[Circle of Hands 1.1] Playtest: Joan of Drikstag

[John W]

Hi all,

We played my Joan of Drikstag (click) scenario, in which a young girl (Ada) has manifested black magic to save her village, and created an Rbaja zone in the process.  The chief wants to use her to defend the village in future.  Most of the villagers are afraid of her, and want to rebuild the village away from the Rbaja zone.  Ada and her family just want to be left alone.  There is also a pronounced inequality of wealth between the gentry and the peasants of Drikstag.

Characters:
Werther (Peter), an entertainer (low) and wizard.  Had been played once before, and had 2 tallies.
Baldur (Christian), a gentry (martial high).  Had been played once before.
Bernhard (Mitch), an outdoorsman.

How it played out: we went through the whole adventure without any combat.  This was fun at first, but eventually became frustrating for the players of the two PCs with low Charm scores.
The Circle knights, on arrival, divided up and each pursued their proper social role at different locations in the village, which allowed me to quickly introduce the village and its principle characters.  Some Charm rolls were successful and some weren't.  I played the failed rolls as indicating not instant hatred, but as lingering mistrust.  However, the characters who failed their Charm rolls were still offered room and board, since they had contributed to village life according to their social ranks.  As it happened, our three PCs were from three different social levels, and so ate and slept with three different families from three different social classes, which again made the game very interesting and varied.

The knights conferred at one point.  They were most concerned about the ten year old girl who might be an Rbaja wizard (I agree this would be Circle knight's main concern).  One knight advocated for busting out some black magic, framing Ada, and killing her to "protect" the village.  He was out-voted by the other two, who wanted to convince her to return to Rolke with them to train as a wizard with the Circle of Hands.  This was the plan that they agreed on.

There was a funny moment when Baldur (who had failed his C roll with the chief) proposes the plan.  The chief at first refuses to give up his best defensive asset, this little girl whom he is convinced will continue to protect the village with her magic.  Then, he misinterprets what Baldur is offering, and "agrees" with Baldur that the thing to do is to take the fight to their enemies, with Ada in the vanguard!  The chief fixates on this plan and becomes very difficult to convince otherwise.

Charming moment: Werther, the wizard and entertainer, summons an imp to show Ada that he too can do black magic.  Ada barely holds back screams of terror, but because Werther had succeeded on his Charm roll with her, she holds herself together.  Werther has the imp balance on an apple, and then "walk" across the table on the rolling apple, like a clown walking on a big ball, and using a spoon as a balancing staff.  He soon has the girl giggling in spite of herself.

There was a tense moment when Ada's father used the Rbaja zone to Curse the chief, and the chief sussed out his detractor and nearly killed him for it.  But in the end, the knights convinced the chief to let Ada and her family go to Rolke, in exchange for a Circle-knight's presence in Drikstag until the source of the raids could be dealt with.

So, in the fiction, everything made sense.  The knights were proud to have solved this problem without violence.  But at the player level, the two players of low-Charm characters eventually became useless and felt marginalized towards the end of the night.  The high-Charm character basically soloed the last 30 minutes of the session as, even in-fiction, the other two knights deferred to him.  The following questions and suggestions were raised:
•   a re-roll of the C vs.12 roll with an NPC should be possible after some time or after weighty events of some kind;
•   can a PC ever have "advantage" on a Charm roll (due to exceptional circumstances) which, being outside of combat, means automatic success?
•   what are a PC's options to do anything useful after a failed Charm roll?
•   the high-charm character gets a lot more spotlight; this would be an issue even in a session that included some combat;
•   one player was frustrated by not only the fact that he had picked a highly martial character which he didn't really get to use, but that he would be prevented from choosing this character in our next session and trying again.  He doesn't like the rule that you can't play the same character twice in a row. 

I could play the game's advocate to some of these points, but instead of being defensive I thought I would just accept the feedback and pass it on without comment, as potentially the most useful thing I could do as a playtester.

If you have any questions about the session, go ahead and ask.  And I'd be interested to hear any response to the above points.  Thanks.

All the best,
-John

[Ron Edwards]

Those are very good points about Charm. I've experimented with both re-rolls and advantage dice, and cut them down from the rules due to basically making all social phenomena into a walk-through. But I do think that stalling out characters permanently isn't a good thing either, so it's time to consider options. So, please thank your players for me specifically for that, and for the "dammit still playtesting when does this get fun" part.

The re-roll is probably the way to go. My only trouble with that is (i) is it really a roll? After all, if you change stuff so drastically that a re-roll is warranted, then why not just give it to the character at that point? It seems he or she has earned more than merely a chance to fail.

As a long-term consideration, did either character improve his or her Charm following the adventure? That's what I've observed in similar situations, as in the Forge Midwest game, after Megan's character's failed Charm rolls spiraled her into more and more trouble. If the group is having enough fun with the game, then I hope that low Charm characters get beefed up - it also amuses me that people would focus on the stepchild of D&D characteristics because they realize how important it is.

[John W]

Further thoughts after sleeping on it:

I don't think I played the NPCs sticky enough.  They all should have been more aggressive about recruiting the PCs to their agendas.  If I'd done that, then the social class war would have come out of the background and into play (it hadn't), and the untrusting and hostile NPCs would have pushed the PCs harder, maybe leading to a physical confrontation.  The ultimate reward for a martial character's failed Charm rolls should be that things devolve into a fight.  Not really a "reward," but: what a low-Charm high-BQ character can't achieve one way, he can achieve the other way.  That way, the game doesn't stay at the social-conflict level where the low-Charm PCs feel useless.

I agree that a PC should be able to eventually move past a failed Charm roll and win over a character with exceptional actions; and that, at that point, no roll is necessary, just give it to them.  I can think of at least one instance last night when I should have let that happen.  And, if the players had known this was possible, then it wouldn't have been so frustrating for them.

Oh, I meant to talk about how we ended the game, since you've asked for details on that.  Once the PCs had negotiated a solution with all the major NPCs, we went immediately into post-game review, because the player of the martial character was busting to express his frustration (he had kindly held it back until that point).  We didn't even narrate or free-role-play a closing scene or epilogue.  We talked a bit about the logistics of how the knights would enact their promises to protect the village, deal with the raiders, and give Circle wizard training to a 10-year-old.  But mostly we talked about the game.

I'll pass along your thanks to the players.  Cheers,
-J

[Ron Edwards]

That post answers nearly all the questions I was going to ask! If you could show it to your players, I'd appreciate it too - I very much support the idea that a knight who's Charm-screwed is at least a hair's-breadth from violent problems. Vincent's advice in Apocalypse World to "look at your NPCs through the cross-hairs" applies perfectly to this game as well, and may be useful GM advice here.

Let's see ... are there any thoughts on the possible group-understanding or buy-in toward particular characters now that they've been played by divers* hands? I'm also thinking that "play a guy twice" may be an artifact of getting kind of screwed this particular time.

Best, Ron

* old-school spelling & meaning

[John W]

Hi Ron, I posed your question to the players via email, but no responses are forthcoming.  For my part, I think that 3 games was not really enough to feel the PCs in the pool evolve.  Werther and Baldur were used in our 2nd session, which went really well, which is probably why they got chosen for the 3rd session (by different players).  Also, both those characters had extreme rather than average scores (a 9 or 10, and some 2-3-4's), which may demonstrate a thing that I always say, that a character with some strengths and weaknesses is more interesting than an average character.  I see a lot of players (in playtest reports here) picking traits to shore up low scores, whereas I'd rather see players pick traits to supercharge high scores, or just to suit the player's character concept.  Weaknesses are just as fun as strengths.  A party full of average characters is going to be less exciting.

My players' oath to give me 3 sessions of playtesting is fulfilled.  I'll keep an eye on developments here, and hope to be able to playtest next big revision.

Cheers,
-J

[Mitch R]

I like the idea of not "owning" any one character.  It was also nice not being stuck with one set of skills, or one set of spells.  Playing a huge number of sessions, say, in D&D is great because you get to "work" on your character and bring it up to where you hope it will be to do what you want it to do - however, it has extreme disadvantages: you get bored/tired of playing the same character, you fantasize about playing other classes or races to see where you could take them, you only get a very monochromatic view of the world.

In the three games that we played, I used the outdoorsman that I created, then an entertainer (low)/wizard, and then I went back to my outdoorsman again.  I like the idea of being "forced" to play different characters, but I did tend to want to play characters that were familiar or had traits/attributes that I would like to play.

We never ended up advancing our characters (we talked about it, but with only three sessions there was never a desire to pump characters that we knew we weren't going to be using for any lengthy period).

So, it was nice not being tied to one character.  I rather enjoyed it.  Combine that with the "forced" role-playing in a particular profession and social class, and it really kept the fiction exciting and fresh.

- Mitch