Spotlight Cards for RQ

Read an interesting article at Dread Unicorn site about spotlight cards and hipster PDA as a player reference for GM.  The idea is to help GM to remember to let each player shine at the spotlight in the game. This can be especially problematic with larger groups at play same time. The spotlight card method gathers rough information about each player and their aspirations to an index card and at the bottom  of the card ask the question: “has the player been in spotlight already”. At the start of the game session you pick a card and make sure that person gets her spotlight in some way. You may have prepared for this beforehand already. After the spotlight moment you move the players index card to the bottom of the stack and go for next player making sure that during the session everybody gets their chance. On that page there are spotlight cards for several game systems.

I thought this was an intriguing and try to combine it here with having some reference information about the player in one card which I have been thinking about how to do for some time. Here is an example (not of any of my gamers…)

The card contains information that might be useful for GM overall.

The proficiency is marked as in Monster Island supplement – as a rough measure: Elite would mean between 71-90% and Cannonfodder 30 or below. Proficiency progresses downwards from Elite-Veteran-Seasoned-Green-Cannonfodder. The color coding helps to see at a glance the levels: blues are elites, green is seasoned, red color is cannonfodder or green proficiency. The colors give the GM a quick indication what should be the level of challenge to come up with and what might be the weak or strong areas.

All of the spotlight cards for my players sit in my Evernote with a combined card as a shortcut that has links to all of the individual cards. I might also print out these as index cards.

I will experiment with this for awhile and will return to the subject.