We just tried this variant of End of Session last night, instead of resolving a bond to mark XP:
“Describe how your opinion of or relationship with another character (PC or NPC) has changed. If everyone at the table agrees, mark XP.”
It worked great. It prompted a lot of interesting conversation and ruminating about the session, and the sessions before it. Unexpected stuff, too! Like two of the 6 players realizing that this was the first time their characters actually bonded, and one of the PCs realizing that the antagonistic relationship with their long-term rival had finally turned a corner.
The really nice part was: everyone felt that they could be involved, even if they didn’t have any bonds that got addressed.
It does lose the “motivation factor” that bonds have, where a player specifically drives play towards resolving a bond. But honestly, I can only think of 1 player that I’ve ever noticed intentionally doing that.
I recommend trying it out!
Sounds a little like Apocalypse World Hx – where it’s not really anything more than a number. The question is “who knows you better, they get a +1 with you”.
Something like this could be fun:
At the end of session, choose a character who’s relationship with your character has changed. They gain 1xp.
This encourages others to get up in your shit, because each player gives out 1xp.
I like the idea. It works as a kind of debrief move as well. How long did the conversation take?
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Eric Nieudan not exactly sure… i think we did all of End of Session (including Drive/Alignment and the “Did we…?” questions) in about 15 minutes. So maybe 5-10 minutes?
Aaron Griffin yup, AW Hx was definitely an inspiration. Though I’d hesitate to go with “everyone gives out 1 XP,” because you could pretty easily end up with one player getting 2-4 XP and everyone else getting none. And because XP is so directly tied to advancement, that could get wacky.
(The AW Hx move doesn’t really have that problem, because Hx affects advancement much more slowly, and until it does, it only affects the interactions between specific characters.)
Did you also use the alternate versions of Aid and Interfere? Since it sounds like you’ve been trying to get rid of +Bond.
Jeremy Strandberg I was asking because we tend to do the end of session move at the very last minute (when we don’t forget). But 15 minutes seems perfectly doable.
Peter J yup. I haven’t used bonds for Aid/Interfere since I started working on Stonetop. And bonds have been replaced with the Introductions stuff I posted about a few days ago.