[Polaris] Starting to Click

[Lisa Padol]

(Possibly to be crossposted on my 'blog.)

We finally had our fourth session of Polaris, so long after the third we were reminding each other what had happened. I think between us, we remembered the important stuff. We also had a Realization about something fairly basic that we'd missed:

Players must be their Heart character's advocate.

Our group's idiosyncracy is that we really are okay with screwing our PCs. This is dead wrong for Polaris.

That is, players have to accept that their PCs will get screwed. We get that.

But, payers should actively try to prevent this. This was not obvious to us. Why prevent all that lovely angst which is the point of the game?

Nevertheless, the role of the Heart is to push against the Mistaken, just as hard as the Mistaken is supposed to push against the Heart. Without that, there's no play to the game as game.

Once we got this central concept, it started clicking. Once you start pushing for your PC to get only Good Stuff and avoid the Bad Stuff, the person playing the Mistaken will push harder. In other words, for angst lovers, the more you fight for your PC and against the angst, the more angst you're likely to get. We saw this with a lovely series of "And furthermore"s, a phrase hardly ever surfacing in previous sessions.

The two problems we've seen in earlier sessions were:

1. The Mistaken doesn't push hard enough. This is a classic problem, and one we knew to look out for.

2. The Mistaken tries to push his or her Heart character into the conflicts. This is something to watch out for if you're used to thinking of gaming as you playing your PC. When you're playing the Mistaken, there is only one PC, and that is the PC of the player across from you. Fortunately, I was the one making that mistake, and Julian was sitting across from me. He figured out the problem and called me on it, and having named it, we had power over it.

As the Mistaken, bring misery down on the Heart, sure. Just don't go out of your way to have your Heart character be the one responsible for it.

So, at the moment, Julian's PC, blind Bellatrix (traded her eyes to the demon The Collector of Eyes in return for wisdom), is the Dictator of Tallstar, strictly for the duration of the emergency, of course. Josh's PC, Aludra, has just been made Overlord of the four remnants, and is clearly riding for a fall. My PC, Alshain, has created so many secret organizations to spy on each other that it's almost comical, while Beth's PC, the sculptor Algorab, husband to Bellatrix, has been given Alshain's position as spymaster, despite protests that he knows nothing about it. Algorab is actually a nice guy, totally innocent of evil intent, and innocently sculpting the Heart of the Mistaken in ice.

Beth: Somebody stop me before I sculpt again!

Polaris is, thus far, the one indie game we've tried where we have had absolutely no trouble with the rules. The online flowchart really helps. Most of the time, we don't have to look things up, but when we do, we find what we're looking for, and we understand the answer. Our only quibbles:

The star names thing is a bit of a pain.

Three out of four remnants having nearly the same name is a pain.

Random observation: We've all played cross-gender from time to time. Somehow, all four of us decided to play cross-gender in Polaris.

-Lisa

[Ben Lehman]

Glad it's working for you!

Here's an observation that your post reminds me of: I see Polaris as operating in two modes, which I will roughly call "gloves-on" Polaris and "gloves-off" Polaris.  Both are fun, the main thing is that the tragedy moves much faster and dramatically in the gloves-off version.

Gloves-on play involves a lot of "but only if" and "you ask far too much."  Dice don't come out very often, and no one uses "and furthermore."

Gloves-off play shows heavy use of "and furthermore" which naturally leads to a lot more "it shall not come to pass" and a lot less "you ask far too much" (since it positions you poorly with respect to "and furthermore" escalation.)  There's also more motivation to Experience, since refreshes matter a lot more.

Thanks for the post!

yrs--
--Ben