Vampire Campaign Post-Mortem (Part One)
Not sure I have a specific format for these campaign post-mortems, so I'll try to develop that as I go along here. I should note that this is one of those campaigns where my notebook got destroyed in the house fire, so I'm going mostly from memory.
A few years ago I was asked to run a Vampire game. I'd just come off of running a short campaign fantasy campaign which had gone pretty well-- it had been fairly anime in that it was over-the-top and I'd used a system where I asked players at the end of each session what they wanted for their character and then wrote up new abilities or powers and gave those to them. In any case, one player told me that he'd enjoyed playing in a White Wolf Vampire campaign that hadn't lasted all that long. When he described the campaign to me, it sounded like your typical Vampire/Super Powers game-- where the monsters are cool because they can do these neat things. I questioned the player about it and expressed my reservations about that approach. We talked and he said he'd really like to play in another Vampire game, especially because he liked the background and liked the idea of more interactions and social stuff. I warned him a few times that it wouldn't be like his other game, but he persisted and eventually I agreed.
Now I should go back a little further to talk about my experience with Vampire as a genre that had evolved. I worked in the game store during the time when Vampire really first arrived on the scene. I saw it evolve from a basic Ann Rice adaptation into something more gamey and then into something more literate. I watch the arrival of LARPs and the eventually explosion of the “World of Darkness” metaverse, which included Werewolf and Mage. Mage I had been excited about but was initially disappointed by the execution. I didn't play in these games but I did read a great deal of the material.
Then I finally played in a Vampire game. It started as kind of BS'ing session with a GM we'll call HJ. He wanted to work through some of the themes and consequences of someone becoming a Vampire. He had me run a session where I ran myself in that situation. I normally don't like that approach to games-- in that running 'yourself' brings a lot of potential baggage and connections. In any case, he right away made apparent that doing any “Vampire-y” stuff had consequences: people's lives shattered, cleaning up the bodies, the uncertainty of life, at that stuff. I got it pretty much right away-- and we played a few more sessions with just my character. Then he decided to expand the game and bring in some other players, again playing as themselves, into things. And that's where it got really strange. I expected the others to see and be shaped by the consequences of their actions-- but they never did. I was stuck in the unenviable position of being, to my mind, the only sane person, while the others still ran their characters like they were playing in a game. That produced some of the strangest and yet most compelling sessions I've ever played in-- as I tried to extricate myself from the group and they kept pulling me back into their sociopathy. The game kind of abruptly ended and on the whole it had more problems than successes, but it really did clarify some of those issues for me.
Anyway, with that in mind, I came into the campaign with the core concept that I wanted to undercut the idea of Vampires as superbeings without a real sense of consequence to them. I had run a World of Darkness campaign that was more oriented towards supernatural super-powers before. Here I wanted to reverse that. I knew it would be tricky-- and I knew that while I wanted to undercut expectations, I also needed to provide a compelling and interesting story. If I didn't it could simply come off as a big FU to the players-- essentially mocking their own desires for the game. Early on I tried to recognize that potential issue and deal with it.
Coming into the campaign I had a number of concepts I wanted to work with:
-I had picked up some of the Victorian-Era Vampire game material, as possible source stuff for the Steampunk campaign. I hadn't used much of it for that, but I liked some of the things. I decided that there would be a portion of the game, although using a modern setting, which would be set in that period. The group would flip back there (ala Dark Shadows) and would be uncertain about what was happening. At first they might believe it to be actual time travel, but eventually I would have another reveal.
-That reveal would be based around another figure-- a sleeping very old Vampire. In the classic Vampire setting, they have these Antediluvians who are incredibly old and powerful but slumber. For reasons I'll get into in a minute, most of these would be dead. My Vampire would just be really, really old. He'd sought redemption, but hadn't found it. Now he slept and went over and over again in his mind the events of the past which had led him here. The player's experience in the Victorian era would actually be them seeing those re-creations. Eventually the players would see the whole story there reset and would have to figure out a way to change things.
-One of the McGuffins would then be that the various factions in the city would be seeking out the power of this slumbering old one, in order to make it their own. That plot, and the slumbering vampire's potential redemption, would be crucial to the story arc.
-I knew I wanted to break with the traditional Vampire structures which implied a wide network of Vampire families, a large population scattered across the globe and a good deal of baggage. Instead I wanted the situation to feel strange and threatened. In the previous World of Darkness campaign I had run, I ended the game with essentially an Apocalypse for supernaturals as the world changed. Essentially a moving effect crossed the globe destroying all of them-- which some saw as a viral effect and others as a moving shockwave of reality rewriting. I decided to base this game in that world after that event. That gave me a set of previous stories to build upon-- not that any of the players had played in that game, but it would serve as a history which could be explored. It also meant that something like 95% of the typical supernatural creatures in the world had been destroyed. Those few remaining had gathered in a few key cities, like the campaign city of Chicago/Hub City, and had lost contact with any real groups outside of that location.
-I also wanted to establish a strongly and explicitly split power structure within the campaign setting. Therefore there would be essentially two Vampiric “Princes”, each with their own set of allies and ares they controlled. My main intent was to avoid the problem of a singular authority in a role-playing game. Often when there's a single figure or force in charge, players instinctively set themselves in opposition to that force. The logic often simply reduces to “Authority=Bad”. I wanted to make that decision more complicated. If they chose to deny one person in charge, would they then be allying with the stated opposite? Or would they explore both sides and potentially find a way to use one against the other. I've used this trope-- in a very different fashion-- in the Changeling game as well.
-I also had a good deal of additional World of Darkness material that I liked. A chunk of that revolved around the various Spirit realms-- both from Wraith and Orpheus. The former had several books detailing their take on the Chinese Underworld. I knew I wanted to bring that in as a threat. Eventually I decided that one of the major threats of the campaign would be forces trying to reach here to tap the power of the sleeping Vampire to convert his dream power into a remaking of the 10,000 Hells and the Dark Kingdom of Jade-- with the plan to bring that into the real world. The later book had great concepts which I would use to create a potent set of NPCs, ghostwalkers who would at first seem to be adversaries but who would, in the course of the game, join with the PCs.
-The other meta-concept that I wanted to play with was some of the third-hand Gnosticism I'd picked up from the Kult RPG which had an awful vision of the world with the Demiurge as absent from the world, leaving horrific angels in charge and battling over the world. Or maybe it wasn't the Demiurge but God...I was never really sure. I used some of those ideas in the previous vampire game and I'd seen them executed in different ways in HJ's and Derek's games. My idea was this: in these dark games, haunted by the nihilism of post-modernism, you have an absent, corrupted or dead God-figure. You see some of this in some people's takes on the Lovecraftian mythos, particularly Dereleth's approach. Anyway, my concept would be that 'God' or the Demiurge or whatever had returned to the world and would be putting his or her house in order. Not that we'd deal really directly with this, but I wanted at the heart of the game that there could be redemption and success even in the face of an awful world. I didn't want to lose sight of the morality tale at the heart of the story.
-Finally, I knew the players would be newly made Vampires-- but that they would have an additional shift from their time of embrace to the present situation of the campaign.
Tomorrow I'll talk about the player characters, my specific prep, the flow of the game/highlight moments, and my final thoughts on the play.
Vampire Campaign Post-mortem Part One
Vampire Campaign Post-mortem Part Two
Vampire Campaign Post-mortem Part Three
Vampire Campaign Post-mortem Part Four
Vampire Campaign Post-mortem Part Five
Monday, April 13, 2009
4/12/09
Food coma.
At least part of that brought on by my own bringing of mashed potatoes. I found it very strange when I talked to a couple of people a few years back and found they'd grown up on instant potatoes-- despite having other higher end foods in the house-- real mashed potatoes were apparently too much work. Anyway, I stole my recipe from Alan, and it is pretty simple.
So, a big batch, like I did today consists of an eight pound bag of potatoes. You can certainly work with less and scale it. I usually peel and slide the potatoes into half-inch segments and put them in cold, salted water. Cutting them up, rather than working with the whole potatoes makes them cook more thouroughly in my experience. The water's usually about an inch above the top of the potatoes. I also rinse them pretty well to reduce the loose starch.
Anywa, boil the potatoes until they're pretty soft. Then a minute longer. Drain them well-- I use a mesh colander. While the potatoes are still steaming hot pour them into a big mixing bowl. In the bowl you should already have about two sticks of butter-- sliced into pats and about 2/3rds of a can of your standard Kraft Parmesan cheese. The heat from the potatoes will melt these. Work the potatoes a little with a spatula to distribute the materials and break up the largest chunks. Add cream, maybe half a cup or so to start. Then go at it with a hand mixer. This is why you use a big, big mixing bowl, because it you don't, you get a nice thin line of mashed potatoes over everything. Work the material heavily, use the spatula to move anything that's on the bottom, and add cream as needed to get the creamy consistency people love. Add salt and more butter to taste.
We had Easter over at Sherri's parents where we had five more people than we were expecting. It ended up pretty packed-- the food was excellent. However, because I'm home a lot by myself, I've found being in large, packed groups of people now makes me more uncomfortable than it used to. I mean, I never liked crowds-- but clearly my wound tightedness has certainly increased over the last year. I ate and then went outside and sat and watched the birds work over Sherri's dad's feeders. A genuinely pleasant experience, but it took some time to shake my general anxiety. To tell people who know me precisely how tense I was:
I skipped the cake.
At least part of that brought on by my own bringing of mashed potatoes. I found it very strange when I talked to a couple of people a few years back and found they'd grown up on instant potatoes-- despite having other higher end foods in the house-- real mashed potatoes were apparently too much work. Anyway, I stole my recipe from Alan, and it is pretty simple.
So, a big batch, like I did today consists of an eight pound bag of potatoes. You can certainly work with less and scale it. I usually peel and slide the potatoes into half-inch segments and put them in cold, salted water. Cutting them up, rather than working with the whole potatoes makes them cook more thouroughly in my experience. The water's usually about an inch above the top of the potatoes. I also rinse them pretty well to reduce the loose starch.
Anywa, boil the potatoes until they're pretty soft. Then a minute longer. Drain them well-- I use a mesh colander. While the potatoes are still steaming hot pour them into a big mixing bowl. In the bowl you should already have about two sticks of butter-- sliced into pats and about 2/3rds of a can of your standard Kraft Parmesan cheese. The heat from the potatoes will melt these. Work the potatoes a little with a spatula to distribute the materials and break up the largest chunks. Add cream, maybe half a cup or so to start. Then go at it with a hand mixer. This is why you use a big, big mixing bowl, because it you don't, you get a nice thin line of mashed potatoes over everything. Work the material heavily, use the spatula to move anything that's on the bottom, and add cream as needed to get the creamy consistency people love. Add salt and more butter to taste.
We had Easter over at Sherri's parents where we had five more people than we were expecting. It ended up pretty packed-- the food was excellent. However, because I'm home a lot by myself, I've found being in large, packed groups of people now makes me more uncomfortable than it used to. I mean, I never liked crowds-- but clearly my wound tightedness has certainly increased over the last year. I ate and then went outside and sat and watched the birds work over Sherri's dad's feeders. A genuinely pleasant experience, but it took some time to shake my general anxiety. To tell people who know me precisely how tense I was:
I skipped the cake.
Saturday, April 11, 2009
List of Topics
So apparently my once a week day off will vary. Anyway, better bloggers than I have said that blogging about blogging is a sin-- a potentially wallowing set of commentaries. So, slightly appropriate on this holiday weekend that I indulge in that. I hit my 100th consecutive fairly full post, if I include linkdumps in that count. So, what do I think about it so far. It is more difficult than I thought, but not that much more.
My original goal was to get myself in the mode of having a single writing task each day that would push me to keep producing something. I think on that score it is successful-- it does push me to organize myself and get some material prepared each day, of varying quality. I've been able to use the blog to double up on some work-- where things I need to get done can be posted here as well. On the other hand, in some cases it has been a small wedge from doing some kinds of writing. I haven't for example, gotten much done on either of the novels. There's also some campaign development stuff that I don't want to post, in that I might use some of it at the table. I've also had a fairly rich set of player-campaign emails I've been working through, both for Libri Vidicos and Changeling. I suspect when I go to run the Sunday Third Continent campaign, I'll try to keep off-table emails to a minimum.
On the whole, though, I'm pretty pleased with it. I've recycled some material-- previously written summaries and the just I've just begun to archive from The Village board. So I'll stick with it for another hundred days, and try to get more interesting material out here.
Things that I mentioned I wanted to write about but haven't yet-- either incomplete series of blog posts or other things mentioned in passing:
-Further discussion of the problems of rpg games in a historical setting
-Final article on authors who have influenced me
-Another piece on striking rpgs that helped shape my approach
-Campaign postmortems-- Vampire, Prophet King, Steambuckler, Bloodlines, Black Company/Planescape, Scion, HCI
-Summaries of older campaigns in the shared fantasy world I've run in
-The New Weird in rpgs
-On the beautiful ephemera of strategy guides
-Approaches to campaign length (medium and long style campaigns)
-Narrative resolution, crunch and argumentation in table play
-Player expectations, meta-discussion and shared personal maps of the campaign shape
-Consensus, player dynamics, and why I won't run for certain people anymore
-Male vs. Female tabletop dynamics
-Robot Zero
-Coming to Classical Music through perfume
-Why I hate orphans in games
-Gender, Race and Sexuality as topics in games
-Sketches for arena game-- both mechanics and setting
-Overcomplicating my plots
-Recent games I've run
-Anime/Manga structures and conventions and their application to tabletop games
My original goal was to get myself in the mode of having a single writing task each day that would push me to keep producing something. I think on that score it is successful-- it does push me to organize myself and get some material prepared each day, of varying quality. I've been able to use the blog to double up on some work-- where things I need to get done can be posted here as well. On the other hand, in some cases it has been a small wedge from doing some kinds of writing. I haven't for example, gotten much done on either of the novels. There's also some campaign development stuff that I don't want to post, in that I might use some of it at the table. I've also had a fairly rich set of player-campaign emails I've been working through, both for Libri Vidicos and Changeling. I suspect when I go to run the Sunday Third Continent campaign, I'll try to keep off-table emails to a minimum.
On the whole, though, I'm pretty pleased with it. I've recycled some material-- previously written summaries and the just I've just begun to archive from The Village board. So I'll stick with it for another hundred days, and try to get more interesting material out here.
Things that I mentioned I wanted to write about but haven't yet-- either incomplete series of blog posts or other things mentioned in passing:
-Further discussion of the problems of rpg games in a historical setting
-Final article on authors who have influenced me
-Another piece on striking rpgs that helped shape my approach
-Campaign postmortems-- Vampire, Prophet King, Steambuckler, Bloodlines, Black Company/Planescape, Scion, HCI
-Summaries of older campaigns in the shared fantasy world I've run in
-The New Weird in rpgs
-On the beautiful ephemera of strategy guides
-Approaches to campaign length (medium and long style campaigns)
-Narrative resolution, crunch and argumentation in table play
-Player expectations, meta-discussion and shared personal maps of the campaign shape
-Consensus, player dynamics, and why I won't run for certain people anymore
-Male vs. Female tabletop dynamics
-Robot Zero
-Coming to Classical Music through perfume
-Why I hate orphans in games
-Gender, Race and Sexuality as topics in games
-Sketches for arena game-- both mechanics and setting
-Overcomplicating my plots
-Recent games I've run
-Anime/Manga structures and conventions and their application to tabletop games
Thursday, April 9, 2009
Dave Arneson
A brief post today, and tomorrow I'll blog about blogging which should be a properly painful exercise.
So Dave Arneson passed away this week. Ken Hite and Robin Laws both have fairly brief and cogent comments on his importance. I started early on D&D thanks to my father's picking up a set of the first small box books for my sister on a trip to Ann Arbor. It was a long time before I really realized Arneson's contribution to establishing the ideas of rpg gaming, since the Gygax machine had been long in place to show him as the father of these games. That's not to say GG didn't do anything, but rather to say that Arneson's contribution had been eclipsed until more recent years when people started to actually compile a decent history of gaming.
I really love role-playing games, so I can only say I'm glad for his contribution and establishment of this hobby.
So Dave Arneson passed away this week. Ken Hite and Robin Laws both have fairly brief and cogent comments on his importance. I started early on D&D thanks to my father's picking up a set of the first small box books for my sister on a trip to Ann Arbor. It was a long time before I really realized Arneson's contribution to establishing the ideas of rpg gaming, since the Gygax machine had been long in place to show him as the father of these games. That's not to say GG didn't do anything, but rather to say that Arneson's contribution had been eclipsed until more recent years when people started to actually compile a decent history of gaming.
I really love role-playing games, so I can only say I'm glad for his contribution and establishment of this hobby.
Wednesday, April 8, 2009
Playing Well
Still thieving from my old board posts-- and one I thieved from before at that. I wrote out some ideas on playing well at the table some time ago and they're worth it for me to keep in mind when I play. I have to see if there's anything here that I've rethought.
Playing Well
(Related to the GM discussion in this forum, I thought I'd bring over part of the good rpg playing thread we had a while ago in the Old Village. Unfortunately, I forgot to archive that thread--maybe someone else did?-- so I brought the parts that I could find.)
Playing Advice
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Kaiju asked me what advice I had for being a good player, so I sat down and wrote out a few ideas...both from the perspective of being a GM and being a player. I thought I'd post these and get other suggestions; Steve thought they were OK. I think this is an incomplete list, but it was what popped first into my head.
OK...general pieces of advice on how to play...or things that I do that make the games generally better for me as a player (or at least more fun). As always, your results may vary.
*****************
1. I imagine lots of stories about my character...other things he does...where he goes to buy boots, what kind of food he likes, little details. Those are in my head when I'm playing...sometimes I can throw them in as details about my characters. For example, in Derek's Werewolf game, my character had "wolfed out" once at a Fast Food place...it never came up during the game and it certainly wasn't on my sheet, but I knew he would react badly if anyone ever suggested eating fast food...that got me to thinking about other things about him...like what kind of place would he ate and what kind of trash would he have in his car. As another example, I had my character be really poor in Barry's game...not that I got points for it or that it mattered, but I would mention how I had to go by used underwear...that became a running detail and people knew something distinct about my character.
2. Come into the game having imagined one cool thing your character could do during the session or else one cool thing you'd like to have happen to him. Work to get those scene to come to fruition.
3. Say things as if they are so...give the GM an excuse to help you...(this is something you already do and is big points in your favor)...say "There is this around thing X around so I can do Y" not "Is there this thing X around...?"
4. Figure out a mannerism or gesture or tone of voice or something that marks your character. use that at the table to mark when you're in character...use it on other players to demonstrate to them that you're in character...and force them to go into character.
5. On a related note: challenge other players. If they're being off topic...go into character and pull them back in. Part of the fun is to play with and against other people at the table...the worst thing that can happen is that you get a cool interaction out of it and you both get some play time. Players generally rise to the occasion when challenged.
6. On a related, related note...be willing to police other people at the table...the GM can only do so much...a good player is active and pulls other players along by example.
7. Know what your character thinks of the other characters in the group and act on that...bring that interaction and your feelings towards them to bear on your play. [That doesn’t mean be awful to them, but know how to play so that those feelings come out…you want to give the other players room to react…just being a dick to them accomplishes nothing…giving them room to respond makes for a back and forth. My second character in Barry’s CP game was Scott’s brother…we hated each other and that made for good play at the table. BUT I wouldn’t have done anything to really harm his character or limit what Scott could do].
8. In any conversation with an NPC...remember that they aren't walking clue boxes...they have something they want and you have something you want...in a story, a conversation between characters helps to illuminate those agendas. (I think I've mentioned this one before).
9. Be aware of how other people are playing at the table and try to draw them in to the game. [Additional: share and play nice is what I mean by this. Don’t get irritated if people talk to NPC’s that you consider “yours”. Be willing to partner up with people. Players should watch stepping on each other’s toes…but at the same time people shouldn’t get defensive about plots or NPCs…and if you have a problem with someone…talk to them about it].
10. JUMP.
That means go forward, take action, jump into the fray and don't worry about right or wrong, make it right by being 100% behind it...it is just as much fun to fail as it is to succeed if it looks good at the table. Don't be afraid to take risks...say what you're going to do and roll...let the GM figure out what your chance of success is. Always, though, describe your actions.
These are my general rules of playing for anyone and not specifically tuned to you...I think you do a number of these things really well. How's that?
I would say as an additional rule...this is off topic and certainly doesn't relate to you...if I'm going to cite general rules about playing...if you're not enjoying a game, don't play. If you find yourself not doing much in the game, talk to the GM, tell him what you want and if that doesn't work then bow out for someone else to have a shot. A good player participates, makes clear to the GM what he wants out of the game, and doesn't just show up as a warm body. I think there are players who don't realize how draining it is to have a non-responsive or distracting player.
Another couple of thoughts:
*Pay attention when other people are having their moments on stage. Loud cross talk makes it hard for the player and GM who are on deck to actually communicate. It also is rude to really blatantly ignore their scene and talk over them...the message sent by that is "you're not important and I don't care." Not that you can't talk when other people are interacting with the GM...but players need to be considerate. Plus if you don't listen, they can't blah and suddenly everyone gets lost or confused. By the same token, when plans are being discussed try to listen to everyone.
*Put your two cents worth in when planning. It's obnoxious to not participate in the planning and then second-guess later.
*Don't read outside junk or do other stuff at the table, it is rude to the GM and other players...hmm...wait...I guess I mean stuff that is way off topic like magazines or newspapers or playing a Game Boy or stuff like that. Looking at game stuff is ok generally.
*Help other players with the rules, but don't second-guess them.
*Love your character.
LittleDevilBird
Those are all good suggestions. I have one to add:
* Give the GM opinions and feedback. Do you like/dislike the game? Do you wish the GM would pull in other elements, NPCs, plot points, historical threads, etc.? Should there be more scene description, fewer NPCs, bigger magic, or creepier monsters? Is the game just not disturbing enough? Player interaction is key, but if the GM doesn't have a clue what you want to get out of the game, they may read you wrong and steer the overall story or mood in a direction that's just not fun for you.
Absolutely.
I forgot one because it is almost a cliche to say it:
Have Fun.
I believe you can be enthusiatic, involved and serious about a game and still have fun.
I believe you can share, interact and be considerate to other players and still have fun.
Auzumel
Here's the one that gives me the greatest pleasure:
Follow the storyline.
Really. If there's a GM busting their butt to put together a cohesive story (not just a episodic fight-of-the-week thing), take advantage of the situation and immerse yourself in at least some part of it. It's a pleasure to watch things start to click into place, to see some little incident reveal heaps of complexities you hadn't considered before, to recognize the chapter endings and the beginnings of new arcs.
As before, with these suggestions your actual millage may vary.
Terling said:
About the only caveat I can suggest to all of that is when thinking about the stories for your character, don't make all of them make you act like a loner in game. A few loner tendencies aren't bad, a lot of loner tendencies make you hard to deal with.
Having been on the receiving end of this as both a player and a GM, I can attest to this. I’ve seen less and less of this over the last several years, but I remember a time when people made characters that seemed made just to not be able to function in a group. I’ve never been sure about what the theory was behind this…was it cool? Tweaking the other players? Or just anti-social behavior? While I think GM’s should be creatively accommodating of character ideas, players should consider that they will be playing with others. Initial character creation is crucial, but I’ve seen people make up characters just to spite other players and/or the GM. [On a side note…I’ve seen this turned around on me magnificently. I’ve only played with Mr. Fenris once, but when I heard his character concept at the beginning…I thought “Oh, God…a loner character”…by the end of that first session he had managed to use that concept and turn it around against my expectations in such a way that, quite frankly, I bow down before his skill.
I also think a good player varies the characters he or she runs. In the end, most characters are going to have some traits between them that are shared (I believe you can’t help this…something of yourself always bleeds through), I think good players try to vary the kinds of characters, personalities and roles that they take on.
As well, a good player recognizes his character isn’t static. A good character grows and evolves during the game. He or she learns something and changes…or decides not to change and has some reasons for that that are self-reflective. A good player thinks about that and wants to build that change. He doesn’t make and angst-y character and then wallow in that for the whole game…eventually something will pull him out of that or he’ll gather hope or something. By the same token, a hopeful character might lose hope or become cynical or something. I really believe that the best players I have seen have managed to develop and grow their characters from their original conception to something greater, based on their experiences. By the same token, some of the worst characters I have seen started at X and remained X by god!
Good players listen to criticism/commentary and consider it in the tone it was given.
Love your failures just as much as your successes and make them as enjoyable for yourself and other players.
Playing Well
(Related to the GM discussion in this forum, I thought I'd bring over part of the good rpg playing thread we had a while ago in the Old Village. Unfortunately, I forgot to archive that thread--maybe someone else did?-- so I brought the parts that I could find.)
Playing Advice
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Kaiju asked me what advice I had for being a good player, so I sat down and wrote out a few ideas...both from the perspective of being a GM and being a player. I thought I'd post these and get other suggestions; Steve thought they were OK. I think this is an incomplete list, but it was what popped first into my head.
OK...general pieces of advice on how to play...or things that I do that make the games generally better for me as a player (or at least more fun). As always, your results may vary.
*****************
1. I imagine lots of stories about my character...other things he does...where he goes to buy boots, what kind of food he likes, little details. Those are in my head when I'm playing...sometimes I can throw them in as details about my characters. For example, in Derek's Werewolf game, my character had "wolfed out" once at a Fast Food place...it never came up during the game and it certainly wasn't on my sheet, but I knew he would react badly if anyone ever suggested eating fast food...that got me to thinking about other things about him...like what kind of place would he ate and what kind of trash would he have in his car. As another example, I had my character be really poor in Barry's game...not that I got points for it or that it mattered, but I would mention how I had to go by used underwear...that became a running detail and people knew something distinct about my character.
2. Come into the game having imagined one cool thing your character could do during the session or else one cool thing you'd like to have happen to him. Work to get those scene to come to fruition.
3. Say things as if they are so...give the GM an excuse to help you...(this is something you already do and is big points in your favor)...say "There is this around thing X around so I can do Y" not "Is there this thing X around...?"
4. Figure out a mannerism or gesture or tone of voice or something that marks your character. use that at the table to mark when you're in character...use it on other players to demonstrate to them that you're in character...and force them to go into character.
5. On a related note: challenge other players. If they're being off topic...go into character and pull them back in. Part of the fun is to play with and against other people at the table...the worst thing that can happen is that you get a cool interaction out of it and you both get some play time. Players generally rise to the occasion when challenged.
6. On a related, related note...be willing to police other people at the table...the GM can only do so much...a good player is active and pulls other players along by example.
7. Know what your character thinks of the other characters in the group and act on that...bring that interaction and your feelings towards them to bear on your play. [That doesn’t mean be awful to them, but know how to play so that those feelings come out…you want to give the other players room to react…just being a dick to them accomplishes nothing…giving them room to respond makes for a back and forth. My second character in Barry’s CP game was Scott’s brother…we hated each other and that made for good play at the table. BUT I wouldn’t have done anything to really harm his character or limit what Scott could do].
8. In any conversation with an NPC...remember that they aren't walking clue boxes...they have something they want and you have something you want...in a story, a conversation between characters helps to illuminate those agendas. (I think I've mentioned this one before).
9. Be aware of how other people are playing at the table and try to draw them in to the game. [Additional: share and play nice is what I mean by this. Don’t get irritated if people talk to NPC’s that you consider “yours”. Be willing to partner up with people. Players should watch stepping on each other’s toes…but at the same time people shouldn’t get defensive about plots or NPCs…and if you have a problem with someone…talk to them about it].
10. JUMP.
That means go forward, take action, jump into the fray and don't worry about right or wrong, make it right by being 100% behind it...it is just as much fun to fail as it is to succeed if it looks good at the table. Don't be afraid to take risks...say what you're going to do and roll...let the GM figure out what your chance of success is. Always, though, describe your actions.
These are my general rules of playing for anyone and not specifically tuned to you...I think you do a number of these things really well. How's that?
I would say as an additional rule...this is off topic and certainly doesn't relate to you...if I'm going to cite general rules about playing...if you're not enjoying a game, don't play. If you find yourself not doing much in the game, talk to the GM, tell him what you want and if that doesn't work then bow out for someone else to have a shot. A good player participates, makes clear to the GM what he wants out of the game, and doesn't just show up as a warm body. I think there are players who don't realize how draining it is to have a non-responsive or distracting player.
Another couple of thoughts:
*Pay attention when other people are having their moments on stage. Loud cross talk makes it hard for the player and GM who are on deck to actually communicate. It also is rude to really blatantly ignore their scene and talk over them...the message sent by that is "you're not important and I don't care." Not that you can't talk when other people are interacting with the GM...but players need to be considerate. Plus if you don't listen, they can't blah and suddenly everyone gets lost or confused. By the same token, when plans are being discussed try to listen to everyone.
*Put your two cents worth in when planning. It's obnoxious to not participate in the planning and then second-guess later.
*Don't read outside junk or do other stuff at the table, it is rude to the GM and other players...hmm...wait...I guess I mean stuff that is way off topic like magazines or newspapers or playing a Game Boy or stuff like that. Looking at game stuff is ok generally.
*Help other players with the rules, but don't second-guess them.
*Love your character.
LittleDevilBird
Those are all good suggestions. I have one to add:
* Give the GM opinions and feedback. Do you like/dislike the game? Do you wish the GM would pull in other elements, NPCs, plot points, historical threads, etc.? Should there be more scene description, fewer NPCs, bigger magic, or creepier monsters? Is the game just not disturbing enough? Player interaction is key, but if the GM doesn't have a clue what you want to get out of the game, they may read you wrong and steer the overall story or mood in a direction that's just not fun for you.
Absolutely.
I forgot one because it is almost a cliche to say it:
Have Fun.
I believe you can be enthusiatic, involved and serious about a game and still have fun.
I believe you can share, interact and be considerate to other players and still have fun.
Auzumel
Here's the one that gives me the greatest pleasure:
Follow the storyline.
Really. If there's a GM busting their butt to put together a cohesive story (not just a episodic fight-of-the-week thing), take advantage of the situation and immerse yourself in at least some part of it. It's a pleasure to watch things start to click into place, to see some little incident reveal heaps of complexities you hadn't considered before, to recognize the chapter endings and the beginnings of new arcs.
As before, with these suggestions your actual millage may vary.
Terling said:
About the only caveat I can suggest to all of that is when thinking about the stories for your character, don't make all of them make you act like a loner in game. A few loner tendencies aren't bad, a lot of loner tendencies make you hard to deal with.
Having been on the receiving end of this as both a player and a GM, I can attest to this. I’ve seen less and less of this over the last several years, but I remember a time when people made characters that seemed made just to not be able to function in a group. I’ve never been sure about what the theory was behind this…was it cool? Tweaking the other players? Or just anti-social behavior? While I think GM’s should be creatively accommodating of character ideas, players should consider that they will be playing with others. Initial character creation is crucial, but I’ve seen people make up characters just to spite other players and/or the GM. [On a side note…I’ve seen this turned around on me magnificently. I’ve only played with Mr. Fenris once, but when I heard his character concept at the beginning…I thought “Oh, God…a loner character”…by the end of that first session he had managed to use that concept and turn it around against my expectations in such a way that, quite frankly, I bow down before his skill.
I also think a good player varies the characters he or she runs. In the end, most characters are going to have some traits between them that are shared (I believe you can’t help this…something of yourself always bleeds through), I think good players try to vary the kinds of characters, personalities and roles that they take on.
As well, a good player recognizes his character isn’t static. A good character grows and evolves during the game. He or she learns something and changes…or decides not to change and has some reasons for that that are self-reflective. A good player thinks about that and wants to build that change. He doesn’t make and angst-y character and then wallow in that for the whole game…eventually something will pull him out of that or he’ll gather hope or something. By the same token, a hopeful character might lose hope or become cynical or something. I really believe that the best players I have seen have managed to develop and grow their characters from their original conception to something greater, based on their experiences. By the same token, some of the worst characters I have seen started at X and remained X by god!
Good players listen to criticism/commentary and consider it in the tone it was given.
Love your failures just as much as your successes and make them as enjoyable for yourself and other players.
Tuesday, April 7, 2009
Campaign Postmortem: City of Ocean
Recycling day-- I'm in the process of trying to back up some of the more (or less) interesting things I posted on the Village Board> We had a couple of discussions of mechanics, ideas, play and settings there I wanted to make sure I had a copy of. There are some topics I wrote on a couple of years ago that I want to revisit what I wrote then and see if my take on things has shifted (particularly my pieces on male vs. female dynamics at the table).
Anyhow, one of the things I wrote up when it was closer in mind than it is now, was a post-mortem of my City of Ocean Campaign. I'm going to post that (along with responses from two of the players). I've been thinking about this campaign and what worked about it-- plus it gives me content and allows me to archive this material again. So if you've already read this, bear with me. Also, there's a couple of links I mentioned that no longer function, so you can ignore those. Maybe we'll find the site backup at some point and repost it. I also probably need to do this kind of post-mortem for a couple of the other campaigns I've finished since then (the Vampire game, Planescape/Black Company, Bloodlines, Steambuckler, Scion, HCI...yow.). Also interesting in that I've run more with the Action-card system that I first really used here.
CITY OF OCEAN POST-MORTEM (long)
This is kind of long, but I wanted to put up something about a campaign I finished a few months ago. I’ve been thinking recently about campaign planning, especially as I come to the wrap up of the Steambuckler campaign and look towards what will follow. I’ve started some planning for that, but it has been skeletal at best and I suspect that it will probably change drastically before I get to the table with it. My Vampire game is starting to hit some of the larger arcs of the story, but the Exalted game is still at the start. Anyhow since I have to start some other planning I thought I’d go back to think about how my City of Ocean game came to be. I haven't done anything like this with my fantasy camapigns, in part becuase most of them have threads that play into other games, but I might in the future.
I welcome questions and comments-- especially if the players could comment on their perception of the campaign...which we played for three (!) years.
The simplest way to describe the game would be weird modern. To get a sense of what it was like check out Auzumel’s page for the game at http://home.comcast.net/~mariko28/COO/coohome.html. She kept that up for about the first of the three years (real time) of the campaign.
Originally I’d been thinking about doing the Modern Gods game I’d talked about for a while. In fact I’d generated a lot of material and passed it on to the three people who were going to be playing (Auzumel, Devilbird and Laeoch). However after doing a lot of work, I hit a brick wall in my thinking and couldn’t figure out how I wanted to structure the campaign. I still haven’t but that’s another story. I knew I wanted to do a modern game since I hadn’t for a long time.
So here are the pieces that were rattling around in my head:
*I owned a copy of Unknown Armies, as well as Over the Edge (and a complete set of the CCG for that game). I liked some of the ideas for these things, but I didn’t like the rules and I didn’t like everything…so maybe 40% from each was useful. But I wanted to take some bits from them.
*I had only seen a couple of episodes of Buffy back them and knew a little of the backstory. Auz and I were driving along and saw a billboard with Spike on it. She asked who he was and I told her as best I could. The thing that stuck me them was the idea of demonic possession causing Vampires. I began to think to myself, why stop there? What if all the supernatural manifestations were different kinds of demons or better yet, the kind of creature that resulted from possession was based on a persons personality. I knew I wanted to do something with that.
*I didn’t have anything yet in mind for the game, but I wanted something strange and yet real. So I did up a syllabus for a course that would take place in a modern world where demons existed (you can see a version of that here http://home.comcast.net/~mariko28/COO/syllabi.html). Once I did that I realized something else about the game world. It would be a place where this supernatural stuff went on but it was dealt with in fairly conventional terms, that people tried to write it off into another paradigm. Part of the point of the game would be these conflicting and contradictory explanations of what was going on it the world.
*I decided one of the big themes of the game would be signal to noise ratio. Unknown Armies deals with this idea suggesting that 99% of what people hear about the “Occult Underground” is malarkey, misinformation and untruths. I thought that was a great idea, but in some ways unplayable. If 99% of what players got wasn’t true then they would be utterly lost. Still the idea of having all kinds of stories about the “real truth” and what magic is and everything else appealed to me. However, I would take the idea and run it backwards.
*By this point I knew I was going to consciously borrow from PK Dick, Borges, Eco and WS Burroughs. I was going to make the strangest possible game. I’d draw from online strangeness to add to the atmosphere. High conspiracy and misanthropic explanations would abound. And here would be the trick: everything might be true. I just keep making stuff up and throwing it at the players. More noise, more events, more alternate explanations and systems of thinking about what was going on. The truth would be whatever the players followed up on and seemed to think was true. Of course, I wasn’t going to tell them that. There a point in Eco’s Foucault’s Pendulum when he realizes that all the conspiracy and plotting that he’s put together has a life of its own and yet is also purely in his own mind. The point of the novel is about ascribing significance to events (I think). In this game I would continually throw things about for the players and watch them assign significance to things…then I’d follow up on the threads that they pulled on.
*By this point I’d started to think about the Persona 2 game for the PS which I’d played a little bit of and which had “rumor magic” as an aspect of the game. I found an image of the city from that game which looked particularly strange and that set my mind about what it would be (you can see the image on the front page of Auzumel’s site). I put together a tourist guide just to start building the geography in my head.
*With this much put together I still didn’t have a structure or real sense of what would actually happen. I ended up spending a week scribbling ideas in a notebook—anything that came into my head. This freewriting really helped. And it was in the middle of this sketching that I found two things that really helped. The first was Ken Hite’s Suppressed Transmission column (which he has two collections of). They are chock full of high weirdness and how to put those in a game. I decided I’d just start shoveling that stuff in…. The second thing was a PBS special on a young man with a certain kind of brain aphasia (I think that was the term). He’d have seizures but instead of fits, when he was overcome by these things he would absolutely and totally believe he was god. I thought that was freaky so I used it.
*I decided to come up with a typology of demons (http://home.comcast.net/~mariko28/COO/cdc.html). I liked the idea that demons would be a “disease-like” phenomena that would be covered by the Centers for Disease Control. I also started to come up with some more thinking about the sources of demons as discussed in that class syllabus. I liked the idea that they were a frightening thing that people didn’t talk about, but everyone has some story for why they were. I also worked on an explanation that had a “First Atlantis” and a Demon pre-civilization and the idea that there was another race of non-possessing demons that had been killed off. However once we got into play, that storyline died out—the players never followed any of those threads and in some ways that story was too literal.
*The explanation that Demons were bent psychics would be a popular one and my thinking about that brought me back to the Divine Aphasia I mentioned before. I decided there would be a really awful family of powerful people who would eventually serve as possible villains. I would call them the Throne family (I know, an easy reference) and they would have a giant media/shopping/entertainment center at the heart of the City of Ocean. [Incidentally, I really liked that name for the city as it had a kind of mythic resonance, but it also became a pain in the ass to write out and say because it is a non-intuitive phrasing]. My idea would be that they family would be involved in the occult happenings, but the most apparently mildest of them would actually be a powerful psychic who projected his Divine Aphasia out on other people, convincing them he was god. That was the starting point and eventually I built a larger and more complicated backstory for the family with all kinds of Faulknerian details: murder, rape, incest, etc. In the end they were a useful set of figures but weren’t really direct opposition until late in the game.
*I started thinking about the PCs and who they would be. I ended up recycling a device I’d used in a previous game. The PCs would all be summoned to a lawyers office on a particular date to receive a legacy from a person they’d never heard of. The trick would be that the instructions would have been set before the characters were ever born. Also, some of the people named in the legacy (essentially everyone but them) would have died in the meantime (strangely of course). The legacy would come out of a previous group of supernatural investigators who owned a location and who had all died or vanished before they were born. My hope at the beginning would be that this would push the group into following that path and being supernatural “PI’s”. That never really happened and in retrospect that was a good and obvious thing. I hadn’t set up any mysteries beyond their own origins and what was generally going on. Most of the campaign ended up with the players just trying to live their lives in the faces of this strangeness which was fun—but only because it was a small game. With a larger group of players, I don’t think it would have worked. An investigation game is by its nature “episodic” but this was continuous in a way I’d never seen before where things just kind of kept rolling downhill.
*I didn’t want to use a conventional game system, but I also didn’t want to go “diceless”. I’d done that with Amber before and had been dissatisfied with the results. Instead I used a resolution system based on a character card deck. I won’t go into the details, but everyone had their own deck, with results tuned to their abilities, special weirdness cards made especially based on their personalities and some other odd result things. I’d used it before for the Crowsmantle game and for a Swashbuckling game I’d done for Armageddon. It worked pretty OK, but because the game was 95% discussion, event and description and maybe 5% combat the cards were less important. They were amusingly fun especially when certain strange cards kept coming up.
*I had everyone come up with character concepts of normal people, but with two things. First, they all had to be either orphans or adopted. Originally I’d thought to make their true fathers and heritage a subplot for the game (as I’d done in another game). However, that ended up being beside the point and pinning that down would have been too concrete so I let it drop. Second, they had to come up with a special thing for their character. Lizbette was a messenger and “knew” the city. Because of that I tried to describe the areas more fully in the game. Eventually from this I ended up making the city itself and its “state” stranger and more metaphorical. I did this in two ways. A) everyone in City of Ocean knew about all the strange stuff, but somehow it didn’t translate to the rest of the world (they figured this out eventually when they tried to tell someone in NY about a cultic ascension over the phone…they just couldn’t get what the players were saying). B) the city itself became a character (or vice versa…hard to explain). Maya made up a character who was focused on names and naming. From that I tried to make most NPCs have interesting or significant names: the old investigation group all had names that were variants on Paul (Pavel, Paolo, etc.), allies would have names that were variants on Alan (Allen, Alewine, Alain, etc.), bad guys had ones as variants on Peter, plus lots of other names were either strange or were taken from historical or literary references. Lei had a character involved with the arts. That led me to develop a plot were he had to organize a museum display for a traveling exhibition based around the Grail mythology in its various forms (think of something like the King Tut or Monet exhibits).
*By this point I’d decided that one of the concepts in the game would be about restarting reality. Unknown Armies has an idea where when the 333 archetypes are filled, then the world restarts. I decided that the Throne bad guy would be trying to do this artificially. He would be severing heads and connecting them to computer programs to program people who would follow these archetypes. At first I thought this would be a fairly literal investigation thing, but it ended up falling to the background until much later in the game. Because I was determined to let the players set the agenda, I tried to let go of ideas that sounded really cool to me, but that the players didn’t follow up on. Instead, I just shoveled more stuff on and watched to see what stuck.
*In the first session I did individual scenes with the players in which they received notes about coming to meet at the lawyers’ office. In each scene, there was a fish—Lizbette was buying one, Lei was watching kids play Go Fish and one dropped out of the sky at Maya’s feet. Quite honestly I thought it was a great image. What did it mean? At the time I didn’t know. But I put it in. My point in the game would be to add these details in—some pre-planned and some on the fly and let the game go. I would come up with explanations later. The tension between these competing explanations and what the characters did would be the theme of the story. I also had it in my head at that point that the group had already done all of this (i.e. the campaign) once, but had failed—as a result the world had broken. They wouldn’t know it but they would be replaying everything. That resulted in them having some glimpses into other paths throughout the game. For example when they arrived to get their legacy, there was a fourth person there who managed to get into a fight with them. Then, just as it got heated, the scene restarted. The three PCs remembered everything, but now there was no fourth person.
*Another detail that I had at this point was the idea of a set of serial murders called the Carpenter Killings. I wouldn’t give the players all of the details about them, but they would be some kind of message from the future or indication of the breakdown in reality. It was one of those cases where I had an idea that I would reference in passing and then if they decided to follow up on it, it would become significant—as it eventually did. That was tough to do but I think made for a very different game.
*Having three players was great but also tough. In the last year of the game, Lei (Laeoch) had to quit because his schedule was screwy. We’d had a number of blown sessions before that and it had started to hurt the campaign. With that few players, the interactions with each other and with the NPCs became really important. Story was much more vital than conflict and combat was rare. However I recommend trying games with small groups like this, especially if you can find dedicated players willing to explore the story.
AUZUMEL REPLIES:
Hmmm, as one of the players, I have to say that CoO was entirely unlike any other game I'd ever played in.
First, it's not like we knew that what was important was what we paid attention to. So, I'm a careful player and poor Lizbette was even more detail-oriented than me (tough when your character pushes you to work harder than you would normally!). So for me, I saw all these things happening and we weren't following up on 'em. It was driving me crazy. Tormenting Lizbette with things that still had to be resolved was a fairly major portion of every session, I swear. Needless to say, there was a level of nervous exhaustion that set in after a while there.
Sometimes it really bothered me when I'd try to follow up on something, get nothing worthwhile and some other character just hanging out would get a veritable banquet of information dropped on their toes--and then they'd just shrug. *sigh* After a while, I gave up on being annoyed. It was just how the game was. Nothing was direct and effort did not have a direct coorelation with results in the short term. Maybe in the long term, but definitely not on the day-to-day logs. Looking back, I see that what the attention to detail did do was drive back most of the encounters with the wierdness. Lizbette's life was a lot less messed up and strange than her comrades' lives were...but she fretted for them too.
It was a hard game too--because I'm accustomed to Edige slowing down and feeding information over and over so that everyone at the table has a few chances to get it. This wasn't like that. At all. Hell, sometimes when I'd refer back to something that happened earlier in the game, Edige would have forgotten and no one would be sure and there'd be much paging back through notes. I mean, there was a lot out there and sometimes the game felt like watching Uzimaki and trying to catch all the spirals on the screen.
There were really great NPCs in the game. I mean, fabulous. Stories as tragic as the world can manage--and I still tear up when I think of some of them. Yeager Allen, especially. Sheesh.
There was constant variety and changes in pace. You'd never know where you were going to end up in any given session. But overall, it was a story about semi-normal people trying to figure out how to get by in a very not-normal world. We didn't try to re-normalize it--we just tried to stay out of big trouble and not cause too much harm. That was the scariest thing in the game--how easy it was to cause terrible things to happen...a moment of negligence, inattention or selfishness and some poor bystander would get the worst of it.
I loved CoO. Loved it completely--even when I was gnashing my teeth in frustration. It makes me a little sad that it's not a trick that Edige can quite pull again--we really didn't catch on that it was a sly wink at PC-centrism until the very last session, when he told us straight out. Of course, the players were the least PC-centric of all Edige's players tho--LDB & I are just not accustomed to thinking of ourselves or our characters as the center of the world. When we heard the news, we literally both blurted out, 'Huh? No way!'
The card system worked fine because the game was mostly observation, social interactions, research and deduction. The battles were handled perfectly fine with the cards--especially because Maya always pulled that KickAss! card when she was intent on kicking ass. The special cards were the best part, definitely. Mystery Machine? *groan* The Immaculate Lizbette? *heh* Just funny and satisfying when the right card came up for the right situation....'You are Here' came up as we were trying to shift the city center away from the Throne Center---I mean, how lucky was that?
LIL' DEVILBIRD REPLIES:
I've been thinking about this, and I don't even know where to begin.
How fitting...
Hm. Let's see -- what were the most memorable points of the game?
1. The NPCs. Edige has a gift for creating NPCs who are actually characters, not just props. Aside from the clever (and sometimes unfortunate) names for almost every person we encountered, there were some NPCs in this game who really just stole the show in some respects. Not because they overshadowed the PCs -- Maya's attention-hogging would only permit her good friend Pan to do that -- but because they truly were unique and odd people. And I mean this about the bad guys as well as the good. There were no cookie-cutter NPCs in the City of Ocean.
Some of the more memorable ones: flamboyant Pan, Maya's best friend; Br. Peter Praetorius, a demon-possessed Inquisitor; Tad Bizzaro, who had no imagination but did possess an amazingly detailed memory and photograph-like art skills; Warner Alain, the (formerly) one-armed Olympic rifleman and cobbler who was sure we were going to get him killed; Yeager Allen, a tragic devil wrestler; Jeffrey Paolo, an enigmatic and truly creepy adversary; the Seneschal, Garzhargen and Weasel (or was it Rabbit?), and Baku Revo from the Black Tower world; the Andalusian Dog, who made an appearance and ate all our brownies; (and speaking of brownies) the impeccably dressed Isaac, who knew all kinds of ritual magic but lost his memory when he tried to talk about it, was from another world shard, and thought we were eating real brownies; Hollo Ting, the bane of Lizbette's existence, but one of those working on climbing the Merchant Archetype ladder; Robert Throne, whose divine Aphasia was so scary and thick he blew up a phone from the other end; Grace Alewine, Lizbet's stoic myrmiddon and another of those climbing the Archetype ladder; Nick Static, who wreaked havoc with magic and ate applesauce like people breath air, the Folding Man, who eventually helped rescue Grace from the cage of thorns, Castonegro, the evil Sorceror (and the relatively benign Buddha of Margate), the fallen gods... the list goes on and on. There are so many more distince characters that I remember, but have forgotten the names, now.
2. The City of Ocean itself. Whether we were in our version of City of Ocean, or the Black Tower world, or Isaac's shard -- the landscape around us was a magical entity in its own right, full of significant names, strangely reminiscent features, and a life of its own. Still, nothing compared to talking to the City on speakerphone, asking it's name, and hearing the grand litany of the eternal City (Nochet, Tanelorn, Silverbrook, etc.), and then realizing that you are one of the Seven Gods of the City.
3. The immense number of story possibilities within the game, and the responsiveness of the GM. Now that I look back at the sheer overload of information and possibilities, and the way the GM listened carefully to the way we phrased things, I can see places where he picked up on what interested us and ran with it.
As Auzumel said, we were surprised to find out how much of the game we had actually directed, but there were signs earlier on. For example, when we were doing something potentially important -- such as Maya using the Name of Castronegro's demon against it and punching it to get away; saving the calf from the slaughterhouse; or using Lizbet's "You Are Here" knack to find someone -- Edige sometimes made us repeat the description of our action. If Lizbet said, "I'm going to try to find Lei using my knack," the result would be much weaker and less immediate than if Lizbet said, "I AM going to find Lei, using my knack." It was all in the wording.
4. The way our characters' "knacks" (Names, navigating the City, aesthetic senses) were incorporated into the game early-on and became key aspects of both the characters and the campaign. Maya could "see" True Names -- when she looked at the Name of any of her companion heirs, the Name was much too big to see, as if she were trying to read a huge billboard with her face pressed against the sign. And if the Name was that big, and we all seemed to share it, it had to be the Name of the City, from Maya's perspective. (Then again, everything was the City, from the perspective of Maya, Lei and Lizbet.)
5. When Laeoch left the game, his character Lei fell into the background of the story, but was still around. Lei had always been connected to the Carpenter killings, which seemed to be progressing backward in time (getting sloppier instead of more skilled, etc.), and there came a point at which we discovered that Lei had gone into the House of Renunciation the first time we had done this, in order to send us the message that became warped and garbled and manifested as the killings. We were shown a vision of death and had a chance to stop it, thereby changing the world again. I loved the fact that Lei wasn't just dropped from the story. He still had a purpose, and when his character did "reboot" and drop from the Seven God heirs, it was because we had finally gotten the message and changed the path away from the previous trainwreck.
6. As Auzumel said, the sheer amount of information was bewildering, tantalizing, frustrating, and unlike anything I'd ever seen in a game. We kept notes as best as we could -- I went through two notebooks, myself -- but I was always discovering I had missed noting an incident, or a connection I should've made, or a detail that changed my perception of the event/person/whatever. And like Auz said, even Edige forgot the djinn in the bottle we found at the flea market, so it wasn't just the players. I think I literally felt lost in the game for the majority of the campaign -- maybe until the last two episodes -- but it still managed to be fun.
7. Also as Auz said, the card system worked really well for this game. The responsibility was on the player to interpret the outcome of the draw -- so if you drew a crappy result, you could still try to make the outcome less painful or embarrassing. Which we often forgot. The luck of the cards was incredible, too -- those special cards kept coming up at just the right moment. I still laugh when I think of Lei's uber-weirdness-magnet Mystery Machine card.
And now for some musings and unanswered questions, if the GM is so inclined...
8. We ate a god and a sacrifical calf, and had halos and a purple feathered-serpent aura after that. I always wondered what would've happened if we had eaten more of the gods and angels that had fallen to earth after we shook them out of heaven.
9. Did we ever find the Carpenter victim that was connected to the disappearance of Maya's house? Who was it? I don't remember doing so, and if we didn't, why not?
10. Was Darren Peters set up to be a bad guy? Or was he a red herring?
11. Who really killed Maria Legatti? She was found in a ditch, wasn't she? I remember someone from the Church had come looking for her and indicated Lei was under suspicion for murder...
12. Who kidnapped Lei, and why couldn't he say 3, 6, or 9 after they drove the cut nail into his head?
EDIGE23 NOTES:
I don't think I ever really answered those questions for her.
Anyhow, one of the things I wrote up when it was closer in mind than it is now, was a post-mortem of my City of Ocean Campaign. I'm going to post that (along with responses from two of the players). I've been thinking about this campaign and what worked about it-- plus it gives me content and allows me to archive this material again. So if you've already read this, bear with me. Also, there's a couple of links I mentioned that no longer function, so you can ignore those. Maybe we'll find the site backup at some point and repost it. I also probably need to do this kind of post-mortem for a couple of the other campaigns I've finished since then (the Vampire game, Planescape/Black Company, Bloodlines, Steambuckler, Scion, HCI...yow.). Also interesting in that I've run more with the Action-card system that I first really used here.
CITY OF OCEAN POST-MORTEM (long)
This is kind of long, but I wanted to put up something about a campaign I finished a few months ago. I’ve been thinking recently about campaign planning, especially as I come to the wrap up of the Steambuckler campaign and look towards what will follow. I’ve started some planning for that, but it has been skeletal at best and I suspect that it will probably change drastically before I get to the table with it. My Vampire game is starting to hit some of the larger arcs of the story, but the Exalted game is still at the start. Anyhow since I have to start some other planning I thought I’d go back to think about how my City of Ocean game came to be. I haven't done anything like this with my fantasy camapigns, in part becuase most of them have threads that play into other games, but I might in the future.
I welcome questions and comments-- especially if the players could comment on their perception of the campaign...which we played for three (!) years.
The simplest way to describe the game would be weird modern. To get a sense of what it was like check out Auzumel’s page for the game at http://home.comcast.net/~mariko28/COO/coohome.html. She kept that up for about the first of the three years (real time) of the campaign.
Originally I’d been thinking about doing the Modern Gods game I’d talked about for a while. In fact I’d generated a lot of material and passed it on to the three people who were going to be playing (Auzumel, Devilbird and Laeoch). However after doing a lot of work, I hit a brick wall in my thinking and couldn’t figure out how I wanted to structure the campaign. I still haven’t but that’s another story. I knew I wanted to do a modern game since I hadn’t for a long time.
So here are the pieces that were rattling around in my head:
*I owned a copy of Unknown Armies, as well as Over the Edge (and a complete set of the CCG for that game). I liked some of the ideas for these things, but I didn’t like the rules and I didn’t like everything…so maybe 40% from each was useful. But I wanted to take some bits from them.
*I had only seen a couple of episodes of Buffy back them and knew a little of the backstory. Auz and I were driving along and saw a billboard with Spike on it. She asked who he was and I told her as best I could. The thing that stuck me them was the idea of demonic possession causing Vampires. I began to think to myself, why stop there? What if all the supernatural manifestations were different kinds of demons or better yet, the kind of creature that resulted from possession was based on a persons personality. I knew I wanted to do something with that.
*I didn’t have anything yet in mind for the game, but I wanted something strange and yet real. So I did up a syllabus for a course that would take place in a modern world where demons existed (you can see a version of that here http://home.comcast.net/~mariko28/COO/syllabi.html). Once I did that I realized something else about the game world. It would be a place where this supernatural stuff went on but it was dealt with in fairly conventional terms, that people tried to write it off into another paradigm. Part of the point of the game would be these conflicting and contradictory explanations of what was going on it the world.
*I decided one of the big themes of the game would be signal to noise ratio. Unknown Armies deals with this idea suggesting that 99% of what people hear about the “Occult Underground” is malarkey, misinformation and untruths. I thought that was a great idea, but in some ways unplayable. If 99% of what players got wasn’t true then they would be utterly lost. Still the idea of having all kinds of stories about the “real truth” and what magic is and everything else appealed to me. However, I would take the idea and run it backwards.
*By this point I knew I was going to consciously borrow from PK Dick, Borges, Eco and WS Burroughs. I was going to make the strangest possible game. I’d draw from online strangeness to add to the atmosphere. High conspiracy and misanthropic explanations would abound. And here would be the trick: everything might be true. I just keep making stuff up and throwing it at the players. More noise, more events, more alternate explanations and systems of thinking about what was going on. The truth would be whatever the players followed up on and seemed to think was true. Of course, I wasn’t going to tell them that. There a point in Eco’s Foucault’s Pendulum when he realizes that all the conspiracy and plotting that he’s put together has a life of its own and yet is also purely in his own mind. The point of the novel is about ascribing significance to events (I think). In this game I would continually throw things about for the players and watch them assign significance to things…then I’d follow up on the threads that they pulled on.
*By this point I’d started to think about the Persona 2 game for the PS which I’d played a little bit of and which had “rumor magic” as an aspect of the game. I found an image of the city from that game which looked particularly strange and that set my mind about what it would be (you can see the image on the front page of Auzumel’s site). I put together a tourist guide just to start building the geography in my head.
*With this much put together I still didn’t have a structure or real sense of what would actually happen. I ended up spending a week scribbling ideas in a notebook—anything that came into my head. This freewriting really helped. And it was in the middle of this sketching that I found two things that really helped. The first was Ken Hite’s Suppressed Transmission column (which he has two collections of). They are chock full of high weirdness and how to put those in a game. I decided I’d just start shoveling that stuff in…. The second thing was a PBS special on a young man with a certain kind of brain aphasia (I think that was the term). He’d have seizures but instead of fits, when he was overcome by these things he would absolutely and totally believe he was god. I thought that was freaky so I used it.
*I decided to come up with a typology of demons (http://home.comcast.net/~mariko28/COO/cdc.html). I liked the idea that demons would be a “disease-like” phenomena that would be covered by the Centers for Disease Control. I also started to come up with some more thinking about the sources of demons as discussed in that class syllabus. I liked the idea that they were a frightening thing that people didn’t talk about, but everyone has some story for why they were. I also worked on an explanation that had a “First Atlantis” and a Demon pre-civilization and the idea that there was another race of non-possessing demons that had been killed off. However once we got into play, that storyline died out—the players never followed any of those threads and in some ways that story was too literal.
*The explanation that Demons were bent psychics would be a popular one and my thinking about that brought me back to the Divine Aphasia I mentioned before. I decided there would be a really awful family of powerful people who would eventually serve as possible villains. I would call them the Throne family (I know, an easy reference) and they would have a giant media/shopping/entertainment center at the heart of the City of Ocean. [Incidentally, I really liked that name for the city as it had a kind of mythic resonance, but it also became a pain in the ass to write out and say because it is a non-intuitive phrasing]. My idea would be that they family would be involved in the occult happenings, but the most apparently mildest of them would actually be a powerful psychic who projected his Divine Aphasia out on other people, convincing them he was god. That was the starting point and eventually I built a larger and more complicated backstory for the family with all kinds of Faulknerian details: murder, rape, incest, etc. In the end they were a useful set of figures but weren’t really direct opposition until late in the game.
*I started thinking about the PCs and who they would be. I ended up recycling a device I’d used in a previous game. The PCs would all be summoned to a lawyers office on a particular date to receive a legacy from a person they’d never heard of. The trick would be that the instructions would have been set before the characters were ever born. Also, some of the people named in the legacy (essentially everyone but them) would have died in the meantime (strangely of course). The legacy would come out of a previous group of supernatural investigators who owned a location and who had all died or vanished before they were born. My hope at the beginning would be that this would push the group into following that path and being supernatural “PI’s”. That never really happened and in retrospect that was a good and obvious thing. I hadn’t set up any mysteries beyond their own origins and what was generally going on. Most of the campaign ended up with the players just trying to live their lives in the faces of this strangeness which was fun—but only because it was a small game. With a larger group of players, I don’t think it would have worked. An investigation game is by its nature “episodic” but this was continuous in a way I’d never seen before where things just kind of kept rolling downhill.
*I didn’t want to use a conventional game system, but I also didn’t want to go “diceless”. I’d done that with Amber before and had been dissatisfied with the results. Instead I used a resolution system based on a character card deck. I won’t go into the details, but everyone had their own deck, with results tuned to their abilities, special weirdness cards made especially based on their personalities and some other odd result things. I’d used it before for the Crowsmantle game and for a Swashbuckling game I’d done for Armageddon. It worked pretty OK, but because the game was 95% discussion, event and description and maybe 5% combat the cards were less important. They were amusingly fun especially when certain strange cards kept coming up.
*I had everyone come up with character concepts of normal people, but with two things. First, they all had to be either orphans or adopted. Originally I’d thought to make their true fathers and heritage a subplot for the game (as I’d done in another game). However, that ended up being beside the point and pinning that down would have been too concrete so I let it drop. Second, they had to come up with a special thing for their character. Lizbette was a messenger and “knew” the city. Because of that I tried to describe the areas more fully in the game. Eventually from this I ended up making the city itself and its “state” stranger and more metaphorical. I did this in two ways. A) everyone in City of Ocean knew about all the strange stuff, but somehow it didn’t translate to the rest of the world (they figured this out eventually when they tried to tell someone in NY about a cultic ascension over the phone…they just couldn’t get what the players were saying). B) the city itself became a character (or vice versa…hard to explain). Maya made up a character who was focused on names and naming. From that I tried to make most NPCs have interesting or significant names: the old investigation group all had names that were variants on Paul (Pavel, Paolo, etc.), allies would have names that were variants on Alan (Allen, Alewine, Alain, etc.), bad guys had ones as variants on Peter, plus lots of other names were either strange or were taken from historical or literary references. Lei had a character involved with the arts. That led me to develop a plot were he had to organize a museum display for a traveling exhibition based around the Grail mythology in its various forms (think of something like the King Tut or Monet exhibits).
*By this point I’d decided that one of the concepts in the game would be about restarting reality. Unknown Armies has an idea where when the 333 archetypes are filled, then the world restarts. I decided that the Throne bad guy would be trying to do this artificially. He would be severing heads and connecting them to computer programs to program people who would follow these archetypes. At first I thought this would be a fairly literal investigation thing, but it ended up falling to the background until much later in the game. Because I was determined to let the players set the agenda, I tried to let go of ideas that sounded really cool to me, but that the players didn’t follow up on. Instead, I just shoveled more stuff on and watched to see what stuck.
*In the first session I did individual scenes with the players in which they received notes about coming to meet at the lawyers’ office. In each scene, there was a fish—Lizbette was buying one, Lei was watching kids play Go Fish and one dropped out of the sky at Maya’s feet. Quite honestly I thought it was a great image. What did it mean? At the time I didn’t know. But I put it in. My point in the game would be to add these details in—some pre-planned and some on the fly and let the game go. I would come up with explanations later. The tension between these competing explanations and what the characters did would be the theme of the story. I also had it in my head at that point that the group had already done all of this (i.e. the campaign) once, but had failed—as a result the world had broken. They wouldn’t know it but they would be replaying everything. That resulted in them having some glimpses into other paths throughout the game. For example when they arrived to get their legacy, there was a fourth person there who managed to get into a fight with them. Then, just as it got heated, the scene restarted. The three PCs remembered everything, but now there was no fourth person.
*Another detail that I had at this point was the idea of a set of serial murders called the Carpenter Killings. I wouldn’t give the players all of the details about them, but they would be some kind of message from the future or indication of the breakdown in reality. It was one of those cases where I had an idea that I would reference in passing and then if they decided to follow up on it, it would become significant—as it eventually did. That was tough to do but I think made for a very different game.
*Having three players was great but also tough. In the last year of the game, Lei (Laeoch) had to quit because his schedule was screwy. We’d had a number of blown sessions before that and it had started to hurt the campaign. With that few players, the interactions with each other and with the NPCs became really important. Story was much more vital than conflict and combat was rare. However I recommend trying games with small groups like this, especially if you can find dedicated players willing to explore the story.
AUZUMEL REPLIES:
Hmmm, as one of the players, I have to say that CoO was entirely unlike any other game I'd ever played in.
First, it's not like we knew that what was important was what we paid attention to. So, I'm a careful player and poor Lizbette was even more detail-oriented than me (tough when your character pushes you to work harder than you would normally!). So for me, I saw all these things happening and we weren't following up on 'em. It was driving me crazy. Tormenting Lizbette with things that still had to be resolved was a fairly major portion of every session, I swear. Needless to say, there was a level of nervous exhaustion that set in after a while there.
Sometimes it really bothered me when I'd try to follow up on something, get nothing worthwhile and some other character just hanging out would get a veritable banquet of information dropped on their toes--and then they'd just shrug. *sigh* After a while, I gave up on being annoyed. It was just how the game was. Nothing was direct and effort did not have a direct coorelation with results in the short term. Maybe in the long term, but definitely not on the day-to-day logs. Looking back, I see that what the attention to detail did do was drive back most of the encounters with the wierdness. Lizbette's life was a lot less messed up and strange than her comrades' lives were...but she fretted for them too.
It was a hard game too--because I'm accustomed to Edige slowing down and feeding information over and over so that everyone at the table has a few chances to get it. This wasn't like that. At all. Hell, sometimes when I'd refer back to something that happened earlier in the game, Edige would have forgotten and no one would be sure and there'd be much paging back through notes. I mean, there was a lot out there and sometimes the game felt like watching Uzimaki and trying to catch all the spirals on the screen.
There were really great NPCs in the game. I mean, fabulous. Stories as tragic as the world can manage--and I still tear up when I think of some of them. Yeager Allen, especially. Sheesh.
There was constant variety and changes in pace. You'd never know where you were going to end up in any given session. But overall, it was a story about semi-normal people trying to figure out how to get by in a very not-normal world. We didn't try to re-normalize it--we just tried to stay out of big trouble and not cause too much harm. That was the scariest thing in the game--how easy it was to cause terrible things to happen...a moment of negligence, inattention or selfishness and some poor bystander would get the worst of it.
I loved CoO. Loved it completely--even when I was gnashing my teeth in frustration. It makes me a little sad that it's not a trick that Edige can quite pull again--we really didn't catch on that it was a sly wink at PC-centrism until the very last session, when he told us straight out. Of course, the players were the least PC-centric of all Edige's players tho--LDB & I are just not accustomed to thinking of ourselves or our characters as the center of the world. When we heard the news, we literally both blurted out, 'Huh? No way!'
The card system worked fine because the game was mostly observation, social interactions, research and deduction. The battles were handled perfectly fine with the cards--especially because Maya always pulled that KickAss! card when she was intent on kicking ass. The special cards were the best part, definitely. Mystery Machine? *groan* The Immaculate Lizbette? *heh* Just funny and satisfying when the right card came up for the right situation....'You are Here' came up as we were trying to shift the city center away from the Throne Center---I mean, how lucky was that?
LIL' DEVILBIRD REPLIES:
I've been thinking about this, and I don't even know where to begin.
How fitting...
Hm. Let's see -- what were the most memorable points of the game?
1. The NPCs. Edige has a gift for creating NPCs who are actually characters, not just props. Aside from the clever (and sometimes unfortunate) names for almost every person we encountered, there were some NPCs in this game who really just stole the show in some respects. Not because they overshadowed the PCs -- Maya's attention-hogging would only permit her good friend Pan to do that -- but because they truly were unique and odd people. And I mean this about the bad guys as well as the good. There were no cookie-cutter NPCs in the City of Ocean.
Some of the more memorable ones: flamboyant Pan, Maya's best friend; Br. Peter Praetorius, a demon-possessed Inquisitor; Tad Bizzaro, who had no imagination but did possess an amazingly detailed memory and photograph-like art skills; Warner Alain, the (formerly) one-armed Olympic rifleman and cobbler who was sure we were going to get him killed; Yeager Allen, a tragic devil wrestler; Jeffrey Paolo, an enigmatic and truly creepy adversary; the Seneschal, Garzhargen and Weasel (or was it Rabbit?), and Baku Revo from the Black Tower world; the Andalusian Dog, who made an appearance and ate all our brownies; (and speaking of brownies) the impeccably dressed Isaac, who knew all kinds of ritual magic but lost his memory when he tried to talk about it, was from another world shard, and thought we were eating real brownies; Hollo Ting, the bane of Lizbette's existence, but one of those working on climbing the Merchant Archetype ladder; Robert Throne, whose divine Aphasia was so scary and thick he blew up a phone from the other end; Grace Alewine, Lizbet's stoic myrmiddon and another of those climbing the Archetype ladder; Nick Static, who wreaked havoc with magic and ate applesauce like people breath air, the Folding Man, who eventually helped rescue Grace from the cage of thorns, Castonegro, the evil Sorceror (and the relatively benign Buddha of Margate), the fallen gods... the list goes on and on. There are so many more distince characters that I remember, but have forgotten the names, now.
2. The City of Ocean itself. Whether we were in our version of City of Ocean, or the Black Tower world, or Isaac's shard -- the landscape around us was a magical entity in its own right, full of significant names, strangely reminiscent features, and a life of its own. Still, nothing compared to talking to the City on speakerphone, asking it's name, and hearing the grand litany of the eternal City (Nochet, Tanelorn, Silverbrook, etc.), and then realizing that you are one of the Seven Gods of the City.
3. The immense number of story possibilities within the game, and the responsiveness of the GM. Now that I look back at the sheer overload of information and possibilities, and the way the GM listened carefully to the way we phrased things, I can see places where he picked up on what interested us and ran with it.
As Auzumel said, we were surprised to find out how much of the game we had actually directed, but there were signs earlier on. For example, when we were doing something potentially important -- such as Maya using the Name of Castronegro's demon against it and punching it to get away; saving the calf from the slaughterhouse; or using Lizbet's "You Are Here" knack to find someone -- Edige sometimes made us repeat the description of our action. If Lizbet said, "I'm going to try to find Lei using my knack," the result would be much weaker and less immediate than if Lizbet said, "I AM going to find Lei, using my knack." It was all in the wording.
4. The way our characters' "knacks" (Names, navigating the City, aesthetic senses) were incorporated into the game early-on and became key aspects of both the characters and the campaign. Maya could "see" True Names -- when she looked at the Name of any of her companion heirs, the Name was much too big to see, as if she were trying to read a huge billboard with her face pressed against the sign. And if the Name was that big, and we all seemed to share it, it had to be the Name of the City, from Maya's perspective. (Then again, everything was the City, from the perspective of Maya, Lei and Lizbet.)
5. When Laeoch left the game, his character Lei fell into the background of the story, but was still around. Lei had always been connected to the Carpenter killings, which seemed to be progressing backward in time (getting sloppier instead of more skilled, etc.), and there came a point at which we discovered that Lei had gone into the House of Renunciation the first time we had done this, in order to send us the message that became warped and garbled and manifested as the killings. We were shown a vision of death and had a chance to stop it, thereby changing the world again. I loved the fact that Lei wasn't just dropped from the story. He still had a purpose, and when his character did "reboot" and drop from the Seven God heirs, it was because we had finally gotten the message and changed the path away from the previous trainwreck.
6. As Auzumel said, the sheer amount of information was bewildering, tantalizing, frustrating, and unlike anything I'd ever seen in a game. We kept notes as best as we could -- I went through two notebooks, myself -- but I was always discovering I had missed noting an incident, or a connection I should've made, or a detail that changed my perception of the event/person/whatever. And like Auz said, even Edige forgot the djinn in the bottle we found at the flea market, so it wasn't just the players. I think I literally felt lost in the game for the majority of the campaign -- maybe until the last two episodes -- but it still managed to be fun.
7. Also as Auz said, the card system worked really well for this game. The responsibility was on the player to interpret the outcome of the draw -- so if you drew a crappy result, you could still try to make the outcome less painful or embarrassing. Which we often forgot. The luck of the cards was incredible, too -- those special cards kept coming up at just the right moment. I still laugh when I think of Lei's uber-weirdness-magnet Mystery Machine card.
And now for some musings and unanswered questions, if the GM is so inclined...
8. We ate a god and a sacrifical calf, and had halos and a purple feathered-serpent aura after that. I always wondered what would've happened if we had eaten more of the gods and angels that had fallen to earth after we shook them out of heaven.
9. Did we ever find the Carpenter victim that was connected to the disappearance of Maya's house? Who was it? I don't remember doing so, and if we didn't, why not?
10. Was Darren Peters set up to be a bad guy? Or was he a red herring?
11. Who really killed Maria Legatti? She was found in a ditch, wasn't she? I remember someone from the Church had come looking for her and indicated Lei was under suspicion for murder...
12. Who kidnapped Lei, and why couldn't he say 3, 6, or 9 after they drove the cut nail into his head?
EDIGE23 NOTES:
I don't think I ever really answered those questions for her.
Monday, April 6, 2009
Matrix Arguments
I may have talked about some of this before, but I'd like to go back to the idea of Matrix Arguments briefly. I mentioned some games that radically reshaped my thinking about games (and I have another post on that eventually). One of these games was more of a concept than a formal game. For a few years I managed a local game con in one form or another. Usually we had a designer named Chris Engle volunteer and run things. I'm not sure how people knew him, but his games were always a hit. I'd see him at other conventions as well. I know Dusty played with Chris Engle and maybe there's some connection on that end. In any case, I never played those, but eventually a sketch version of some of the rules came into my hands. His system, called a Matrix Game, builds around the idea that the shared narrative of the rpg actually has the form of a series of arguments-- I state that X is going to happen, then show how the system supports that argument, the GM rules, dice are rolled and the situation advances. He has a number of games books that elaborate these ideas and there's more to it, but I'll talk about what I came away with from this.
I began by adapting some of those ideas for a Third Continent game which I knew would focus on building, the Pillar of Fire campaign I mentioned earlier. The group would be the fragments of a mercenary company, trying to rebuild and eventually take revenge on the people who sold them down the river (a classic theme I reused in my Black Company/Planescape game). We used Rolemaster at the time, which had many contradictory systems for handling large scale task resolution. So I decided to use elements of the Matrix system to handle the large scale plots and plans. It looked essentially something like this.
Objective: Stated goal for what the characters want to achieve long term
Method: The basic plan the characters want to undertake to do achieve this
Three Supporting Statements: Three things the group can bring to bear to actually carry that out.
As a GM I'd have them put those together, then I'd rate the relative strength of those support statements, take into consideration the difficulty of the task involved and have them make a roll. Based on that I'd determine success or failure, quality, time involved and so on.
As an example
Objective: We want recruit like-minded converts to our cause in the city
Method: Establishing a fraternal organization that covers our true purposes but draws in people to be screened.
Support #1: Balamon has extraordinarily strong social skills plus magics to supplement this
Support #2: We have a goodly supply of money to pour into the project
Support #3: We'll craft a particularly appealing set of precepts that will play on peoples egos, since the characters have a strong religious background we have experience in proselytizing.
Depending on the area, that might be more or less difficult. The choice of supporting statements comes into play in that, as a GM, I know who the lead person is, I know that there's a made up “code” they've come up with that I might use later on. So generally, I consider the strength, if it fits with what's been going on, and if I think they've actually put enough time and effort (in game) into a project to get it off the ground.
That's a fairly broad-scale example. Matrix arguments can also be used on a smaller scale. They're not as formal in that case and can serve an additional purpose for a player. Sometimes a player doesn't want to play out a particular scene or event at the table, but they still want to accomplish something. Or alternately, their character possesses skills that they don't feel they can adequately narrate at the table. I recall the old Legend of the Five Rings Gamemaster's Book had a nice section on this last point. Supposing you have two people playing Courtiers, both with equal skills. Let's say that one player's more comfortable with the back and forth banter at the table, while another gets tongue-tied when put on the spot. Part of the GM's obligation should be to recognize those divisions and help level the playing field. You shouldn't necessarily penalize the articulate player, but you should give the less articulate player another means to demonstrate that they have equal social skills-- as measured by the game system. In a case like this you can use a Martix argument.
Objective: I want to ingratiate myself with the Daimyo of the Winter Court
Method: I'll do this by aiding and befriending those persons who he seems to have faith in
Support #1: I have good skills in Human Perception and Court Lore-- allowing me to identify those people
Support #2: I have an existing network of contacts I can use to find out what these people need and to possibly obtain those things
Support #3: I have strong oratory skills, which I'll use to praise those people discreetly and gain their trust.
Again, the level of concrete detail can vary from argument to argument. The more specific the supporting statements, the more I generally give the benefit of the doubt. The trick, as a GM, is that I want to be convinced of the validity of these things. Examples of other small scale things which people might use a Matrix argument for: seduction, setting up an information network, building something, writing a book, creating a business, researching a field in depth, gossip mongering, making a reputation, and so on.
So to give a final example, taken at least a little bit from a conversation I'm having with Will in the Changeling game.
Objective: I want to start a club on campus
Now let me stop there and note that the objective describes the end reality a character is working towards. Another version of that objective might look like this: I want to gain a social position on campus by starting and leading a club. Keep in mind how that stated objective shapes what follows.
Method: Find a niche that no one has exploited
Support #1: I know Kay Ballentine, plus a few other older students on campus who have been here for some time. I can get from them what might be an area no one else has come up with.
Support #2: My Fairest skills have a general social application, but also the lives of the Court is always about finding the next hot thing. I can apply that here.
Support #3: I've been a leader before, and that experience should show me the best way to get both student and administration support.
That's just an example off the top of my head, and probably not a great one. These kinds of arguments can be useful for players who look at the mass of information and NPCs in a game and aren't sure where to start. Stating your objective up front and then negotiating with the GM provides a short-hand that allows you to actually use your character's skills at the same time as it doesn't reduce everything to “make a roll.”
I began by adapting some of those ideas for a Third Continent game which I knew would focus on building, the Pillar of Fire campaign I mentioned earlier. The group would be the fragments of a mercenary company, trying to rebuild and eventually take revenge on the people who sold them down the river (a classic theme I reused in my Black Company/Planescape game). We used Rolemaster at the time, which had many contradictory systems for handling large scale task resolution. So I decided to use elements of the Matrix system to handle the large scale plots and plans. It looked essentially something like this.
Objective: Stated goal for what the characters want to achieve long term
Method: The basic plan the characters want to undertake to do achieve this
Three Supporting Statements: Three things the group can bring to bear to actually carry that out.
As a GM I'd have them put those together, then I'd rate the relative strength of those support statements, take into consideration the difficulty of the task involved and have them make a roll. Based on that I'd determine success or failure, quality, time involved and so on.
As an example
Objective: We want recruit like-minded converts to our cause in the city
Method: Establishing a fraternal organization that covers our true purposes but draws in people to be screened.
Support #1: Balamon has extraordinarily strong social skills plus magics to supplement this
Support #2: We have a goodly supply of money to pour into the project
Support #3: We'll craft a particularly appealing set of precepts that will play on peoples egos, since the characters have a strong religious background we have experience in proselytizing.
Depending on the area, that might be more or less difficult. The choice of supporting statements comes into play in that, as a GM, I know who the lead person is, I know that there's a made up “code” they've come up with that I might use later on. So generally, I consider the strength, if it fits with what's been going on, and if I think they've actually put enough time and effort (in game) into a project to get it off the ground.
That's a fairly broad-scale example. Matrix arguments can also be used on a smaller scale. They're not as formal in that case and can serve an additional purpose for a player. Sometimes a player doesn't want to play out a particular scene or event at the table, but they still want to accomplish something. Or alternately, their character possesses skills that they don't feel they can adequately narrate at the table. I recall the old Legend of the Five Rings Gamemaster's Book had a nice section on this last point. Supposing you have two people playing Courtiers, both with equal skills. Let's say that one player's more comfortable with the back and forth banter at the table, while another gets tongue-tied when put on the spot. Part of the GM's obligation should be to recognize those divisions and help level the playing field. You shouldn't necessarily penalize the articulate player, but you should give the less articulate player another means to demonstrate that they have equal social skills-- as measured by the game system. In a case like this you can use a Martix argument.
Objective: I want to ingratiate myself with the Daimyo of the Winter Court
Method: I'll do this by aiding and befriending those persons who he seems to have faith in
Support #1: I have good skills in Human Perception and Court Lore-- allowing me to identify those people
Support #2: I have an existing network of contacts I can use to find out what these people need and to possibly obtain those things
Support #3: I have strong oratory skills, which I'll use to praise those people discreetly and gain their trust.
Again, the level of concrete detail can vary from argument to argument. The more specific the supporting statements, the more I generally give the benefit of the doubt. The trick, as a GM, is that I want to be convinced of the validity of these things. Examples of other small scale things which people might use a Matrix argument for: seduction, setting up an information network, building something, writing a book, creating a business, researching a field in depth, gossip mongering, making a reputation, and so on.
So to give a final example, taken at least a little bit from a conversation I'm having with Will in the Changeling game.
Objective: I want to start a club on campus
Now let me stop there and note that the objective describes the end reality a character is working towards. Another version of that objective might look like this: I want to gain a social position on campus by starting and leading a club. Keep in mind how that stated objective shapes what follows.
Method: Find a niche that no one has exploited
Support #1: I know Kay Ballentine, plus a few other older students on campus who have been here for some time. I can get from them what might be an area no one else has come up with.
Support #2: My Fairest skills have a general social application, but also the lives of the Court is always about finding the next hot thing. I can apply that here.
Support #3: I've been a leader before, and that experience should show me the best way to get both student and administration support.
That's just an example off the top of my head, and probably not a great one. These kinds of arguments can be useful for players who look at the mass of information and NPCs in a game and aren't sure where to start. Stating your objective up front and then negotiating with the GM provides a short-hand that allows you to actually use your character's skills at the same time as it doesn't reduce everything to “make a roll.”
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)