[Universalis] First experiment: An intro to a pirates story

[Arturo G.]

Hi there!

Finally, I managed to get some people to play. I followed (with some degree of success) the procedure described in the thread Topic: [PtA]The Belt: Creating the show and Stealth Gaming works.
In my eMail list to get players I included people who played with me long time ago in different places and events, and some more people who showed interest when talking to them during the last year (job collegues and more).

For our first session I got 4 more people, but on the scheduled date one of them were required to travel and another was catched in a meeting which lasted until too late to arrive on time. Bad coincidence. We were only 3 players, but we tried anyway.

Players:
Mot begun to play RPGs with me as the GM, when we were at the university on the 90s. We used to live in the same college. Some nice RuneQuest, Call of Cthulhu and D&D experiences. Our group was very functional on those times. We have not played together since then.
Luis is a friend of us who has played only a couple of times to I'm not sure what RPG, but something classic.
For all of us it was the first try with an indie game.

After 20-30 minutes to explain them the rules with a couple of mini-examples we played for 2 hours. The transcription of the session may be found here (I have inserted comments, and a summary of the conclusions of our post-play-discussion at the end):
Universalis - Session 6 Oct.


Although we were still getting used to the rules and we were playing slow (most of the time hesitating or lacking ideas), the result was satisfactory. We were engaged all the time and having a lot of fun. Indeed, I offered them to try other games inbetween, but they insisted on planing the second try for this week. I hope we will have more people and time.


A) Mechanical question:

We were playing complications with one dice pool per player, for each one to have the possibility of getting coins for his contribution. Players decided to which side their pool went at the end. You can see some troubles with this in the complication of our first scene.
Moreover, our old gamist-uses appeared. During the post-play-discussion I discovered ourselves analyzing (to try to avoid) the possibility of players fighting with interruptions at the beginning of a complication, to get the possibility to introduce the obvious traits in the conflict, and get the potential coins. Of course all of us agreed that there is no point on doing it, but...

We have decided we prefer to have only one pool on each side of a complication. Thus, a player with no component involved may add dice to any, or both of them if it seems appropriate. The coins are got by the player who introduced the complication on one side, and the player who controled the target component on the other side.

But this leads us to a similar problem. What to do if a complication arises which involves several targets controled by different players (e.g. a storm which affects a ship, in which they are travelling two characters controled by a different players)??
We are in the first situation again. Only the first one who gets the turn will have the opportunity to draw the obvious traits (e.g. the ship traits for sailing). Is the fear of a gamist CA plaging ourselves too much??


B) Please, I would also appreciate general comments about our conclusions at the end of transcription? Were we right about them?

Cheers,
Arturo

[Jack Aidley]

I recently started out in Universalis too (you can find my experiences here and here) so I don't exactly have a wealth of experience to draw on here.

I'm surprised by your comment that there were too many tenets, I would have said you had a relatively small set of tenets (although well focused) my experiences so far suggest that more tenets is generally a good thing.

I don't think you're handling complications correctly. As I understand it a complication occurs between two or more components - and only the players controlling the components are involved. It also happens outside the turn structure so no interpruptions or turns take place during the complication. Each player activates traits and pays coins to get more traits to call upon. I'm surprised as well by the lady calling out in your complication, it seems to me that that should have been part of the resolution of the complication not an element introduced during the pool building stage. Finally, it's not possible for the winning player to have no coins to play with so you must be "scoring" the complication incorrectly. At the of the complication the losing player or players get back a number of coins equal to the dice in the pool they rolled while the winning player gets the total of their success dice (dice showing 1 to 5) - since you must have at least one success dice to win, this means they always get at least one coin (and usually considerably more).

I consider introducing elements without an agenda clear to the other players one of the joys of Universalis. Seeing other players take your character and run with them in a new and unexpected way is, to me, a feature not a flaw.

I think Universalis is a fantastic game. I'd suggest though that you consider giving up more than one consecutive session to playing it, I found trying to cram a game into a single session foreshortened things unpleasently.

[Arturo G.]

Hi, Jack. Thank's for the reply.

I'm surprised by your comment that there were too many tenets, I would have said you had a relatively small set of tenets (although well focused) my experiences so far suggest that more tenets is generally a good thing.

We were trying only a 2 hour game. At the end we had the feeling that the tenets were suggesting a much more complicate story than it was possible in 2 hours. Anyway, we were quite happy with them. But in general I agree with you, I insisted on at least two round of tenets to be sure everyone said something and got involved.

I don't think you're handling complications correctly. As I understand it a complication occurs between two or more components - and only the players controlling the components are involved. It also happens outside the turn structure so no interruptions or turns take place during the complication. Each player activates traits and pays coins to get more traits to call upon. I'm surprised as well by the lady calling out in your complication, it seems to me that that should have been part of the resolution of the complication not an element introduced during the pool building stage. Finally, it's not possible for the winning player to have no coins to play with so you must be "scoring" the complication incorrectly. At the of the complication the losing player or players get back a number of coins equal to the dice in the pool they rolled while the winning player gets the total of their success dice (dice showing 1 to 5) - since you must have at least one success dice to win, this means they always get at least one coin (and usually considerably more).

Yes, I really need some advice on how to manage complications.

In page 64 it says: "Players continue to Interrupt and take their turns normally". And it the grey box on the right, titled "Creative sources of dice", third point it says: "Create a new component, and purchase new Traits to Draw upon". More or less it is what I tried with the lady. Were we really missing the point?

About the no-coins problem. It was originated by the multiple pools. At the end of page 63 it says: "Alternatively, players may prefer that every participating player keep their own Pool and narrate and narrate its result regardless of wether they Control a Target Component or not. After the dice are accumulated but before they're rolled each player can declare his Pool for whichever side makes sense based on the dice that build it."

We tried this alternative rule. Thus, Mot's pool and Luis' pool were joined together on one side vs. my pool in the other. Luis got no success, but Mot got more successes than me. Their side won, but Luis, the one who controled the target component got no success himself (no coins). Moreover, Mot had joined his pool to that side somehow reluctantly, and he narrated a very soft outcome, he was not so concerned because he was not controlling anything in the complication.
That's one of the reasons we prefer to skip this alternative rule. We would prefer one pool for each side. But this leads us to the associated problem: What to do when multiple targets are controled by different players?

Am I messing everything??

I consider introducing elements without an agenda clear to the other players one of the joys of Universalis. Seeing other players take your character and run with them in a new and unexpected way is, to me, a feature not a flaw.

I see your point. For me it was not a problem, but the other players were having plans for the components they introduced and they were somehow expecting them to finally appear. It is probably a matter of them getting used to the idea. If they really want something to happend they should pay for it. In other case, just wait and see what the other players can do with it.

And finally, I strongly agree with you. Universalis is a great game.

Arturo

[Jack Aidley]

Actually Arturo, after reading through the rules again, I think your interpretation is closer to the rules than mine. Oops.

[Mike Holmes]

There are actually several ways to do complications that are presented here and there. The basic method from the book does allow for multiple pools on each side. Having only one on a side is a common gimmick.

Now, the problem I'm having responding is that I'm not seeing the problem. What didn't seem to go right? Just the odd case in which a reluctant supporter got to narrate the important parts of the outcome? I think you'll find that an unusual case. I mean, if they're reluctant, why did they participate? Further, when this does occur, I think that the nature of such outcomes is pretty interesting. Long-term the rules work just fine as written. But go ahead and alter them if you want to try something different.

You might want to put in the Bob McNamee gimmick instead, which says that you have to spend at least half your winnings on narration. This makes it so that players don't jump on board with complications unless they can imagine what they'd spend the winnings on. So you don't get the reluctant player.

What to do with "multiple targets?" Well, there are a bewildering variety of solutions that you can find on the web site. But the simplest is to have two "sides" for the complication. Basically the pools band up just like it was a multipool single target contest. If, in fact, there seem to be more than two sides, then the question becomes how this situation got to be in the first place. When the first declaration occured that triggered the complication, that should have been about X changing Y. Work the two sides off of that, resolve it first, and then move on to subsequent contests.

Again, that's just the simplest way. Basically there are no "targets" just "sides." If you want more complicated ones, they exist, too. But I don't know that any of them are superior to this simple solution.

The other typically used solution is to just have a pool for whoever wants to have their own "side" and then resolve from most successes on down to least.

On the subject of tenets, yes, for a two hour game, that was way too much, likely. Most people play for longer than two hours total (some games go on and on and on). For short games, I sometimes skip the tenet phase entirely, in fact. But now you know better, and can make a more informed guess as to how many tenets to put in next time. There is a learning curve to Universalis techniques. You'll find that the second session is much better, and the third even better than that. Then it tends to level out with some marginal improvements after that.

Mike

[Arturo G.]

We have played again. I had not time yet for a transcription. This time there is lot of stuff. It was going much more smoothly.

We played 2 hours and a half (we are improving on scheduling). We issued many more tenets, but highly focused. Thus, no problem at all. And we are planning to continue the story.

For the complications we added a gimmick: When several targets are involved in the same side of a complication they band together the dice and split evenly the earned coins. It worked well but we need to try more complications.
I want also to try the normal system more times. I think you are right, Mike. Our problems are ficticious.

Something much more interesting:
For the first time I have clearly noticed how important is the investment. There was a moment I spent almost all my coins in a scene. For the rest of the scene and even in the next one I had not enough coins to interrupt so many times as I wanted. The story begun to go in a way I didn't like so much, and I begun to loose interest. A complication and a new scene and I had the control again. I tried to incorporate my ideas to their previous stuff, and it took my some time to figure out how to do it, but as it begun to take form I was rising-up, highly interested, immediately.

It's nice how you can see this flow during the game.

Cheers,
Arturo