Creating an extra character
For Halloween, I'm running a light horror-ish RPG for some friends. We play other RPGs regularly. I had a great little game in mind called ViewScream, designed for online play. Everyone plays a character isolated on a spaceship that has Problems (TM). Each character has two life-threatening emergencies which must be solved lest they die in the end. Each character also has three technobabble solutions to help solve others' emergencies. These may or may not work; the player knows, but the other players don't know. Everyone takes turns dialoguing, telling about their emergencies, offering up solutions, seeing how they worked (or didn't).
But there are 6 of us, and I didn't have a prebuilt scenario that went past 5.
Characters are pretty minimal. They have a tiny personality description and a little bit of relationship info, a couple of barebones sentences explaining how they feel or think about another character. In addition they have one secret or twist or scripted mini-scene. Should be easy enough to insert a 6th, right?
The main thing to check is whether the overall mechanics will still work. This is a horror scenario - some characters will die. So check the math - looks like the options are giving a 6th person either 1 or 2 successful solutions, meaning either 1-2 or 1 (respectively) characters are mathematically guaranteed to die. Seems fine, make it 1 successful solution. But what's the twist? All of the other characters' twists are slightly connected to each other, and this new character won't have anything pointed back at itself. My solution is to make the new character's twist more impactful to everyone. They get a pre-game choice: either follow their orders and knowingly have less effective solutions, or ignore their orders to make improvements they think are good and run the risk of hurting the crew overall. Either way sets them up to yell at basically everyone which is exactly what I want in an otherwise disconnected extra.
Will do a bit of retrospective after Halloween.
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