[Schism] Life During Wartime

[dikaiosunh (Daniel)]

I posted for some advice on how to run this, so I figure it's only fair to post to say how it went.  I'm doing my best to keep in the spirit of the AP posts I've read, so apologies if commit any faux pas.

That aside...

I ran the game at an informal local "con," and the guy organizing it (who was the only participant I know socially) wasn't in the game, so it was a group of totally new faces.  No one had played Sorcerer or Schism before, and one (Jen) had never played a tabletop game before.  However, I believe all have played FiranMUX (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FiranMUX), so all had RPG experience of some description.  I've never run Sorcerer before, and am only starting out in the world of indie games (though I've run Donjon, played DitV, and both run and played Pretender, so I'm not totally new to the "feel").

The setup was not totally ideal - we were playing in the 11AM slot, with bagels and such lying around, and the sun a little bright for the mood of the game.  Also, while I'd prepped four characters (though, I left their descriptors and kickers blank for "customization"), to avoid spending time on some of the crunchy bits, deciding on powers, etc. we had a fifth who wanted to play, and since it was a friendly environment, where the main point was that everyone have a chance to play something, I wanted to accomodate her.  Anyway, five players was... a bit much. 

The basic premise was that all the characters had contracted Psychogenesis while fighting in a (intentionally vaguely described) war, and to begin were recuperating under the auspices of a private medical contractor, Allied.

I sort of fudged on how to handle Humanity 0.  I told the players how it normally works in Schism, and then told them that if they hit 0 during play they could have a death scene if they wanted one.  Ultimately, three of the five took the option, but only at the very end of the game (so their death scenes were effectively the last scenes of the game, barring short narrated epilogues for the two survivors).

Characters were:
- Max Boot, formerly a marine, and a Psyker.  Her Kicker was that someone had stolen her extremely sentimental socks from the laundry, and she was enraged by this and determined to find the culprit (more on this...)
- Alex Hand, a former intelligence contractor, and a Scanner.  His Kicker was that he'd just learned that the terrorists that had attacked his unit during the war had just found him and were after him.
- Kit Shaper, a former navy man, and another Psyker.  His Kicker was that he was being kicked out by Allied (his Price was a fear of being alone, so this was a fairly good motivator).
- Jamie Kruze, a former pilot, and a Seer.  Her Kicker was that the doctors who had tried to experiment on her in the military had decided to come to Allied and collect her.

The underlying relationship map was only slightly convoluted, and I put it together with a mind to the Cronenberg-y sensibility involved in Schism (or at least I tried).  Allied was controlled by Legion, a computer experimenting on Psychogens to try to find a way to inhabit an organic body.  Legion's AI was created using the template of Senator Campbell Smith's dead wife's mind, and she feared and was attracted to him.  Sen. Smith was the leader of the rival cabal, The Voice, a religious group with ties to the government.  Smith knew about Legion's origin, but only cared to the extent that it gave him an opening for manipulation.  Dr. Chase Williams was the head researcher at Allied, and in love with Legion.  Allied wanted to use the characters to get rid of the Voice (so as to get out from under its thumb) and The Voice wanted to steal them away to use them against terrorists in the city (which I didn't decide in advance was an actually worthwhile goal, or a deluded one).  I figured that was weird enough to start, and with four (I'd planned) Kickers to integrate, it'd be better to have a general idea and slot in some more NPCs once I knew what direction the characters wanted to go in.

The transcript in a nutshell (skip this if you don't care):  Most of the Kickers were ultimately woven into a set of scenes having to do with a Voice attempt to get the characters away from Allied (I even got the damn socks in there, as two hazmat-suit wearing agents were caught trying to plant tracking devices in the laundry).  Things turned violent very, very quickly (The Voice was going to present themselves as able to offer better treatment and a more fulfilling purpose than getting meds and cafeteria food all day, but as soon as there was any hint of conflict, the players chose the most violent solution possible - Dr. Williams died in the first scene as he tried to call for help; the stuff about Legion never really came into play - the one failed clone the characters found was used as an impromptu weapon and promptly forgotten).  Following info gleaned by one of the telepaths, they ultimately ended up at Sen. Smith's, where two of the characters decided to enlist in his cause.  Things got to be very talky (there was a lot of "how can we trust you" - I responded with some obvious stuff, like about how he was willing to supply them with money, weapons, and protection, and then just asked the players, "what could he say that would make a difference to your characters one way or the other?"  Two players still thought the money and guns were good enough, and the rest just wouldn't trust him, period), so I tried throwing in a bang in the form of an actual explosion (basically, "Look - if you believe him about the terrorists, his pet Psychogen is going after them; if you don't believe him, he's pretty damn dangerous and just blew some crap up - choose something!).  Most players gleefully took off after the terrorists, chased them into a crowded area, killed them both.  One stayed behind and wasted Sen. Smith.  Police arrived to control the situation, and were fought.  Two characters then got into a serious power-fight for reasons that remain totally unclear to me.  The rest chose to flame out in fairly nihilistic death scenes.

The table chatter was pretty fluid, especially since everyone knew each other (except me), and one player had her baby with her, that other folks wanted to hold, etc.  Though, to be fair, folks mostly didn't have to be called to attention when it was their chance to act.  There wasn't a lot of meta-game chat (though there was some); most of it was purely social.

The good:

Everyone came up to me afterward and talked about what a good time they had playing the game.  Except when distracted by various bits of chaos going around, folks did seem to enjoy it while playing, as well.  We ran into only one serious mechanical question, though explaining the die-rolling took a while and we made some mistakes doing it (nothing systematic, just a few, "wait, no, hold on, we rolled that wrong" moments).

The bad:

First, I screwed up.  I'd meant to have players draw the diagram on the back of their sheets and fill stuff in, but in the rush of trying to walk someone through both the system and character creation in a short period of time, it completely slipped my mind until halfway through the session, and then I figured it'd do more harm than good to back up and have folks do it.  Mea culpa.

As the above shows, the players approached the game with a certain amount of levity(?).  Civilians were treated in a very "Grand Theft Auto" way - one player was toting up his body count on his character sheet. To take a stab at the emergent theme, it would be something like, "no one cares about you except to use you, so why the f**k care about anyone else?"  Going after the terrorists was more an act of "yeah, we want to be on the side of the guy who'll give us guns" than a genuine buy-in to the Sen.'s goals and ideals.

An autobiographical word about what I had in mind:  I didn't go in with an idea of plot, or even a fully-worked-out theme.  But I came from a particular place in setting up the situation.  In my professional life, I work on Iraq (for an NGO), and I find it deeply unnerving how distanced even I am from the war, despite it occupying a significant chunk of my waking hours - e.g., I do almost everything through at least two intermediaries, and I then go home to my comfortable house when I know that some of the folks I work with (most of whom I've never met in person) are trying to figure out a route that won't let someone catching them going to work with Americans in the IZ.  So, while I didn't have a theme, I put the game together from a deep feeling of alienation and frustration at how little real practical and emotional investment most folks here in the US seem to have (and not necessarily culpably - part of the point of this talk about myself is that it can be *hard* to invest).  That's why all the characters had been away, and then when home found themselves alienated by the effects of Psychogenesis. 

I know, I know, a lot of baggage for a little con one-shot.  But I figured, if I was going to run Sorcerer, I might as well run it using some stuff that really mattered to me.  Anyway, I went into the session with fairly weighty stuff on my mind.  My only effort to direct things in that direction, though, were the general setting notes, an effort to choose grim, gritty Prices and such (brain lesions, nightmares, etc.), and setting up situations where the characters risked hurting people in the city who wouldn't really understand what the ultimate goal was (like trying to chase down terrorists in a crowd).

The players were having none of it.  They thought it was awesome when one character's errant shotgun blast killed two bystanders.

Now, don't get me wrong - this isn't a "bad" because, dammit, the players didn't follow my script!  It's only a bad because the lack of meeting of the minds left me feeling a bit let down.  Unless folks were lying to me, the *players* enjoyed it.  I realized early on that the game they wanted was not the kind of game I'd been looking forward to, and did my best to run with it.  We had a lot more fights, and I worked the missing socks into something halfway serious.  Things blew up when folks seemed to be interested in blowing stuff up.  I did have cops show up, but that was more a "how will you deal with this?" than an attempt to assert control (I mean, I didn't have them show up in such overwhelming numbers that it was a "stop it, now" move).

Which leads me to my general GMing question - how do folks deal with this sort of attitudinal mismatch?  As I said, I tried to telegraph my ideas through setting and some of the color.  But, while I sent one Kicker back because it was a goal, rather than a Kicker, I felt that it would defeat the purpose for me to send them back on the grounds that I didn't like them.  Granted, I think I would have been on better grounds to punt back the socks bit for sheer silliness, but... I didn't want to start a slippery slope about where I thought silly stopped, and I figured it might be more engaging to the player to try to work with her and bring it into something a bit more meaty.  Even aside from the Kickers, there was constant pressure from the players in a more gonzo-violent direction, and any attempts to inject possibly-sobering consequences in the form of fearful reactions, civilian deaths, etc., were treated as speed bumps (literally, in one case). 

So I wasn't sure what my options were aside from: use some form of Force to make the players have a different kind of game (bad), explicitly revisit the social contract out of game by saying something like "look, I wanted a more serious game than this" (probably amounting to a similar kind of deprotagonization), or roll with it (what I chose to try to do).

That's all I have to say on substantive matters, really.  It was my first outing with the game, so I'd appreciate any advice, pointers to where I totally screwed stuff up, or whatever.

- Daniel

PS Oh, the mechanics question!  In Sorcerer, lasting damage is halved at the end of a fight.  The question that I couldn't answer definitively was: does this apply only to damage from *that* fight?  E.g.:

Jamie takes 4 lasting damage in a fight.  This drops to 2 after it's over.  In the next fight, she takes an additional 4 lasting damage, putting her at 6.  Now, does she drop to 3 (halving her total lasting damage) or drop to 4 (halving the additional lasting damage)?  I found myself unclear from looking at the book, and for the sake of ease gave the first, more charitable interpretation (though it's subject to exploitation if characters pick easy fights just to halve their lasting penalties).

[dikaiosunh (Daniel)]

Not that it's that crucial, but I realized I'd left off the fifth character (the non-pregen one): Mooby, an Army Ranger turned telepath, whose Kicker was discovering a mysterious dead body in the complex.

[Christopher Kubasik]

Hi Daniel,

First, congrats on running the game. I know you spent a lot of time pondering it -- and you did it! 

Second, congrats on running a game that the players enjoyed.  At a Con.  With lots of distractions! Again, well done.

What I'm about to say has everything to do with learning from this experience and applying it to the next.

I wanted to reference a quote from Sorcery & Sex.  I happened to pick up the book again last night and re-read the first 15 pages on a whim after reading some comments about it recently on the Internet.

So, here's the passage I wanted to focus on.  I'm not sure if you have the book, so here it is, from page10:

"For the content of the game to matter at all, what the characters 'think' is not the foundation -- the players must care, because they are the ones who invent what the characters think.  These people are sitting in a group, talking to one another, and that's where 'what the characters do' comes from."

Emphasis added by moi.

I don' think that note is specific to Kickers (though it is vital to Kickers), but actually must be applied to every aspect of Sorcerer (and to all Narrativist games in general.)

When giving help to new players on Kickers, people often state things along the lines of, "It gets the character into action," or, "It's a situation the character can't ignore."  Both of which are true, of course.

But they seldom touch on this one aspect -- and I'm always confused by this.  Whatever the Kicker is, it MUST be about a matter the actual human being at the table has some sort of visceral or emotional connection to.  They must care.  Not the character.  The player.  These games hang on that.

Now, I may be wrong, but reading over the post I didn't get the feeling the players were actually that invested in the Kickers.  And since the Kicker is what a session is about -- well, you ended up with play that wasn't about much.  It was fun in a rock 'em sock 'em kind of way, but it didn't have the emotional gravitas you wanted. 

So, some specifics:

Here's my short list for Kickers:

• they must be emotionally or viscerally engaging to the player
  they must require a decision or action on the part of the character
  they must be open ended in the choices available to the player and character

The Socks?  I don't think so.  Did they require an action on the part of the character?  Favorite socks, sure.  But, so what?  That's nothing like:

"That planet, where you claim you found those Alien eggs? The eggs that you say contained an alien that came on board your ship and wiped out your whole crew and you barely survived and you're having nightmares every night so that you can't sleep and you've lost your job and have no life?  Um, we've lost contact with the colony on that world.  We're sending a expedition to find out what happened.  You want to come along?"

Now, image a player wrote that for herself. She's invested in it. She want to know what's going to happen.  All that recent backstory is stuff she's already decided matters to her.  She wants to go face something that terrifies her character and doesn't know what will happen when she gets there.

That's fucking awesome.  For whatever reason, this player cares about that.  And because she's invested in it, the GM can throw things at her and she's respond in interesting ways because, for reasons that may or may not ever be clear to the rest of the group, this mattered to her.

Now, again, I wasn't there, so maybe the other Kickers really did have some juice behind them.  But I'm guessing no.  They read kind of "built to get a character into action," but forget about the investment of the Players into the equation.  And so you got light, non-invested play.

Here's something it took me a while to figure out:

Don't worry about the lighting conditions.  Don't worry if the players are grooving on the grim and the gritty.  That will take care of itself if the Players are invested in what's going on at the table.  After all, your offices where you work are well lit, right?  New York City had a beautiful blue sky the day the Towers went down.  Art decoration won't elicit investment from players.  The Players are human beings... They're rich with emotional investment.  But they have to invest.  That's the key.

One final note: the back of the character sheet.  This is a big bugaboo for me.  It doesn't get a lot of page count in the book, but it's VITAL. 

I know you were rushed, that's not the point.  The point is, it's important for next time, and here's why:

It gives the Player ownership of those details.  You know how Players often come up with all that backstory for the PCs and it has no place on the character sheet -- so it's shoved into margins are written up on separate pages?  And you know how some GMs, the first thing they do is screw the players over by killing the NPCs to get the out of the way or to motivate a fight or something?  When it was clear that because the Player conceived of the NPC and took the time to note it down, the player actually wanted the NPC to become part of the story?

The back of the character sheet FORMALIZES this for the game.  The player stakes out locations and people and events and says, "This matters to me."  And because it's on his or her sheet -- it belongs to the Player.  This doesn't mean that GM doesn't get use the items on the back of the sheet.  But it means that the Players can write things down and know they won't be punished for having come up with details they care about.

This, too, leads to investment.  Especially if the GM respects that these things are on the back of the character sheet of the Player.  These are "toys" the Player has gone out of the way to say, "I care about this."  Just the act of writing them down will automatically build more investment into the Players for that game, those situations and the story to come.  If the GM finds ways to deepen the complications and complexity of the relationship the PC has with those items, things really take off.

Good luck with all your gaming to come, and congrats again.

Christopher

[dikaiosunh (Daniel)]

Christopher,

Thanks for the comments, and for the congratulations (I'm not sure it was as much as an ordeal as all that makes it sound, but thanks nonetheless).

Re: the kicker/cover/etc. diagram.  I do know it's important.  This was 100% a case of me getting distracted and forgetting to do it, not of not appreciating its value.

Re: player investment.  I think you're right that that is what was missing.  I did mention that Kickers were an opportunity to give them ownership over the story, but I don't think I emphasized enough that the point of that ownership was to let them help craft a story that would be meaningful to them, as players.  I think I was too focused on making sure that the Kickers would give me something to work with in terms of character motivation, and maybe even a bit too concerned to be non-judgmental about them (e.g., I didn't want to hand the socks one back as too silly, but I probably could have said something like, "since you're going to spend the next five hours telling this story, and you could be playing D&D in the other room instead, or being outside enjoying the weather, or spending quality time with your family, or any number of other worthy pastimes, are you sure you want it to be a story about some guy who's lost his socks?").

Though, the player did seem to get a kick out of playing this crazy guy with weird obsessions and crazy powers, so maybe it's not just about investment.  That's why I hesitate to call what happened a bad thing overall... it's just that *I* didn't find it as satisfying.  I think part of it was a mismatch of investments.  I'm not all doom-and-gloom: I can be perfectly happy sitting down to play a game of D&D and geeking out over my character's cool stuff and not worrying about whether or not that orc had a family.  Being invested in getting cool stuff can be a kind of investment that leads to a fully satisfying game (and can even be a problem the other way - I once ran a D&D game where I'd tried to pitch as a game where orcs would be smashed and cool stuff obtained, and had mostly players who seemed to want something deeper).  So, thinking more about it (sorry, I'm kind of thinking as I'm writing), I'm not sure that *lack* of player investment is the whole story.  Kickers that motivated characters but didn't grab players would have led to a boring game, not an rock-em-sock-em one.

Maybe it's just the artificiality of the con/pickup environment.  With folks I know socially, I have time for more explicit conversations, where we can do things like discuss the level of seriousness and the kinds of themes we want.  And if I come forward and say, "hey, I've been thinking about the alienated nature of war in modern democracies and want to do something with it," people can either say, "yeah, I could go for that" or "not my style."

Anyway, this was intended to be a quick reply and note of thanks before heading out for a run, and now I'm rambling, so I'll end it here.

- Daniel

[Christopher Kubasik]

Hi Daniel,

1) Yes, the con environment isn't the best venue for the type of play you were looking for. Though it can be done, it's just more difficult.  (Strangely, it occurs to me that for exactly this reason the con environment is PERFECT for a game of Diplomacy.  Strangers meet, abuse and use each other for selfish gain, and then never see each other again.  Anyone wanting to make a comparison to a San Francisco bath house is free to do so.)

2) You said you'd hesitate to call your session "bad."  I hope I didn't give the impression I thought it was bad.  I know I didn't use the word bad.  It was, as you say in your first and third post, not what you wanted.  We might say, if we wanted to get all nutty, your creative agenda didn't get fulfilled.  The fact that the other players had a really good time only goes to show that different people at different times have different creative agendas.  Yeah!  Ron was right!

3) Per the above, I don't think the players weren't invested... I'd say they weren't invested in what you were invested in.  Lack of investment is boredom.  Lack of shared investment in incoherent play.  No big deal.  But there it is.  So if I suggested they weren't "invested" I apologize.  A baseball player is deeply invested in the game he's playing.  But he's got a very different investment than someone playing a game to address thematic premise.  Right?

4) My post above then, was all about how do you get people to try out addressing thematic premise.  Sure, you could intellectualize it and say, "Hey, I've been thinking about the alienated nature of war in modern democracies and want to do something with it." 

Or you could nudge the players' Kickers to ensure that they end up with something they are personally invested in within the narrative-color framework you set up.  I know which one I expect will be more productive.  Intellectualize it, and everyone approaches it as an intellectual exercise.  As them to dig deeper into more emotional and moral details that are "grabby" to them -- and you kick off with elements that are more emotional and moral.

5) Sorry if I implied that you didn't know the back of character sheet was important.  I brought it up because I think it ties to the matter at hand.  I truly believe that the act of writing places, names and events on the character sheet offers people the chance to say, "Hey, this is mine. Why does this person matter to me?  Oh, I see, things that are connected should be near each other on the sheet. So, how does this NPC connect to my Kicker?  How does that orphanage I mentioned connect to the Kicker?"  I think it helps bring Nar play. 

Because the back of the character sheet gets short shrift in the rules, I bring it up in case anyone else wandering along to this thread goes, "Yeah, yeah, yeah, Kubasik, but how do the players connect to this investment thing you're going on about to actual play?"  Well, the back of the character sheet is actual play.

I know you know that.  But the back of the sheet is often missed.  I missed it.  Just making sure to bring it up in a post about these matters.

Christopher

[Adam Dray]

I think Sorcerer (and, I assume, Schism) really front-loads the Narrativist power in the character generation phase. I would guess that, because you brought pregenerated characters, you run the risk of the players not investing their own Nar goals in the character. Writing kickers helped, I'm sure. Perhaps the lack of ownership of the characters contributed to their willingness to treat them like cardboard cut-outs. It doesn't really explain why they treated the fictional bystanders like collateral damage, though.

Here's a thought. Perhaps they were playing in a Narr fashion, but the statements they were making were radically different than the one you'd make. Like you said:

To take a stab at the emergent theme, it would be something like, "no one cares about you except to use you, so why the f**k care about anyone else?"

Maybe that was their take on the Narr situation you all set up. Sounds like a personal statement to me. I don't know, though. The "socks" thing is lame. If you thought it was lame, too, you could've stomped on it before starting play.

Further, these players come from a pretty heavy Sim background (Firan). Firan is a big, rich setting with enforced GM consequences. It's a serious socio-political game a lot of the time with "slice of life" role-play filling the gaps. I don't know how much that influenced the game. I've had some great games of Dogs, Roach, and My Life with Master with various Firan players, but I made sure to talk to them a bit before the game to help them understand what I thought the games were about and what kind of play I hoped to see.

[dikaiosunh (Daniel)]

Christopher,

Point taken re: the diagram.  I just wanted to reiterate that the issue was not whether or not it was important.  I think it is valuable to point it out, though - I know if I'd merely read the Sorcerer rules without reading around the forums, I'd probably have discounted it.

Re: "bad."  I was referring to my placing it under "the bad" of the session, not any implication on your part.  And you're right - I think the issue is one of differing investments.  So my concern is really something like, "what does one do to try to bring the kind of investment various players (including the GM) are interested in into some sort of harmony?"

On that point, I'm not sure how to make a clean distinction between "intellectualizing" and "emotionally grabbing" players.  You're right, approaching it as, "I'm interested in (say) alienation and war, make up something about alienation and war," is probably too blunt and constraining to be the best approach (especially since it cuts off other interesting investments in the same neighborhood - e.g., the player who is really grabbed by the hatred she feels for terrorists, or some such).  But it seems that asking for an emotional grab will also require a bit of explicit semi-intellectualized pushing - though maybe more along the lines of, "I want you to really find something to put into this character that melds with the setting (which is about war and is kinda alienated, by the way) but gets to you on a serious emotional level."  I'm not sure we're disagreeing, actually...

Adam,

You're right about the level of character investment required - and, even with the non-pregen character, character creation was very quick, and so not particularly conducive to deep thought about meaning.

I certainly didn't mean my comments as a slam against Firan players, or Sim players, or these players in particular.  The problem was not with them, but with something of a mismatch between the game I'd hoped for and the game they seemed to want - which is a kind of game I've played and enjoyed, and would have found an unmixed pleasure to run had I not had any expectations going in (maybe that was my problem!).  And you're right that some sort of personal statement *did* come out of the play.

Again, to put a finer point on my question, it's something like... there are all sorts of valid personal/thematic statements that can be made through a game, but not all of them are equally interesting or satisfying to everyone.  The "traditional" RPG approach tends to put all the responsibility for the theme in the GM's hands, which makes it awesome to be a GM, since with a modicum of skill you can make sure that *you* have fun.  But when running a game where everyone should have input into the themes, how does one address the situation to ensure as far as possible that a theme emerges that is satisfying to all the participants? 

This question would arise just as much, of course, if it's one of the non-GM players who's out of step with the emergent group attitude - so I'm motivated as much by the question of how best to craft a session satisfying to future players when I'm the GM as preserving my preferred GM-themes.

If any of that makes sense.

[dikaiosunh (Daniel)]

Oh, and re: the civilians.

I could see a number of explanations for how the cavalier attitude arose.  Schism emphasizes a very empty, lonely world, so for most of the session there were few folks around aside from non-civilian types.  So, by the time of the crowd scene, there hadn't been a lot of groundwork laid with particular character relationships, and a sort of "blow things up" attitude had already become entrenched.  Beyond that, the characters were powerful enough that killing civilians didn't result in that many non-moral consequences for them (perhaps it would have, in a longer-form game, where they had to worry about, e.g., building alliances with folks who would take a dimmer view of collateral damage).  I did try to emphasize the fear and confusion of one "terrorist" that they captured rather than killing, but that didn't stop her from getting tortured to gain a control die (one telepath had "inflicting pain" as a control focus).  It may just have been too little, too late.