[Doctor Xaos] Biggest rule

[Ron Edwards]

From the latest accounts of playtesting making their way to me by email, here, and elsewhere ... clearly a widespread problem is the importance of and failure to Shut. The Fuck. Up.

OK, maybe that's too mean, but seriously, the rule to stick to just a sentence or two is there for a reason. If you know all of Doctor Xaos' motivations and back-story, there's nothing for Portrait Moments to show. And Portrait Moments feed directly into the narration of the next person to play the character; they're a really big deal. If you describe a hero's powers in minute detail upon introduction, they're not fun to play, they don't return, and the whole engine of learning to like some or all of the heroes is absent.

It's baffling me. I say it over and over in the rules. Do I have to designate a player to be STFU man/woman?

[Eero Tuovinen]

A STFU officer will only work if it is fun and creatively rewarding to execute the function. Perhaps if you can find a way to make shutting up actively rewarding, it'll be easier for players to regulate themselves and remember to exercise restraint. Merely advising them to do so is, of course, just as effective as the earnest suggestions towards character roleplaying you find in WW rulebooks :D

The three psychological factors in the game that seem to me to encourage thorough narratives the most:
* This kind of story establishing game directly rewards a player for utilizing the spotlight in bold, definitive strokes: if you can, you naturally want to be the one who lays out what is really going on. For one thing, it saves you from the lurking danger of not having the story cohere at all, so it is natural for a player who can to establish, instead of leaving mere possibilities in their wake. Being understood by the other players is the ultimate reward, and being thorough and definitive is the way to have your material be understood and appreciated.
* The genre of superheroes is for many people fraught with cheese; every creative move taken in the game is, in a way, being judged in literary terms. Is it sufficiently earnest, sufficiently adult, how much it relies on existing tropes, how current to modern concerns it is, and so on. This encourages thorough literary performance in front of your peers in an effort to establish yourself as a master of the form in a way that I believe would not be the case with some other genres.
* The episode structure rests upon the premise that anybody at any time may plop down their melds and end the episode; this will often happen after you've personally only gotten one or two turns. With this ticking timer, it seems natural to me that players will rather hasten towards more immediate and thorough narratives instead of risking the prospect that their idea will not have time to get developed before the episode ends.

My experience so far (one game played, another in waiting mode until Ropecon season goes away in a couple of weeks) is that a first play-through will absolutely stumble on this issue, but that it is only a problem in that it undermines the Portrait Moments procedure (and the hero development to some small degree); otherwise the game runs fine, if perhaps somewhat slowly, even without paying any special attention to the thoroughness and focus of narrative. Most importantly, it is relatively easy to see what you're doing wrong once you're doing it - I figured out that we had a somewhat overexposed Doctor Xaos after the first Portrait Moment myself, for example.

I think that probably the most effective strictly pedagogical approach, even though cumbersome, would be to establish some explicit no-go areas or other restraint for the Doctor Xaos creation brainstorming. For example, expand the communication of the cheese rule, which is satisfactorily explained and motivated in a way that players actually seem to rely on it (at least we did); give it a partner rule about not spoiling the mystery, or something like that. Once you establish the concept of not spoiling the mystery with Doctor Xaos, it is easy to invoke the rule later when it comes to heroes and general episode narration and wherever you might need it, just like you invoke the cheese rule (or rather, the lack of it) when it comes to the minor villains and heroes.

I guess you could also construct a mechanical device of some sort to encourage and enforce the pacing, although I would understand if that would feel unsatisfactory in terms of mechanical elegance. Something where the players write out "secrets" for Doctor Xaos in advance and put them in a hat would do the job of establishing a central mystery in advance, and would thus discourage early exposition, but it'd also be pretty cumbersome a fix for something that ultimately amounts to playing skill.

Philosophically speaking, Zombie Cinema has similar playing skill features where the game simply works better if you do things this way instead of that way; my choice in terms of rules structuring and pedagogy was minimalistic, I'd let people play however they would for their first game, and presumably they'd see what they did wrong and learn from it, leaving them the satisfaction of figuring it out for themselves. This works to an extent in that at least the game is easy to approach, and if you like that sort of thing you're likely to figure out the best practices for your second game. Sort of a sink or swim approach, I'm giving you the guitar but it's up to you to learn how to play.

[Ron Edwards]

I don't agree with your assessment. What you describe sounds to me like a bunch of wannabe novelists or Alan Moores who don't trust one another enough to listen and riff, rather than fill in space with their incessant attempt to dominate.

In my experience of the last few games, all that's needed is one person who says, (i) "Keep it short," and (2) "That's enough," and (3) "Finish it." (that last is for people who keep saying, "I fly at the machine," or "I try to hit him.") If someone does that a little bit during the first Episode, then it's all clear for everyone for the rest of the game.