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[S/Lay w/Me] The lover in danger

Started by Moreno R., August 14, 2013, 02:10:00 PM

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Moreno R.

I am about to play S/Lay w/Me this evening so I am reading all the threads about the game here, and I have some rules questions. This is the first.

From this post: http://indie-rpgs.com/adept/index.php?topic=118.msg1116#msg1116

QuoteRed saw that Sonia was right under Sssar's fall, about to be crushed. He grabbed her by an arm and ran for a small gallery, too small for Sssar. The snake fell and hissed at the entrance of the gallery, trying to slip in. Red walked with Sonia farther in the gallery, trying to find a way out. When things seemed to calm a bit, he took some time to examine the text on the tablet. Sonia was afraid, he promised her he would take her with him. Dave managed to investigate on his goal plus he made a promise to Sonia, so this time he had two dice to roll and got lucky: double 6.

And to our mutual surprise, Dave realized that he could end the conflict now by asking me to reroll my two dice, which I did. His sum was 15, with four dice, so of course there was no way I could beat him. I rolled 3 and 4, and Dave could only achieve one secondary objective. At this point we had no idea if we were supposed to choose the outcome right now, or to keep playing until Dave was in a position to choose between several outcomes. We decided to choose at once: of course Red would get the tablet, having the highest sum on the dice, but he would also heal or avoid any wound from Sssar. Sonia would die but not the monster.

But must Sonia really die?

Not in that specific game (it's a creative decision of the players for their own game), but in general. I read in the section about the post-match accomplishments:
Save someone in danger, including the Lover (if the Lover is indeed at risk) / Otherwise, this person dies

And:
Make sure that the Lover's fate is accounted for by choosing any one of the same parameters as the Lover dice during the Match,
to repeat:
Abandon him or her to a grim fate / Bring him or her with you when you leave / Leave alone gracefully / Stay there with him or her
Your decision about the Lover during the Climax is wholly unconstrained by dice outcome or previous events, but you must choose one of the listed options.


So, the life of the Lover is NOT put at risk by default, and if someone don't actively describe her in danger, the "you" player can decide her fate freely from that list without worrying about dice.

If, instead, she is in danger, the "You" player has to "spend" an accomplishment (2 dice) to save her.

This is clear by the rules, I think. What it's not clear is what do we mean with "danger".

In the actual play I used as an example, she is not in immediate danger. She and the "You" character are reading the text on a table, "When things seemed to calm a bit". She is afraid for her future when Red will go away, but he reassure her promising to take her with him. She is afraid of a possible danger. Does this means that she is in danger?

From reading the actual play, my take is that she was not in danger, but I wasn't at the table with the players, I don't know. In any case, I suppose that it's a judgment call for the players.

But let's say that we are playing that scene, and when the "you" player choose the accomplishment, he does not think to "save her" because he don't think she is in danger. The "I" player perceive that she is instead in danger, and seeing that she was not "saved", he think that she will die in the following "goes"

After that they start with the "goes", one thinking that she will come out alive, the other not.

What is the solution of this difference?
1) when one of the two does something that show the difference in how they perceived the situation, they talk and they decide what is the right interpretation. (if she lives or die) Or...
2) as for the (1) but the "you" player can change the way he did spent his/her dice from the match, or...
2) the first one that says something definitive with his/her narration ("and she is riding with me when I go away", or "the arrow misses you and hit her in the neck, killing her" or something like that) "make it happen", the other has to build on the narration and remember to be more clear next time.
3) The "real" interpretation is the one of the "You" player.
4) The "real" interpretation is the one of the "I" player.
5) The "real" interpretation is the one of the "I" player, but the "You" player can change the way he/she did spent the coin, retroactively..

Eero Tuovinen

The way I've played this (and I agree that it is a little conundrum) is that insofar as the players have any uncertainty about what the stakes of the story are, they can discuss it during the Climax and nail down the particulars. In other words, "You" can ask "I" whether the Lover is in danger in his opinion, and "I" tells his opinion. This goes for the "anything else you want to accomplish" one, too: sometimes you just need to know the other player's position on the matter to know whether you need to spend a success on securing it, or not. Effectively, the players can introduce outlying uncertainties such as whether the Lover is in danger at this point, and resolve them pre-emptively, so as to make it possible to make informed decisions about how to spend the successes.

The reason that these options require that bit of dialogue is basically because they're optional, and therefore not choosing them does not automatically lock down the opposite outcome, like the "succeed in Goal", "protect from harm" and "slay Monster" options do. One could play these as uncertain by nature, but it'd be awkward in my judgement - the game can't work with an asymmetric uncertainty where you might waste one of the sparse successes to block an outcome nobody was intending to introduce anyway, or not spend a success and then find out that you can't get something you assumed, but the other player wants to block.

Ron Edwards

That is a very, very good question. Your reading of the rules is precisely correct, so I can get right into the question itself.

Most importantly, "in danger or not" should be explicit at the point of Climax and honored as such afterwards.

Most of your question deals with that possibly breaking down due to miscommunication. Obviously, the best solution is to avoid it in the first place, but if you find out during play that such a miscommunication happened, then the "you" player's interpretation stands (your #3 which is actually fourth on your list). My reasoning is that that this player has already committed to the single and most significant exercise of currency in the game, and therefore dialing back on that to any degree undermines the entire adventure.

However, I think the issue is bigger than merely miscommunication. I've been thinking about this and whether it needs some textual attention since reviewing Gregor and Joe's game in [S/Lay w/Me] the Tome of Mechanical Wonders. In that game, Joe included killing the Monster and saving the Lover (she was in fact in danger in that case), but during the events after the Climax, Gregor threatened the life of another NPC whom Joe valued.

The way Gregor wrote about the adventure, Joe considered that it might have been better if he'd not chosen to kill the Monster and bought "save this person" (or rather, bought it twice) to have on hold in the case of such an event.

In reading this, although I didn't make a big deal of it at the time, I realized that I didn't want anyone buying outcomes with Good Dice in case of new developments. I wanted pretty much all the dramatic outcomes locked down in broad strokes at the Climax except for the Lover's fate, without curve balls showing up and saying, "Ah ha, you should have spent Good Dice to keep this from happening, just in case it did, as it has in fact done!"

Therefore I'll set aside the question of miscommunication and abstract the question a bit further than you did: can the Lover, any other NPC, or some entity (like "the town") be placed at new risk during post-Climax play?

My take is not. That is, if "new" is understood to be entirely novel. If, for example, a Lover is at risk from some source at the point of Climax, but that source is negated by one or another set of events, then he or she could be put at risk again, and so basically kept at risk so the Good Dice spent (or not) for him or her still mean something ... that's not what I'm talking about. I'm saying that if the Lover seems to be clear of danger at the point of Climax, then treat that as his or her condition throughout the rest of play. The same goes for other characters who have become more than just furniture, or entities that can be risked or saved ("the town").

Best, Ron

P.S. Good call & phrasing, Eero.