[Anotherkind] Children of the Corn

[Jonathan Walton]

So we were hanging around IRC and Paganini wanted to play something, Josh was game, and I volunteered to GM.  We settled on Otherkind, specifically just the dice mechanic, which Vincent had recently reiterated on his blog.

I've been doing too much post-colonial stuff in my research, so I wasn't really up for tree-hugging forest creatures against the iron-bearing forces of human civilization, so I suggested that we turn things around.  The Otherkind live in these huge glistening cities and the humans are from the dark, unknown wastes beyond.  Deepest, darkest Peru.  That kind of thing.  So we had a sort of colonial Heart of Darkness feel going.  Pag was this orcish guy who'd had enough of the humans and was going to track down their leaders and kill them.  Josh was an anthropologist who wanted to study them before they came (y'know, like the huns) and destroyed the glistening cities.

We decided that Pag's ninja dude was in disguise as the scholar's servant, just so we could have this personal conflict waiting to happen.  And then, we were off.  The rest can be found in the log:

http://1001.indie-rpgs.com/anotherkind.txt

Play Summery:

Well, the bulk of play centered around the Tribe of Corn, this propietary state on the edge of the cities, where the humans had recently been raiding.  Our heroes show up, make some acquaintances, talk their way past the elders (giant sentiant stalks of corn), Pag's character gets recognized by an orc shaman from a rival tribe, they discover the humans just as a band begins to attack, a new friend of theirs gets captured by the humans and hauled off, and Pag's character (poor guy) gets beat up by some of those rival orcs.  When we decided to stop, they had effectively been exiled from the Corn community and were planning to go after the humans on their own, in the hopes of finding their friend still alive.

Really, the deliciousness came in three varieties.  First, there was Josh's splendid efforts at characterization.  His scholar was a pacifist bookworm who was absolutely out of touch with reality.  He wanted to make friends with the humans, even when they obviously wanted to kill him.  Second was the delightful interactions between the main characters, who shared many of the same goals but also had very strong differences.  It had the feel of a good mis-matched buddy flick.  Finally, there were a few occasions when the dice rolls came up totally bad and things really hit the fan.  In one particular instance Pag called "#1 Climb the Stalk and Spot Some Humans, #2 The Humans Attack, #3 I Fall Down and Look Stupid."  When all three things occured, it was simply too funny.  "Hey, there's some people approaching from over....  aaaaaaaahhhhh (thud)."

Reflections:

A few revelations for me.

First of all, Vincent has this thing for making games where rolling the dice becomes the chief method of complicating and driving play.  We soon moved beyond using the Otherkind dice rolls for resolution.  It became a method of scene framing.  Don't know what to do next?  Well, you declare your intentions (what you want to accomplish) and come up with two ways that you might be frustrated.  You roll, and this gives you a situation that you have to deal with.  Interesting.

Makes me think that there might be possibilities in a system that ignored resolution completely and just had scene framing.  Instead of resolving a conflict, you just frame your way out of it into something new.  Two guys about to get into a fight?  Resolution, you frame a situation where one's on the ground with a black eye looking up at the taunting figure above.  It's like comics: you can guess what happened between the panels even if you weren't shown it.  Definitely some potential there, especially for increasingly cinematic styles that want to mimick the image-framing of movies.

There are some issues, though.  If you set out, as one of your complicating factors, something that you have no intention of letting happen ("I break my leg" or "my friend dies"), you really make your choice easier after you roll.  There's no wavering about where to place your dice.  It works better, I think, when you have two complicating factors that are of equal discomfort or affect two different parties, so a choice between the two is actually a choice between two different things or people (or yourself and someone/thing else).

There were also a few times when I felt like I didn't want the situation to be complicated anymore.  I just wanted a more traditional resolution mechanic, or a way of framing that didn't involve more bad stuff going down.  Shreyas said, later, that this is what Moonlight and Iron does in the full version of the Otherkind rules, making complicating bad stuff more or less likely to happen.  If that's so, then this is just a note, not a complaint.

I think, before we play again, it would be helpful to have some discussion (or even some helpful suggestive charts, like with the mitigating factors in Polaris) that would make it easier to come up with bad things to have happen.  Ours were pretty tame and predictable, for the most part.  It would have been neat if we could think outside of the box more, or had some sort of relationship map that would keep all the bad stuff more focused or based on the themes that we were interested in exploring.

Anyway, it was pretty fun and I'm looking forward to the possibility of maybe finishing the game later.

[Piers]

There are some issues, though. If you set out, as one of your complicating factors, something that you have no intention of letting happen ("I break my leg" or "my friend dies"), you really make your choice easier after you roll. There's no wavering about where to place your dice. It works better, I think, when you have two complicating factors that are of equal discomfort or affect two different parties, so a choice between the two is actually a choice between two different things or people (or yourself and someone/thing else).

For some reason this chimed for me with both Ben Lehman's Polaris, with its different roles (Ice Maiden, Moons, Heart), and the discussions on Vicent's blog about 'What do I contribute'.

So what what if we grafted an incentive mechanism onto Otherkind and split the assignment of complicating factors amongst players:

Two players each pick a complication.  If during resolution their complication does NOT occur, they get a bonus thingie.

Maybe add a third player who adds a different 'good thing that can happen'--they get a bonus if it occurs.

This way the system tells players how they should contribute (you want to make the complication tough enough that it won't be taken) and the balancing between complications happens automatically.

Would this drive play?  What about the point at which we don't need complications anymore?