When we were still young in the ways of Lady Blackbird, a good friend of mine decided to use its remarkable and flexible system to run a genre dear to his heart: cyberpunk. He crafted characters with interlocking keys and traits to form a lean, mean heist team, came up with a starting scenario, and we gleeful players set forth to take the world by storm. I played Zero Cool, resident netrunner and annoying kid criminal extraordinaire. We played this game for a few sessions and definitely had some good times, but the game eventually trailed off, and we haven't come back to it since.
The game didn't work for a few reasons - one of which was that we were trying to play with more people than usual, always a tricky adjustment - but the one I want to discuss today is about system and genre. Cyberpunk stories are about a grossly unfair world, in which the haves dictate to the have-nots by dint of technology, capital and brute force, and criminality is the last best hope of freedom. It's about a society, in short, which says No at every turn. In contrast, Lady Blackbird is a system which jubilantly cries Yes! Yes!
A simple example from play: one of our characters was an artificial being equipped with an unspecified number of gadgets and attachments. At one point, we had caused a stampede in a crowded dance club. Most of us flowed with the crowd; the artificial being had drawn a lot of attention and needed a quicker exit, so his player triumphantly declared that he fired his onboard rockets and escaped up into the air. The players laughed at the audacity of the world-building and cheered at the sheer style of the exit; our GM, though, hesitated. The advice Lady Blackbird gives for GMs is to say yes or roll the dice. Personal rockets just weren't part of his conception of the universe, though. Cyberpunk can fall anywhere on a broad spectrum, and his concept was of a gritty universe without any of the trappings of far-flung SF. The player had found something that he couldn't say Yes to; it was an awkward moment of conflict that took several minutes for us to resolve and put a damper on the whole session.
LB wasn't the right system for the story we were trying to tell. The story was too much about the characters being told No, and finding a way around it, but the whole time the rules were telling us Yes, telling us we could try this or that and it would work - and when that spirit collided with the fiction, it wasn't a pretty picture.
Today some members of my group were discussing the idea of "vanity projects" for each of us, games that would let each play the perfect character for us. It started as a joke but it quickly produced some interesting ideas (I now eagerly await a noir game in which I'll get to play the femme fatale). One of the things that got the ball rolling was one player wishing she could play a pony, and it occurred to me that LB might be perfect for a Friendship Is Magic roleplay. You have keys to model the virtues, faults and relationships so essential to the show (yes I've watched it), and secrets for the ponies' magic abilities. Most of all, the tags and traits system is perfect for telling the players Yes just as the show says Yes to its characters. Yes, you can kick clouds out of the way! Yes, you know a spell to find gemstones! Yes, you can scold that dragon into behaving! The one problem I'm having is building in the one big No you'd need - a way to stop violence from ever coming up as a solution. The ponies do sometimes resort to violence, but in the world of the show it never solves things in a lasting way.
Conversely, I've seen attempts to model ponies in terms of say, Dungeons and Dragons. That seems like a project that's doomed to failure, because even if you model all of the things happen in the show and convince the players that their objective is not to kill goblins to get treasure, the system is still telling them No at every point - No, your Kick Clouds extraordinary ability doesn't let you ride on lightning, No, you don't have a "Travel to the moon" spell in your spellbook, No, your Diplomacy roll was too low to make friends with the roc.
So No systems - Dungeons and Dragons, say, or (one that's been on my mind lately) Fudge, aren't great for every story - but they're perfect for a project like my friend's cyberpunk game. If we'd been playing Fudge, he'd have been able to say, "Where's the rocket on your character sheet?" and that would have been the end of it, and everyone would have been happy. He'd have been secure knowing that he could create the universe he'd envisioned, and we would have gone back to our heist-planning and chaos-creation driven in the knowledge that we were bringing down the kind of society that prevented robots from having personal rockets.
Showing posts with label rpg. Show all posts
Showing posts with label rpg. Show all posts
Monday, September 5, 2011
Monday, August 29, 2011
Incident At Owl Lake with Andre Kruppa
I attended the Open Gaming Convention, OGC, up in Nashua, New Hampshire this weekend. I learned a lot from the experience, trying out different games, seeing players with a variety of styles, and getting to play with skilled, experienced GMs. I played two games with variants of the Fudge system, and enjoyed both of them, and I'll definitely be checking Fudge out in the future.
As I said, there's a lot to think about, but the main thing I want to get down right away is a little bit about the last game that I played at OGC, "Incident At Owl Lake," run by one Andre Kruppa (check out his website at gamesoapbox.com. This was a horror game using Fudge. It had many virtues; one of them was - I don't want to use the loaded term 'immersion', so instead I'll say - engagement. The game was extremely engaging from start to finish. It created an atmosphere like no game I've ever seen. Andre used any number of tricks to achieve that effect, but I want to mention the two big ones: presentation and... let's say refrain.
"Focused" is a word you could apply to the whole game, which was another part of why it was so successful. I'm a huge fan of in-character cross-talk: while the gamemaster is running a scene with Cyrus Vance interrogating a prisoner, Naomi and Kale's players are quietly role-playing a scene together - the conversation Naomi and Kale are having outside the interrogation room, say. It's a way to stay engaged while your character isn't acting and too explore the characters more, always a priority in my group. In "Incident," that didn't happen. I tried once, and the player I was trying to engage politely shushed me with a nod to Andre. He was quite right; this game followed the GM's attention like a film camera. Whatever Andre was paying attention to was what took over our shared imaginative space, completely. That meant there were long stretches where I had nothing to do, which is never ideal for me as a player, but on the whole I didn't mind, because what was going on elsewhere was always fascinating. I'm not sure exactly why it worked so well. I guess it was probably part of maintaining the "ritual" feel; community is part of ritual, I suppose, so being creatively together at all times may be important. It also kept Andre in tight control of the game world, which was a necessary aspect of the experience, for sure.
One bit of oddness was that there were a few in-character reasons to keep the party split up, but no reward for doing so. Nothing very interesting ever happened to people who stayed behind. The most problematic section of the game for me came when we (foolishly, of course) split the party in the second half. Three of us invaded a mysterious, dangerous place while the rest of us waited outside. The male characters were trying to protect the female characters, from the horrors of this place (very in character, as the game took place in the 50s), and my doctor wanted to stay with an afflicted patient. This left those of us left behind with nothing to do while a lengthy combat ensued - made especially painful because it quickly became clear we should never have split the party, and the lads were being taken apart, but we had no in-character knowledge of it. Admittedly, though, "don't split the party" is such a basic notion I guess that we have nobody to blame but ourselves.
As I said, there's a lot to think about, but the main thing I want to get down right away is a little bit about the last game that I played at OGC, "Incident At Owl Lake," run by one Andre Kruppa (check out his website at gamesoapbox.com. This was a horror game using Fudge. It had many virtues; one of them was - I don't want to use the loaded term 'immersion', so instead I'll say - engagement. The game was extremely engaging from start to finish. It created an atmosphere like no game I've ever seen. Andre used any number of tricks to achieve that effect, but I want to mention the two big ones: presentation and... let's say refrain.
- Presentaion
This game had more technical effects than some plays I've been in. Unlike every other game at OGC, we played in a smaller private room instead of the hotel's ballroom. There were no other games going on, no random bystanders strolling by and looking over our shoulders, no random chatter floating through the room. In fact, the lights in the room were off; we saw by the theatrical lighting Andre had installed, or, when that was off in dark scenes, by the flashlights he'd laid out on the table.Yes, the lights would go out when our characters were in the dark; they'd take on a reddish glow when we were by the campfire; at other times, they'd turn a bright white or a cool green, as appropriate to our increasingly freaky situation. One of the simplest and coolest things Andre did with the lights was a quick bright flash whenever a gun was fired.
There was also sound, beginning with some period music as Andre explained the rules and we chose characters. The whole game was punctuated by great ambient music cued up by Andre on the fly as appropriate to the scene. I swear, some sequences he must have timed out, because he would get to the big climax of a piece of description just at the moment the music swelled...
The theatrical lighting and the elaborate, well-chosen sound were the biggest items under presentation, but there were other factors as well; every player was equipped with a number of play aids including writing paper, setting information and laminated cards for tracking health and to help adjudicate rolls. There was water and candy available on the table. Even the use of the quick, intuitive Fudge system enhanced the presentation; from the system on up, everything was laid out for us so that we could focus on the game and Andre's great effects, instead of worrying about taking notes or going foraging for water.
Andre himself completed the presentation, in a lot of little ways. He was always serious and attentive and always, always kept the game moving. There were a lot of little touches that added to the feeling in the air, but perhaps the most important was his request at the beginning that we stay in character and refrain from asides. That little request was unique at OGC for me and it made all the difference.
- RepetitionThis game made use of long blocks of prepared text. This made me wary at first; when it became clear that certain blocks were going to be repeated over and over again - they related to characters' internal experience upon seeing something unnatural for the first time - I got warier. I guess I've come to associate prepared text with laziness, with wooden readings of bland committee-written description. I didn't need to worry in this case; the writing was evocative, the reading smooth and spirited. The repetition - even of quite lengthy bits of text - far from getting boring actually became one of my favorite bits, a defining aspect of the game. Part of the point was the eerie similarity between each characters' experience and memory. By chance, my character was the last one to experience anything that triggered one of these blocks of text, and when the time came I was excited for it, even thought I'd heard the same long description read out twice before. It felt like an initiation, and I wanted badly to become an initiate. Andre read the text for my character with the same energy as he'd read it before - he even threw in a quick modification that applied specifically to my character.
The repetition, combined with the excellent presentation, gave the whole game a solemn, significant, ritual feel that I found engrossing.
"Focused" is a word you could apply to the whole game, which was another part of why it was so successful. I'm a huge fan of in-character cross-talk: while the gamemaster is running a scene with Cyrus Vance interrogating a prisoner, Naomi and Kale's players are quietly role-playing a scene together - the conversation Naomi and Kale are having outside the interrogation room, say. It's a way to stay engaged while your character isn't acting and too explore the characters more, always a priority in my group. In "Incident," that didn't happen. I tried once, and the player I was trying to engage politely shushed me with a nod to Andre. He was quite right; this game followed the GM's attention like a film camera. Whatever Andre was paying attention to was what took over our shared imaginative space, completely. That meant there were long stretches where I had nothing to do, which is never ideal for me as a player, but on the whole I didn't mind, because what was going on elsewhere was always fascinating. I'm not sure exactly why it worked so well. I guess it was probably part of maintaining the "ritual" feel; community is part of ritual, I suppose, so being creatively together at all times may be important. It also kept Andre in tight control of the game world, which was a necessary aspect of the experience, for sure.
One bit of oddness was that there were a few in-character reasons to keep the party split up, but no reward for doing so. Nothing very interesting ever happened to people who stayed behind. The most problematic section of the game for me came when we (foolishly, of course) split the party in the second half. Three of us invaded a mysterious, dangerous place while the rest of us waited outside. The male characters were trying to protect the female characters, from the horrors of this place (very in character, as the game took place in the 50s), and my doctor wanted to stay with an afflicted patient. This left those of us left behind with nothing to do while a lengthy combat ensued - made especially painful because it quickly became clear we should never have split the party, and the lads were being taken apart, but we had no in-character knowledge of it. Admittedly, though, "don't split the party" is such a basic notion I guess that we have nobody to blame but ourselves.
Thursday, August 11, 2011
Do: Pilgrims of the Flying Temple part 2: Pilgrims Get In Trouble!
This is a follow-up to my previous post on Do: Pilgrims of the Flying Temple. Even though I'm discussing the ways it didn't work for my group here, I still love the game and recommend you check it out!
So, like I said, I love Do: Pilgrims of the Flying Temple, But, when my group tried it out the response from the other players - there's no GM in Do, so I can't say "my" players - was only so-so. They didn't dislike it, they seemed to have some fun, but I could tell they weren't 100% invested as we were playing, and at the end of the first letter when I hopefully asked if they wanted to do another there was an awkward silence, and then we watched a movie. So, beautiful game, I had fun... what went wrong here?
First is expectations. I spent some time describing this game to everyone before we played, but I don't think I got across quite what it is, and it's very different from what we've done in the past. One player later said to me that she thought the reason it wasn't a huge success was that everyone expected a role-playing game, and Do isn't a role-playing game. Now, I don't know what Daniel Solis would say about that. In the introduction, Do calls itself a "storytelling game," which I think is an answer to the question that means something in the context of GNS theory, but doesn't mean anything to me. I'm inclined to think that it is a role-playing game, but didn't meet everyone's expectations for what playing a role-playing game is like.
In the past we've played Vampire and Lady Blackbird, games with very fluid procedures. Everyone at the table can speak at any time, or have their character attempt an action at any time. In practice there's a bottleneck in the form of a GM, so procedures are created on the fly: "Ok, so Little gets the better of the intruder in the club. Now, what is Cal doing outside?" is basically the same as saying "Little's turn is over, now it's Cal's turn," but it's a procedure created specially for the current situation and discarded as soon as, say, Cal joins Little in the club. In Vampire, things get more concrete during combat, but we're honestly fudging even that quite a bit by using one contested roll to model combat, etc. Do has very strict procedures - it's my turn now, and not yours, and because it's my turn I do specific things and you do other things.
This strict procedure does two things: it lets you play without having a GM to play traffic cop (about which more below) and it creates a certain kind of narrative output. When we played Lady Blackbird, narrative output for a scene was anything I said to the players and anything they said to me, and also the two in-character side conversation other players were having, and the one-liner a character threw in "in passing" as the player went to get another beer from the fridge. The output was a lot more dense than, say, a film, where one thing is happening at any given moment. In Do, narrative output is one, maybe two sentences per turn, and each sentence has one of two topics: how the pilgrims helps or how the pilgrim gets in trouble. Output is very spare, much less dense than film, like calligraphy or a Dr. Seuss book (I hope these analogies to other mediums are making some kind of sense). I think I see a lot of good reasons for the enforcement of that low output: besides being an interesting gameplay constraint on its own, it's thematically consistent with Do's inspirations (i.e. Buddhism, or children's literature). But I think my players, used to going crazy and fleshing out a world in a great many words, may have felt stifled.
The other big thing, of course, is the lack of a GM. I know for a fact that a hell of a lot of ink has been spilled on the role of a GM in play, and I don't necessarily want to get into that now. Right or wrong, though, I'm not necessarily a minimalist GM. "Lazy," or whatever, perhaps, but not minimalist. The way play has organically worked itself out in for my group could be termed as "player roles, GM describes." Naomi's player says she's trying to kill Lord Mandrake, Snargle's player says he's trying to stop her, they both roll and then I (the GM) say what happens based on who rolls better. I know that's considered strange in some circles, and I know in other circles it would beconsidered strange that there's an alternative to that, so whatever. My point is, I take a lot of responsibility for authorial control, for saying, "Here's what you should be imagining" at the table. Then, for Do, I turned around and said, "Do players are ruled by their play procedures, not their game masters! Be free and play!" And I've heard from at least one player that they didn't like that, that they wanted to be a persona in the world and definitely NOT take responsibility for the world at large.1
So, to wrap it up: Do is awesome. Maybe it's not for every group, and maybe it's not for my group, because maybe some groups (my group) need things like fluid play procedure and a strong GM. People are different from each other sometimes? Wow! Don't say you didn't learn anything today.
In any event, I haven't decided decisively that Do won't work for my group; nobody wanted to press on to a second letter the first night we played, but everyone was game for trying again with a better understanding of what they were getting into. If we do, I'll let you know.
1. I take this as vindication of my identification of my players as mostly simulationists. Except for th one narrativist. Any guesses who unexpectedly shot a major NPC in our Lady Blackbird game?
So, like I said, I love Do: Pilgrims of the Flying Temple, But, when my group tried it out the response from the other players - there's no GM in Do, so I can't say "my" players - was only so-so. They didn't dislike it, they seemed to have some fun, but I could tell they weren't 100% invested as we were playing, and at the end of the first letter when I hopefully asked if they wanted to do another there was an awkward silence, and then we watched a movie. So, beautiful game, I had fun... what went wrong here?
First is expectations. I spent some time describing this game to everyone before we played, but I don't think I got across quite what it is, and it's very different from what we've done in the past. One player later said to me that she thought the reason it wasn't a huge success was that everyone expected a role-playing game, and Do isn't a role-playing game. Now, I don't know what Daniel Solis would say about that. In the introduction, Do calls itself a "storytelling game," which I think is an answer to the question that means something in the context of GNS theory, but doesn't mean anything to me. I'm inclined to think that it is a role-playing game, but didn't meet everyone's expectations for what playing a role-playing game is like.
In the past we've played Vampire and Lady Blackbird, games with very fluid procedures. Everyone at the table can speak at any time, or have their character attempt an action at any time. In practice there's a bottleneck in the form of a GM, so procedures are created on the fly: "Ok, so Little gets the better of the intruder in the club. Now, what is Cal doing outside?" is basically the same as saying "Little's turn is over, now it's Cal's turn," but it's a procedure created specially for the current situation and discarded as soon as, say, Cal joins Little in the club. In Vampire, things get more concrete during combat, but we're honestly fudging even that quite a bit by using one contested roll to model combat, etc. Do has very strict procedures - it's my turn now, and not yours, and because it's my turn I do specific things and you do other things.
This strict procedure does two things: it lets you play without having a GM to play traffic cop (about which more below) and it creates a certain kind of narrative output. When we played Lady Blackbird, narrative output for a scene was anything I said to the players and anything they said to me, and also the two in-character side conversation other players were having, and the one-liner a character threw in "in passing" as the player went to get another beer from the fridge. The output was a lot more dense than, say, a film, where one thing is happening at any given moment. In Do, narrative output is one, maybe two sentences per turn, and each sentence has one of two topics: how the pilgrims helps or how the pilgrim gets in trouble. Output is very spare, much less dense than film, like calligraphy or a Dr. Seuss book (I hope these analogies to other mediums are making some kind of sense). I think I see a lot of good reasons for the enforcement of that low output: besides being an interesting gameplay constraint on its own, it's thematically consistent with Do's inspirations (i.e. Buddhism, or children's literature). But I think my players, used to going crazy and fleshing out a world in a great many words, may have felt stifled.
The other big thing, of course, is the lack of a GM. I know for a fact that a hell of a lot of ink has been spilled on the role of a GM in play, and I don't necessarily want to get into that now. Right or wrong, though, I'm not necessarily a minimalist GM. "Lazy," or whatever, perhaps, but not minimalist. The way play has organically worked itself out in for my group could be termed as "player roles, GM describes." Naomi's player says she's trying to kill Lord Mandrake, Snargle's player says he's trying to stop her, they both roll and then I (the GM) say what happens based on who rolls better. I know that's considered strange in some circles, and I know in other circles it would beconsidered strange that there's an alternative to that, so whatever. My point is, I take a lot of responsibility for authorial control, for saying, "Here's what you should be imagining" at the table. Then, for Do, I turned around and said, "Do players are ruled by their play procedures, not their game masters! Be free and play!" And I've heard from at least one player that they didn't like that, that they wanted to be a persona in the world and definitely NOT take responsibility for the world at large.1
So, to wrap it up: Do is awesome. Maybe it's not for every group, and maybe it's not for my group, because maybe some groups (my group) need things like fluid play procedure and a strong GM. People are different from each other sometimes? Wow! Don't say you didn't learn anything today.
In any event, I haven't decided decisively that Do won't work for my group; nobody wanted to press on to a second letter the first night we played, but everyone was game for trying again with a better understanding of what they were getting into. If we do, I'll let you know.
1. I take this as vindication of my identification of my players as mostly simulationists. Except for th one narrativist. Any guesses who unexpectedly shot a major NPC in our Lady Blackbird game?
Friday, August 5, 2011
Do: Pilgrims of the Flying Temple
I've decided to split this post about Do: Pilgrims of the Flying Temple in two, because it's getting too damn long. First (here) I'm going to tell you a little about the game, why I was drawn to it and why I like it and what happened in our first session. Then in another post, I'm going to get into some details about why I'm not sure it's the right game for my group.That's going to get kind of theoretical. I may get in-depth about "procedure."
So scheduling for our ongoing Vampire game has proven utterly impossible this last month for my group. Between vacations, work, and other activities (one of us is in a play, another is in a barbershop chorus, etc., etc., etc.) there's literally not a single day all of us are free through - I think we've determined at this point - August 14 (and we haven't met since something like the first week of July). I have a wandering eye where games are concerned, however, and it tells me that this is not a problem but an opportunity, a chance to meet in the interim with whoever is available and try out any game or setting that meets my fancy. Last Friday, that meant Do: Pilgrims of the Flying Temple.
I'm a huge fan of Avatar: The Last Airbender (the cartoon, not the movie, as devotees now must constantly point out), so Do - a storytelling game about superpowered adolescent adventurers helping people and getting in trouble in a whacky multiverse where anything is possible - was an enticing option. The rulebook itself is a thing of beauty, and I say this as somebody who owns it as a .pdf. The art, the layout and design, the in-universe letters that provide Pilgrims with their adventures, these are lovely things that make you want to play the game. The rules have a certain beauty to them as well, if that makes any sense. Two of them are "Pilgrims Fly Away" and "Pilgrims Grow Up," and these (with a little more explanation) are fundamental to how the game is played! I mean, I ask you.
The basic mechanic is this. Each pilgrim has a way that they help and a way that they get in trouble. My pilgrim, Yellow Clock, helped by being organized and got in trouble by being too cheerful. Each individual "session" of Do is based on a letter the pilgrims have which is a request for help from somebody in the wide, whacky multiverse they live in. The letter we attempted, one of the silliest and simplest, was about a tiny world that had been swallowed by a whale. The letter explains the situation in narrative terms, and also provides goal words for the pilgrims.
The players take turns. When it's my turn, I am the storyteller, and I can write a sentence about how my pilgrim helps someone (anyone - myself, another pilgrim, the letter-writer, someone else on the letter-writer's world, whomever, as long as my action makes the situation better). However, the way that I help has to be my way of helping. Then the other players, who on my turn are called the troublemakers, write a sentence about how my pilgrim gets into trouble, based on the way that I've said my pilgrim gets in trouble. In each sentence - mine and the troublemakers - you can use a goal word from the letter. At the end of the game, if you've used all the goal words, you get a "parade ending" - the problem is solved and the pilgrims go merrily off on to the next world. Otherwise, they get a "pitchforks ending" and are chased off in ignominy.
So example time: Yellow Clock, on my first turn, helped Melanie, the little girl living on the little planet inside the whale, get her house ready for the journey out of the whale. But, the troublemakers decided, my cheerful presence put her in such a good mood that she went off to play, and I ended up following her around picking up after her. Silly, yes, but sweet, I think, which is what I was looking for from Do. Some of the letters are a good deal less silly, though some whackiness will probably come in to any letter as the pilgrims stretch to make their ways of helping relevant to different situations.
Now there's a good deal more to the game: it's randomized so that not every turn is the same - sometimes you help but don't get in trouble, sometimes you get in trouble but can't help. And once you're in trouble, you can only help yourself, and you can't use a goal word when you help. And so on, there are a few wrinkles, and some fun stuff to do at the end of every letter as well. But that's the core: write a sentence to help, write a sentence about trouble, use goal words.The neat thing that takes a moment to realize is that the goal word mechanic actually enforces narrative structure. In my first turn, there's no reason I can't write a sentence that solves the letter-writer's main problem and end it, "...and they all lived happily ever after." But now everybody's going to have to write some weird, awkward sentences to hit all of the other goal words.
So, all of that I love. I find it delightful. And I loved it in play, as well. Like I said, silly, but sweet, which is just what I wanted.
I'll close with a brief "transcript" of our game.
First, our characters were:
So scheduling for our ongoing Vampire game has proven utterly impossible this last month for my group. Between vacations, work, and other activities (one of us is in a play, another is in a barbershop chorus, etc., etc., etc.) there's literally not a single day all of us are free through - I think we've determined at this point - August 14 (and we haven't met since something like the first week of July). I have a wandering eye where games are concerned, however, and it tells me that this is not a problem but an opportunity, a chance to meet in the interim with whoever is available and try out any game or setting that meets my fancy. Last Friday, that meant Do: Pilgrims of the Flying Temple.
I'm a huge fan of Avatar: The Last Airbender (the cartoon, not the movie, as devotees now must constantly point out), so Do - a storytelling game about superpowered adolescent adventurers helping people and getting in trouble in a whacky multiverse where anything is possible - was an enticing option. The rulebook itself is a thing of beauty, and I say this as somebody who owns it as a .pdf. The art, the layout and design, the in-universe letters that provide Pilgrims with their adventures, these are lovely things that make you want to play the game. The rules have a certain beauty to them as well, if that makes any sense. Two of them are "Pilgrims Fly Away" and "Pilgrims Grow Up," and these (with a little more explanation) are fundamental to how the game is played! I mean, I ask you.
The basic mechanic is this. Each pilgrim has a way that they help and a way that they get in trouble. My pilgrim, Yellow Clock, helped by being organized and got in trouble by being too cheerful. Each individual "session" of Do is based on a letter the pilgrims have which is a request for help from somebody in the wide, whacky multiverse they live in. The letter we attempted, one of the silliest and simplest, was about a tiny world that had been swallowed by a whale. The letter explains the situation in narrative terms, and also provides goal words for the pilgrims.
The players take turns. When it's my turn, I am the storyteller, and I can write a sentence about how my pilgrim helps someone (anyone - myself, another pilgrim, the letter-writer, someone else on the letter-writer's world, whomever, as long as my action makes the situation better). However, the way that I help has to be my way of helping. Then the other players, who on my turn are called the troublemakers, write a sentence about how my pilgrim gets into trouble, based on the way that I've said my pilgrim gets in trouble. In each sentence - mine and the troublemakers - you can use a goal word from the letter. At the end of the game, if you've used all the goal words, you get a "parade ending" - the problem is solved and the pilgrims go merrily off on to the next world. Otherwise, they get a "pitchforks ending" and are chased off in ignominy.
So example time: Yellow Clock, on my first turn, helped Melanie, the little girl living on the little planet inside the whale, get her house ready for the journey out of the whale. But, the troublemakers decided, my cheerful presence put her in such a good mood that she went off to play, and I ended up following her around picking up after her. Silly, yes, but sweet, I think, which is what I was looking for from Do. Some of the letters are a good deal less silly, though some whackiness will probably come in to any letter as the pilgrims stretch to make their ways of helping relevant to different situations.
Now there's a good deal more to the game: it's randomized so that not every turn is the same - sometimes you help but don't get in trouble, sometimes you get in trouble but can't help. And once you're in trouble, you can only help yourself, and you can't use a goal word when you help. And so on, there are a few wrinkles, and some fun stuff to do at the end of every letter as well. But that's the core: write a sentence to help, write a sentence about trouble, use goal words.The neat thing that takes a moment to realize is that the goal word mechanic actually enforces narrative structure. In my first turn, there's no reason I can't write a sentence that solves the letter-writer's main problem and end it, "...and they all lived happily ever after." But now everybody's going to have to write some weird, awkward sentences to hit all of the other goal words.
So, all of that I love. I find it delightful. And I loved it in play, as well. Like I said, silly, but sweet, which is just what I wanted.
I'll close with a brief "transcript" of our game.
First, our characters were:
- Pilgrim Burly Bridge
- Pilgrim Yellow Clock
- Pilgrim Slouching Egg
- Pilgrim Boisterous Well
- Pilgrim Whistling Wolf
- Pilgrim Burly Bridge convinces the whale to open his mouth by explaining that it has mistakenly swallowed a small planet.
- The whale is so alarmed by Burly Bridge's forceful explanation that it throws its mouth open and swallows him!
- Pilgrim Yellow Clock flies through the whale's blowhole to help Melanie get organized for leaving the whale
- But he puts her in such a good mood that Melanie can't focus, and he winds up following her around cleaning up after her.
- Pilgrim Slouching Egg feeds cookies to the whale - but to a whale, that's a dire insult!
- Pilgrim Slouch Egg is so interested to learn of whale society that she placates the whale with her rapt attention and concerned questions.
- Pilgrim Boisterous Well builds a pulley system to fix everyone's problems, but the reciprocal force pushes him into the trees and he gets tangled up.
- Pilgrim Boisterous Well sees Melanie's cat in the trees and gives him a treat, and the cat repays him by clawing at the ropes and freeing him.
- Pilgrims Whistling Wolf dons snorkeling gear and uses echo echo location to find and rescue Burly Bridge from the digestive tract of the whale.
- Pilgrim Whistling Wolf notices someone else the whale ate - another Pilgrim in the digestive tract who needs saving!
- Pilgrim Burly Bridge harnesses the cat to the planet and convinces it to pull the planet out of the whale.
- Pilgrim Yellow Clock develops an incredible child-care itinerary that keeps Melanie happily occupied.
- But Yellow Clock makes the whale so happy that it begins to sing, shaking the house so much that Yellow Clock must dive into a door frame to steady himself and the house.
- Pilgrim Slouching Egg's conversation with the whale ends with the whale deciding to return to the whale homeland (plus she learns all about whales and gets all Melanie's cookies!).
- Pilgrim Boisterous Well spends the remainder of his time in the whale playing with Melanie's cat, and learning the value of small things like string.
- Pilgrim Whistling Wolf finds herself extremely lost in the digestive tract of the whale with the other pilgrim, where she stays until the whale hiccups them up - but she happily fell in love with her new companion and now boyfriend under the stars of the whale's belly.
- Pilgrim Burly Bridge spent a few days impressing Melanie with his feats of strength, eventually leading him to knock down a wall in her house which he had to repair.
- Pilgrim Yellow Clock made a complete schedule of educational, healthy, and fun activities for Melanie, so she'll have plenty to do once the Pilgrim's leave.
Friday, July 22, 2011
Lady Blackbird, or, How I learned to stop worrying and love my players
There are a lot of things I could say about my current group’s inaugural game, Lady Blackbird. The way the mechanics organically created tight bonds between the characters in play, the way the players could talk among themselves for a half hour at a time without needing my input, I could go on and on. But I want to zoom way in on a major moment for me as the GM, a moment that that created the plot of the game without my prior thought or input.
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| The Owl, by John Harper |
Lady Blackbird is a game by John Harper, with a simple concept. There are five pre-generated characters. The action begins in media res: the eponymous Lady Blackbird has run away from her stately home in the Empire and hired a crew of smugglers and their skyship, the Owl, to take her to her great love, the pirate Uriah Flint. The Owl has been captured by an imperial cruiser, and all the players are in the brig. It’s only a matter of time before the imperials realize who they’ve captured, send Lady Blackbird home, and send the smugglers to trial. From there, with no further knowledge of the setting or the figures involved (like Uriah Flint, for instance), you just go. The players make up details about their characters as they come up, you make up details about the people they meet and the situations they get into, and everyone has fun. It’s a great play experience, suitable for a quick one-shot or a longer campaign, and it requires practically no preparation on anybody’s part whatsoever. You should check it out now, seriously.
Anyway, we were way past the brig of the imperial cruiser and had created, together, a complicated political thriller of a plot with a dash of romance on the side. The private army of the imperial House Twilight had infiltrated the lawless region of the Sky known as the Remnant in order to eliminate Uriah Flint. "Why" was a little mysterious until the characters discovered that Uriah had partnered with a rogue member of the Imperial house, Princess Sophie.
Princess Sophie was an idea I had after the characters started to make some real progress towards finding Flint. Obviously they couldn’t just meet Uriah, shake hands, drop off Lady Blackbird for a happy ending, and fly away into the sunset, so I introduced the idea that Uriah had another woman with him. Actually, it developed over time that he had an Imperial princess with him and was holding off an Imperial fleet to keep her. The imperials seemed to regard her as a prisoner, but all signs pointed to her being a willing guest… leading our Lady Blackbird to suspect the worst. But when the party finally met Sophie, she wasn’t a passionate lover or a heroic figure . She was actually a bit unimpressive, a bit of a milksop.
It turned out that she was an idealist: she wanted the end of imperial expansion and war and piracy. Uriah Flint wanted to unite all the disparate factions opposed to the Empire (and each other) into one power bloc, and he’d approached her as a partner to lend him legitimacy when he made the transition from “pirate” to “civic official,” and to try to make a lasting peace with the Empire possible. She was playing out of her league and she knew it - she didn't really have a good answer to 'But how do you know Uriah's not just using you?' - but she was committed to making the Sky a better place and this was the path she’d chosen to do it.
If you can’t tell, I was very fond of Sophie. I put a lot of me into her; I loved that she lacked the heroic skill and killer instincts of most figures in our game, PC and NPC, but was still trying her best to change the world. I was proud of the dilemma she posed for our Lady Blackbird, who now had to deal with a sort-of rival rival with good intentions and no way of defending herself. Then, one of the characters snuck out of her room, snuck and fast-talked through Uriah’s base, and shot Sophie through the heart.
Yeesh. That caught me off-guard. I didn’t know what to do. Sophie was like, my favorite character in the game, whom I had assumed would be critical in the endgame. I didn’t have any firm plans about her fate, but I figured her presence would shape all of the conflicts from here on out. She was an important figure in the world – a war was literally being fought because her. My mind started racing about how I could save her. Uriah rushes in at the last minute? Unexpected imperial attack? Bullet proof vest?
But I decided in the moment that that would be disrespecting the spirit of the game, and Sophie fell down dead and that was it. Best call I could have made, because it was that murder that shaped every conflict for the rest of the game. The character had made some effort to cover her tracks, but she’d made slips, and the other characters figured out what had happened, as did Uriah Flint. The imperials figured it out too, and when the characters realized that the imperials had figured it out, that opened the door for a desperate Trojan Horse operation on the imperial flagship and a confrontation with Sophie’s sister…
So the point of this story, and the biggest lesson I learned from Lady Blackbird, is not to plan. Have a starting point ready, and from there ride the wave as your players start bouncing around and making choices. This is not some grand new discovery that I expect to set the world on fire. It's actually a very common RPG style, and whole games have been built around it - Lady Blackbird itself, for one, or Apocalypse World. It's very new to me, though. I grew up on White Wolf products from the old World of Darkness that advocated tightly scripted plots. I used to make those, when I first started gaming in high school, and I always found them frustrating, and I think they were frustrating for my players too, because there was always this feeling we were struggling to get through something and it wasn't going very well. Most games fizzled out before their time just because I couldn't plan them out up until the end.
I think that this new style - "riding the wave," making things up, reacting to player input, whatever you want to call it - is the right fit for me. Now I'm trying to practice it as much as possible - starting with my current Vampire game.
Wednesday, July 20, 2011
Vampire Music
There's a certain set of songs that have become a part of how I visualize and understand the world of my Vampire game. Having gotten to know the players a little, I started thinking of themes for them. I came up with the below list and then, like you do, found the tracks on youtube and sent my players the playlist, and I thought I'd share that here as well.
Quick liner notes:
For instance, I'd heard this song by Butterfly Boucher years ago, and when something reminded me of it I made a Pandora station off of it. That led me to this band called Magneta Lane, who are a fair amount louder and fiercer than Butterfly Boucher. Magneta Lane had exactly the sort of feel I wanted for the mythical Vampire: the Requiem game that was always in my head: rocking but emotional, loud but melodic. So I built a whole Pandora station off of them and honed it over the course of about six months. It provided me with most of the tracks above. Check it out.
Quick liner notes:
- Kiss Kiss Kiss - Yeah Yeah Yeahs (Cal + Viv's theme)
- Can You See The Light - Butterfly Boucher (Beckett's Theme, disregard weird AMV)
- Little Mouth - Sleater-Kinney (Little's Theme) (Seriously, that's the name of the song)
- Adventure - Be Your Own Pet (Brain's Theme)
- Rock 'N' Roll - The Sounds (Viv's Theme)
- Date With the Night - Yeah Yeah Yeahs (Cal's Theme)
- Perhaps Vampires Is A Bit Strong, But... - Arctic Monkeys (Credits Theme)
For instance, I'd heard this song by Butterfly Boucher years ago, and when something reminded me of it I made a Pandora station off of it. That led me to this band called Magneta Lane, who are a fair amount louder and fiercer than Butterfly Boucher. Magneta Lane had exactly the sort of feel I wanted for the mythical Vampire: the Requiem game that was always in my head: rocking but emotional, loud but melodic. So I built a whole Pandora station off of them and honed it over the course of about six months. It provided me with most of the tracks above. Check it out.
Sunday, July 17, 2011
Vampire session!
We played our second session – first “mainstage” session – of Vampire: the Requiem last night. On the whole it was definitely a big success, and everybody had a lot of fun. I still think I made some mistakes that I can improve upon, but the overall objective of having a good night with my friends was met.
Long long accounting of what went down below. My big notes for myself are to remember to use the atrocity rules to full effect - I was good about polling the group for if they thought new atrocity dice were warranted, but I don't think I ever asked anyone to throw in atrocity dice in place of their regular dice pool. Also, most of the combat that took place was not important enough to merit a full blow-by-blow, so I think I'll read up on the simplified combat rules in Danse Macabre for a more "indy feel.".
A quick note about Danse Macabre: it's probably my favorite "crunchy" Vampire supplement ever. I love the clanbooks as an experience, but Danse Macabre has done the most to change the way I approach Vampire. The idea of tiers inspired my current game in certain ways; even though the players are at the "default" antediluvian tier, the tiers section of Danse unpacked some of the basic concepts of Vampire for me in a very useful way. I also love the atrocity system as a replacement for humanity and the hierarchy of sins, and the simplified combat rules saved my bacon when one ultimately unimportant scuffle threatened to drag out indefinitely with most of the players just looking on.
Danse Macabre is nominated for an Enny at the moment; I think I may just navigate right over and vote for it, in fact.
Long actual play follows:
Long long accounting of what went down below. My big notes for myself are to remember to use the atrocity rules to full effect - I was good about polling the group for if they thought new atrocity dice were warranted, but I don't think I ever asked anyone to throw in atrocity dice in place of their regular dice pool. Also, most of the combat that took place was not important enough to merit a full blow-by-blow, so I think I'll read up on the simplified combat rules in Danse Macabre for a more "indy feel.".
A quick note about Danse Macabre: it's probably my favorite "crunchy" Vampire supplement ever. I love the clanbooks as an experience, but Danse Macabre has done the most to change the way I approach Vampire. The idea of tiers inspired my current game in certain ways; even though the players are at the "default" antediluvian tier, the tiers section of Danse unpacked some of the basic concepts of Vampire for me in a very useful way. I also love the atrocity system as a replacement for humanity and the hierarchy of sins, and the simplified combat rules saved my bacon when one ultimately unimportant scuffle threatened to drag out indefinitely with most of the players just looking on.
Danse Macabre is nominated for an Enny at the moment; I think I may just navigate right over and vote for it, in fact.
Long actual play follows:
Friday, July 8, 2011
Vampire: the Requiem game - first session
So I effing love effing Vampire: the Requiem to pieces. Someday I'll have to get into why - which will involve figuring out why, probably - but for now I'll just tell you I've loved this game for a long time and never really played it. I'm writing about Vampire now because I'm playing it again. We had our first session two weekends ago! We're playing again tomorrow night!
I'm playing with what I guess you could call my role-playing group. They're all close friends with varying degrees and types of role-playing experience. I had wanted to role-play and to run a game for a while, and through various circumstances it emerged they each had an interest in playing one. Our first game was an amazing run of Lady Blackbird. I will always be grateful to John Harper, designer of Lady Blackbird, for that wonderful experience, so thank you, John. I'll talk about it sometime.
Everyone was so kind to humor my desire to run a Requiem game as well. Two things about Lady Blackbird: it uses pregenerated character, and setting creation is a part of the game (as the politically-correct goblin Snargle or the gigantic gems known as heartstones needed to navigate the Remnant from our game attest). So, playing Requiem provided two challenges for my players they hadn't needed to tackle before: creating their own characters and dealing with an existing setting.
Read more after the break.
I'm playing with what I guess you could call my role-playing group. They're all close friends with varying degrees and types of role-playing experience. I had wanted to role-play and to run a game for a while, and through various circumstances it emerged they each had an interest in playing one. Our first game was an amazing run of Lady Blackbird. I will always be grateful to John Harper, designer of Lady Blackbird, for that wonderful experience, so thank you, John. I'll talk about it sometime.
Everyone was so kind to humor my desire to run a Requiem game as well. Two things about Lady Blackbird: it uses pregenerated character, and setting creation is a part of the game (as the politically-correct goblin Snargle or the gigantic gems known as heartstones needed to navigate the Remnant from our game attest). So, playing Requiem provided two challenges for my players they hadn't needed to tackle before: creating their own characters and dealing with an existing setting.
Read more after the break.
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