[Shock 0.1.0] Brain jacks and naval plugs

[Allan]

The Players
Allan - Serious sci-fi nut, hard-core gamer and designer, and recent narativist convert
Brian - Gaming again after a 10-year break.  Used to play CoC.  New to indie games.  Sci-fi fan.
Pierre - French indie game translater and designer.  Familiar with indie games and sci-fi.
Celine - French exchange student.  Pierre's girlfriend, not a regular gamer, she's sampled a few different games, and knows she prefers indies.  Not really into sci-fi. 

Brian and Pierre and I have been playing together for 3 months, alternating the new World of Darkness with one-shot sessions of weird little indies.  This was the first time Celine joined us.  Of the 3 new Forge games I suggested for playtesting, Celine chose Shock, because of the GM-less, open, collaborative style. 

Set-Up
Issues:  Retirement, Water Supply, Isolation, Drug Addiction
Shocks:  Space/Time Travel, Brain Implants, Resurrection, Aliens

Praxis Scales:  Legal/Illegal, Action/Negotiation

*Tagonists
(Isolation/Resurrection)
Protagonist:  Karim Jenkins (Celine) 10 yr old boy with a fatal disease wants to be Resurrected when he dies.
Antagonist:  Peter Krauss (Pierre) Resurrection Corp. CEO offers the treatment only for a high price, or to VIPs.

(Water Supply/Time Travel)
Protagonist:  Leroy Jenkins (Allan) Blue-collar time transporter dumps waste water in a prehistoric lake.
Antagonist:  Og (Brian) Neanderthal hunting the strange, stinking "lake-monster"

(Isolation/Brain Implants)
Protagonist:  Richy (Pierre) Brain Hacker investigating autonomous AIs, has lost any emotional human contact.
Antagonist:  The Isabella Virus (Allan) invades and destroys the personality of those who spend too much time wired into the net.

(Retirement/Time Travel)
Protagonist:  John (Brian) Old man with no pension uses black-market time travel to seek life extension.
Antagonist:  Time Cop (Celine) loyal undercover lawman on John's trail.

Minutiae
-Time travel requires a personal cybernetic plug implanted in the naval, which connects to a stationary plug in a wall, rock, etc.  You can only travel to destinations with stationary plugs installed, and need to find a plug when you wish to return to your own time. 

-Og's tribe believe that a huge monster lives in the lake.

-Autonomous, intelligent viruses have evolved in the brainternet

-"Surveilance bugs" are tiny remote sensor robots.

-"Resurrection garbage" are the organs and body parts too diseased to be repaired, which are replaced and discarded instead.

-Man from the future, burned, scarred, diseased, walks with a cane.   

Scene 1
Celine frames a scene of John buying a black-market time-plug map, and has her undercover time cop try to arrest him.  John runs for the nearest plug, Brian rolls a 1 on Action, and he disappears.  Nothing the cop can do about it for now. 

Scene 2
CEO Peter Krauss sends (yet another) headmail to Leroy Jenkins, denying his son Karim's latest appeal for Resurrection.  Leroy breaks the news to Karim, and Karim pleads with his father for help.  Leroy promises to use his official time-plug to make an unauthorized trip to the future to look for a cure for Karim's disease.  We end the scene without conflict.

Scene 3
Before heading to the future, Leroy has a job to do in the prehistoric past.  Og witesses the camouflaged but foul-smelling man from the future dumping toxins into the lake.  Og attacks, Leroy wins (bidding his "Fuck Causality" Trait), but runs for the time-plug as Og starts gathering his tribe.  In his haste, Leroy leaves his time-hose and toxic pump behind, which the Neanderthals assume is part of a huge lake monster.  They "kill" it, and eat it's toxic contents. 
Scene 4
Richy is doing some casual brain hacking from his tiny featureless drawer of an apartment.  He notices a virus attacking him, and disconnects from the net.  He wins the first conflict to identify the virus as the infamous Isabella, but fails the second conflict to evade her through a cover identity.  This is our first close conflict, and Isabella wins by bidding all her traits.  The best part of this scene was Richy trying to function in a wired world without jacking in.  He has no phone, no transportation, no way of contacting his friends without the head-net, and he realizes for the first time how isolated he is. 

Scene 5
While his father is away traveling in time, Karim goes to investigate the Resurrection facility up close.  He wins the conflict against Peter Krauss' surveillance, and sneaks inside unnoticed. 

Scene 6
John uses his black-market time-plug to travel 500 years into the future.  The city lies in ruins, and he finds a single sickly, radiation-burned inhabitant.  Through crude gestures, the burned man from the future tells John that he has lived a log time, possible hundreds of years, thanks to an injected drug that comes from "up".  John decides that he is on the right track to longevity, and travels another 500 years into the future.  Again, the scene is resolved without conflict. 

That's where we ended the session, but everyone liked the game, and is eager to continue the story.  I'll make a separate post with some problems and comments.

[Joshua A.C. Newman]

Rock on! I eagerly await your questions and comments.

[Joshua A.C. Newman]

I just realized, on closer inspection, that no one used the "Aliens" Shock. I have a strong suspicion that stories should start with one or two Shocks and no more than three; it gets fuzzy if there are too many, and I think you've seen that here. You can add them between stories for a perpetual, rambling environment, or make a new environ to talk about the new Shocks.

How did Celine like playing science fiction? Did she get into the SFness through the game? (I'm over here crossing my fingers)

[Allan]

Sorry for the lapse, there are not enough hours in the day.

Celine really liked the game, and most of the the really cool SF ideas (the naval plugs, and the post-apocalyptic future) were hers.  I really hope she joins us again tomorrow. 

Here are our problems, roughly in the order we encountered them. 

1)  No one used the 'Aliens' Shock, or the 'Drug Addiction' Issue, because Brian joined play late, and introduced these elements after the other characters were already in place.  He felt left out, and disapointed that his issues weren't being addressed in the story.  Granted, that's what you get when you're late, and with 4 players not all the issues are going to get equal attention in the first session, but it is harder to join Shock late than most other games. 

2)  The number of Shocks and Issues did make things fuzy, and busy, splitting our focus in a lot of directions.  Do you think 3 is the maximum number of players, or that not every player should introduce a Shock?  What if Shocks and Issues had variable, but defined, screen presence (to use the PTA term), so that everyone knows we are focusing on Time Travel for now, and Aliens will be in the background?  This is already what the grid sort of does.  It was cool how having a couple of characters on the 'Isolation' line focused the story on that Issue. 

3)  The characters we created had no clear connection to each other, aside from Celine and I creating a father and son.  What we had was 4 different stories of interesting Pro/Antag relationships that occurred simultaeneously in the same world, rather than one cohesive story.  Again, this gets worse the more players you add. 

This was our own fault.  There's nothing in the rules telling us to create such separate characters, but there's also nothing telling us to create linked characters.  Having each character deal with a separate Shock and Antagonist sems to reinforce each character having their own story.  There are rules for what happens when multiple Protagonists are in a scene, but no mechanics for introducing more Protagonists into a scene, or making connections between separate stories.

4)  Why do you want to begin with an Antagonist acting?  After creating all of our *Tags, the Antagonists were clearly all blocking or reacting to the Protagonists' actions.  To start initial scenes, we had to assume that the Protagonists had already acted.  Karim had already petitioned for Resurrection.  John had already broken temporal law, so that a cop was after him.  Why not start with the Pro action? 

5)  We didn't understand the use of coins.  The rules say you start with 9 each, but that you'll need more as you play.  The rules never say (that I could find), how more coins are introduced during play.  When coins are spent in a bid, where do they go?  Are they discarded, or do they go to the winner of the conflict?  It seems like players could potentially run out of coins really fast.

I inferred from the "Company Mold" playtest thread (and from having played PTA) that players gain coins for narrating "Cool" descriptive elements.  So we used this, and it seemed to work ok.  We were awarding each other coins from an inexhaustible bank, which seemed wrong.  Is this right?

When Antagonists bid coins, are they drawing from the same pool of 9 coins?  If so, for a player to bid coins for their Antagonist, weakens the ability of their Protagonist. 

6)  Most conflicts were won by whoever introduced them.  Most of our characters were weighted heavily toward Action, and so took mostly Action actions, and won most of those conflicts.  Partly because of the way we were rolling, we didn't get a lot of results close enough to be swayed by Traits.  But also, there didn't seem to be a lot of incentive for Antagonists to bid Traits. 

It was a little cumbersome to roll an extra, uncounted die for each action.  I like the 2 Praxis scales, and the Relationships, in theory.  They didn't come up yet for us. 

7)  Is the Antagonist player's narrative control / authority over challenges limited to controlling their Antagonist?  What about scenes where the Antagonist is not involved, or obstacles/challenges that are not directly related to them.  From the rules, "Any conflicts that aren't between *Tagonists are resolved simply by the Protagonist Player."  So:

When Karim went to investigate the Resurrection plant, his ability to cross the city as a 10-yr old never comes into question.  Karim can do anything Celine narrates him doing, until blocked by her Antagonist, or his security system (or, presumably, if group consensus vetoes the action as impossible for the character or harmful to the story).

Leroy's Antagonist is a caveman in the prehistoric past.  Can Leroy take any action he wants in the present of the story (outside of his Antagonist's reach), without conflict?  Is Brian (his Antag Player) supposed to extend Og's reach?  Or should he use Og's Traits to oppose Leroy in conflicts where Og is symbolicly or thematicly involved?  Is an Antagonist this limited a bad Antagonist?  I don't think this problem is limited to time travel stories, but could result from spatial difference or opperating outside your Antagonist's "jurisdiction".

Similarly, John travels 500 years into the future.  Celine could choose to have the time cop follow him, or even have him lying in wait.  Instead she narrates other setting and plot elements, and the scene progresses without the Antagonist or any conflict.  Is this right? 

8)  A player can either own a Shock or Issue (define it), or control the Protag who confronts it, but not both.  What happens when a Protag encounters their player's own Issue or Shock?  Who has narrative control?

Karim travels across town to investigate the Resurrection plant.  Pierre (Antag player) wants the trip itself to be complex and challenging, but his Antagonist isn't directly involved.  Celine is the Protag player, and she controls the Space/Time Travel Shock.  She can define how citizens of our setting travel, introducing teleportation technology and trucking procedures that benefit Karim.  Is that right?  Or should she only have control over Karim's actions, while Pierre has authority over the world around him? 

John travels 500 years into the future.  Celine (Antag player) creates a post-apocalyptic far-future whose inhabitants have longevity from dependance on a drug that comes from aliens.  It was really cool that Celine incorporated Brian's Shock and Issue, which hadn't been getting a lot of attention.  But now can Brian define Aliens and Drug Addiction in a way that benefits John?  If John encounters Aliens in our next session, who controls them?  Brian (who owns the Shock), or Celine (his Antag player)?

We were adding details and complications to our Shocks during play.  Should the Shocks all be defined in the world-creation phase, before play begins?

Hopefully we'll try again tomorrow.   

[Joshua A.C. Newman]

Celine really liked the game, and most of the the really cool SF ideas (the naval plugs, and the post-apocalyptic future) were hers.  I really hope she joins us again tomorrow. 

Excellent.

Here are our problems, roughly in the order we encountered them. 

Holy crap, this is a lot of questions. Those I can't answer tonight I'll answer tomorrow.

1)  No one used the 'Aliens' Shock, or the 'Drug Addiction' Issue, because Brian joined play late, and introduced these elements after the other characters were already in place.  He felt left out, and disapointed that his issues weren't being addressed in the story.  Granted, that's what you get when you're late, and with 4 players not all the issues are going to get equal attention in the first session, but it is harder to join Shock late than most other games. 

... and you can't have someone not show up for a game.

This bothers me just a little bit. Mostly, I say to myself, "You can't put on a play if someone doesn't show up, either." I think this is a feature of Shock: and one that you'll see in a lot of games from here out. I'm assuming in the design of my games that everyone's serious about being there and playing. You're talking about serious issues, really, and you can't expect someone to drop in on the conversation late and be able to just fit in.

It's tough love.

2)  The number of Shocks and Issues did make things fuzy, and busy, splitting our focus in a lot of directions.  Do you think 3 is the maximum number of players, or that not every player should introduce a Shock?

New rule: there are as many Shocks and Issues as there are players, total. So if five people are playing, you might have two Shocks and three Issues. You can't have more than three Shocks, and you should probably limit yourself to one or two. I can just barely see cases where three would be fun, and four is just totally screwball.

What if Shocks and Issues had variable, but defined, screen presence (to use the PTA term), so that everyone knows we are focusing on Time Travel for now, and Aliens will be in the background?  This is already what the grid sort of does.  It was cool how having a couple of characters on the 'Isolation' line focused the story on that Issue.

This is just an artifact of there being too many Shocks in 0.1.0. Do it the new way next time and I think you'll see characters colliding and making stories.

3)  The characters we created had no clear connection to each other, aside from Celine and I creating a father and son.  What we had was 4 different stories of interesting Pro/Antag relationships that occurred simultaeneously in the same world, rather than one cohesive story.  Again, this gets worse the more players you add. 

This was our own fault.  There's nothing in the rules telling us to create such separate characters, but there's also nothing telling us to create linked characters. Having each character deal with a separate Shock and Antagonist sems to reinforce each character having their own story.  There are rules for what happens when multiple Protagonists are in a scene, but no mechanics for introducing more Protagonists into a scene, or making connections between separate stories.

There's no reason the characters should know each other, necessarily. It's fun either way and you can decide at any point how and if you want to have the Protags meet.

4)  Why do you want to begin with an Antagonist acting?  After creating all of our *Tags, the Antagonists were clearly all blocking or reacting to the Protagonists' actions.  To start initial scenes, we had to assume that the Protagonists had already acted.  Karim had already petitioned for Resurrection.  John had already broken temporal law, so that a cop was after him.  Why not start with the Pro action? 

Can you give me more detail about this? I've agonized over this feature and am as dissatisfied as you. So, if it's working for you cool.

This might have to do with the kinds of stories you're telling. Hm.

5)  We didn't understand the use of coins. 

Yeah. Well, what you're doing here isn't right, but it's also superbusted right now. More later on that.

The rules say you start with 9 each, but that you'll need more as you play.  The rules never say (that I could find), how more coins are introduced during play.  When coins are spent in a bid, where do they go?  Are they discarded, or do they go to the winner of the conflict?  It seems like players could potentially run out of coins really fast.

No! The coins go to the loser of the conflict. This part is very, very important. Also, in 0.2.0 the number of coins is doubled. With 4s and 5s and the like, it's just too coarse.

I inferred from the "Company Mold" playtest thread (and from having played PTA) that players gain coins for narrating "Cool" descriptive elements.  So we used this, and it seemed to work ok.  We were awarding each other coins from an inexhaustible bank, which seemed wrong.  Is this right?

When someone says something cool and it's written down, no one gets a coin. Instead, whenever you use one of the Minutiæ as part of a Confrontation, you get a +1 in whichever direction you like.

When Antagonists bid coins, are they drawing from the same pool of 9 coins?  If so, for a player to bid coins for their Antagonist, weakens the ability of their Protagonist. 

Nope, the Antag starts with a separate pool of coins from the Protag. The Antag starts with 5, the Protag with 4. Again, in 0.2.0, those numbers are doubled. But then, other stuff is also changed that makes Conflict Resolution suck less, too.

6)  Most conflicts were won by whoever introduced them.  Most of our characters were weighted heavily toward Action, and so took mostly Action actions, and won most of those conflicts.  Partly because of the way we were rolling, we didn't get a lot of results close enough to be swayed by Traits.  But also, there didn't seem to be a lot of incentive for Antagonists to bid Traits. 

The Antagonist can't win if sHe doesn't bid, so I'm not sure what's unclear here. Can you tell me how resolution was going, blow-by-blow? I have a feeling there's something grossly miscommunicated in the text.

It was a little cumbersome to roll an extra, uncounted die for each action.  I like the 2 Praxis scales, and the Relationships, in theory.  They didn't come up yet for us. 

That sounds like a dumb luck issue; if you weren't getting desperate enough to even have to bid Traits, you certainly weren't getting desperate enough to change dice. It'll come up. Don't forget the rule when you roll crappity crap, though.

7)  Is the Antagonist player's narrative control / authority over challenges limited to controlling their Antagonist?  What about scenes where the Antagonist is not involved, or obstacles/challenges that are not directly related to them.  From the rules, "Any conflicts that aren't between *Tagonists are resolved simply by the Protagonist Player." 

Consider this Antagonist:

[quote author = A Made Up Game]Senator Ullulu Bergix

Traits:
I have spies everywhere. Subterfuge 3
I have many body doubles. Diplomacy 2
I own the underworld. Coersion 2
All civil services belong to me. Direct Control 3

This dude will practically never show up in person. He'll turn your power on and off at will, he'll know what you're doing, where you're going, and who you're with,  and when you try to hurt him, you just wind up shooting a clone.

So:

When Karim went to investigate the Resurrection plant, his ability to cross the city as a 10-yr old never comes into question.  Karim can do anything Celine narrates him doing, until blocked by her Antagonist, or his security system (or, presumably, if group consensus vetoes the action as impossible for the character or harmful to the story).

Yeah, I've yet to see the Bullshit Rule implemented in Shock:, but I bet it'll happen. I fully endorse the power of disbelief.

Karim's Antagonist, though, he's not going to stop him crossing the city. There's nothing interesting about that. What Celine wants to do here is narrate a creepy little scene on a bus, walking through a strange neighborhood, having to ask directions from someone. A little montage scene, really. Then he gets to the door and gets turned away by the company.

Leroy's Antagonist is a caveman in the prehistoric past.  Can Leroy take any action he wants in the present of the story (outside of his Antagonist's reach), without conflict?  Is Brian (his Antag Player) supposed to extend Og's reach?  Or should he use Og's Traits to oppose Leroy in conflicts where Og is symbolicly or thematicly involved?

Og's interests are contrary to Leroy's. If Og can't act against Leroy, he's ineffective as an Antagonist and you should just make another one with the same resources as Og.

Is an Antagonist this limited a bad Antagonist?  I don't think this problem is limited to time travel stories, but could result from spatial difference or opperating outside your Antagonist's "jurisdiction".

Yeah, the Antag is operating against the Protag. If they can't do that, they're broken.

Hey, new rule: if you've left the grasp of your Antag, create a new one with the same number of coins, Relationships, and Traits. I think you can probably even go back and forth between Antags, if it's appropriate. The same person should probably play them both. Bookkeeping could get really stupid, so don't do that too often, though.

I would be that Og represents a bigger concern, though.

Similarly, John travels 500 years into the future.  Celine could choose to have the time cop follow him, or even have him lying in wait.  Instead she narrates other setting and plot elements, and the scene progresses without the Antagonist or any conflict.  Is this right? 

It's your call, I think. But without conflict, you're without drama. That doesn't mean you can't have quiet moments without a conflict, though. But when it's been more than a scene or two, come out swinging.

8)  A player can either own a Shock or Issue (define it), or control the Protag who confronts it, but not both.  What happens when a Protag encounters their player's own Issue or Shock?  Who has narrative control?

You mean, my Protag's Issue is Poverty and his Shock is Psychic Powers, and I own the Shock "Genetic Modification", what happens when my character wants to get genetically modified?

He does. It doesn't address the core of your Protag, so there's no conflict of interest.

Karim travels across town to investigate the Resurrection plant.  Pierre (Antag player) wants the trip itself to be complex and challenging, but his Antagonist isn't directly involved.  Celine is the Protag player, and she controls the Space/Time Travel Shock.  She can define how citizens of our setting travel, introducing teleportation technology and trucking procedures that benefit Karim.  Is that right?  Or should she only have control over Karim's actions, while Pierre has authority over the world around him? 

Ahhh. I understand.

This is weird to old RPing habits, but these are guns I'll stick to: it doesn't matter if it's not connected thematically to your character. Some color about how you teleport across town is beneficial to everyone; now they know how it works. They've seen it in action.

Get Karim to have to deal with Resurrection. Don't bother rolling to see if he gets lost because he can't read a bus map. Have him misread the bus map, get lost, and get to the front door of the company!

John travels 500 years into the future.  Celine (Antag player) creates a post-apocalyptic far-future whose inhabitants have longevity from dependance on a drug that comes from aliens.  It was really cool that Celine incorporated Brian's Shock and Issue, which hadn't been getting a lot of attention.  But now can Brian define Aliens and Drug Addiction in a way that benefits John?  If John encounters Aliens in our next session, who controls them?  Brian (who owns the Shock), or Celine (his Antag player)?

John defines them. It's to everyone's benefit to see them in action. It more completely defines the world. But he sure as fuck doesn't get to use any of it in a Confrontation.

The only "benefits" come when you're confronting your own Shock/Issue crux. Your character's made for that. Since John can't get any goodies (except for gaining Minutiæ perhaps), he has no reason to describe them in any way except as interestingly as possible.

We were adding details and complications to our Shocks during play.  Should the Shocks all be defined in the world-creation phase, before play begins?

In play, in play, in play. Someitmes, a Shock is just a name until people start to play with it. "The Mugwump Prognosticator? I'll take that! We'll figure out what it is as we go! Obviously something about seeing the future, and it's alive..."

Definitely continue to define Shocks and Issues as you go. That's why they have owners: so when someone says, "How long does it take to get to Mars with this teleport technology?" someone can say, "Well, it travels at the speed of light (which no one knew before), and there's computation on either end (which no one knew before), and that takes a couple of hours... so it take 12 hours to get to Mars (which no one knew before).

Dig?

Hey! I got to all of it!

Any questions about my answers?

[joepub]

Protagonist:  Leroy Jenkins

A HA HA HA HA HA!


hahahahahaha


oh, that's gold. Leroy *would* dump waste water too, wouldn't he?

[joepub]

One other potential problem I notice is this:

sometimes an antagonist isn't fighting the same battles, or facing the same problems. It is merely situation that brings the protag and the antag together, and into conflict.


I'm not sure that the antagonist would always share the same issue and shock. Maybe, but arguably maybe not.

[Joshua A.C. Newman]

One other potential problem I notice is this:

sometimes an antagonist isn't fighting the same battles, or facing the same problems. It is merely situation that brings the protag and the antag together, and into conflict.


I'm not sure that the antagonist would always share the same issue and shock. Maybe, but arguably maybe not.

The antagonist's reasons for doing what sie's doing can be whatever. Your character's issue might be "Job security" and the Shock might be "AI", and your Antagonist might be your daughter, who wants you to quit. She does all sorts of stuff: she's in college studying micromemtics, she's engaged to an AI named Lorens, she's a good cook and rides a motorcycle, but she's there because she's at the crux of Job Security and AI.