[TSOY] The Mini-Campaign of Mologn

[James_Nostack]

This is an Actual Play thread from the player's point of view, and it covers maybe six game sessions set in the World of Near.  Characters and a few logs can be found on the TSOY Wiki.  I expect the other players and Storyguide will chime in as necessary.

Format - IRC chat
Players - Vaxalon, the Storyguide
Me, with the bestest character ever
Crackmonkey, playing a greedy little Ratkin nerd
Lxndr, playing a cyborg Elf who has given up his elf-ness
Chris Edwards, playing the depraved son of the Elf
Selene, playing a lovestruck bard

Synopsis
(If you hate this shite, skip to the Critique Section)

OK, so, like, there's this ruined town called Mologn with lots of magical potential and stuff!  And we're all going there, in our own ways!  

My guy--ZOLOBACHAI OF THE NINE VISIONS![/color]--stops by this crummy little village called Ashvale to hire a guide to the ruins.  Everyone is under a spell or something that makes them lusty!  My guy tries to help this woman, but bungles his magic and makes bugs crawl out of her hair!  Yipes!  (My guy bungles his spells a lot.  If the dice hate you in TSOY, it can be brutal at low levels.)

Somehow my guy meets the Baroness, who is all into kinky stories but I'm, like, this Important Wizard Guy who is too dignified for that.  A couple bungled spells later, I convince her that by becoming her Court Wizard I can learn about this plot to overthrow her.  She sends me to investigate this plot, with the help of her ranger named Karl.  I persuade Karl to screw that quest, and explore Mologn instead!  I am muy persuasivo!

Then we bump into Chris's guy, the sadistic torturer who is also a doctor!  We persuade him to explore Mologn with us, because he has, like, wasted a bunch of rat soldiers!  We bump into Nick's nerdy Rat, who gets all legal on us and draws up a contract to act as our guide!

We visit the Rat Magician, and I'm ready for a show of magical wills!--but he's been kidnapped and his school has been destroyed!  Sacrilege against the powers of Magic!  So, my guy goes off to rescue him!  

...and the other two players, being fine, upstanding people--go off to plunder the magical lore of the ruins in the middle of chaos.  Pfah!

So my Wizard--who is, like, totally unskilled in any of the harmful arts--walks into the Rat Gang Lord's citadel... and casts a spell to kill the guard... and bungles it.  Luckily the ranger kills the guard instead.  I rescue the Rat Magician, bungle some more spells, and escape (barely) thanks to the ranger.

Then I am all sad because I learn all these spells but stink!  Boo hoo, my dude's life's ambition is to be heroic wizard, and instead he's this overweight, incompetent bald guy.  Everything I do right, happens because some nitwit with a bow saves my skin.  It is time to retire being a wizard, and start a new career!

But it turns out the Rat Magician is even more incompetent, and even more self-pitying.  Somehow this makes me sad, and I talk him into cheering up, and reopening his school, and we hold this big Wake/Party/Celebration/Constitutional Convention thing in the town square for all the ratkin to become unified and join together!  It's a big party, like with the Ewoks (if the Ewoks were filthy vermin) (which they are) (oh, and the Ewoks with the good song, not the bad song).

Other Players' Versions of the Story
I don't know about this authoritatively, so I don't wanna say nothin'.  It involved polluting the bowl of a Toilet God.  And time travel.  It was cool, but with IRC I was too stuck doing my own thing to notice much.

Critique
1.  TSOY is a fun game.  It is fun to run and fun to play.

2.  Playing a low level magician dude is hard.  First time I've done it in any fantasy RPG.

3.  Playing a low level magician dude with NO OFFENSIVE SPELLS is even harder than that.  Adventuring Tip - If you are a diviner, don't storm the Evil Stronghold through the front gate all by yourself.

4.  Group felt that BDTP, as presented in original published rules, and the first iteration of the Speeding Up rules, was pretty slow.  I disagree, but I'm only one person.

5.  The trick to playing TSOY well is to have 3 keys, designed so that at least one fires in every scene.  Lxndr was a master of this, and I will not lie: I was jealous as hell.  He was a better player than I was.  (PS - this taught me that I have strong Gamist reactions sometimes.)

5A.  Note to Clinton - You may already know this, but not all keys are created equal.  Keys that are totally passive ("I did'nt do anything, but I was in the same scene with Joey--give me XP") lead to noticeably more powerful characters than keys that require lots of work.  My guy went for several sessions without turning keys, because the act of turning them (even to a minor extent) required an entire session of play.

6.  TSOY does not work as a standard dungeon game, where enemies who want to kill you lurk behind every corner.  If some monster wants to kill you in TSOY, conflict res means that can happen with a single die roll unless you BDTP.  BDTP is meant to make this challenge really important.  If the challenge isn't meant to be really important, you need to dial down the enemies' intentions because these determine whether BDTP happens.  So--definitely not a "kill or be killed" sorta game.  More like captured, interrogated, frightened off.

7.  Buying Off Keys -- oh man!

So, when I made my wizardly guy, the notion I had in mind is that here's this guy who has magical power in a greedy world, but he sincerely wants to restore the Three Corner School and use magic to help the People.  So--"Key of the Mission" to locate the School and learn its forgotten lore.

At the climax of the adventure (for me, at least) my guy stands revealed as a total nincompoop fraud.  I really felt bad for him!  And it made sense that he would "buy off" the Key by abandoning this mission.  But this also means that the character loses the initial spark of interest that drew me to him.  So, it's an agonizing feeling for both the player and the character.

(If I were a good player--an Lxndr, let's say--I would have bought off the key and explored whatever comes next.  In the end, I backed down and managed to talk myself back from the brink of total disillusionment.)

8.  A game where the players organize an enormous Ewok Feast at the end is awesome.  Screw the DM narrating all that stuff!  It's our work, we'll throw the party!

[Vaxalon]

I don't know why, but your post makes me chuckle.

There was definitely something disfunctional about this game.  I'm still trying to figure out what it was.

[James_Nostack]

If you figure it out, let me know.  I would guess that TSOY is designed for "light touch" fantasy games with audience participation through gift dice, which means everybody has to get along despite possible rivalry at the character-level.  From my perspective it achieved that, with the possible exception of Bringing Down the Pain.

I got the impression that we might have frustrated you slightly at various points, perhaps due to differing expectations between players and GM, and people settling in to each other's play styles.  I had a blast once things got rolling.  The by-play between me, Chris, and Nick was a lot of fun.  (I think part of the fun of this game is that I really liked my character--I'd be happy to watch him eat toast.)

[Vaxalon]

I think it's the "whiff factor" I saw.  You have to have a score of at least 2 in something to achieve even odds on a minimal success; given the character generation system, you can't have more than a few abilities that go far above this threshold.