[funny anecdote] MLwM and assorted other games in school

[Eero Tuovinen]

So I never get around to writing actual play accounts anymore, and what little I write tends to happen at the Finnish forums, where they're needed. Instead of an actual play account I'll present a funny anecdote about preparing to play.

Background: I've been running games in upper Savo area, specifically the town of Iisalmi, for a couple of years now. This is practically an all-teen show, with players ranging in age from 15 to 18. So these teenagers decided to get some easy credit in high school and talked their teacher to allow them to arrange a roleplaying course. They asked me to run some games for the course, too; the basic idea is that the experienced roleplaying teens would run games for the newbies, but they have a bit of a shortage of competent gamemasters, it seems. Or they just want me to run games for some other reason, I don't know.

So we came together one day with their teacher (middle-aged lady) and the 20+ teens who wanted to be on the course, and split up into groups for play. The plan would be to play four hours per week in two two-week blocks, with groups mixed in the middle. Two eight-hour games, in other words. The teens have to write actual play accounts for their teacher, and the teacher might check up on the groups, but otherwise each group would have to arrange it's own playtimes, what they'd play and so on. (The course will climax with a larp at the end, but that's not my department.)

The first meeting was pretty chaotic due to the teens not having thought group assortment through. The groups were worked out pretty randomly at first, but after I interfered we decided to split the players into "has played before" and "has not played before" categories, to make play a bit easier on the newbies. I also made sure that the resulting play groups - four or five groups, I think - mixed boys and girls for that extra zest.

Anyway, that first round of play isn't really my topic, so I'll be brief. I ended up running The Mountain Witch (in it's new Finnish guise) for a bunch of newbies myself, while other groups played another Mountain Witch game, one Dust Devils and one Shadow of Yesterday game. Yeah, they're all indie, which is apparently because I've been running little else for these teens for the last couple of years, at least I didn't suggest any games for them or anything. One group actually had some difficulty agreeing on a game to play because it included a relatively grognardly teen who "doesn't like all that indie narration sharing" as he himself put it. I tried to find him some accomplices for a WoD game, but apparently he was the only one on the course not jazzed by the indie titles. (Certainly indie had an edge in this time-frame, who in his right mind would try running a meaningful WoD or D&D under eight hours, total?)

Now, my anecdote starts here: for the last couple of weeks we played TMW and other games, as I mentioned, and today the course gathered to return their actual play accounts and to form new groups for the latter part of the course. This time the idea was that willing gamemasters would tell about the games they intented to run, and each player would pick the game he wanted out of the set. Here's the games our teenaged game masters wanted to run:
Dust Devils
The Shadow of Yesterday
Dust Devils, "streets of New York" variant
Primetime Adventures
The last one is me, I'm trying to prepare for translating the game, so I figured that I might as well play it a bit with the teens. However, the noteworthy point is that it's again all indie, so I'm forced to conclude that indie games are a huge majority in the Iisalmi roleplaying scene. (At least I can't imagine a better test than taking night-all interested roleplayers from the local high school and asking them what they want to play.) It gets more interesting, though:

After outlining what games were available, each teen got to pick what he wanted to play. The DD variant was filled quickly with three or four players, as well as TSOY (mostly rpg geeks this one). It was a bit slow, though. Then one teenager raised his hand and asked "What about that My Life with Master game, isn't anybody going to run that?" There were perhaps three or four people in the class who had played MLwM previously at one point or another, but apparently MLwM had been mentioned in the first round, when wrangling about games to play.

So, this other teen who was going to run Dust Devils, he's a bright kid and an excellent game master for his age, he promptly crossed over his Dust Devils game on the whiteboard and wrote MLwM in there. He also described the game with a couple of sentences, evil Master blah blah minions blah blah love and so on, who wants to play that? Immediately half of the class raised their hands, this was the game they wanted!

In the meantime, my Primetime Adventures? Not one player was interested in that. As MLwM was blowing other games out of the water, I switched to it, too. We ended up with two 4-player groups of MLwM, as well as some players who lamentably ended up playing DD or TSOY because they didn't fit in the MLwM groups.

Final tally had my group consisting of four girls and one boy, all people who'd played TMW in the last round. Should be interesting: one of the girls is an experienced roleplayer, two are anime-heads, one has chat-roleplaying experience, and the lone boy hasn't played anything except the TMW game. We'll be creating a Master next Monday, I expect it'll go pretty well.

The point: for some unfathomable reason MLwM is clearly the most popular indie game in Iisalmi among the teenagers. I've had similar experiences in the past, especially about girls liking the game. There is some geeks who are hot to trod The Shadow of Yesterday whenever they get a chance, but numerically they're a clear minority compared to MLwM fans. Weird.

[Dirk Ackermann]

Hi Eero,

I do not like to write that word awesome. But here I can not hold back!

AWESOME!

Your whole post is dripping with blood from a man on a mission. But one without lunatic fever. I bowe to you!

I am a missioner myself, trying mildly to show the gamers that there are other games and that they should speak about their little rpg-problems with another and not just tell the same old stories forever; mostly I tell them to play. I GMed a lot of sessions for indie-newbies and most of the time it is just awarding. Not only for me, for them too.

I become a teacher myself and of course I will play rpg's with the kids and teens. But I will have to seed from the very first hatchling. Maybe you did the same. But look at the fruits! Twenty kids yelling for rpg's! How genius.

I am very speechless, Eero!

MfG

Dirk

[Joshua A.C. Newman]

I look forward to further updates on this program. This sounds really cool.

If you can muster the effort, I'd love to see some AP from the games themselves, too.

[Clinton R. Nixon]

I seriously love the fact that The Shadow of Yesterday is what the geeks like.

My new ad tagline should be "The Shadow of Yesterday: what grognards play in Finland."

[Eero Tuovinen]

I seriously love the fact that The Shadow of Yesterday is what the geeks like.

My new ad tagline should be "The Shadow of Yesterday: what grognards play in Finland."

Man, this is, like, the single greatest hurdle for getting a game on with TSOY. The character creation alone takes an hour, you see how the eyes of the girly girlies and poet-boys glaze over when they have to numerically quantify their characters' Reason or pick a suitable Secret from a large list. Horrible to watch. My current policy is to drive all the nerds into a herd and let them play TSOY together, while the less... ahem... adjusted individuals play something that doesn't require you to develop a fetish for your character as the first thing. It's actually rather heartbreaking when our little grognards to be stroll the halls of the high school, whining to everybody and begging them to play some TSOY with them, and nobody listens because they're too busy playing TMW or MLwM. So yeah, TSOY is clearly a real gamer's game, not a feminine story-telling excercise.

(While I remember: you did get the books I sent you, Clinton?)

But yeah, I'll try to write some AP from my recent games with the teens at some point. The TMW game I just ran was pretty interesting, even if the play experience itself was substandard. It was a perfect example of what can happen when a gamer decides to wilfully prove that a game doesn't work, and fails due to peer pressure. Another game I should probably put up some notes about is the Naruto-TSOY campaign we've been running with the aforementioned gamer-boys. It's been an excellent success, and a great example of how people don't really neet high-falutin' literary theory to grasp the basic themes of an anime series. But now I'm just running ahead of myself, I really should write about these games in Finnish first, I've already promised the teens that I'll give some feedback on both of those games.

[Andrew Cooper]

They have a role-playing class?

It takes an hour to make a TSoY character?

I want a role-playing class!

An hour?  Really?

[Glendower]

This solidifies my opinion that the Finnish should rule the world.  Hurry up and take over!