What Story Now play looks like

So I feel like play-style is a pretty stable thing; I, for one, will pick a relationship, goal, or situation in play and charge at it, hands outstretched, in order to get a good grip and squeeze drama out of it.

Relationship? No one can tell this person what to do but me! This way, interacting with him/her will be charged with potential conflict.

Actual play example: [game: Storming the Wizard's Tower][my character: a fisherman, father to a (secretly) pregnant shepherdess] The blacksmith's apprentice is my daughter's best friend. She knows about the pregnancy, and (out of character) says as much aloud.

Best part? I made a Charged Conversations roll, then asked, "Is my daughter actually pregnant? Is that the truth?" GM thinks about how to respond (since I was asking about something a player said, not a character. Yes, quibbling is a big part of what RPGs are about ^__^), and then says, "Yes. She is." I really liked knowing something as a player, but not as a character, and having the dramatic irony give off an awesome vibe.

Situation? I will seek the origin of the curse upon your house, and later we will ret-con that I actually placed the curse, myself! Hahaha! Now, there is another twist in the emerging situation, and it pits us against each other in a bad-blood way. Cool!

Actual play example: [game: Polaris][my character: a Knight of the Stars who is a skilled male midwife; tasked with concealing the deformed byblows of another noble house] The women of the House of Corvus, it is whispered, give birth sometimes to reptilian monsters that do not live beyond birth. It's my job to dispose of them discreetly. Then, one day, when I'm burying one in the courtyard, I discover a lizard-figurine buried in the dirt that's just stinking with dark magic. (I enter this element into the story because it seems like a fun answer to, "Why is House Corvus cursed?")

The sages inspect the thing, and determine that it is, indeed, the source of the curse. Another of the Knights (a fellow player), cynically suspecting treachery on my part, narrates, "Sir Fornax moved the curse-lizard from the courtyard of his own House into ours. He means to push his own line's barrenness onto the Corvus clan!" Ha, well, I didn't challenge this assertion using any Key Phrases, and decided it was just too awesome a twist to turn down.

Goal? I will pick the worst (best?) possible moment for my quest to conflict with yours, so as to achieve delicious drama.

Actual play example: [game: Exalted][my character: an Abyssal (a champion of death) who truly believes in the purifying power of Oblivion] My master, a Deathlord, is uninterested in anything but his own consolidation of power. When this means fighting other Abyssals instead of banding together to spread our dark power, I rebel, flee the Deathlords, and throw myself on the mercy of the Solars (champions of the sun, my people's implacable foes) rather than serve a lord without integrity.

Note - Exalted lacked any direct means via the rules (explanatory text about background and setting is not "rules" in the normal sense) for me to address theme in the way that I wished. On the other hand, if goals/relationships are not tied closely to the game system in some way (explicitly, or emergent in play), it can be tough to find your "way in" to that. My character was pretty crappy with the dice rolls in this last example, so really the only recourse I had was in my allegiances, not my actions, in play. I wasn't blocked from exploring Theme all on my own, but it would have been a lot more satisfying if character creation had gotten other players thinking in this direction, too.

Bottom line: rules can't stop you from playing as you wish, but if you follow them, they sure can help with a particular style. You can tell pretty quickly (during character creation, maybe; definitely in play) whether the game is working with you or against you. Is the game too creatively demanding for your tastes? Does it get lost in the "fluff" instead of who wins and who loses? Is it too creatively constraining? Lots of things can go wrong; playing a game that seems to "get" your style is an extra-awesome experience.

Reflections on the One Ring RPG

Thanks to the .pdf being so readily available, The One Ring RPG already has dozens of pages of comments in forums like Story Games and rpg.net, so there's already a lot out there to look at.

I've gotten hold of the .pdf myself (and will, yeah, most likely buy the boxed set), and I have to say, I'm really excited about this game!

A few comments and quibbles:

- yes, there is a passing similarity to Mouse Guard, but not a strong one.

- yes, the formatting is such that particular rules can be a little tricky to find at times, but if you read it from beginning to end you'll find everything; some things just aren't repeated like they should be, or are first mentioned in odd places and then never mentioned again (like what the Feat die and Success dice look like..)

- I have been underlining all kinds of things, just to overcome the semi-weird formatting; things that look important but aren't flagged and bolded have been underlined or circled in black pen (thanks, b/w printout!)

- you roll a d12, the Feat die, every time you roll the dice. If it comes up an 11, it's the Eye of Sauron, which negatively affects the result. If it comes up 12, it's the Rune of Gandalf, which has a positive effect. Kind of wonky that they went with 11 instead of, you know, 1, but whatever. Strictly speaking (I need to investigate this), it could be that the Eye still counts as an 11 but also creates bad or weird side effects. Still, kind of odd.

Straight-up cool stuff:

- adventures occur at the rate of one per year, followed by a recovery period called the Fellowship Phase in which you manage your reputation, your wealth, and your spiritual health (by shedding Shadow points); this phase lasts between a week and a season, and "caps" the adventure.

For context, the journey from the Shire to Rivendell could be considered one adventure, since they take their sweet time healing Frodo, something on the order of weeks!

The journey to Mount Doom, come to think of it, would be one enormous adventure from there on out, since the poor hobbitses never really get a break after that. Maybe I'm just recalling the movie version of events, though. Merry and Pippin catch a bit of a break when they encounter the Ents and get a chance to rest up at the Enthall, though.

- corruption! Okay, so I'm not quite sold yet on the cool-factor of gaining Shadow points from traveling through tainted lands, but experiencing anguish and doing horrid things to others both seem like legit sources of Shadow points. The latter, especially, is reminiscent of Polaris and its Experience Tests.

- to remove Shadow taint from yourself, you must make a Craft test or a Song test. Yep, just like in Earthdawn, making beautiful things is how you free yourself from the taint of evil. Cool! (okay, okay, in Earthdawn, strictly speaking, making beautiful things is how you prove that you are free of evil's icy grip, rather than how you remove yourself from it. Close enough ^__^)

- the game is set about five years before "the shadow returns to Mirkwood". Given the time-frame mentioned above, that means you've got about five adventures ahead of you before the War of the Ring's first blow will be struck (that is, the ringwraiths capturing and torturing Gollum, and finding out where the One Ring is). Naturally, that means the players have five game-years to walk into the Shire and encounter Bilbo Baggins and, who knows, maybe hear a little tale about his magic ring...

- the text is chock full of little story-gamey gems that demand a close-read. Yes, this game is in the Trad Games tradition (in that Trad rather than Indie is where the creators have been hanging out, where they got their experience and inspiration, etc.), but it's got neat little things in it like:

"the player shall declare the intended result of his action. On a success, he narrates what occurs," [paraphrased from the text]

and

"When a player selects the skill he will roll to complete an action, and when he describes the action itself, the other players shall have veto power over these decisions for the sake of logic and theme. If the players cannot resolve the issue, the Loremaster [GM] shall make a ruling." [paraphrased from the text]

To be fair, there are also depressing little tidbits like,

"...nothing ruins a good session of play as [much as] a player questioning the Loremaster's knowledge of the source material" p. 7, Loremaster's Book

and

"Before the game begins, the Loremaster should have at least a generic idea of how the plot of the adventure should unfold.... The Loremaster needs to have an idea of when [the events of the plot] will happen." p. 13, Loremaster's Book

So, yeah, you get some of the standard stuff about "The GM makes the plot, and the players are its main characters", (Google the "Provisional Glossary" and search for the phrase "Impossible Thing Before Breakfast" for more context).

To be fair, if the LM cannot "barf forth Tolkien-style apocalyptica" to the players' satisfaction (lil Apocalypse World reference, there), then the LM probably shouldn't be LMing. It's kind of neat that the rules explicitly state that the person best qualified to LM is whoever knows the most about Tolkien in the group, so at least they offer a method of handling this head-on. ^__^

Secondly, there is absolutely nothing wrong with pre-game prep. What I find objectionable is outcome prep, rather than simply content prep. Any veteran GM will tell you they've written up all sorts of amazing things on their lonesome before a session, only to never quite get a chance to use them in play. Understandably, the outcome/content distinction is not made explicit here.

Additionally, there are really neat little rays of light poking out, indicating that the designers were of two minds about player autonomy, which is cool:

"The last thing a Loremaster should do is to restrict his players ... in order to make them conform to his idea of how the game should progress. Players must feel that their characters can attempt any action, no matter how limited the chances of a successful outcome." p. 7, Loremaster's Book

Additionally, along the same lines:

"Managing the game system properly is absolutely vital for the creation of a truly cooperative role-playing experience....nothing is more destructive to a player's suspension of disbelief and immersion in the game than the feeling that his [hero's] fate is being dictated by the Loremaster's choices and not his own." p. 17, Loremaster's Book

Really! How cool is this?

Following up is this:

"... the rules are not the province of the Loremaster alone, but are an invaluable resource to be shared with all participants." p. 18, Loremaster's Book [emphasis mine]

Basically, you have what appears to be, and seems to be largely received by players as, an ordinary adventure-journey game that, thematically, takes D&D full circle into explicitly Tolkien-themed waters. But, clearly, there are elements of player empowerment, and a few gems here and there in the Corruption rules, that demonstrate it can be something more or different or stranger than that.

I didn't even mention character creation stuff, or Encounters!

To sum up the cool bits super-quick-like, there are several opportunities to plug your character concept into a larger context: many of the Backgrounds you can choose from (which actually determine more about your character than the character-class-equivalent, "callings") explicitly mention family members, social status, and community ties, right there in black and white. Lovely!

Now, of course, connecting your character's odd, unpleasant, or strange Background to, well, the rest of the game... the trick is to take it with you! That's going to take the GM's assistance. For example - Tookish hobbits are not trusted, considered wild, unpredictable, and adventurous. So - should the GM simply have a few NPCs mutter about your Tookish features, clucking their tongues?

No way! See, the biggest mood-killer for building Theme and whatnot, I think, is obsessively making the game about the traveling. The Journey mechanics really don't need to be front-and-center; they aren't even that complicated, so you could use kind of like a complicated AW custom move to further stress the scarcity and danger of Middle-Earth.

Additionally, Encounters are reserved for dealing with single or grouped (friendly or neutral) NPCs that you meet on your travels; the GM reserves judgment for deciding what constitutes an Encounter, but it puts a bit of emphasis on making such things significant in some way. The part I find the most compelling is this: all PCs have virtues (valour and wisdom), and NPCs look at one or the other virtue to decide how well they regard you.

The value of the chosen virtue dictates how many failed dice rolls the party can make during the Encounter before the NPCs decide they've had enough of your bungling. Things like racial prejudice (yep! In the rules!) and your characters' social standing (especially with the culture the NPC(s) belong(s) to) all affect how many of your failures they will endure. If you reach their Tolerance (that's the game term, yes), they will basically decide they aren't interested in listening to or dealing with you further - - what that means in detail is rooted in the direction the fiction is taking.

It's like taking the old-timey D&D reaction roll and expanding its scope to include a whole scene, rather than just a random little die roll at the moment of encounter.

Lots of cool stuff. I'm working on getting a campaign going. We'll see what comes of it!

[Chronica Feudalis] Not what I expected

Today I had an adventure in close-reading, and I think I've learned some important things in the past couple of days about how games work.

I used to flip straight to the "standard task resolution" rules in a new game book, trying to get a sense of the very core of a system right away. For some reason, my high school and college days were a time when knowing this solitary thing, and nothing else, was quite important.

Of course, there are lots of games out there that would be much poorer for it if they were stripped down to only the basic "mechanic" - imagine Polaris without Zeal and Weariness, for instance, using only the Key Phrases all the time without any kind of superstructure "around" them to elaborate them and provide the downward arc for Heart characters. Kind of sucks away half the game and forces the players to just kind of grope in the direction of that sort of play, doesn't it?

Segueing... playing Chronica Feudalis tonight with Chad, a college friend, was good and surprising. I prepped about as much as I needed to, with a little cheat sheet and a good online dice rolling program. I could definitely use a physical copy of the book, but not so much so that I'd buy one just yet; I'd hold out for a campaign or something, or just beg someone to print out the .pdf. Yes, perhaps that makes me a terrible person, but... okay, I have no justification other than poverty, and when my promotion goes through in January, I'll no longer have that excuse.

Anyway, that stuff about Polaris above connects strongly to my initial bafflement at Chronica - the basic resolution seems really, really straightforward and flat until you start learning more about Aspects - freeform traits with mechanical weight that you can switch on and off. Aspects make all sorts of things about *every* character come to life - tonight's best one was definitely "My son is a sodomite", which my lone player inflicted on an archbishop's assistant to blackmail him. Very nice.

Another thing that's changed about how I read is how I sense things like GM/player agency, and how a very close reading of procedural text is key to minimizing unintentional hand-wavey play. This edition of the game (the first edition, I reckon) is a little vague in places, but it's pretty awesome how it throws Aspects all over the place, giving and demanding Ardor (metagame points that manipulate Aspects). If you let the GM tell you one thing that one of your Aspects makes you do, and you do it, you get Ardor. If some equipment you're carrying interferes with a task, you get Ardor. Basically, if you surrender a little authority, or make your life a little harder, you get more narrative pull.
It's interesting, though - the exact procedural text falls on one side of causality: certain things that make sense in the fiction are going to trigger an Aspect being Endured, but the player decides whether or not to have an Aspect Compelled (eliciting a particular, unwanted behavior).

You can spend Ardor to introduce Aspects on other characters, temporarily turn off one of your negative Aspects, or resist the causality of your equipment thwarting your efforts - your heavy armor will surely count against you when diving in to save the duchess, unless you spend some Ardor to ignore its weight.

Our session tonight was one scene: Chad's priest, a bastard son of the duke, forced into the cloth to keep him out of the line of succession, learns that the King of France will be coming through the city (Troyes at Champagne, in France) and supping with the duke and the archbishop. The priest espies the archbishop's assistant at midday Mass, and confronts him afterward with (true) rumors that the man's son is a sodomite.
We used the social conflict rules - the "Parley" - and Father Luc threatened to release his list of suspected sexual degenerates to the wider Church - risking a general inquiry in northern France - unless the assistant could promise that he'd
get the archbishop to look into a supposed (fictitious) heresy brewing in the nearby countryside. Details were fuzzy, of course, but the assistant agreed, belatedly remembering that the imminent Royal Feast would then divide His Grace the Archbishop's attentions. [I made the assistant an Agent, a level two (of three) opponent, only to realize how much tougher this made him as an adversary than a Simple, or level one foe. A level one opponent might have broken too easily, though, and we were constrained by time, so I simply had the assistant back down more readily than he really had to, which fit the severity of the threat against him.]

Father Luc, naturally, offered to represent the Archbishop at the feast. If the offer were rejected, he'd be forced to sit at a lower table, away from the duke and Luc's noble half-brothers, and stew in the shame of his low birth. But if the Archbishop goes for it, and agrees to have the bastard priest sit at the high table in his stead, then Luc could rub it in his father's face!
Of course, there are a few pieces to this plot, and only the first has been laid, thus far. I'm pretty excited about where this will go, and I'm going to read up on some rpg.net actual play reports that suddenly got a lot more interesting to me ^_^

Last thing: we used gchat, wikipedia, random.org's dice roller, and .pdf's of the game. Hurrah for 21st century gaming! Incidentally, I rolled actual, meatspace dice, out of an old, repurposed bag of Royal Salute whiskey. Good times.

Funny thing happened on my way to the Mistake...

Three sessions in, my new Polaris campaign is complete. We had a lot of fun, banged out 14 great scenes, one Star Knight almost crossed over from Novice to Veteran (a male midwife with delusions of glory and grandeur, and a cruel streak a mile wide), and we left it at this:

- two Knights heading into the South to destroy a cursed, bronze artifact (only Southern forges could possibly melt it down!)
- the almost-Veteran riding out to the Mistake to fulfill a vision quest and significantly delay the inevitable (by finding a McGuffin, Sir Knight would make all demons there sterile for one year, and unable to attack the Remnants for just as long!)

Sounds pretty good to me! Yeah, we shared a feeling of "did we mess that up?", but we surpassed it by agreeing that we just didn't want to carry on any further. There was some concern, initially, that traveling South might go beyond the game's intended material; whether or not that's true, it's fair to say that the task of imagining the South was more than we were up for, and that sapped some of our interest.
Also, we poured so much emotion and creativity into those 14 scenes that we were kind of running on empty, by the end, not to mention that lots of Real Life stuff came up for us as a group, and we decided to have fun talks about our lives instead of playing a game.

We're all interested in starting a new game of *something* soon, once things settle down a bit in general. Any suggestions are appreciated! :)

Polaris rocks! [another AP thread, kinda]

I promise that soon I'll give a scene-by-scene rundown of the Polaris game I started today; suffice it to say that this game can be bloody amazing!
We have half-giants, infanticide, the transference of family curses, and artifacts from the mysterious South (the whole world is south of Polaris, after all...), and my male midwife character lost a hand to a magic arrow, gaining a third eye of Starliiiight Powerrrr in its place!
This. Game. Rocks.
Since we're playing with 3 people, instead of the recommended 4, we had to mash the two "Moon" (supporting character/judge and arbitrator) roles together into one, meaning that, at times, it got a little confusing as to who should be doing what, and for whom.

Also - we learned a bit more, on the fly, how some key phrases work - the diff. between But Only If and And, Furthermore is apparently this: the former gives you access to the sweet shutdown phrase It Was Not Meant to Be, which requires both you and your opponent to take back your very last statements, respectively. Did not get that for the first six scenes, but once we got it, the reason to actually choose between BOI and AF finally clicked. Good thing!

It's possible, by the way, for Exhausting Themes (as in, the exhausting OF themes; the themes themselves do not tire us) to either be an easy or difficult thing - if your themes have a lot in common, you can do lots of the same kind of thing, but you get in hot water easily, whereas if your themes are all different from each other, you can do more, but maybe only once each. Good to know!

A-MAZING.

Polaris - AP Thread

Hey, gang!
Connor, a friend of mine is visiting from San Francisco; he's in school out there, studying drama therapy. He's played WoW and other video games in the past, but I've never been able to persuade him to try a role-playing game before (and I hadn't tried asking in years...). Tonight, we couldn't find anything to do, and he didn't want to drive back to his parents' house just yet (around 7pm), so I suggested a board game.

He asked, "Is the board game going to involve a lot of thinking and strategy?" At which point, I doubled back from the game closet, sheepishly. I suggested playing an RPG instead, and, surprisingly, he assented!
I had been thinking of downloading a PDF of S/Lay w/Me, only to discover at the unstore that, hey, there is no PDF for sale yet! Oh, well - I'd bought a copy of Polaris this week, so I showed it to Connor and had him read that "As It Was" section about the king, queen, knights, etc., while I went and got dice, paper, pens, etc.
When I returned, he picked a name from the star-names list, and then we just kind of sat for a bit, while I asked him if, in all the ice and splendor and horror and demonic invasions going on, if he had any ideas for a character. Somewhere in there, I mentioned that Polaris is a tragedy, and all star-knights inevitably die, go mad, or join the demons. He scowled, conjectured on Ben Lehman's upbringing and emotional well-being, and then reminded me of his hesitation about playing. But, eventually, we extracted the following:

Sir Cetus
[all normal Aspects, plus...]
Blessing: Shield of Black Shiny Goodness (his name for it; he described a shield made of glittery obsidian)
Fate: Mensa - a character. No idea who this is, yet!
Ability: Attribute - Big (Cetus is an enormous individual - alternately described as being like a "huge ice-statue" and "big and hairy, like Thor")

New Moon character: Equuleus - a relative of Cetus's, a young boy. "The Chosen One"
Mistake character: High Priest Octans - a trouble-making prophet who declared Equuleus the "Chosen One", and who wants Sir Cetus to guard Equuleus on his way into the Mistake(!), where he claims the boy will somehow end the Mistaken demon-army altogether

Play: Connor was really nervous, but also interested in the game, so I tried to keep things as low-key as possible. Partly because he'd never RP'd before, and partly because there were only two of us playing, we divvied up the responsibilities of the Moons - anyone moving against the Heart would be played by me; anyone standing up for the Heart would be played by Connor; and anyone standing on the sidelines would be played by me (as generously and fairly as possible - no ruthlessness from such characters allowed!)

We cleared up how the Moon characters would be played (in truth, I didn't really explain the Moons, just those responsibilities), and then began.
And so it was...
Equuleus and Cetus were walking together on a rampart atop the Remnant, and Equuleus reveals that it was the High Priest who declared him the Chosen One (Connor had a good grumble about this - "How can he do that to a little boy?"), and that, as the One, he could pick anybody he liked to accompany him into the Mistake, to save the world. He naturally chooses Cetus ("You're the bravest, strongest warrior in the world!") and this led to our first conflict.

[Connor has done a lot of improv, so we started out just using the phrases "But Only If..." and "And Furthermore" to start. He quibbled a bit about using the exact phrases, but I told him it was important to keep the proper mood and tone, which was a good enough reason for him.]
Angry, Cetus sends the child to his room. [and furthermore! I add...] On the way to his room, Equuleus sneaks off instead and goes to tell the High Priest that Sir Cetus is a coward, and won't go with him to fulfill the High Priest's prophecy. [and furthermore! Connor adds...] The High Council calls Cetus in to explain himself. [Connor double-checked a couple of times if he could introduce new characters or not, but he took to "just say your intent; don't hedge" without me having to ever bring it up directly!] I agreed - And that was how it happened! Then we ended the scene, and took a break.

I told Connor that a break was just that - a solid break from the game completely, to talk about whatever. He went on a bit about feeling really resistant to being creative, how he felt like he was on the receiving end of the very techniques he's learning in school, and on three separate occasions tonight, he pantomimed feeling stuck in a box by the prospect of being creative for the game. He told me he was enjoying it, though, and he just had a lot of baggage to get over about performance and getting things right - I told him that whatever he comes up with will be totally cool as-is, and he resolved to keep that in mind.

We started up a second scene.
And so it was...
Sir Cetus stands before the High Council, accused of cowardice and thwarting the Chosen One's wishes. They beg an explanation, and he tells them that he's been to the Mistake before, as they know [I write this down, whispering "awesome!"], and it is no place for a boy, not even a Chosen One. They consider this, but High Priest Octans loses it and screams "This traitor should be thrown in prison!" [Connor replies, "What, like you threw my parents in prison?" He then explains that Cetus's parents went demon-mad and were locked away at the bottom of the Remnant for their own safety. Rad!]
[We start a conflict at this point:
Connor says: but only if... the High Priest has been wrong before about his prophecies.
I say, in turn: but only if... the High Council trusts him anyway.
Connor says: you ask far too much!... then continues to narrate]
Equuleus comes out of hiding and tells the Council they have no right to do this to his chosen guardian! [Connor exhausts his Theme of Fate, and I amend my statement] The High Priest demands, instead of arresting Sir Cetus that Sir Cetus show Equuleus his mad parents, in their cell - "The better to show the boy what he is protected from by the prophecy, from which others are not..." [Burn! Connor asks me if Cetus is now required to do this thing, if he has to, and I say no, but now the Council expects him to do so. He agrees.]

We ended the scene there. I'm noticing, looking back, that there was a slight rule-thing that we missed - "You ask far too much" applies to the previous statement made by one's opponent, whereas we used it for the statement that caused the conflict - i.e. Cetus is arrested. Since retroactively changing that would have meant erasing some cool stuff established about Octans and the Council, I'm okay with this.

At this point, we end the scene. We talk for a bit about things, Connor says he's really enjoying himself, though still nervous about performing well (he's a nervous guy by nature), and then I ask if he wants to play out the scene where his parents, Al Niyat and Alya, are introduced. Screaming, mad, padded-room parents? Fun! He says he's not up for another scene tonight, but he does have an idea about what happened to Cetus's parents - when Cetus went to the Mistake (the circumstances of which are unclear), he nearly died, and some kind of Council of Demons (he said it was a sort of counterpart to the High Council of the People) agreed to trade "one life for two minds" - his parents were driven insane by demon sorcery, and in exchange, the demon councilors spared Cetus and sent him home. Connor honed in on this a bit more - Cetus is not one for bravado or foolhardiness, because he's seen horrible things first-hand and doesn't care to inflict that on anyone else. AND! the High Priest had once told *Cetus* that he, too, could not be harmed by the Mistake, which we then concluded together made it possible that, should Equuleus enter the Mistake, some kind of price would be paid to see the boy safely out of there again, and Cetus did NOT want that to happen!

We chatted a bit about drama therapy, RPGs, improv, etc.; I mentioned that I'd heard a rumor that Polaris is a metaphorical examination of the strain of doing social work for a living, he guffawed and clucked his tongue at that, and then we agreed to play again! Yay! We will probably play again while he's still here in Virginia, if possible, and then figure out from there when we'll play once we're on the opposite ends of the country from one another. I'm very excited that he gave this a shot, and that he connected to it on a couple of levels (improv, therapy..)

So! More to follow, with any luck.
[Cross-posted at the Forge and story-games]

Quick update

I owe one of my non-gamer coworkers a game of Shock: the next time we're able to hang out and do that. We have protagonists ready to go; next we'll have antagonists raring to go, too!

I bought a copy of Polaris as well, and I plan on getting two other people (prolly a couple of trad gamers; a couple of *certain* trad gamers, haha) to join me. Yessss!

Derailed by Game Night

So I checked out the weekly Thursday indie/small press game night in Falls Church, at the Compleat Strategist.

It was awesome.

I played Spirit of the Century - amazing! I don't have too much time to get into a whole thing about how it went, but to be fair, we didn't get much further than character creation before I had to jet. Still, the highly collaborative nature of character creation was some hot bees, lemme tell ya. Also, my character was based very heavily on the Kriegaffe from the Hellboy comics - imagine a steampunk cyborg ape, raised by Nazis. Good times.

I also just got Shock: Social Science Fiction (v. 1.2), which looks really exciting - the references to Children of Men (see it!) make it all the more interesting for, like Ron Edwards said, doing sci-fi where the fiction is really about something cool and meaningful (that's more or less what

he said).

Looking back at how Questing Beast went - the players came up with interesting characters, and we spent two hours with a Saxon raid on a village. I wasn't a huge fan of the highly individualized chargen, which sabotaged our brainstorming on how to include the characters in each others' sagas.

The very concept of parallel, individual sagas (Polaris does this too, though I haven't played it yet and can't materially claim that this is what it does in practice) feels like the antithesis of the "Guest Starring..." feature in SotC's chargen - you actually devise some adventure that your protagonist has already gone through, and you randomly determine another protagonist who "guest stars" in your tale. It's totally badass, and really draws the characters together (not to mention taking full advantage of the whole group's creativity; wha-chaa!)

We have another session tomorrow; I'll see what the group thinks of the game so far, how they rate it, likes and dislikes, etc., and then see how the session goes, if we end up doing it.

I say "if" because SotC really opened up my head and showed me cool new things you can do with an RPG to get that creativity pot bubbling; I may buy Dogs in the Vineyard soon to check out their sweet, awesome see-and-raise conflict resolution rules, which sound really neat.