How do you do a Soulgaze moment?

[Wendell_Burke]

This pertains to the magical effect known as the Soul Gaze.

This effect is meant to make a strong impact on those characters involved as each one rapidly takes in the measure of the other’s essential self. Not specific information, but a summation of character, who and what the other is as a being at their essence.

I’m interested to hear how some of you handle this in your games? How do you convey to your players, the weight of something like this and how do you make certain that you’re being accurate to the character in question? How do you describe it so you’re not just restating the obvious about the other character? Do you hand the description of the vision off to the player being observed? What if they don’t feel ready to come up with something?

[Sanctaphrax]

I mostly play PbP, where being ready to come up with things is a non-issue. Can't help with that.

My preferred approach is to compose brief vision sequences, like dreams, that evokes the tone I want the NPCs to convey and contains a metaphor for some critical aspect of their being. Evocativeness and feel are the priorities; if the image is cool, restating the obvious isn't really a problem.

As for what the NPC sees of the PC, I pretty much ignore the details.

[Mr. Death]

Typically, I put it as an exercise to my players -- have them come up with, beforehand, what their soul looks like. They've generally had a lot of fun coming up with the symbolism, the structure of it, etc.

For most NPCs, I come up with it on the fly, but when there's someone important, I typically come up with the gist beforehand. Once or twice I've had a soulgaze start an entirely mental scene -- typically, if the soulgaze is used as part of freeing someone from compulsion or mind control or something.