding tools. It's all good.

Also for the record... I wouldn't be above using their metagame tricks against them to influence the party's decisions. :-) It just happens that it wasn't the case this time.

Comments

[edg.livejournal.com]

You may be amused to find out that Dave and I had an hour-long discussion about why we should let the President die, based on (caffeine-fueled, probably) speculation about the global geopolitical situation. (We determined that by letting the President die and then hoping really hard that diplomatic negotiation failed between the US and Germany, we could prevent the Great Depression and our timeline's World War II, although we'd probably end up nuking Havana or Beijing in the 60s.)